In contrast to these positions, I would label myself as a “moral quasi-realist”: I don’t think morality is objective, but I still care greatly about what a future Holden—one who has reflected more, learned more, etc. - would think about the ethical choices I’m making today.
I worry that you might end up conflating future holden with holden-who-has-reflected-more-learned-more-etc. Future you won’t necessarily be better you. Maybe future you will be brainwashed or mind-controlled; maybe the stuff you’ll have learned will be biased propaganda and the reflections you’ve undergone will be self-serving rationalizations.
But probably not! I think that if you are just thinking about what you in the future will think, it’s probably a reasonable assumption that present you should defer to future you.
HOWEVER, when we move from the individual to all of society, I think the parallel assumption is no longer reasonable. I’m a quasi-realist like you, but I think it’s not at all obvious that the way social norms evolve in gigantic populations of people over many decades are in general good, such that we should in general defer to what people in the future think. For example, insofar as there is a conflict between “what sounds good to say & feels good to believe” and “what’s actually conducive to flourishing in the long run” we should expect there to be many conditions under which society drifts systematically towards the former and away from the latter.
The main counterargument is “Empirically there does seem to be a trend of moral and epistemic progress.”
But this argument is flawed (at least in the case of morality) because even if societal morals were a total random walk over time, it would still look like progress from our perspective:
This is a graph of some random walks in n-dimensional spaces, with the y-axis being “distance from the t=10000 point.”
To be clear I’m not claiming that morality/norms evolve randomly over time. There’s definitely rhyme and reason in how they evolve. What I’m saying is that we have no good reason so far to think that the rhyme and reason is systematically good, systematically such that we should defer to future societies. (By mild contrast with the individual case where generally speaking you can expect to have reflected more and experienced more in good ways like doing philosophy rather than bad ways like being brainwashed by propaganda.)
For example, suppose that the underlying driver of moral changes over time is “What memes prevail in a population is a function of how much selection pressure there is for (A) looking good and feeling good to believe, (B) causing you to do things that help you solve physical problems in the real world such as how to grow crops or survive the winter or build a spaceship or prevent a recession, (C) causing you to do things that are conducive to the general happiness of people influenced by your decisons, and (D) causing you to pass on your genes.” (Realistically there is also the very important (S): causing you to gain status. But usually S is a function of A, B, C, and D.) And suppose that in the past, with most people living in small farming villages, selection pressure for B and C and D was much stronger than selection pressure for A. But over the course of history the balance of selection pressures shifted and (A) became a lot stronger, and (D) became a lot weaker.
I literally just now pulled this toy model out of my ass, it’s probably wrong in a bunch of ways and there are lots of ways to improve on it no doubt. But it’ll do to illustrate the point I’m trying to make.
Suppose that this toy model is roughly right; that’s the underlying driver of societal norms; the reason why e.g. gay people are accepted now and not in the past is that with the abundant wealth of modern economies status comes from more from saying things that sound good rather than from passing on your genes, and so anti-gayness memes (that sound bad but solved the problem of getting your relatives to have more kids, thereby helping spread your genes) have been relatively disfavored.
Then we quasi-realists should not defer to the moral judgment of future societies. The memes that flourish in them will be better in some ways and worse in other ways than the memes that flourish now. (Unless we have a good argument that ‘what sounds good and feels good’ isn’t Goodhartable, i.e. is such a good proxy for the quasi-realist moral truth that it’ll continue to be a good proxy even as society optimizes significantly harder and harder for it.)
(Thanks to Nico Mace for making the graph in an earlier conversation)
I think this is still not responsive to what I’ve been trying to say. Nowhere in this post or the one before have I claimed that today’s society is better morally, overall, compared to the past. I have simply reached out for reader intuitions that particular, specific changes really are best thought of as “progress”—largely to make the point that “progress” is a coherent concept, distinct from the passage of time.
I also haven’t said that I plan to defer to future Holden. I have instead asked: “What would a future Holden who has undertaken the sorts of activities I’d expect to lead to progress think?” (Not “What will future Holden think?”)
My question to you would be: do you think the changing norms about homosexuality, or any other change you can point to, represent something appropriately referred to as “progress,” with its positive connotation?
My claim is that some such changes (specifically including changing norms about homosexuality) do—not because today’s norms are today’s (today may be worse on other fronts, even worse overall), and not because there’s anything inevitable about progress, but simply because they seem to me like “progress,” by which I roughly (exclusively) mean that I endorse the change and am in the market for more changes like that to get ahead of.
Does that clarify at all? (And are there any changes in morality—historical or hypothetical—that you would consider “progress?”)
My apologies then; it’s likely I misinterpreted you. Perhaps we are on the same page.
My answer to your question depends on the definition of progress. I prefer to taboo the term and instead say the following:
When society or someone or whatever changes from A to B, and B is morally better than A, that’s a good change.
