Even accepting the premise that voting for the proposition was clearly wrong, that’s a single anecdote. It does nothing to demonstrate that Mormons are overall worse people than atheists. It is only a single point in the atheists’ favor. I could respond with examples of atheists doing terrible things, e.g., the amount of suffering caused by communists.
Anecdotes are not reliable evidence; you need a careful, thorough, and systematic analysis to be able to make confident statements. It’s really surprised me how commonly people supply purely anecdotal evidence here and expect it to be accepted (and how often it is accepted!). This is a site all about promoting rationalism, and part of that is reserving judgment unless you have good evidence.
I really don’t think a systematic analysis of the morality of Mormons vs. atheists exists, for any given utility function. That kind of analysis is probably close to impossible, in fact, even if you can precisely specify a utility function that a lot of people will agree on. To begin with, it would absolutely have to be controlled to be meaningful ― the cultural, etc. backgrounds of atheists are surely not comparable on average to those of Mormons.
I think this is an issue that rationalists just need to admit uncertainty about. That’s life, when you’re rational. Only religious people get to be certain most of the time about moral issues. A Mormon asked the same question would be able to say with confidence that the atheists caused more evil, since not following Mormonism is so evil that it would clearly outweigh any minor statistical differences between the two groups in terms of things like violent crime. If you believe in utility functions that depend on all sorts of complex empirical questions, you really can’t answer most moral questions very confidently.
It does nothing to demonstrate that Mormons are overall worse people than atheists. It is only a single point in the atheists’ favor.
I think these two sentences are contradictory. If it is a point in favor of the proposition that atheists are better in some regard than Mormons, then it does something to demonstrate the general case, if only weakly.
Rationality is not about reserving judgment until ideal evidence is available. Rationality is incorporating all the evidence at your disposal. I agree that most of the evidence available is mixed and weak, so it shouldn’t be overweighted, but it is still relevant.
Even accepting the premise that voting for the proposition was clearly wrong, that’s a single anecdote. It does nothing to demonstrate that Mormons are overall worse people than atheists. It is only a single point in the atheists’ favor. I could respond with examples of atheists doing terrible things, e.g., the amount of suffering caused by communists.
Anecdotes are not reliable evidence; you need a careful, thorough, and systematic analysis to be able to make confident statements. It’s really surprised me how commonly people supply purely anecdotal evidence here and expect it to be accepted (and how often it is accepted!). This is a site all about promoting rationalism, and part of that is reserving judgment unless you have good evidence.
I really don’t think a systematic analysis of the morality of Mormons vs. atheists exists, for any given utility function. That kind of analysis is probably close to impossible, in fact, even if you can precisely specify a utility function that a lot of people will agree on. To begin with, it would absolutely have to be controlled to be meaningful ― the cultural, etc. backgrounds of atheists are surely not comparable on average to those of Mormons.
I think this is an issue that rationalists just need to admit uncertainty about. That’s life, when you’re rational. Only religious people get to be certain most of the time about moral issues. A Mormon asked the same question would be able to say with confidence that the atheists caused more evil, since not following Mormonism is so evil that it would clearly outweigh any minor statistical differences between the two groups in terms of things like violent crime. If you believe in utility functions that depend on all sorts of complex empirical questions, you really can’t answer most moral questions very confidently.
I think these two sentences are contradictory. If it is a point in favor of the proposition that atheists are better in some regard than Mormons, then it does something to demonstrate the general case, if only weakly.
Rationality is not about reserving judgment until ideal evidence is available. Rationality is incorporating all the evidence at your disposal. I agree that most of the evidence available is mixed and weak, so it shouldn’t be overweighted, but it is still relevant.