This is a critique of cultural relativism more than anything else. I’m not a relativist, although my argument here was made in a relativism agnostic manner.
I’m not a relativist, although my argument here was made in a relativism agnostic manner.
No it wasn’t. Relativists have no non-subjective notion of “normativity”, thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
Edit: In practice of course, most relativists are willing to treat things like murder as if they are objectively wrong. However, this is a case of their System I protecting them from the consequences of their System II beliefs, similar to the way New Agers who don’t believe in objective reality manage to avoid walking out of high story windows.
Relativists have no non-subjective notion of “normativity”, thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
This is not true of all relativists. There are relativists who believe in entirely objective agent-relative moral facts. In other words, they would say something like, “It is an objective moral truth that X is wrong for members of community Y”. The normative force of “X is wrong” would apply even to members of community Y who don’t believe that X is wrong (hence the objectivity), but it wouldn’t apply to people outside community Y (hence the relativism).
Maybe a word other than normative would satisfy those relativists who don’t believe in any kind of normative morality, but still believe that morality within a society is the closest thing we can have. Although, this appears to be more a terminology issue than anything else.
No it wasn’t. Relativists have no non-subjective notion of “normativity”, thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
I don’t know if I count as a “relativist”, so let’s taboo the terms:
I don’t believe there is an objective morality existing independently of humans. I don’t even believe the category “morality” exists independently of humans (and other animals). I am not a “moral objectivist”.
That doesn’t stop me from treating murder as “wrong”. The word “wrong” here unpacks here as follows: I profit most if neither I nor anyone else murders, so I support the social contract of not murdering, and I punish defectors.
I also have evolved instincts that counteract me murdering and cause me to be upset when others are murdered. I (consciously) treat these the same as any other feelings and instincts: they don’t have a special “moral” status, but I still reliably act on them; just as I like sex and sweets and dislike pain, I dislike murder.
Because almost everyone agrees with me on this, I can act and talk as if it is “objectively” wrong to murder, even though it doesn’t have the status of a physical or logical truth.
I would say this is error theory, because even if you mean something true when you say that “it is wrong to murder,” you do not mean what ordinary people mean, and the thing that they mean, you believe to be false.
If you explain your opinion clearly to ordinary people, I think they will believe that you accept error theory, and they will no longer trust you about anything except when they have a special reason to do so, e.g. if they think you like them personally.
they will no longer trust you about anything except when they have a special reason to do so.
IIUC, you’re saying they would think that because I understand the evolutionary reasons for my instinct not to murder people, and I understand (and accept) the game-theoretical and expected-utility reasons for not murdering people, I am more likely to consciously override these reasons if I find a particular case where they don’t apply. Whereas a deontologist makes a commitment not to murder even if it creates net benefit or saves the whole world (e.g. would you murder Hitler if that was the only way of stopping WW2?)
That seems like it should generalize into an argument that utilitarians and/or rationalists will not be trusted by ‘ordinary’ people. And perhaps even by other rationalists; it may be related to the reasons why our kind can’t cooperate. Although I haven’t observed anything like that in practice; have you?
I don’t think most utilitarians and rationalists accept error theory, or at least most of them say that they don’t, and consequently there won’t be the same reason for distrusting them. For example, Eliezer calls himself a utilitarian but he still believes that “murder is wrong” is an objectively true statement about the relationship between murder and the abstract pattern which we call “right”. And he agrees that it means neither “we don’t like murder” nor “game theory doesn’t recommend murder.”
It may well be true that some people do accept error theory, but don’t admit it. In this way they will advance their goals by getting people to trust them. I would guess that you behave that way in ordinary life as well (in your previous comment you said that you can talk and act as if it is objectively wrong to murder.)
For example, Eliezer calls himself a utilitarian but he still believes that “murder is wrong” is an objectively true statement about the relationship between murder and the abstract pattern which we call “right”.
