But the other sort of amazing thing to me is you keep asking me to defiine moral realism. What do you want me to do, copy the first few paragraphs from the wikipedia article? I’m not going to do a better job than they do. If you think the definition is dopey or meaningless or whatever, then oh well. I have nothing to add.
To quote the definition of moral realism from Wikipedia:
Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion.
This immediately raises three questions:
How are propositions made true by objective features of the world?
Do we find that these objectively true propositions match our moral intuitions? If they do, then whose?
But most importantly:
Why do you think some answer to (1), this mapping of non-moral fact to moral fact, of ‘is’ to ‘ought’, is unique, objective, morally important?
The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.
So my question is: what is the evidence that convinced any moral realist to be a moral realist? This is essential, all else is secondary.
I’ve not found such evidence anywhere. In everything that I’ve read about moral realism, people are just trying to justify intuitions they have about morals, to claim that if not their morals then at least some morals must be objective and universal. As far as I can tell right now, the sole cause of some people being moral realists is that it gives them pleasure to believe so. They have faith in moral realism, as it were.
Then, assuming that belief is provisionally true, they look for models of that world that will allow it to be true. But such reasoning is wrong. They must show evidence for moral realism in order to have the right to believe in it.
A belief that morality is subjective is controversial by any straightforward meaning of that word, nothing else I have said is as relevant to anything else you have said as that.
Beliefs in gods, fairies, and p-zombies are also controversial. That doesn’t make them worthy of discussion.
In my phrasing in previous posts I may have assumed you yourself were at least uncertain about the truth of moral realism, and therefore knew of some valid argument for it. I talked of things being controversial or not on LW, not among all humanity. I’m sorry that that was unclear and confused the conversation.
The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.
You can replace the phrase “moral realist” with “physical realist” in the above statement and your subsequent argument and it remains equally valid.
What exactly do you mean by ‘physical realism’? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that “the physical world objectively exists independently of us”, or maybe like positivism. But googling ‘physical realism’ brings up mostly pseudoscientific nonsense, so it may not be a commonly used term, and there are no wikipedia/Stanford/etc. entries. So I wanted to make sure what you meant by it.
What exactly do you mean by ‘physical realism’? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that “the physical world objectively exists independently of us”,
OK. Then your point is that people believe in physical reality, that exists independently of them, only because of intuition—the way their minds are shaped. This is correct as a description of why people in fact believe in it.
The rejection of physical realism is solipsism. It is not a fruitful position, however, in the sense that people who say they don’t believe in physical reality still act as if though they believe in it. They don’t get to ignore pain, or retreat into an imaginary world inside their heads. I believe this is known as the “I refute it thus!” kicking-a-stone argument.
My argument against moral realism does not work against physical realism. My argument is basically “show me the evidence”, and physical anti-realism rejects the very concept of evidence. Physical realism is a requirement for my argument and for every other argument about the physical world, too.
Regarding the more general point that we only believe in physical realism because of intuitions, and we have similar intuitions for moral realism. Once we understand why a certain intuition exists, evolutionarily speaking, that accounts for the entirety of the evidence given by the intuition.
For instance we have a strong intuition that physics is Aristotelian in nature, and not relativistic or quantum. We understand why: because it is a good model of the physical world we deal with at our scale; relativistic and quantum phenomena do not happen much at our scale, so evolution didn’t build us to intuit them.
Similarly, we have moral intuitions, which both say things about morals and also say that morals are objective. From an evolutionary perspective, we understand why humans who believed their morals to be objective tended to win out over those who publicly proclaimed they were subjective and malleable. And that’s a complete explanation of that intuition; it doesn’t provide evidence that morals are really objective.
At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being “really objective”.
Does it mean that all minds must be persuaded by it? But that is of course false, since there is always a mind that does the opposite. Does it mean that it’s written on a stone tablet in space somewhere? But that seems irrelevant, because who would want to follow random stone-commandments found in space anyway, and what if someone modified the stone tablet? Does it mean something else?
The definition of prime numbers isn’t found on a stone tablet anywhere, or written in the fabric of space-time. Only the pebblesorters would be persuaded by an argument that a heap of 21 pebbles is composite. Yet would you say that the number 21 is “objectively” composite? Is the “existence” of anything necessary to make 21 composite?
At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being “really objective”.
I’m a fan of using other people’s definitions of words, what with the purpose of words being to communicate with other people and all.