However, sometimes good changes are caused by processes that are not completely trustworthy/reliable. That is, sometimes it’s the case that a process causes a good change from situation A to B, but in some other situation C it will produce a bad change to D. The example on my mind most is the one I gave earlier—maybe the memetic evolution process is like this; selecting memes on the basis of how nice they sound produces some good changes A-->B (such as increased acceptance of homosexuality) but will also produce other bad changes C to D (I don’t have a particular example here but hopefully don’t need one; if you want I can try to come up with one.). Goodhart’s Curse weighs heavily on my mind; this pattern of optimization processes at first causing good changes and then later causing bad changes is so pervasive that we have a name for it!
I do believe in progress, in the following sense: There are processes which I trust / consider reliable / would defer to. If I learned that future-me or future-society had followed those processes and come to conclusion X, I would update heavily towards X. And I’m very excited to learn more about what the results of these processes will be so that I can update towards them.
I am skeptical of progress, in the following different sense: I consider it a wide-open question whether default memetic evolution among terrestrial humans (i.e. what’ll happen if we don’t build AGI and just let history continue as normal) is a process which I trust.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clarity about what those trustworthy processes are exactly. Nor do I have a lot of clarity about what the actual causes of past moral changes were, such as acceptance of homosexuality. So I am pretty uncertain about which good changes in the past were caused by trustworthy processes and which weren’t. History is big; presumably both kinds exist.
I basically agree. I would describe a moral law as a pendulum swinging between “this is very bad and everyone doing it should be punished” and “this is very good and everyone saying otherwise should be punished”, according to the historical and social context. It probably doesn’t swing truly randomly, but there’s no reason for it to swing always in the same direction.
Also, note that if you look on a thousand-years timescale, acceptance of homosexuality did not actually advance in a straight path (take a look at Ancient Greeks). We live in a context were the homosexuality acceptance pendulum is swinging toward more acceptance. But push the pendulum too much, and you’ll end up invoking the ban of Dante’s Divine Comedy because it sends gay people to Hell (I definitely don’t count that as moral progress).
More generally, I hold the view that morality is mostly a conformity thing. Some people for some reason manage to make the pendulum swing, and everyone else is more or less forced to chase it. Imagine waking up in a Matrix pod, and being told that no one in the real world believes in gay marriage, that homosexuality is obviously wrong and it’s still firmly on the official list of mental illnesses (with absolutely zero gay activist in the world and plenty of people around proudly declaring themselves as ex-gay). Would your belief still hold in this scenario? I don’t think that mine would last for long.
I worry that you might end up conflating future holden with holden-who-has-reflected-more-learned-more-etc. Future you won’t necessarily be better you. Maybe future you will be brainwashed or mind-controlled; maybe the stuff you’ll have learned will be biased propaganda and the reflections you’ve undergone will be self-serving rationalizations.
But probably not! I think that if you are just thinking about what you in the future will think, it’s probably a reasonable assumption that present you should defer to future you.
HOWEVER, when we move from the individual to all of society, I think the parallel assumption is no longer reasonable. I’m a quasi-realist like you, but I think it’s not at all obvious that the way social norms evolve in gigantic populations of people over many decades are in general good, such that we should in general defer to what people in the future think. For example, insofar as there is a conflict between “what sounds good to say & feels good to believe” and “what’s actually conducive to flourishing in the long run” we should expect there to be many conditions under which society drifts systematically towards the former and away from the latter.
The main counterargument is “Empirically there does seem to be a trend of moral and epistemic progress.”
But this argument is flawed (at least in the case of morality) because even if societal morals were a total random walk over time, it would still look like progress from our perspective:
This is a graph of some random walks in n-dimensional spaces, with the y-axis being “distance from the t=10000 point.”
To be clear I’m not claiming that morality/norms evolve randomly over time. There’s definitely rhyme and reason in how they evolve. What I’m saying is that we have no good reason so far to think that the rhyme and reason is systematically good, systematically such that we should defer to future societies. (By mild contrast with the individual case where generally speaking you can expect to have reflected more and experienced more in good ways like doing philosophy rather than bad ways like being brainwashed by propaganda.)
For example, suppose that the underlying driver of moral changes over time is “What memes prevail in a population is a function of how much selection pressure there is for (A) looking good and feeling good to believe, (B) causing you to do things that help you solve physical problems in the real world such as how to grow crops or survive the winter or build a spaceship or prevent a recession, (C) causing you to do things that are conducive to the general happiness of people influenced by your decisons, and (D) causing you to pass on your genes.” (Realistically there is also the very important (S): causing you to gain status. But usually S is a function of A, B, C, and D.) And suppose that in the past, with most people living in small farming villages, selection pressure for B and C and D was much stronger than selection pressure for A. But over the course of history the balance of selection pressures shifted and (A) became a lot stronger, and (D) became a lot weaker.
