aside from a lot of arguing about definitions over whether Eliezer counts as a relativist.
I think these are in fact the whole story. Eliezer says loudly that he is a moral realist and not any sort of relativist, but his views amount to saying “Define good and bad and so forth in terms of what human beings, in fact, value; then, as a matter of objective fact, death and misery are bad and happiness and fun are good”, which to many people sounds exactly like moral relativism plus terminological games; confusion ensues.
The reason Eliezer’s views are commonly mistaken for relativism in the manner you describe is because most people do not have a good grasp on the difference between sense and reference(a difference that, to be fair, doesn’t seem to be well explained anywhere). To elaborate:
“Define good and bad and so forth in terms of what human beings, in fact, value” sounds like saying that goodness depends on human values. This is the definition you get if you say “let ‘good’ mean ‘human values’”. But the actual idea is meant to be more analogous to this: assuming for the sake of argument that humans value cake, define “good” to mean cake. Obviously, under that definition, “cake is always good regardless of what humans value” is true. In that case “good” is a rigid designator for cake.
The difference is that “good” and “human values” are not synonymous. But they refer to the same thing, when you fully dereference them, namely {happiness, fun and so forth}. This is the difference between sense and reference, and it’s why it is necessary to understand rigid designators.
Here is my question: Why bother with the middle man? No one can actually define good and everyone is constantly checking with ‘human values’ to see what it says! Assuming the universe runs on math and humans share attitudes about some things obviously there is some platonic entity which precisely describes human values (assuming there isn’t too much contradiction) and can be called “good”. But it doesn’t seem especially parsimonious to reify that concept. Why add it to our ontology?
It’s just semantics in a sense: but there is a reason we don’t multiply entities unnecessarily.
Well, if you valued cake you’d want a way to talk about cake and efficiently distinguish cakes from non-cakes—-and especially with regards to planning, to distinguish plans that lead to cake from plans that do not. When you talk about cake there isn’t really any reification of “the platonic form of cake” going on; “cake” is just a convenient word for a certain kind of confection.
The motivation for humans having a word for goodness is the same.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with using the word “good” so long as everyone understands it isn’t something out there in the world that we’ve discovered—that it’s a creation of our minds, words and behavior—like cake. This is a problem because most of the world doesn’t think that. A lot of times it doesn’t seem like Less Wrong thinks that (but I’m beginning to think that is just non-standard terminology).
Yeah, a lot of the Metaethics Sequence seems to be trying to get to this point.
For my part, it seems easier to just stop using words like “good” if we believe they are likely to be misunderstood, rather than devoting a lot of energy to convincing everyone that they should mean something different by the word (or that the word really means something different from what they think it means, or whatever).
I’m content to say that we value what we currently value, because we currently value it, and asking whether that’s good or not is asking an empty question.
Of course, I do understand the rhetorical value of getting to claim that our AI does good, rather than “merely” claiming that it implements what we currently value.
I’m content to say that we value what we currently value, because we currently value it, and asking whether that’s good or not is asking an empty question.
I am content to say the question is not empty, and if you assumptions lead you to suppose it is, then your assumptions need to be questioned.
Yes, sorry, I wasn’t clear enough about that. No, let me go further; what I wrote was downright misleading. This is why I shouldn’t write Less Wrong comments on a tablet where I am too strongly incentivized to make them brief :-). I endorse your description of Eliezer’s position.
This is the definition you get if you say “let ‘good’ mean ‘human values’”. But the actual idea is meant to be more analogous to this: assuming for the sake of argument that humans value cake, define “good” to mean cake. Obviously, under that definition, “cake is always good regardless of what humans value” is true. In that case “good” is a rigid designator for cake.
Why is cake a referent of good?
The difference is that “good” and “human values” are not synonymous. But they refer to the same thing, when you fully dereference them, namely {happiness, fun and so forth}. This is the difference between sense and reference, and it’s why it is necessary to understand rigid designators.
And what happened to the normativity of Good? Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things, when Good is just whatever we value?
ADDED:
The reason Eliezer’s views are commonly mistaken for relativism in the manner you describe is because most people do not have a good grasp on the difference between sense and reference(a difference that, to be fair, doesn’t seem to be well explained anywhere).
