Douglas Knight, I'm not sure what predictions you're referring to. Statistical methods have a good pedigree. I take a correlation to be a correlation and try not to overinterpret it.

I'm very strict about this. I only accept claims that come out of science. I have a narrow definition of science based on lineage: you have to be able to trace it back to settled physics. Physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, molecular biology, neural biology, etc, all have strict lines of descent. Much of theoretical psychology, on the other hand (to give an example), does not; it's ab initio theorizing. Anything that is not science (so narrowly defined) I take to be noise. Systematic and flagrant abuse of the "genetic fallacy" is probably the quickest way to truth.

I think the best way to display the sheer mind-boggling absurdity of the "problem of induction" is to consider that we have two laws: the first law is the law science gives us for the evolution of a system and the second law simply states that the first law holds until time t and then "something else" happens. The first law is a product of the scientific method and the second law conforms to our intuition of what could happen. What the problem of induction is actually saying is that imagination trumps science. That's ridiculous. It's apparently very hard for people to acknowledge that what they can conceive of happening holds no weight over the world.

The absurdity comes in earlier on though. You have to go way back to the very notion that science is mediated by human psychology; without that nobody would think their imagination portends the future. Let's say you have a robotic arm that snaps Lego pieces together. Is the way Lego pieces can snap together mediated by the control system of the robotic arm? No. You need the robotic arm (or something like it) to do the work but nothing about the robotic arm itself determines whether the work can be done. Science is just a more complex example of the robotic arm. Science requires an entity that can do the experiments and manipulate the equations but that does not mean that the experiments and equations are therefore somehow "mediated" by said entity. Nothing about human psychology is relevant to whether the science can be done.

You need to go taboo crazy, throw out "belief," "knowledge," "understanding," and the whole apparatus of philosophy of science. Think of it in completely physical terms. What science requires is a group of animals that are capable of fine-grained manipulation both of physical objects and of symbol systems. These animals must be able to coordinate their action, through sound or whatever, and have a means of long-term coordination, such as marks on paper. Taboo "meaning," "correspondence," etc. Science can be done in this situation. The entire history of science can be carried out by these entities under the right conditions given the right dynamics. There's no reason those dynamics have to include anything remotely resembling "belief" or "knowledge" in order to get the job done. They do the measurements, make the marks on a piece of paper that have, by convention, been agreed to stand for the measurements, and some other group can then use those measurements to make other measures, and so forth. They have best practices to minimize the effect of errors entering the system, sure, but none of this has anything to do with "belief."

The whole story about "belief" and "knowledge" that philosophy provides us is a story of justification against skepticism. But no scientist has reason to believe in the philosophical tale of skepticism. We're not stuck in our heads. That makes sense if you're Descartes, if you're a dualist and believe knowledge comes from a priori reasoning. If you're a scientist, we're just physical systems in a physical world, and there's no great barrier to be penetrated. Physically speaking, we're limited by the accuracy of our measurements and the scale of the Universe, but we're not limited by our psychology except by limitations it imposes on our ability to manipulate the world (which aren't different in kind from the size of our fingers or the amount of weight we can lift). Fortunately our immediate environment has provided the kind of technological feedback loop that's allowed us to overcome such limitations to a high degree.

Justification is a pseudo-problem because skepticism is a pseudo-problem. Nothing needs to be justified in the philosophical sense of the term. How errors enter the system and compound is an interesting problem but, beyond that, the line from an experiment to your sitting reading a paper 50 years later in an unbroken causal chain and if you want to talk about "truth" and "justification" then, beyond particular this-worldy errors, there's nothing to discuss. There's no general project of justifying our beliefs about the world. This or that experiment can go wrong in this or that way. This or that channel of communication can be noisy. These are all finite problems and there's no insurmountable issue of recursion involved. There's no buck to be passed. There might be a general treatment of these issues (in terms of Bayes or whatever) but let's not confuse such practical concerns with the alleged philosophical problems. We can throw out the whole philosophical apparatus without loss; it doesn't solve any problems that it didn't create to begin with.