(Emphasis mine.) That word we plays a crucial role. It’s the same as my saying “wrong according to us”. You might believe the sentiment “murder is wrong” is shared by all of humanity (although I would disagree, empirically), but that’s not the same as saying it’s “objective” in the same sense as logic or physics. Eliezer would agree that wrong!Human is not the same as wrong!Babyeater or wrong!Superhappies. I merely go one step further and point out that humans (across time and space and different cultures) don’t really agree on morality nearly as much as we like to pretend.
in your previous comment you said that you can talk and act as if it is objectively wrong to murder.
It’s not as if I’m pretending to anything I don’t believe. It’s really wrong for me, according to me to murder; this is objectively true (for me!) and I behave accordingly. If anything, saying there are no universal laws that everyone actually follows should imply I should trust others less, not that others should trust me less.
Put another way, my behavior is the same as that of an objective moralist who also happens to believe most people other than him follow partial or corrupted versions of the objectively true morality, or don’t follow it at all. He and I will behave identically and make identical predictions; I merely remove the extra logical concept of ‘objective morality’ which is empirically undetectable and does no useful predictive work, just like a God who causes no miracles and is impossible to detect.
I’m not sure if “error theory” is the correct term (it may be); I used to describe my position as “moral anti-realist”, but let’s not get hung up on words.
If I say “2 and 2 make 4,” that can’t be true apart from the meanings of those words, but that doesn’t make it subjective.
Eliezer may be right or he may be wrong, but it is not obvious (even if it turns out to be true) that he is talking about something different from ordinary people. He thinks that he is simply developing what ordinary people mean, and maybe he is. But what you are saying clearly contrasts with what other people mean.
I do think what Eliezer is developing is different from what ordinary people mean. Ordinary people are, for the most part, moral objectivists in the strong sense—they think objectively true morals exist “out there” independently of humankind. This is usually tied into their religious or spiritual beliefs (which most ‘ordinary’ people have).
Eliezer spends a lot of time in the sequences saying things like “there is not a grain of mercy or justice in the universe, it is cold and uncaring, morals are found in us, humans”. This is exactly what most ‘ordinary’ people don’t accept.
Unfortunately, the issue is confused because Eliezer insists on using non-standard terminology. The whole ethics sequence can be seen as shoehorning the phrase “morals are objective” into actually meaning “human!morals are objective”. He claims this is how we should unpack these words, but I don’t believe ‘ordinary’ people would agree if asked. I also don’t think the universal subset of human!morals is nontrivially large or useful.
Eliezer says that what is signified by moral claims is something that would be true even if human beings did not exist, since he says it is basically like a mathematical statement. It is true that no one would make the statement in that situation, but no one would say that “2 and 2 make 4” in the same situation.
He doesn’t think that true morals exist “out there” in the same sense that he doesn’t think that mathematics exists “out there”. That is probably pretty similar to what most people think.
Also, people I know who believe in angels do not think that angels have the same morality as human beings, and those are pretty ordinary people. So that lines up quite closely with what Eliezer thinks as well.
That doesn’t stop me from treating murder as “wrong”. The word “wrong” here unpacks here as follows: I profit most if neither I nor anyone else murders, so I support the social contract of not murdering, and I punish defectors.
What about a norm that it’s OK to murder members of group X (where group X is a group you don’t belong to)? That logic doesn’t seem to apply in that case.
I could either support such a norm, or not support it. I would *treat it as wrong” (two-place word) iff I didn’t support it. I would only call it “wrong” period, as shorthand for “wrong according to me and I’m treating it as wrong”, if it was clear from the context what person or group I was referring to that held it to be wrong.
In other words:
Saying people believe something is “wrong” means they condemn or punish it, and support others doing so. For almost any act there’s someone who doesn’t agree it’s wrong. Saying “it’s wrong” is shorthand for “I think it’s wrong”, and/or “most everyone thinks it wrong”, and (given game theory and human cognition) “I think others should think it’s wrong, and will try to convince them and to punish those who don’t punish defectors, etc”. A group of people who think it’s wrong (including myself) is always implied.
I could either support such a norm, or not support it. I would *treat it as wrong” (two-place word) iff I didn’t support it. I would only call it “wrong” period, as shorthand for “wrong according to me and I’m treating it as wrong”, if it was clear from the context what person or group I was referring to that held it to be wrong.