Wikipedia does a nice job.#Objectivity_in_ethics) This article gives very concise descriptions of different types of subjective and objective ethical theories.
The basic meaning, my summary of an already very summary wikipedia article is this. Subjective ethical theories say that moral statements are LIMITED TO ones on which fully informed well-functioning rational minds could (or do?) disagree, while objective ethical theories hypothesize AT LEAST SOME moral statements which are “mind independent,” fully informed well-functioning rational minds would agree because the truth is “out there in the world” and not a creation of the mind.
Dan made an interesting point early on that ‘what was right and wrong for humans could be very different from what is right and wrong for an alien intelligence.’ On its face, I would measure this statement as an objective and moral statement, and therefore if true, this statement would be part of an objective moral theory. A slightly different statement that I would judge as objective, but not moral, would be ‘what a human believes is right and wrong may be very different from what an alien intelligence believes is right and wrong.’ In the first version, we are actually making a statement about what IS right and wrong. Saying that ANYTHING is right or wrong is a moral statement.
The fact that we say what IS right and wrong for humans and aliens might be different doesn’t make these statements any less objective, anymore than saying “it is wrong to drive on the right side of the road in Britain, but it is wrong to drive on the left side of the road in France.” is subjective. Any fully qualified moral statement will need to have the conditions under which the moral statement applies or not. If those qualifications include facts of location, genetics, rank or office, this does not make these statements subjective. As qualified, these statements are still statements about the world whose truth or falsehood would be agreed on by sufficiently informed, well-functioning rational minds.
In favor of subjective morality from my point of view is the idea that in describing human morality, I would have a hard time saying “For Saudi Arabian women, driving a car is wrong.” is a true statement. The best I could manage is “Many Saudi Arabians believe that it is wrong for a woman to drive a car.” So the idea that the moral opinions of the morons around you would actually obligate you in any way runs counter to my moral intuition.
In favor of objective morality for me is something like “for humans, picking an 8 year old human child at random and chopping off its limbs because you want to see what that feels like to do is wrong.” I can’t realistically imagine any sense in which I could ever NOT believe that. Following through on that by saying “yeah, but I can’t PROVE it so I’m going to call it subjective” seems wimpy to me. Like saying I’m going to claim I don’t think “the sun will rise tomorrow” is a true statement so I can enjoy the puerile pleasure of claiming not to need to assume induction.
Note also there don’t have to be many moral statements which are objectively true for objective morality to be the case. One will do. If there is one action that is known to be right or wrong about as well as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, then moral statements are in the same neighborhood as physical statements, and you either go the full monty solipsist and NOTHING is real, not even the sun, or you have to describe sensibly why you are willing to make the assumptions necessary to call physical truths “truths,” but the analagous assumptions needed to call moral truths “truths” is a step too far.
To summarize, to believe anything is ‘objective’ requires assumptions. One can justify those assumptions in a variety of ways, but one cannot prove them without at best being circular and at worst just being wrong. To adopt the assumptions necessary for physical realism, and then decide morality is subjective because it doesn’t prove objective under the assumptions necessary for physical realism is to only do half the job. The REASON we accept the assumptions necessary for physical realism to be objectively true is because “objectively true” is a useful concept, it helps us build things. Moral truths help us build productive societies, and possibly other things, so the concept of a Moral truth is useful. To accept some physical objective truths, but to decide that moral truths just don’t cut it is something I would expect you would have to have a good reason for.
I’m not sure what it means. I hear people say the words, “morals are or may be objective”, and I ask them what they mean. And they only answer very vaguely and talk about things like “how can you be sure nothing is objective besides physics and logic” and “there exist undiscovered things that if we knew about we’d describe using the word ‘objective’” and so on.
At this point I don’t want to assign meaning to “morals are objective”. I want to taboo the word and hear some actual statements from someone who came into this discussion assigning concrete meaning to that statement (whether or not they believed it).
In your comment that you link to, you give a more narrow definition, specifying “the scientific method”. I agree there might be things outside of that (which will undoubtedly be absorbed into accepted science over time, mutating the concepts of the scientific method to suit new knowledge).
But here you specify all “statements about the world”. In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there “exist” something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it. Nothing you will ever think or do or say or believe in, or perceive with your senses, will be causally related to something outside “the world”. So there is no reason to ever discuss such a thing.
