It has a function and we neutralize it at our peril.
Can you be more specific? What exactly are the dangers of neutralizing our “inner moralizers”?
Also, see my previouscomments, which may be applicable here. I speculate that “aspies” free up a large chunk of the brain for other purposes when they ignore “emotional games”, and it’s not clear to me that they should devote more of their cognitive resources toward such games.
Can you be more specific? What exactly are the dangers of neutralizing our “inner moralizers”?
Having brought up this topic, I find that I’m reluctant to now do the hard work of organizing my thoughts on the matter. It’s obvious that the ability to moralize has a tactical value, so doing without it is a form of personal or social disarmament. However, I don’t want to leave the answer at that Nietzschean or Machiavellian level, which easily leads to the view that morality is a fraud but a useful fraud, especially for deceptive amoralists. I also don’t want to just say that the human utility function has a term which attaches significance to the actions, motives and character of other agents, in such a way that “moralizing” is sometimes the right thing to do; or that labeling someone as Bad is an efficient heuristic.
I have glimpsed two rather exotic reasons for retaining one’s capacity for “judging people”. The first is ontological. Moral judgments are judgments about persons and appeal to an ontology of persons. It’s important and useful to be able to think at that level, especially for people whose natural inclination is to think in terms of computational modules and subpersonal entities. The second is that one might want to retain the capacity to moralize about oneself. This is an intriguing angle because the debate about morality tends to revolve around interactions between persons, whether morality is just a tool of the private will to power, etc. If the moral mode can be applied to one’s relationship to reality in general (how you live given the facts and uncertainties of existence, let’s say), and not just to one’s relationship to other people, that gives it an extra significance.
The best answer to your question would think through all that, present it in an ordered and integrated fashion, and would also take account of all the valid reasons for not liking the moralizing function. It would also have to ground the meaning of various expressions that were introduced somewhat casually. But—not today.
In another comment on this post, Eugine Nier linked to Schelling. I read that post, and the Slate page that mentions Schelling vs. Vietnam, and it became clear to me that acting moral acts as an “antidote” to these underhanded strategies that count on your opponent being rational. (It also serves as a Gödelian meta-layer to decide problems that can’t be decided rationally.)
If, in Schellings example, the guy who is left with the working radio set is moral, he might reason that “the other guy doesn’t deserve the money if he doesn’t work for it”, and from that moral strongpoint refuse to cooperate. Now if the rationalist knows he’s working with a moralist, he’ll also know that his immoral strategy won’t work, so he won’t attempt it in the first place—a victory for the moralist in a conflict that hasn’t even occurred (in fact, the moralist need never know that the rationalist intended to cheat him).
This is different from simply acting irrationally in that the moralist’s reaction remains predictable.
So it is possible that moral indignation helps me to prevent other people from manouevering me into a position where I don’t want to be.
It occurs to me that I’m not less judgmental than the typical human, just judgmental in a different way and less vocal about it (except in the “actions speak louder than words” sense). My main judgement of a person is just whether it is worth my time to talk to / work with / play with / care about that person, and if my “inner moralizer” says no, I simply ignore or get away from them. I’m not sure if I can be considered an “aspie” but I suspect many of them are similar in this way.
Compared to what’s more typical, this method of “moralizing” seems to have all of the benefits you listed (except the last one, “If the moral mode can be applied to one’s relationship to reality in general”, which I don’t understand) but fewer costs. It is less costly in mental resources, and less likely to get you involved in negative-sum situations. I note that it wouldn’t have worked well in an ancestral environment where you lived in a small tribe and couldn’t ignore or get away from others freely, which perhaps explains why it doesn’t come naturally to most people despite its advantages.
the benefits you listed (except the last one, “If the moral mode can be applied to one’s relationship to reality in general”, which I don’t understand)
See the comments here on the psychological meaning of “kingship”. That’s one aspect of the “relationship to reality” I had in mind. If you subtract from consideration all notions of responsibility towards other people, are all remaining motivations fundamentally hedonistic in nature, or is there a sense in which you could morally criticize what you were doing (or not doing), even if you were the only being that existed?
There is a tendency, in discussions here and elsewhere about ethics, choice, and motivation, either to reduce everything to pleasure and pain, or to a functionalist notion of preference which makes no reference to subjective states at all. Eliezer advocates a form of moral realism (since he says the word “should” has an objective meaning), but apparently the argument depends on behavior (in the real world, you’d pull the child on the train tracks out of harm’s way) and on the hypothesized species-universality of the relevant cognitive algorithms. But that doesn’t say what is involved in making the judgment, or in making the meta-judgment about how you would act. Subjectively, are we to think of such judgments as arising from emotional reactions (e.g. basic emotions like disgust or fear)? It leaves open the question of whether there is a distinctive moral modality—a mode of perception or intuition—and my further question would be whether it only applies to other people (or to relations between you the individual and other people), or whether it can ever apply to yourself in isolation. In culture, I see a tendency to regard choices about how to live (that don’t impact on other people) as aesthetic choices rather than ethical choices.
