Wow. I’ve been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That “is this action morally wrong” question really struck me.
Myself, I believe that there is an objective morality outside humanity, one that is, as Eliezer would deride the idea, “written on a stone tablet somewhere”. This may be an unpopular hypothesis, but accepting it is not a prerequisite for my point. When asked about why certain actions were immoral, I, too, have reached for the “because it harms someone” explanation… an explanation which I just now see as the sin of Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points.
What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of “wrong” actions: one we might term “sins”, and the other we might term “social transgressions”. Social Transgressions is that class of acts which are punishable by society, usually those that are harmful. Sins is that class of acts which goes against this Immutable Moral Law. Examples are given below, being (in the spirit of full disclosure) the first examples I thought of, and neither the more pure examples, nor the most defensible, non-controversial examples.
Spitting on the floor of an office building is a social transgression, but not a sin.
Homosexuality is a sin, but not a social transgression (insofar as it is accepted by society, which is more and more very day).
Murder is both a sin and a social transgression.
I do not know if this is a defensible position, but I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.
Voted up for thinking about the problem, self-honesty, and more importantly for speaking up. (I don’t quite understand whence the downvotes… just screaming “Boo!” at outgroup beliefs?) [Edit: at the time of this comment, the parent was at −5.]
It seems to me that by “sin” you just mean things that make you go “Squick!”. Why do you expect that, if we found the relevant stone tablet, it wouldn’t read “Spitting on the floor is wrong. Ew, tuberculosis.”, nor “Maximise your score at Tetris.”, but “Homosexuality is wrong.”?
I’m really having trouble not snickering as I write this. I literally cannot empathise with “Homosexuality is wrong”. I can sorta picture “Gay sex? Squick!”, but the obvious followup is “Squick isn’t a good criterion”, not “Homosexuality is wrong”. Also, pray tell, what (rather, whom) should genderqueers do?
I’m really having trouble not snickering as I write this. I literally cannot empathise with “Homosexuality is wrong”.
If Arandur is correct, that makes you no different from the theist who literally can’t imagine God not existing, or even anyone truly believing that God doesn’t exist, and thus concludes that “atheists” are merely angry at God.
I didn’t say it was a good thing! But as Manfred points out, I can imagine it. More than just imagine it: I know that people hold such beliefs, are sincere about it, and act upon them in acceptably predictable ways. I can also imagine it being true (like, it cause strange psychological damage, or if you zoom out and look at the universe like a painting it’s prettier when purely heterosexual, or unresolved sexual tension is a really important emotion, whatever) - but that doesn’t put me in the same mental state as people who currently believe it; namely, it makes me fall over laughing at how deeply weird the universe is.
It does make me no different from the theist who, upon reading blog posts carefully explaining “No, we don’t hate your god, we just think it’s a silly idea like the tooth fairy”, stammers “Buh… buh… WHY?”, looks for arguments, find they don’t at all match eir arguments for theism, and walks away scratching eir head. The cure is more blog posts.
Take as a premise, “One of the key [insert suitable word choice something like: duties/responsibilities/purposes/nice-things-to-do] of being human is to carry on your ancestry and raise healthy children to serve as the next strong generation of humanity.”
Or, as a less extreme version—“A mentally and physically healthy person having kids and raising them with more opportunities than they had is one of the easiest huge benefits for humanity. This is especially true if the person is particularly intelligent and thoughtful.”
If you had one of those premises, you might come to the conclusion that homosexuality doesn’t serve that goal.
Now me, I actually have the second ethic and do believe it, but I also have gay friends and could care less who anyone is loving, fucking, cuddling with, consorting abouts with, or whatever. Though if I had a son that was intelligent, healthy, and gay, I’d strongly encourage him to look into other ways to reproduce and get both the joy of having children and serve humanity by creating the next line of a-bit-more-intelligent and a-bit-better-informed people. (I don’t know what I’d do if I had a daughter who was gay—I’d have to do more research. I think I understand well enough how a gay man thinks sexually and in terms of family, but I don’t personally know any lesbian women so will refrain from an opinion until knowing more.)
(Edit: I realize this isn’t a mainstream view. I tend to believe people have base temperaments and pushing people against their base temperament is a bad idea, but I also think one of the chief forms of the world getting better is by healthy people having kids and raising them with better opportunities and teaching them more than they knew growing up. So I sat down and thought it through, and this is what I came up with. I doubt I’m the only person in the world that thinks this way, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard it put this way before.)
laughs I have always wondered how to define gay/straight/queer from a gender-queer perspective. I tend to figure the opposite of gender-queer is gender-absent, although I could see an argument that anyone who is gender-stable qualifies as fair game. :)
Gender-stable is the opposite of gender-fluid. Genderqueer is more disputed but seems to be a big umbrella including non-gendered and null-gendered and bigender and in-between people and then some and wow this is complicated. I’d just say the opposite of genderqueer is binary gender—the set {man, woman}.
