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.
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.