BTW, I think the most important defining feature of an MSA is ability to kick people’s asses. Very humanizing.
I don’t know if you meant that as a joke, but that’s pretty much my take from a contractarian perspective (though I wouldn’t use the phrase “morally significant agent”). Fish can’t do much about us cooking and eating them, so they are not a party to any social contract. That’s also the logic behind my tolerance of infanticide.
I realize you’re joking, but it bears mentioning in a general-knowledge kind of way:
Bows and arrows were, at the time, as dangerous if not more so than guns. The reason guns were superior back then was solely due to a lack of required training. (Bows take decades of practice, and it’s been joked that you should start with the grandfather—but in practice, starting with the father is a good idea.)
I guess it was meant that you start with the grandfather because he would be most skilled.. Has this been described in certain kinds of books? (Diaries, etc.)
No, the grandfather would be the least skilled of the three.
The basic idea is that to make a good archer, you need to start when he’s (women need not apply) practically a baby. In order to teach well, you must be an archer yourself; thus, the father should be an archer.
Adding in the grandfather was probably a case of exaggeration for effect, but—no, I haven’t read any diaries about it, so I could be wrong. You’d probably get some benefit from it.. I have no idea how much.
I am an emotivist and do not believe anything is good or bad in an objective sense. I think some Indians may have had guns by the 1700s, but their bows and arrows weren’t terribly outclassed by many of the old muskets back then either (I’m actually discussing that at my blog right now). The biggest advantage of the colonists was their ever-increasing numbers (while disease steadily drained those of the natives). The indians frequently did respond in kind to killings and the extent to which they could do so would strike me as as the most significant factor to take into consideration when it comes to the decision to kill them.
There is also the factor of trade relations that could be disrupted, but most people engaged in prolonged voluntary trade are going to have significant ass-kicking ability or otherwise they would have been conquered and their goods seized by force already. I understand Peter Leeson has a paper “Trading with bandits” disputing that point, but the frequency with which dominance based resource extraction occurs makes me think the phenomena he discusses only occur under very limited conditions.
Well, I can’t accuse you of having any unwillingness to bite bullets. Nor of having any unwillingness to do lots of other questionable things with bullets besides.
Still, Less Wrong has got to be the only place where I can ask if it’s okay to massacre Indians, and get one person who says it depends what the people living back then thought, and another who says it depends on the sophistication of musketry technology. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing about this site.
I suspect there are a higher-than-average number of bullet-biters here, and I number myself among them. I don’t grant the intuitions which lead people to dodge bullets much credence.
Although I am a gun-owner, I don’t think I am substantially more likely to shoot anyone (delicious animals are another story) than the others here. Though you may think my above-mentioned criteria (including the government as a source of ass-kicking and taking into account risk aversion) don’t count, I’d say that constitutes a substantial unwillingness. Also, while this is pedantic, I’d like to again emphasize the importance of disease over guns. Note that north america and australia have had nearly complete population replacement by europeans, while africa has been decolonized. The reason for that is not technology, but relative vulnerability to disease.
If it makes you feel any better about the inhabitants of Less Wrong, note that your reaction was voted up while my response (which was relevant and informative with links to more information, if I may judge my own case for a moment) was voted down. I do not say this to object to anyone’s actions (I don’t bother voting myself and have no plans to make a front-page post) but to indicate that this is evidence of what the community approves.
Although, as mentioned, I don’t believe in objective normative truth, we can pretend for a little while in response to joeteicher. We believe we have a better understanding of many things than 1700s colonists did. If we could bring them in a time-machine to the present we could presumably convince them of many of those things. Do you think we could convince them of our moral superiority? From a Bayesian perspective (I think this is Aumann’s specialty) do they have any less justification for dismissing our time period’s (or country’s) morality as being obviously wrong? Or would they be horrified and make a note to lock up anyone who promotes such crazy ideas in their own day?
G. K. Chesterton once said tradition is a democracy in which the dead get to vote (perhaps he didn’t know much about Chicago), which would certainly not be a suitable mechanism of electing representatives but gets to an interesting point in majoritarian epistemology. There are simply huge numbers of people who lived in the past and had such beliefs. What evidence ancient morality?
I don’t doubt you’re a nonviolent and non-aggressive guy in every day life, nor that in its proper historical context the history of colonists and Indians in the New World was really complicated. I wasn’t asking you the question because of an interest in 18th century history, I was asking it as a simplified way to see how far you were taking this “Anyone who can’t kick ass isn’t a morally significant agent” thing.
Your willingness to take it as far as you do is...well, I’ll be honest. To me it’s weird, especially since you describe yourself as an emotivist and therefore willing to link morality to feeling. I can think of two interpretations. One, you literally wouldn’t feel bad about killing people, as long as they’re defenseless. This would make you a psychopath by the technical definition, the one where you simply lack the moral feelings the rest of us take for granted. Two, you have the same tendency to feel bad about actually killing an Indian or any other defenseless person as the rest of us, but you want to uncouple your feelings from “rationality” and make a theory of morality that ignores them (but then how are you an emotivist?!). I know you read all of the morality stuff on Overcoming Bias and that that stuff gave what I thought was a pretty good argument for not doing that. Do you have a counterargument?
(Or I could be completely misunderstanding what you’re saying and taking your statement much further than you meant for it to go.)
By the way, I didn’t downvote your response; you deserve points for consistency.
Do I deserve points for consistency? I personally tend to respect bullet-biters more, but I am one. I’m not sure I have a very good reason for that. When I say that I think bullet-dodgers tend to be less sensible I could just be affirming something about myself. I don’t know your (or other non-biters) reasons for giving points, other than over-confidence being more respected than hedged mealy-mouth wishy-washing. One might say that by following ideas to their logical conclusion we are more likely to determine which ideas are false (perhaps making bullet-biters epistemological kamikazes), but by accepting repugnant/absurd reductios we may just all end up very wrong rather than some incoherent mix of somewhat wrong. In the case of morality though I can’t say what it really means to be wrong or what motivation there is to be right. Like fiction, I choose to evict these deadbeat mind-haunting geists and forestall risks to my epistemic hygiene.
