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Kaj_Sotala comments on Questions for Moral Realists - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: peter_hurford 13 February 2013 05:44AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 13 February 2013 07:46:14AM 5 points [-]

I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind.

I would very much doubt such an argument: most humans also share the same mechanisms for language learning, but still end up speaking quite different languages. (Yes, you can translate between them and learn new languages, but that doesn't mean that all languages are the same: there are things that just don't translate well from one language to another.) Global structure, local content.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 13 February 2013 08:00:21AM *  2 points [-]

I don't think the analogy to languages holds water. Substituting a word for a different word doesn't have the kind of impact on what people do that substituting a moral rule for a different moral rule does. Put another way, there are selection pressures constraining what human moralities look like that don't constrain what human languages look like.

Comment author: twanvl 13 February 2013 05:47:27PM 1 point [-]

Substituting a word for a different word doesn't have the kind of impact on what people do that substituting a moral rule for a different moral rule does.

This sounds like a strawman argument to me. It doesn't refute the argument that part of morality is cultural but based on a shared morality-learning mechanism.

there are selection pressures constraining what human moralities look like that don't constrain what human languages look like.

There are also selection pressures constraining what human languages look like, that don't constrain what human moralities look like. Or to give another example: there are selection pressures that constrain what dogs look like that don't constrain what catfish look like, and vice-versa. That doesn't mean that they also have similarities.

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