Reckon it’s atop some mystical unassailable mountain on a windswept planet. That, or it doesn’t exist. :P I’m well aware of the arguments against stone tablet morality. I had thought I’d made it clear above that this was an epiphany about my flawed mind-state, not about Actual Morality. Judging by the downvotes, I did not make this sufficiently clear.
What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of “wrong” actions
the first examples I thought of
I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.
I don’t think this is a problem with clarity. Did you mean “believed” rather than “believe”? If you think this is a flawed mind-state rather than a defensible position, why not use “feel” instead of “belief”? In a similar vein, MixedNuts’s suggestion to replace ‘sin’ with ‘squick’ seems like it might describe and communicate your mind-state more effectively.
I’ve been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That “is this action morally wrong” question really struck me.
What, specifically, were you guilty of? And how does your new formulation solve the problem? Re-reading the OP doesn’t make this clear for me.
It seems like the talk of rationalization in the OP made you notice rationalization of a different kind in yourself. You would previously justify moral claims using reasoning that did not even appeal to your alleged premises. Now you associate this with Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points, because until now you didn’t notice the discrepancy. Postulating two different kinds of moral beliefs may solve this problem and certainly improves the situation in the sense that it allows you to give the real reasons behind some of your moral beliefs.
But it doesn’t begin to address the OP.
You appear to have separated out the part of your moral approach that you don’t understand yet, shoved it in a box and labelled it “sins”. Now if you intend to figure out the contents of the box or prove that it has such a small effect you can ignore it, then this seems like a perfectly good method of inquiry (one that resembles Feynman’s approach to quantum mechanics). But you appear to say that you still think the contents of the box come from a “Law” that exists “outside humanity”, and as yet I’ve seen you give no reason for continuing to believe this.
Yes, I’ve read through Yudkowsky’s post on metaethics, I’m sorry if I made the point of this post insufficiently clear, please see the… cousin… to this comment.
Wow. I’ve been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That “is this action morally wrong” question really struck me.
Myself, I believe that there is an objective morality outside humanity, one that is, as Eliezer would deride the idea, “written on a stone tablet somewhere”. This may be an unpopular hypothesis, but accepting it is not a prerequisite for my point. When asked about why certain actions were immoral, I, too, have reached for the “because it harms someone” explanation… an explanation which I just now see as the sin of Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points.
What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of “wrong” actions: one we might term “sins”, and the other we might term “social transgressions”. Social Transgressions is that class of acts which are punishable by society, usually those that are harmful. Sins is that class of acts which goes against this Immutable Moral Law. Examples are given below, being (in the spirit of full disclosure) the first examples I thought of, and neither the more pure examples, nor the most defensible, non-controversial examples.
Spitting on the floor of an office building is a social transgression, but not a sin.
Homosexuality is a sin, but not a social transgression (insofar as it is accepted by society, which is more and more very day).
Murder is both a sin and a social transgression.
I do not know if this is a defensible position, but I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.
Voted up for thinking about the problem, self-honesty, and more importantly for speaking up. (I don’t quite understand whence the downvotes… just screaming “Boo!” at outgroup beliefs?) [Edit: at the time of this comment, the parent was at −5.]
It seems to me that by “sin” you just mean things that make you go “Squick!”. Why do you expect that, if we found the relevant stone tablet, it wouldn’t read “Spitting on the floor is wrong. Ew, tuberculosis.”, nor “Maximise your score at Tetris.”, but “Homosexuality is wrong.”?
I’m really having trouble not snickering as I write this. I literally cannot empathise with “Homosexuality is wrong”. I can sorta picture “Gay sex? Squick!”, but the obvious followup is “Squick isn’t a good criterion”, not “Homosexuality is wrong”. Also, pray tell, what (rather, whom) should genderqueers do?
If Arandur is correct, that makes you no different from the theist who literally can’t imagine God not existing, or even anyone truly believing that God doesn’t exist, and thus concludes that “atheists” are merely angry at God.
