I don’t know what it would even mean for Christian values to be “true”.
That’s pretty simple. If God—specifically the Christian God—truly exists and the general teachings of Christianity adequately represent Him, then Christian morality is basically like physics: it’s the natural law because that’s how the world has been constructed and that’s how it works. Your personal utility function is irrelevant in the same sense in which maybe you really want to fly, yet if you jump off a cliff gravity will still do its job.
That’s quite standard theology—since LW frequently discusses religious matters (without usually recognizing them as such :-D) I recommend at least some familiarity with it...
My claim is that this idea of morality being “like natural law” is conceptual nonsense. Does it mean that I’d be incapable of violating it? No. Does it mean that I’m being irrational if I don’t follow it? Well, one could define rationality that way, but what is the point; I don’t care if I’m losing according to the “law of the universe” just like I don’t care that I’m losing in terms of reproductive success.
My claim is that this idea of morality being “like natural law” is conceptual nonsense.
I don’t think so. “Like natural law” here means “will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so”.
If Christianity were true (we’ll ignore a bunch of issues and self-contradictions here) then, for example, dying after committing a mortal sin and without proper repentance will lead you to Hell. Doesn’t matter whether you think it wasn’t a big deal—you still end up in Hell. Having free will means you can violate the Christian morality but it’s similar to jumping off a cliff—you just will make a messy splat. Whether you care or not is irrelevant.
That’s not what I was disputing. Of course you’d end up in hell if Christianity is true, but if your personal utility function is utilitarianism, you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good.
No, because if Christianity were true then God defines what is the “greater good”, not you. Your belief that what you’re going for is “greater good” would be mistaken. Because of free will you can choose between good and evil but you can’t define what is good and what is evil.
To elaborate: Even if counterfactually God were to legislate that all must use the holy dictionary that defines the symbol “greater good” as divine punishment, or face smiting, this would not make the sacrifice mentioned by ice9 not for the greater good. Because what we are talking about when we say “greater good” here, in the real world, is not divine punishment. Specifically, when ice9 says “you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good” they mean you’d sacrifice yourself to save people from a god’s evil vendetta.
Below you mentioned that you can’t define gravity to repulse things instead of attract. This is a good analogy what you are supposing God to be doing. In fact God is free to define “gravity” (a symbol, a string of 7 letters) in a new language of His own. But claiming that God can define gravity itself is logical nonsense (gravity not being a symbol of any language).
The same way, it is logical nonsense to suppose that God can define the greater good to be something bad. He can invent a new language where “the greater good” (a string) refers to something bad, but that would simply be a useless language that no-one here speaks, and irrelevant to any matter of actual morality.
(I won’t dispute that “god can redefine the greater good” might well be standard theology, but as theology it is logical nonsense.)
But claiming that God can define gravity itself is logical nonsense
You’re quite mistaken about that. In the Christian world God not only can define gravity itself—He did define gravity itself. Remember that whole Creator bit..?
If I build a house with a triangular roof, does the fact that I could have built one with a square roof instead mean I can define triangles as squares if I want to?
The fact remains that gravity is a force, not a word or a symbol. “Gravity” can be defined as something; gravity cannot, because defining things is intrinsically a linguistic activity.
“Gravity” can be defined as something; gravity cannot, because defining things is intrinsically a linguistic activity.
Do not attempt to confuse yourself with wordplay.
Let’s replace the word “define” with the word “create”. God created gravity, the force itself. In the process of creating it he defined it to be what it is. This is all before language—the same way by building a house with a triangular roof I defined that roof as triangular regardless of what you’ll call it later.
Again, the major difference between the Christian world and the atheist world is not in what someone calls things—it’s in what things are and are not.
Specific morality is a built-in feature of reality in the Christian world, similar to how gravity is a built-in feature of reality in the physical world. The names that your mind assigns do not change this.
By building a house with any kind of roof you have done nothing more and nothing less than give that house a particular kind of roof. The actual squareness or triangularness of the particular kind of roof is an immutable mathematical fact. Not even God can imbue a three-sided shape with squareness.
