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gjm comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm seeing fundamental disagreement on what "moral" means.
In the Anglo Saxon tradition, what is moral is what you should or ought to do, where should and ought both entail a debt one has the obligation to pay. Note that this doesn't make morality binary; actions are more or less moral depending on how much of the debt you're paying off. I wouldn't be surprised if this varied a lot by culture, and I invite people to detail the similarities and differences in other cultures they are familiar with.
What I hear from some people here is Utilitarianism as a preference for certain states of the world, where there is no obligation to do anything - action to bring about those states is optional.
I think in the Anglo Saxon tradition, actions which fulfill preferences but are not obligatory would be considered praiseworthy or benevolent. Perhaps people would call them moral in terms of more than paying off your debt, but failing to "pay extra" would not be considered immoral.
Let's call people who view morality as what is obligatory as Moralos, and people who view morality as what is preferable as Moralps.
Moralos will view Moralps as unjustly demanding and completely hypocritical - demanding payments on a huge debt, but only making tiny payments, if any, toward those debts themselves. Moralps will view Moralos as pretty much hateful - they don't even prefer a better world, they want it to be worse.
This looks very familiar to me.
Haidt should really add questions to his poll to get at just what morality means to people, in particular in terms of obligation.
What buybuy said. Plus... Moralps are possibly hypocritical, but it could be that they are just wrong, claiming one preference but acting as if they have another. If I claim that I would never prefer a child to die so that I can buy a new car, and I then buy a new car instead of sending my money to feed starving children in wherever, then I am effectively making incorrect statements about my preferences, OR I am using the word preferences in a way that renders it uninteresting. Preferences are worth talking about precisely because to the extent that they describe what people will actually do.
I suspect in the case of starving children and cars, my ACTUAL preference is much more sentimental and much less universal. If I came home one day and laying on my lawn was a starving child, I would very likely feed that child even if this food came from a store I was keeping to trade for a new car. But if this child is around the corner and out of my sight, then its Tesla S time!
So Moralps are possibly hypocritical, but certainly wrong at describing their own preferences, IF we insist that preferences are things that dictate our volition.
Preferences of this sort might be interesting not because they describe what their holders will do themselves, but because they describe what their holders will try to get other people to do. I might think that diverting funds from luxury purchases to starving Africans is always morally good but not care enough (or not have enough moral backbone, or whatever) to divert much of my own money that way -- but I might e.g. consistently vote for politicians who do, or choose friends who do, or argue for doing it, or something.
Your comment reads to me like a perfect description of hypocrisy. Am I missing something?
Nope. Real human beings are hypocrites, to some extent, pretty much all the time.
But holding a moral value and being hypocritical about it is different from not holding it at all, so I don't think it's correct to say that moral values held hypocritically are uninteresting or meaningless or anything like that.