You say, "One reason is that murder is just obviously bad, and saying that Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t make any moral error because he had a preference for eating people seems like a massive cost to a theory."
What massive cost do you have in mind? I'm a moral antirealist, and I do not think there are any costs to rejecting moral realism.
Hi Lance, I like watching your YouTube videos, so this was a fun comment to wake up to.
I just mean that "Jeffrey Dahmer didn't make any moral error" seems obviously false, and any theory, that commits me to saying it's true should be suspect. From what I understand, you don't share those sorts of seemings, so I can't imagine that'll be a satisfactory answer for you, but there you are!
I still find it strange when people recognize me, but I'm glad to see people are seeing my videos (even if they disagree).
I'm a bit puzzled by this response. You say that one reason it seems obviously bad...then you say "and" it seems like a massive cost to a theory to say otherwise, but if the only thing that makes it a massive cost is that it seems obviously false, might it be a bit redundant to say both? That is, if the massive cost just is that it seems false, what's the point in saying there's a massive cost?
I am interested in how one might adjudicate disputes that turn on how things "seem" to people. If it seems that way to you, but not to me, is there any way, in principle, to determine which of us is correct?
I'm also interested in the method itself. Things don't really "seem" this or that way to me, and I'm extremely suspicious of the whole discourse around "seemings" and "intuitions" in philosophy. None of the way people talk about this resonates with my own psychology, but given my familiarity with human psychology, it doesn't comport with how I generally understand people to think. I certainly *speak* in a way that superficially resembles the way philosophers go about their practice: I'll talk of how things seem or appear and so on, but this is all just a crude metaphor for what amounts to judgments largely predicated, to me, on an accumulation of empirical knowledge. I don't think I have any special faculty for "detecting truth." What troubles me is that philosophers will insist that we have such a faculty, and that everyone simply must use it: this is a highly contentious claim in the context of the whole history of philosophy.
It's as if rationalists and foundationalists have become so impatient they've started to simply stomp their feet and demanded that we all concede that their presumptions are correct. I don't grant those presumptions, and it worries me that people interested in philosophy employ all of this intuition so readily and, I worry, without regard for whether there is something psychologically dubious at work here.
Haha, I'd say you're quite well known! At least among people I know.
The cost of Moral Subjectivism is not that it seems false itself, it's that it commits me to believing things that seem obviously false. The objective badness of Dahmer is a datum that subjectivism would have to deny, but I think would be costly to do so. Like how, were there some theory that denied the existence of chairs, that denial would be a big cost to it.
As far as ways of adjudicating disputes, I think there probably isn't a way. Every one has to build their world view from basic beliefs that seem the most indispensable to them, then build from there. Sometimes you're going to meet someone who disagrees about those, and there's not much you can do about that - because they are our most indispensable beliefs! After listening to you speak about your internal life, I don't think your views are irrational. It sounds like just have different pools of evidence to pull from., and I don't really know what to do about that.
As for the psychology, I'm not really qualified to weigh in. All I can say is that the talk of seemings and intuition make perfect sense to me, and they really are what I base my beliefs off of
What do you mean when you say it's "a datum" that skeptics would have to deny? What's the cost of denying it?
"Like how, were there some theory that denied the existence of chairs, that denial would be a big cost to it."
Why is denying realism like denying the existence of chairs?
Thanks for addressing the other question; I'm not sure I have indispensible beliefs. Maybe I have incorrigible beliefs...beliefs I would be unwilling or unable to abandon, but I'm not sure if I actually do have anything like that.
When people talk of things making sense to them I am very suspicious. If it makes sense, one test of this is to explain what it means to other people. Yet people who talk of seemings and intuitions seem to me to not do a great job of explaining what they're talking about. These seem like psychological terms to me, yet appeals to them are rarely accompanied by any substantive appeal to actual details about human psychology. So, perhaps it does make sense. In that case, I'd like to know what they are and how they work, and how people who appeal to them know how they work. It strikes me as talk of human psychology, and I, at least, expect there to be some defensible empirical basis for such claims.
For comparison, if I said that I had "antirealist gnosis powers," that gave me "special access" to the truth, and the truth was "antirealism," I doubt you or anyone else would take this remotely seriously. Invocation of quasi-perceptual psychological powers warrants skepticism unless, and only unless, those appealing to those powers can offer some reasonable, publicly evaluable basis for taking them seriously.
What I mean is this: what reasons or evidence could you offer someone who purports not to have "seemings" or "intuitions" to believe that you have them, and that they should take them seriously (if, in fact, they should) as a source of evidence (if, in fact, they are a source of evidence?)