Further, math (logic) is in the world. It does not have some Platonic independent “existence” because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.
The reason we talk about math is that it is lawfully embodied in the physical world. Our brains are so built as to be able to think about math. When we think about math we find that we enjoy it, and also that we can use it for useful purposes of applied science. So we keep talking more about math. That is a complete explanation of where math comes from. No additional postulate of math “objectively existing” is required or indeed meaningful.
But here you specify all “statements about the world”. In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there “exist” something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it.
I don’t find the generalized p-zombie principle particularly convincing, in part because it’s not clear what “interact” means.
It does not have some Platonic independent “existence” because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.
I think you’re using the word “exists” to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.
It means ‘causally influence in at least one direction’. Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.
I think you’re using the word “exists” to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.
I know two meanings of the word ‘exist’. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.
Second, ‘exists’ may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.
It means ‘causally influence in at least one direction’.
Well, when you start dealing with mathematical systems, causality becomes a very tricky concept.
Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.
Well, knowing mathematics certainly helps with studying the physical world.
I know two meanings of the word ‘exist’. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.
Second, ‘exists’ may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.
What do you mean by ‘exists’?
Belong to the same cluster in thing space as your two examples.
Belong to the same cluster in thing space as your two examples.
IIUC this unpacks to “things such that if we talked about them, we would decide to use the same words as we do for the two examples”.
Applying this to “objective morals”, I don’t feel that the statement tells me much. If this is all you meant, that’s a valid position, but not very interesting in my view. Could you more explicitly describe some property of objective morals, assuming they “exist” by your definition? Something that is not a description of humans (what word we would use to describe something) but of the thing itself?
And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.
It would seem that you believe that. So what is your proof?
And that is a moral statement to boot.
From the more physicsy side, I’d guess you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that electrons at the center of the earth have the same rest mass and charge as the insanely small number of electrons that have actually had their mass and charge carefully measured. You probably believe a or not-a and that 2+2=4. Are you familiar with Godel’s theorem? My recollection of it is that he proved that any formal system above a certain trivial level of complexity had true statements in it that were unprovable.
I can tell you the easy way out is to claim you don’t believe anything, that it is all in your head, not just the moral stuff. Of course then we need to invent new language to describe the difference between statements like “no-one has the right to just believe something without proof” and “no-one has the right to just believe something with proof.” I guess you could say that just because you believe something doesn’t mean you believe it is true, but that starts to sound more like a non-standard definition of the word “believe” than anything with useful content.
As to my explaining to you the details of why anyone should be a moral realist, I”m not interested in attempting that. I’m not a committed moral realist myself, and I’d just have to do a lot of reading myself to find a good description of what ask for. Sorry.
It would seem that you believe that. So what is your proof?
Proof is only meaningful in a system of shared assumptions (physics) or axioms (logic).
The statement that “it’s wrong to believe without proof”, equivalently, that “a single correct set of beliefs is mandated given by your proof (=evidence) and assumptions (=prior)”, is a logical consequence of the rules of Bayesian deduction.
If moral realists, or anyone else, doesn’t agree to Bayesianism or another commonly understood framework of proof, logic, and common assumptions, then I’m not interested in talking to them (about moral realism).
From the more physicsy side [...]
I believe all those things (with very high probability, to be pedantic). I know Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
Saying that some true things are formally unprovable in a logic system is not significant evidence that any specific unproven statement (eg moral realism) is in fact true just because it’s not disproven. And the theorem doesn’t apply to probabilistic belief systems modeling the physical universe: I can have an arbitrary degree of confidence in a belief, as long as it’s not probability 1, without requiring logical proof.
However, the situation for moral realism isn’t “unproven conjecture”, it’s more like “unformalized conjecture whose proponents refuse to specify what it actually means”. At least that’s the state of debate in this thread.
As to my explaining to you the details of why anyone should be a moral realist, I”m not interested in attempting that. I’m not a committed moral realist myself, and I’d just have to do a lot of reading myself to find a good description of what ask for. Sorry.
Yet you assign sufficient probability to moral realism to think it’s worth discussing or reading about. Otherwise you’d have said from the start, “I agree with you that moral realism has no evidence for it, let’s just drop the subject”. To have such a high prior requires evidence. If you don’t have such evidence, you are wrong.
It would seem that you believe that. So what is your proof?