I don’t see the S/R difference is relevant to relativism. If the referents of “good” vary with the mental contents of the person saying “good”, that is relativism/subjectivism. (That the values referenced are ultimately physical does not affect that: relativism is an epistemological claim, not a metaphysical one).
Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things
For a start, the fact that some things seem to make sense is not a oracular window unto philosophical truth. Anything that we are unsure about will seem as if it could go either way, even if one of the options is in fact logically necessary or empirically true. That’s the point of being unsure (example: the Riemann conjecture).
At the object level, no-one knows in full detail exactly what they mean by “good”, or the detailed contents of their own values. So trying to test “my values are good” by direct comparison, so to speak, is a highly nontrivial (read: impossible) exercise. Figuring out based on things like “wanting to do the right thing” that “good” and “human values” refer to the same thing while not being synonymous is another nontrivial exercise.
I don’t see the S/R difference is relevant to relativism. If the referents of “good” vary with the mental contents of the person saying “good”, that is relativism/subjectivism. (That the values referenced are ultimately physical does not affect that: relativism is an epistemological claim, not a metaphysical one).
To me, the fact that you don’t understand is evidence the difference matters. Unless you’re saying that “relativism” is just the statement that people on different planets speak different languages, in which case, “no shit” as the French say.
I was wondering how one knows what the referents of good are when one doesn’t know the sense.
I didn’t claim that anything was anoracular window. But note that things you believe in, such as an external world, can just as glibly be dismissed as illusion.
Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things, when Good is just whatever we value?
We are in the habit of (and reinforced for) asking certain questions about actual real-world things. “Is the food I’m eating good food?” “Is the wood I’m building my house out of good wood?” “Is the exercise program I’m starting a good exercise program?” Etc. In each case, we have some notion of what we mean by the question that grounds out in some notion of our values… that is, in what we want food, housing materials, and exercise programs to achieve.
We continue to apply that habitual formula even in cases where we’re not very clear what those values are, what we want those things to achieve. “Is democracy a good political system?” is a compelling-sounding question even for people who lack a clear understanding of what their political values are; “Is Christianity a good religion?” feels like a meaningful question to many people who don’t have a clear notion of what they want a religion to achieve.
That we continue to apply the same formula to get the question “Are the values I’m using good values?” should not surprise us; I would expect us to ask it and for it to feel meaningful whether it actually makes sense or not.
But when you ask a question and someone provides an answer you don’t like, showing why that answer is wrong can sometimes be more effective than simply asserting that you don’t buy it.
And any theory can be made to fail if I am allowed to demand that it explain things that don’t actually exist.
So it seems to matter whether the thing I’m dismissing exists or not.
Regardless, all of this is a tangent from my point.
You asked “Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things?” as a rhetorical question, as a way of arguing that it appears to make sense because it does make sense, because the question of whether our values are right is non-empty. My point is that this is not actually why it appears to make sense; it would appear to make sense even if the question of whether our values are right were empty.
That is not proof that the question is empty, of course. All it demonstrates is that one of your arguments in defense of its non-emptiness is flawed.
You will probably do better to accept that and marshall your remaining argument-soldiers to a victorious campaign on other fronts.
There was one aspect of that which made intuitive sense to me, but which now that I think about it may not have been adequately explained, ever. Eliezer’s position seems to be that from some universal reference frame human beings would be viewed as moral relativists. However it is a serious mistake to think that such universal frames exist! So we shouldn’t even try to think from a universal frame. From within the confines of a single, specific reference frame, the experience of morality is that of a realist.
EDIT: Put differently, I think Eliezer might agree that there is a metaphorical stone tablet with the rules of morality spelled out—it’s encoded in the information patterns of the 3 lbs of grey matter inside your skull. Maybe Eliezer would say that he is a “subjective realist” or something like that. This is strictly different from moral relativism, where choice of morality is more or less arbitrary. As a subjective realist your morality is different than your pebblesorter friend, but it’s not arbitrary. You have only limited control over the morality that evolution and culture gifted you.
Maybe Eliezer would say that he is a “subjective realist” or something like that. This is strictly different from moral relativism, where choice of morality is more or less arbitrary. As a subjective realist your morality is different than your pebblesorter friend, but it’s not arbitrary.
