If morality is not objective, than moral propositions do not have true-or-falseness about them, and all the discussions about morality are vapid.
It seems very obvious and uncontroversial to me that morality is not objective. (Yay typical mind fallacy!) Morality is, or arises from, a description of human actions, judgements and thoughts. Aliens who behaved completely differently should be said to have different morals.
It’s not clear to me why someone would even think to argue for objective (=universally correct and unique) morals unless motivated by religion or tradition.
Of course, it’s also clear to me that our subjective morals add up to normality. For instance murder is generally morally wrong. Of course that should be read to say it’s wrong in our eyes! Of course things are not right or wrong in themselves; value judgements, including moral values, are passed by observers who have values/preferences/moral theories.
It seems to me that nihilism, if it is commonly understood to mean this, should be accepted by pretty much any materialist. This doesn’t seem to be the case. What am I missing? What are the reasons to think there’s something in nature (or in logic, perhaps) that should be identified as “objective morals”?
If I said “Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice” and you said “no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans” I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist. I made a moral statement and you told me I was wrong. You seem to believe that that moral statement is either true or false no matter who says it, that “I think I’ll murder Dan” is not just a subjective choice like “I think I’ll read a Neil Gaiman book tonight” might be.
But you also characterize morality as a description of human actions. If I say “I notice that murder is said to be wrong by many people but is practiced by some non-trivial minority of humans, there fore, since I observe it is part of the human moral landscape, I will pick a kid at random in the mall and shoot him.” and you say “no, you shouldn’t” then you are probably a moral realist. You apparently think that the proposition I proposed has a truth or falseness to it that exists outside yourself, and you are expressing to me that this statement I made is false.
My moral nihilism which I have abandoned perhaps a week ago arose from my comparing the quality of moral facts and fact finding to the quality of scientific facts and fact finding. Science seemed developed through an objective process: you had to test the world to see if statements about the world were true or false. Whereas morality seemed to come entirely from intuitions and introspection. “you shouldn’t kill random kids in the mall.” “You should recycle.” Blah blah blah where is even the test? In my case I was a nihilist in that I thought there was no sensible way to declare a moral statement to be a “fact” rather than a choice, but I was totally willing to kill reflecting my choices (i.e., kill someone who threatened me or my friends or my family). So I had what I thought was a de facto morality that I thought could not be justified as “fact” in the same way that engineering and physics textbooks could be justified.
Upon being reminded of “the problem of induction” I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.
It could be that we are nowhere near as good at figuring out what the moral facts are as we are at figuring out what the scientific facts are. But 3000 years ago, we weren’t very good at scientific facts either, and that presumably didn’t stop them from being facts, we just didn’t know much about them yet.
So maybe morality CAN’T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven’t figure it out yet.
But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?
If I said “Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice” and you said “no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans” I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist.
This is a bad framing of the issue. Murder (for humans) is not, properly speaking, right or wrong. Saying that it is will do for casual conversation but let’s make things precise. The term “murder” also presupposes wrong-ness, so I’ll replace it with ‘killing’.
Moral judgments (right/wrong) are descriptions given by people to actions. Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself. This is true whether ‘killing’ stands here for a very specific case we are discussing, or whether we are making a generalization over some or all cases of actual or possible killing. (In the latter case, we will be implying some generalization such as ‘most/all/typical/… cases of killing are wrong in X’s eyes’.)
We can also generalize over the person doing the moral judgment. For instance, if most/all/typical/… 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. This, as I noted above, is what we typically do in conversation—and it’s OK, but only as long as everyone understands and agrees on who is said to (dis)approve of the action in question!
Finally, all that I have said isn’t necessarily incorrect even if you believe in objective moral truth. In that case you can view it as a definition of the words ‘morally right/wrong’. We can talk about people’s moral opinions even if there is a separate Objective Moral Truth that not all people agree with. We should just be clear when we’re talking about truth, and when about opinions.
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. You say:
Upon being reminded of “the problem of induction” I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.
Science starts with assumptions, and fundamental observations, that are about the objective world it describes. Morals start with assumptions and observations about human moral judgments. These judgments are the functions of human brains, which of course exist objectively. The morals you deduce from these assumptions are an objective fact—but they are a fact about human brains! That’s what you deduced them from! They are not a fact about e.g. the action of killing in itself.