This is what is normally meant by calling something “subjective”.
It’s subjective in the sense that when two people disagree about morals, there is no objective truth of the matter that could be determined empirically and settle the dispute, outside any formal ethical system they may use. It’s as subjective as goals and values. Objectively I have goal X, but the goal is mine own, so it’s subjective in that sense.
Why would murderers what to subscribe to the “no murder” social contract? The whole point of having objective ethics (in any sense worth the name) is that it applies to people whether they want it to or not.
Edit:
For example, let X = “everybody except DanAmark”...
Just saw this, did you add it? How about let X be some minority for which we can come up with a plausible reason to hate them.
Why would murderers what to subscribe to the “no murder” social contract?
Game-theoretically, because it’s usually better to forgo killing your enemies in exchange for not being killed yourself, unless you’re in a position of relative power. Evolutionarily, because we’re executing the adaptation of not murdering members of the in-group without a valid reason our friends would accept, and modern culture is conductive to very large in-groups.
Your question also mixes up things a bit. Being a murderer is not a personal quality, it’s a fact about a past action. A person who subscribes to the “no murder” contract doesn’t murder, so they aren’t a murderer. A murderer obviously found a reason not to subscribe to the contract, although they may want to re-subscribe to it, may regret their actions, may find excuses, etc.
The whole point of having objective ethics (in any sense worth the name) is that it applies to people whether they want it to or not.
Similarly, the whole point of having an objective religion is that God judges people whether they want Him to or not. But this isn’t an argument for such a God in fact existing.
Ethics is always consensual. What does it mean to say that a theory of ethics “applies” to me if I don’t believe in it and don’t act accordingly? What objective test will reveal a theory of ethics to be true, if no person in the world believes in it?
What does it mean to say that a theory of ethics “applies” to me if I don’t believe in it and don’t act accordingly?
Well, if you use a rigid-designator based definition of “ethical” like e.g. EY does, then “murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter” is like “a nine-pebble heap does not contain a prime number of pebbles, even when made by a human”—they are both technically true, but (in absence of enforcement systems using ethics or primality as their Schelling points) not particularly useful for either predicting or affecting pebblesorters’ or humans’ actions respectively.
I’ve always felt that EY’s wording ends up using words like “ethical” and “objective” in a different sense from most everyone else, which invariably confuses discussions more than it helps.
The sentence “murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter” has two implicit assumptions.
First, that “ethical” means “human!ethical”, which causes confusion because other people (not just me) would naively read the sentence as a claim of moral realism, which is a different thing.
And secondly, that “human!ethics” is a nontrivial set that contains such statements as “do not murder”—which is effectively a claim that all possible human cultures in the past or future (a hugely varied set!) share much the same ethics, or else that people who don’t are “not human”. I disagree with this empirical claim, and find the latter normative one pointless.
So if I don’t consent to your no murder rule, it doesn’t apply to me and I can murder whoever I want?
Yes, though the police “can” arrest you after you do so, people “can” stop associating with you once you’ve announced you don’t consent to that rule, and so on.
Say we’re talking about Nazi Germany so it’s required to report Jews. If someone refuses to follow the rule does that make him an outlaw? Would you say he should follow the law? If he doesn’t, in what sense is he different from my “I can murder whoever I want” example?
If someone refuses to follow the rule does that make him an outlaw?
Yes, of course.
Would you say he should follow the law?
Not sure why my personal opinion is relevant, but he has the option of following the law or not.
If he doesn’t, in what sense is he different from my “I can murder whoever I want” example?
At sufficiently high levels of abstraction he is not different. Once you descend to breathable altitudes, other interesting concepts like “harm” and “autonomy” come into play.
Being a murderer is not a personal quality, it’s a fact about a past action.
How’s this distinction relevant here.
You say, “why would murderers subscribe to the no-murder social contract”? I reply, this is tautological: to call them murderers means they have murdered; at the time they did so, they did not follow the contract.