Nor can you specify squareness to be a “built in feature of reality” in God’s world, and true of triangles in that world. Squareness is simply that predicate that is true of exactly all equal-length four-sided shapes. Immutably. Mathematically.
What is morality? It is a predicate that is true of all and only those things that help others, avoid harm, promote happiness, etc etc etc.¹ You can no more imbue an evil deed with morality than you can imbue a triangle with squareness.
¹ Source: this is how the term “morality” is generally actually used by people. Nonsensicle self-referential things people tend to suppose morality to be, such as “whatever everyone agrees ‘morality’ means” quickly fall apart on examination. More specifically, this is how I use the term “morality” (ie. how I am using it above), and almost certainly is how ice9 uses the term.
[More linguistic stuff redacted so as not to distract everyone]
Source: this is how the term “morality” is generally actually used by people.
I am sorry, can I see your credentials for confidently making naked assertions about how people actually use the term “morality”? Or at least some evidence?
Um. You’re not really good at geometry, are you? :-D
I assume it goes without saying that I’m talking about shapes in a flat euclidean plane because listing every random corner case is a waste of everyone’s time. (EDIT: yeah… fuckin’ parallelograms. Sneaky bastards.)
...
The evidence for this particular description of morality includes such as the fact that people confidently call some things good and some things bad, “even if $(RANDOM_COUNTERFACTUAL_CONDITION)”, and thought experiments like the Gandhi murder pill and, well, there’s too much subject to describe in one comment.
But that’s not really important, and you’re not going to believe me anyway. More generally, regardless of the specific form of the morality predicate, God can’t make one mathematical object be something else. He can only modify physical circustances. For example, if morality was “murder is good, except at midday” he could make it always be midday by messing with the sun or something, which would affect when murder was good.
I’m talking about shapes in a flat euclidean plane
Yes, you are bad at geometry.
And, of course, God is not constrained by your favorite dimensionality of space or by your preferences for Euclid over, say, Riemann.
God can’t make one mathematical object be something else. He can only modify physical circustances.
Why is that? You seem to be very certain about limitations of God. You also seem to imply that morality is a mathematical object. That doesn’t look obvious to me.
And, of course, God is not constrained by your favorite dimensionality of space or by your preferences for Euclid over, say, Riemann.
No, but my topic of discussion is. God can do whatever he likes, it doesn’t change the facts of Euclidean geometry. Or Riemannian geometry for that matter. Or both of them together. Or any other type of geometry, or number theory or whatever.
You also seem to imply that morality is a mathematical object.
The same is true of every other abstract concept that divides thingspace into things-that-are and things-that-aren’t. Except there are good reasons to think that morality in particular divides thingspace in a way that doesn’t care about little XML tags attached to physical objects and actions (which are the sort of thing that God could mess with, being omnipotent regarding the physical world).
You seem to be very certain about limitations of God.
Perhaps you think that “God can override logic” isn’t logical nonsense, or you prefer not to use logic. Either approach seems rather pointless as far as getting useful results is concerned.
Taboo moral terms like good/bad/evil; can you still explain to me how a world where a God given morality exists is different from a world where it doesn’t? My belief that I’m doing it for the greater good would not be mistaken because I’d define “the greater good” as the amount of suffering prevented (assuming that this is my terminal value), and I literally don’t care whether that definition corresponds with whatever semantic tricks God wants to play.
can you still explain to me how a world where a God given morality exists is different from a world where it doesn’t?
See a couple of steps above: “Like natural law” here means “will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so”.
because I’d define “the greater good”
You can’t. Under Christianity you do not have the power to define “the greater good”. In physical parallels this would be similar to “I define gravity to repulse objects instead of attract and I literally don’t care whether that definition corresponds with whatever tricks nature wants to play”.
If Christianity is true, then you can’t define away things like “this action puts me in Hell”, but I wouldn’t call that being unable to define the greater good; I’d say that in that situation I am still defining the greater good but Hell is now decoupled from it.