I did read the morality stuff at Overcoming Bias (other than the stuff in Eliezer’s sci-fi series, I don’t read fiction), didn’t find it convincing and made similar arguments there.
You’re right that emotivism doesn’t imply indifference to the suffering of others, it’s really a meta-ethical theory which says that moral talk is “yay”, “boo”, “I approve and want you to as well” and so on rather than having objective (as in one-parameter-function) content. Going below the meta-level to my actual morals (if they can be called such), I am a Stirnerite egoist. I believe Vichy is as well, but I don’t know if other LWers are. Even that doesn’t preclude sympathy for others (though its hard to say what it does preclude). I think it meshes well with emotivism, and Bryan Caplan seems to as well since he deems Stirner an “emotivist anarchist”. Let’s ignore for now that he never called himself an anarchist and Sidney Parker said the egoist must be an archist!
At any rate, with no moral truth or God to punish me I have no reason to subject myself to any moral standard. To look out for ones’ self is what comes easiest and determines most of our behavior. That comes into tension with other impulses, but I am liberated from the tribal constraints which would force me to affirm the communal faith. I probably would not do that if I felt the conflicting emotions that others do (low in Agreeable, presumably like most atheists but even moreso). To the extent that I can determine how I feel, I choose to do so in a way that serves my purposes. Being an adaptation-executer, my purposes are linked to how I feel and so I’m quite open to Nozick’s experience machine (in some sense there’s a good chance I’m already in one) or wireheading. Hopefully Anonymous is also an egoist, but would seek perpetual subjective existence even if it means an eternity of torture.
One proto-emotivist book, though it doesn’t embrace egoism, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I haven’t actually read it in the original, but there’s a passage about a disaster in China compared to the loss of your own finger. I think it aptly describes how most of us would react. The occurrence in China is distant, like something in a work of fiction. If the universe is infinite there may well be an infinite number of Chinas, or Earths, disappearing right now. And the past, with its native americans and colonists or peasants and proletariat that died for modernity is similar. If we thought utilitarianism was true, it would be sheerest nonsense to care more about your own finger than all the Chinese, or even insects. But I do care more about my finger and am completely comfortable with that reflexive priority. If I was going to be in charge of making deals then the massive subjective harm from the perspective of the Chinese would be something to consider, and that leads us back to the ability to take part in a contract.
Aschwin de Wolf’s Against Politics site used to have a lot more material on contractarianism and minimal ethics, but the re-launched version has less and I was asked to take down my mirror site. There is still some there to check out, and cyonics enthusiasts may be interested in the related Depressed Metabolism site.
Still, Less Wrong has got to be the only place where I can ask if it’s okay to massacre Indians, and get one person who says it depends what the people living back then thought, and another who says it depends on the sophistication of musketry technology. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing about this site.
It’s not that unusual in my experience, to be perfectly frank. Once you get out of the YouTube-comment swamps to less-mainstream, more geeky sites, the GIFT-ratio starts to drop enough to allow intelligent provocative conversation. I could easily imagine this comment thread on a Making Light post, for example.
As an emotivist, you might be interested in reading After Virtue, particularly the first three or four chapters. He presents a rather compelling argument against emotivism, and if you want to maintain your emotivism you probably ought to find some rationalization defending yourself from his argument.
One should generally seek reasons as a defense from argument, not rationalization.
{Edit: My mistake, he really did mean emotivism and this paragraph kind of misses the point. Not going to delete, as it may confuse later comments.} More to the point, though, a refutation of emotivism is not a refutation of moral relativism, and, based on the little bit I could get off Amazon previews, relativism seems to be his problem, even if he wants to straw-man it as emotivism. Similarly, TGGP (given that he redundantly conjoins “I do not believe anything is good or bad in an objective sense” with “emotivism”) seems to be more about the relativism than the emotivism specifically.
If that author actually manages to put a decent dent in moral relativism, please explain so I can go buy this book immediately, because I would be literally stunned to see such an argument.
Actually, based on this comment, TGGP actually believes in emotivism as such.
He isolates three reasons in the second chapter:
Moral approval is a magical category that hides what is meant by “moral.”
“‘Moral judgments express feelings or attitudes,’ it is said. ‘What kind of feelings or attitudes?’ we ask. ‘Feelings or attitudes of approval,’ is the reply. ‘What kind of approval?’ we ask, perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds. It is in answer to this question that every version of emotivism either remains silent or… becomes vacuously circular [by identifying the approval as moral approval]” (12, 13).
Emotivism conflates ‘expressions of personal preference’ (“I like this!”) with ‘evaluative expressions’ (“This is good!”), despite the fact the first is gets part of its meaning from the person saying it (“I like this!”) and the second doesn’t.
Emotivism attempts to assign meaning to the sentence, when the sentence itself might express different feelings or attitudes in different uses. (See Gandalf’s take on “Good morning!” in The Hobbit). This is probably where emotivism can be rehabilitated, as MacIntyre goes on to say:
“This suggests that we should not simply rely on these objections to reject the emotive theory, but that we should consider whether it ought not to have been proposed as a theory about the use—understood as purpose or function—of members of a certain class of expressions rather than about their meaning....” (13).
Note that I’m not defending MacIntyre’s position, here; I’m only bringing it up because an emotivist should know what his or her response to it is, because it is a pretty large objection. My experience is that they go into absolute denial upon hearing the second and third objections, and that’s just not cool.
What does “pretty large” mean of an objection other than “good”? But you say you’re not defending MacIntyre.
I’d just like to know what the position is.
