Summary:
System 1 follows non-moral heuristics, System 2 deliberates on and follows morality.
Far mode uses System 2, Near mode uses System 1 unless something unusual happens and System 2 takes over.
People who believe in moral realism want System 2 to be in charge all the time.
This is unpleasant, because
Nothing unpleasant is true, therefore moral realism is false.
Read the following in near mode, and introspect your emotions:
I don't have perfect control of which mode I'm working in. You're the writer, it's your job to write the sentence in a way that makes your reader feel "This heineous rapist bastard is getting away with barely a slap on the wrist, and laughing at how he conned us into thinking that was fair" rather than "A member of the reference class of imprisoned criminals is being treated as humanely as is compatible with minimizing danger to society".
Sexual predator Jerry Sandusky will serve his time in a minimal security prison, where he’s allowed groups of visitors five days a week.
Some readers will experience a sense of outrage. Then remind yourself: There’s no free will.
What? No! I'm okay with Sandusky receiving visitors because prisons are for time-out, not for revenge. (If asked to justify that, I'll switch to Far mode and talk about deterrence.)
I do not believe that Sandusky, or any human short of heavy mind alteration, was inevitably led to rape the way water is led downhill ("no free will" in the traditional sense). A kid begging you not to hurt him is a typical thing that should trigger the "horror and remorse" script, or System 1 confusion and switch to Far mode, and that's only in the case you never noticed "Huh, Near-mode-me wants to rape kids, I better never give it occasion to then".
Neither do I believe that Sandusky suffered a failure of willpower ("no free will" in the "finite willpower" sense this article uses). That's certainly a thing that happens to humans. But Sandusky didn't turn himself in or run away, he kept raping his victims. His choice was as real as choices get, and he chose to rape.
In moralism, an exaggerated subjective sense of duty and excessive sense of guilt co-exist with unresponsiveness to morality’s practical demands.
That's partially true, but behavior is not perfectly unresponsive. Most people have wanted to do something, thought "It would be wrong", and refrained. System 1 can be trained to mirror System 2; people can read abstract arguments about the death penalty, be convinced, and start feeling revulsion at the death penalty. (I suppose it works the other way too; if you're attracted to kids, you pretty much have to switch your philosophical position from "People who are attracted to kids are horrible monsters" to "People who are attracted to kids need lots of support to help fight their urges".)
Well, that was System 2 speaking. System 1 says:
Your philosophical sophistry would have us coddle rapists! What any douchebag feels like doing is law, and morality is for chumps. And you call yourself good?
I have not read this article, because I find it to be visually hideous. Just scrolling past it made me notice a huge amount of difference between it and most articles posted on Less Wrong; a tinted background, changed font colors, an extremely long title, and it doesn't seem to have any references in it.
While I remain open to the possibility that this is a great post which is worth cross-posting, I would ask that when you cross-post something to Less Wrong, that you format it in a style standard fro Less Wrong.
Agreed. Also, adding a summary to the end would be something that I, personally, would find helpful.
As usually understood on LW, "free will" is a relatively simple property of reasoning during decision-making. As such, it's not clear what does the statement "there is no free will" mean, and correspondingly how the belief in this statement works, if using the conventional-on-LW sense of "free will". If this is not the sense you are working under, you should introduce the sense that you do use in the post.
Some readers will experience a sense of outrage. Then remind yourself: There’s no free will.If you believe the reminder, your outrage will subside; if you’ve long been a convinced and consistent determinist, you might not need to remind yourself. Morality inculpates based on acts of free will: morality and free will are inseparable.
They're perfectly separable. My hypothetical outrage is based on seeing a heinous monster not get what's coming to him. If the heinous monster's actions were in principle predictable if we looked at the entire state of the universe ten years prior, then... so what?
What happened to this article ? Did a unicorn explode all over it ?
All the crazy colors are making it very hard to read.
That reminds me of Rainbow Splash, the Fourier-transformed alter-ego of Rainbow Dash in "Momentum Space".
Having read the article, I can now confirm that it is approximately as worthless as its poor formatting and excessive wordiness would suggest. Downvoted.
However irritating the formatting might be (and believe me, it did irritate me), I think you still have an intellectual obligation to provide some kind of justification for making such a harsh judgment on someone else's contribution. What made the article worthless, in your estimation? (You don't need to write a detailed review; a few lines should suffice.)
The article (as well as being poorly formatted and wordy):
Appears to equate moral realism with some kind of deontology, or virtue theory, it's hard to tell, since the term is only defined through describing what bad things it causes.
Seems to have been written in ignorance of the notion of compatibilist free will, as well as lacking justification for why free will would even be relevant anyway.
In general seems to be a long string of arguments with little justification of their validity, and
Mainly, appears to have been written for the purpose of proving wrong the author's political opponent "moralism", and as such to have written the bottom line first.
I could be more specific, but I don't really think it would be worthwhile.
I agree with these points, and I also think that he is using certain terms in either unique or unfamiliar ways. This, in itself, is fine, but I'm not seeing any specific place in which these words are defined as being used in an unusual manner, and it left me very confused as I was reading.
I think you still have an intellectual obligation to provide some kind of justification for making such a harsh judgment on someone else's contribution.
I disagree. There's too many idiots out there for me to provide an explanation to everyone I dismiss.
There's too many idiots out there for me to provide an explanation to everyone I dismiss.
That's fine - if you're strapped for time, you can "dismiss" them without posting anything. But if you have the time to complain, then you should make the complaints helpful.
Unjustified assertions could be more productive if not made. Creating fuss about idiots makes unnecessary noise. However, we could think this dismissiveness inform us about the status of the post.
according to moral realism and free will, moral good is the product of conscious free choice
This seems to be the core of your argument. Where are you getting it from? I think most moral realists would disagree.
For some reason I'm seeing this pop up at the top of the discussion section repeatedly. That's bad :(
[Crossposted.]
What a belief in moral realism and free will do is nothing less than change the architecture of decision-making. When we practice principles of integrity and internalize them, they and nonmoral considerations co-determine our System 1 judgments, whereas according to moral realism and free will, moral good is the product of conscious free choice, so System 2 contrastsits moral opinion to System 1’s intuition, for which System 2 compensates—and usually overcompensates. The voter had to weigh the imperatives of the duty to vote and the duty to avoid “lowering the bar” when both candidates are ideologically and programmatically distasteful. System 2 can prime and program System 1 by studying the issues, but the multifaceted decision is itself best made by System 1. What happens when System 2 tries to decide these propositions? System 2 makes the qualitative judgment that System 1 is biased one way or the other and corrects System 1. This will implicate the overcompensation bias, in which conscious attempts to counteract biases usually overcorrect. A voter who thinks correction is needed for a bias toward shirking duty will vote when not really wanting to, all things considered. A voter biased toward "lowering the bar" will be excessively purist. Whatever standard the voter uses will be taken too far.