It would be like saying “I define gravity to repulse objects” and then adding “Of course, this means that I am now using some name other than ‘gravity’ for the force that makes things fall”. It’s not at all clear that this is wrong. At most, it’s just not very useful, because if I look around for things that satisfy my new definition of gravity, I can’t find them. But that objection doesn’t seem to apply to the “greater good” case—if I define :”greater good” to mean something other than “doesn’t get me sent to Hell”, I can in fact find things that meet my definition, and I have a reason to want to talk about them as a category.
To give a concrete example: Imagine that forcibly converting Jews gets you sent to heaven and refusing to do so gets you sent to Hell. Why can I not say that someone who refuses to forcibly convert Jews is acting for the greater good, but some people who act for the greater good get sent to Hell? That seems like an equally sensible way of describing it, rather than “forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good”.
Because of the difference between the map and the territory.
We’re talking about a counterfactual universe where Christianity is true. This is a different universe from the one we live in, different in many subtle and profound ways. It’s not just the same old world that happens to have an angry old guy sitting up there in the clouds, chucking souls alternatively into a fire pit and into a line for harps.
One of the differences is that in the Christian world morality exists not in your mind, but in the world. It is objective, not subjective. It is built in into the fabric of reality. It is part of the territory.
You can redefine the greater good no more than you can redefine the value of pi or the Planck length.
Now maps, sure. You can draw whatever maps you like and tag things with whatever labels you want. You can make a map of the desert, call it a mountain, and start constructing a ship in the middle of it. That’s all fine—but all you’re doing is scribbling on a map and the territory is not changed by that.
That’s, by the way, is why occasionally Christians classify atheism as a mental disorder. From their point of view claiming to define the greater good yourself is tantamount to claiming to define the gravitational constant yourself—clearly a crazy thing to do. You’re constructing false maps.
Your ability to name things does not change what things are.
That’s like suggesting a hypothetical world where diamonds are red and made of corundum, while rubies are a form of carbon.
We use terms such as “diamonds”, “rubies”, and “greater good” because we are trying to convey some concept. They’re defined that way. In this hypothetical Christian world, “greater good” no longer means the same thing as that concept. If so, how is it meaningful to even call it greater good? It clearly is nothing like what I would otherwise think of as greater good.
The point is that I use the label because I want to express the concept. If something doesn’t match the concept, I’m not going to use the label for it. I’m “privileging” my concept because I’m the one doing the communicating and I’m not going to deliberately communicate something other than what I want to communicate.
Answer your same question with the above definitions of diamonds and rubies. Are you really “privileging your concept” if you insist that because clear gemstones made from carbon are not what you mean by “ruby”, you’re not going to call them that? “Greater good” in this hypothetical Christian world is as far from what I mean by “greater good” as rubies are from “clear gemstone made of carbon”.
I’m “privileging” my concept because I’m the one doing the communicating
A communication involves two parties. As I said, you can define things any way you like, that neither affects what they are nor helps your attempts to communicate.
The metaphor of diamonds and rubies works against you because the standard, default presumption on the part of most people in the real world is that morality is objective, not subjective. Most people would agree that you can’t define your own morality. So when you come and say “I can define the greater good to be anything I like”, you are the minority who says that corundum stones which everyone calls rubies should not be called so—you personally define rubies to mean “the gleam of red in my eye” and so there!
In any case your disagreement with the Christians is deeper than just terminology. You insist that the gems are just an illusion and you can make them be anything you want in your mind’s eye. They say that the gems are real and whatever you’re imagining is your own problem and does not affect the real gems in the real world.
the standard, default presumption on the part of most people in the real world is that morality is objective, not subjective.
There’s a wide gap between “I can define it to mean anything I like” and “I can define it within a certain range”. Given the hypothetical where forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good, most people in the real world would say “in that hypothetical, ‘greater good’ is so far from what we ordinarily mean by ‘greater good’ that there’s no point in even calling it that”. People in the real world give lip service to morality being objective but wouldn’t carry that to its conclusion.
