In my view, the neural-net type of processing has different strength and weaknesses from the explicit reasoning, and they are often complementary.
Agreed. As I say in the post:
Of course cold calculated reasoning has its place, and many situations call for it. But there are many more in which being calculating is wrong.
I also mention that faking it til you make it (which relies on explicit S2 type processing) is also justified sometimes, but something one ideally dispenses with.
“moral perception” or “virtues” …is not magic, bit also just a computation running on brains.
Of course. But I want to highlight something you might be have missed: part of the lesson of the “one thought too many” story is that sometimes explicit S2 type processing is intrinsically the wrong sort of processing for that situation: all else being equal you would be better person if you relied on S1 in that situation. Using S2 in that situation counted against your moral standing. Now of course, if your S1 processing is so flawed that it would have resulted in you taking a drastically worse action, then relying on S2 was overall the better thing for you to do in that moment. But, zooming out, the corollary claim here (to frame things another way) is that even if your S2 process was developed to arbitrarily high levels of accuracy in identifying and taking the right action, there would still be value left on the table because you didn’t develop your S1 process. There are a few ways to cash out this idea, but the most common is to say this: developing one’s character (one’s disposition to feel and react a certain way when confronted with a given situation – your S1 process) in a certain way (gaining the virtues) is constitutive of human flourishing – a life without such character development is lacking. Developing one’s moral reasoning (your S2 process) is also important (maybe even necessary), but not sufficient for human flourishing.
Regarding explanatory fundamentality: I don’t think your analogy is very good. When you describe mechanical phenomena using the different frameworks you mention, there is no disagreement between them about the facts. Different moral theories disagree. They posit different assumptions and get different results. There is certainly much confusion about the moral facts, but saying theorists are confused about whether they disagree with each other is to make a caricature of them. Sure, they occasionally realize they were talking past each other, but that’s the exception not the rule.
We’re not going to resolve those disagreements soon, and you may not care about them, which is fine – but don’t think that they don’t exist. A closer analogy might be different interpretations of QM: just like most moral theorists agree on ~90% of all common sense moral judgments, QM theorists agree on the facts we can currently verify but disagree about more esoteric claims that we can’t yet verify (e.g. existence of other possible worlds). I feel like I need to remind EA people (which you may or may not be) that the EA movement is unorthodox, it is radical (in some ways – not all). That sprinkle of radicalism is a consequence of unwaveringly following very specificphilosophical positions to their logical limits. I’m not saying here that being unorthodox automatically means you’re bad. I’m just saying: tread carefully and be prepared to course-correct.
Agreed. As I say in the post:
I also mention that faking it til you make it (which relies on explicit S2 type processing) is also justified sometimes, but something one ideally dispenses with.
Of course. But I want to highlight something you might be have missed: part of the lesson of the “one thought too many” story is that sometimes explicit S2 type processing is intrinsically the wrong sort of processing for that situation: all else being equal you would be better person if you relied on S1 in that situation. Using S2 in that situation counted against your moral standing. Now of course, if your S1 processing is so flawed that it would have resulted in you taking a drastically worse action, then relying on S2 was overall the better thing for you to do in that moment. But, zooming out, the corollary claim here (to frame things another way) is that even if your S2 process was developed to arbitrarily high levels of accuracy in identifying and taking the right action, there would still be value left on the table because you didn’t develop your S1 process. There are a few ways to cash out this idea, but the most common is to say this: developing one’s character (one’s disposition to feel and react a certain way when confronted with a given situation – your S1 process) in a certain way (gaining the virtues) is constitutive of human flourishing – a life without such character development is lacking. Developing one’s moral reasoning (your S2 process) is also important (maybe even necessary), but not sufficient for human flourishing.
Regarding explanatory fundamentality:
I don’t think your analogy is very good. When you describe mechanical phenomena using the different frameworks you mention, there is no disagreement between them about the facts. Different moral theories disagree. They posit different assumptions and get different results. There is certainly much confusion about the moral facts, but saying theorists are confused about whether they disagree with each other is to make a caricature of them. Sure, they occasionally realize they were talking past each other, but that’s the exception not the rule.
We’re not going to resolve those disagreements soon, and you may not care about them, which is fine – but don’t think that they don’t exist. A closer analogy might be different interpretations of QM: just like most moral theorists agree on ~90% of all common sense moral judgments, QM theorists agree on the facts we can currently verify but disagree about more esoteric claims that we can’t yet verify (e.g. existence of other possible worlds). I feel like I need to remind EA people (which you may or may not be) that the EA movement is unorthodox, it is radical (in some ways – not all). That sprinkle of radicalism is a consequence of unwaveringly following very specific philosophical positions to their logical limits. I’m not saying here that being unorthodox automatically means you’re bad. I’m just saying: tread carefully and be prepared to course-correct.