G.E. Moore is famous for this argument against external world skepticism: “How do I know I have hands?” (he raises his hands in front of his face) “Here! Here are my hands!”. His point was that it is absurd to call the more obvious into doubt by means of the less obvious: By whatever means I might understand an argument supporting skepticism about my hands (say, the Boltzmann Brain argument), by those very means I am all the more sure that I do have hands.
I think something similar might apply here. To say that morality is ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ may be an equivocation or category mistake, but if I understand anything, I understand that slavery is wrong. I can’t falsify this, or reduce it to some more basic principle because there is nothing more basic, and no possible world in which slavery is right. A world in which the alternative is true cannot be tested for because it is wholly inconceivable.
His point was that it is absurd to call the more obvious into doubt by means of the less obvious: By whatever means I might understand an argument supporting skepticism about my hands (say, the Boltzmann Brain argument), by those very means I am all the more sure that I do have hands.
A world in which the alternative is true cannot be tested for because it is wholly inconceivable.
A world in which I do not have hands is totally conceivable and easily tested for. So it would appear you have at least this gigantic difference between “Slavery is wrong” differs from your G.E. Moore analogy source statement.
To say that it is obvious that “slavery is wrong” does not rule out this being a statement of preference, does it? I would rather be slowly sucked to orgasm by healthy young females than to have my limbs and torso crushed and ground while immersed in a strong acid. This is AT LEAST as obvious to me as “slavery is wrong” is obvious to you, I would bet, yet it is quite explicitly a statement of preference.
To say that it is obvious that “slavery is wrong” does not rule out this being a statement of preference, does it?
That’s a fair point, but I can easily imagine a world in which I prefer being crushed to death than receiving the attentions of some attractive women, so long as you let me add a little context. Lots of people have chosen painful deaths over long and pleasant lives and we’ve rightly praised them for it. So while I agree that the choice you describe is a clear preference of mine, it has none of the strength of my moral belief about slavery.
A world in which I do not have hands is totally conceivable and easily tested for.
That wasn’t quite the point. The analogue here wouldn’t be between the hands and the moral principle. The analogue is this: how surely do you know this epistemic rule about falsification? Do you know it more surely than you know that slavery is wrong? I for one, am vastly more sure that slavery is wrong than I am that instrumentalism or falsificationism is the correct epistemic theory.
I may be misguided, of course, so I won’t say that instrumentalist epistemology can’t in principle call my moral idea into question. But it seems absurd to assume that is does.
I think your point about falsification is a good one. I in fact believe in falisifiability in some powerful sense of the word believe. I suspect a positive belief in falsifiability is at least weakly falsifiable. With time and resources one could look for correlations between belief in falsifiability and various forms of creativity and understanding. I would expect to find it highly correlated with engineering, scientific, and mathematical understanding and progress.
Of course “proving” falisifiabilty by using falisifiability is circular. In my own mind I fall back on instrumentalism: I claim I’m interested in learning falisifiable things about the world and don’t care whether we call them “true” or not and don’t care whether you call other non-falsifiable statements true or not, I’m interested in falsifiable ones. Behind or above that belief is my belief that I really want power, I want to be able to do things, and that it is the falsifiable statements only that allow me to manipulate the environment effectively: since non-falsifiable statements almost by definition don’t help me in manipulating the world in which I would be trying to falsify them.
Is a statement like “Slavery is wrong” falsifiable? Or even “Enslaving this particular child in this particular circumstance”? I think they are not “nakedly” falsifiable and in fact have zero problem imagining a world in which at least some people do not think they are wrong (we live in that world). I think the statement “Slavery is wrong because it reduces average happiness” is falsifiable. “Slavery is wrong because it misallocates human resources” is falsifiable. These reflect instrumentalist THEORIES of morality, theories which it does not seem to be could be falsifiable.
So I have an assumption of falsifiability. You may have an assumption of what is moral. I admit the symmetry.