...most people in the real world would say … People in the real world give lip service to morality being objective but wouldn’t carry that to its conclusion.
Please provide some evidence for these assertions. I happen to think they are false. I think you’re projecting your personal bubble onto the entire world.
Given the hypothetical where forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good, most people in the real world would say “in that hypothetical, ‘greater good’ is so far from what we ordinarily mean by ‘greater good’ that there’s no point in even calling it that”.
Except if you claim to be a utilitarian, you’re not allowed to say that.
That’s pretty simple. If God—specifically the Christian God—truly exists and the general teachings of Christianity adequately represent Him, then Christian morality is basically like physics: it’s the natural law because that’s how the world has been constructed and that’s how it works. Your personal utility function is irrelevant in the same sense in which maybe you really want to fly, yet if you jump off a cliff gravity will still do its job.
That’s quite standard theology—since LW frequently discusses religious matters (without usually recognizing them as such :-D) I recommend at least some familiarity with it...
My claim is that this idea of morality being “like natural law” is conceptual nonsense. Does it mean that I’d be incapable of violating it? No. Does it mean that I’m being irrational if I don’t follow it? Well, one could define rationality that way, but what is the point; I don’t care if I’m losing according to the “law of the universe” just like I don’t care that I’m losing in terms of reproductive success.
I don’t think so. “Like natural law” here means “will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so”.
If Christianity were true (we’ll ignore a bunch of issues and self-contradictions here) then, for example, dying after committing a mortal sin and without proper repentance will lead you to Hell. Doesn’t matter whether you think it wasn’t a big deal—you still end up in Hell. Having free will means you can violate the Christian morality but it’s similar to jumping off a cliff—you just will make a messy splat. Whether you care or not is irrelevant.
That’s not what I was disputing. Of course you’d end up in hell if Christianity is true, but if your personal utility function is utilitarianism, you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good.
No, because if Christianity were true then God defines what is the “greater good”, not you. Your belief that what you’re going for is “greater good” would be mistaken. Because of free will you can choose between good and evil but you can’t define what is good and what is evil.
Speakers use their actual language.
To elaborate: Even if counterfactually God were to legislate that all must use the holy dictionary that defines the symbol “greater good” as divine punishment, or face smiting, this would not make the sacrifice mentioned by ice9 not for the greater good. Because what we are talking about when we say “greater good” here, in the real world, is not divine punishment. Specifically, when ice9 says “you’d sacrifice yourself for the greater good” they mean you’d sacrifice yourself to save people from a god’s evil vendetta.
Below you mentioned that you can’t define gravity to repulse things instead of attract. This is a good analogy what you are supposing God to be doing. In fact God is free to define “gravity” (a symbol, a string of 7 letters) in a new language of His own. But claiming that God can define gravity itself is logical nonsense (gravity not being a symbol of any language).
The same way, it is logical nonsense to suppose that God can define the greater good to be something bad. He can invent a new language where “the greater good” (a string) refers to something bad, but that would simply be a useless language that no-one here speaks, and irrelevant to any matter of actual morality.
(I won’t dispute that “god can redefine the greater good” might well be standard theology, but as theology it is logical nonsense.)
You’re quite mistaken about that. In the Christian world God not only can define gravity itself—He did define gravity itself. Remember that whole Creator bit..?
Do not attempt to confuse yourself with wordplay.
If I build a house with a triangular roof, does the fact that I could have built one with a square roof instead mean I can define triangles as squares if I want to?
The fact remains that gravity is a force, not a word or a symbol. “Gravity” can be defined as something; gravity cannot, because defining things is intrinsically a linguistic activity.
Do not attempt to confuse yourself with wordplay.
Let’s replace the word “define” with the word “create”. God created gravity, the force itself. In the process of creating it he defined it to be what it is. This is all before language—the same way by building a house with a triangular roof I defined that roof as triangular regardless of what you’ll call it later.
Again, the major difference between the Christian world and the atheist world is not in what someone calls things—it’s in what things are and are not.
