To make it unambiguous, let us consider the action “mwengler, a human, goes to a randomly chosen location, abducts the first child under 4′ tall he sees there, then takes that child, and kills it with a chainsaw. When asked about it he says ‘I’ve done things like this before, I do it because I like the way it makes me feel.’ ”
You say:
Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself.
This is an assertion which is either true or false. You assert it as true. By my reading of the definition, this makes you a moral nihilist. This on my part is not an act of judgment, but rather of labeling in a way which is common enough among a community who thinks about stuff like this to have been spelled out rather clearly in a wikipedia article.
However, I believe there is no such thing as objective moral truth. This isn’t just because there’s no evidence for it (which is true); the very concept seems to me to be confused.
There are plenty of people who do believe there is an objective moral truth. So many that there is a label for it: moral realism. You can read about it in wikipedia and in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The concept may be “confused,” but it may be less “confused” after you read what some real clear philosophy writers have to say about it.
people think a case of killing is morally wrong, I can simply say that “it is wrong” without making explicit who does or doesn’t agree with this judgment.
By this I take it to mean you would like to define “it is wrong” and “it is right” to mean “most people think it is wrong” and “most people think it is right.” I find a lot of problems with that definition.
First, as a physicist I recognize a world of difference between 1) “electrons repel each other” and 2) “most physicists think electrons repel each other.” They are probably both true, but negating the first would have vast implications for all of electronics, while the second would represent a remarkable, and possibly disastrous, social phenomenon. So I’d love to keep the semantic distinction between what is and what people think is.
I guess my point about this would be, yes its natural to translate objective language into subjective rough equivalents if you think the subjectivity of morality is natural, inescapable, unavoidable. But you will misunderstand other people and be misunderstood by them if you do so and assume that they do so as well, because there are a lot of moral realists out there.
Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself.
I’m curious how you interpret this situation in this light:
You think my joy-killing random children is wrong. I think it is right, or perhaps I merely think it is not wrong because I don’t think anything is right or wrong. And I have decided that to live life fully I must have many unique and exciting experiences, especially those that define me as an individual that would set me apart from other men. As part of that program, I have traveled to Antarctica, scuba’d in caves in deep volcanic lakes. And killed the odd child. I find the experience somewhat distasteful, but also somewhat fascinating, and although I don’t expect to want to kill children forever, I feel that I’ll probably need to kill 2 or 3 more to get everything I want from the experience.
What do you do about me? Incarcerate me while telling me that I am being imprisoned for life not because I did or want to do something wrong but because “most people think I did something wrong?” Well I would ask you what YOU think. I do ask you what YOU think. Do you think I am wrong to kill these children? How much does it matter that I disagree with you? If it doesn’t matter that I disagree with you, doesn’t that mean that you think it is objectively wrong?
I think some confronting this might want to say there was something wrong with me if I liked killing children and didn’t feel there was something wrong with it. In this case, you are essentially defining “humans” as, among other things, “people who think randomly killing children because it is fun” as wrong. You know have the problem of having to identify the disease process in me (and others) that leads me to this error. Perhaps “wrong” is objective in that it is part of a common genetic heritage we have evolved to live with each other? And that as with insulin or albinism or senility, there can be a genetic defect in some people? Then wrong would be some kind of disease, but it would still be objective.
But it would not be normative. (Read about normative in wikipedia and encyclopedia). Just because most humans genetically found killing children wrong, wouldn’t tell me, with my genetic disease, that I “should” think that too. It merely tells me that I am different from most humans in this respect.
I don’t know where it all ends. I do think there are powerful reasons to think morality is objective, just as there are powerful reasons to wonder if it isn’t.
This is an assertion which is either true or false. You assert it as true.
Correct. I want to point out what this is an assertion about: it is about the meaning of the word ‘morals’. I.e. a definition, not a statement of logical or physical fact.
If you think that “there are objective morals” that is a different claim about the meaning of the word, but also (and much more importantly) a claim about the existence of something—and I’m asking you to define that something. Let’s leave aside for now the issue of why you call this something “morals”, let’s taboo that word. Please describe this objectively existing something you are talking about.
There are plenty of people who do believe there is an objective moral truth.
I don’t even know if this is evidence for or against them being right. There are plenty of people who are very wrong about lots of things that are not part of their everyday lives.
You can read about it in wikipedia and in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I have now read both articles. (You linked to Stanford twice, so I read the WP article “Moral Realism”.)
Wikipedia doesn’t give a single argument for moral realism, it just says that if we accept it, that makes it convenient to reason about morals. Which is not evidence.