The second bullet point looks like the “point and gape” attack. It simply restates emotivism and replies by declaring the opposite to be fact. The whole point of emotivism is that the “I” is implicity in “this is good,” that the syntax is deceptive. The defense seems to be that we should trust syntax.
Is “moral approval” any more magic than “moral”? It seems like a pretty straightforward category: when people express approval using moral language. This fails to predict when people will express moral approval rather than the ordinary type, but that hardly makes it magical.
Is there any moral theory to which the third bullet point does not apply? Surely, every moral theory has opponents who will apply it incorrectly to “good morning.” The second bullet point says we should trust syntax, while the third that language is tricky.
The quoted part seems like a good response to virtually all of analytic philosophy; perhaps it can be rehabilitated. But surely emotivism is explicit about promoting performance over meaning? Isn’t that thewhole point of emotivism as opposed to other forms of moral relativism?
1) “pretty large” tends to mean the same thing as “fundamental”, “general”, “widely binding”—at least in my experience. E.g., “Godel’s Theorem was a pretty large rejection of the Russell program.”
And no, I’m not defending MacIntyre. All I’m trying to demonstrate is that his arguments against emotivism are worthy enough for emotivists to learn.
2) No. You’ve never heard someone say, “I may not like it, but it’s still good?” For example, there are people who are personally dislike gay marriage, but support it anyway because they feel it is good.
3) Defining “moral approval” as “when people express approval using moral language” says nothing about what the term “moral” means, and that’s something any ethical system really ought to get to eventually.
4) Yes: deontological systems don’t give one whit about the syntax of a statement; if your ‘intention’ was bad, your speech act was still bad. Utilitarianism also is more concerned with the actual weal or woe caused by a sentence, not its syntatic form.
And I’m done. If you want to learn more about MacIntyre, read the damn book. I’m a mathematician, not a philosopher.
“I may not like it, but it’s still good?” For example, there are people who are personally dislike gay marriage, but support it anyway because they feel it is good.
You said that emotivists you know go into “absolute denial” at point 2; how do they react to an example like this?
I would expect them to say that the people are lying or feel constrained by social conventions. In Haidt terms, they feel both fairness and disgust or violation of tradition and feel that fairness trumps tradition/purity in this instance. Or they live in a liberal milieu where they’re not allowed to treat tradition or purity morally. (I should give a lying example, but I’m not sure what I meant.)
ETA: if MacIntyre treated deontology the way he treats emotivism, he’d say that the morning is not an actor, therefore it cannot be “good” so “good morning” is incoherent. But I guess deontology is not a theory of language, so it’s OK to just say that people are wrong.
For reference, I think you’ve done MacIntyre sufficient justice here.
says nothing about what the term “moral” means, and that’s something any ethical system really ought to get to eventually.
I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. Figuring out what ‘moral’ means should be something you do before even starting to try to study morality.
Ah, I stand corrected; I got the impression from the intro of the book that the author was trying to slay relativism by slaying emotivism, which really doesn’t work. I basically agree with the point against emotivism; it does not capture meaning well. I ascribe to projectivism myself, but it looks like I’ve mistaken where the original argument was going, so sorry for adding confusion.
If you understand the point, could you spell it out? Weren’t there supposed to be three points? I don’t see anything in the above to distinguish emotivism from projectivism. I suspect that you just assumed an argument against something you rejected was the argument you use.
There are three points, marked with bullet points.
1) “Moral approval” is magical.
2) Reducing “This is good” to “I like this” misrepresents the way people actually speak.
3) Emotivism doesn’t account for the use of sentences in a context—which is the whole of actual ethical speech.
Emotivism is very different from projectivism. One is a theory of ethical language, and one is a theory of mind.
EDIT: Perhaps this wasn’t so clear—one consequence of projectivism is a theory of ethical language as well; see Psychohistorian below. My point was that it’s a category error to consider them as indistinguishable, because projectivism proper has consequences in several other fields of philosophy, whereas emotivism proper is mostly about ethical language and doesn’t say anything wrt how we think about things other than moral approval.
Ethical projectivism isn’t quite so much a theory of mind as it is a theory of ethical language. It’s clear that in most cases where people say, “X is wrong” they ascribe the objective quality “wrongness” to X. Projectivism holds that there is no such objective quality, thus, the property of wrongness is in the mind, but it doesn’t feel like it, much like how the concepts of beauty and disgust are in the mind, but don’t feel like it. You can’t smell something disgusting and say, “Well, that’s just my opinion, that’s not really a property of the smell;” it still smells disgusting. Thus, projectivism has the same rejection of objective morality as emotivism does, but it describes how we actually think and speak much better than emotivism does.
The attack on emotivism as not accurately expressing what we mean is largely orthogonal to realism vs. subjectivism. Just because we speak about objective moral principles as if they exist does not mean they actually exist, anymore than speaking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it existed conjures it into existence. But the view that moral statements actually express mere approval or disapproval seems clearly wrong; that’s just not what people mean when they talk about morality.
As I see it, you ignore the first and third bullet points and take the second bullet point to promote projectivism over emotivism. It’s certainly true that projectivism takes speech more at face value than emotivism. But since emotivism is up-front about this, this is a pretty weak complaint. Maybe it means that emotivism has to do more work to fill in a psychological theory of morality, but producing a psychological theory of morality seems big enough that it’s not obvious whether it makes it harder or easier.
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
I have trouble understanding this; mostly, I don’t get if you think it exists or if you just want me to pretend it does. But, if I do understand the concept correctly, if something is being imposed on the conscious mind as a moral imperative, that would be projectivist, as it would feel real. If you had part of the unconscious mind that imposed the most socially acceptable, expedient concept of “disgust” on the rest of the mind, one would still feel genuinely disgusted by whatever it “thought” you should be disgusted by. The problem with emotivism is that most people who make moral statements genuinely believe them to be objective, so rendering them into emotive statements loses meaning. Projectivism retains this meaning without accepting the completely unsupported (and I believe unsupportable) claim that objective morals exist.