A better question is why would anyone subscribe to the contract (which I answered), and why would anyone choose not to subscribe, and murder someone.
So if I don’t consent to your no murder rule, it doesn’t apply to me and I can murder whoever I want?
By consensual I mean that a person only follows an ethical or moral rule if they choose to. Morality and ethics involves choices and decisions. True laws of nature or of mathematics are amoral.
I, like others, hold that it’s wrong for everyone to murder, and I act accordingly. You can decide differently and murder whoever you want: this is a fact of physics, not of morality. (Up to determinism, imperfect knowledge, etc.)
By consensual I mean that a person only follows an ethical or moral rule if they choose to.
A person also only believes in something if they choose to. Nevertheless, someone who chooses to believe that 2+2=3 is objectively wrong. Would you say the same thing about someone who chooses not to consent to the no murder rule?
2+2=3 is a statement based on explicit shared assumptions (definitions, axioms), so there’s a sense in which it’s objectively wrong independent of whoever makes it.
Not murdering is not an empirical or mathematical statement; it is a description or prescription of behavior. The only objective way to be wrong about it is to say “DanArmak doesn’t consent to the no-murder rule”; that is objectively wrong. The rule itself isn’t right or wrong any more than any other goal or value. Similarly, preferring a trip to the sea instead of climbing mountains isn’t objectively right or wrong; it can only be wrong in respect to someone’s goals, values, etc.
I don’t, and I feel I might not even understand the question or the position of those who disagree with me. There’s no way I could “believe” in such a concept; it’s not an empirical or mathematical claim which could turn out to be true. What kind of evidence would you count for or against such a concept?
Normative rules or preferences “exist” in the same way that values do. For instance, “don’t murder” is a normative preference. “Maximize the number of paperclips” is another. Neither of them has any special or privileged status of itself. No normative preference is inherently special or interesting or “true”. We’re only interested in the normative preferences we happen to hold, and hold in common with other people.
This disagreement (or possibly misunderstanding) feels like it might be a kind of joy in the merely real. I realize there are no objectively true ethics or morals, but that doesn’t mean I believe my own ethics and morals any less strongly than the average human, or that they are extremely unusual.
No, it’s not a critique of cultural relativism. It’s an observation that I don’t know where the boundary is and that your “normative offense” can be gamed by picking a suitable position on the small-group—large-group spectrum.
You assume that everyone agrees on which offenses are “normative”. That is not the case.
This exact critique is used against single-level (standard) cultural relativism. My analysis is agnostic between objective morality and single-level cultural relativism. It doesn’t cover multi-level cultural relativism.
That said, it handles this case fairly well. If someone wants to argue that something is family-level offensive or country-level offensive, they can’t just equate this with being individual-level offensive.
Echoing VoiceOfRa, none of my analysis is contingent on people agreeing which offenses are normative. If you disagree, I’d love to know which part depends on this assumption.
they can’t just equate this with being individual-level offensive
If there is no established standard, I can equate anything with anything. What’s going to stop me from calling my personal offense “normative”? I’m sure there are some people somewhere who will be just as offended as I am.
none of my analysis is contingent on people agreeing which offenses are normative
Of course it is. If people do not agree on which offenses are normative, the word “normative” loses its meaning and becomes nothing more than “I want some support for being offended so I’ll call the offense ‘normative’ ”. The whole concept of “normative offenses” relies on a large number of people agreeing that the behavior in question is, indeed, offensive.
And by the way, I’m still interested: 20 goats for a bride, offensive or not?
I was merely explaining that my analysis was robust enough to be applied within a multi-level relativism framework. However, in retrospect, that does not appear to be the framework that you are using. What conception of morality are you critiquing my analysis from?
Well, as we’re currently assuming a relativist framework, I’d say not offensive within certain cultural contexts.
“Normative” doesn’t mean “globally normative” here. It can also mean “culturally normative”. Cultures don’t just take positions on object-level positions, they also take meta-level positions that can be used to justify these object-level positions.