Imagine an alien that doesn’t think killing kittens is morally wrong. It can do so without any compunctions. This is of course its subjective view. However, some humans think killing kittens is generally morally wrong, no matter who does it (as long as it’s an intelligent being that makes choice about its actions).
In a universe with aliens and kittens but no humans, would an alien killing kittens be morally right or wrong? My answer: this is a wrong question; a correct question about morality is e.g. “do humans think that xxx is wrong”, and there is no morality without reference to some agents (human or otherwise) doing the moral judging. Your answer is, presumably, that it is as right or as wrong as it is in our universe. (Are moral truths like logical truths? Or contingent on physical law?)
So maybe morality CAN’T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven’t figure it out yet.
You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?
In the latter case at least you have to say what physical evidence causes you to believe they exist.
And what does it mean for an objective moral truth to exist? If it’s a logical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean my behavior is irrational in some sense? If it’s a physical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean I will make wrong predictions about physical facts I don’t know yet?
If I gave you an oracle for logical truths, and an oracle for physical facts, could you in principle deduce all moral truths? How?
But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?
“Murder” presupposes “moral wrong”, that’s just what the word means. I certainly agree that “killing”—any particular instance of killing, as well as killing in general—is not in itself right or wrong; it is only right or wrong in the eyes of some people. Most people in any given society agree about most killings, which creates a consensus useful for many purposes, which all adds up to normality.
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.
You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?
So you admit that there are two different kinds of objective facts. Given that there are two different kinds, why can’t there be more?
These are two quite different things. We group them under one name, ‘facts’, but that is just a convention. That’s why I wanted to find out which kind we were talking about.
Saying that “there might be a third kind” is misleading: it is a matter of definitions of words. You propose there might be some undiscoverd X. You also propose that if we discovered X, we would be willing to call it “a new kind of fact”. But X itself is vastly more interesting than what words we might use.
Therefore please taboo “fact” and tell me, what is it you think there may be more of?
Certainly, they have a lot in common, as well as a lot of differences.
But this discussion doesn’t seem profitable. We shouldn’t be discussing the probability that “another kind of fact” exists. Either someone has a suggestion for a new kind of fact, which we can then evaluate, or else the subject is barren. The mere fact that “we’ve not ruled out that there might exist more things we would choose to apply the word ‘fact’ to” is very weak evidence. We’ve not ruled out china teacups in solar orbit, either, but we don’t spend time discussing them.
But this discussion doesn’t seem profitable. We shouldn’t be discussing the probability that “another kind of fact” exists. Either someone has a suggestion for a new kind of fact, which we can then evaluate, or else the subject is barren.
So if I understand your meta-theory correctly, anyone living before the scientific method, or simple hasn’t heard of it, should be a Cartesian skeptic.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. By “Cartesian skeptic” do you mean a Cartesian dualist who is skeptical of pure materialism? Or a Cartesian skeptic who does not wish to rely on his senses, who is skeptical of scientific inquiry into objective reality? Or something else?
That’s not physical anti-realism, but it’s a sort of skepticism about physical realism. However, nothing can “prove” physical realism correct if you don’t already accept it.
If someone doesn’t believe his sense inputs reflect something with independent existence, then any new information they receive via those very same sense inputs can’t logically influence their belief. Learning about the scientific method would not matter. Living today or at Descartes’ time or ten thousand years ago, there are still exactly the same reasons for being a physical realist: the world just seems that way, we act that way even if we proclaim we don’t believe in it, we can’t change or escape the world we perceive via our senses by wishing it, and we have a strong instinct not to die.
Interesting point. But that’s very weak evidence (because as I said the two known instances have significant differences). Also, this is a heuristic and produces many false positives.
At best it motivates me to remain open to arguments that there might be more kinds of ‘truth’, which I am. But the mere argument that there might be is not interesting, unless someone can provide an argument for a concrete example. Or even a suggestion of what a concrete example might be like.
At best it motivates me to remain open to arguments that there might be more kinds of ‘truth’, which I am. But the mere argument that there might be is not interesting, unless someone can provide an argument for a concrete example.
You should study more history of ideas; once you see several examples of seemingly-unsolvable philosophical problems that were later solved by intellectual paradigm shifts, you become much less willing to believe that a particular problem is unsolvable simple because we currently don’t have any idea how to solve it.