Well, a subjectivist would have to deny that what Dahmer did was objectively wrong, that just comes with the theory. However, it seems so obviously true that what he did WAS wrong, even if we approved of it. So, the "cost" in the scenario is giving up on something that seems obviously true. Obviously, that's not going to convince you, because what Dahmer did doesn't seem objectively wrong to you. If you reject the datum, it's also not costly to give it up.
On the chair example, I wasn't saying realism was like believing in chairs, I was just using it as example of how rejecting plausible data is a cost to a theory.
As for not being able to explain what intuition/seemings are with words, I agree that it can be hard to articulate, but there are a lot of things that are hard to articulate that I still believe in and understand. Colours, Numbers, Consciousness. It'd be really hard to explain these to someone who doesn't have a concept of them, but I still think I'm justified in believing in them. I think this just comes with the territory of trying to explain parts of our experience that are at bedrock. Language seems to have it's limitations. I'm also not sure what empirical evidence of them even could look like when they're internal to our minds. - I'm not a psychologist though.
As for the Gnostic Powers scenario, I wouldn't find their arguments compelling! I also see how it's analogous to being in your position. That's why I don't think your antirealism is a failure of reasoning on your part - I bet it does sound weird! However, I think it's weird that you don't have them. In fact, I'm not really sure of how you come to any belief without them. They seem to be at the bedrock of all my beliefs. For any premise, I can keep asking "But why do I think that?" until eventually I bottom out to "well, this foundational belief just seems to be true". If you don't know what I mean by that experience of "seeming", I imagine that it would be as unsatisfactory as the gnosis powers would be to me - but I don't consider my job in philosophy to be convincing people who disagree with me, I consider it to be finding out what's true. I can accept that how I formulate beliefs is unintelligible to some people, and not lose sleep over it. If you don't have intuitions I don't think there's anything I could say to make you believe I have them (except for maybe good faith that I'm not lying), and I don't know what reason you would have to take my seemings seriously.
I've already saved three of your articles for future reference. I rarely do that!
Fantastic article, and I feel like this very popular lay-theory of morality as either being preferences or as being caused by preferences is an underaddressed position. Thanks!
What do you think of evolutionary debunking arguments? How do you think we get access to the moral facts? Can’t we just explain all the phenomena without invoking moral facts via just evolution and culture stuff?
I have some reasons to doubt Evo debunking arguments. For example, it's not clear why our moral attitudes don't just align with reproducing as much as possible. It's also hard to explain the sudden liberalisation of our moral values around the time of the enlightenment. I think Evo debunking arguments are the best challenge to Moral Realism, but I'm less confident in them than I am in the disvlaue of pain.
Also, if I were to accept Evo debunking arguments I would just be an Error Theorist, or an anti realist without an account of language, like Lance Bush. I wouldn't be a Subjectivist
Not sure why they would just align with reproducing as much as possible as this is not just about evolution - its culture, different societal cooperation, more in group than our group (as we experience), ect. It would be really weird if it was only reproduction! Also, I agree that moral language is weird but we would expect that if we had these weird types of intuitions from various cultural and evolutionary stuff!
Sorry, didn't answer your second question. I just think we can Intuit moral facts much like we can Intuit other non natural facts, for example that there are no true contradictions, or that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line
How do you think our cognitive faculties evolve? It seems like the way we know that is also through experience and stuff. We even experience bias about certain things which makes perfect sense in light of these! Once again, where do these facts come from! Sorry if I’m coming off a little bold; I just think this point is pretty underrated and obvious
Hahah, no stress, bold is fine! I just think we've evolved the capacity for reason, and that's allowed us to intuit certain facts. Do you think that we gain our belief that their cannot be true contradictions from our senses? I thinks that's odd. I believe it because when I think about true contradictions they just seem impossible.
As for where the facts come from, I don't know, they just are. But I also don't know where matter comes from, or where the fact that there are no true contradictions come from, but I still believe in those
You can talk about meta beliefs but I’m asking where do those come from. It would be weird to say they come from some spooky realm, but if you don’t say they come from evolution/ culture/ empirical observation, that seems to be the most forceful answer. Perhaps you can say that our brains developed the law of non contradiction because every empirical and survival instinct would tell us that because it’s true in the world, but there seems no equivalent to morals here. If morality doesn’t actually help you get to places, there is no selective pressure for it, and we would have access to facts about it. Given that we reject the fact that we have facts, it would be then really weird to say that the facts exist because our reason for believing that they do in the first place was the fact that we intuit them.
