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JMiller comments on Confusion about Normative Morality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Thanks for the idea. In a way, I think they are simillar. Normative ethics is traditionally defined as "the way things ought to be" and descriptive ethics is "the way people think things are". But, the way things ought to be are only the way things are on another level.
If you mean that I am confusing what people think with what is the case, I am having difficulting understanding what from my comments led you to think that.
I don't think of them as being in the same bucket. Descriptive ethics to me is something like "we noticed that people claimed to value one thing and did something else, so we did an experiment to test it." And prescriptive ethics is decision theories.
What gave me the idea is this sentence: "as opposed to taking account of real effects of moral ideas in the actual world. "
which sounds like thinking about descriptive ethics while the post title refers to prescriptive ethics.
FYI, normative ethics tends to include a lot more than decision theory. It also includes Kantian reasoning based on so-called "principles of rational agency". And, in practice, it includes moral reasoning based on the morals and values that human people and societies broadly agree on. The informal evaluation of "right versus right" that we do in order to solve disputes in everyday life (assuming that these do not turn into full-blown legal or political disputes) would also fall under normative ethics, since we do broadly agree on how such "balancing" should work in general, even though we'll disagree about specific outcomes.
FWIW, I think the term "descriptive ethics" should be taboo-ed and deprecated, because it is mildly "Othering" and patronizing. Just call it morality. Nobody thinks they are doing "descriptive ethics" when they do everyday moral reasoning based on their peculiar values. But that's what it gets called by moral philosophers/ethicists, since "describing" morals from an outside, supposedly objective POV is what their work involves.
those aren't decision theories?
Um, no? To me, 'decision theory' means a formal object such as CDT or UDT/TDT. These have little to do with ethics persay, even though TDT apparently does capture some features of ethical reasoning, such as the "reflective" character of the Kantian categorical imperative.
Fuzzy heuristics based ethical reasoning seems to involve some screening off of the space of possible decision theories the agent regards as valid to me.
After all, our work on decision theories is to get everything to add up to normality (in the "I don't know what friendliness is, but I know it when I see it" sense)
Perhaps we have different ideas of what "ethics" involves. To me, ethical reasoning is at its core a way of informally solving disputes by compromising among value systems. This is what Kant seems to be getting at with his talk of different "principles of rational agency". We also include common human values as a part of "normative ethics", but strictly speaking that should perhaps be categorized as morality.
Ah I see. What I ment by that is the tendency to argue about terminology and not content, that's all. Sorry for the confusion.
I think arguing over semantics is a natural reaction to edge cases. The case is extreme so suddenly the boundaries of what we mean by the word "child" becomes magnified in importance.