I don’t believe a problem is unsolvable. I don’t see a problem in the first place. I don’t have any unsolved questions in my world model.
You keep saying I should be more open to new ideas and unsure of my existing ideas. But you do not suggest any concrete new idea. You also do not point to the need for a new idea, such as an unsolved problem. You’re not saying anything that isn’t fully general and applicable to all of everyone’s beliefs.
I’m not interested in dialogue with physical anti-realists. Certain mutual assumptions are necessary to hold a meaningful conversation, and some kind of physical realism is one of them. Another example is the Past Hypothesis: we must assume the past had lower entropy, otherwise we would believe that we are Boltzmann brains and be unable to trust our memories or senses. A third example is induction: believing the universe is more likely to be lawful than not, that our past experience is at least in principle a guide to the future.
If moral realists are on the same level as physical realists—if they have no meaningful arguments for their position based on shared assumptions, but rather say “we are moral realists first and everything else follows, and if it conflicts with any other epistemological principles so much the worse for them”—then I’m not interested in talking to them (about moral realism). And I expect a very large proportion of people who agree with LW norms on rational thinking would say the same.
I’d like to tie up some of the things you said in your first and second posts in this thread.
You started with:
I don’t understand the quote. Under what definition of “nihilistic” does it make sense?
and I responded with a link to the definition of moral nihilism in wikipedia, saying moral nihilism is the label for the belief that there are no objective moral truths or falsehoods.
You responded with
It seems very obvious and uncontroversial to me that morality is not objective.
When you say something is “uncontroversial,” that means that, barring some class of people too stupid or whacky to be bothered with, people competent to have an opinion agree with you that it is obvious that morality is not objective.
In response to that I briefly summarized moral realism and linked to its wikipedia entry. By this I intended to show that the community of people who believed morality to be objective was competent and obvious enough to have a simple label on their belief, with that label cited and explained widely by (it seems) everybody who bothers to summarize moral philosophy.
I did NOT mean to suggest that moral realism is obvious or that I believe it or that the negation of moral realism is obvious or that I believe that. I DID mean to suggest that it IS controversial, meaning literally that there are moral realists who controvert (“speak against”) nihilists and nihilists who speak against moral realists.
From there we go in to the weeds, or at least I do. First, I muddied the waters by talking about a particular example which I thought clarified some issues but which seems to clarify nothing, so it is not worth even mentioning again.
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.
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.
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.
It seems very obvious and uncontroversial to me that morality is not objective. (Yay typical mind fallacy!) Morality is, or arises from, a description of human actions, judgements and thoughts. Aliens who behaved completely differently should be said to have different morals.
It’s not clear to me why someone would even think to argue for objective (=universally correct and unique) morals unless motivated by religion or tradition.
Of course, it’s also clear to me that our subjective morals add up to normality. For instance murder is generally morally wrong. Of course that should be read to say it’s wrong in our eyes! Of course things are not right or wrong in themselves; value judgements, including moral values, are passed by observers who have values/preferences/moral theories.
It seems to me that nihilism, if it is commonly understood to mean this, should be accepted by pretty much any materialist. This doesn’t seem to be the case. What am I missing? What are the reasons to think there’s something in nature (or in logic, perhaps) that should be identified as “objective morals”?
If I said “Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice” and you said “no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans” I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist. I made a moral statement and you told me I was wrong. You seem to believe that that moral statement is either true or false no matter who says it, that “I think I’ll murder Dan” is not just a subjective choice like “I think I’ll read a Neil Gaiman book tonight” might be.
But you also characterize morality as a description of human actions. If I say “I notice that murder is said to be wrong by many people but is practiced by some non-trivial minority of humans, there fore, since I observe it is part of the human moral landscape, I will pick a kid at random in the mall and shoot him.” and you say “no, you shouldn’t” then you are probably a moral realist. You apparently think that the proposition I proposed has a truth or falseness to it that exists outside yourself, and you are expressing to me that this statement I made is false.
My moral nihilism which I have abandoned perhaps a week ago arose from my comparing the quality of moral facts and fact finding to the quality of scientific facts and fact finding. Science seemed developed through an objective process: you had to test the world to see if statements about the world were true or false. Whereas morality seemed to come entirely from intuitions and introspection. “you shouldn’t kill random kids in the mall.” “You should recycle.” Blah blah blah where is even the test? In my case I was a nihilist in that I thought there was no sensible way to declare a moral statement to be a “fact” rather than a choice, but I was totally willing to kill reflecting my choices (i.e., kill someone who threatened me or my friends or my family). So I had what I thought was a de facto morality that I thought could not be justified as “fact” in the same way that engineering and physics textbooks could be justified.