I didn’t say it was a good thing! But as Manfred points out, I can imagine it. More than just imagine it: I know that people hold such beliefs, are sincere about it, and act upon them in acceptably predictable ways. I can also imagine it being true (like, it cause strange psychological damage, or if you zoom out and look at the universe like a painting it’s prettier when purely heterosexual, or unresolved sexual tension is a really important emotion, whatever) - but that doesn’t put me in the same mental state as people who currently believe it; namely, it makes me fall over laughing at how deeply weird the universe is.
It does make me no different from the theist who, upon reading blog posts carefully explaining “No, we don’t hate your god, we just think it’s a silly idea like the tooth fairy”, stammers “Buh… buh… WHY?”, looks for arguments, find they don’t at all match eir arguments for theism, and walks away scratching eir head. The cure is more blog posts.
Take as a premise, “One of the key [insert suitable word choice something like: duties/responsibilities/purposes/nice-things-to-do] of being human is to carry on your ancestry and raise healthy children to serve as the next strong generation of humanity.”
Or, as a less extreme version—“A mentally and physically healthy person having kids and raising them with more opportunities than they had is one of the easiest huge benefits for humanity. This is especially true if the person is particularly intelligent and thoughtful.”
If you had one of those premises, you might come to the conclusion that homosexuality doesn’t serve that goal.
Now me, I actually have the second ethic and do believe it, but I also have gay friends and could care less who anyone is loving, fucking, cuddling with, consorting abouts with, or whatever. Though if I had a son that was intelligent, healthy, and gay, I’d strongly encourage him to look into other ways to reproduce and get both the joy of having children and serve humanity by creating the next line of a-bit-more-intelligent and a-bit-better-informed people. (I don’t know what I’d do if I had a daughter who was gay—I’d have to do more research. I think I understand well enough how a gay man thinks sexually and in terms of family, but I don’t personally know any lesbian women so will refrain from an opinion until knowing more.)
(Edit: I realize this isn’t a mainstream view. I tend to believe people have base temperaments and pushing people against their base temperament is a bad idea, but I also think one of the chief forms of the world getting better is by healthy people having kids and raising them with better opportunities and teaching them more than they knew growing up. So I sat down and thought it through, and this is what I came up with. I doubt I’m the only person in the world that thinks this way, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard it put this way before.)
Not quite, since “empathize” is different from “imagine.” Perhaps he even thought of this when making that word choice.
laughs I have always wondered how to define gay/straight/queer from a gender-queer perspective. I tend to figure the opposite of gender-queer is gender-absent, although I could see an argument that anyone who is gender-stable qualifies as fair game. :)
Gender-stable is the opposite of gender-fluid. Genderqueer is more disputed but seems to be a big umbrella including non-gendered and null-gendered and bigender and in-between people and then some and wow this is complicated. I’d just say the opposite of genderqueer is binary gender—the set {man, woman}.
Any idea where this stone tablet is, so I can break it?
Reckon it’s atop some mystical unassailable mountain on a windswept planet. That, or it doesn’t exist. :P I’m well aware of the arguments against stone tablet morality. I had thought I’d made it clear above that this was an epiphany about my flawed mind-state, not about Actual Morality. Judging by the downvotes, I did not make this sufficiently clear.
I don’t think this is a problem with clarity. Did you mean “believed” rather than “believe”? If you think this is a flawed mind-state rather than a defensible position, why not use “feel” instead of “belief”? In a similar vein, MixedNuts’s suggestion to replace ‘sin’ with ‘squick’ seems like it might describe and communicate your mind-state more effectively.
What, specifically, were you guilty of? And how does your new formulation solve the problem? Re-reading the OP doesn’t make this clear for me.
It seems like the talk of rationalization in the OP made you notice rationalization of a different kind in yourself. You would previously justify moral claims using reasoning that did not even appeal to your alleged premises. Now you associate this with Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points, because until now you didn’t notice the discrepancy. Postulating two different kinds of moral beliefs may solve this problem and certainly improves the situation in the sense that it allows you to give the real reasons behind some of your moral beliefs.
But it doesn’t begin to address the OP.
You appear to have separated out the part of your moral approach that you don’t understand yet, shoved it in a box and labelled it “sins”. Now if you intend to figure out the contents of the box or prove that it has such a small effect you can ignore it, then this seems like a perfectly good method of inquiry (one that resembles Feynman’s approach to quantum mechanics). But you appear to say that you still think the contents of the box come from a “Law” that exists “outside humanity”, and as yet I’ve seen you give no reason for continuing to believe this.
What if we actually found this stone tablet and it said “no, morality is maximising your score in tetris”?
Yes, I’ve read through Yudkowsky’s post on metaethics, I’m sorry if I made the point of this post insufficiently clear, please see the… cousin… to this comment.