My original point was just that “subjective versus objective” is a false dichotomy in this context. I don’t want to have a big long discussion about meta-ethics, but, descriptively, many people do talk in a conventionalist way about morality or components of morality and thinking of it as a social construction is handy in navigating the world.
Turning now to the substance of whether moral or judgement words (“should”, “ought”, “honest”, etc) are bad concepts --
At work, we routinely have conversations about “is it ethical/honest to do X”, or “what’s the most ethical way to deal with circumstance Y”. And we do not mean “what is our private preference about outcomes or rules”—we mean something imprecise but more like “what would our peers think of us if they knew” or “what do we think our peers ought to think of us if they knew”. We aren’t being very precise how much is objective, subjective, and socially constructed, but I don’t see that we would gain from trying to speak with more precision than our thoughts actually have.
Yes, these terms are fuzzy and self-referential. Natural language often is. Yes, using ‘ethical’ instead of other terms smuggles in a lot of connotation. That’s the point! Vagueness with some emotional shading and implication is very useful linguistically and I think cognitively.
The original topic was “harmful” concepts, I believe, and I don’t think all vagueness is harmful. Often the imprecision is irrelevant to the actual communication or reasoning taking place.
The accusation of being bad concepts was not because they are vague, but because they lead to bad modes of thought (and because they are wrong concepts, in the manner of a wrong question). Being vague doesn’t protect you from being wrong; you can talk all day about “is it ethical to steal this cookie” but you are wasting your time. Either you’re actually referring to specific concepts that have names (will other people perceive of this as ethically justified?) or you’re babbling nonsense. Just use basic consequentialist reasoning and skip the whole ethics part. You gain literally nothing from discussing “is this moral”, unless what you’re really asking is “What are the social consequences” or “will person x think this is immoral” or whatever. It’s a dangerous habit epistemically and serves no instrumental purpose.
My original point was just that “subjective versus objective” is a false dichotomy in this context. I don’t want to have a big long discussion about meta-ethics, but, descriptively, many people do talk in a conventionalist way about morality or components of morality and thinking of it as a social construction is handy in navigating the world.
Turning now to the substance of whether moral or judgement words (“should”, “ought”, “honest”, etc) are bad concepts -- At work, we routinely have conversations about “is it ethical/honest to do X”, or “what’s the most ethical way to deal with circumstance Y”. And we do not mean “what is our private preference about outcomes or rules”—we mean something imprecise but more like “what would our peers think of us if they knew” or “what do we think our peers ought to think of us if they knew”. We aren’t being very precise how much is objective, subjective, and socially constructed, but I don’t see that we would gain from trying to speak with more precision than our thoughts actually have.
Yes, these terms are fuzzy and self-referential. Natural language often is. Yes, using ‘ethical’ instead of other terms smuggles in a lot of connotation. That’s the point! Vagueness with some emotional shading and implication is very useful linguistically and I think cognitively.
The original topic was “harmful” concepts, I believe, and I don’t think all vagueness is harmful. Often the imprecision is irrelevant to the actual communication or reasoning taking place.
The accusation of being bad concepts was not because they are vague, but because they lead to bad modes of thought (and because they are wrong concepts, in the manner of a wrong question). Being vague doesn’t protect you from being wrong; you can talk all day about “is it ethical to steal this cookie” but you are wasting your time. Either you’re actually referring to specific concepts that have names (will other people perceive of this as ethically justified?) or you’re babbling nonsense. Just use basic consequentialist reasoning and skip the whole ethics part. You gain literally nothing from discussing “is this moral”, unless what you’re really asking is “What are the social consequences” or “will person x think this is immoral” or whatever. It’s a dangerous habit epistemically and serves no instrumental purpose.