And if you’ve been reading along this whole time, you know the answer isn’t going to be, “Look at this fundamentally moral stuff!”
I didn’t know what “fundamentally moral” meant, so I translated it to the nearest term with which I’m more familiar, what Mackie called “intrinsic prescriptivity.” Or, perhaps more clearly, “intrinsic goodness,” following Korsgaard:
Objects, activities, or whatever have an instrumental value if they are valued for the sake of something else—tools, money, and chores would be standard examples. A common explanation of the supposedly contrasting kind, intrinsic goodness, is to say that a thing is intrinsically good if it is valued for its own sake, that being the obvious alternative to a thing’s being valued for the sake of something else. This is not, however, what the words “intrinsic value” mean. To say that something is intrinsically good is not by definition to say that it is valued for its own sake: it is to say that it has goodness in itself. It refers, one might say, to the location or source of the goodness rather than the way we value the thing. The contrast between instrumental and intrinsic value is therefore misleading, a false contrast. The natural contrast to intrinsic goodness—the value a thing has “in itself”—is extrinsic goodness—the value a thing gets from some other source. The natural contrast to a thing that is valued instrumentally or as a means is a thing that is valued for its own sake or as an end.
So what I mean to say in (5) is that nothing is intrinsically good (in Korsgaard’s sense). That is, nothing has value in itself. Things only have value in relation to something else.
I’m not sure whether this notion of intrinsic value is genuinely confused or merely not-understood-by-Luke-Muehlhauser, but I’m betting it is either confused or false. (“Untrue” is the term usually used to capture a statement’s being either incoherent or meaningful-and-false: see for example Richard Joyce on error theory.)
But now, I’m not sure you agree with (5) as I intended it. Do you think life, consciousness, activity, and some other things have value-in-themselves? Do these things have intrinsic value?
Thanks again for your reply. I’m going to read Chappell’s comment on this thread, too.
Do you think a heap of five pebbles is intrinsically prime, or does it get its primeness from some extrinsic thing that attaches a tag with the five English letters “PRIME” and could in principle be made to attach the same tag to composite heaps instead? If you consider “beauty” as the logical function your brain’s beauty-detectors compute, then is a screensaver intrinsically beautiful?
Does the word “intrinsic” even help, considering that it invokes bad metaphysics all by itself? In the physical universe there are only quantum amplitudes. Moral facts are logical facts, but not all minds are compelled by that-subject-matter-which-we-name-”morality”; one could as easily build a mind to be compelled by the primality of a heap of pebbles.
So the short answer is that there are different functions that use the same labels to designate different relations while we believe that the same labels designate the same functions?
I wonder if Max Tegmark would have written a similar comment. I’m not sure if there is a meaningful difference regarding Luke’s question to say that there are only quantum amplitudes versus there are only relations.
What I’m saying is that in the physical world there are only causes and effects, and the primeness of a heap of pebbles is not an ontologically basic fact operating as a separate and additional element of physical reality, but it is nonetheless about as “intrinsic” to the heap of pebbles as anything.
Once morality stops being mysterious and you start cashing it out as a logical function, the moral awfulness of a murder is exactly as intrinsic as the primeness of a heap of pebbles. Just as we don’t care whether pebble heaps are prime or experience any affect associated with its primeness, the Pebblesorters don’t care or compute whether a murder is morally awful; and this doesn’t mean that a heap of five pebbles isn’t really prime or that primeness is arbitrary, nor yet that on the “moral Twin Earth” murder could be a good thing. And there are no little physical primons associated with the pebble-heap that could be replaced by compositons to make it composite without changing the number of pebbles; and no physical stone tablet on which morality is written that could be rechiseled to make murder good without changing the circumstances of the murder; but if you’re looking for those you’re looking in the wrong closet.
