Part of the sequence: No-Nonsense Metaethics

When I say I think I can solve (some of) metaethics, what exactly is it that I think I can solve?

First, we must distinguish the study of ethics or morality from the anthropology of moral belief and practice. The first one asks: "What is right?" The second one asks: "What do people think is right?" Of course, one can inform the other, but it's important not to confuse the two. One can correctly say that different cultures have different 'morals' in that they have different moral beliefs and practices, but this may not answer the question of whether or not they are behaving in morally right ways.

My focus is metaethics, so I'll discuss the anthropology of moral belief and practice only when it is relevant for making points about metaethics.

So what is metaethics? Many people break the field of ethics into three sub-fields: applied ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

Applied ethics: Is abortion morally right? How should we treat animals? What political and economic systems are most moral? What are the moral responsibilities of businesses? How should doctors respond to complex and uncertain situations? When is lying acceptable? What kinds of sex are right or wrong? Is euthanasia acceptable?

Normative ethics: What moral principles should we use in order to decide how to treat animals, when lying is acceptable, and so on? Is morality decided by what produces the greatest good for the greatest number? Is it decided by a list of unbreakable rules? Is it decided by a list of character virtues? Is it decided by a hypothetical social contract drafted under ideal circumstances?

Metaethics: What does moral language mean? Do moral facts exist? If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts? How can we know whether moral judgments are true or false? Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it? Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute? Does it make sense to talk about moral progress?

Inspired by Konkvistador's comment

Posts titled "Rational ___-ing" or "A Rational Approach to ____" induce groans among a sizeable contingent here, myself included. However, inflationary use of "rational" and its transformation into an applause light is only one part of the problem. These posts tend to revolve around specific answers, rather than the process of how to find answers. I claim a post on "rational toothpaste buying" could be on-topic and useful, if correctly written to illustrate determining goals, assessing tradeoffs, and implementing the final conclusions. A post detailing the pros and cons of various toothpaste brands is for a dentistry or personal hygiene forum; a post about algorithms for how to determine the best brands or whether to do so at all is for a rationality forum. This post is my shot at showing what this would look like.

In the original When None Dare Urge Restraint post, Eliezer discusses the dangers of the "spiral of hate" that can develop when saying negative things about the Hated Enemy trumps saying accurate things. Specifically, he uses the example of how the 9/11 hijackers were widely criticized as "cowards," even though this vice in particular was surely not on their list. Over this past Memorial Day weekend, however, it seems like the exact mirror-image problem played out in nearly textbook form.

The trouble began when MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted* that he was uncomfortable with how people use the word "hero" to describe those who die in war -- in particular, because he thinks this sort of automatic valor attributed to the war dead makes it easier to justify future wars. And as you might expect, people went crazy in response, calling Hayes's comments "reprehensible and disgusting," something that "commie grad students would say," and that old chestnut, apparently offered without a hint of irony, "unAmerican." If you watch the video, you can tell that Hayes himself is really struggling to make the point, and by the end he definitely knew he was going to get in trouble, as he started backpedaling with a "but maybe I'm wrong about that." And of course, he apologized the very next day, basically stating that it was improper to have "opine[d] about the people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots."

This whole episode struck me as particularly frightening, mostly because Hayes wasn't even offering a criticism. Soldiers in the American military are, of course, an untouchable target, and I would hardly expect any attack on soldiers to be well received, no matter how grounded. But what genuinely surprised me in this case was that Hayes was merely saying "let's not automatically apply the single most valorizing word we have, because that might cause future wars, and thus future war deaths." But apparently anything less than maximum praise was not only incorrect, but offensive.

Of course, there's no shortage of rationality failures in political discourse, and I'm obviously not intending this post as a political statement about any particular war, policy, candidate, etc. But I think this example is worth mentioning, for two main reasons. First, it's just such a textbook example of the exact sort of problem discussed in Eliezer's original post, in a purer form than I can recall seeing since 9/11 itself. I don't imagine many LW members need convincing in this regard, but I do think there's value in being mindful of this sort of problem on the national stage, even if we're not going to start arguing politics ourselves.

