A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
Do moral facts exist?
Moral facts are one’s preferences together with the associated instrumental actions and the necessary environmental circumstances to realize them, which are then unconsciously ascribed to the outside world by the use of ought statements.
If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts?
They are reducible to the interactions of different agents with each other and the environment in order to realize their preferences.
Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it?
The connection is your subjective evaluation of the evidence in favor of a judgement. If you believe the judegment to be correct and binding then you are motivated to abide it.
Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute?
You said most of those questions make no sense to you so I tried to make sense of them myself and thought I could as well write down my thoughts.
Regarding your own questions. I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
You further say that you cannot easily change those intuitions. That is correct, but do we want to change them? Does it even make sense to ask if we want to have different intuitions?
I think that if we face conflicting preferences we don’t want to change or discard the preferences with less weight but simply ignore them temporarily.
We are humans and that means that we are inconsistent agents without stable utility functions. Do we want to change that?
Further, I don’t think that our “morality core” is all that important. We are highly adaptable and easily catch cultural induced memes that can override most of our “morality core”. Just see how many people here claim that they would be killing the fat guy when faced with the trolley problem. That is a case where high-level cognition, cultural and academic “memes” hijack what you call our “morality core” in an attempt to resolve conflicting preferences by favoring the one that we assign the most weight.
Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?
I have no idea, I upvoted your post because I have the same question.
I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
The uses of moral language we’re exposed to is a massivly biased sample that would tend to lead to that conclusion, whatever morality really was.
It’s almost always clear what’s right and what’s wrong (this is true whatever your view of the nature of morality). Go out onto the street and you won’t see people massacring other people right and left, because everyone knows how to behave. Importantly, nobody says anything. People don’t go on and on about morality. They just get on with their day.
On very rare occasions, it’s not clear what’s right and what’s wrong. There is a difference of opinion. And it’s precisely on these rare occasions that people start talking a lot about morality. Almost all of the moral language that we’re exposed to comes from these rare occasions where it’s not clear.
Moreover, on these rare occasions, everybody is of course going to try to convince everybody else that morality actually favors their case. The same thing happens in court. Every statement you hear in court from one side or the other is about why the law or the facts favor their side. So pretty much every statement that you ever hear about morality is going to be somebody drying to say why you should do what they want you to do.
Biased sampling is a major source of error. It’s something that needs to be taken into account when drawing conclusions.
A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
I must say I agree with this, and it’s reassuring to see someone else say it out loud.
I find that a lot of people who successfully make the step to a non-theistic world view are unable to then shed the baggage of moral realism. They continue to damn their intellectual opponents as demonstrably, factually “immoral”. They just change the source of that objective morality from God to secular philosophy. It’s uncomfortable to realize that your side isn’t the one, true, noble cause. Thus, new atheists latch on to some political cause or the “cause of Reason” and assert it as the true objective good.
And hey, I support many of the goals of the “cause of Reason”. I’m in favor of raising the sanity waterline and improving the instrumental rationality of my friends and colleagues. But that’s a subjective value. That’s my preference. And that’s okay.
Heh, I’m tempted to answer “yes” to your question because it makes me seem wittier than I was.
In reality, what I meant by “okay” was: Not contradictory or a crisis of rationality. It is indeed hard to avoid the language of objective judgments in English. :)
A convoluted, covert and self-delusional way of expressing how you want other people to behave.
Moral facts are one’s preferences together with the associated instrumental actions and the necessary environmental circumstances to realize them, which are then unconsciously ascribed to the outside world by the use of ought statements.
They are reducible to the interactions of different agents with each other and the environment in order to realize their preferences.
The connection is your subjective evaluation of the evidence in favor of a judgement. If you believe the judegment to be correct and binding then you are motivated to abide it.
I like this explanation.
No, there is no justification to add the word ‘moral’. What we mean by ‘moral progress’ is how close we are to a preference equilibrium.
Your comment seems to be a response to lukeprog’s questions, rather than to my question.
You said most of those questions make no sense to you so I tried to make sense of them myself and thought I could as well write down my thoughts.
Regarding your own questions. I believe that there are some genetically hard-coded intuitions about how to approach and respond to other primates. Why would we want to wrap that into some confusing terminology like moral philosophy?
You further say that you cannot easily change those intuitions. That is correct, but do we want to change them? Does it even make sense to ask if we want to have different intuitions?
I think that if we face conflicting preferences we don’t want to change or discard the preferences with less weight but simply ignore them temporarily.
We are humans and that means that we are inconsistent agents without stable utility functions. Do we want to change that?
Further, I don’t think that our “morality core” is all that important. We are highly adaptable and easily catch cultural induced memes that can override most of our “morality core”. Just see how many people here claim that they would be killing the fat guy when faced with the trolley problem. That is a case where high-level cognition, cultural and academic “memes” hijack what you call our “morality core” in an attempt to resolve conflicting preferences by favoring the one that we assign the most weight.
I have no idea, I upvoted your post because I have the same question.
Why, to disguise it of course.
The uses of moral language we’re exposed to is a massivly biased sample that would tend to lead to that conclusion, whatever morality really was.
It’s almost always clear what’s right and what’s wrong (this is true whatever your view of the nature of morality). Go out onto the street and you won’t see people massacring other people right and left, because everyone knows how to behave. Importantly, nobody says anything. People don’t go on and on about morality. They just get on with their day.
On very rare occasions, it’s not clear what’s right and what’s wrong. There is a difference of opinion. And it’s precisely on these rare occasions that people start talking a lot about morality. Almost all of the moral language that we’re exposed to comes from these rare occasions where it’s not clear.
Moreover, on these rare occasions, everybody is of course going to try to convince everybody else that morality actually favors their case. The same thing happens in court. Every statement you hear in court from one side or the other is about why the law or the facts favor their side. So pretty much every statement that you ever hear about morality is going to be somebody drying to say why you should do what they want you to do.
Biased sampling is a major source of error. It’s something that needs to be taken into account when drawing conclusions.
I must say I agree with this, and it’s reassuring to see someone else say it out loud.
I find that a lot of people who successfully make the step to a non-theistic world view are unable to then shed the baggage of moral realism. They continue to damn their intellectual opponents as demonstrably, factually “immoral”. They just change the source of that objective morality from God to secular philosophy. It’s uncomfortable to realize that your side isn’t the one, true, noble cause. Thus, new atheists latch on to some political cause or the “cause of Reason” and assert it as the true objective good.
And hey, I support many of the goals of the “cause of Reason”. I’m in favor of raising the sanity waterline and improving the instrumental rationality of my friends and colleagues. But that’s a subjective value. That’s my preference. And that’s okay.
Great points! Was the final sentence intentional irony? :)
Edit to clarify: “And that’s okay” seems to slip back into objective morality (although of course it is hard to avoid such phrasing in English).
Heh, I’m tempted to answer “yes” to your question because it makes me seem wittier than I was.
In reality, what I meant by “okay” was: Not contradictory or a crisis of rationality. It is indeed hard to avoid the language of objective judgments in English. :)