The magical category objection doesn’t really make sense, even for emotivism. If “Murder is bad” means, “Boo murder!” no category is evoked and none need be. Furthermore, from any anti-realist perspective, any thing or act could potentially be viewed as immoral, so trying to describe a set of things or acts that count as valid subjects of “moral approval” makes no sense. “Perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds” makes no (or at the best, very ill-defined) sense. The author doesn’t mention a single kind, and it is unclear what would distinguish kinds in a way that meets his own standards. Forcing the other side to navigate an ill-defined, context-free classification system and claiming their definition is defective when they fail to do so proves nothing.
As for the third point, it’s a straw man. Claiming that emotivism must act as a mapping function such that any sentence XYZ → a new sentence ABC irrespective of context is a caricature; English doesn’t work like this, and no self-respecting theory of language would pretend it does. Unless emotivists consistently claim that context is irrelevant and can be ignored, this point shouldn’t even be made. I could write a paper about how “Murder is wrong” can be replaced with, “Boo murder!” You can’t then use ‘”Murder is wrong” contains the word “is”’ as a legitimate counterexample, because it is quite obviously a different context.
I don’t remember why I asked that question. It sure reads as a trick question. It’s certainly reasonable to treat things as a dichotomy if the overlap is not likely, but I think that’s wrong here. I endorse this very broad projectivist view that includes this example, and I imagine most emotivists agree; I doubt that most emotivists are sociopaths projecting their abnormality onto the general population. But I also think emotivism is possible, such as along the lines of this example, or more broadly.
I do think you’re treating projectivism as broad, and thus likely, and emotivism as narrow, and thus unlikely. In theory, that’s fine, except for miscommunication, but in practice it’s terrible. Either you give emotivism’s neighbors names, greatly raising their salience, or you don’t, greatly lowering their salience. (Contrast this to the first bullet point, which seems to reject emotivism on the ground that it’s broad. That’s silly.)
Since projectivism is a theory of mind and emotivism a theory of language or social interaction, they are potentially compatible, though it seems tricky to merge their simple interpretations. But neither minds nor meaning are unitary. If projectivism says that there’s a part of the mind that does something, that’s broad theory, thus likely to be true, but it also doesn’t seem to predict much. Emotivism is a claim about the overall meaning. That’s narrower than a claim that there exists a part of the mind that takes a particular meaning and broader than the claim that the mind is unitary and takes a particular meaning. But the overall meaning is the most important.
I think some confusion here might arise from missing the distinction between “projectivism” and “ethical projectivism”. Projectivism is a family of theories in philosophy, one of which applies to ethics.
Just an aside, you should look up some of the writings by my old (and favourite) Professor Dr. (James?) Weaver of McMaster University. He argues that it was the social technology of institutions, banking, land speculating, and established commerce that allowed whites to take over North America, not individual hostility. The key players he notes are the empire (who vacillated between expansionist and not-expansionist), the homesteaders, and the land speculators.
The Indians were harsh and intelligent bargainers, but they were playing by the rules of a game that white people wrote and created—the house always wins.
Fact: All Historians approach historical documents with their own set of contexts and biases—all Historians except Dr. Weaver, that is.
Fact: Most Historians have to cite sources—Dr. Weaver is able to go back in time and create them.
Was it okay to kill the Indians back in the 1700s, before they got guns?
No, cryonic suspension wasn’t available back then, and a headshot would have prevented it in any case. In general, murder strikes me as a very dangerous activity—I can see why it’s outlawed.
Was it okay to kill the Indians back in the 1700s, before they got guns?
No, cryonic suspension wasn’t available back then
Erm… so it’s ok to kill people as long as you cryonically suspend them afterwards? I’ve no idea if you actually believe this (I assume not, or you would probably have committed suicide), but even joking about it seems to be very bad politics if you’re a cryonics advocate.
Did the majority of people living at the time feel like it was okay? Is it okay for you to second guess the judgement of thoughtful people who understood the context way better than anyone does now?
If at some point most people believe that killing mammals for food is monstrous, and it is banned, and children learn with horror about 21st century practices of murdering and devouring millions of cows and pigs each year, will that make it wrong to eat a hamburger now? Will eating a hamburger now be okay if that never happens? I certainly don’t feel that the moral value of my actions should depend on the beliefs of people living hundreds of years in the future.
If at some point most people believe that killing mammals for food is monstrous, and it is banned, and children learn with horror about 21st century practices of murdering and devouring millions of cows and pigs each year, will that make it wrong to eat a hamburger now?
Yes, that will make it wrong in their view. There’s no law of nature that says different people from different times should have identical moral judgements.
I certainly don’t feel that the moral value of my actions should depend on the beliefs of people living hundreds of years in the future.
No, the moral value of your actions in your view doesn’t have to depend on their beliefs. There’s no law of nature that says different people from different times should have identical moral judgements.
I certainly don’t feel that the moral value of my actions should depend on the beliefs of people living hundreds of years in the future.
Don’t worry, you have it backwards. The moral value of your actions is not determined by the beliefs of any people, but rather the people’s beliefs are an attempt to track the facts about the moral value of your actions (assuming there is such a thing at all).
So once I create a friendly-to-me AI I am the only morally significant agent in existence? I think not.
Relevant moral significance seems to be far more determined by the ability of any agent (not limited to just themselves) to kick ass on their behalf. So infants, fish or cows can have moral significance just because someone says so (and is willing to back that up).
Fortunately for you this means that if I happen to gain overwhelming power you will remain a morally significant agent based purely on my whim.
That’s using the word “moral” to mean its opposite. Or, it’s a claim that “morality” is a nonsensical concept, disguised as an alternate view of morality.
