= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on Why didn't people (apparently?) understand the metaethics sequence? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (229)
I think my confusion is less about understanding the view (assuming the Richard's rigid designator interpretation is accurate) and more everyone's insistence on calling it a moral realist view. It feels like everyone is playing word games to avoid being moral subjectivists. I don't know if it was all the arguing with theists or being annoyed with moral relativist social-justice types but somewhere along the way much of the Less Wrong crowd developed strong negative associations with the words used to describe varieties of moral anti-realism.
As far as I can tell most everyone here has the same descriptive picture of what is going on with ethics. There is this animal on planet Earth that has semi-ordered preferences about how the world should be and how things similar to that animal should act. Those of this species which speak the language called "English" write inscriptions like "morality" and "right and wrong" to describe these preferences. These preferences are the result of evolved instincts and cultural norms. Many members of this species have very similar preferences.
This seems like a straightforward description of ethical subjectivism -- the position that moral sentences are about the attitudes of people (notice that isn't the same as saying they are relative). But people don't seem to like calling themselves ethical subjectivists-- or maybe they don't like that the theory doesn't tell them what to do? I don't understand this. I'd love for someone to explain it. In any case, then we start doing philosophy to try to shoehorn this description into something we can call moral realism.
And it definitely is true that much of our moral language function like rigid designators, which hides the causal history of our moral beliefs. This explains why people don't feel like morality changes under counterfactuals-- i.e. if you imagine a world in which you have a preference for innocent children being murdered you don't believe that murdering children is therefore moral in that world. I outlined this in more detail here. I didn't use the term 'rigid designator' in that post, but the point is that what we think is moral is invariant in counterfacturals.
I don't see how this isn't a straightforward example of moral subjectivism. And that is reflected in the fact that there are no universally compelling arguments. I can see how you can sort of structure the arguments and questions and get it to output "moral realism" if you really had to. You say that the word "right" designates particular facts about worlds such that worlds can be objectively evaluated according to that concept. But to me, it is weird and confusing to ignore the fact that the rule uniting those facts about the world is determined by our attitudes-- especially since we can't right now enumerate the rigid contents of our moral language and have to apply the rule in most circumstances.
Whether you call it moral subjectivism or not, it seems like the next step is examining our preferences to see how much they can overlap, and what constitutes an ethical and effective way of reconciling them so that they are consistent with each other. In other words, we need to know how we ought to resolve moral disagreements, 'reflective equilibrium', that kind of stuff. This is how we determine how universal our morality is. And that's what actually matters, not whether or not it exists independently of human attitudes.
Except that's not Eliezer's view. The mistake you're making here is the equivalent of thinking that, because the meaning of the word "water" is determined by how English speakers use it, therefore sentences about water are sentences about the behavior of English speakers.
I understand, this is what I'm dealing with in the second to last paragraph.
There is a sense in which all concepts both exist subjectively and objectively. There is some mathematical function that describes all the things that ChrisHallquist thinks are funny just like there is a mathematical function that describes the behavior of atoms. We can get into the nitty-gritty about what makes a concept subjective and what makes a concept objective. But I don't see what the case for morality counting as "objective" is unless we're just going to count all concepts as objective.
Can you be clearer about the way you are using "describes" here?
I'm not clear if you are thinking about a) a giant lookup table of all the things Chris Hallquist finds funny, or b) a program that is more compact than that list - so compact, indeed, that a cut-down bug-filled beta of it can be implemented inside his skull! - but yet can generate the list.
My point works with either, I think. Which is more charitable to Eliezer's position?
A few nitpicks of your descriptive picture.
1- There are inevitable conflicts between practically any two creatures on this planet as to what preferences they would have as to the world. If you narrow these down to the area classified by humans as "moral" the picture can be greatly simplified, but there will still be a large amount of difference. 2- I dispute that moral sentences ARE about the attitudes of people. Most people throughout history have had a concept of "Right" and "Wrong" as being objective. This naive conception is philosophically indefensible, but the best descriptor of what people throughout history, and even nowadays, have believed. It is hard to defend the idea that a person thinks they are referring to X and are in fact referring to Y when X and Y are drastically different things and the person is not thinking of Y on any level of their brain- the likely case for, say, a typical Stone Age man arguing a moral point.
Sure, as I said at the end, the "universality" of the whole thing is an open problem.
That's fine. But in that case, all moral sentences are false (or nonsense, depending on how you feel about references to non-entities). I agree that there is a sense in which that is true which you outlined here. In this case we can start from scratch and just make the entire enterprise about figuring out what we we really truly want to do with the world-- and then do that. Personally I find that interpretation of moral language a bit uncharitable. And it turns out people are pretty stuck on the whole morality idea and don't like it when you tell them their moral beliefs are false.
Subjectivism seems both more charitable and friendlier-- but ultimately these are two different ways of saying the same thing. The debates between varieties of anti-realism seem entirely semantic to me.
1- Alright. Misunderstood.
2- There are some rare exceptions- some people define morality differently and can thus be said to mean different things. Almost all moral sentences, if every claim to something be right or wrong throughout history count as moral sentences, are false/nonsense, however.
The principle of charity, however, does not apply here- the evidence clearly shows that human beings throughout history have truely believed that some things are morally wrong and some morally right on a level more than preferences, even if this is not in fact true.
Philosophy typically involves taking folk notions that are important but untrue in a strict sense and constructing something tenable out of that material. And I think the situation is more ambiguous than you make it sound.
But it is essentially irrelevant. I mean, you could just go back to bed after concluding all moral statements are false. But that seems like it is ignoring everything that made us interested in this question in the first place. Regardless of what people think they are referring to when they make moral statements it seems pretty clear what they're actually doing. And the latter is accurately described by something like subjectivism or quasi-realism. People might be wrong about moral claims, but what we want to know is why and what they're doing when they make them.
A typical person would be insulted if you claimed that their moral statements referred only to feelings. Most philosophical definitions work on a principle which isn't quite like how ordinary people see them but would seem close enough to an ordinary person.
There are a lot of uses of the concepts of right and wrong, not just people arguing with each other. Ethical dilemnas, people wondering whether to do the "right" thing or the "wrong" thing, philosophical schools (think of the Confucians, for example, who don't define 'right' or 'wrong' but talk about it a lot). Your conception only covers one use.