So, did we already reach the point where it’s all relative and culture-dependent, and subculture-relevant, etc. and the difference between normative offense and subjective offense disappears into indistinguishability? :-)
I was using subjectively offensive to mean personally offensive; that is subjectively offensive relative to a person. Normatively offensive here means offensive relative to a group. So they are distinct. Does this clear it up? I’m getting quite confused here: are you a cultural relativist or do you believe that morality is individual?
That said, it handles this case fairly well. If someone wants to argue that something is family-level offensive or country-level offensive, they can’t just equate this with being individual-level offensive.
Except most people claiming offense are capable of finding or defining some group in whose name to claim offense.
This is a critique of cultural relativism more than anything else. I’m not a relativist, although my argument here was made in a relativism agnostic manner.
No it wasn’t. Relativists have no non-subjective notion of “normativity”, thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
Edit: In practice of course, most relativists are willing to treat things like murder as if they are objectively wrong. However, this is a case of their System I protecting them from the consequences of their System II beliefs, similar to the way New Agers who don’t believe in objective reality manage to avoid walking out of high story windows.
This is not true of all relativists. There are relativists who believe in entirely objective agent-relative moral facts. In other words, they would say something like, “It is an objective moral truth that X is wrong for members of community Y”. The normative force of “X is wrong” would apply even to members of community Y who don’t believe that X is wrong (hence the objectivity), but it wouldn’t apply to people outside community Y (hence the relativism).
Exactly what I going to say. Thanks.
Maybe a word other than normative would satisfy those relativists who don’t believe in any kind of normative morality, but still believe that morality within a society is the closest thing we can have. Although, this appears to be more a terminology issue than anything else.
I don’t know if I count as a “relativist”, so let’s taboo the terms:
I don’t believe there is an objective morality existing independently of humans. I don’t even believe the category “morality” exists independently of humans (and other animals). I am not a “moral objectivist”.
That doesn’t stop me from treating murder as “wrong”. The word “wrong” here unpacks here as follows: I profit most if neither I nor anyone else murders, so I support the social contract of not murdering, and I punish defectors.
I also have evolved instincts that counteract me murdering and cause me to be upset when others are murdered. I (consciously) treat these the same as any other feelings and instincts: they don’t have a special “moral” status, but I still reliably act on them; just as I like sex and sweets and dislike pain, I dislike murder.
Because almost everyone agrees with me on this, I can act and talk as if it is “objectively” wrong to murder, even though it doesn’t have the status of a physical or logical truth.
I would say this is error theory, because even if you mean something true when you say that “it is wrong to murder,” you do not mean what ordinary people mean, and the thing that they mean, you believe to be false.
If you explain your opinion clearly to ordinary people, I think they will believe that you accept error theory, and they will no longer trust you about anything except when they have a special reason to do so, e.g. if they think you like them personally.
IIUC, you’re saying they would think that because I understand the evolutionary reasons for my instinct not to murder people, and I understand (and accept) the game-theoretical and expected-utility reasons for not murdering people, I am more likely to consciously override these reasons if I find a particular case where they don’t apply. Whereas a deontologist makes a commitment not to murder even if it creates net benefit or saves the whole world (e.g. would you murder Hitler if that was the only way of stopping WW2?)
That seems like it should generalize into an argument that utilitarians and/or rationalists will not be trusted by ‘ordinary’ people. And perhaps even by other rationalists; it may be related to the reasons why our kind can’t cooperate. Although I haven’t observed anything like that in practice; have you?
I don’t think most utilitarians and rationalists accept error theory, or at least most of them say that they don’t, and consequently there won’t be the same reason for distrusting them. For example, Eliezer calls himself a utilitarian but he still believes that “murder is wrong” is an objectively true statement about the relationship between murder and the abstract pattern which we call “right”. And he agrees that it means neither “we don’t like murder” nor “game theory doesn’t recommend murder.”
It may well be true that some people do accept error theory, but don’t admit it. In this way they will advance their goals by getting people to trust them. I would guess that you behave that way in ordinary life as well (in your previous comment you said that you can talk and act as if it is objectively wrong to murder.)
Most people do not think “murder is wrong. Period”, they allow a few exceptions to that rule.