I can tell you the “I can’t imagine it” test fails in epic fashion in science. One of the great thrills of special relativity and quantum mechanics is that they are so wildly non-intuitive for humans, and yet they are so powerfully instrumentally true in understanding absolute reams of phenomenon allowing us to correctly design communications satellites and transistors to name just two useful instrumentalities. So I suppose my belief against ” I can’t imagine it” as a useful way to learn the truth is a not-necessarily-logical extension of a powerful truth from one domain that I respect powerfully in to other domains.
Further, I CAN imagine a world in which slavery is moral. I can go two ways to imagine this: 1) mostly we don’t mind enslaving those who are not “people.” Are herds of cattle for food immoral? Is it unimaginable that they are moral? Well if you can’t imagine that is moral, what about cultivated fields of wheat? Human life in human bodies ends if we stop exploiting other life forms for nutritition. Sure, you can “draw the line” at chordates for whether cultivating a crop is “slavery” or not. Other people have drawn the line at clan members, family members, nation members, skin-color members. I’m sure there were many white slave holders in the southern U.S. who could not imagine a world in which enslaving white people was moral. Or enslaving British people. Or enslaving British aristocracy. So how far do you go to be sure you are not enslaving anything that shouldn’t be enslaved? Or do you trust your imagination that it is only people (or only chordates), even as you realize how powerfully other people’s imaginations have failed in the past?
I also reject all religious truth based on passed down stories of direct revelations from god. Again, this kind of belief fails epically in doing science, and I extend its failure there in to domains where perhaps it is not so easy to show it fails. And in my instrumentalist soul, I ultimately don’t care whether I am “right” or “wrong,” I would just rather use my limited time, energy, and brain-FLOPs pursuing falsifiable truths, and hope fort he best.
I can easily imagine a world in which I prefer being crushed to death than receiving the attentions of some attractive women, so long as you let me add a little context. [..] So while I agree that the choice you describe is a clear preference of mine, it has none of the strength of my moral belief about slavery.
I understand this to imply that you cannot imagine a world in which you prefer to send someone into slavery than not do so, no matter what the context. Have I understood that correctly?
No, I can easily imagine a world in which I prefer to send someone into slavery than drink a drop of lemon juice: all I have to do is imagine that I’m a bad person. My point was that it’s easy to imagine any world in which my preferences are different, but I cannot imagine a world in which slavery is morally permissible (at least not without radically changing what slavery means).
How about a world in which by sending one person from your planet into slavery you defer the enslavement of the entire earth for 140 years? A world in which alien invaders which outgun us more than Europeans outgunned the tribes in Africa from which many of them took slaves, but who are willing for some reason we can’t comprehend to take one person you pick back to the home planet, 70 light years away. But failing your making that choice, they will stay here and at some expense to themselves enslave our entire race and planet?
Can you now imagine a world in which your sending someone in to slavery is not immoral? If so, how does this change in what you can and cannot imagine change your opinion of either the imagination standard or slavery’s moral status?
It seems to me most likely source of emotions, feelings, is evolution. We aren’t just evolved to run from a sabre tooth tiger, we have a rush of overwhelming fear as the instrumentality of our fleeing effectively. SImilarly, we have evolved, mammals as a whole, not just humans not even just primates, to be “social” animals meaning a tremendously important part of the environment was our group of other mammals. Long before we made the argument that slavery was wrong, we had strong feelings of wanting to resist the things that went along with being enslaved, while apparently we also had power feelings that assisted us in forcing others to do what we wanted.
Given the way emotions probably evolved, I think it does make sense to look to our emotions to guide us in knowing what strategies probably work better than others in interacting with our environment, but it doesn’t make sense to expect them to guide us correctly in corner cases, in rare situations in which there would have not been enough pay-off to have evolution do any fine tuning of emotional responses.
Can you imagine a world in which killing people is morally permissible?
Sure, I live in one. I chose slavery because it’s a pretty unequivocal case of moral badness, while killing is not such as in war, self-defense, execution, etc. I think probably rape, and certainly lying are things which are always morally wrong (I don’t think this entails that one should never do them, however).