Proof is only meaningful in a system of shared assumptions (physics) or axioms (logic).
I’m glad you recognize that. Then you should also recognize that for reasons having nothing to do with logical necessity you have accepted some things as true which are unprovable, in your case a particular interpretation of how to do Bayesian.
All you have offered so far is assertion, and the appearance that you don’t even realize that you are making assumptions until after it is pointed out. When I found my self in that position, it humbled me a bit. In Bayesian terms, it moved all of my estimates further from 0 and 1 than they had been.
In any case, whatever program you have used to decide what you could assume, what if your assumptions are incomplete? What if you simply haven’t tried hard enough to have something “more than zero” on the moral side?
If moral realists, or anyone else, doesn’t agree to Bayesianism or another commonly understood framework of proof, logic, and common assumptions, then I’m not interested in talking to them (about moral realism).
So you have picked your church and your doctrine and you wish to preserve your orthodoxy by avoiding intelligent apostates. This is not a new position to take, but it has always seemed to me to be a very human bias, so I am surprised to see it stated so baldly on a website devoted to avoiding human biases in the twenty-first century. Which is to say, are you SURE you want to treat your assumptions as if they were the one true religion?
However, the situation for moral realism isn’t “unproven conjecture”, it’s more like “unformalized conjecture whose proponents refuse to specify what it actually means”. At least that’s the state of debate in this thread.
Why limit yourself to this one thread, populated as it isn’t by anyone who claims any real expertise?
Yet you assign sufficient probability to moral realism to think it’s worth discussing or reading about. Otherwise you’d have said from the start, “I agree with you that moral realism has no evidence for it, let’s just drop the subject”. To have such a high prior requires evidence. If you don’t have such evidence, you are wrong.
Your particular rejection of moral realism doesn’t seem to reflect much knowledge. For a Bayesian, knowing that other intelligent minds have looked at something, gathered LOTS of evidence and done lots of analysis, and reached a different conclusion than your prior should LOWER your certainty in your prior. Finding one guy who can’t or won’t spoonfeed you concentrated moral realism, and claiming on that basis that your prior of essentially zero must stand is not at all how I interpret the Bayesian program. In my interpretation, it is when I am ignorant that my mind is most open, that my estimates are furthest from 0 and 1.
I wish someone like Eliezer, or who knows his morality well enough, would pipe in on this, because from my reading of Eliezer, he is also a moral realist. Not that that proves anything, but it is relevant bayesian evidence.
what if your assumptions are incomplete? What if you simply haven’t tried hard enough to have something “more than zero” on the moral side?
Normally one tries to assume as little as necessary. To argue in favour of new assumptions, one might show that they are necessary (or even sufficient) for some useful, desirable conclusions. Are there any such here? If not, why assume e.g. moral realism when one could just as well assume any of infinitely many alternatives?
So you have picked your church and your doctrine and you wish to preserve your orthodoxy by avoiding intelligent apostates.
NO. This is completely wrong. You have not understood my position.
I said:
If moral realists, or anyone else, doesn’t agree to Bayesianism or another commonly understood framework of proof, logic, and common assumptions...
Note emphasis. I am not demanding dialogue within a specific worldview. I’m asking that the rules of the worldview being discussed be stated clearly. I’m asking for rigorous definitions instead of words like “morality objectively exists”, which everyone may understand differently.
Why limit yourself to this one thread, populated as it isn’t by anyone who claims any real expertise?
This thread is on LW. When people here said they gave a high prior to moral realism (i.e. did not dismiss it as I did), I assumed they were rational about it: that they had some evidence to support such a prior. By now it’s pretty clear that this is not the case, so after these last few posts of clarification I think the thread should end.
As for looking elsewhere, I did when referred—as with the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy—and the presumably high quality summaries there confirmed me in my belief that there’s nothing to moral realism, it’s not a defensible or even well defined position, and it is not worth investigating.
Your particular rejection of moral realism doesn’t seem to reflect much knowledge. For a Bayesian, knowing that other intelligent minds have looked at something, gathered LOTS of evidence and done lots of analysis, and reached a different conclusion than your prior should LOWER your certainty in your prior.
I lowered it. That’s why I was willing to spend time on this conversation. Then I examined the evidence those other minds could offer and raised my certainty way back up.
In my interpretation, it is when I am ignorant that my mind is most open, that my estimates are furthest from 0 and 1.