This is probably true as you meant it, but most people don’t call it murder in those circumstances.
(Emphasis mine.) That word we plays a crucial role. It’s the same as my saying “wrong according to us”. You might believe the sentiment “murder is wrong” is shared by all of humanity (although I would disagree, empirically), but that’s not the same as saying it’s “objective” in the same sense as logic or physics. Eliezer would agree that wrong!Human is not the same as wrong!Babyeater or wrong!Superhappies. I merely go one step further and point out that humans (across time and space and different cultures) don’t really agree on morality nearly as much as we like to pretend.
It’s not as if I’m pretending to anything I don’t believe. It’s really wrong for me, according to me to murder; this is objectively true (for me!) and I behave accordingly. If anything, saying there are no universal laws that everyone actually follows should imply I should trust others less, not that others should trust me less.
Put another way, my behavior is the same as that of an objective moralist who also happens to believe most people other than him follow partial or corrupted versions of the objectively true morality, or don’t follow it at all. He and I will behave identically and make identical predictions; I merely remove the extra logical concept of ‘objective morality’ which is empirically undetectable and does no useful predictive work, just like a God who causes no miracles and is impossible to detect.
I’m not sure if “error theory” is the correct term (it may be); I used to describe my position as “moral anti-realist”, but let’s not get hung up on words.
If I say “2 and 2 make 4,” that can’t be true apart from the meanings of those words, but that doesn’t make it subjective.
Eliezer may be right or he may be wrong, but it is not obvious (even if it turns out to be true) that he is talking about something different from ordinary people. He thinks that he is simply developing what ordinary people mean, and maybe he is. But what you are saying clearly contrasts with what other people mean.
I do think what Eliezer is developing is different from what ordinary people mean. Ordinary people are, for the most part, moral objectivists in the strong sense—they think objectively true morals exist “out there” independently of humankind. This is usually tied into their religious or spiritual beliefs (which most ‘ordinary’ people have).
Eliezer spends a lot of time in the sequences saying things like “there is not a grain of mercy or justice in the universe, it is cold and uncaring, morals are found in us, humans”. This is exactly what most ‘ordinary’ people don’t accept.
Unfortunately, the issue is confused because Eliezer insists on using non-standard terminology. The whole ethics sequence can be seen as shoehorning the phrase “morals are objective” into actually meaning “human!morals are objective”. He claims this is how we should unpack these words, but I don’t believe ‘ordinary’ people would agree if asked. I also don’t think the universal subset of human!morals is nontrivially large or useful.
Eliezer says that what is signified by moral claims is something that would be true even if human beings did not exist, since he says it is basically like a mathematical statement. It is true that no one would make the statement in that situation, but no one would say that “2 and 2 make 4” in the same situation.
He doesn’t think that true morals exist “out there” in the same sense that he doesn’t think that mathematics exists “out there”. That is probably pretty similar to what most people think.
Also, people I know who believe in angels do not think that angels have the same morality as human beings, and those are pretty ordinary people. So that lines up quite closely with what Eliezer thinks as well.
What about a norm that it’s OK to murder members of group X (where group X is a group you don’t belong to)? That logic doesn’t seem to apply in that case.
I could either support such a norm, or not support it. I would *treat it as wrong” (two-place word) iff I didn’t support it. I would only call it “wrong” period, as shorthand for “wrong according to me and I’m treating it as wrong”, if it was clear from the context what person or group I was referring to that held it to be wrong.
In other words:
Saying people believe something is “wrong” means they condemn or punish it, and support others doing so. For almost any act there’s someone who doesn’t agree it’s wrong. Saying “it’s wrong” is shorthand for “I think it’s wrong”, and/or “most everyone thinks it wrong”, and (given game theory and human cognition) “I think others should think it’s wrong, and will try to convince them and to punish those who don’t punish defectors, etc”. A group of people who think it’s wrong (including myself) is always implied.
This is what is normally meant by calling something “subjective”.
