For example, most people would think that needlessly hurting somebody else is wrong, just because. The claim doesn't need further elaboration, and in fact the reasons for it can't be explained, though people can and do construct elaborate rationalizations for why everyone should accept the claim.
I think this is a folk theory about how "moral intuitions" work, and I don't think that it is true, in the sense that it is a naive answer to a naive question that should have been dissolved rather than answered. For example, most people think everything "just because", and further elaboration is just confabulation unless you do something unusual.
Thinking that morality is a specialized domain (a separate magisterium?) leads to the idea of "debating morality" as though the actual real communication events that acquire that label are like other debates except about the specialized domain: engaged in for similar purposes, with similar actual end points, resolved according to similar rhetorical patterns, and so on. Compare and contrast variations on the terms: "ethical debates", "political debates", "scientific debates", "m...
Why do modern-day liberals (for example) generally consider it okay to say "I think everyone should be happy" without offering an explanation, but not okay to say "I think I should be free to keep slaves", regardless of the explanation offered?
"I think everyone should be happy" is an expression of a terminal value. Slavery is not a typically positive terminal value, so if you terminally value slavery you would have to say something like "I like the idea of slavery itself"; if you just say "I like slavery" people will think you have some justification in terms of other terminal values (e.g. slavery -> economics -> happiness).
So, to say you like slavery implies you have some justification for it as an instrumental value. Such justifications are generally considered to be incorrect for typical terminal values and so, the "liberals" could legitimately consider you to be factually incorrect.
So, to say you like slavery implies you have some justification for it as an instrumental value.
Well, let's ask some folks who actually did like slavery, and fought for it.
From the Texas Declaration of Secession, adopted February 2, 1861:
[T]he servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations [...]
So at least some people who strongly believed that slavery was moral, claimed to hold this belief on the basis of (what they believed to be) both consequential and divine-command morality.
Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion of his finding that while the upper classes in both Brazil and USA were likely to find things like "not wearing a uniform to school" to be violations of social convention, lower classes in both countries were likely to find them violations of absolute moral codes.
Does he? The data in the source disagree (tables on 619-620). I haven't read all the text of the source, but it gives the uniform as the prototypical example of a custom and seems to say ...
There's a theory of ethics I seem to follow, but don't know the name of. Can someone refer me to existing descriptions?
The basic idea is to restrict the scope where the theory is valid. Many other theories fail (only in my personal view, obviously) by trying to solve universal problems: does my theory choose the best possible universe? How do I want everyone to behave? If everyone followed my theory, would that be a good or a stable world? Solving under these constraints can lead people to some pretty repugnant conclusions, as well as people rejecting othe...
I have been corrupted by the American blogosphere and literature, and will therefore be using "liberal" and "conservative" mostly to denote their American meanings.
You could use “left-wing” and “right-wing”, whose meanings (across the First World at least) are more consistent.
Our moral reasoning is ultimately grounded in our moral intuitions
I don't accept the premise. Moral intuitions play a part, but the ultimate constraints come more from the nature of rational discourse and the psychology of the discoursing species. For extended arguments along these lines (well mostly the emphasized part) see Jürgen Habermas and Thomas Scanlon.
Change you link to a better version of Haidt's paper. Your current link doesn't have searchable text.
I would compare ethics to swimming in a giant tub of ice cream (all the same flavor) with the rest of humanity. Everyone has a favorite flavor which their intuitions pick for them, but the world can't fit everyone's tastes. Some flavors are acceptable deviations, but others are painfully unbearable. It only makes sense to try and fill the tub with your personal preference.
So what about the cases when the distance is too large, when the gap simply cannot be bridged? Well in those cases, we will simply have to fight to keep pushing our own moral intuitions to as many people as possible, and hope that they will end up having more influence than the unacceptable intuitions.
We're not stuck with our moral intuitions, unless we have "faith" that they're "true."
Doesn't it seem odd, Kaj_Sojala—even irrational—that we should push our "moral intuitions" when that's all they are: intuitions—which don
I have an impression that most of the explicit thinking about "morality" gets sabotaged by conditioning. The type of thought that allows you to eat the last piece of cake is associated with eating cake, the type of thought that leads to sense of guilt is associated with guilt.
Subsequently a great deal of self proclaimed systems of morality are produced in such a manner that they are much too ill defined to be used to determine the correct actions , and are only usable for rationalization (utilitarianisms, i am looking at you).
Meanwhile, there is ...
FWIW, I don't actually want to let everyone live the way they want to.
Ideally, I would far prefer that everyone live the way that's best for everyone.
Of course, I don't know that there is any such way-to-live, and I certainly don't know what it is, or how to cause everyone to live that way.