My belief comes from the fact that when I experience pain it's disvlaue is self evident. I don't think evolution selected for morality per se (although clearly evolution, culture, and other influences affect our intuitions), I think it selected for our capacity for reason - and we're able to use that to gain a priori knowledge. I just think some moral beliefs fall under that apriori banner, much like other non natural facts. Things like mathematical facts, other normative facts, the rules of logic, etc.
I would say that I agree it is self evident that even if someone explained to us the reasoning for things like pleasure that wouldn’t change the fact that we would want it and think it would be the right thing to go for it. On the other hand, if someone gave you and proved a total explanation of why you have moral faculties despite moral facts not being objective, it WOULD give you a reason to be less moral in action than if you thought they didn’t exist.
Sorry, and I should say that we intuit these facts through reason because they're just true. You may think that's spooky, but I guess I don't find non natural facts existing independently from us that odd
Laws of the universe, sure. I guess, even without knowledge, you can guess that these exist because we have so much experience in so many different areas of them working. But laws about how we should act???? This seems to be an entirely different realm and would only exist when humans (who came relative to now extremely late in evolution) existed. This seems like not the greatest point to me, but let me know if you think im misunderstanding something.
Typically "X is wrong" doesn't mean "I think X is wrong," it means, "X is wrong per stances we share, or stances we would share if you were to alter yours to be consistent, undeluded, and virtuous."
Nobody is aware of any true moral proposition that is completely stance-independent (has no tie to anyone's cares & concerns), so while morality is real in many key senses of the word "real," moral realism ("there is 1+ stance-independent true moral proposition") remains disconnected from observed reality.
I disagree! But to be clear, this article is not an argument for Moral Realism per se, and more of an argument that moral statements don't merely describe our preferences
I am happy you're fighting the good fight against people saying that moral statements only describe preferences and nothing else. That is a goofy position. As an irrealist / antirealist myself, I'd agree that it is clear that moral propositions, while stance-dependent, almost always involve a swath of stance-independent facts.
For example, with the proposition "I ought to drive 70 MPH," there are clearly a number of stances upon which its truth value depends, like those related to preferences re: prompt arrival, safety vs. risk, and degree of compliance with the law. But that's not enough. We also need to include stance-independent circumstantial factors; how much time do you have before the appointment, and what are the ramifications of degrees of being late? How fast is everyone else going? What is the posted speed? What is local police attitude toward degrees of going over, and what fines are on the books? Is it raining? Is it foggy? Is there construction?
The notion that these questions are immaterial, and that "I like to go 70 MPH" is all this proposition means, is a facile notion indeed, and makes me curious about who you've run into holding that notion.
The author writes "One reason is that murder is just obviously bad"
This is a terrible example since it is explicitly a preference.
The definition of murder is the *unlawful* killing of a person by another person. Compare to capital punishment, which a *lawful* killing of a person by another. The difference between these two kids of people killing is that one is lawful (culturally/legally permitted) and one is not.
When I say "obviously bad" I mean stance independently bad, so I'm not talking about my preferences
I'm also not talking about legal definitions. I'm speaking about murder in the ethical sense of the word. Something like "unjust killing". I take it if the law against murder was suddenly repealed tomorrow, you would still think it appropriate to call an unjust killing "murder"
Whether something is legal or just is very much stance dependent in that the law and people’s sense of what is just vary over place and time.
Take capital punishment. Many people feel it is unjust and it has traditionally been illegal in a number of states.
A classic example is slavery. Slavery was a normal thing for thousands of years without anyone thinking it was some great evil. Today it is very much seen as deeply evil. A moral realist position would either be than slavery was not immoral and thinking modern opposition is a temporary mistake like gender fluidity, or that it is immoral and then trying to comprehend how almost nobody noticed this until just the last couple of centuries in its multi-millennium run.
Okay it sounds like you just don't agree that murder is stance independently bad. That's fine, but it doesn't mean murder is a bad example. Sounds like I could've put anything in there and you would've rejected it being stance independently bad
But remember, I meant stance independently wrong. So it translates in into unjust killing is obviously stance independently bad, which is not a tautology
It's still a tautilogy. Inserting "stance independently" into wrongful killing is wrong doesn't change that. Neither does replacing wrongful with its synonym unjust, and wrong with bad.