But second, I think this episode says something not just about nationalism, but about how people approach death more generally. Of course, we're all familiar with afterlifism/"they're-in-a-better-place"-style rationalizations of death, but labeling a death as "heroic" can be a similar sort of rationalization. If a death is "heroic," then there's at least some kind of silver lining, some sense of justification, if only partial justification. The movie might not be happy, but it can still go on, and there's at least a chance to play inspiring music. So there's an obvious temptation to label death as "heroic" as much as possible -- I'm reminded of how people tried to call the 9/11 victims "heroes," apparently because they had the great courage to work in buildings that were targeted in a terrorist attack.

If a death is just a tragedy, however, you're left with a more painful situation. You have to acknowledge that yes, really, the world isn't fair, and yes, really, thousands of people -- even the Good Guy's soldiers! -- might be dying for no good reason at all. And even for those who don't really believe in an afterlife, facing death on such a large scale without the "heroic" modifier might just be too painful. The obvious problem, of course -- and Hayes's original point -- is that this sort of death-anesthetic makes it all too easy to numb yourself to more death. If you really care about the problem, you have to face the sheer tragedy of it. Sometimes, all you can say is "we shall have to work faster." And I think that lesson's as appropriate on Memorial Day as any other.

*I apologize that this clip is inserted into a rather low-brow attack video. At the time of posting it was the only link on Youtube I could find, and I wanted something accessible.

Taylor & Brown (1988) argued that several kinds of irrationality are good for you — for example that overconfidence, including the planning fallacy, protects you from depression and gives you greater motivation because your expectancy of success is higher.

One can imagine other examples. Perhaps the sunk cost fallacy is useful because without it you're prone to switch projects as soon as a higher-value project comes along, leaving an ever-growing heap of abandoned projects behind you.

This may be one reason that many people's lives aren't much improved by rationality training. Perhaps the benefits of having more accurate models of the world and making better decisions are swamped by the negative effects of losing out on the benefits of overconfidence and the sunk costs fallacy and other "positive illusions." Yes, I read "Less Wrong Probably Doesn't Cause Akrasia," but there were too many methodological weaknesses to give that study much weight, I think. 

Others have argued against Taylor & Brown's conclusion, and at least one recent study suggests that biases are not inherently positive or negative for mental health and motivation because the effect depends on the context in which they occur. There seems to be no expert consensus on the matter.

(Inspired by a conversation with Louie.)

Introduction

An anthropic problem is one where the very fact of your existence tells you something. "I woke up this morning, therefore the earth did not get eaten by Galactus while I slumbered." Applying your existence to certainties like that is simple - if an event would have stopped you from existing, your existence tells you that that it hasn't happened. If something would only kill you 99% of the time, though, you have to use probability instead of deductive logic. Usually, it's pretty clear what to do. You simply apply Bayes' rule: the probability of the world getting eaten by Galactus last night is equal to the prior probability of Galactus-consumption, times the probability of me waking up given that the world got eaten by Galactus, divided by the probability that I wake up at all. More exotic situations also show up under the umbrella of "anthropics," such as getting duplicated or forgetting which person you are. Even if you've been duplicated, you can still assign probabilities. If there are a hundred copies of you in a hundred-room hotel and you don't know which one you are, don't bet too much that you're in room number 68.

But this last sort of problem is harder, since it's not just a straightforward application of Bayes' rule. You have to determine the probability just from the information in the problem. Thinking in terms of information and symmetries is a useful problem-solving tool for getting probabilities in anthropic problems, which are simple enough to use it and confusing enough to need it. So first we'll cover what I mean by thinking in terms of information, and then we'll use this to solve a confusing-type anthropic problem.