If somebody said to me "morality is just what we do." If they presented evidence that the whole apparatus of their moral philosophy was a coherent description of some subset of human psychology and sociology. Then that would be enough for me. It's just a description of a physical system. Human morality would be what human animals do. Moral responsibility wouldn't be problematic; moral responsibility could be as physical as gravity if it were psychologically and sociologically real. "I have a moral responsibility" would be akin to "I can lift 200 lbs." The brain is complicated, sure, but so are muscles and bones and motor control. That wouldn't make it a preference or a mere want either. That's probably where we're headed. But I don't think metaethics is the interesting problem. The deeper problem is, I think, the empirical one: Do humans really display this sort of morality?

My response to these questions is simply this: Once the neurobiology, sociology and economics is in, these questions will either turn out to have answers or to be the wrong questions (the latter possibility being the much more probable outcome). The only one I know how to answer is the following:

Do the concepts of "moral error" and "moral progress" have referents?

The answer being: Probably not. Reality doesn't much care for our ways of speaking.

A longer (more speculative) answer: The situation changes and we come up with a moral story to explain that change in heroic terms. I think there's evidence that most "moral" differences between countries, for example, are actually economic differences. When a society reaches a certain level of economic development the extended family becomes less important, controlling women becomes less important, religion becomes less important, and there is movement towards what we consider "liberal values." Some parts of society, depending on their internal dynamics and power structure, react negatively to liberalization and adopt reactionary values. Governments tend to be exploitative when a society is underdeveloped, because the people don't have much else to offer, but become less exploitative in productive societies because maintaining growth has greater benefits. Changes to lesser moral attitudes, such as notions of what is polite or fair, are usually driven by the dynamics of interacting societies (most countries are currently pushed to adopt Western attitudes) or certain attitudes becoming redundant as society changes for other reasons.

I don't give much weight to peoples' explanations as to why these changes happen ("moral progress"). Moral explanations are mostly confabulation. So the story that we have of moral progress, I maintain, is not true. You can try to find something else and call it "moral progress." I might argue that people are happier in South Korea than North Korea and that's probably true. But to make it a general rule would be difficult: baseline happiness changes. Most Saudi Arabian women would probably feel uncomfortable if they were forced to go out "uncovered." I don't think moral stories can be easily redeemed in terms of harm or happiness. At a more basic level, happiness just isn't the sort of thing most moral philosophers take it to be, it's not something I can accumulate and it doesn't respond in the ways we want it too. It's transient and it doesn't track supposed moral harm very well (the average middle-class Chinese is probably more traumatized when their car won't start than they are by the political oppression they supposedly suffer). Other approaches to redeeming the kinds of moral stories we tell are similarly flawed.

This dialogue leads me to conclude that "fairness" is a form of social lubricant that ensures our pies don't get cold while we're busy arguing. The meta-rule for fairness rules would then be: (1) fast; (2) easy to apply; and (3) everybody gets a share.

(1) Buy a country. You could probably bribe your way into becoming dictator of North Korea or Myanmar or somewhere similar.

(2) Build a huge army.

(3) Crash the US economy.

(4) Take over the world.

(5) Profit.

You can fully describe the mind/brain in terms of dynamics without reference to logic or data. But you can't do the reverse. I maintain that the dynamics are all that matters and the rest is just folk theory tarted up with a bad analogy (computationalism).

Unknown,

For all those who have said that morality makes no difference to them, I have another question: if you had the ring of Gyges (a ring of invisibility) would that make any difference to your behavior?

Sure. I could get away with doing all sorts of things. No doubt the initial novelty and power rush would cause me to do some things that would be quite perverted and that I'd feel guilty about. I don't think that's the same as a world without morality though. You seem to view morality as a constraint whereas I view it as a folk theory that describes a subset of human behavior. (I take Eliezer to mean that we're rejecting morality at an intellectual level rather than rewiring our brains.)

I'd do everything I do now. You can't escape your own psychology and I've already expressed my skepticism about the efficacy of moral deliberation. I'll go further and say that nobody would act any differently. Sure, after you shout in from the rooftops, maybe there will be an upsurge in crime and the demand for black nail polish for a month or so but when the dust settled nothing would have changed. People would still cringe at the sight of blood and still react to the pain of others just as they react to their own pain. People would still experience guilt. People would still find it hard to lie to loved ones. People would still eat when they got hungry and drink when they got thirsty. We vastly overestimate our ability to alter our own behavior.