It’s subjective in the sense that when two people disagree about morals, there is no objective truth of the matter that could be determined empirically and settle the dispute, outside any formal ethical system they may use. It’s as subjective as goals and values. Objectively I have goal X, but the goal is mine own, so it’s subjective in that sense.
In particular, it’s not objective in the sense that physics or mathematics is.
Why would members of group X want to subscribe to such a social contract? For example, let X = “everybody except DanAmark”...
Why would murderers what to subscribe to the “no murder” social contract? The whole point of having objective ethics (in any sense worth the name) is that it applies to people whether they want it to or not.
Edit:
Just saw this, did you add it? How about let X be some minority for which we can come up with a plausible reason to hate them.
Game-theoretically, because it’s usually better to forgo killing your enemies in exchange for not being killed yourself, unless you’re in a position of relative power. Evolutionarily, because we’re executing the adaptation of not murdering members of the in-group without a valid reason our friends would accept, and modern culture is conductive to very large in-groups.
Your question also mixes up things a bit. Being a murderer is not a personal quality, it’s a fact about a past action. A person who subscribes to the “no murder” contract doesn’t murder, so they aren’t a murderer. A murderer obviously found a reason not to subscribe to the contract, although they may want to re-subscribe to it, may regret their actions, may find excuses, etc.
Similarly, the whole point of having an objective religion is that God judges people whether they want Him to or not. But this isn’t an argument for such a God in fact existing.
Ethics is always consensual. What does it mean to say that a theory of ethics “applies” to me if I don’t believe in it and don’t act accordingly? What objective test will reveal a theory of ethics to be true, if no person in the world believes in it?
Well, if you use a rigid-designator based definition of “ethical” like e.g. EY does, then “murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter” is like “a nine-pebble heap does not contain a prime number of pebbles, even when made by a human”—they are both technically true, but (in absence of enforcement systems using ethics or primality as their Schelling points) not particularly useful for either predicting or affecting pebblesorters’ or humans’ actions respectively.
I’ve always felt that EY’s wording ends up using words like “ethical” and “objective” in a different sense from most everyone else, which invariably confuses discussions more than it helps.
The sentence “murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter” has two implicit assumptions.
First, that “ethical” means “human!ethical”, which causes confusion because other people (not just me) would naively read the sentence as a claim of moral realism, which is a different thing.
And secondly, that “human!ethics” is a nontrivial set that contains such statements as “do not murder”—which is effectively a claim that all possible human cultures in the past or future (a hugely varied set!) share much the same ethics, or else that people who don’t are “not human”. I disagree with this empirical claim, and find the latter normative one pointless.
How’s this distinction relevant here.
So if I don’t consent to your no murder rule, it doesn’t apply to me and I can murder whoever I want?
Yes, though the police “can” arrest you after you do so, people “can” stop associating with you once you’ve announced you don’t consent to that rule, and so on.
Sure. Such people are called “outside of the law” and the usual approach is to kill them first.
Would you apply the same to logic to the social contract I mentioned here?
Do you have something specific in mind? Generally speaking, yes, I would.
Say we’re talking about Nazi Germany so it’s required to report Jews. If someone refuses to follow the rule does that make him an outlaw? Would you say he should follow the law? If he doesn’t, in what sense is he different from my “I can murder whoever I want” example?
Yes, of course.
Not sure why my personal opinion is relevant, but he has the option of following the law or not.
At sufficiently high levels of abstraction he is not different. Once you descend to breathable altitudes, other interesting concepts like “harm” and “autonomy” come into play.
You say, “why would murderers subscribe to the no-murder social contract”? I reply, this is tautological: to call them murderers means they have murdered; at the time they did so, they did not follow the contract.
A better question is why would anyone subscribe to the contract (which I answered), and why would anyone choose not to subscribe, and murder someone.
By consensual I mean that a person only follows an ethical or moral rule if they choose to. Morality and ethics involves choices and decisions. True laws of nature or of mathematics are amoral.
I, like others, hold that it’s wrong for everyone to murder, and I act accordingly. You can decide differently and murder whoever you want: this is a fact of physics, not of morality. (Up to determinism, imperfect knowledge, etc.)