The Stanford article lists many arguments against realism, but no arguments for it. It seems to conclude that because realism arises from “common sense and initial appearances” [I disagree strongly] and because they identify problems with some alternatives, realism should not be dismissed. Yet they identify no problems with my approach; and even if they did find problems with all known other approaches, as long as there is no problem to be found with the rejection of realism in itself, then there is no valid reason to accept realism.
To sum up: moral realism claims truth-properties for moral statements, but it also claims they cannot be evaluated for truth on the basis of any observations of the physical objective universe. That reduces it to the statement “our common sense tells us so, you can’t prove us wrong, we don’t have to prove ourselves right”. Not very great philosophy.
By this I take it to mean you would like to define “it is wrong” and “it is right” to mean “most people think it is wrong” and “most people think it is right.” I find a lot of problems with that definition.
No I don’t want to define it so. It can and does mean different things in different contexts. Whenever there is doubt we should make it explicit what we mean.
Whether I understand moral realists is a separate issue. First I would like to understand moral realism itself. Please taboo “something is right” and tell me what your claim of objective moral truths or moral realism means.
What do you do about me? Incarcerate me while telling me that I am being imprisoned for life not because I did or want to do something wrong but because “most people think I did something wrong?”
I don’t like incarceration itself, but it might be the best alternative available. Regardless of what I do with you, it would be because “most people (including me) think you did something wrong”, not because “it is somehow objectively wrong”.
I do ask you what YOU think. Do you think I am wrong to kill these children?
Yes I do.
How much does it matter that I disagree with you?
It matters for some purposes. For instance, if there were reliable ways to check and modify a person’s actual moral feelings, I would want to impose on you modifications that would make you view killing children as immoral. I would prefer that to incarcerating you.
Another possible difference is in the severity of punishment, if any. One goal of punishment is deterring other potential criminals (and your own potential recidivism). People who don’t have moral feelings stopping them from killing children, might need more punishment (ceteris paribus) to achieve the same deterrence. So it might make sense to punish you more severly, to influence people like you who don’t share the social morals being enforced to follow them anyway out of self-interest.
Also, your lack of these moral feeling makes you likely to kill children again in the future (as you noted yourself), so I would want to incarcerate you for longer so as to protect children from you for longer.
If it doesn’t matter that I disagree with you, doesn’t that mean that you think it is objectively wrong?
As I said, it does matter. But suppose it didn’t matter: suppose I sentenced you without regard to your moral feelings. That wouldn’t mean I thought your behavior was “objectively wrong”. It would simply mean I was sentencing according to the moral beliefs of myself (and, by stipulation, most people). I see nothing wrong in doing so. To refrain from doing so would be to refrain from acting according to my moral beliefs.
I think some confronting this might want to say there was something wrong with me if I liked killing children and didn’t feel there was something wrong with it.
“There is something wrong with you” is yet another different, confusing, usage of the word ‘wrong’ in this discussion :-) Tabooing ‘wrong’ it means simply: you are unusual in this regard. Which is true by stipulation of our scenario—as you said, “most people think you did something wrong”. Anything else (“who is human?”) is arguing about the definitions of words and is not interesting or relevant.
I do think there are powerful reasons to think morality is objective
I fail to see the relevance. Humans convince each other of many things all the time. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be here on this site! There are minds “out there” in mind-space whom we couldn’t convince, but that doesn’t mean there are such human minds, because humans are quite similar to one another.
Are you seriously suggesting humanity is divided into moral realists and anti-realists, and no realist can possibly explain to me or convince me of their position and even talking about it is pointless?
I fail to see the relevance. Humans convince each other of many things all the time. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be here on this site!
Yes, and those things include moral statements.
Are you seriously suggesting humanity is divided into moral realists and anti-realists, and no realist can possibly explain to me or convince me of their position and even talking about it is pointless?
No, because most if not all humans who call themselves moral non-realists are actually moral realists who believe themselves to be moral non-realists.
Why do you think so? Where do I act as if I believed in moral realism? I am not aware of such.
This is similar to the way people who claim to be physical non-realists still manage to avoid walking out of high story windows. If someone punched you or stole your stuff, I strongly suspect you’d object in moral terms.
If someone punched you or stole your stuff, I strongly suspect you’d object in moral terms.
To me, this is a point in favor of anti-realism. I hardly react at all when strangers get punched and worse (as we speak, probably). Tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Of course I would, and that doesn’t make me a moral realist. I would say: by the morals that I feel, and most other people also feel and agree on, the person who assaulted me acted immorally. Nothing to do with objective moral rules: just rules that I and most other people feel to be moral and agree on.