When you're faced with a lesser evil choice, there's no morality inherent in the choice other than the general duty to choose the lesser harm. But no one has the right to judge you for choosing badly regardless of why. The moral culpability falls on whoever put you in that position. If it was your bad choices, then yes, you're culpable. If it was incidental or unrelated to your prior choices then it's the responsibility of whoever created the situation or the system that created the situation. And if you've been faced with lesser evil choices your entire life you've never had the opportunity to take moral responsibility no matter what you do, no matter how you end up.
Sure, maybe we can forgive me for pleading not to be chosen in that scenario - but I still really would think I ought be the one tortured. I'm not talking about moral responsibility here, I'm out talking about moral attitudes
Can you meaningfully know that one second more suffering for one person is really worse than a second less for someone else? What if that someone else was a tiny fraction more sensitive to pain?
Okay, assume we know that we have the same pain sensitivity. Positing differences like that is just sidestepping the point the hypothetical is trying to get at. The point is that, yes, it's obviously worse to torture someone for 1h 1s than it is to torture them for just 1h.
My point is that no one can judge your state of mind when encountering a situation like that. There are all sorts of reasons you might have to choose what appears the less viable option from an external perspective, including simply not caring. The responsibility, and the solution to the problem, most lie in preventing it or at least concentrating as much as possible on the initial cause, not the ultimate outcome.
You're still talking about moral responsibility and I'm not sure why. The hypothetical asks us to compare what we think ought be done, with what we would prefer be done. Whether or not someone external to us can or can't judge us for our choice is irrelevant. We're also not even making a choice, the third stranger is - so I'm not really sure I follow what you're talking about
whether or not the third stranger is justified in their belief that they are reducing the damage caused that is unreported unconscious repressed suffering or increasing the conscious report of suffering that is self reported as a cathartic drive to personal growth, seems entirely relevant to the strangers moral choice, subjective to the person experiencing it and problematic for them to reliably compare, justify and be true. Or is the claim that the first account is morally neutral and the latter less moral by virtue of some universal measure of suffering irrespective of the subjects account (or lack there in of one) ?
The way you distinguish between the 1st and 2nd order preferences, seems to question whether your account of preference is true by appeal to some implicit state of affairs not in the hypothetical. By virtue of what in the hypothetical should we think the button pusher (not us) should value himself or the other ? Or are we discussing our accumulated reasoned facts from the world projected onto the hypothetical as implicit assumptions on how anyone should think and value, IE why can't you trip like I do ?
By the time I'm talking about second order preferences, I've moved on from the hypothetical. The hypothetical only serves to refute the claim that our moral attitudes are our first order preferences
Why does it 'serve', I also don't think morality is described by intentional attitude, if pressed I think it's a post hoc descriptive account we fit to explain what is the case, beyond the polemic of language. Language's meaning is a story of our past, no two people share it, yet we assume the words mean the same to each other. The miracle for me is that language works at all.
I’m also a moral realist. However, I think it is true that many people differ even diametrically so, on what they feel they know is absolutely wrong. It’s hard to underestimate how evil American southerners in the antebellum south thought interracial romantic relationships were. They knew it as much as They knew of their own existence. Anyone who disagreed was either morally ignorant, stupid, or insane to paraphrase Richard Dawkins.
There are a lot of other examples. However, the moral realist can fall back to ontology being the culprit. CS Lewis made the point that it may not be so evil to execute witches if a society really believes that a witch is someone who is sold herself for the actualization of absolute evil, and is intent on using supernatural powers to harm her neighbors.
There may be a core set of moral facts which are viewed through our particular ontologies as through the wrong end of a smudged up telescope. We can get it wrong in the application, and with horrifically tragic results sometimes. This is not excuse anyone or any society. We are at some point epistemically responsible for our ontologies, it seems to me.
I think this is part of the point of the genesis story of the fall of Adam. It was for short period of time outside of human purview to determine right and wrong. We were and still are largely incompetent in that regard. Ingolf Dalferth says that only God is free and that only God can determine that all of his actions result in only good consequences. that may not be what most libertarians see as free will, but it seems cogent somehow at least to the subject at hand.
You say, "One reason is that murder is just obviously bad, and saying that Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t make any moral error because he had a preference for eating people seems like a massive cost to a theory."
What massive cost do you have in mind? I'm a moral antirealist, and I do not think there are any costs to rejecting moral realism.
Hi Lance, I like watching your YouTube videos, so this was a fun comment to wake up to.
I just mean that "Jeffrey Dahmer didn't make any moral error" seems obviously false, and any theory, that commits me to saying it's true should be suspect. From what I understand, you don't share those sorts of seemings, so I can't imagine that'll be a satisfactory answer for you, but there you are!
