Thanks for the detailed comments! I only have time to engage with a few of them:
Most of this is underdefined, and that’s unsettling at least in some (but not necessarily all) cases, and if we want to make it less underdefined, the notion of ‘one ethics’ has to give.
I’m not that wedded to ‘one ethics’, more like ‘one process for producing moral judgements’. But note that if we allow arbitrariness of scope, then ‘one process’ can be a piecewise function which uses one subprocess in some cases and another in others.
I find myself having similarly strong meta-level intuitions about wanting to do something that is “non-arbitrary” and in relevant ways “simple/elegant”. …motivationally it feels like this intuition is importantly connected to what makes it easy for me to go “all-in“ for my ethical/altruistic beliefs.
I agree that these intuitions are very strong, and they are closely connected to motivational systems. But so are some object-level intuitions like “suffering is bad”, and so the relevant question is what you’d do if it were a choice between that and simplicity. I’m not sure your arguments distinguish one from the other in that context.
one can maybe avoid to feel this uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty by deferring to idealized reflection. But it’s not obvious that this lastingly solves the underlying problem
Another way of phrasing this point: reflection is almost always good for figuring out what’s the best thing to do, but it’s not a good way to define what’s the best thing to do.
Thanks for the detailed comments! I only have time to engage with a few of them:
I’m not that wedded to ‘one ethics’, more like ‘one process for producing moral judgements’. But note that if we allow arbitrariness of scope, then ‘one process’ can be a piecewise function which uses one subprocess in some cases and another in others.
I agree that these intuitions are very strong, and they are closely connected to motivational systems. But so are some object-level intuitions like “suffering is bad”, and so the relevant question is what you’d do if it were a choice between that and simplicity. I’m not sure your arguments distinguish one from the other in that context.
Another way of phrasing this point: reflection is almost always good for figuring out what’s the best thing to do, but it’s not a good way to define what’s the best thing to do.