A person also only believes in something if they choose to. Nevertheless, someone who chooses to believe that 2+2=3 is objectively wrong. Would you say the same thing about someone who chooses not to consent to the no murder rule?
No, I wouldn’t.
2+2=3 is a statement based on explicit shared assumptions (definitions, axioms), so there’s a sense in which it’s objectively wrong independent of whoever makes it.
Not murdering is not an empirical or mathematical statement; it is a description or prescription of behavior. The only objective way to be wrong about it is to say “DanArmak doesn’t consent to the no-murder rule”; that is objectively wrong. The rule itself isn’t right or wrong any more than any other goal or value. Similarly, preferring a trip to the sea instead of climbing mountains isn’t objectively right or wrong; it can only be wrong in respect to someone’s goals, values, etc.
So you don’t believe in any concept of the normative independent of individual subjective preferences?
I don’t, and I feel I might not even understand the question or the position of those who disagree with me. There’s no way I could “believe” in such a concept; it’s not an empirical or mathematical claim which could turn out to be true. What kind of evidence would you count for or against such a concept?
Normative rules or preferences “exist” in the same way that values do. For instance, “don’t murder” is a normative preference. “Maximize the number of paperclips” is another. Neither of them has any special or privileged status of itself. No normative preference is inherently special or interesting or “true”. We’re only interested in the normative preferences we happen to hold, and hold in common with other people.
This disagreement (or possibly misunderstanding) feels like it might be a kind of joy in the merely real. I realize there are no objectively true ethics or morals, but that doesn’t mean I believe my own ethics and morals any less strongly than the average human, or that they are extremely unusual.
No, it’s not a critique of cultural relativism. It’s an observation that I don’t know where the boundary is and that your “normative offense” can be gamed by picking a suitable position on the small-group—large-group spectrum.
You assume that everyone agrees on which offenses are “normative”. That is not the case.
Not everyone agrees on what things are true either. That doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist.
This exact critique is used against single-level (standard) cultural relativism. My analysis is agnostic between objective morality and single-level cultural relativism. It doesn’t cover multi-level cultural relativism.
That said, it handles this case fairly well. If someone wants to argue that something is family-level offensive or country-level offensive, they can’t just equate this with being individual-level offensive.
Echoing VoiceOfRa, none of my analysis is contingent on people agreeing which offenses are normative. If you disagree, I’d love to know which part depends on this assumption.
If there is no established standard, I can equate anything with anything. What’s going to stop me from calling my personal offense “normative”? I’m sure there are some people somewhere who will be just as offended as I am.
Of course it is. If people do not agree on which offenses are normative, the word “normative” loses its meaning and becomes nothing more than “I want some support for being offended so I’ll call the offense ‘normative’ ”. The whole concept of “normative offenses” relies on a large number of people agreeing that the behavior in question is, indeed, offensive.
And by the way, I’m still interested: 20 goats for a bride, offensive or not?
I was merely explaining that my analysis was robust enough to be applied within a multi-level relativism framework. However, in retrospect, that does not appear to be the framework that you are using. What conception of morality are you critiquing my analysis from?
Relative. If you accept objective morality then the point becomes moot—there is no “normative” or “subjective”, there is just right and wrong.
How about them goats?
Well, as we’re currently assuming a relativist framework, I’d say not offensive within certain cultural contexts.
“Normative” doesn’t mean “globally normative” here. It can also mean “culturally normative”. Cultures don’t just take positions on object-level positions, they also take meta-level positions that can be used to justify these object-level positions.
So, did we already reach the point where it’s all relative and culture-dependent, and subculture-relevant, etc. and the difference between normative offense and subjective offense disappears into indistinguishability? :-)
I was using subjectively offensive to mean personally offensive; that is subjectively offensive relative to a person. Normatively offensive here means offensive relative to a group. So they are distinct. Does this clear it up? I’m getting quite confused here: are you a cultural relativist or do you believe that morality is individual?
I don’t fit into pigeonholes well :-)
Except most people claiming offense are capable of finding or defining some group in whose name to claim offense.