I still find it strange when people recognize me, but I'm glad to see people are seeing my videos (even if they disagree).
I'm a bit puzzled by this response. You say that one reason it seems obviously bad...then you say "and" it seems like a massive cost to a theory to say otherwise, but if the only thing that makes it a massive cost is that it seems obviously false, might it be a bit redundant to say both? That is, if the massive cost just is that it seems false, what's the point in saying there's a massive cost?
I am interested in how one might adjudicate disputes that turn on how things "seem" to people. If it seems that way to you, but not to me, is there any way, in principle, to determine which of us is correct?
I'm also interested in the method itself. Things don't really "seem" this or that way to me, and I'm extremely suspicious of the whole discourse around "seemings" and "intuitions" in philosophy. None of the way people talk about this resonates with my own psychology, but given my familiarity with human psychology, it doesn't comport with how I generally understand people to think. I certainly *speak* in a way that superficially resembles the way philosophers go about their practice: I'll talk of how things seem or appear and so on, but this is all just a crude metaphor for what amounts to judgments largely predicated, to me, on an accumulation of empirical knowledge. I don't think I have any special faculty for "detecting truth." What troubles me is that philosophers will insist that we have such a faculty, and that everyone simply must use it: this is a highly contentious claim in the context of the whole history of philosophy.
It's as if rationalists and foundationalists have become so impatient they've started to simply stomp their feet and demanded that we all concede that their presumptions are correct. I don't grant those presumptions, and it worries me that people interested in philosophy employ all of this intuition so readily and, I worry, without regard for whether there is something psychologically dubious at work here.
Haha, I'd say you're quite well known! At least among people I know.
The cost of Moral Subjectivism is not that it seems false itself, it's that it commits me to believing things that seem obviously false. The objective badness of Dahmer is a datum that subjectivism would have to deny, but I think would be costly to do so. Like how, were there some theory that denied the existence of chairs, that denial would be a big cost to it.
As far as ways of adjudicating disputes, I think there probably isn't a way. Every one has to build their world view from basic beliefs that seem the most indispensable to them, then build from there. Sometimes you're going to meet someone who disagrees about those, and there's not much you can do about that - because they are our most indispensable beliefs! After listening to you speak about your internal life, I don't think your views are irrational. It sounds like just have different pools of evidence to pull from., and I don't really know what to do about that.
As for the psychology, I'm not really qualified to weigh in. All I can say is that the talk of seemings and intuition make perfect sense to me, and they really are what I base my beliefs off of
What do you mean when you say it's "a datum" that skeptics would have to deny? What's the cost of denying it?
"Like how, were there some theory that denied the existence of chairs, that denial would be a big cost to it."
Why is denying realism like denying the existence of chairs?
Thanks for addressing the other question; I'm not sure I have indispensible beliefs. Maybe I have incorrigible beliefs...beliefs I would be unwilling or unable to abandon, but I'm not sure if I actually do have anything like that.
When people talk of things making sense to them I am very suspicious. If it makes sense, one test of this is to explain what it means to other people. Yet people who talk of seemings and intuitions seem to me to not do a great job of explaining what they're talking about. These seem like psychological terms to me, yet appeals to them are rarely accompanied by any substantive appeal to actual details about human psychology. So, perhaps it does make sense. In that case, I'd like to know what they are and how they work, and how people who appeal to them know how they work. It strikes me as talk of human psychology, and I, at least, expect there to be some defensible empirical basis for such claims.
For comparison, if I said that I had "antirealist gnosis powers," that gave me "special access" to the truth, and the truth was "antirealism," I doubt you or anyone else would take this remotely seriously. Invocation of quasi-perceptual psychological powers warrants skepticism unless, and only unless, those appealing to those powers can offer some reasonable, publicly evaluable basis for taking them seriously.
What I mean is this: what reasons or evidence could you offer someone who purports not to have "seemings" or "intuitions" to believe that you have them, and that they should take them seriously (if, in fact, they should) as a source of evidence (if, in fact, they are a source of evidence?)
Well, a subjectivist would have to deny that what Dahmer did was objectively wrong, that just comes with the theory. However, it seems so obviously true that what he did WAS wrong, even if we approved of it. So, the "cost" in the scenario is giving up on something that seems obviously true. Obviously, that's not going to convince you, because what Dahmer did doesn't seem objectively wrong to you. If you reject the datum, it's also not costly to give it up.
On the chair example, I wasn't saying realism was like believing in chairs, I was just using it as example of how rejecting plausible data is a cost to a theory.