You need to read something by Gauthier or Binmore. The idea that morality is closely related to rational self-interest is hardly a crackpot idea. There are at least two lines of argument pointing in this direction.
One derives from Hume’s point that a system of morality must not only inform us as to what actions are moral, but also show why we should perform only the moral actions.
The other observes that “moral facts” are simply our moral intuitions, and that those have been shaped by evolution into a pretty good caricature of rational self-interest.
A ’morality” which takes into account the power of others may be un-Christian, but it is hardly inhuman.
BTW, I think the most important defining feature of an MSA is ability to kick people’s asses. Very humanizing.
I don’t know if you meant that as a joke, but that’s pretty much my take from a contractarian perspective (though I wouldn’t use the phrase “morally significant agent”). Fish can’t do much about us cooking and eating them, so they are not a party to any social contract. That’s also the logic behind my tolerance of infanticide.
Was it okay to kill the Indians back in the 1700s, before they got guns? What were they going to do? Throw rocks at us?
I realize you’re joking, but it bears mentioning in a general-knowledge kind of way:
Bows and arrows were, at the time, as dangerous if not more so than guns. The reason guns were superior back then was solely due to a lack of required training. (Bows take decades of practice, and it’s been joked that you should start with the grandfather—but in practice, starting with the father is a good idea.)
I guess it was meant that you start with the grandfather because he would be most skilled.. Has this been described in certain kinds of books? (Diaries, etc.)
No, the grandfather would be the least skilled of the three.
The basic idea is that to make a good archer, you need to start when he’s (women need not apply) practically a baby. In order to teach well, you must be an archer yourself; thus, the father should be an archer.
Adding in the grandfather was probably a case of exaggeration for effect, but—no, I haven’t read any diaries about it, so I could be wrong. You’d probably get some benefit from it.. I have no idea how much.
I am an emotivist and do not believe anything is good or bad in an objective sense. I think some Indians may have had guns by the 1700s, but their bows and arrows weren’t terribly outclassed by many of the old muskets back then either (I’m actually discussing that at my blog right now). The biggest advantage of the colonists was their ever-increasing numbers (while disease steadily drained those of the natives). The indians frequently did respond in kind to killings and the extent to which they could do so would strike me as as the most significant factor to take into consideration when it comes to the decision to kill them.
There is also the factor of trade relations that could be disrupted, but most people engaged in prolonged voluntary trade are going to have significant ass-kicking ability or otherwise they would have been conquered and their goods seized by force already. I understand Peter Leeson has a paper “Trading with bandits” disputing that point, but the frequency with which dominance based resource extraction occurs makes me think the phenomena he discusses only occur under very limited conditions.
Well, I can’t accuse you of having any unwillingness to bite bullets. Nor of having any unwillingness to do lots of other questionable things with bullets besides.
Still, Less Wrong has got to be the only place where I can ask if it’s okay to massacre Indians, and get one person who says it depends what the people living back then thought, and another who says it depends on the sophistication of musketry technology. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing about this site.
I suspect there are a higher-than-average number of bullet-biters here, and I number myself among them. I don’t grant the intuitions which lead people to dodge bullets much credence.
Although I am a gun-owner, I don’t think I am substantially more likely to shoot anyone (delicious animals are another story) than the others here. Though you may think my above-mentioned criteria (including the government as a source of ass-kicking and taking into account risk aversion) don’t count, I’d say that constitutes a substantial unwillingness. Also, while this is pedantic, I’d like to again emphasize the importance of disease over guns. Note that north america and australia have had nearly complete population replacement by europeans, while africa has been decolonized. The reason for that is not technology, but relative vulnerability to disease.
If it makes you feel any better about the inhabitants of Less Wrong, note that your reaction was voted up while my response (which was relevant and informative with links to more information, if I may judge my own case for a moment) was voted down. I do not say this to object to anyone’s actions (I don’t bother voting myself and have no plans to make a front-page post) but to indicate that this is evidence of what the community approves.
Although, as mentioned, I don’t believe in objective normative truth, we can pretend for a little while in response to joeteicher. We believe we have a better understanding of many things than 1700s colonists did. If we could bring them in a time-machine to the present we could presumably convince them of many of those things. Do you think we could convince them of our moral superiority? From a Bayesian perspective (I think this is Aumann’s specialty) do they have any less justification for dismissing our time period’s (or country’s) morality as being obviously wrong? Or would they be horrified and make a note to lock up anyone who promotes such crazy ideas in their own day?
G. K. Chesterton once said tradition is a democracy in which the dead get to vote (perhaps he didn’t know much about Chicago), which would certainly not be a suitable mechanism of electing representatives but gets to an interesting point in majoritarian epistemology. There are simply huge numbers of people who lived in the past and had such beliefs. What evidence ancient morality?
I don’t doubt you’re a nonviolent and non-aggressive guy in every day life, nor that in its proper historical context the history of colonists and Indians in the New World was really complicated. I wasn’t asking you the question because of an interest in 18th century history, I was asking it as a simplified way to see how far you were taking this “Anyone who can’t kick ass isn’t a morally significant agent” thing.
Your willingness to take it as far as you do is...well, I’ll be honest. To me it’s weird, especially since you describe yourself as an emotivist and therefore willing to link morality to feeling. I can think of two interpretations. One, you literally wouldn’t feel bad about killing people, as long as they’re defenseless. This would make you a psychopath by the technical definition, the one where you simply lack the moral feelings the rest of us take for granted. Two, you have the same tendency to feel bad about actually killing an Indian or any other defenseless person as the rest of us, but you want to uncouple your feelings from “rationality” and make a theory of morality that ignores them (but then how are you an emotivist?!). I know you read all of the morality stuff on Overcoming Bias and that that stuff gave what I thought was a pretty good argument for not doing that. Do you have a counterargument?
(Or I could be completely misunderstanding what you’re saying and taking your statement much further than you meant for it to go.)