More importantly, if some people in my place would appeal to “objective/factual morals”, that is not in itself evidence for the existence of such objective morals. Since when I ask them (you) how they perceive these objective morals, how they even know them to exist, I receive so far no answer.
Of course I would, and that doesn’t make me a moral realist. I would say: by the morals that I feel, and most other people also feel and agree on, the person who assaulted me acted immorally.
What if I said that by the morals I feel it’s ok for me to hit you? You could answer that most people disagree with me, but I suspect you’d object to being punched even if, e.g., you belonged to a low status group that people thought it was ok to abuse.
I live by my morals, whether or not others share them. This doesn’t change the fact that they are my morals, a feature of my brain state, and not some sort of objective independently existing morals. It’s exactly the same situation as saying that I feel that my girlfriend is beautiful whether or not others agree, but that doesn’t mean there’s an objective standard of beauty in the universe that doesn’t depend on observers.
If I belonged to a low status group that most people had no moral issues with abusing, then I would keep saying they behave immorally according to my views, and they would keep ignoring my words and abusing me. I fail to see what about this situation suggests that I behave as if I believe in realist morals.
If I belonged to a low status group that most people had no moral issues with abusing, then I would keep saying they behave immorally according to my views, and they would keep ignoring my words and abusing me. I fail to see what about this situation suggests that I behave as if I believe in realist morals.
And you would really be ok with them living by their morals and abusing you?
Of course I would not be OK. I would want them to change their behavior and I would try to change it. This would be because of my preferences as to how people should behave towards me. These preferences don’t exist independently of me. Morals are a special kind of preferences.
Saying “there exist someone’s morals but there do not exist morals by themselves” is exactly the same as saying “there exist someone’s preferences but there do not exist preferences by themselves”.
They wouldn’t. Nobody ever acts other than by their own preferences. Me by mine, they by theirs. This is pretty much baked into the definition of ‘preferences’, although with non-utility-maximizers like humans the situation is more complex than we’d like.
This is inherent in your own description of the scenario. You said they abuse me. So presumably their preferences (including their morals) are OK with that.
I’m sure you understand all this. What made you think I believed anything different?
Prediction: If you were forced to consider the situation in near mode, e.g., if you had something to protect that was being threatened, you wouldn’t be arguing that preferences are relative to the individual, but why the other person was acting amorally.
If I were in a crisis, I would be arguing whatever was most likely to convince the other person. If the other person was a moral realist—and most people instinctively are if they never really thought about the issue—then I would argue moral realism. And if the other person was religious—as again most people instinctively are—then I would argue about god. In neither case is that evidence that I believe in moral realism, or in gods; I would just be choosing the most effective argument.
And even if I did believe in moral realism, or the fact that many others do—that is not strong evidence for moral realism itself, because it is explained by evolutionary reasons that made us feel this way. Valid evidence is not that people believe one way or another, but the reasons they can explicitly articulate for that belief. When you observe that most or even all people behave like moral realists under pressure, that is a fact about people, not about moral realism.
To make it unambiguous, let us consider the action “mwengler, a human, goes to a randomly chosen location, abducts the first child under 4′ tall he sees there, then takes that child, and kills it with a chainsaw. When asked about it he says ‘I’ve done things like this before, I do it because I like the way it makes me feel.’ ”
You say:
This is an assertion which is either true or false. You assert it as true. By my reading of the definition, this makes you a moral nihilist. This on my part is not an act of judgment, but rather of labeling in a way which is common enough among a community who thinks about stuff like this to have been spelled out rather clearly in a wikipedia article.
There are plenty of people who do believe there is an objective moral truth. So many that there is a label for it: moral realism. You can read about it in wikipedia and in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The concept may be “confused,” but it may be less “confused” after you read what some real clear philosophy writers have to say about it.
By this I take it to mean you would like to define “it is wrong” and “it is right” to mean “most people think it is wrong” and “most people think it is right.” I find a lot of problems with that definition.
First, as a physicist I recognize a world of difference between 1) “electrons repel each other” and 2) “most physicists think electrons repel each other.” They are probably both true, but negating the first would have vast implications for all of electronics, while the second would represent a remarkable, and possibly disastrous, social phenomenon. So I’d love to keep the semantic distinction between what is and what people think is.
I guess my point about this would be, yes its natural to translate objective language into subjective rough equivalents if you think the subjectivity of morality is natural, inescapable, unavoidable. But you will misunderstand other people and be misunderstood by them if you do so and assume that they do so as well, because there are a lot of moral realists out there.
