Recently, I had a discussion with a close friend about morality and, let us say, fundamentals of epistemology. This person has no connection to the aspiring rationalist community.
We started out talking about discussion norms. I had sent my friend Julia Galef's talk on scout mindset. In previous discussions, I had gotten the impression that my friend argued to persuade, and I argued to learn something. This had collided and some of these discussions had seemed quite unfruitful to me.
My friend agreed that in factual discussions, scout mindset is the way to go. In moral discussions, my friend argued that one tries to persuade as one is a 100% sure of their moral beliefs. This got me wondering. For a long time, I have held a vague belief that there are no 0s and 1s when it comes to holding true beliefs. I pointed out that I do not think that morality belongs in another category. My friend confronted me with asking how I could say that I am not a 100% sure that murder is wrong. Well, I said, I am like 99.99% sure that it is wrong. Here the discussion got a bit emotional. They said they would not want to be friends with someone who gives even a slight chance that murder, racism, homophobia or any other bad thing might be morally right.
To me, saying I am 99.99% sure feels almost the same as saying I am 100% sure. I just thought that it is not a good idea on principle to assign 0% or 100% to any belief. Many people have been wrong about moral issues in the past, so who am I to be so sure about them.
So, people of Lesswrong, how sure are you that murder is wrong? Are you 100% sure? How would you go about solving the disagreement with my friend?
Confidence can be pretty straighforward if there is a separte outside reality to which correspondece is straightforward. Sometimes language is polymorphic in that vastly different things get covered in same or same sounding terms.
One potential categoy of categorization which moral statemdents might have is when the target of the statement is to be communally created. If half of a movie crew thought "We are making a romantic comedy" and another half thought "We are making a horror movie" there might be big trouble. If a creative leader has made a decision then being informed about it can be about accuracy in the traditional sense. However if the creative direction has never been discussed there might need to be the determination of the direction of the moive. Before such discussion has happened neither statement can be true. One of the possible outcomes is that group A goes a separated way to make a romantic comedy and group B goes to make a horror movie. If this happens in a sense both groups were right.
If a group of people goes out to make an arrangement where people do not backstab and kill each other mutually that can be a form of executive decision rather than an ethical discovery. If somebody then starts to "doubt" "maybe we should kill each other a little bit" that can be a form of setting out a different society or reforming the society to a different order. In this sense if somebody ask for your favorite color is it would be weird to be uncertain what your favorite color is. It would be really weird to read a proof to the effect of "your favorite color is actually green rather than red" and be convinced. Such things are true not because we discover them but because we stipulate them. Saying "maybe my favorite color is blue" is not knowing what your favorite color is or refusing to have a favorite color.
Now it seems open to me whether moral questions are such stipulative executive decisions. Under this kind of conception "murder is wrong, 95% confidence" can sound a lot like "I reserve a right to let 5% of murderers off the hook, but generally punish them."