By the way, I didn’t downvote your response; you deserve points for consistency.
Do I deserve points for consistency? I personally tend to respect bullet-biters more, but I am one. I’m not sure I have a very good reason for that. When I say that I think bullet-dodgers tend to be less sensible I could just be affirming something about myself. I don’t know your (or other non-biters) reasons for giving points, other than over-confidence being more respected than hedged mealy-mouth wishy-washing. One might say that by following ideas to their logical conclusion we are more likely to determine which ideas are false (perhaps making bullet-biters epistemological kamikazes), but by accepting repugnant/absurd reductios we may just all end up very wrong rather than some incoherent mix of somewhat wrong. In the case of morality though I can’t say what it really means to be wrong or what motivation there is to be right. Like fiction, I choose to evict these deadbeat mind-haunting geists and forestall risks to my epistemic hygiene.
I did read the morality stuff at Overcoming Bias (other than the stuff in Eliezer’s sci-fi series, I don’t read fiction), didn’t find it convincing and made similar arguments there.
You’re right that emotivism doesn’t imply indifference to the suffering of others, it’s really a meta-ethical theory which says that moral talk is “yay”, “boo”, “I approve and want you to as well” and so on rather than having objective (as in one-parameter-function) content. Going below the meta-level to my actual morals (if they can be called such), I am a Stirnerite egoist. I believe Vichy is as well, but I don’t know if other LWers are. Even that doesn’t preclude sympathy for others (though its hard to say what it does preclude). I think it meshes well with emotivism, and Bryan Caplan seems to as well since he deems Stirner an “emotivist anarchist”. Let’s ignore for now that he never called himself an anarchist and Sidney Parker said the egoist must be an archist!
At any rate, with no moral truth or God to punish me I have no reason to subject myself to any moral standard. To look out for ones’ self is what comes easiest and determines most of our behavior. That comes into tension with other impulses, but I am liberated from the tribal constraints which would force me to affirm the communal faith. I probably would not do that if I felt the conflicting emotions that others do (low in Agreeable, presumably like most atheists but even moreso). To the extent that I can determine how I feel, I choose to do so in a way that serves my purposes. Being an adaptation-executer, my purposes are linked to how I feel and so I’m quite open to Nozick’s experience machine (in some sense there’s a good chance I’m already in one) or wireheading. Hopefully Anonymous is also an egoist, but would seek perpetual subjective existence even if it means an eternity of torture.
One proto-emotivist book, though it doesn’t embrace egoism, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I haven’t actually read it in the original, but there’s a passage about a disaster in China compared to the loss of your own finger. I think it aptly describes how most of us would react. The occurrence in China is distant, like something in a work of fiction. If the universe is infinite there may well be an infinite number of Chinas, or Earths, disappearing right now. And the past, with its native americans and colonists or peasants and proletariat that died for modernity is similar. If we thought utilitarianism was true, it would be sheerest nonsense to care more about your own finger than all the Chinese, or even insects. But I do care more about my finger and am completely comfortable with that reflexive priority. If I was going to be in charge of making deals then the massive subjective harm from the perspective of the Chinese would be something to consider, and that leads us back to the ability to take part in a contract.
Aschwin de Wolf’s Against Politics site used to have a lot more material on contractarianism and minimal ethics, but the re-launched version has less and I was asked to take down my mirror site. There is still some there to check out, and cyonics enthusiasts may be interested in the related Depressed Metabolism site.
It’s not that unusual in my experience, to be perfectly frank. Once you get out of the YouTube-comment swamps to less-mainstream, more geeky sites, the GIFT-ratio starts to drop enough to allow intelligent provocative conversation. I could easily imagine this comment thread on a Making Light post, for example.
As an emotivist, you might be interested in reading After Virtue, particularly the first three or four chapters. He presents a rather compelling argument against emotivism, and if you want to maintain your emotivism you probably ought to find some rationalization defending yourself from his argument.
One should generally seek reasons as a defense from argument, not rationalization.
{Edit: My mistake, he really did mean emotivism and this paragraph kind of misses the point. Not going to delete, as it may confuse later comments.} More to the point, though, a refutation of emotivism is not a refutation of moral relativism, and, based on the little bit I could get off Amazon previews, relativism seems to be his problem, even if he wants to straw-man it as emotivism. Similarly, TGGP (given that he redundantly conjoins “I do not believe anything is good or bad in an objective sense” with “emotivism”) seems to be more about the relativism than the emotivism specifically.
If that author actually manages to put a decent dent in moral relativism, please explain so I can go buy this book immediately, because I would be literally stunned to see such an argument.
Actually, based on this comment, TGGP actually believes in emotivism as such.
He isolates three reasons in the second chapter:
Moral approval is a magical category that hides what is meant by “moral.”
Emotivism conflates ‘expressions of personal preference’ (“I like this!”) with ‘evaluative expressions’ (“This is good!”), despite the fact the first is gets part of its meaning from the person saying it (“I like this!”) and the second doesn’t.
Emotivism attempts to assign meaning to the sentence, when the sentence itself might express different feelings or attitudes in different uses. (See Gandalf’s take on “Good morning!” in The Hobbit). This is probably where emotivism can be rehabilitated, as MacIntyre goes on to say:
Note that I’m not defending MacIntyre’s position, here; I’m only bringing it up because an emotivist should know what his or her response to it is, because it is a pretty large objection. My experience is that they go into absolute denial upon hearing the second and third objections, and that’s just not cool.
What does “pretty large” mean of an objection other than “good”? But you say you’re not defending MacIntyre.
I’d just like to know what the position is.
The second bullet point looks like the “point and gape” attack. It simply restates emotivism and replies by declaring the opposite to be fact. The whole point of emotivism is that the “I” is implicity in “this is good,” that the syntax is deceptive. The defense seems to be that we should trust syntax.