My thought is just that at least at the core of them, moral beliefs aren’t subject to having been otherwise. I guess this is true of beliefs about logic too, though maybe not for the same reasons. And this doesn’t make either kind of belief immune to error, of course.
G.E. Moore is famous for this argument against external world skepticism: “How do I know I have hands?” (he raises his hands in front of his face) “Here! Here are my hands!”. His point was that it is absurd to call the more obvious into doubt by means of the less obvious: By whatever means I might understand an argument supporting skepticism about my hands (say, the Boltzmann Brain argument), by those very means I am all the more sure that I do have hands.
I think something similar might apply here. To say that morality is ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ may be an equivocation or category mistake, but if I understand anything, I understand that slavery is wrong. I can’t falsify this, or reduce it to some more basic principle because there is nothing more basic, and no possible world in which slavery is right. A world in which the alternative is true cannot be tested for because it is wholly inconceivable.
Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_a_hand#Logical_form http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/knowing-your-ar.html http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#fn41
A world in which I do not have hands is totally conceivable and easily tested for. So it would appear you have at least this gigantic difference between “Slavery is wrong” differs from your G.E. Moore analogy source statement.
To say that it is obvious that “slavery is wrong” does not rule out this being a statement of preference, does it? I would rather be slowly sucked to orgasm by healthy young females than to have my limbs and torso crushed and ground while immersed in a strong acid. This is AT LEAST as obvious to me as “slavery is wrong” is obvious to you, I would bet, yet it is quite explicitly a statement of preference.
That’s a fair point, but I can easily imagine a world in which I prefer being crushed to death than receiving the attentions of some attractive women, so long as you let me add a little context. Lots of people have chosen painful deaths over long and pleasant lives and we’ve rightly praised them for it. So while I agree that the choice you describe is a clear preference of mine, it has none of the strength of my moral belief about slavery.
That wasn’t quite the point. The analogue here wouldn’t be between the hands and the moral principle. The analogue is this: how surely do you know this epistemic rule about falsification? Do you know it more surely than you know that slavery is wrong? I for one, am vastly more sure that slavery is wrong than I am that instrumentalism or falsificationism is the correct epistemic theory.
I may be misguided, of course, so I won’t say that instrumentalist epistemology can’t in principle call my moral idea into question. But it seems absurd to assume that is does.
I think your point about falsification is a good one. I in fact believe in falisifiability in some powerful sense of the word believe. I suspect a positive belief in falsifiability is at least weakly falsifiable. With time and resources one could look for correlations between belief in falsifiability and various forms of creativity and understanding. I would expect to find it highly correlated with engineering, scientific, and mathematical understanding and progress.
Of course “proving” falisifiabilty by using falisifiability is circular. In my own mind I fall back on instrumentalism: I claim I’m interested in learning falisifiable things about the world and don’t care whether we call them “true” or not and don’t care whether you call other non-falsifiable statements true or not, I’m interested in falsifiable ones. Behind or above that belief is my belief that I really want power, I want to be able to do things, and that it is the falsifiable statements only that allow me to manipulate the environment effectively: since non-falsifiable statements almost by definition don’t help me in manipulating the world in which I would be trying to falsify them.
Is a statement like “Slavery is wrong” falsifiable? Or even “Enslaving this particular child in this particular circumstance”? I think they are not “nakedly” falsifiable and in fact have zero problem imagining a world in which at least some people do not think they are wrong (we live in that world). I think the statement “Slavery is wrong because it reduces average happiness” is falsifiable. “Slavery is wrong because it misallocates human resources” is falsifiable. These reflect instrumentalist THEORIES of morality, theories which it does not seem to be could be falsifiable.
So I have an assumption of falsifiability. You may have an assumption of what is moral. I admit the symmetry.