I’m curious how you interpret this situation in this light:
You think my joy-killing random children is wrong. I think it is right, or perhaps I merely think it is not wrong because I don’t think anything is right or wrong. And I have decided that to live life fully I must have many unique and exciting experiences, especially those that define me as an individual that would set me apart from other men. As part of that program, I have traveled to Antarctica, scuba’d in caves in deep volcanic lakes. And killed the odd child. I find the experience somewhat distasteful, but also somewhat fascinating, and although I don’t expect to want to kill children forever, I feel that I’ll probably need to kill 2 or 3 more to get everything I want from the experience.
What do you do about me? Incarcerate me while telling me that I am being imprisoned for life not because I did or want to do something wrong but because “most people think I did something wrong?” Well I would ask you what YOU think. I do ask you what YOU think. Do you think I am wrong to kill these children? How much does it matter that I disagree with you? If it doesn’t matter that I disagree with you, doesn’t that mean that you think it is objectively wrong?
I think some confronting this might want to say there was something wrong with me if I liked killing children and didn’t feel there was something wrong with it. In this case, you are essentially defining “humans” as, among other things, “people who think randomly killing children because it is fun” as wrong. You know have the problem of having to identify the disease process in me (and others) that leads me to this error. Perhaps “wrong” is objective in that it is part of a common genetic heritage we have evolved to live with each other? And that as with insulin or albinism or senility, there can be a genetic defect in some people? Then wrong would be some kind of disease, but it would still be objective.
But it would not be normative. (Read about normative in wikipedia and encyclopedia). Just because most humans genetically found killing children wrong, wouldn’t tell me, with my genetic disease, that I “should” think that too. It merely tells me that I am different from most humans in this respect.
I don’t know where it all ends. I do think there are powerful reasons to think morality is objective, just as there are powerful reasons to wonder if it isn’t.
Correct. I want to point out what this is an assertion about: it is about the meaning of the word ‘morals’. I.e. a definition, not a statement of logical or physical fact.
If you think that “there are objective morals” that is a different claim about the meaning of the word, but also (and much more importantly) a claim about the existence of something—and I’m asking you to define that something. Let’s leave aside for now the issue of why you call this something “morals”, let’s taboo that word. Please describe this objectively existing something you are talking about.
I don’t even know if this is evidence for or against them being right. There are plenty of people who are very wrong about lots of things that are not part of their everyday lives.
I have now read both articles. (You linked to Stanford twice, so I read the WP article “Moral Realism”.)
Wikipedia doesn’t give a single argument for moral realism, it just says that if we accept it, that makes it convenient to reason about morals. Which is not evidence.
The Stanford article lists many arguments against realism, but no arguments for it. It seems to conclude that because realism arises from “common sense and initial appearances” [I disagree strongly] and because they identify problems with some alternatives, realism should not be dismissed. Yet they identify no problems with my approach; and even if they did find problems with all known other approaches, as long as there is no problem to be found with the rejection of realism in itself, then there is no valid reason to accept realism.
To sum up: moral realism claims truth-properties for moral statements, but it also claims they cannot be evaluated for truth on the basis of any observations of the physical objective universe. That reduces it to the statement “our common sense tells us so, you can’t prove us wrong, we don’t have to prove ourselves right”. Not very great philosophy.
No I don’t want to define it so. It can and does mean different things in different contexts. Whenever there is doubt we should make it explicit what we mean.
Whether I understand moral realists is a separate issue. First I would like to understand moral realism itself. Please taboo “something is right” and tell me what your claim of objective moral truths or moral realism means.
I don’t like incarceration itself, but it might be the best alternative available. Regardless of what I do with you, it would be because “most people (including me) think you did something wrong”, not because “it is somehow objectively wrong”.
Yes I do.
It matters for some purposes. For instance, if there were reliable ways to check and modify a person’s actual moral feelings, I would want to impose on you modifications that would make you view killing children as immoral. I would prefer that to incarcerating you.
Another possible difference is in the severity of punishment, if any. One goal of punishment is deterring other potential criminals (and your own potential recidivism). People who don’t have moral feelings stopping them from killing children, might need more punishment (ceteris paribus) to achieve the same deterrence. So it might make sense to punish you more severly, to influence people like you who don’t share the social morals being enforced to follow them anyway out of self-interest.
Also, your lack of these moral feeling makes you likely to kill children again in the future (as you noted yourself), so I would want to incarcerate you for longer so as to protect children from you for longer.
As I said, it does matter. But suppose it didn’t matter: suppose I sentenced you without regard to your moral feelings. That wouldn’t mean I thought your behavior was “objectively wrong”. It would simply mean I was sentencing according to the moral beliefs of myself (and, by stipulation, most people). I see nothing wrong in doing so. To refrain from doing so would be to refrain from acting according to my moral beliefs.