Philosophers just call this position “moral subjectivism”. Moral realism is usually defined to exclude it. “Relativism” at this point should be tabooed since no one uses it in the technical sense and the popular sense includes a half dozen variations which are very different from one another to the extent they have been defined at all.
Eliezer says loudly that he is a moral realist and not any sort of relativist
Yes, he loudly says he’s not a relativist, but he doesn’t loudly talk about realism. If you ask him whether he’s a moral realist, he’ll say yes, but if you ask him for a self-description, he’ll say cognitivist which is often grouped against realism. Moreover, if asked for detail, he’ll say that he’s an anti-realist. (though not all cognitivists are anti-realists)
Let me try that again: Eliezer loudly claims to be cognitivist. He quietly equivocates on realism. He also loudly claims not to be relativist, but practically everyone does.
You’re right, not all cognitivists are anti-realists. But some are, including Eliezer.
Indeed, realists are generally considered cognitivist. But my impression is that if a moral system is labeled cognitivist, the implication is that it is anti-realist. That’s because realism is usually the top level of classifying moral systems, so if you’re bothering to talk about cognitivism, it’s because the system is anti-realist.
This is correct I think, but confusing. All realists are by definition cognitivists. Non-cognitivist is simply one variety of anti-realist: someone who thinks moral statements aren’t the kinds of things that can have truth conditions at all. For example, someone who thinks they merely reflect the speakers emotional feelings about the matter (like loudly booing).
Of the anti-realists there are two kinds of cognitivists: Moral error theorists who think that moral statements are about mind-independent facts but that there are no such facts And moral subjectivists who think that moral statements are about mind-dependent facts. If what you say is true, Eliezer is one of those (more or less).
Yes, people who say that realists are cognitivists say that this is true by definition, but I don’t think these terms are used consistently enough that it is a good idea to argue by definition. In particular, I think Eliezer is right to equivocate on whether he is a realist. He certainly rejects the description of his morality as “mind-dependent.”
Yes, people who say that realists are cognitivists say that this is true by definition, but I don’t think these terms are used consistently enough that it is a good idea to argue by definition.
I’m not trying to argue by definition: I’m just telling you what the terms means as they are used in the metaethical literature (where they’re used plenty consistently). If someone wants to say they are a moral realist but not a cognitivist then I have no idea what they are because they’re not using standard terminology. If someone doesn’t fit into the boxes created by the traditional terminology then come up with different labels. But it’s an incredibly confusing and bad idea to use an unorthodox definition to classify yourself as something you’re not. You representation makes me more confused about Eliezer’s views. Why position him with this language if you aren’t taking definitions from an encyclopedia?
According to the standard groupings being an anti-realist cognitivist and objectivist would group someone with the error theorists. If Eliezer doesn’t fit there then we can come up with a word to describe his position once it is precisely distinguished from the other positions.
Here’s an example of inconsistency in philosophical use. I keep saying that Eliezer equivocates about whether he is a realist, and that I think he’s right to do so. Elsewhere in the comments on this post you say that moral subjectivism is not realism by definition. But it’s not clear to me from the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on moral realism that this is so. The entry on anti-realism says that Sayre-McCord explicitly puts moral subjectivism in moral realism. Since he wrote the article on realism, that explains why it seems to accept that possibility, but this it certainly demonstrates that this uncertainty is more mainstream than you allow.
Uncertainty, even disagreement, about how to classify views is fine. It’s not the same as inconsistency. Sayre-McCord’s position on subjectivism is non-standard and treated as such. But I can still figure out what he thinks just from a single paragraph summarizing his position. He takes the standard definitions as a starting point and then makes an argument for his structure of theories. This is the sort of thing I’m asking you to do if you aren’t going to use the standard terminology.
You seem to be concerned with bashing philosophy instead of explaining your usage. I’m not the field’s standard bearer. I just want to know what you mean by the words you’re using! Stop equivocating about realism and just state the ways in which the position is realist and the ways in which it is anti-realist. Or how it is realist but you don’t think realism should mean what people think it means.
I never used “realism,” so there’s no point in my defining it.
Look back at this thread!
My whole point was that Eliezer avoids the word. He thinks that cognitivism is a useful concept, so he uses it. Similarly, he avoids “moral subjectivism” and uses terms like “subjectively objective.” He equivocates when asked for a label, endorsing both “realist” and “cognitivist anti-realist.” But he does spell out the details, in tens of thousands of words across this sequence.
