Separating morality and epistemics is not possible because the universe contains agents who use morality to influence epistemological claims, and the speaker is one of them. I wrote up a response to this post with a precise account of what “should” is and how it should be used. Precise definitions also solve these problems. Looking back today, I think my post introduces new problems of its own. I don’t know when I will finish it. For now, in case I never do finish it, I should mention the best parts here. I don’t believe or endorse all these claims, but mixed up with the false claims are important ones, that must be passed along.
I used to play with tabooing “should” to avoid tying myself to unrealistic hopes and expectations of moral realism, but found a better way.
A previous post was written under the assumption that morality has nothing to do with epistemics. That is, in fact, broadly wrong. Our desires must impact our predictions. You might want to read The Parable of Predict-o-matic to learn how, but I’ll summarize the principle: There are many things that become true as a result of being believed to be true. The assignment of names, declarations of war, predictions of the changes in value of a currency, beliefs about whether a plan will be carried out. (Aside from that last one, most of these are for collective epistemology, rather than individual, but language is for collective reasoning and we’re talking about language so!!)
Many of the parts of reality in which believing agents are involved, are being constructed by those agents’ beliefs. If our selection of beliefs about the future do not answer to our values, we cede much of our agency over the future, we construct a wretched, arbitrary reality where the values of currencies, the relationships between factions, the meaning of our words, are all mostly determined by random forces. We see ourselves as being caught in a threshing tide that is beyond our control, but the tide actually consists of us, it was always in our control, when people miss that, tragedy occurs.
We need “should” to tame the tide. “Should” is the modality that associates belief and desire. ”X Should Be So” means “X Will Be So, Because We Want it to Be.”
We can call this account of ‘should’ the realist should. We can call the old, naive standard english dialect speakers’ account, the idealist should. We can be prescriptivists about the meaning of should because the idealist should is problematic and useless.
The idealist should is often spoken dishonestly. It does not care whether the things it claims can actually happen. It rails against reality. It fatally underestimates the strength of its opponent. It rallies around plans that will not work.
The realist should is more or less logically interchangeable with an enlightened optimist’s “will”. Anything that you accept will happen, should happen, and anything that should happen, will happen. It has a different connotation to “will”, it is saying “think about how our desires influence this”, but it can’t be more than a connotative difference, if your should and will diverge, the dialog spirals into the idealism of fixating on plans that you know will not work.
The realist should is used in a few ways that an idealist will find unfamiliar. Exercise: Lets use the realist “should” in the proper way until you get used to it.
Idealist: Nobody should ever have to die of cancer.
Realist: About a billion people should die of cancer before the cure is found.
Idealist: You should have known everything we knew, and read the same books we had read. Instead you failed and are bad.
Realist: You should have acted under bounded rationality and read whatever seemed important to you at the time given what you knew. We must work with the sad reality that different people will have read different books.
The realist “should” has an implicit parameter. A plan.
What “should” be, is part of an implied plan. Different plans use “should” differently. When a person says “should”, you will now be consciously aware that they have some specific plan in mind, just as you realize that when someone says “they” they have a particular person in mind, or when a person says “the thing” they have assumed that there is only one salient instance of a thing and you’ll know what they mean. It’s perfectly normal for words to have somewhat complicated implicit bindings like this, it becomes unproblematic as soon as you learn to consciously interrogate the bindings, to question, “Who’s ‘they’?”, “There is more than one instance of that class.”, “‘Should’, under which plan? Tell me about your aims and your assumptions about how the world works.”
With these adjustments we will have no further difficulties.
Separating morality and epistemics is not possible because the universe contains agents who use morality to influence epistemological claims, and the speaker is one of them. I wrote up a response to this post with a precise account of what “should” is and how it should be used. Precise definitions also solve these problems. Looking back today, I think my post introduces new problems of its own. I don’t know when I will finish it. For now, in case I never do finish it, I should mention the best parts here. I don’t believe or endorse all these claims, but mixed up with the false claims are important ones, that must be passed along.
I used to play with tabooing “should” to avoid tying myself to unrealistic hopes and expectations of moral realism, but found a better way.
A previous post was written under the assumption that morality has nothing to do with epistemics. That is, in fact, broadly wrong. Our desires must impact our predictions. You might want to read The Parable of Predict-o-matic to learn how, but I’ll summarize the principle: There are many things that become true as a result of being believed to be true. The assignment of names, declarations of war, predictions of the changes in value of a currency, beliefs about whether a plan will be carried out. (Aside from that last one, most of these are for collective epistemology, rather than individual, but language is for collective reasoning and we’re talking about language so!!)
Many of the parts of reality in which believing agents are involved, are being constructed by those agents’ beliefs. If our selection of beliefs about the future do not answer to our values, we cede much of our agency over the future, we construct a wretched, arbitrary reality where the values of currencies, the relationships between factions, the meaning of our words, are all mostly determined by random forces. We see ourselves as being caught in a threshing tide that is beyond our control, but the tide actually consists of us, it was always in our control, when people miss that, tragedy occurs.
We need “should” to tame the tide. “Should” is the modality that associates belief and desire.
”X Should Be So” means “X Will Be So, Because We Want it to Be.”
We can call this account of ‘should’ the realist should. We can call the old, naive standard english dialect speakers’ account, the idealist should. We can be prescriptivists about the meaning of should because the idealist should is problematic and useless.
The idealist should is often spoken dishonestly. It does not care whether the things it claims can actually happen. It rails against reality. It fatally underestimates the strength of its opponent. It rallies around plans that will not work.
The realist should is more or less logically interchangeable with an enlightened optimist’s “will”. Anything that you accept will happen, should happen, and anything that should happen, will happen. It has a different connotation to “will”, it is saying “think about how our desires influence this”, but it can’t be more than a connotative difference, if your should and will diverge, the dialog spirals into the idealism of fixating on plans that you know will not work.
The realist should is used in a few ways that an idealist will find unfamiliar. Exercise: Lets use the realist “should” in the proper way until you get used to it.
Idealist: Nobody should ever have to die of cancer.
Realist: About a billion people should die of cancer before the cure is found.
Idealist: You should have known everything we knew, and read the same books we had read. Instead you failed and are bad.
Realist: You should have acted under bounded rationality and read whatever seemed important to you at the time given what you knew. We must work with the sad reality that different people will have read different books.
The realist “should” has an implicit parameter. A plan.
What “should” be, is part of an implied plan. Different plans use “should” differently. When a person says “should”, you will now be consciously aware that they have some specific plan in mind, just as you realize that when someone says “they” they have a particular person in mind, or when a person says “the thing” they have assumed that there is only one salient instance of a thing and you’ll know what they mean.
It’s perfectly normal for words to have somewhat complicated implicit bindings like this, it becomes unproblematic as soon as you learn to consciously interrogate the bindings, to question, “Who’s ‘they’?”, “There is more than one instance of that class.”, “‘Should’, under which plan? Tell me about your aims and your assumptions about how the world works.”
With these adjustments we will have no further difficulties.