How come they disagree on all those apparently non-spooky questions about relevant patterns in the world?
tl;dr: I take meta-ethics, like psychology and economics ~200 years ago, to be asking questions we don’t really have the tools or know-how to answer. And even if we did, there is just a lot of work to be done (e.g. solving meta-semantics, which no doubt involves solving language acquisition. Or e.g. doing some sort of evolutionary anthropology of moral language). And there are few to do the work, with little funding.
Long answer: I take one of philosophy’s key contributions to the (more empirical) sciences to be the highlighting of new or ignored questions, conceptual field clearing, the laying out of non-circular pathways in the theoretical landscape, the placing of landmarks at key choice points. But they are not typically the ones with the tools to answer those questions or make the appropriate theoretical choices informed by finer data. Basically, philosophy generates new fields and gets them to a pre-paradigmatic stage: witness e.g. Aristotle on physics, biology, economics etc.; J. S. Mill and Kant on psychology; Yudkowsky and Bostrom on AI safety; and so on. Give me enough time and I can trace just about every scientific field to its origins in what can only be described as philosophical texts. Once developed to that stage, putatively philosophical methods (conceptual analysis, reasoning by analogy, logical argument, postulation and theorizing, sporadic reference to what coarse data is available) won’t get things much further – progress slows to a crawl or authors might even start going in circles until the empirical tools, methods, interest and culture are available to take things further.
(That’s the simplified, 20-20 hindsight view with a mature philosophy and methodology of science in hand: for much of history, figuring out how to “take things further” was just as contested and confused as anything else, and was only furthered through what was ex ante just more philosophy. Newton was a rival of Descartes and Leibniz: his Principia was a work of philosophy in its time. Only later did we start calling it a work of physics, as pertaining to a field of its own. Likewise with Leibniz and Descartes’ contributions to physics.)
Re: meta-ethics, I don’t think it’s going in circles yet, but do recognize the rate at which it has produced new ideas (found genuinely new choice points) has slowed down. It’s still doing much work in collapsing false choice points though (and this seems healthy: it should over-generate and then cut down).
One thing it has completely failed to do is sell the project to the rest of the scientific community (hence why I write). But it’s also tough sell. There are various sociological obstacles at work here:
20th century ethical disasters: I think after the atrocities committed in the name of science during, during the (especially early) 20th century, scientists rightly want nothing to do with anything that smells normative. In some sense, this is a philosophical success story: awareness of the naturalistic fallacy has increased substantially. The “origins and nature of morality” probably raises a lot of alarm bells for many scientists (though, yes, I’m aware there are evolutionary biologists who explore the topic. I want to see more of this). To be clear, the wariness is warranted: this subject is indeed a normative minefield. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be crossed and that answers can’t be found. (I actually think, in the specific case of meta-ethics, part of philosophy’s contribution is to clear or at least flag the normative mines – keep the first and second order claims as distinct as possible).
Specialization: As academia has specialized, there has been less cross-departmental pollination.
Philosophy as a dirty word: I think “hard scientists” have come to associate “philosophy” (and maybe especially “ethics”) with “subjective” or something, and therefore to be avoided. Like, for many it’s just negative association at this point, with little reason attached to it. (I blame Hegel – he’s the reason philosophy got such a bad rap starting in the early 20th century).
Funding: How many governments or private funding institutions in today’s post-modern world do you expect prioritize “solving the origins and nature of morality” over other more immediately materially/economically useful or prestigious/constituent-pleasing research directions?
There are also methodological obstacles: the relevant data is just hard to collect; the number of confounding variables, myriad; the dimensionality of the systems involved, incredibly high! Compare, for example, with macroeconomics: natural experiments are extremely few and far between, and even then confounding variables abound; the timescales of the phenomena of interest (e.g. sustained recessions vs sustained growth periods) are very long, and as such we have very little data – there’ve only been a handful of such periods since record keeping began. We barely understand/can predict macro-econ any better than we did 100 years ago, and it’s not for a lack of brilliance, rigor or funding.
Alternately, maybe at least one of them is bad at science :P
In the sense that I take you to be using “science” (forming a narrow hypothesis, carefully collecting pertinent data, making pretty graphs with error bars) neither of them are probably doing it well.[1] But we shouldn’t really expect them to? Like, that’s not what the discipline is good for.
I’d bet they liberally employ the usual theoretical desiderata (explanatory power, ontological parsimony, theoretical conservatism) to argue for their view, but they probably only make cursory reference to empirical studies. And until they are do refer to more empirical work, they won’t converge on an answer (or improve our predictions, if you prefer). But, again, I don’t expect them to, since I think most of the pertinent empirical work is yet to be done.
“if morality is as real as tigers” being a cheeky framing
I’m not surprised you find this cheeky, but just FYI I was dead serious: that’s pretty much literally what I and many think is possibly the case.
it’s not necessary that everyone means precisely the same thing when they talk about tigers, as long as the amount of interpersonal noise doesn’t overwhelm the natural sparsity of the world that allows us to have single-world handles for general categories of things. You could still call this an attractor, it’s just not a pointlike attractor—there’s space for different people to use “tiger” in different ways that are stable under normal dynamics. [...] But it would be a mistake to then say “Therefore the most moral point is the center, we should all go there.”
