Having had time to mull over—I think here’s something about your post that bothers me. I don’t think it’s possible to pinpoint a single sentence, but here are two things that don’t quite satisfy me.
1) Neither your austere or empathetic meta-ethicists seem to be telling me anything I wanted to hear. What I want is a “linguistic meta-ethicist”, who will tell me what other competent speakers of English mean when they use “moral” and suchlike terms. I understand that different people mean different things, and I’m fine with an answer which comes in several parts, and with notes about which speakers are primarily using which of those possible definitions.
What I don’t want is a brain scan from each person I talk to—I want an explanation that’s short and accessible enough to be useful in conversations. Conventional ethics and meta-ethics has given a bunch of useful definitions. Saying “well, it depends” seems unnecessarily cautious; saying “let’s decode your brain” seems excessive for practical purposes.
2) Most of the conversations I’m in that involve terms like “moral” would be only slightly advanced by having explicit definitions—and often the straightforward terms to use instead of “moral” are very nearly as contentious or nebulous. In your own examples, you have your participants talk about “well-being” and “non-moral goodness.” I don’t think that’s a significant step forward. That’s just hiding morality inside the notion of “a good life”—which is a sensible thing to say, but people have been saying it since Plato, and it’s an approach that has problems of its own.
By the way, I do understand that I may not have been your target audience, and that the whole series of posts has been carefully phrased and well organized, and I appreciate that.
I would think that the Hypothetical Imperatives are useful there. You can thus break down your own opinions into material of the form:
“If the set X of imperative premises holds, and the set Y of factual premises holds, then logic Z dictates that further actions W are imperative.
“I hold X already, and I can convince logic Z of the factual truth of Y, thus I believe W to be imperative.”
Even all those complete bastards who disagree with your X can thus come to an agreement with you about the hypothetical as a whole, provided they are epistemically rational. Having isolated the area of disagreement to X, Y, or Z, you can then proceed to argue about it.
Your linguistic metaethicist sounds like the standard philosopher doing conceptual analysis. Did you see my post on ‘Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory’?
I think conversations using moral terms would be greatly advanced by first defining the terms of the debate, as Aristotle suggested. Also, the reason ‘well-being’ or ‘non-moral goodness’ are not unpacked is because I was giving brief examples. You’ll notice the austere metaethicist said things like “assuming we have the same reduction of well-being in mind...” I just don’t have the space to offer such reductions in what is already a long post.
I would find it helpful—and I think several of the other posters here would as well—to see one reduction on some nontrivial question carried far enough for us to see that the process can be made to work. If I understand right, your approach requires that speakers, or at least many speakers much of the time, can reduce from disputed, loaded, moral terms to reasonably well-defined and fact-based terminology. That’s the point I’d most like to see you spend your space budget on in future posts.
Definitions are good. Precise definitions are usually better than loose definitions. But I suspect that in this context, loose definitions are basically good enough and that there isn’t a lot of value to be extracted by increased precision there. I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
I did read your post on conceptual analysis. I just re-read it. And I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences . My sense is that the standard textbook definitions are basically fine, and that the ongoing work in the field is mostly just people trying to get tenure and show off their cleverness.
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis—so long as we don’t mistake an approximate and tentative linguistic exercise for access to any sort of deep truth.
I don’t think many speakers actually have an explicit ought-reduction in mind when they make ought claims. Perhaps most speakers actually have little idea what they mean when they use ought terms. For these people, emotivism may roughly describe speech acts involving oughts.
Rather, I’m imagining a scenario where person A asks what they ought to do, and person B has to clarify the meaning of A’s question before B can give an answer. At this point, A is probably forced to clarify the meaning of their ought terms more thoroughly than they have previously done. But if they can’t do so, then they haven’t asked a meaningful question, and B can’t answer the question as given.
I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
Why? What I’ve been saying the whole time is that improving our definitions isn’t worth as much effort as philosophers are expending on it.
I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.
On this, we agree. That’s why conceptual analysis isn’t very valuable, along with “most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.” (Well, depending on where you draw the boundary around the term ‘social sciences.’)
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis...
Do you see something wrong with the way Barry and Albert were arguing about the meaning of ‘sound’ in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory? I’m especially thinking of the part about microphones and aliens.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.
Welcome to Less Wrong!