Specific morality is a built-in feature of reality in the Christian world, similar to how gravity is a built-in feature of reality in the physical world. The names that your mind assigns do not change this.
By building a house with any kind of roof you have done nothing more and nothing less than give that house a particular kind of roof. The actual squareness or triangularness of the particular kind of roof is an immutable mathematical fact. Not even God can imbue a three-sided shape with squareness.
Nor can you specify squareness to be a “built in feature of reality” in God’s world, and true of triangles in that world. Squareness is simply that predicate that is true of exactly all equal-length four-sided shapes. Immutably. Mathematically.
What is morality? It is a predicate that is true of all and only those things that help others, avoid harm, promote happiness, etc etc etc.¹ You can no more imbue an evil deed with morality than you can imbue a triangle with squareness.
¹ Source: this is how the term “morality” is generally actually used by people. Nonsensicle self-referential things people tend to suppose morality to be, such as “whatever everyone agrees ‘morality’ means” quickly fall apart on examination. More specifically, this is how I use the term “morality” (ie. how I am using it above), and almost certainly is how ice9 uses the term.
[More linguistic stuff redacted so as not to distract everyone]
Um. You’re not really good at geometry, are you? :-D
Huh? Not at all. Consult wikipedia for starters.
I am sorry, can I see your credentials for confidently making naked assertions about how people actually use the term “morality”? Or at least some evidence?
I assume it goes without saying that I’m talking about shapes in a flat euclidean plane because listing every random corner case is a waste of everyone’s time. (EDIT: yeah… fuckin’ parallelograms. Sneaky bastards.)
...
The evidence for this particular description of morality includes such as the fact that people confidently call some things good and some things bad, “even if $(RANDOM_COUNTERFACTUAL_CONDITION)”, and thought experiments like the Gandhi murder pill and, well, there’s too much subject to describe in one comment.
But that’s not really important, and you’re not going to believe me anyway. More generally, regardless of the specific form of the
moralitypredicate, God can’t make one mathematical object be something else. He can only modify physical circustances. For example, if morality was “murder is good, except at midday” he could make it always be midday by messing with the sun or something, which would affect when murder was good.Yes, you are bad at geometry.
And, of course, God is not constrained by your favorite dimensionality of space or by your preferences for Euclid over, say, Riemann.
Why is that? You seem to be very certain about limitations of God. You also seem to imply that morality is a mathematical object. That doesn’t look obvious to me.
No, but my topic of discussion is. God can do whatever he likes, it doesn’t change the facts of Euclidean geometry. Or Riemannian geometry for that matter. Or both of them together. Or any other type of geometry, or number theory or whatever.
The same is true of every other abstract concept that divides thingspace into things-that-are and things-that-aren’t. Except there are good reasons to think that morality in particular divides thingspace in a way that doesn’t care about little XML tags attached to physical objects and actions (which are the sort of thing that God could mess with, being omnipotent regarding the physical world).
Perhaps you think that “God can override logic” isn’t logical nonsense, or you prefer not to use logic. Either approach seems rather pointless as far as getting useful results is concerned.
Taboo moral terms like good/bad/evil; can you still explain to me how a world where a God given morality exists is different from a world where it doesn’t? My belief that I’m doing it for the greater good would not be mistaken because I’d define “the greater good” as the amount of suffering prevented (assuming that this is my terminal value), and I literally don’t care whether that definition corresponds with whatever semantic tricks God wants to play.
See a couple of steps above: “Like natural law” here means “will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so”.
You can’t. Under Christianity you do not have the power to define “the greater good”. In physical parallels this would be similar to “I define gravity to repulse objects instead of attract and I literally don’t care whether that definition corresponds with whatever tricks nature wants to play”.
Why can’t you define “the greater good”?
If Christianity is true, then you can’t define away things like “this action puts me in Hell”, but I wouldn’t call that being unable to define the greater good; I’d say that in that situation I am still defining the greater good but Hell is now decoupled from it.
