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peter_hurford comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - LessWrong
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Broadly, I think moral principles exist as logical standards by wish actions can be measured. It's a fact whether a particular action is endorsed by utilitarianism or deontology, etc. Therefore moral facts exist in the same realm as any other sort of fact.
More specifically, I think the actual set of moral principles someone lives by are a personal choice that is subject to a lot of factors. Some of it might be self-interest, but even if it is, it's usually indirect, not overt.
OK. But standards are not facts. They are metrics in the same way that a unit of length, say, meter, is not a fact but a metric.
How do you validate the choice of meters (and not, say, yards) to measure?
The usual answer is "fitness for a purpose", but how does this work for morality?
True. But whether something meets a standard is a fact. While a meter is a standard, it's an objective fact that my height is approximately 1.85 meters.
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Social consensus. Also, a meter is much easier to use than a yard.
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Standards could be evaluated on further desiderata, like internal consistency and robustness in the face of thought experiments.
Social consensus and ease of use could also be factors.
I agree. You can state as a fact whether some action meets some standard of morality. That does nothing to validate a standard of morality, however.
Oh, boy. Social consensus, ease of use, really?
I'm not sure a standard of morality could ever be validated in the way you might like.
What do you think validates a standard of morality?
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That's not a very helpful retort.
Nothing, pretty much. I think standards of morality cannot be validated.
I don't know if you think your position is defensible or it was just a throwaway line. It's rather trivial to construct a bunch of moralities which will pass your validation criteria and look pretty awful at the same time.
It seems to me things like social consensus and ease of use are factors in determining whether a morality is popular, but I don't see how they can validate moral values.
In a handful of discussions now, you've commented "X doesn't do Y," and then later followed up with "nothing can do Y," which strikes me as logically rude compared to saying "X doesn't do Y, which I see as a special case of nothing doing Y." For example, in this comment, asking the question "what does it mean for a moral principle to be validated?" seems like the best way to clarify peter_hurford's position.
I do think that standards of morality can be 'validated,' but what I mean by that is that standards of morality have practical effects if implemented, and one approach to metaethics is to choose a moral system by the desirability of its practical effects. I understood peter_hurford's response here to be "I don't think practical effects are the reason to follow any morality."
This comment makes great sense inside of a morality, because moralities often operate by setting value systems. If one decides to adopt a value system which requires vegetarianism in order to signal that they are compassionate, that suggests their actual value system is the one which rewards signalling compassion. To use jargon, moralities want to be terminal goals, but in this metaethical system they are instrumental goals.
I don't think this comment makes sense outside of a morality (i.e. I have a low opinion of the implied metaethics). If one is deciding whether to adopt morality A or morality B, knowing that A thinks B is immoral and B thinks A is immoral doesn't help much (this is the content of the claim that a moral sphere restricted to humans is weird and arbitrary.) Knowing that morality A will lead to a certain kind of life and morality B will lead to a different kind of life seems more useful (although there's still the question of how to choose between multiple kinds of lives!).
This leads to the position that even if you have the Absolutely Correct Morality handed to you by God, so long as that morality is furthered by more adherents it would be useful to think outside of that morality because standard persuasion advice is to emphasize the benefits the other party would receive from following your suggestion, rather than emphasizing the benefits you would receive if the other party follows your suggestions ("I get a referral bonus from the Almighty for every soul I save" is very different from "you'll much prefer being in Heaven over being in Hell"). Instead of showing how your conclusion follows from your premises, it's more effective to show how your conclusion is implied by their premises.
(I should point out that you can sort of see this happening by the use of "weird and arbitrary" as they don't make sense as a logical claim but do make sense as a social claim. "All the cool kids are vegetarian these days" is an actual and strong reason to become vegetarian.)
Well, I didn't mean to be rude but I'll watch myself a bit more carefully for such tendencies. Talking to people over the 'net leads one to pick up some unfortunate habits :-)
That one actually was a bona fide question. I didn't think morality could be validated, but on the other hand I didn't spend too much time thinking about the issue. So -- maybe I was missing something, and this was a question with the meaning of "well, how could one go about it?" Maybe there was a way which didn't occur to me.
I am not a big fan of such an approach because I think that in this respect ethics is like philosophy -- any attempts at meta very quickly become just another ethics or just another philosophy. And choosing on the basis of consequences is the same thing as expecting a system of ethics to be consistent (since you evaluate the desirability of consequences on the basis of some moral values). In other words I don't think ethics can be usefully tiered -- it's a flat system.
Oh, and I think that moralities do not set value systems. Moralities are value systems. And they are terminal goals (or criteria, or metrics, or standards), they cannot be instrumental (again, because it's a flat system).
I very strongly disagree with this. From the descriptive side individual morality of course is influenced by social pressure. From the normative side, however, I don't believe it should be.
Agreed that a given metaethical approach will cash out as a particular ethics in a particular situation. The reason I think it's useful to go to metaethics is because you can then see the linkage between the situation and the prescription, which is useful for both insight and correcting flaws in an ethical system. I also think that while infinite regress problems are theoretically possible, for most humans there is a meaningful cliff suggesting it's not worth it to go from meta-meta-ethics to meta-meta-meta-ethics, because to me ethics looks like a set of behaviors and responses, metaethics looks like psychology and economics, and meta-meta-ethics looks like biology.
It seems to me that there are a lot of obvious ways for morality derived without any sort of social help to go wrong, but we may be operating under different conceptions of 'pressure.'
Can you give me an example where metaethics is explicitly useful for that? I don't see why in flat/collapsed ethics this should be a problem.
Ah. Interesting. To me ethics is practical application (that is, actions) of morality which is a system of values. Morality is normative. Psychology and economics for me are descriptive (with an important side-note that they describe not only what is, but also boundaries for what is possible/likely). Biology provides provides powerful external forces and boundaries which certainly shape and affect morality, but they are external -- you have to accept them as a given.
Of course, but so what? I suspect this issue will turn on the attitude towards the primacy of social vs the primacy of individual.
I think we agree there, then.
I was thinking of a different kind of "validation".