That is just wrong. A prior of zero knowledge does not mean assigning 0.5 probability to every proposition. Propositions are entangled, so that would be inconsistent. Besides, you have evidence-based priors about other propositions entangled with this one, so your prior isn’t naive anyway.
from my reading of Eliezer, he is also a moral realist.
No he’s not. See this post which was recently on Sequence Reruns and the other posts linked from it. See also the entire Metaethics Sequence in the wiki and in particular this post in twoparts arguing against simple moral realism.
When people here said they gave a high prior to moral realism (i.e. did not dismiss it as I did), I assumed they were rational about it: that they had some evidence to support such a prior. By now it’s pretty clear that this is not the case,
Perhaps they misunderstood what was referred to by “moral realism”. The phrase certainly doesn’t seem to be very well defined. For example Eliezer does say that there are things that are actually right, and actually wrong. mwengler seems to think this is sufficient to make him a moral realist. You don’t. Classic recipe for confusion.
To quote the definition of moral realism from Wikipedia:
This immediately raises three questions:
How are propositions made true by objective features of the world?
Do we find that these objectively true propositions match our moral intuitions? If they do, then whose?
But most importantly:
Why do you think some answer to (1), this mapping of non-moral fact to moral fact, of ‘is’ to ‘ought’, is unique, objective, morally important?
The knowledge or belief in moral realism is acquired. People may be born with moral realist intuitions, but they are not born with coherent arguments in favor of moral realism. And no-one has the right to just believe something without proof.
So my question is: what is the evidence that convinced any moral realist to be a moral realist? This is essential, all else is secondary.
I’ve not found such evidence anywhere. In everything that I’ve read about moral realism, people are just trying to justify intuitions they have about morals, to claim that if not their morals then at least some morals must be objective and universal. As far as I can tell right now, the sole cause of some people being moral realists is that it gives them pleasure to believe so. They have faith in moral realism, as it were.
Then, assuming that belief is provisionally true, they look for models of that world that will allow it to be true. But such reasoning is wrong. They must show evidence for moral realism in order to have the right to believe in it.
Beliefs in gods, fairies, and p-zombies are also controversial. That doesn’t make them worthy of discussion.
In my phrasing in previous posts I may have assumed you yourself were at least uncertain about the truth of moral realism, and therefore knew of some valid argument for it. I talked of things being controversial or not on LW, not among all humanity. I’m sorry that that was unclear and confused the conversation.
You can replace the phrase “moral realist” with “physical realist” in the above statement and your subsequent argument and it remains equally valid.
What exactly do you mean by ‘physical realism’? At first I thought it was something like the simple claim that “the physical world objectively exists independently of us”, or maybe like positivism. But googling ‘physical realism’ brings up mostly pseudoscientific nonsense, so it may not be a commonly used term, and there are no wikipedia/Stanford/etc. entries. So I wanted to make sure what you meant by it.
More or less this.
OK. Then your point is that people believe in physical reality, that exists independently of them, only because of intuition—the way their minds are shaped. This is correct as a description of why people in fact believe in it.
The rejection of physical realism is solipsism. It is not a fruitful position, however, in the sense that people who say they don’t believe in physical reality still act as if though they believe in it. They don’t get to ignore pain, or retreat into an imaginary world inside their heads. I believe this is known as the “I refute it thus!” kicking-a-stone argument.
My argument against moral realism does not work against physical realism. My argument is basically “show me the evidence”, and physical anti-realism rejects the very concept of evidence. Physical realism is a requirement for my argument and for every other argument about the physical world, too.
Regarding the more general point that we only believe in physical realism because of intuitions, and we have similar intuitions for moral realism. Once we understand why a certain intuition exists, evolutionarily speaking, that accounts for the entirety of the evidence given by the intuition.
For instance we have a strong intuition that physics is Aristotelian in nature, and not relativistic or quantum. We understand why: because it is a good model of the physical world we deal with at our scale; relativistic and quantum phenomena do not happen much at our scale, so evolution didn’t build us to intuit them.
Similarly, we have moral intuitions, which both say things about morals and also say that morals are objective. From an evolutionary perspective, we understand why humans who believed their morals to be objective tended to win out over those who publicly proclaimed they were subjective and malleable. And that’s a complete explanation of that intuition; it doesn’t provide evidence that morals are really objective.