Upon being reminded of “the problem of induction” I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.
It could be that we are nowhere near as good at figuring out what the moral facts are as we are at figuring out what the scientific facts are. But 3000 years ago, we weren’t very good at scientific facts either, and that presumably didn’t stop them from being facts, we just didn’t know much about them yet.
So maybe morality CAN’T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven’t figure it out yet.
But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?
This is a bad framing of the issue. Murder (for humans) is not, properly speaking, right or wrong. Saying that it is will do for casual conversation but let’s make things precise. The term “murder” also presupposes wrong-ness, so I’ll replace it with ‘killing’.
Moral judgments (right/wrong) are descriptions given by people to actions. Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself. This is true whether ‘killing’ stands here for a very specific case we are discussing, or whether we are making a generalization over some or all cases of actual or possible killing. (In the latter case, we will be implying some generalization such as ‘most/all/typical/… cases of killing are wrong in X’s eyes’.)
We can also generalize over the person doing the moral judgment. For instance, if most/all/typical/… 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. This, as I noted above, is what we typically do in conversation—and it’s OK, but only as long as everyone understands and agrees on who is said to (dis)approve of the action in question!
Finally, all that I have said isn’t necessarily incorrect even if you believe in objective moral truth. In that case you can view it as a definition of the words ‘morally right/wrong’. We can talk about people’s moral opinions even if there is a separate Objective Moral Truth that not all people agree with. We should just be clear when we’re talking about truth, and when about opinions.
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. You say:
Science starts with assumptions, and fundamental observations, that are about the objective world it describes. Morals start with assumptions and observations about human moral judgments. These judgments are the functions of human brains, which of course exist objectively. The morals you deduce from these assumptions are an objective fact—but they are a fact about human brains! That’s what you deduced them from! They are not a fact about e.g. the action of killing in itself.
Imagine an alien that doesn’t think killing kittens is morally wrong. It can do so without any compunctions. This is of course its subjective view. However, some humans think killing kittens is generally morally wrong, no matter who does it (as long as it’s an intelligent being that makes choice about its actions).
In a universe with aliens and kittens but no humans, would an alien killing kittens be morally right or wrong? My answer: this is a wrong question; a correct question about morality is e.g. “do humans think that xxx is wrong”, and there is no morality without reference to some agents (human or otherwise) doing the moral judging. Your answer is, presumably, that it is as right or as wrong as it is in our universe. (Are moral truths like logical truths? Or contingent on physical law?)
You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?
In the latter case at least you have to say what physical evidence causes you to believe they exist.
And what does it mean for an objective moral truth to exist? If it’s a logical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean my behavior is irrational in some sense? If it’s a physical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean I will make wrong predictions about physical facts I don’t know yet?
If I gave you an oracle for logical truths, and an oracle for physical facts, could you in principle deduce all moral truths? How?
“Murder” presupposes “moral wrong”, that’s just what the word means. I certainly agree that “killing”—any particular instance of killing, as well as killing in general—is not in itself right or wrong; it is only right or wrong in the eyes of some people. Most people in any given society agree about most killings, which creates a consensus useful for many purposes, which all adds up to normality.
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.
So you admit that there are two different kinds of objective facts. Given that there are two different kinds, why can’t there be more?
These are two quite different things. We group them under one name, ‘facts’, but that is just a convention. That’s why I wanted to find out which kind we were talking about.
Saying that “there might be a third kind” is misleading: it is a matter of definitions of words. You propose there might be some undiscoverd X. You also propose that if we discovered X, we would be willing to call it “a new kind of fact”. But X itself is vastly more interesting than what words we might use.
Therefore please taboo “fact” and tell me, what is it you think there may be more of?
There’s a reason we use the same word for both of them. They have a lot in common, for example being extremely objective in practice.
Certainly, they have a lot in common, as well as a lot of differences.