Yes, if people want to pin down Eliezer’s views they should say what parts are realist and what parts are anti-realist. When I object to people calling him realist or anti-realist, I’m certainly agreeing with that!
After that comment about “bashing philosophy,” I don’t think there’s any point in responding to your first paragraph.
But he does spell out the details, in tens of thousands of words across this sequence.
I am one of a number of people who cannot detect a single coherent theory in his writings. A summary in the standard jargon would be helpful in persuading me that there is one.
You’re right, not all cognitivists are anti-realists. But some are, including Eliezer.
...
If you ask him whether he’s a moral realist, he’ll say yes, but if you ask him for a self-description, he’ll say cognitivist which is often grouped against realism. Moreover, if asked for detail, he’ll say that he’s an anti-realist.
These quotes did not exactly express to me that you don’t know to what extent his views or realist or anti-realist. I’m sorry if I was targeting you instead of Eliezer… but you were agreeing with his confusing equivocation.
Similarly, he avoids “moral subjectivism” and uses terms like “subjectively objective.”
Ah yes, the old eschewing the well-recognized, well-explored terminology for an oxymoronic neologism. How could anyone get confused?
You sure you’re not trying to force me to use jargon I don’t like? I don’t know what else to call responding to new jargon with sarcasm.
At the very least, you seem to be demanding that we confuse laymen so that philosophers can understand. I happen to believe that philosophers won’t understand, either.
No, the right answer isn’t to say “I don’t know if he is a realist.” Actually, I do think it would be better to reject the question of realism than to equivocate, but I suspect Eliezer has tried this and found that people don’t accept it.
At the very least, you seem to be demanding that we confuse laymen so that philosophers can understand. I happen to believe that philosophers won’t understand, either.
As far as I can tell, no one understands. But I don’t see how my suggestion, which involves reading maybe 2 encyclopedia articles to pick up jargon, would confuse laymen especially.
No, the right answer isn’t to say “I don’t know if he is a realist.”
Right, it’s just you explicitly called him an anti-realist. And he apparently calls himself both? You can see how I could get confused.
Actually, I do think it would be better to reject the question of realism than to equivocate, but I suspect Eliezer has tried this and found that people don’t accept it.
Do people accept equivocation? I’d be fine with rejecting the question of realism so long as it was accompanied by an explanation of how it was a wrong question.
You sure you’re not trying to force me to use jargon I don’t like? I don’t know what else to call responding to new jargon with sarcasm.
Just expressing my opinion re: design principles in the construction of jargon. I know I’ve been snippy with you, apologies, I haven’t had enough sleep.
The problem with the standard jargon is that “realism” is used to label a metaphysical and an epistemological claim. I like to call the epistemological claim, that there is a single set of moral truths, moral objectivism, which clearly is the opposite of moral subjectivism.
I simply don’t believe you that philosophers use these words consistently. Philosophers have an extremely bad track record of asserting that they use words consistently.
So, I think that is simply false regarding the analytic tradition, especially if we’re comparing them to Less Wrong’s use of specialized jargon (which is often hilariously ill-defined). I’d love to see some evidence for your claim. But that isn’t the point.
There are standard introductory reference texts which structure theories of ethical semantics. They contain definitions. They don’t contradict each other. And all of them will tell you what I’m telling you. Let’s look, here’s wikipedia. Here is the SEP on Moral Realism. Here is the SEP on Moral Anti-Realism. Here is the entry on Moral Cognitivism. All three are written by different philosophers and all use nearly identical definitions which define the moral realist as necessarily being a cognitivist. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the same thing.
We’re not talking about something that is ambiguous or borderline. Cognitivism is the first necessary feature of moral realism in the standard usage. If you are using the term “moral realist”, but don’t think cognitivism is part of the definition then no one can figure out what you’re saying! Same goes for describing someone as an anti-realist who believes in cognitivism, that moral statments can be true and that they are mind-indpendent. All the terms after “anti-realist” in that sentence make up the entire definition of moral realism
I’m not trying to be pedantic or force you to use jargon you don’t like. But if you’re going to use it, why not use the terms as they are used in easily available encyclopedia articles written by prominent philosophers? Or at least redefine the terms somewhere.