I might end up endorsing letting everyone live the way they want to, if I were convinced that that was the best achievable approximation of everyone living the way that's best for everyone. (IRL I'm not convinced of that.) But it would be an approximation of what ...
I don't have much to contribute here personally; Just want ton ote that Yvain has an excellent diagram on the "inferrential distances" thing: http://squid314.livejournal.com/337475.html
(Also, the place he linked it from: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/30/fetal-attraction-abortion-and-the-principle-of-charity/ is probably the more obviously relevant thing to moral debates in politics and the like.)
I probably have very different sense what's moral and what isn't from the author (who claims to be American liberal), but I agree with pretty much everything the author says about meta-morality.
Moral intuitions (i.e, 'kneejerk reactions') are what fuels many people's opinions. Can we do better on LW? Meta-ethical systems (consequentialism, deontology) are often used as post-hoc rationalizations for said moral intuitions, but can we do better?
For these kind of problems I especially like Kant's approach -- can we come up with a rule that underlies our opinion on something, and would we be willing to follow that rule, even if it goes against our immediate intuitions in some other case? And the more specific a rule gets (ie., 'this only applies to green people', the clearer is the sign that we're doing some special pleading.
Perhaps we should view our moral intuitions as yet another evolved mechanism, in that they are imperfect and arbitrary though they work well enough for hunter gatherers.
When we lived as hunter gatherers, an individual could find a group with compatible moral intuitions or walk away from a group with incompatible ones. The ability or possibility that an unpleasant individual's moral intuitions would affect you from one valley over was minimal.
One should note, though, that studies of murder rates amongst hunter gatherer groups found that they were on the high side compared to industrialized societies.
From what I have read of groups in the Amazon and New Guinea, if you were to walk away from your group and try to walk into another, you would most likely be killed, and possibly captured and enslaved.
What groups? Low-tech tribal societies in the Amazon and New Guinea aren't necessarily hunter-gatherers. Both regions have agricultural societies going back a long way.
The style in the following article is slightly different from most LW articles, due to the fact that I originally posted this on my blog. Some folks on #lesswrong liked it, so I thought it might be liked here as well.
Our moral reasoning is ultimately grounded in our moral intuitions: instinctive "black box" judgements of what is right and wrong. For example, most people would think that needlessly hurting somebody else is wrong, just because. The claim doesn't need further elaboration, and in fact the reasons for it can't be explained, though people can and do construct elaborate rationalizations for why everyone should accept the claim. This makes things interesting when people with different moral intuitions try to debate morality with each other.
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Why do modern-day liberals (for example) generally consider it okay to say "I think everyone should be happy" without offering an explanation, but not okay to say "I think I should be free to keep slaves", regardless of the explanation offered? In an earlier age, the second statement might have been considered acceptable, while the first one would have required an explanation.
In general, people accept their favorite intuitions as given and require people to justify any intuitions which contradict those. If people have strongly left-wing intuitions, they tend to consider right-wing intuitions arbitrary and unacceptable, while considering left-wing intuitions so obvious as to not need any explanation. And vice versa.
Of course, you will notice that in some cultures specific moral intuitions tend to dominate, while other intuitions dominate in other cultures. People tend to pick up the moral intuitions of their environment: some claims go so strongly against the prevailing moral intuitions of my social environment that if I were to even hypothetically raise the possibility of them being correct, I would be loudly condemned and feel bad for even thinking that way. (Related: Paul Graham's What you can't say.) "Culture" here is to be understood as being considerably more fine-grained than just "the culture in Finland" or the "culture in India" - there are countless of subcultures even within a single country.
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Social psychologists distinguish between two kinds of moral rules: ones which people consider absolute, and ones which people consider to be social conventions. For example, if a group of people all bullied and picked on one of them, this would usually be considered wrong, even if everyone in the group (including the bullied person) thought it was okay. But if there's a rule that you should wear a specific kind of clothing while at work, then it's considered okay not to wear those clothes if you get special permission from your boss, or if you switch to another job without that rule.
The funny thing is that many people don't realize that the distinction of which is which is by itself a moral intuition which varies from people to people, and from culture to culture. Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion of his finding that while the upper classes in both Brazil and USA were likely to find violations of harmless taboos to be violations of social convention, lower classes in both countries were more likely to find them violations of absolute moral codes. At the time, moral psychology had mistakenly thought that "moving on" to a conception of right and wrong that was only grounded in concrete harms would be the way that children's morality naturally develops, and that children discover morality by themselves instead of learning it from others.
So moral psychologists had mistakenly been thinking about some moral intuitions as absolute instead of relative. But we can hardly blame them, for it's common to fail to notice that the distinction between "social convention" and "moral fact" is variable. Sometimes this is probably done for purpose, for rhetorical reasons - it's a much more convincing speech if you can appeal to ultimate moral truths rather than to social conventions. But just as often people simply don't seem to realize the distinction.