I literally just now pulled this toy model out of my ass, it’s probably wrong in a bunch of ways and there are lots of ways to improve on it no doubt. But it’ll do to illustrate the point I’m trying to make.
Suppose that this toy model is roughly right; that’s the underlying driver of societal norms; the reason why e.g. gay people are accepted now and not in the past is that with the abundant wealth of modern economies status comes from more from saying things that sound good rather than from passing on your genes, and so anti-gayness memes (that sound bad but solved the problem of getting your relatives to have more kids, thereby helping spread your genes) have been relatively disfavored.
Then we quasi-realists should not defer to the moral judgment of future societies. The memes that flourish in them will be better in some ways and worse in other ways than the memes that flourish now. (Unless we have a good argument that ‘what sounds good and feels good’ isn’t Goodhartable, i.e. is such a good proxy for the quasi-realist moral truth that it’ll continue to be a good proxy even as society optimizes significantly harder and harder for it.)
(Thanks to Nico Mace for making the graph in an earlier conversation)
I think this is still not responsive to what I’ve been trying to say. Nowhere in this post or the one before have I claimed that today’s society is better morally, overall, compared to the past. I have simply reached out for reader intuitions that particular, specific changes really are best thought of as “progress”—largely to make the point that “progress” is a coherent concept, distinct from the passage of time.
I also haven’t said that I plan to defer to future Holden. I have instead asked: “What would a future Holden who has undertaken the sorts of activities I’d expect to lead to progress think?” (Not “What will future Holden think?”)
My question to you would be: do you think the changing norms about homosexuality, or any other change you can point to, represent something appropriately referred to as “progress,” with its positive connotation?
My claim is that some such changes (specifically including changing norms about homosexuality) do—not because today’s norms are today’s (today may be worse on other fronts, even worse overall), and not because there’s anything inevitable about progress, but simply because they seem to me like “progress,” by which I roughly (exclusively) mean that I endorse the change and am in the market for more changes like that to get ahead of.
Does that clarify at all? (And are there any changes in morality—historical or hypothetical—that you would consider “progress?”)
My apologies then; it’s likely I misinterpreted you. Perhaps we are on the same page.
My answer to your question depends on the definition of progress. I prefer to taboo the term and instead say the following:
When society or someone or whatever changes from A to B, and B is morally better than A, that’s a good change.
However, sometimes good changes are caused by processes that are not completely trustworthy/reliable. That is, sometimes it’s the case that a process causes a good change from situation A to B, but in some other situation C it will produce a bad change to D. The example on my mind most is the one I gave earlier—maybe the memetic evolution process is like this; selecting memes on the basis of how nice they sound produces some good changes A-->B (such as increased acceptance of homosexuality) but will also produce other bad changes C to D (I don’t have a particular example here but hopefully don’t need one; if you want I can try to come up with one.). Goodhart’s Curse weighs heavily on my mind; this pattern of optimization processes at first causing good changes and then later causing bad changes is so pervasive that we have a name for it!
I do believe in progress, in the following sense: There are processes which I trust / consider reliable / would defer to. If I learned that future-me or future-society had followed those processes and come to conclusion X, I would update heavily towards X. And I’m very excited to learn more about what the results of these processes will be so that I can update towards them.
I am skeptical of progress, in the following different sense: I consider it a wide-open question whether default memetic evolution among terrestrial humans (i.e. what’ll happen if we don’t build AGI and just let history continue as normal) is a process which I trust.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clarity about what those trustworthy processes are exactly. Nor do I have a lot of clarity about what the actual causes of past moral changes were, such as acceptance of homosexuality. So I am pretty uncertain about which good changes in the past were caused by trustworthy processes and which weren’t. History is big; presumably both kinds exist.
I basically agree. I would describe a moral law as a pendulum swinging between “this is very bad and everyone doing it should be punished” and “this is very good and everyone saying otherwise should be punished”, according to the historical and social context. It probably doesn’t swing truly randomly, but there’s no reason for it to swing always in the same direction.
Also, note that if you look on a thousand-years timescale, acceptance of homosexuality did not actually advance in a straight path (take a look at Ancient Greeks). We live in a context were the homosexuality acceptance pendulum is swinging toward more acceptance. But push the pendulum too much, and you’ll end up invoking the ban of Dante’s Divine Comedy because it sends gay people to Hell (I definitely don’t count that as moral progress).
More generally, I hold the view that morality is mostly a conformity thing. Some people for some reason manage to make the pendulum swing, and everyone else is more or less forced to chase it. Imagine waking up in a Matrix pod, and being told that no one in the real world believes in gay marriage, that homosexuality is obviously wrong and it’s still firmly on the official list of mental illnesses (with absolutely zero gay activist in the world and plenty of people around proudly declaring themselves as ex-gay). Would your belief still hold in this scenario? I don’t think that mine would last for long.