Clarification- do you mean inconsistencies within or between philosophers? Between philosophers I agree with you- within a single philosopher’s work I’d be curious to see examples.
I just mean that philosophers have a bad track record asserting that they are using the same definition as each other. That’s rather worse than just not using the same definition. I told Jack that he wasn’t using the same definition as the Stanford Encyclopedia. I didn’t expect him to believe me, but he didn’t even notice. Does that count for your purpose, since he chose the source?
But, yes, I do condemn argument by definition because I don’t trust the individuals to have definitions.
If someone wants to say they are a moral realist but not a cognitivist then I have no idea what they are because they’re not using standard terminology.
Presumably a Platonist who thinks the Form of the Good is revealed by a mystical insight.
A Platonist who thinks the Form of the Good is revealed by mystical insight is a cognitivist and I don’t know why you would think otherwise. Wikipedia:) “Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false”.
Or you’re not using standard terminology, in which case, see above.
I think these are in fact the whole story. Eliezer says loudly that he is a moral realist and not any sort of relativist, but his views amount to saying “Define good and bad and so forth in terms of what human beings, in fact, value; then, as a matter of objective fact, death and misery are bad and happiness and fun are good”, which to many people sounds exactly like moral relativism plus terminological games; confusion ensues.
Rigid designators
The reason Eliezer’s views are commonly mistaken for relativism in the manner you describe is because most people do not have a good grasp on the difference between sense and reference(a difference that, to be fair, doesn’t seem to be well explained anywhere). To elaborate:
“Define good and bad and so forth in terms of what human beings, in fact, value” sounds like saying that goodness depends on human values. This is the definition you get if you say “let ‘good’ mean ‘human values’”. But the actual idea is meant to be more analogous to this: assuming for the sake of argument that humans value cake, define “good” to mean cake. Obviously, under that definition, “cake is always good regardless of what humans value” is true. In that case “good” is a rigid designator for cake.
The difference is that “good” and “human values” are not synonymous. But they refer to the same thing, when you fully dereference them, namely {happiness, fun and so forth}. This is the difference between sense and reference, and it’s why it is necessary to understand rigid designators.
This is an excellent description of the argument.
Here is my question: Why bother with the middle man? No one can actually define good and everyone is constantly checking with ‘human values’ to see what it says! Assuming the universe runs on math and humans share attitudes about some things obviously there is some platonic entity which precisely describes human values (assuming there isn’t too much contradiction) and can be called “good”. But it doesn’t seem especially parsimonious to reify that concept. Why add it to our ontology?
It’s just semantics in a sense: but there is a reason we don’t multiply entities unnecessarily.
Well, if you valued cake you’d want a way to talk about cake and efficiently distinguish cakes from non-cakes—-and especially with regards to planning, to distinguish plans that lead to cake from plans that do not. When you talk about cake there isn’t really any reification of “the platonic form of cake” going on; “cake” is just a convenient word for a certain kind of confection.
The motivation for humans having a word for goodness is the same.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with using the word “good” so long as everyone understands it isn’t something out there in the world that we’ve discovered—that it’s a creation of our minds, words and behavior—like cake. This is a problem because most of the world doesn’t think that. A lot of times it doesn’t seem like Less Wrong thinks that (but I’m beginning to think that is just non-standard terminology).
Yeah, a lot of the Metaethics Sequence seems to be trying to get to this point.
For my part, it seems easier to just stop using words like “good” if we believe they are likely to be misunderstood, rather than devoting a lot of energy to convincing everyone that they should mean something different by the word (or that the word really means something different from what they think it means, or whatever).
I’m content to say that we value what we currently value, because we currently value it, and asking whether that’s good or not is asking an empty question.
Of course, I do understand the rhetorical value of getting to claim that our AI does good, rather than “merely” claiming that it implements what we currently value.
.
I am content to say the question is not empty, and if you assumptions lead you to suppose it is, then your assumptions need to be questioned.
You seem to believe that I have arrived at my current position primarily via unquestioned assumptions.
What makes you conclude that?
Yes, sorry, I wasn’t clear enough about that. No, let me go further; what I wrote was downright misleading. This is why I shouldn’t write Less Wrong comments on a tablet where I am too strongly incentivized to make them brief :-). I endorse your description of Eliezer’s position.