So this is very interesting to me, and I think I agree with you on some points here, but that you’re missing others. But first I need to understand what you mean by “natural sparsity” and what your (very very rough) story is of how our words get their referents. I take it you’re drawing on ML concepts and explanations, and it sounds like a story some philosophers tell, but I’m not familiar with the lingo and want to understand this better. Please tell me more. Related: would you say that we know more about water than our 1700s counterparts, or would you just say “water” today refers to something different than what it referred to in the 1700s? In which case, what is it we’ve gained relative to them? More accurate predictions regarding… what?
Maybe the general gist was “if you strip away the supposedly-contingent disagreements like ‘is there a morality attractor,’” what are the remaining fundamental disagreements about how to do moral reasoning?
Thanks, yep, I’m not sure. Whether or not there is an attractor (and how that attraction is supposed to work) seems like the major crux – certainly in our case!
One thing I want to defend and clarify: someone the other day objected that philosophers are overly confident in their proposals, overly married to them. I think I would agree in some sense, since I think their work is often in doing pre-paradigmatic work: they often jump the gun and declare victory, take philosophizing to be enough to settle a matter. Accordingly, I need to correct the following:
Meta-ethicists are like physicists who are interested in understanding what causes the perturbations Uranus’ orbit, whatever it turns out to be: they are not married to a specific planet-induced-perturbations hypothesis, dropping all interest once Vulcan was found missing.
I should have said the field as whole is not married to any particular theory. But I’m not sure having individual researchers try so hard to develop and defend particular views is so perverse. Seems pretty normal that in trying to advance theory, individual theorists heavily favor one or another theory – the one they are curious about, want to develop, make robust and take to its limit. One shouldn’t necessarily look to one particular frontier physicist to form your best guess about their frontier – instead one should survey the various theories being advanced/developed in the area.
For posterity, we discussed in-person, and both (afaict) took the following to be clear predictive disagreements between the (paradigmatic) naturalist realists and anti-realists (condensed for brevity here, to the point of really being more of a mnemonic device):
Realists claim that:
(No Special Semantics): Our use of “right” and “wrong” are picking up, respectively, on what would be appropriately called the rightness and wrongness features in the world.
(Non-subjectivism/non-relativism): These features are largely independent of any particular homo sapiens attitudes and very stable over time.
(Still Learning): We collectively haven’t fully learned these features yet – the sparsity of the world does support and can guide further refinement of our collective usage of moral terms should we collectively wish to generalize better at identifying the presence of said features. This is the claim that leads to claims of there being a “moral attractor.”
Anti-realists may or may not disagree with (1) depending on how they cash out their semantics, but they almost certainly disagree with something like (2) and (3) (at least in their meta-ethical moments).
tl;dr: I take meta-ethics, like psychology and economics ~200 years ago, to be asking questions we don’t really have the tools or know-how to answer. And even if we did, there is just a lot of work to be done (e.g. solving meta-semantics, which no doubt involves solving language acquisition. Or e.g. doing some sort of evolutionary anthropology of moral language). And there are few to do the work, with little funding.
Long answer: I take one of philosophy’s key contributions to the (more empirical) sciences to be the highlighting of new or ignored questions, conceptual field clearing, the laying out of non-circular pathways in the theoretical landscape, the placing of landmarks at key choice points. But they are not typically the ones with the tools to answer those questions or make the appropriate theoretical choices informed by finer data. Basically, philosophy generates new fields and gets them to a pre-paradigmatic stage: witness e.g. Aristotle on physics, biology, economics etc.; J. S. Mill and Kant on psychology; Yudkowsky and Bostrom on AI safety; and so on. Give me enough time and I can trace just about every scientific field to its origins in what can only be described as philosophical texts. Once developed to that stage, putatively philosophical methods (conceptual analysis, reasoning by analogy, logical argument, postulation and theorizing, sporadic reference to what coarse data is available) won’t get things much further – progress slows to a crawl or authors might even start going in circles until the empirical tools, methods, interest and culture are available to take things further.
(That’s the simplified, 20-20 hindsight view with a mature philosophy and methodology of science in hand: for much of history, figuring out how to “take things further” was just as contested and confused as anything else, and was only furthered through what was ex ante just more philosophy. Newton was a rival of Descartes and Leibniz: his Principia was a work of philosophy in its time. Only later did we start calling it a work of physics, as pertaining to a field of its own. Likewise with Leibniz and Descartes’ contributions to physics.)
Re: meta-ethics, I don’t think it’s going in circles yet, but do recognize the rate at which it has produced new ideas (found genuinely new choice points) has slowed down. It’s still doing much work in collapsing false choice points though (and this seems healthy: it should over-generate and then cut down).