At this point I might ask you what you both think you mean by morals being “really objective”.
Does it mean that all minds must be persuaded by it? But that is of course false, since there is always a mind that does the opposite. Does it mean that it’s written on a stone tablet in space somewhere? But that seems irrelevant, because who would want to follow random stone-commandments found in space anyway, and what if someone modified the stone tablet? Does it mean something else?
The definition of prime numbers isn’t found on a stone tablet anywhere, or written in the fabric of space-time. Only the pebblesorters would be persuaded by an argument that a heap of 21 pebbles is composite. Yet would you say that the number 21 is “objectively” composite? Is the “existence” of anything necessary to make 21 composite?
I’m a fan of using other people’s definitions of words, what with the purpose of words being to communicate with other people and all.
Wikipedia does a nice job.#Objectivity_in_ethics) This article gives very concise descriptions of different types of subjective and objective ethical theories.
The basic meaning, my summary of an already very summary wikipedia article is this. Subjective ethical theories say that moral statements are LIMITED TO ones on which fully informed well-functioning rational minds could (or do?) disagree, while objective ethical theories hypothesize AT LEAST SOME moral statements which are “mind independent,” fully informed well-functioning rational minds would agree because the truth is “out there in the world” and not a creation of the mind.
Dan made an interesting point early on that ‘what was right and wrong for humans could be very different from what is right and wrong for an alien intelligence.’ On its face, I would measure this statement as an objective and moral statement, and therefore if true, this statement would be part of an objective moral theory. A slightly different statement that I would judge as objective, but not moral, would be ‘what a human believes is right and wrong may be very different from what an alien intelligence believes is right and wrong.’ In the first version, we are actually making a statement about what IS right and wrong. Saying that ANYTHING is right or wrong is a moral statement.
The fact that we say what IS right and wrong for humans and aliens might be different doesn’t make these statements any less objective, anymore than saying “it is wrong to drive on the right side of the road in Britain, but it is wrong to drive on the left side of the road in France.” is subjective. Any fully qualified moral statement will need to have the conditions under which the moral statement applies or not. If those qualifications include facts of location, genetics, rank or office, this does not make these statements subjective. As qualified, these statements are still statements about the world whose truth or falsehood would be agreed on by sufficiently informed, well-functioning rational minds.
In favor of subjective morality from my point of view is the idea that in describing human morality, I would have a hard time saying “For Saudi Arabian women, driving a car is wrong.” is a true statement. The best I could manage is “Many Saudi Arabians believe that it is wrong for a woman to drive a car.” So the idea that the moral opinions of the morons around you would actually obligate you in any way runs counter to my moral intuition.
In favor of objective morality for me is something like “for humans, picking an 8 year old human child at random and chopping off its limbs because you want to see what that feels like to do is wrong.” I can’t realistically imagine any sense in which I could ever NOT believe that. Following through on that by saying “yeah, but I can’t PROVE it so I’m going to call it subjective” seems wimpy to me. Like saying I’m going to claim I don’t think “the sun will rise tomorrow” is a true statement so I can enjoy the puerile pleasure of claiming not to need to assume induction.
Note also there don’t have to be many moral statements which are objectively true for objective morality to be the case. One will do. If there is one action that is known to be right or wrong about as well as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, then moral statements are in the same neighborhood as physical statements, and you either go the full monty solipsist and NOTHING is real, not even the sun, or you have to describe sensibly why you are willing to make the assumptions necessary to call physical truths “truths,” but the analagous assumptions needed to call moral truths “truths” is a step too far.
To summarize, to believe anything is ‘objective’ requires assumptions. One can justify those assumptions in a variety of ways, but one cannot prove them without at best being circular and at worst just being wrong. To adopt the assumptions necessary for physical realism, and then decide morality is subjective because it doesn’t prove objective under the assumptions necessary for physical realism is to only do half the job. The REASON we accept the assumptions necessary for physical realism to be objectively true is because “objectively true” is a useful concept, it helps us build things. Moral truths help us build productive societies, and possibly other things, so the concept of a Moral truth is useful. To accept some physical objective truths, but to decide that moral truths just don’t cut it is something I would expect you would have to have a good reason for.
I’m not sure what it means. I hear people say the words, “morals are or may be objective”, and I ask them what they mean. And they only answer very vaguely and talk about things like “how can you be sure nothing is objective besides physics and logic” and “there exist undiscovered things that if we knew about we’d describe using the word ‘objective’” and so on.