Is “moral approval” any more magic than “moral”? It seems like a pretty straightforward category: when people express approval using moral language. This fails to predict when people will express moral approval rather than the ordinary type, but that hardly makes it magical.
Is there any moral theory to which the third bullet point does not apply? Surely, every moral theory has opponents who will apply it incorrectly to “good morning.” The second bullet point says we should trust syntax, while the third that language is tricky.
The quoted part seems like a good response to virtually all of analytic philosophy; perhaps it can be rehabilitated. But surely emotivism is explicit about promoting performance over meaning? Isn’t that thewhole point of emotivism as opposed to other forms of moral relativism?
1) “pretty large” tends to mean the same thing as “fundamental”, “general”, “widely binding”—at least in my experience. E.g., “Godel’s Theorem was a pretty large rejection of the Russell program.”
And no, I’m not defending MacIntyre. All I’m trying to demonstrate is that his arguments against emotivism are worthy enough for emotivists to learn.
2) No. You’ve never heard someone say, “I may not like it, but it’s still good?” For example, there are people who are personally dislike gay marriage, but support it anyway because they feel it is good.
3) Defining “moral approval” as “when people express approval using moral language” says nothing about what the term “moral” means, and that’s something any ethical system really ought to get to eventually.
4) Yes: deontological systems don’t give one whit about the syntax of a statement; if your ‘intention’ was bad, your speech act was still bad. Utilitarianism also is more concerned with the actual weal or woe caused by a sentence, not its syntatic form.
And I’m done. If you want to learn more about MacIntyre, read the damn book. I’m a mathematician, not a philosopher.
You said that emotivists you know go into “absolute denial” at point 2; how do they react to an example like this?
I would expect them to say that the people are lying or feel constrained by social conventions. In Haidt terms, they feel both fairness and disgust or violation of tradition and feel that fairness trumps tradition/purity in this instance. Or they live in a liberal milieu where they’re not allowed to treat tradition or purity morally. (I should give a lying example, but I’m not sure what I meant.)
ETA: if MacIntyre treated deontology the way he treats emotivism, he’d say that the morning is not an actor, therefore it cannot be “good” so “good morning” is incoherent. But I guess deontology is not a theory of language, so it’s OK to just say that people are wrong.
For reference, I think you’ve done MacIntyre sufficient justice here.
I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. Figuring out what ‘moral’ means should be something you do before even starting to try to study morality.
Ah, I stand corrected; I got the impression from the intro of the book that the author was trying to slay relativism by slaying emotivism, which really doesn’t work. I basically agree with the point against emotivism; it does not capture meaning well. I ascribe to projectivism myself, but it looks like I’ve mistaken where the original argument was going, so sorry for adding confusion.
If you understand the point, could you spell it out? Weren’t there supposed to be three points? I don’t see anything in the above to distinguish emotivism from projectivism. I suspect that you just assumed an argument against something you rejected was the argument you use.
There are three points, marked with bullet points.
1) “Moral approval” is magical. 2) Reducing “This is good” to “I like this” misrepresents the way people actually speak. 3) Emotivism doesn’t account for the use of sentences in a context—which is the whole of actual ethical speech.
Emotivism is very different from projectivism. One is a theory of ethical language, and one is a theory of mind.
EDIT: Perhaps this wasn’t so clear—one consequence of projectivism is a theory of ethical language as well; see Psychohistorian below. My point was that it’s a category error to consider them as indistinguishable, because projectivism proper has consequences in several other fields of philosophy, whereas emotivism proper is mostly about ethical language and doesn’t say anything wrt how we think about things other than moral approval.
Ethical projectivism isn’t quite so much a theory of mind as it is a theory of ethical language. It’s clear that in most cases where people say, “X is wrong” they ascribe the objective quality “wrongness” to X. Projectivism holds that there is no such objective quality, thus, the property of wrongness is in the mind, but it doesn’t feel like it, much like how the concepts of beauty and disgust are in the mind, but don’t feel like it. You can’t smell something disgusting and say, “Well, that’s just my opinion, that’s not really a property of the smell;” it still smells disgusting. Thus, projectivism has the same rejection of objective morality as emotivism does, but it describes how we actually think and speak much better than emotivism does.
The attack on emotivism as not accurately expressing what we mean is largely orthogonal to realism vs. subjectivism. Just because we speak about objective moral principles as if they exist does not mean they actually exist, anymore than speaking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it existed conjures it into existence. But the view that moral statements actually express mere approval or disapproval seems clearly wrong; that’s just not what people mean when they talk about morality.
As I see it, you ignore the first and third bullet points and take the second bullet point to promote projectivism over emotivism. It’s certainly true that projectivism takes speech more at face value than emotivism. But since emotivism is up-front about this, this is a pretty weak complaint. Maybe it means that emotivism has to do more work to fill in a psychological theory of morality, but producing a psychological theory of morality seems big enough that it’s not obvious whether it makes it harder or easier.
What if I posited a part of the mind that tried to figure out what moral claims it could (socially) get away with making and chose the one it felt was most advantageous to impose on the conscious mind as a moral imperative. Would you call that emotivism or projectivism?
I have trouble understanding this; mostly, I don’t get if you think it exists or if you just want me to pretend it does. But, if I do understand the concept correctly, if something is being imposed on the conscious mind as a moral imperative, that would be projectivist, as it would feel real. If you had part of the unconscious mind that imposed the most socially acceptable, expedient concept of “disgust” on the rest of the mind, one would still feel genuinely disgusted by whatever it “thought” you should be disgusted by. The problem with emotivism is that most people who make moral statements genuinely believe them to be objective, so rendering them into emotive statements loses meaning. Projectivism retains this meaning without accepting the completely unsupported (and I believe unsupportable) claim that objective morals exist.
