I mean, this is technically true, but I feel like it hides from the problem? If I encounter a group of Purple people and I’m trying to figure out if they’re moral agents like me, or if I can exploit them for my own purposes, and someone says don’t worry, morality is only in the map, I don’t feel that helps me solve the problem.
Right—it doesn’t solve the problem, it identifies it. You can’t figure out if Purple People are moral targets, you can decide they are (or aren’t), and you can ask others if they’ll punish you for treating them as such. In no case is there a “correct” answer you can change by a measurement.
Now you get it! That was one of the shorter paths to enlightenment I’ve seen.
Sadly, just because it’s a non-objective set of personal and societal beliefs, does NOT mean we can easily decide otherwise. There’s something like momentum in human cognition that makes changes of this sort very slow. These things are very sticky, and often only change significantly by individual replacement over generations, not considered decisions within individuals (though there’s some of that, too, especially in youth).
In addition to the stickiness of institutional beliefs, I would add that individually agents cannot decide against their own objective functions (except merely verbally). In the case of humans, we cannot decide what qualities our phenomenal experience will have; it is a fact of the matter rather than an opinion that suffering is undesirable for oneself, etc.. One can verbally pronounce that “I don’t care about my suffering”, but the phenomenal experience of badness will in fact remain.
Yes, it is not a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ in general, you are right. But it is one in the specific case of agents (like ourselves). I cannot decide that my suffering is not undesirable to me, and so I am limited to a normative frame of reference in at least this case.
I don’t think it’s wrong to ‘reason within’ that “normative frame of reference” but I think the point was that we can’t expect all other possible minds to reason in a similar way, even just from their own similar ‘frame of reference’.
I don’t think it’s wrong to also (always) consider things from our own frame of reference tho.
I believe that pushes the arbitrariness to the wrong level. What’s (arguably) arbitrary is the metaethical system itself. That doesn’t mean ethics-level questions have an arbitrary answer in this sense.
Been a long time since I’ve watched Love and Death, but I have the urge to shout “Yes, but subjectivity is objective!”.
IMO, arbitrariness cascades down levels of concreteness. it’s not real because there is no possible way to confirm whether it corresponds to observations. At any level—there’s no way to determine if a metaethics generates ethics which correspond to reality.
IMO, arbitrariness cascades down levels of concreteness.
That doesn’t mean the answer can be arbitrarily picked. If I arbitrarily decide on a statement being a theorem in a set theory, I might still be wrong even if its axioms are in some sense arbitrary.
I mean, this is technically true, but I feel like it hides from the problem? If I encounter a group of Purple people and I’m trying to figure out if they’re moral agents like me, or if I can exploit them for my own purposes, and someone says don’t worry, morality is only in the map, I don’t feel that helps me solve the problem.
Right—it doesn’t solve the problem, it identifies it. You can’t figure out if Purple People are moral targets, you can decide they are (or aren’t), and you can ask others if they’ll punish you for treating them as such. In no case is there a “correct” answer you can change by a measurement.
Your attitude extends far past morality, and dissolves all problems in general because we can decide that something isn’t a problem.
Now you get it! That was one of the shorter paths to enlightenment I’ve seen.
Sadly, just because it’s a non-objective set of personal and societal beliefs, does NOT mean we can easily decide otherwise. There’s something like momentum in human cognition that makes changes of this sort very slow. These things are very sticky, and often only change significantly by individual replacement over generations, not considered decisions within individuals (though there’s some of that, too, especially in youth).
In addition to the stickiness of institutional beliefs, I would add that individually agents cannot decide against their own objective functions (except merely verbally). In the case of humans, we cannot decide what qualities our phenomenal experience will have; it is a fact of the matter rather than an opinion that suffering is undesirable for oneself, etc.. One can verbally pronounce that “I don’t care about my suffering”, but the phenomenal experience of badness will in fact remain.
That seems true, but not also a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ either.
‘Problem’ seems like an inherently moral idea/frame.
Yes, it is not a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ in general, you are right. But it is one in the specific case of agents (like ourselves). I cannot decide that my suffering is not undesirable to me, and so I am limited to a normative frame of reference in at least this case.
I don’t think it’s wrong to ‘reason within’ that “normative frame of reference” but I think the point was that we can’t expect all other possible minds to reason in a similar way, even just from their own similar ‘frame of reference’.
I don’t think it’s wrong to also (always) consider things from our own frame of reference tho.
I believe that pushes the arbitrariness to the wrong level. What’s (arguably) arbitrary is the metaethical system itself. That doesn’t mean ethics-level questions have an arbitrary answer in this sense.
Been a long time since I’ve watched Love and Death, but I have the urge to shout “Yes, but subjectivity is objective!”.
IMO, arbitrariness cascades down levels of concreteness. it’s not real because there is no possible way to confirm whether it corresponds to observations. At any level—there’s no way to determine if a metaethics generates ethics which correspond to reality.
That doesn’t mean the answer can be arbitrarily picked. If I arbitrarily decide on a statement being a theorem in a set theory, I might still be wrong even if its axioms are in some sense arbitrary.