Can you be more specific? What exactly are the dangers of neutralizing our “inner moralizers”?
Also, see my previous comments, which may be applicable here. I speculate that “aspies” free up a large chunk of the brain for other purposes when they ignore “emotional games”, and it’s not clear to me that they should devote more of their cognitive resources toward such games.
Having brought up this topic, I find that I’m reluctant to now do the hard work of organizing my thoughts on the matter. It’s obvious that the ability to moralize has a tactical value, so doing without it is a form of personal or social disarmament. However, I don’t want to leave the answer at that Nietzschean or Machiavellian level, which easily leads to the view that morality is a fraud but a useful fraud, especially for deceptive amoralists. I also don’t want to just say that the human utility function has a term which attaches significance to the actions, motives and character of other agents, in such a way that “moralizing” is sometimes the right thing to do; or that labeling someone as Bad is an efficient heuristic.
I have glimpsed two rather exotic reasons for retaining one’s capacity for “judging people”. The first is ontological. Moral judgments are judgments about persons and appeal to an ontology of persons. It’s important and useful to be able to think at that level, especially for people whose natural inclination is to think in terms of computational modules and subpersonal entities. The second is that one might want to retain the capacity to moralize about oneself. This is an intriguing angle because the debate about morality tends to revolve around interactions between persons, whether morality is just a tool of the private will to power, etc. If the moral mode can be applied to one’s relationship to reality in general (how you live given the facts and uncertainties of existence, let’s say), and not just to one’s relationship to other people, that gives it an extra significance.
The best answer to your question would think through all that, present it in an ordered and integrated fashion, and would also take account of all the valid reasons for not liking the moralizing function. It would also have to ground the meaning of various expressions that were introduced somewhat casually. But—not today.
In another comment on this post, Eugine Nier linked to Schelling. I read that post, and the Slate page that mentions Schelling vs. Vietnam, and it became clear to me that acting moral acts as an “antidote” to these underhanded strategies that count on your opponent being rational. (It also serves as a Gödelian meta-layer to decide problems that can’t be decided rationally.)
If, in Schellings example, the guy who is left with the working radio set is moral, he might reason that “the other guy doesn’t deserve the money if he doesn’t work for it”, and from that moral strongpoint refuse to cooperate. Now if the rationalist knows he’s working with a moralist, he’ll also know that his immoral strategy won’t work, so he won’t attempt it in the first place—a victory for the moralist in a conflict that hasn’t even occurred (in fact, the moralist need never know that the rationalist intended to cheat him).
This is different from simply acting irrationally in that the moralist’s reaction remains predictable.
So it is possible that moral indignation helps me to prevent other people from manouevering me into a position where I don’t want to be.
Seems like morality is (inter alia) a heuristic for improving one’s bargaining position by limiting one’s options.
It occurs to me that I’m not less judgmental than the typical human, just judgmental in a different way and less vocal about it (except in the “actions speak louder than words” sense). My main judgement of a person is just whether it is worth my time to talk to / work with / play with / care about that person, and if my “inner moralizer” says no, I simply ignore or get away from them. I’m not sure if I can be considered an “aspie” but I suspect many of them are similar in this way.
Compared to what’s more typical, this method of “moralizing” seems to have all of the benefits you listed (except the last one, “If the moral mode can be applied to one’s relationship to reality in general”, which I don’t understand) but fewer costs. It is less costly in mental resources, and less likely to get you involved in negative-sum situations. I note that it wouldn’t have worked well in an ancestral environment where you lived in a small tribe and couldn’t ignore or get away from others freely, which perhaps explains why it doesn’t come naturally to most people despite its advantages.
See the comments here on the psychological meaning of “kingship”. That’s one aspect of the “relationship to reality” I had in mind. If you subtract from consideration all notions of responsibility towards other people, are all remaining motivations fundamentally hedonistic in nature, or is there a sense in which you could morally criticize what you were doing (or not doing), even if you were the only being that existed?
There is a tendency, in discussions here and elsewhere about ethics, choice, and motivation, either to reduce everything to pleasure and pain, or to a functionalist notion of preference which makes no reference to subjective states at all. Eliezer advocates a form of moral realism (since he says the word “should” has an objective meaning), but apparently the argument depends on behavior (in the real world, you’d pull the child on the train tracks out of harm’s way) and on the hypothesized species-universality of the relevant cognitive algorithms. But that doesn’t say what is involved in making the judgment, or in making the meta-judgment about how you would act. Subjectively, are we to think of such judgments as arising from emotional reactions (e.g. basic emotions like disgust or fear)? It leaves open the question of whether there is a distinctive moral modality—a mode of perception or intuition—and my further question would be whether it only applies to other people (or to relations between you the individual and other people), or whether it can ever apply to yourself in isolation. In culture, I see a tendency to regard choices about how to live (that don’t impact on other people) as aesthetic choices rather than ethical choices.
Mostly I have questions rather than answers here.