As for not being able to explain what intuition/seemings are with words, I agree that it can be hard to articulate, but there are a lot of things that are hard to articulate that I still believe in and understand. Colours, Numbers, Consciousness. It'd be really hard to explain these to someone who doesn't have a concept of them, but I still think I'm justified in believing in them. I think this just comes with the territory of trying to explain parts of our experience that are at bedrock. Language seems to have it's limitations. I'm also not sure what empirical evidence of them even could look like when they're internal to our minds. - I'm not a psychologist though.
As for the Gnostic Powers scenario, I wouldn't find their arguments compelling! I also see how it's analogous to being in your position. That's why I don't think your antirealism is a failure of reasoning on your part - I bet it does sound weird! However, I think it's weird that you don't have them. In fact, I'm not really sure of how you come to any belief without them. They seem to be at the bedrock of all my beliefs. For any premise, I can keep asking "But why do I think that?" until eventually I bottom out to "well, this foundational belief just seems to be true". If you don't know what I mean by that experience of "seeming", I imagine that it would be as unsatisfactory as the gnosis powers would be to me - but I don't consider my job in philosophy to be convincing people who disagree with me, I consider it to be finding out what's true. I can accept that how I formulate beliefs is unintelligible to some people, and not lose sleep over it. If you don't have intuitions I don't think there's anything I could say to make you believe I have them (except for maybe good faith that I'm not lying), and I don't know what reason you would have to take my seemings seriously.
I've already saved three of your articles for future reference. I rarely do that!
Fantastic article, and I feel like this very popular lay-theory of morality as either being preferences or as being caused by preferences is an underaddressed position. Thanks!
Awesome! Thanks for subscribing, and the support, I appreciate it
What do you think of evolutionary debunking arguments? How do you think we get access to the moral facts? Can’t we just explain all the phenomena without invoking moral facts via just evolution and culture stuff?
I have some reasons to doubt Evo debunking arguments. For example, it's not clear why our moral attitudes don't just align with reproducing as much as possible. It's also hard to explain the sudden liberalisation of our moral values around the time of the enlightenment. I think Evo debunking arguments are the best challenge to Moral Realism, but I'm less confident in them than I am in the disvlaue of pain.
Also, if I were to accept Evo debunking arguments I would just be an Error Theorist, or an anti realist without an account of language, like Lance Bush. I wouldn't be a Subjectivist
Not sure why they would just align with reproducing as much as possible as this is not just about evolution - its culture, different societal cooperation, more in group than our group (as we experience), ect. It would be really weird if it was only reproduction! Also, I agree that moral language is weird but we would expect that if we had these weird types of intuitions from various cultural and evolutionary stuff!
Sorry, didn't answer your second question. I just think we can Intuit moral facts much like we can Intuit other non natural facts, for example that there are no true contradictions, or that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line
How do you think our cognitive faculties evolve? It seems like the way we know that is also through experience and stuff. We even experience bias about certain things which makes perfect sense in light of these! Once again, where do these facts come from! Sorry if I’m coming off a little bold; I just think this point is pretty underrated and obvious
Hahah, no stress, bold is fine! I just think we've evolved the capacity for reason, and that's allowed us to intuit certain facts. Do you think that we gain our belief that their cannot be true contradictions from our senses? I thinks that's odd. I believe it because when I think about true contradictions they just seem impossible.
As for where the facts come from, I don't know, they just are. But I also don't know where matter comes from, or where the fact that there are no true contradictions come from, but I still believe in those
I don’t like everything about the post, but this makes a similar point and does so really well:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmqLxvtsPzZ2s6mpY/a-priori.
You can talk about meta beliefs but I’m asking where do those come from. It would be weird to say they come from some spooky realm, but if you don’t say they come from evolution/ culture/ empirical observation, that seems to be the most forceful answer. Perhaps you can say that our brains developed the law of non contradiction because every empirical and survival instinct would tell us that because it’s true in the world, but there seems no equivalent to morals here. If morality doesn’t actually help you get to places, there is no selective pressure for it, and we would have access to facts about it. Given that we reject the fact that we have facts, it would be then really weird to say that the facts exist because our reason for believing that they do in the first place was the fact that we intuit them.
My belief comes from the fact that when I experience pain it's disvlaue is self evident. I don't think evolution selected for morality per se (although clearly evolution, culture, and other influences affect our intuitions), I think it selected for our capacity for reason - and we're able to use that to gain a priori knowledge. I just think some moral beliefs fall under that apriori banner, much like other non natural facts. Things like mathematical facts, other normative facts, the rules of logic, etc.
