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mwengler comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Yes. In science and math we had reality against which to measure our progress.
What do you measure your progress against in coming up with a moral system? If it is the extent to which your moral system matches your moral intuitions, you will never do better than just following your intuitions.
If you are measuring your progress against something else, do say what it is. I know I have been searching for decades for some way to make morality objective.
If there is nothing against which to measure your progress, than following your intuitions is immeasurably better or worse than making up a system based on SOME of your intuitions.
I would say that for someone who accepts liberal ideas (counting most conservatives in western countries), this seems like a very useful argument for convincing them of this: If we always used intuitional morality, we would currently have morality that disagrees with their intuitions (about slavery being wrong, democracy being good, those sorts of things).
Of course, as a rational argument it makes no sense. It just appeals to me because my intuitions are Consequentialist and I want to try to convince others to follow Consequentialism, because it will lead to better outcomes.
Except how do you measure something against reality in a way that doesn't (at least implicitly) rely on your intuitions?
Well, this is more-or-less what we do in mathematics.
I can routinely travel thousands of miles in a few hours at extremely finite cost. Our modern society gives US citizens on average the benefit of 25 humans worth of energy usage (that is, the amount of energy per day used by the average american would require 25 slaves to generate if human slaves were used to generate energy).
Even in math, I can build my understanding in to circuits which by working, verify my mathematical reasoning, and more importantly, verify that the reasoning stands independently of my own feelings or intuitions about it it. I routinely calculate things and then build software to implement them that 1) either works as I expected from my mathematical calculations, or 2) doesn't, in which case, so far, I have always been able to find that I made a mistake in my calculations, or in my interpretation of how my implementation was related to my calculations.
I'll admit some theoretical intuitive component to understanding the connection between science/math and real benefits that come from it.
But it isn't just that I am privileging math/science in a way I refuse to privilege moral reasoning. It is that I don't even know what benefits for systematized morality you are claiming. What do I expect as my payoff for systematizing morality, that I may perhaps have to make some intuitive leaps to notice? What does systematized morality offer us that merely relying on moral intuition in a non-systematic way doesn't do just as well?
This is a real question, not some rhetorical question to say "see, I am right." What do you get out of throwing your faith behind moral realism and systematizing it?