Why is cake a referent of good?
And what happened to the normativity of Good? Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things, when Good is just whatever we value?
ADDED:
I don’t see the S/R difference is relevant to relativism. If the referents of “good” vary with the mental contents of the person saying “good”, that is relativism/subjectivism. (That the values referenced are ultimately physical does not affect that: relativism is an epistemological claim, not a metaphysical one).
Why do we have words that mean things at all?
For a start, the fact that some things seem to make sense is not a oracular window unto philosophical truth. Anything that we are unsure about will seem as if it could go either way, even if one of the options is in fact logically necessary or empirically true. That’s the point of being unsure (example: the Riemann conjecture).
At the object level, no-one knows in full detail exactly what they mean by “good”, or the detailed contents of their own values. So trying to test “my values are good” by direct comparison, so to speak, is a highly nontrivial (read: impossible) exercise. Figuring out based on things like “wanting to do the right thing” that “good” and “human values” refer to the same thing while not being synonymous is another nontrivial exercise.
To me, the fact that you don’t understand is evidence the difference matters. Unless you’re saying that “relativism” is just the statement that people on different planets speak different languages, in which case, “no shit” as the French say.
I was wondering how one knows what the referents of good are when one doesn’t know the sense.
I didn’t claim that anything was anoracular window. But note that things you believe in, such as an external world, can just as glibly be dismissed as illusion.
We are in the habit of (and reinforced for) asking certain questions about actual real-world things. “Is the food I’m eating good food?” “Is the wood I’m building my house out of good wood?” “Is the exercise program I’m starting a good exercise program?” Etc. In each case, we have some notion of what we mean by the question that grounds out in some notion of our values… that is, in what we want food, housing materials, and exercise programs to achieve.
We continue to apply that habitual formula even in cases where we’re not very clear what those values are, what we want those things to achieve. “Is democracy a good political system?” is a compelling-sounding question even for people who lack a clear understanding of what their political values are; “Is Christianity a good religion?” feels like a meaningful question to many people who don’t have a clear notion of what they want a religion to achieve.
That we continue to apply the same formula to get the question “Are the values I’m using good values?” should not surprise us; I would expect us to ask it and for it to feel meaningful whether it actually makes sense or not.
You can argue that the things your theory can’t explain are non-issues. I don’t have to buy that,
You certainly don’t have to buy it, that’s true.
But when you ask a question and someone provides an answer you don’t like, showing why that answer is wrong can sometimes be more effective than simply asserting that you don’t buy it.
The problem is a kind of quodlibet. Any inadequate theory can be made to work if one is allowed to dismiss whatever the theory can’t explain.
Sure, I agree.
And any theory can be made to fail if I am allowed to demand that it explain things that don’t actually exist.
So it seems to matter whether the thing I’m dismissing exists or not.
Regardless, all of this is a tangent from my point.
You asked “Why does it appear to make sense to wonder if we are valuing the right things?” as a rhetorical question, as a way of arguing that it appears to make sense because it does make sense, because the question of whether our values are right is non-empty. My point is that this is not actually why it appears to make sense; it would appear to make sense even if the question of whether our values are right were empty.
That is not proof that the question is empty, of course. All it demonstrates is that one of your arguments in defense of its non-emptiness is flawed.
You will probably do better to accept that and marshall your remaining argument-soldiers to a victorious campaign on other fronts.
Non-emptiness is no more flawed than emptiness. The Open Question remains open.
This is a nonsequitor. My claim was about a specific argument.
There was one aspect of that which made intuitive sense to me, but which now that I think about it may not have been adequately explained, ever. Eliezer’s position seems to be that from some universal reference frame human beings would be viewed as moral relativists. However it is a serious mistake to think that such universal frames exist! So we shouldn’t even try to think from a universal frame. From within the confines of a single, specific reference frame, the experience of morality is that of a realist.
EDIT: Put differently, I think Eliezer might agree that there is a metaphorical stone tablet with the rules of morality spelled out—it’s encoded in the information patterns of the 3 lbs of grey matter inside your skull. Maybe Eliezer would say that he is a “subjective realist” or something like that. This is strictly different from moral relativism, where choice of morality is more or less arbitrary. As a subjective realist your morality is different than your pebblesorter friend, but it’s not arbitrary. You have only limited control over the morality that evolution and culture gifted you.