At this point I don’t want to assign meaning to “morals are objective”. I want to taboo the word and hear some actual statements from someone who came into this discussion assigning concrete meaning to that statement (whether or not they believed it).
Belonging to the same similarity cluster in thing space as mathematics and statements about the world.
In your comment that you link to, you give a more narrow definition, specifying “the scientific method”. I agree there might be things outside of that (which will undoubtedly be absorbed into accepted science over time, mutating the concepts of the scientific method to suit new knowledge).
But here you specify all “statements about the world”. In that case I can say outright that in no meaningful sense does there “exist” something not in the world which cannot interact with the world. By the generalized p-zombie principle: if it cannot interact with us, then it is not causally involved with your reason for speaking about it. Nothing you will ever think or do or say or believe in, or perceive with your senses, will be causally related to something outside “the world”. So there is no reason to ever discuss such a thing.
Further, math (logic) is in the world. It does not have some Platonic independent “existence” because existence is a predicate of things in the physical world; it makes as much sense for a pure circle to exist as to not exist.
The reason we talk about math is that it is lawfully embodied in the physical world. Our brains are so built as to be able to think about math. When we think about math we find that we enjoy it, and also that we can use it for useful purposes of applied science. So we keep talking more about math. That is a complete explanation of where math comes from. No additional postulate of math “objectively existing” is required or indeed meaningful.
I don’t find the generalized p-zombie principle particularly convincing, in part because it’s not clear what “interact” means.
I think you’re using the word “exists” to mean something different from what I mean by it. This may be one source of confusion.
It means ‘causally influence in at least one direction’. Two systems are said to interact if knowing something about one of them gives you information about the other.
I know two meanings of the word ‘exist’. First, predicate about states of the physical world (and by extension of other counterfactual or hypothetical worlds that may be discussed). There exists the chair I am sitting on. There does not exist in this room a sofa.
Second, ‘exists’ may be a statement about a mathematical structure. There exist irrational numbers. There exists a solution to a certain problem, but not to another.
What do you mean by ‘exists’?
Well, when you start dealing with mathematical systems, causality becomes a very tricky concept.
Well, knowing mathematics certainly helps with studying the physical world.
Belong to the same cluster in thing space as your two examples.
IIUC this unpacks to “things such that if we talked about them, we would decide to use the same words as we do for the two examples”.
Applying this to “objective morals”, I don’t feel that the statement tells me much. If this is all you meant, that’s a valid position, but not very interesting in my view. Could you more explicitly describe some property of objective morals, assuming they “exist” by your definition? Something that is not a description of humans (what word we would use to describe something) but of the thing itself?
It would seem that you believe that. So what is your proof?
And that is a moral statement to boot.
From the more physicsy side, I’d guess you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that electrons at the center of the earth have the same rest mass and charge as the insanely small number of electrons that have actually had their mass and charge carefully measured. You probably believe a or not-a and that 2+2=4. Are you familiar with Godel’s theorem? My recollection of it is that he proved that any formal system above a certain trivial level of complexity had true statements in it that were unprovable.
I can tell you the easy way out is to claim you don’t believe anything, that it is all in your head, not just the moral stuff. Of course then we need to invent new language to describe the difference between statements like “no-one has the right to just believe something without proof” and “no-one has the right to just believe something with proof.” I guess you could say that just because you believe something doesn’t mean you believe it is true, but that starts to sound more like a non-standard definition of the word “believe” than anything with useful content.
As to my explaining to you the details of why anyone should be a moral realist, I”m not interested in attempting that. I’m not a committed moral realist myself, and I’d just have to do a lot of reading myself to find a good description of what ask for. Sorry.
Proof is only meaningful in a system of shared assumptions (physics) or axioms (logic).
The statement that “it’s wrong to believe without proof”, equivalently, that “a single correct set of beliefs is mandated given by your proof (=evidence) and assumptions (=prior)”, is a logical consequence of the rules of Bayesian deduction.
If moral realists, or anyone else, doesn’t agree to Bayesianism or another commonly understood framework of proof, logic, and common assumptions, then I’m not interested in talking to them (about moral realism).