But this discussion doesn’t seem profitable. We shouldn’t be discussing the probability that “another kind of fact” exists. Either someone has a suggestion for a new kind of fact, which we can then evaluate, or else the subject is barren. The mere fact that “we’ve not ruled out that there might exist more things we would choose to apply the word ‘fact’ to” is very weak evidence. We’ve not ruled out china teacups in solar orbit, either, but we don’t spend time discussing them.
So if I understand your meta-theory correctly, anyone living before the scientific method, or simple hasn’t heard of it, should be a Cartesian skeptic.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. By “Cartesian skeptic” do you mean a Cartesian dualist who is skeptical of pure materialism? Or a Cartesian skeptic who does not wish to rely on his senses, who is skeptical of scientific inquiry into objective reality? Or something else?
Someone who doesn’t believe his sense inputs necessarily reflect any reality.
That’s not physical anti-realism, but it’s a sort of skepticism about physical realism. However, nothing can “prove” physical realism correct if you don’t already accept it.
If someone doesn’t believe his sense inputs reflect something with independent existence, then any new information they receive via those very same sense inputs can’t logically influence their belief. Learning about the scientific method would not matter. Living today or at Descartes’ time or ten thousand years ago, there are still exactly the same reasons for being a physical realist: the world just seems that way, we act that way even if we proclaim we don’t believe in it, we can’t change or escape the world we perceive via our senses by wishing it, and we have a strong instinct not to die.
There could be more. It just turns out that there aren’t.
Do you have any evidence for this besides not being able to think of a third meta-theory?
Do you have any evidence against it? Are you able to think of a third?
The zero-one-infinity hueristic.
Interesting point. But that’s very weak evidence (because as I said the two known instances have significant differences). Also, this is a heuristic and produces many false positives.
At best it motivates me to remain open to arguments that there might be more kinds of ‘truth’, which I am. But the mere argument that there might be is not interesting, unless someone can provide an argument for a concrete example. Or even a suggestion of what a concrete example might be like.
You should study more history of ideas; once you see several examples of seemingly-unsolvable philosophical problems that were later solved by intellectual paradigm shifts, you become much less willing to believe that a particular problem is unsolvable simple because we currently don’t have any idea how to solve it.
I don’t believe a problem is unsolvable. I don’t see a problem in the first place. I don’t have any unsolved questions in my world model.
You keep saying I should be more open to new ideas and unsure of my existing ideas. But you do not suggest any concrete new idea. You also do not point to the need for a new idea, such as an unsolved problem. You’re not saying anything that isn’t fully general and applicable to all of everyone’s beliefs.
The physical anti-realist doesn’t see any problem in his world view either.
I’m not interested in dialogue with physical anti-realists. Certain mutual assumptions are necessary to hold a meaningful conversation, and some kind of physical realism is one of them. Another example is the Past Hypothesis: we must assume the past had lower entropy, otherwise we would believe that we are Boltzmann brains and be unable to trust our memories or senses. A third example is induction: believing the universe is more likely to be lawful than not, that our past experience is at least in principle a guide to the future.
If moral realists are on the same level as physical realists—if they have no meaningful arguments for their position based on shared assumptions, but rather say “we are moral realists first and everything else follows, and if it conflicts with any other epistemological principles so much the worse for them”—then I’m not interested in talking to them (about moral realism). And I expect a very large proportion of people who agree with LW norms on rational thinking would say the same.
I’d like to tie up some of the things you said in your first and second posts in this thread.
You started with:
and I responded with a link to the definition of moral nihilism in wikipedia, saying moral nihilism is the label for the belief that there are no objective moral truths or falsehoods.
You responded with
When you say something is “uncontroversial,” that means that, barring some class of people too stupid or whacky to be bothered with, people competent to have an opinion agree with you that it is obvious that morality is not objective.
In response to that I briefly summarized moral realism and linked to its wikipedia entry. By this I intended to show that the community of people who believed morality to be objective was competent and obvious enough to have a simple label on their belief, with that label cited and explained widely by (it seems) everybody who bothers to summarize moral philosophy.
I did NOT mean to suggest that moral realism is obvious or that I believe it or that the negation of moral realism is obvious or that I believe that. I DID mean to suggest that it IS controversial, meaning literally that there are moral realists who controvert (“speak against”) nihilists and nihilists who speak against moral realists.
From there we go in to the weeds, or at least I do. First, I muddied the waters by talking about a particular example which I thought clarified some issues but which seems to clarify nothing, so it is not worth even mentioning again.
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.
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.
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.