Philosophers just call this position “moral subjectivism”. Moral realism is usually defined to exclude it. “Relativism” at this point should be tabooed since no one uses it in the technical sense and the popular sense includes a half dozen variations which are very different from one another to the extent they have been defined at all.
Yes, he loudly says he’s not a relativist, but he doesn’t loudly talk about realism. If you ask him whether he’s a moral realist, he’ll say yes, but if you ask him for a self-description, he’ll say cognitivist
which is often grouped against realism. Moreover, if asked for detail, he’ll say that he’s an anti-realist. (though not all cognitivists are anti-realists)Let me try that again: Eliezer loudly claims to be cognitivist. He quietly equivocates on realism. He also loudly claims not to be relativist, but practically everyone does.
Is it? That seems backwards to me: non-cognitivism is one of the main varieties of non realism. (The other being error theory.) What am I missing?
You’re right, not all cognitivists are anti-realists. But some are, including Eliezer.
Indeed, realists are generally considered cognitivist. But my impression is that if a moral system is labeled cognitivist, the implication is that it is anti-realist. That’s because realism is usually the top level of classifying moral systems, so if you’re bothering to talk about cognitivism, it’s because the system is anti-realist.
This is correct I think, but confusing. All realists are by definition cognitivists. Non-cognitivist is simply one variety of anti-realist: someone who thinks moral statements aren’t the kinds of things that can have truth conditions at all. For example, someone who thinks they merely reflect the speakers emotional feelings about the matter (like loudly booing).
Of the anti-realists there are two kinds of cognitivists: Moral error theorists who think that moral statements are about mind-independent facts but that there are no such facts And moral subjectivists who think that moral statements are about mind-dependent facts. If what you say is true, Eliezer is one of those (more or less).
Yes, people who say that realists are cognitivists say that this is true by definition, but I don’t think these terms are used consistently enough that it is a good idea to argue by definition. In particular, I think Eliezer is right to equivocate on whether he is a realist. He certainly rejects the description of his morality as “mind-dependent.”
I’m not trying to argue by definition: I’m just telling you what the terms means as they are used in the metaethical literature (where they’re used plenty consistently). If someone wants to say they are a moral realist but not a cognitivist then I have no idea what they are because they’re not using standard terminology. If someone doesn’t fit into the boxes created by the traditional terminology then come up with different labels. But it’s an incredibly confusing and bad idea to use an unorthodox definition to classify yourself as something you’re not. You representation makes me more confused about Eliezer’s views. Why position him with this language if you aren’t taking definitions from an encyclopedia?
According to the standard groupings being an anti-realist cognitivist and objectivist would group someone with the error theorists. If Eliezer doesn’t fit there then we can come up with a word to describe his position once it is precisely distinguished from the other positions.
Here’s an example of inconsistency in philosophical use. I keep saying that Eliezer equivocates about whether he is a realist, and that I think he’s right to do so. Elsewhere in the comments on this post you say that moral subjectivism is not realism by definition. But it’s not clear to me from the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on moral realism that this is so. The entry on anti-realism says that Sayre-McCord explicitly puts moral subjectivism in moral realism. Since he wrote the article on realism, that explains why it seems to accept that possibility, but this it certainly demonstrates that this uncertainty is more mainstream than you allow.
Uncertainty, even disagreement, about how to classify views is fine. It’s not the same as inconsistency. Sayre-McCord’s position on subjectivism is non-standard and treated as such. But I can still figure out what he thinks just from a single paragraph summarizing his position. He takes the standard definitions as a starting point and then makes an argument for his structure of theories. This is the sort of thing I’m asking you to do if you aren’t going to use the standard terminology.
You seem to be concerned with bashing philosophy instead of explaining your usage. I’m not the field’s standard bearer. I just want to know what you mean by the words you’re using! Stop equivocating about realism and just state the ways in which the position is realist and the ways in which it is anti-realist. Or how it is realist but you don’t think realism should mean what people think it means.
I never used “realism,” so there’s no point in my defining it.
Look back at this thread!
My whole point was that Eliezer avoids the word. He thinks that cognitivism is a useful concept, so he uses it. Similarly, he avoids “moral subjectivism” and uses terms like “subjectively objective.” He equivocates when asked for a label, endorsing both “realist” and “cognitivist anti-realist.” But he does spell out the details, in tens of thousands of words across this sequence.