(Note to international readers: I have been corrupted by the American blogosphere and literature, and will therefore be using "liberal" and "conservative" mostly to denote their American meanings. I apologize profusely to my European readers for this terrible misuse of language and for not using the correct terminology like God intended it to be used.)
For example, social conservatives sometimes complain that liberals are pushing their morality on them, by requiring things such as not condemning homosexuality. To liberals, this is obviously absurd - nobody is saying that the conservatives should be gay, people are just saying that people shouldn’t be denied equal rights simply because of their sexual orientation. From the liberal point of view, it is the conservatives who are pushing their beliefs on others, not vice versa.
But let's contrast "oppressing gays" to "banning polluting factories". Few liberals would be willing to accept the claim that if somebody wants to build a factory that causes a lot of harm to the environment, he should be allowed to do so, and to ban him from doing it would be to push the liberal ideals on the factory-owner. They might, however, protest that to prevent them from banning the factory would be pushing (e.g.) pro-capitalism ideals on them. So, in other words:
Conservatives want to prevent people from being gay. They think that this just means upholding morality. They think that if somebody wants to prevent them from doing so, that somebody is pushing their own ideals on them.
Liberals want to prevent people from polluting their environment. They think that this just means upholding morality. They think that if somebody wants to prevent them from doing so, that somebody is pushing their own ideals on them.
Now my liberal readers (do I even have any socially conservative readers?) will no doubt be rushing to point out the differences in these two examples. Most obviously the fact that pollution hurts other people than just the factory owner, like people on their nearby summer cottages who like seeing nature in a pristine and pure state, so it's justified to do something about it. But conservatives might also argue that openly gay behavior encourages being openly gay, and that this hurts those in nearby suburbs who like seeing people act properly, so it's justified to do something about it.
It's easy to say that "anything that doesn't harm others should be allowed", but it's much harder to rigorously define harm, and liberals and conservatives differ in when they think it's okay to cause somebody else harm. And even this is probably conceding too much to the liberal point of view, as it accepts a position where the morality of an act is judged primarily in the form of the harms it causes. Some conservatives would be likely to argue that homosexuality just is wrong, the way that killing somebody just is wrong.
My point isn't that we should accept the conservative argument. Of course we should reject it - my liberal moral intuitions say so. But we can't in all honestly claim an objective moral high ground. If we are to be honest to ourselves, we will accept that yes, we are pushing our moral beliefs on them - just as they are pushing their moral beliefs on us. And we will hope that our moral beliefs win.
Here's another example of "failing to notice the subjectivity of what counts as social convention". Many people are annoyed by aggressive vegetarians, who think anyone who eats meat is a bad person, or by religious people who are actively trying to convert others. People often say that it's fine to be vegetarian or religious if that's what you like, but you shouldn't push your ideology to others and require them to act the same.
Compare this to saying that it's fine to refuse to send Jews to concentration camps, or to let people die in horrible ways when they could have been saved, but you shouldn't push your ideology to others and require them to act the same. I expect that would sound absurd to most of us. But if you accept a certain vegetarian point of view, then killing animals for food is exactly equivalent to the Holocaust. And if you accept a certain religious view saying that unconverted people will go to Hell for an eternity, then not trying to convert them is even worse than letting people die in horrible ways. To say that these groups shouldn't push their morality to others is to already push your own ideology - which says that decisions about what to eat and what to believe are just social conventions, while decisions about whether to kill humans and save lives are moral facts - on them.
So what use is there in debating morality, if we have so divergent moral intuitions? In some cases, people have such widely differing intuitions that there is no point. In other cases, their intuitions are similar enough that they can find common ground, and in that case discussion can be useful. Intuitions can clearly be affected by words, and sometimes people do shift their intuitions as a result of having debated them. But this usually requires appealing to, or at least starting out from, some moral intuition that they already accept. There are inferential distances involved in moral claims, just as there are inferential distances involved in factual claims.
So what about the cases when the distance is too large, when the gap simply cannot be bridged? Well in those cases, we will simply have to fight to keep pushing our own moral intuitions to as many people as possible, and hope that they will end up having more influence than the unacceptable intuitions. Many liberals probably don't want to admit to themselves that this is what we should do, in order to beat the conservatives - it goes so badly against the liberal rhetoric. It would be much nicer to pretend that we are simply letting everyone live the way they want to, and that we are fighting to defend everyone's right for that.
But it would be more honest to admit that we actually want to let everyone live the way they want to, as long as they don't things we consider "really wrong", such as discriminating against gays. And that in this regard we're no different from the conservatives, who would likewise let everyone live the way they wanted to, as long as they don't do things the conservatives consider "really wrong".
Of course, whether or not you'll want to be that honest depends on what your moral intuitions have to say about honesty.