Confidence in moral judgments is never a sound criterion for them being “terminal”, it seems to me.
To see why, consider that ones working values are unavoidably a function of two related things: one’s picture of oneself, and of the social world. Thus, confident judgments are likely to reflect confidence in relevant parts of these pictures, rather than the shape of the function. To take your example, your adverse judgement of authority could have been a reflection of a confident picture of your ideal self as not being submissive, and of human society at its current state of development as being capable of operating without authority (doubtless oversimplifying greatly, but I hope you get the idea).
A crude mathematical model may help. If M is a vector of your moral values, and S and I is your understanding of society and personal construct respectively, then I am suggesting M = F(S, I). Then the problem is that “terminal values” as I understand them reside in F, but it is only M that is directly accessible to introspection. It is extremely difficult to imagine away the effect of S and I, but one way of making progress should be to vary S & I. That is, try hard to imagine being in an utterly different social context to the one we know. EG: an ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal group; a group of castaways on an island, the remainder being young children; an encounter with aliens; in a group defending ones family against an evil oppressor; etc. etc. Likewise, imagine being in the shoes of somebody with very different aptitudes and personality. The things that remain constant—the things that tell us how to deal with all these different cases—are our terminal values. (Or rather, they would be if we could only eliminate self-deception.)
EG: an ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal group; a group of castaways on an island, the remainder being young children; an encounter with aliens; in a group defending ones family against an evil oppressor; etc. etc. Likewise, imagine being in the shoes of somebody with very different aptitudes and personality. The things that remain constant—the things that tell us how to deal with all these different cases—are our terminal values. (Or rather, they would be if we could only eliminate self-deception.)
Excellent suggestion.
I would like to add “Nazi”to that list, and note that if you imagine doing something other than the historical results (in those cases where we know the historical result) you’re doing this wrong.
EDIT: reading this over, it sounds kinda sarcastic. Just want to clarify I’m being sincere here.
Yes indeed, it is a challenge to understand how the same human moral functionality “F” can result in a very different value system “M” to ones own, though I suspect a lot of historical reading would be necessary to fully understand the Nazi’s construction of the social world—“S”, in my shorthand. A contemporary example of the same challenge is the cultures that practice female genital mutilation. You don’t have to agree with a construction of the world to begin to see how it results in the avowed values that emerge from it, but you do have to be able to picture it properly. In both cases, this challenge has to be distinguished from the somewhat easier task of explaining the origins of the value system concerned.
Oh, I didn’t mean it was particularly challenging—at least, as long as you avoid the antipattern of modelling them as Evil Monsters—just that it was a good exercise for this sort of thing. Indeed, I think most people can model the antisemitism (if not the philosophy and rhetorical/emotional power) by imagining society is being subverted by insidious alien Pod People.
You don’t have to agree with a construction of the world to begin to see how it results in the avowed values that emerge from it, but you do have to be able to picture it properly.
Another excellent point.
A contemporary example of the same challenge is the cultures that practice female genital mutilation.
I don’t know much about FGM or the cultures that practice it, but it might easily be analogous to so-called “male genital mutilation” or circumcision.
Confidence in moral judgments is never a sound criterion for them being “terminal”, it seems to me.
To see why, consider that ones working values are unavoidably a function of two related things: one’s picture of oneself, and of the social world. Thus, confident judgments are likely to reflect confidence in relevant parts of these pictures, rather than the shape of the function. To take your example, your adverse judgement of authority could have been a reflection of a confident picture of your ideal self as not being submissive, and of human society at its current state of development as being capable of operating without authority (doubtless oversimplifying greatly, but I hope you get the idea).
A crude mathematical model may help. If M is a vector of your moral values, and S and I is your understanding of society and personal construct respectively, then I am suggesting M = F(S, I). Then the problem is that “terminal values” as I understand them reside in F, but it is only M that is directly accessible to introspection. It is extremely difficult to imagine away the effect of S and I, but one way of making progress should be to vary S & I. That is, try hard to imagine being in an utterly different social context to the one we know. EG: an ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal group; a group of castaways on an island, the remainder being young children; an encounter with aliens; in a group defending ones family against an evil oppressor; etc. etc. Likewise, imagine being in the shoes of somebody with very different aptitudes and personality. The things that remain constant—the things that tell us how to deal with all these different cases—are our terminal values. (Or rather, they would be if we could only eliminate self-deception.)
Excellent suggestion.
I would like to add “Nazi”to that list, and note that if you imagine doing something other than the historical results (in those cases where we know the historical result) you’re doing this wrong.
EDIT: reading this over, it sounds kinda sarcastic. Just want to clarify I’m being sincere here.
Yes indeed, it is a challenge to understand how the same human moral functionality “F” can result in a very different value system “M” to ones own, though I suspect a lot of historical reading would be necessary to fully understand the Nazi’s construction of the social world—“S”, in my shorthand. A contemporary example of the same challenge is the cultures that practice female genital mutilation. You don’t have to agree with a construction of the world to begin to see how it results in the avowed values that emerge from it, but you do have to be able to picture it properly. In both cases, this challenge has to be distinguished from the somewhat easier task of explaining the origins of the value system concerned.
Oh, I didn’t mean it was particularly challenging—at least, as long as you avoid the antipattern of modelling them as Evil Monsters—just that it was a good exercise for this sort of thing. Indeed, I think most people can model the antisemitism (if not the philosophy and rhetorical/emotional power) by imagining society is being subverted by insidious alien Pod People.
Another excellent point.
I don’t know much about FGM or the cultures that practice it, but it might easily be analogous to so-called “male genital mutilation” or circumcision.