Yes, if people want to pin down Eliezer’s views they should say what parts are realist and what parts are anti-realist. When I object to people calling him realist or anti-realist, I’m certainly agreeing with that!
After that comment about “bashing philosophy,” I don’t think there’s any point in responding to your first paragraph.
I am one of a number of people who cannot detect a single coherent theory in his writings. A summary in the standard jargon would be helpful in persuading me that there is one.
...
These quotes did not exactly express to me that you don’t know to what extent his views or realist or anti-realist. I’m sorry if I was targeting you instead of Eliezer… but you were agreeing with his confusing equivocation.
Ah yes, the old eschewing the well-recognized, well-explored terminology for an oxymoronic neologism. How could anyone get confused?
You sure you’re not trying to force me to use jargon I don’t like? I don’t know what else to call responding to new jargon with sarcasm.
At the very least, you seem to be demanding that we confuse laymen so that philosophers can understand. I happen to believe that philosophers won’t understand, either.
No, the right answer isn’t to say “I don’t know if he is a realist.” Actually, I do think it would be better to reject the question of realism than to equivocate, but I suspect Eliezer has tried this and found that people don’t accept it.
As far as I can tell, no one understands. But I don’t see how my suggestion, which involves reading maybe 2 encyclopedia articles to pick up jargon, would confuse laymen especially.
Right, it’s just you explicitly called him an anti-realist. And he apparently calls himself both? You can see how I could get confused.
Do people accept equivocation? I’d be fine with rejecting the question of realism so long as it was accompanied by an explanation of how it was a wrong question.
Just expressing my opinion re: design principles in the construction of jargon. I know I’ve been snippy with you, apologies, I haven’t had enough sleep.
The problem with the standard jargon is that “realism” is used to label a metaphysical and an epistemological claim. I like to call the epistemological claim, that there is a single set of moral truths, moral objectivism, which clearly is the opposite of moral subjectivism.
I simply don’t believe you that philosophers use these words consistently. Philosophers have an extremely bad track record of asserting that they use words consistently.
So, I think that is simply false regarding the analytic tradition, especially if we’re comparing them to Less Wrong’s use of specialized jargon (which is often hilariously ill-defined). I’d love to see some evidence for your claim. But that isn’t the point.
There are standard introductory reference texts which structure theories of ethical semantics. They contain definitions. They don’t contradict each other. And all of them will tell you what I’m telling you. Let’s look, here’s wikipedia. Here is the SEP on Moral Realism. Here is the SEP on Moral Anti-Realism. Here is the entry on Moral Cognitivism. All three are written by different philosophers and all use nearly identical definitions which define the moral realist as necessarily being a cognitivist. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the same thing.
We’re not talking about something that is ambiguous or borderline. Cognitivism is the first necessary feature of moral realism in the standard usage. If you are using the term “moral realist”, but don’t think cognitivism is part of the definition then no one can figure out what you’re saying! Same goes for describing someone as an anti-realist who believes in cognitivism, that moral statments can be true and that they are mind-indpendent. All the terms after “anti-realist” in that sentence make up the entire definition of moral realism
I’m not trying to be pedantic or force you to use jargon you don’t like. But if you’re going to use it, why not use the terms as they are used in easily available encyclopedia articles written by prominent philosophers? Or at least redefine the terms somewhere.
Clarification- do you mean inconsistencies within or between philosophers? Between philosophers I agree with you- within a single philosopher’s work I’d be curious to see examples.
I just mean that philosophers have a bad track record asserting that they are using the same definition as each other. That’s rather worse than just not using the same definition. I told Jack that he wasn’t using the same definition as the Stanford Encyclopedia. I didn’t expect him to believe me, but he didn’t even notice. Does that count for your purpose, since he chose the source?
But, yes, I do condemn argument by definition because I don’t trust the individuals to have definitions.
Presumably a Platonist who thinks the Form of the Good is revealed by a mystical insight.
A Platonist who thinks the Form of the Good is revealed by mystical insight is a cognitivist and I don’t know why you would think otherwise. Wikipedia:) “Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false”.
Or you’re not using standard terminology, in which case, see above.