Are you arguing that the world is basically a cellular automaton and that therefore beauty is logically implied to be a property of some instance of the universe? If some agent does perceive beauty then that is a logically implied fact about the circumstances. Asking if another agent would perceive the same beauty could be rephrased as asking about the equality of the expressions of an equation?
I think a lot of people are arguing about the ambiguity of the string “beauty” as it is multiply realized.
But now, I’m not sure you agree with (5) as I intended it. Do you think life, consciousness, activity, and some other things have value-in-themselves? Do these things have intrinsic value?
It is rather difficult to ask that question in the way you intend it. Particularly if the semantics have “because I say so” embedded rather than supplemented.
Eliezer,
In Setting Up Metaethics, you wrote:
I didn’t know what “fundamentally moral” meant, so I translated it to the nearest term with which I’m more familiar, what Mackie called “intrinsic prescriptivity.” Or, perhaps more clearly, “intrinsic goodness,” following Korsgaard:
So what I mean to say in (5) is that nothing is intrinsically good (in Korsgaard’s sense). That is, nothing has value in itself. Things only have value in relation to something else.
I’m not sure whether this notion of intrinsic value is genuinely confused or merely not-understood-by-Luke-Muehlhauser, but I’m betting it is either confused or false. (“Untrue” is the term usually used to capture a statement’s being either incoherent or meaningful-and-false: see for example Richard Joyce on error theory.)
But now, I’m not sure you agree with (5) as I intended it. Do you think life, consciousness, activity, and some other things have value-in-themselves? Do these things have intrinsic value?
Thanks again for your reply. I’m going to read Chappell’s comment on this thread, too.
Do you think a heap of five pebbles is intrinsically prime, or does it get its primeness from some extrinsic thing that attaches a tag with the five English letters “PRIME” and could in principle be made to attach the same tag to composite heaps instead? If you consider “beauty” as the logical function your brain’s beauty-detectors compute, then is a screensaver intrinsically beautiful?
Does the word “intrinsic” even help, considering that it invokes bad metaphysics all by itself? In the physical universe there are only quantum amplitudes. Moral facts are logical facts, but not all minds are compelled by that-subject-matter-which-we-name-”morality”; one could as easily build a mind to be compelled by the primality of a heap of pebbles.
So the short answer is that there are different functions that use the same labels to designate different relations while we believe that the same labels designate the same functions?
I wonder if Max Tegmark would have written a similar comment. I’m not sure if there is a meaningful difference regarding Luke’s question to say that there are only quantum amplitudes versus there are only relations.
What I’m saying is that in the physical world there are only causes and effects, and the primeness of a heap of pebbles is not an ontologically basic fact operating as a separate and additional element of physical reality, but it is nonetheless about as “intrinsic” to the heap of pebbles as anything.
Once morality stops being mysterious and you start cashing it out as a logical function, the moral awfulness of a murder is exactly as intrinsic as the primeness of a heap of pebbles. Just as we don’t care whether pebble heaps are prime or experience any affect associated with its primeness, the Pebblesorters don’t care or compute whether a murder is morally awful; and this doesn’t mean that a heap of five pebbles isn’t really prime or that primeness is arbitrary, nor yet that on the “moral Twin Earth” murder could be a good thing. And there are no little physical primons associated with the pebble-heap that could be replaced by compositons to make it composite without changing the number of pebbles; and no physical stone tablet on which morality is written that could be rechiseled to make murder good without changing the circumstances of the murder; but if you’re looking for those you’re looking in the wrong closet.
Are you arguing that the world is basically a cellular automaton and that therefore beauty is logically implied to be a property of some instance of the universe? If some agent does perceive beauty then that is a logically implied fact about the circumstances. Asking if another agent would perceive the same beauty could be rephrased as asking about the equality of the expressions of an equation?
I think a lot of people are arguing about the ambiguity of the string “beauty” as it is multiply realized.
Good answer!
It is rather difficult to ask that question in the way you intend it. Particularly if the semantics have “because I say so” embedded rather than supplemented.