I believe all those things (with very high probability, to be pedantic). I know Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
Saying that some true things are formally unprovable in a logic system is not significant evidence that any specific unproven statement (eg moral realism) is in fact true just because it’s not disproven. And the theorem doesn’t apply to probabilistic belief systems modeling the physical universe: I can have an arbitrary degree of confidence in a belief, as long as it’s not probability 1, without requiring logical proof.
However, the situation for moral realism isn’t “unproven conjecture”, it’s more like “unformalized conjecture whose proponents refuse to specify what it actually means”. At least that’s the state of debate in this thread.
Yet you assign sufficient probability to moral realism to think it’s worth discussing or reading about. Otherwise you’d have said from the start, “I agree with you that moral realism has no evidence for it, let’s just drop the subject”. To have such a high prior requires evidence. If you don’t have such evidence, you are wrong.
I’m glad you recognize that. Then you should also recognize that for reasons having nothing to do with logical necessity you have accepted some things as true which are unprovable, in your case a particular interpretation of how to do Bayesian.
All you have offered so far is assertion, and the appearance that you don’t even realize that you are making assumptions until after it is pointed out. When I found my self in that position, it humbled me a bit. In Bayesian terms, it moved all of my estimates further from 0 and 1 than they had been.
In any case, whatever program you have used to decide what you could assume, what if your assumptions are incomplete? What if you simply haven’t tried hard enough to have something “more than zero” on the moral side?
So you have picked your church and your doctrine and you wish to preserve your orthodoxy by avoiding intelligent apostates. This is not a new position to take, but it has always seemed to me to be a very human bias, so I am surprised to see it stated so baldly on a website devoted to avoiding human biases in the twenty-first century. Which is to say, are you SURE you want to treat your assumptions as if they were the one true religion?
Why limit yourself to this one thread, populated as it isn’t by anyone who claims any real expertise?
Your particular rejection of moral realism doesn’t seem to reflect much knowledge. For a Bayesian, knowing that other intelligent minds have looked at something, gathered LOTS of evidence and done lots of analysis, and reached a different conclusion than your prior should LOWER your certainty in your prior. Finding one guy who can’t or won’t spoonfeed you concentrated moral realism, and claiming on that basis that your prior of essentially zero must stand is not at all how I interpret the Bayesian program. In my interpretation, it is when I am ignorant that my mind is most open, that my estimates are furthest from 0 and 1.
I wish someone like Eliezer, or who knows his morality well enough, would pipe in on this, because from my reading of Eliezer, he is also a moral realist. Not that that proves anything, but it is relevant bayesian evidence.
Apologies for replying late.
You seem to misunderstand my comments.
Normally one tries to assume as little as necessary. To argue in favour of new assumptions, one might show that they are necessary (or even sufficient) for some useful, desirable conclusions. Are there any such here? If not, why assume e.g. moral realism when one could just as well assume any of infinitely many alternatives?
NO. This is completely wrong. You have not understood my position.
I said:
Note emphasis. I am not demanding dialogue within a specific worldview. I’m asking that the rules of the worldview being discussed be stated clearly. I’m asking for rigorous definitions instead of words like “morality objectively exists”, which everyone may understand differently.
This thread is on LW. When people here said they gave a high prior to moral realism (i.e. did not dismiss it as I did), I assumed they were rational about it: that they had some evidence to support such a prior. By now it’s pretty clear that this is not the case, so after these last few posts of clarification I think the thread should end.
As for looking elsewhere, I did when referred—as with the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy—and the presumably high quality summaries there confirmed me in my belief that there’s nothing to moral realism, it’s not a defensible or even well defined position, and it is not worth investigating.
I lowered it. That’s why I was willing to spend time on this conversation. Then I examined the evidence those other minds could offer and raised my certainty way back up.
That is just wrong. A prior of zero knowledge does not mean assigning 0.5 probability to every proposition. Propositions are entangled, so that would be inconsistent. Besides, you have evidence-based priors about other propositions entangled with this one, so your prior isn’t naive anyway.
No he’s not. See this post which was recently on Sequence Reruns and the other posts linked from it. See also the entire Metaethics Sequence in the wiki and in particular this post in two parts arguing against simple moral realism.
Perhaps they misunderstood what was referred to by “moral realism”. The phrase certainly doesn’t seem to be very well defined. For example Eliezer does say that there are things that are actually right, and actually wrong. mwengler seems to think this is sufficient to make him a moral realist. You don’t. Classic recipe for confusion.