Is there a part of your comment that you suspect I disagree with? Or, is there a sentence in my post with which you disagree?
Having had time to mull over—I think here’s something about your post that bothers me. I don’t think it’s possible to pinpoint a single sentence, but here are two things that don’t quite satisfy me.
1) Neither your austere or empathetic meta-ethicists seem to be telling me anything I wanted to hear. What I want is a “linguistic meta-ethicist”, who will tell me what other competent speakers of English mean when they use “moral” and suchlike terms. I understand that different people mean different things, and I’m fine with an answer which comes in several parts, and with notes about which speakers are primarily using which of those possible definitions.
What I don’t want is a brain scan from each person I talk to—I want an explanation that’s short and accessible enough to be useful in conversations. Conventional ethics and meta-ethics has given a bunch of useful definitions. Saying “well, it depends” seems unnecessarily cautious; saying “let’s decode your brain” seems excessive for practical purposes.
2) Most of the conversations I’m in that involve terms like “moral” would be only slightly advanced by having explicit definitions—and often the straightforward terms to use instead of “moral” are very nearly as contentious or nebulous. In your own examples, you have your participants talk about “well-being” and “non-moral goodness.” I don’t think that’s a significant step forward. That’s just hiding morality inside the notion of “a good life”—which is a sensible thing to say, but people have been saying it since Plato, and it’s an approach that has problems of its own.
By the way, I do understand that I may not have been your target audience, and that the whole series of posts has been carefully phrased and well organized, and I appreciate that.
I would think that the Hypothetical Imperatives are useful there. You can thus break down your own opinions into material of the form:
“If the set X of imperative premises holds, and the set Y of factual premises holds, then logic Z dictates that further actions W are imperative.
“I hold X already, and I can convince logic Z of the factual truth of Y, thus I believe W to be imperative.”
Even all those complete bastards who disagree with your X can thus come to an agreement with you about the hypothetical as a whole, provided they are epistemically rational. Having isolated the area of disagreement to X, Y, or Z, you can then proceed to argue about it.
asr,
Your linguistic metaethicist sounds like the standard philosopher doing conceptual analysis. Did you see my post on ‘Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory’?
I think conversations using moral terms would be greatly advanced by first defining the terms of the debate, as Aristotle suggested. Also, the reason ‘well-being’ or ‘non-moral goodness’ are not unpacked is because I was giving brief examples. You’ll notice the austere metaethicist said things like “assuming we have the same reduction of well-being in mind...” I just don’t have the space to offer such reductions in what is already a long post.
I would find it helpful—and I think several of the other posters here would as well—to see one reduction on some nontrivial question carried far enough for us to see that the process can be made to work. If I understand right, your approach requires that speakers, or at least many speakers much of the time, can reduce from disputed, loaded, moral terms to reasonably well-defined and fact-based terminology. That’s the point I’d most like to see you spend your space budget on in future posts.
Definitions are good. Precise definitions are usually better than loose definitions. But I suspect that in this context, loose definitions are basically good enough and that there isn’t a lot of value to be extracted by increased precision there. I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
I did read your post on conceptual analysis. I just re-read it. And I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences . My sense is that the standard textbook definitions are basically fine, and that the ongoing work in the field is mostly just people trying to get tenure and show off their cleverness.
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis—so long as we don’t mistake an approximate and tentative linguistic exercise for access to any sort of deep truth.
I don’t think many speakers actually have an explicit ought-reduction in mind when they make ought claims. Perhaps most speakers actually have little idea what they mean when they use ought terms. For these people, emotivism may roughly describe speech acts involving oughts.
Rather, I’m imagining a scenario where person A asks what they ought to do, and person B has to clarify the meaning of A’s question before B can give an answer. At this point, A is probably forced to clarify the meaning of their ought terms more thoroughly than they have previously done. But if they can’t do so, then they haven’t asked a meaningful question, and B can’t answer the question as given.
Why? What I’ve been saying the whole time is that improving our definitions isn’t worth as much effort as philosophers are expending on it.
On this, we agree. That’s why conceptual analysis isn’t very valuable, along with “most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.” (Well, depending on where you draw the boundary around the term ‘social sciences.’)
Do you see something wrong with the way Barry and Albert were arguing about the meaning of ‘sound’ in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory? I’m especially thinking of the part about microphones and aliens.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.