I have an article on the topic of motivation and self evident desires that you might appreciate here: https://open.substack.com/pub/irrationalitycommunity/p/thinking-about-means-and-ends?r=1owv24&utm_medium=ios.
I would say that I agree it is self evident that even if someone explained to us the reasoning for things like pleasure that wouldn’t change the fact that we would want it and think it would be the right thing to go for it. On the other hand, if someone gave you and proved a total explanation of why you have moral faculties despite moral facts not being objective, it WOULD give you a reason to be less moral in action than if you thought they didn’t exist.
Sorry, and I should say that we intuit these facts through reason because they're just true. You may think that's spooky, but I guess I don't find non natural facts existing independently from us that odd
Laws of the universe, sure. I guess, even without knowledge, you can guess that these exist because we have so much experience in so many different areas of them working. But laws about how we should act???? This seems to be an entirely different realm and would only exist when humans (who came relative to now extremely late in evolution) existed. This seems like not the greatest point to me, but let me know if you think im misunderstanding something.
Typically "X is wrong" doesn't mean "I think X is wrong," it means, "X is wrong per stances we share, or stances we would share if you were to alter yours to be consistent, undeluded, and virtuous."
Nobody is aware of any true moral proposition that is completely stance-independent (has no tie to anyone's cares & concerns), so while morality is real in many key senses of the word "real," moral realism ("there is 1+ stance-independent true moral proposition") remains disconnected from observed reality.
I disagree! But to be clear, this article is not an argument for Moral Realism per se, and more of an argument that moral statements don't merely describe our preferences
I am happy you're fighting the good fight against people saying that moral statements only describe preferences and nothing else. That is a goofy position. As an irrealist / antirealist myself, I'd agree that it is clear that moral propositions, while stance-dependent, almost always involve a swath of stance-independent facts.
For example, with the proposition "I ought to drive 70 MPH," there are clearly a number of stances upon which its truth value depends, like those related to preferences re: prompt arrival, safety vs. risk, and degree of compliance with the law. But that's not enough. We also need to include stance-independent circumstantial factors; how much time do you have before the appointment, and what are the ramifications of degrees of being late? How fast is everyone else going? What is the posted speed? What is local police attitude toward degrees of going over, and what fines are on the books? Is it raining? Is it foggy? Is there construction?
The notion that these questions are immaterial, and that "I like to go 70 MPH" is all this proposition means, is a facile notion indeed, and makes me curious about who you've run into holding that notion.
Wouldn’t all these contextual facts reduce to a +1 stance-independent proposition something like... you shouldn’t cause harm to other sentient beings?
The litmus criteria for both "(enough) harm" and "(enough) sentience" are stance-dependent.
The author writes "One reason is that murder is just obviously bad"
This is a terrible example since it is explicitly a preference.
The definition of murder is the *unlawful* killing of a person by another person. Compare to capital punishment, which a *lawful* killing of a person by another. The difference between these two kids of people killing is that one is lawful (culturally/legally permitted) and one is not.
When I say "obviously bad" I mean stance independently bad, so I'm not talking about my preferences
I'm also not talking about legal definitions. I'm speaking about murder in the ethical sense of the word. Something like "unjust killing". I take it if the law against murder was suddenly repealed tomorrow, you would still think it appropriate to call an unjust killing "murder"
Whether something is legal or just is very much stance dependent in that the law and people’s sense of what is just vary over place and time.
Take capital punishment. Many people feel it is unjust and it has traditionally been illegal in a number of states.
A classic example is slavery. Slavery was a normal thing for thousands of years without anyone thinking it was some great evil. Today it is very much seen as deeply evil. A moral realist position would either be than slavery was not immoral and thinking modern opposition is a temporary mistake like gender fluidity, or that it is immoral and then trying to comprehend how almost nobody noticed this until just the last couple of centuries in its multi-millennium run.
Okay it sounds like you just don't agree that murder is stance independently bad. That's fine, but it doesn't mean murder is a bad example. Sounds like I could've put anything in there and you would've rejected it being stance independently bad
You defined murder as the unjust killing of a person. What makes something unjust? That it is wrongful.
Saying murder is obviously wrong by your definition translates into
wrongful killing of a person is obviously wrong
This is a tautology. It is true only in a trivial sense. This is what makes it a bad example.
Slavery is a better example because there is no tautology. When slavery was legal, whether a person was property or not was objective.