One thing it has completely failed to do is sell the project to the rest of the scientific community (hence why I write). But it’s also tough sell. There are various sociological obstacles at work here:
20th century ethical disasters: I think after the atrocities committed in the name of science during, during the (especially early) 20th century, scientists rightly want nothing to do with anything that smells normative. In some sense, this is a philosophical success story: awareness of the naturalistic fallacy has increased substantially. The “origins and nature of morality” probably raises a lot of alarm bells for many scientists (though, yes, I’m aware there are evolutionary biologists who explore the topic. I want to see more of this). To be clear, the wariness is warranted: this subject is indeed a normative minefield. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be crossed and that answers can’t be found. (I actually think, in the specific case of meta-ethics, part of philosophy’s contribution is to clear or at least flag the normative mines – keep the first and second order claims as distinct as possible).
Specialization: As academia has specialized, there has been less cross-departmental pollination.
Philosophy as a dirty word: I think “hard scientists” have come to associate “philosophy” (and maybe especially “ethics”) with “subjective” or something, and therefore to be avoided. Like, for many it’s just negative association at this point, with little reason attached to it. (I blame Hegel – he’s the reason philosophy got such a bad rap starting in the early 20th century).
Funding: How many governments or private funding institutions in today’s post-modern world do you expect prioritize “solving the origins and nature of morality” over other more immediately materially/economically useful or prestigious/constituent-pleasing research directions?
There are also methodological obstacles: the relevant data is just hard to collect; the number of confounding variables, myriad; the dimensionality of the systems involved, incredibly high! Compare, for example, with macroeconomics: natural experiments are extremely few and far between, and even then confounding variables abound; the timescales of the phenomena of interest (e.g. sustained recessions vs sustained growth periods) are very long, and as such we have very little data – there’ve only been a handful of such periods since record keeping began. We barely understand/can predict macro-econ any better than we did 100 years ago, and it’s not for a lack of brilliance, rigor or funding.
In the sense that I take you to be using “science” (forming a narrow hypothesis, carefully collecting pertinent data, making pretty graphs with error bars) neither of them are probably doing it well.[1] But we shouldn’t really expect them to? Like, that’s not what the discipline is good for.
I’d bet they liberally employ the usual theoretical desiderata (explanatory power, ontological parsimony, theoretical conservatism) to argue for their view, but they probably only make cursory reference to empirical studies. And until they are do refer to more empirical work, they won’t converge on an answer (or improve our predictions, if you prefer). But, again, I don’t expect them to, since I think most of the pertinent empirical work is yet to be done.
I’m not surprised you find this cheeky, but just FYI I was dead serious: that’s pretty much literally what I and many think is possibly the case.
So this is very interesting to me, and I think I agree with you on some points here, but that you’re missing others. But first I need to understand what you mean by “natural sparsity” and what your (very very rough) story is of how our words get their referents. I take it you’re drawing on ML concepts and explanations, and it sounds like a story some philosophers tell, but I’m not familiar with the lingo and want to understand this better. Please tell me more. Related: would you say that we know more about water than our 1700s counterparts, or would you just say “water” today refers to something different than what it referred to in the 1700s? In which case, what is it we’ve gained relative to them? More accurate predictions regarding… what?
Thanks, yep, I’m not sure. Whether or not there is an attractor (and how that attraction is supposed to work) seems like the major crux – certainly in our case!
One thing I want to defend and clarify: someone the other day objected that philosophers are overly confident in their proposals, overly married to them. I think I would agree in some sense, since I think their work is often in doing pre-paradigmatic work: they often jump the gun and declare victory, take philosophizing to be enough to settle a matter. Accordingly, I need to correct the following:
I should have said the field as whole is not married to any particular theory. But I’m not sure having individual researchers try so hard to develop and defend particular views is so perverse. Seems pretty normal that in trying to advance theory, individual theorists heavily favor one or another theory – the one they are curious about, want to develop, make robust and take to its limit. One shouldn’t necessarily look to one particular frontier physicist to form your best guess about their frontier – instead one should survey the various theories being advanced/developed in the area.
For posterity, we discussed in-person, and both (afaict) took the following to be clear predictive disagreements between the (paradigmatic) naturalist realists and anti-realists (condensed for brevity here, to the point of really being more of a mnemonic device):
Realists claim that:
(No Special Semantics): Our use of “right” and “wrong” are picking up, respectively, on what would be appropriately called the rightness and wrongness features in the world.
(Non-subjectivism/non-relativism): These features are largely independent of any particular homo sapiens attitudes and very stable over time.
(Still Learning): We collectively haven’t fully learned these features yet – the sparsity of the world does support and can guide further refinement of our collective usage of moral terms should we collectively wish to generalize better at identifying the presence of said features. This is the claim that leads to claims of there being a “moral attractor.”
Anti-realists may or may not disagree with (1) depending on how they cash out their semantics, but they almost certainly disagree with something like (2) and (3) (at least in their meta-ethical moments).