“There is something wrong with you” is yet another different, confusing, usage of the word ‘wrong’ in this discussion :-) Tabooing ‘wrong’ it means simply: you are unusual in this regard. Which is true by stipulation of our scenario—as you said, “most people think you did something wrong”. Anything else (“who is human?”) is arguing about the definitions of words and is not interesting or relevant.
So tell me what they are already!
I got lost in all the comments and accidentally replied to you in a reply to myself. That comment is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dei/rationality_quotes_july_2012/6z6h?context=3
This is ultimately the case for all statements.
I fail to see the relevance. Humans convince each other of many things all the time. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be here on this site! There are minds “out there” in mind-space whom we couldn’t convince, but that doesn’t mean there are such human minds, because humans are quite similar to one another.
Are you seriously suggesting humanity is divided into moral realists and anti-realists, and no realist can possibly explain to me or convince me of their position and even talking about it is pointless?
Yes, and those things include moral statements.
No, because most if not all humans who call themselves moral non-realists are actually moral realists who believe themselves to be moral non-realists.
Exactly. So I’m asking to be convinced—I’m asking for the evidence that convinced others to be moral realists. So far no such evidence has been given.
Why do you think so? Where do I act as if I believed in moral realism? I am not aware of such.
This is similar to the way people who claim to be physical non-realists still manage to avoid walking out of high story windows. If someone punched you or stole your stuff, I strongly suspect you’d object in moral terms.
To me, this is a point in favor of anti-realism. I hardly react at all when strangers get punched and worse (as we speak, probably). Tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Ethical egoism is still a form of moral realism.
(Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily endorse full ethical egoism.)
Of course I would, and that doesn’t make me a moral realist. I would say: by the morals that I feel, and most other people also feel and agree on, the person who assaulted me acted immorally. Nothing to do with objective moral rules: just rules that I and most other people feel to be moral and agree on.
More importantly, if some people in my place would appeal to “objective/factual morals”, that is not in itself evidence for the existence of such objective morals. Since when I ask them (you) how they perceive these objective morals, how they even know them to exist, I receive so far no answer.
What if I said that by the morals I feel it’s ok for me to hit you? You could answer that most people disagree with me, but I suspect you’d object to being punched even if, e.g., you belonged to a low status group that people thought it was ok to abuse.
I live by my morals, whether or not others share them. This doesn’t change the fact that they are my morals, a feature of my brain state, and not some sort of objective independently existing morals. It’s exactly the same situation as saying that I feel that my girlfriend is beautiful whether or not others agree, but that doesn’t mean there’s an objective standard of beauty in the universe that doesn’t depend on observers.
If I belonged to a low status group that most people had no moral issues with abusing, then I would keep saying they behave immorally according to my views, and they would keep ignoring my words and abusing me. I fail to see what about this situation suggests that I behave as if I believe in realist morals.
And you would really be ok with them living by their morals and abusing you?
Of course I would not be OK. I would want them to change their behavior and I would try to change it. This would be because of my preferences as to how people should behave towards me. These preferences don’t exist independently of me. Morals are a special kind of preferences.
Saying “there exist someone’s morals but there do not exist morals by themselves” is exactly the same as saying “there exist someone’s preferences but there do not exist preferences by themselves”.
So why should they act in accordance with your preferences?
They wouldn’t. Nobody ever acts other than by their own preferences. Me by mine, they by theirs. This is pretty much baked into the definition of ‘preferences’, although with non-utility-maximizers like humans the situation is more complex than we’d like.
This is inherent in your own description of the scenario. You said they abuse me. So presumably their preferences (including their morals) are OK with that.
I’m sure you understand all this. What made you think I believed anything different?
Prediction: If you were forced to consider the situation in near mode, e.g., if you had something to protect that was being threatened, you wouldn’t be arguing that preferences are relative to the individual, but why the other person was acting amorally.
If I were in a crisis, I would be arguing whatever was most likely to convince the other person. If the other person was a moral realist—and most people instinctively are if they never really thought about the issue—then I would argue moral realism. And if the other person was religious—as again most people instinctively are—then I would argue about god. In neither case is that evidence that I believe in moral realism, or in gods; I would just be choosing the most effective argument.
And even if I did believe in moral realism, or the fact that many others do—that is not strong evidence for moral realism itself, because it is explained by evolutionary reasons that made us feel this way. Valid evidence is not that people believe one way or another, but the reasons they can explicitly articulate for that belief. When you observe that most or even all people behave like moral realists under pressure, that is a fact about people, not about moral realism.