It would be like saying “I define gravity to repulse objects” and then adding “Of course, this means that I am now using some name other than ‘gravity’ for the force that makes things fall”. It’s not at all clear that this is wrong. At most, it’s just not very useful, because if I look around for things that satisfy my new definition of gravity, I can’t find them. But that objection doesn’t seem to apply to the “greater good” case—if I define :”greater good” to mean something other than “doesn’t get me sent to Hell”, I can in fact find things that meet my definition, and I have a reason to want to talk about them as a category.
To give a concrete example: Imagine that forcibly converting Jews gets you sent to heaven and refusing to do so gets you sent to Hell. Why can I not say that someone who refuses to forcibly convert Jews is acting for the greater good, but some people who act for the greater good get sent to Hell? That seems like an equally sensible way of describing it, rather than “forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good”.
Because of the difference between the map and the territory.
We’re talking about a counterfactual universe where Christianity is true. This is a different universe from the one we live in, different in many subtle and profound ways. It’s not just the same old world that happens to have an angry old guy sitting up there in the clouds, chucking souls alternatively into a fire pit and into a line for harps.
One of the differences is that in the Christian world morality exists not in your mind, but in the world. It is objective, not subjective. It is built in into the fabric of reality. It is part of the territory.
You can redefine the greater good no more than you can redefine the value of pi or the Planck length.
Now maps, sure. You can draw whatever maps you like and tag things with whatever labels you want. You can make a map of the desert, call it a mountain, and start constructing a ship in the middle of it. That’s all fine—but all you’re doing is scribbling on a map and the territory is not changed by that.
That’s, by the way, is why occasionally Christians classify atheism as a mental disorder. From their point of view claiming to define the greater good yourself is tantamount to claiming to define the gravitational constant yourself—clearly a crazy thing to do. You’re constructing false maps.
Your ability to name things does not change what things are.
That’s like suggesting a hypothetical world where diamonds are red and made of corundum, while rubies are a form of carbon.
We use terms such as “diamonds”, “rubies”, and “greater good” because we are trying to convey some concept. They’re defined that way. In this hypothetical Christian world, “greater good” no longer means the same thing as that concept. If so, how is it meaningful to even call it greater good? It clearly is nothing like what I would otherwise think of as greater good.
To you. Why do you privilege your concept over the Christian concept? I bet more people believe in objective morality than in subjective morality.
The point is that I use the label because I want to express the concept. If something doesn’t match the concept, I’m not going to use the label for it. I’m “privileging” my concept because I’m the one doing the communicating and I’m not going to deliberately communicate something other than what I want to communicate.
Answer your same question with the above definitions of diamonds and rubies. Are you really “privileging your concept” if you insist that because clear gemstones made from carbon are not what you mean by “ruby”, you’re not going to call them that? “Greater good” in this hypothetical Christian world is as far from what I mean by “greater good” as rubies are from “clear gemstone made of carbon”.
A communication involves two parties. As I said, you can define things any way you like, that neither affects what they are nor helps your attempts to communicate.
The metaphor of diamonds and rubies works against you because the standard, default presumption on the part of most people in the real world is that morality is objective, not subjective. Most people would agree that you can’t define your own morality. So when you come and say “I can define the greater good to be anything I like”, you are the minority who says that corundum stones which everyone calls rubies should not be called so—you personally define rubies to mean “the gleam of red in my eye” and so there!
In any case your disagreement with the Christians is deeper than just terminology. You insist that the gems are just an illusion and you can make them be anything you want in your mind’s eye. They say that the gems are real and whatever you’re imagining is your own problem and does not affect the real gems in the real world.
There’s a wide gap between “I can define it to mean anything I like” and “I can define it within a certain range”. Given the hypothetical where forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good, most people in the real world would say “in that hypothetical, ‘greater good’ is so far from what we ordinarily mean by ‘greater good’ that there’s no point in even calling it that”. People in the real world give lip service to morality being objective but wouldn’t carry that to its conclusion.
Please provide some evidence for these assertions. I happen to think they are false. I think you’re projecting your personal bubble onto the entire world.
Except if you claim to be a utilitarian, you’re not allowed to say that.