When a person kills another it is not an objective fact that the act was of the wrongful category (murder by your definition).
But remember, I meant stance independently wrong. So it translates in into unjust killing is obviously stance independently bad, which is not a tautology
It's still a tautilogy. Inserting "stance independently" into wrongful killing is wrong doesn't change that. Neither does replacing wrongful with its synonym unjust, and wrong with bad.
All this does is camouflage the tautology.
When you're faced with a lesser evil choice, there's no morality inherent in the choice other than the general duty to choose the lesser harm. But no one has the right to judge you for choosing badly regardless of why. The moral culpability falls on whoever put you in that position. If it was your bad choices, then yes, you're culpable. If it was incidental or unrelated to your prior choices then it's the responsibility of whoever created the situation or the system that created the situation. And if you've been faced with lesser evil choices your entire life you've never had the opportunity to take moral responsibility no matter what you do, no matter how you end up.
Sure, maybe we can forgive me for pleading not to be chosen in that scenario - but I still really would think I ought be the one tortured. I'm not talking about moral responsibility here, I'm out talking about moral attitudes
Can you meaningfully know that one second more suffering for one person is really worse than a second less for someone else? What if that someone else was a tiny fraction more sensitive to pain?
Okay, assume we know that we have the same pain sensitivity. Positing differences like that is just sidestepping the point the hypothetical is trying to get at. The point is that, yes, it's obviously worse to torture someone for 1h 1s than it is to torture them for just 1h.
My point is that no one can judge your state of mind when encountering a situation like that. There are all sorts of reasons you might have to choose what appears the less viable option from an external perspective, including simply not caring. The responsibility, and the solution to the problem, most lie in preventing it or at least concentrating as much as possible on the initial cause, not the ultimate outcome.
You're still talking about moral responsibility and I'm not sure why. The hypothetical asks us to compare what we think ought be done, with what we would prefer be done. Whether or not someone external to us can or can't judge us for our choice is irrelevant. We're also not even making a choice, the third stranger is - so I'm not really sure I follow what you're talking about
whether or not the third stranger is justified in their belief that they are reducing the damage caused that is unreported unconscious repressed suffering or increasing the conscious report of suffering that is self reported as a cathartic drive to personal growth, seems entirely relevant to the strangers moral choice, subjective to the person experiencing it and problematic for them to reliably compare, justify and be true. Or is the claim that the first account is morally neutral and the latter less moral by virtue of some universal measure of suffering irrespective of the subjects account (or lack there in of one) ?
The way you distinguish between the 1st and 2nd order preferences, seems to question whether your account of preference is true by appeal to some implicit state of affairs not in the hypothetical. By virtue of what in the hypothetical should we think the button pusher (not us) should value himself or the other ? Or are we discussing our accumulated reasoned facts from the world projected onto the hypothetical as implicit assumptions on how anyone should think and value, IE why can't you trip like I do ?
By the time I'm talking about second order preferences, I've moved on from the hypothetical. The hypothetical only serves to refute the claim that our moral attitudes are our first order preferences
Why does it 'serve', I also don't think morality is described by intentional attitude, if pressed I think it's a post hoc descriptive account we fit to explain what is the case, beyond the polemic of language. Language's meaning is a story of our past, no two people share it, yet we assume the words mean the same to each other. The miracle for me is that language works at all.
I’m also a moral realist. However, I think it is true that many people differ even diametrically so, on what they feel they know is absolutely wrong. It’s hard to underestimate how evil American southerners in the antebellum south thought interracial romantic relationships were. They knew it as much as They knew of their own existence. Anyone who disagreed was either morally ignorant, stupid, or insane to paraphrase Richard Dawkins.
There are a lot of other examples. However, the moral realist can fall back to ontology being the culprit. CS Lewis made the point that it may not be so evil to execute witches if a society really believes that a witch is someone who is sold herself for the actualization of absolute evil, and is intent on using supernatural powers to harm her neighbors.
There may be a core set of moral facts which are viewed through our particular ontologies as through the wrong end of a smudged up telescope. We can get it wrong in the application, and with horrifically tragic results sometimes. This is not excuse anyone or any society. We are at some point epistemically responsible for our ontologies, it seems to me.
I think this is part of the point of the genesis story of the fall of Adam. It was for short period of time outside of human purview to determine right and wrong. We were and still are largely incompetent in that regard. Ingolf Dalferth says that only God is free and that only God can determine that all of his actions result in only good consequences. that may not be what most libertarians see as free will, but it seems cogent somehow at least to the subject at hand.