For a long time, I wanted to ask something. I was just thinking about it again when I saw that Alicorn has a post on a similar topic. So I decided to go ahead.
The question is: what is the difference between morally neutral stimulus responces and agony? What features must an animal, machine, program, alien, human fetus, molecule, or anime character have before you will say that if their utility meter is low, it needs to be raised. For example, if you wanted to know if lobsters suffer when they're cooked alive, what exactly are you asking?
On reflection, I'm actually asking two questions: what is a morally significant agent (MSA; is there an established term for this?) whose goals you would want to further; and having determined that, under what conditions would you consider it to be suffering, so that you would?
I think that an MSA would not be defined by one feature. So try to list several features, possibly assigning relative weights to each.
IIRC, I read a study that tried to determine if fish suffer by injecting them with toxins and observing whether their reactions are planned or entirely instinctive. (They found that there's a bit of planning among bony fish, but none among the cartilaginous.) I don't know why they had to actually hurt the fish, especially in a way that didn't leave much room for planning, if all they wanted to know was if the fish can plan. But that was their definition. You might also name introspection, remembering the pain after it's over...
This is the ultimate subjective question, so the only wrong answer is one that is never given. Speak, or be wrong. I will downvote any post you don't make.
BTW, I think the most important defining feature of an MSA is ability to kick people's asses. Very humanizing.
I have trouble understanding this; mostly, I don't get if you think it exists or if you just want me to pretend it does. But, if I do understand the concept correctly, if something is being imposed on the conscious mind as a moral imperative, that would be projectivist, as it would feel real. If you had part of the unconscious mind that imposed the most socially acceptable, expedient concept of "disgust" on the rest of the mind, one would still feel genuinely disgusted by whatever it "thought" you should be disgusted by. The problem with emotivism is that most people who make moral statements genuinely believe them to be objective, so rendering them into emotive statements loses meaning. Projectivism retains this meaning without accepting the completely unsupported (and I believe unsupportable) claim that objective morals exist.
The magical category objection doesn't really make sense, even for emotivism. If "Murder is bad" means, "Boo murder!" no category is evoked and none need be. Furthermore, from any anti-realist perspective, any thing or act could potentially be viewed as immoral, so trying to describe a set of things or acts that count as valid subjects of "moral approval" makes no sense. "Perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds" makes no (or at the best, very ill-defined) sense. The author doesn't mention a single kind, and it is unclear what would distinguish kinds in a way that meets his own standards. Forcing the other side to navigate an ill-defined, context-free classification system and claiming their definition is defective when they fail to do so proves nothing.
As for the third point, it's a straw man. Claiming that emotivism must act as a mapping function such that any sentence XYZ -> a new sentence ABC irrespective of context is a caricature; English doesn't work like this, and no self-respecting theory of language would pretend it does. Unless emotivists consistently claim that context is irrelevant and can be ignored, this point shouldn't even be made. I could write a paper about how "Murder is wrong" can be replaced with, "Boo murder!" You can't then use '"Murder is wrong" contains the word "is"' as a legitimate counterexample, because it is quite obviously a different context.
I don't remember why I asked that question. It sure reads as a trick question. It's certainly reasonable to treat things as a dichotomy if the overlap is not likely, but I think that's wrong here. I endorse this very broad projectivist view that includes this example, and I imagine most emotivists agree; I doubt that most emotivists are sociopaths projecting their abnormality onto the general population. But I also think emotivism is possible, such as along the lines of this example, or more broadly.
I do think you're treating projectivism as broad, and thu... (read more)