I can tell you the “I can’t imagine it” test fails in epic fashion in science. One of the great thrills of special relativity and quantum mechanics is that they are so wildly non-intuitive for humans, and yet they are so powerfully instrumentally true in understanding absolute reams of phenomenon allowing us to correctly design communications satellites and transistors to name just two useful instrumentalities. So I suppose my belief against ” I can’t imagine it” as a useful way to learn the truth is a not-necessarily-logical extension of a powerful truth from one domain that I respect powerfully in to other domains.
Further, I CAN imagine a world in which slavery is moral. I can go two ways to imagine this: 1) mostly we don’t mind enslaving those who are not “people.” Are herds of cattle for food immoral? Is it unimaginable that they are moral? Well if you can’t imagine that is moral, what about cultivated fields of wheat? Human life in human bodies ends if we stop exploiting other life forms for nutritition. Sure, you can “draw the line” at chordates for whether cultivating a crop is “slavery” or not. Other people have drawn the line at clan members, family members, nation members, skin-color members. I’m sure there were many white slave holders in the southern U.S. who could not imagine a world in which enslaving white people was moral. Or enslaving British people. Or enslaving British aristocracy. So how far do you go to be sure you are not enslaving anything that shouldn’t be enslaved? Or do you trust your imagination that it is only people (or only chordates), even as you realize how powerfully other people’s imaginations have failed in the past?
I also reject all religious truth based on passed down stories of direct revelations from god. Again, this kind of belief fails epically in doing science, and I extend its failure there in to domains where perhaps it is not so easy to show it fails. And in my instrumentalist soul, I ultimately don’t care whether I am “right” or “wrong,” I would just rather use my limited time, energy, and brain-FLOPs pursuing falsifiable truths, and hope fort he best.
I understand this to imply that you cannot imagine a world in which you prefer to send someone into slavery than not do so, no matter what the context. Have I understood that correctly?
No, I can easily imagine a world in which I prefer to send someone into slavery than drink a drop of lemon juice: all I have to do is imagine that I’m a bad person. My point was that it’s easy to imagine any world in which my preferences are different, but I cannot imagine a world in which slavery is morally permissible (at least not without radically changing what slavery means).
How about a world in which by sending one person from your planet into slavery you defer the enslavement of the entire earth for 140 years? A world in which alien invaders which outgun us more than Europeans outgunned the tribes in Africa from which many of them took slaves, but who are willing for some reason we can’t comprehend to take one person you pick back to the home planet, 70 light years away. But failing your making that choice, they will stay here and at some expense to themselves enslave our entire race and planet?
Can you now imagine a world in which your sending someone in to slavery is not immoral? If so, how does this change in what you can and cannot imagine change your opinion of either the imagination standard or slavery’s moral status?
It seems to me most likely source of emotions, feelings, is evolution. We aren’t just evolved to run from a sabre tooth tiger, we have a rush of overwhelming fear as the instrumentality of our fleeing effectively. SImilarly, we have evolved, mammals as a whole, not just humans not even just primates, to be “social” animals meaning a tremendously important part of the environment was our group of other mammals. Long before we made the argument that slavery was wrong, we had strong feelings of wanting to resist the things that went along with being enslaved, while apparently we also had power feelings that assisted us in forcing others to do what we wanted.
Given the way emotions probably evolved, I think it does make sense to look to our emotions to guide us in knowing what strategies probably work better than others in interacting with our environment, but it doesn’t make sense to expect them to guide us correctly in corner cases, in rare situations in which there would have not been enough pay-off to have evolution do any fine tuning of emotional responses.
Ah, OK. Thanks for the clarification.
Can you imagine a world in which killing people is morally permissible?
Sure, I live in one. I chose slavery because it’s a pretty unequivocal case of moral badness, while killing is not such as in war, self-defense, execution, etc. I think probably rape, and certainly lying are things which are always morally wrong (I don’t think this entails that one should never do them, however).
My thought is just that at least at the core of them, moral beliefs aren’t subject to having been otherwise. I guess this is true of beliefs about logic too, though maybe not for the same reasons. And this doesn’t make either kind of belief immune to error, of course.
OK. Thanks for clarifying.