The magical category objection doesn’t really make sense, even for emotivism. If “Murder is bad” means, “Boo murder!” no category is evoked and none need be. Furthermore, from any anti-realist perspective, any thing or act could potentially be viewed as immoral, so trying to describe a set of things or acts that count as valid subjects of “moral approval” makes no sense. “Perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds” makes no (or at the best, very ill-defined) sense. The author doesn’t mention a single kind, and it is unclear what would distinguish kinds in a way that meets his own standards. Forcing the other side to navigate an ill-defined, context-free classification system and claiming their definition is defective when they fail to do so proves nothing.
As for the third point, it’s a straw man. Claiming that emotivism must act as a mapping function such that any sentence XYZ → a new sentence ABC irrespective of context is a caricature; English doesn’t work like this, and no self-respecting theory of language would pretend it does. Unless emotivists consistently claim that context is irrelevant and can be ignored, this point shouldn’t even be made. I could write a paper about how “Murder is wrong” can be replaced with, “Boo murder!” You can’t then use ‘”Murder is wrong” contains the word “is”’ as a legitimate counterexample, because it is quite obviously a different context.
I don’t remember why I asked that question. It sure reads as a trick question. It’s certainly reasonable to treat things as a dichotomy if the overlap is not likely, but I think that’s wrong here. I endorse this very broad projectivist view that includes this example, and I imagine most emotivists agree; I doubt that most emotivists are sociopaths projecting their abnormality onto the general population. But I also think emotivism is possible, such as along the lines of this example, or more broadly.
I do think you’re treating projectivism as broad, and thus likely, and emotivism as narrow, and thus unlikely. In theory, that’s fine, except for miscommunication, but in practice it’s terrible. Either you give emotivism’s neighbors names, greatly raising their salience, or you don’t, greatly lowering their salience.
(Contrast this to the first bullet point, which seems to reject emotivism on the ground that it’s broad. That’s silly.)
Since projectivism is a theory of mind and emotivism a theory of language or social interaction, they are potentially compatible, though it seems tricky to merge their simple interpretations. But neither minds nor meaning are unitary. If projectivism says that there’s a part of the mind that does something, that’s broad theory, thus likely to be true, but it also doesn’t seem to predict much. Emotivism is a claim about the overall meaning. That’s narrower than a claim that there exists a part of the mind that takes a particular meaning and broader than the claim that the mind is unitary and takes a particular meaning. But the overall meaning is the most important.
I think some confusion here might arise from missing the distinction between “projectivism” and “ethical projectivism”. Projectivism is a family of theories in philosophy, one of which applies to ethics.
You might be talking past each other.
Psychohistorian and I seem to be in agreement, actually.
I didn’t say I can’t distinguish them, I said the particular attack on emotivism applies just as well to projectivism.
My bad; I misread you.
As much as I’d like to think so, I’ll try to learn a lesson about pronouns and antecedents in high latency communications.
Just an aside, you should look up some of the writings by my old (and favourite) Professor Dr. (James?) Weaver of McMaster University. He argues that it was the social technology of institutions, banking, land speculating, and established commerce that allowed whites to take over North America, not individual hostility. The key players he notes are the empire (who vacillated between expansionist and not-expansionist), the homesteaders, and the land speculators.
The Indians were harsh and intelligent bargainers, but they were playing by the rules of a game that white people wrote and created—the house always wins.
Fact: All Historians approach historical documents with their own set of contexts and biases—all Historians except Dr. Weaver, that is. Fact: Most Historians have to cite sources—Dr. Weaver is able to go back in time and create them.
No, cryonic suspension wasn’t available back then, and a headshot would have prevented it in any case. In general, murder strikes me as a very dangerous activity—I can see why it’s outlawed.
Erm… so it’s ok to kill people as long as you cryonically suspend them afterwards? I’ve no idea if you actually believe this (I assume not, or you would probably have committed suicide), but even joking about it seems to be very bad politics if you’re a cryonics advocate.
Did the majority of people living at the time feel like it was okay? Is it okay for you to second guess the judgement of thoughtful people who understood the context way better than anyone does now?
If at some point most people believe that killing mammals for food is monstrous, and it is banned, and children learn with horror about 21st century practices of murdering and devouring millions of cows and pigs each year, will that make it wrong to eat a hamburger now? Will eating a hamburger now be okay if that never happens? I certainly don’t feel that the moral value of my actions should depend on the beliefs of people living hundreds of years in the future.
Moral realism fallacy alert?
Yes, that will make it wrong in their view. There’s no law of nature that says different people from different times should have identical moral judgements.
No, the moral value of your actions in your view doesn’t have to depend on their beliefs. There’s no law of nature that says different people from different times should have identical moral judgements.
Ha! Nice to see we have this one covered from both sides.
Are you defending some kind of temporal moral relativism here?
Don’t worry, you have it backwards. The moral value of your actions is not determined by the beliefs of any people, but rather the people’s beliefs are an attempt to track the facts about the moral value of your actions (assuming there is such a thing at all).
So once I create a friendly-to-me AI I am the only morally significant agent in existence? I think not.
Relevant moral significance seems to be far more determined by the ability of any agent (not limited to just themselves) to kick ass on their behalf. So infants, fish or cows can have moral significance just because someone says so (and is willing to back that up).
Fortunately for you this means that if I happen to gain overwhelming power you will remain a morally significant agent based purely on my whim.
That’s using the word “moral” to mean its opposite. Or, it’s a claim that “morality” is a nonsensical concept, disguised as an alternate view of morality.
You need to read something by Gauthier or Binmore. The idea that morality is closely related to rational self-interest is hardly a crackpot idea. There are at least two lines of argument pointing in this direction.
One derives from Hume’s point that a system of morality must not only inform us as to what actions are moral, but also show why we should perform only the moral actions.
The other observes that “moral facts” are simply our moral intuitions, and that those have been shaped by evolution into a pretty good caricature of rational self-interest.
A ’morality” which takes into account the power of others may be un-Christian, but it is hardly inhuman.