All of Breakfast's Comments + Replies

No kidding! Haligonian lurker here too.

What I'm saying is that when you say the word "ought", you mean something. Even if you can't quite articulate it, you have some sort of standard for saying "you ought do this, you ought not do that" that is basically the definition of ought.

I'd object to this simplification of the meaning of the word (I'd argue that 'ought' means lots of different things in different contexts, most of which aren't only reducible to categorically imperative moral claims), but I suppose it's not really relevant here.

I'm pretty sure we agree and are jus... (read more)

Well, my "moral reasons are to be..." there was kind of slippery. The 'strong moral realism' Roko outlined seems to be based on a factual premise ("All...beings...will agree..."), which I'd agree most moral realists are smart enough not to hold. The much more commonly held view seems to amount instead to a sort of ... moral imperative to accept moral imperatives -- by positing a set of knowable moral facts that we might not bother to recognize or follow, but ought to. Which seems like more of the same circular reasoning that Psy-Kosh has been talking about/defending.

What do you mean by "should" in this context other than a moral sense of it? What would count as a "good reason"?

By that I mean rationally motivating reasons. But I'd be willing to concede, if you pressed, that 'rationality' is itself just another set of action-directing values. The point would still stand: if the set of values I mean when I say 'rationality' is incongruent with the set of values you mean when you say 'morality,' then it appears you have no grounds on which to persuade me to be directed by morality.

This is a very uns... (read more)

Well, that's not necessarily a moral sense of 'should', I guess -- I'm asking whether I have any sort of good reason to act morally, be it an appeal to my interests or to transcendent moral reasons or whatever.

It's generally the contention of moralists and paperclipists that there's always good reason for everyone to act morally or paperclippishly. But proving that this contention itself just boils down to yet another moral/paperclippy claim doesn't seem to help their case any. It just demonstrates what a tight circle their argument is, and what little reason someone outside of it has to care about it if they don't already.

But why should I feel obliged to act morally instead of paperclippishly? Circles seem all well and good when you're already inside of them, but being inside of them already is kind of not the point of discussing meta-ethics.

I'm newish here too, JenniferRM!

Sure, I have an impact on the behaviour of people who encounter me, and we can even grant that they are more likely to imitate/approve of how I act than disapprove and act otherwise -- but I likely don't have any more impact on the average person's behaviour than anyone else they interact with does. So, on balance, my impact on the behaviour of the rest of the world is still something like 1/6.5 billion.

And, regardless, people tend to invoke this "What if everyone ___" argument primarily when there are no clear ill... (read more)

It suits some intuitions very nicely.

I suppose that's about as good as we're going to get with moral theories!

Well, I hope I haven't caused you too much corner-sobbing; thanks for explaining.

Actually, Kant only defended the duty not to lie out of philanthropic concerns.

Huh! Okay, good to know. ... So not-lying-out-of-philanthropic-concerns isn't a mere context-based variation?

A counterfactual telling you that your action is un-universalizeable can be informative to a deontic evaluation of an act even if you perform the act in complete secrecy. It can be informative even if etc.

Okay, I get that. But what does it inform you of? Why should one care in particular about the universalizability of one's actions?

I don't want to just come down to asking "Why should I be moral?", because I already think there is no good answer to that question. But why this particular picture of morality?

Huh? To be fair, I don't think you were setting out to make the case for deontology here. All I am saying about its "use" is that I don't see any appeal. I think you gave a pretty good description of what deontologists are thinking; the North Pole - reindeer - haunting paragraph was handily illustrative.

Anyway, I think Kant may be to blame for employing arguments that consider "what would happen if others performed similar acts more frequently than they actually do". People say similar things all the time -- "What if everyone did that?" -- as though there were a sort of magical causal linkage between one's individual actions and the actions of the rest of the world.

I'm (obviously) no Kant scholar, but I wonder if there is any possible way to flesh out a consistent and satisfactory set of such context-invariant ethical injunctions.

For example, he infamously suggests not lying to a murderer who asks where your friend is, even if you reasonably expect him to go murder your friend, because lying is wrong. Okay -- even if we don't follow our consequentialist intuitions and treat that as a reductio ad absurdum for his whole system -- that's your 'not lying' principle satisfied. But what about your 'not betraying your friends' principle? How many principles have we got in the first place, and how can we weigh them against one another?

Sorry. But then I said:

Maybe this is to beg the question of consequences mattering in the first place.

And added,

But I suppose I have no idea what use deontology is if it doesn't boil down to consequentialism at some level.

?

Certainly, many theists immediately lump atheism, utilitarianism and nihilism together. There are heaps of popular depictions framing utilitarian reasoning as being too 'cold and calculating' and not having 'real heart'. Which follows from atheists 'not having any real values' and from accepting the nihilistic, death-obsessed Darwinian worldview, etc.

What has never stopped bewildering me is the question of why anyone should consider such a possible world relevant to their individual decision-making. I know Kant has some... tangled, Kantian argument regarding this, but does anyone who isn't a die-hard Kantian have any sensible reason on hand for considering the counterfactual "What if everyone did the same"?

Everyone doing X is not even a remotely likely consequence of me doing X. Maybe this is to beg the question of consequences mattering in the first place. But I suppose I have no idea what u... (read more)

That sounds pretty confusing. You might as well just not have officially sanctioned factions in the first place, right? People who agree on a given issue will naturally band together on it, but they won't be so afflicted with the bias or the pressure that comes of being on a well-defined Side, to have their whole range of opinions cohere with those held by the group. There are already de facto 'factions' on any issue we might discuss, and everyone is already felt to be continually obliged to examine the rationality of their positions, so it kind of seems like we're already there!

Hrm. Well, if politics itself is any example to judge by, that may make for a resilient institution -- but the mess of allegiances and biases created by splitting people into well-defined factions probably entails that the institution would be much worse off in terms of truth-finding, because devoting too much of its energies to internecine squabbling.

I suppose you need to strike a balance between unproductive antagonism, and ending up as a group of like-minded folks just patting each other on the back. Thankfully, LW seems to have a strong dose of "Let's get to the bottom of this"-type norms, and the appropriately rigorous/persnickety personalities, to stop it from getting too back-patty.

Well, thank you again!

Done, thanks. (That was my first ever comment here)

But parents — probably the vast majority of them — routinely make tremendous sacrifices in every area of their lives for their children, which seems to come pretty darn close.

"But people are sometimes authoritarian and cruel! Just for fun! And the only people who you can be consistently cruel to without them slugging you, shunning you, suing you, or calling the police on you are your children. This is a reason for more than the usual amount of skepticism of arguments that say that strict parenting is necessary."

That's a very good point. But there may be a parallel counterpoint: "Sometimes parents are indulgent and too lazy or exhausted or undisciplined to enforce an appropriate degree of discipline in their ow... (read more)