Okay, yeah, so belief in belief is a thing. We can profess opinions that we’ve been taught are virtuous to hold without deeply integrating them into our worldview; and that’s probably increasingly common these days as traditional belief systems clank their way into some sort of partial conformity with mainstream secular ethics. But at the same time, we should not automatically assume that anyone professing traditional values—or for that matter unusual nontraditional ones—is doing so out of self-interest or a failure to integrate their ethics.
On the contrary, I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that somebody who bases their morality on religious background has not integrated these preferences and is simply confused. My objection here is mainly in case somebody brings up a more extreme example. In these ethical debates, somebody always (me this time, I guess) brings up the example of Islamic sub-groups who throw acid in the faces of their daughters. Somebody always ends up claiming that “well that’s their culture, you know, you can’t criticize that. Who are you to say that they are wrong to do so?”. In that case, my reply would be that those people do not actually have a preference for disfigured daughters, they merely hold the belief that this is right as a result of their religion. This can be seen from the fact that the only people who do this hold more or less the same set of religious beliefs. And given that the only ones who hold that ‘preference’ do so as a result of a belief which is factually false, I think it’s again reasonable to say: No, I do not respect their beliefs and their culture is wrong and stupid.
Setting aside the issues with “terminal value” in a human context, it may well be that post-Enlightenment secular ethics are closer in some absolute sense to a human optimal, and that a single optimal exists.
The point is not so much whether there is one optimum, but rather that some cultures are better than others and that progress is in fact possible. If you agree with that, we have already closed most of the inferential distance between us. :)
Even if people don’t have fully integrated beliefs in destructive policies, their beliefs can be integrated enough to lead to destructive behavior.
The Muslims who throw acid in their daughters’ faces may not have an absolute preference for disfigured daughters, but they may prefer disfigured daughters over being attacked by their neighbors for permitting their daughters more freedom than is locally acceptable—or prefer to not be attacked by the imagined opinions (of other Muslims and/or of Allah) which they’re carrying in their minds.
Also, even though it may not be a terminal value, I’d say there are plenty of people who take pleasure in hurting people, and more who take pleasure in seeing other people hurt.
Somebody always ends up claiming that “well that’s their culture, you know, you can’t criticize that. Who are you to say that they are wrong to do so?” [...] The point is not so much whether there is one optimum, but rather that some cultures are better than others and that progress is in fact possible.
There’s some subtlety here. I believe that ethical propositions are ultimately reducible to physical facts (involving idealized preference satisfaction, although I don’t think it’d be productive to dive into the metaethical rabbit hole here), and that cultures’ moral systems can in principle be evaluated in those terms. So no, culture isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. But that works both ways, and I think it’s very likely that many of the products of modern secular ethics are as firmly tied to the culture they come from as would be, say, an injunction to stone people who wear robes woven from two fibers. We don’t magically divorce ourselves from cultural influence when we stop paying attention to the alleged pronouncements of the big beardy dude in the sky. For these reasons I try to be cautious about—though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “skeptical of”—claims of ethical progress in any particular domain.
The other fork of this is stability of preference across individuals. I know I’ve been beating this drum pretty hard, but preference is complicated; among other things, preferences are nodes in a deeply nested system that includes a number of cultural feedback loops. We don’t have any general way of looking at a preference and saying whether or not it’s “true”. We do have some good heuristics—if a particular preference appears only in adherents of a certain religion, and their justification for it is “the Triple Goddess revealed it to us”, it’s probably fairly shallow—but they’re nowhere near good enough to evaluate every ethical proposition, especially if it’s close to something generally thought of as a cultural universal.
Islamic sub-groups who throw acid in the faces of their daughters [...] the only people who do this hold more or less the same set of religious beliefs.
The Wikipedia page on acid throwing describes it as endemic to a number of African and Central and South Asian countries, along with a few outside those regions, with religious cultures ranging from Islam through Hinduism and Buddhism. You may be referring to some subset of acid attacks (the word “daughter” doesn’t appear in the article), but if there is one, I can’t see it from here.
Fair enough. I largely agree with your analysis: I agree that preferences are complicated, and I would even go as far as to say that they change a little every time we think about them. That does make things tricky for those who want to build a utopia for all mankind! However, in every day life I think objections on such an abstract level aren’t so important. The important thing is that we can agree on the object level, e.g. sex is not actually sinful, regardless of how many people believe it is. Saying that sex is sinful is perhaps not factually wrong, but rather it belies a kind of fundamental confusion regarding the way reality works that puts it in the ‘not even wrong’ category. The fact that it’s so hard for people to be logical about their moral beliefs is actually precisely why I think it’s a good litmus test of rationality/clear thinking: If it were easy to get it right, it wouldn’t be much of a test.
The Wikipedia page on acid throwing describes it as endemic to a number of African and Central and South Asian countries, along with a few outside those regions, with religious cultures ranging from Islam through Hinduism and Buddhism.
Looking at that page I am still getting the impression that it’s primarily Islamic cultures that do this, but I’ll agree that calling it exclusively Islamic was wrong. Thanks for the correction :)
On the contrary, I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that somebody who bases their morality on religious background has not integrated these preferences and is simply confused. My objection here is mainly in case somebody brings up a more extreme example. In these ethical debates, somebody always (me this time, I guess) brings up the example of Islamic sub-groups who throw acid in the faces of their daughters. Somebody always ends up claiming that “well that’s their culture, you know, you can’t criticize that. Who are you to say that they are wrong to do so?”. In that case, my reply would be that those people do not actually have a preference for disfigured daughters, they merely hold the belief that this is right as a result of their religion. This can be seen from the fact that the only people who do this hold more or less the same set of religious beliefs. And given that the only ones who hold that ‘preference’ do so as a result of a belief which is factually false, I think it’s again reasonable to say: No, I do not respect their beliefs and their culture is wrong and stupid.
The point is not so much whether there is one optimum, but rather that some cultures are better than others and that progress is in fact possible. If you agree with that, we have already closed most of the inferential distance between us. :)
Even if people don’t have fully integrated beliefs in destructive policies, their beliefs can be integrated enough to lead to destructive behavior.
The Muslims who throw acid in their daughters’ faces may not have an absolute preference for disfigured daughters, but they may prefer disfigured daughters over being attacked by their neighbors for permitting their daughters more freedom than is locally acceptable—or prefer to not be attacked by the imagined opinions (of other Muslims and/or of Allah) which they’re carrying in their minds.
Also, even though it may not be a terminal value, I’d say there are plenty of people who take pleasure in hurting people, and more who take pleasure in seeing other people hurt.
Agreed on each count.
There’s some subtlety here. I believe that ethical propositions are ultimately reducible to physical facts (involving idealized preference satisfaction, although I don’t think it’d be productive to dive into the metaethical rabbit hole here), and that cultures’ moral systems can in principle be evaluated in those terms. So no, culture isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. But that works both ways, and I think it’s very likely that many of the products of modern secular ethics are as firmly tied to the culture they come from as would be, say, an injunction to stone people who wear robes woven from two fibers. We don’t magically divorce ourselves from cultural influence when we stop paying attention to the alleged pronouncements of the big beardy dude in the sky. For these reasons I try to be cautious about—though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “skeptical of”—claims of ethical progress in any particular domain.
The other fork of this is stability of preference across individuals. I know I’ve been beating this drum pretty hard, but preference is complicated; among other things, preferences are nodes in a deeply nested system that includes a number of cultural feedback loops. We don’t have any general way of looking at a preference and saying whether or not it’s “true”. We do have some good heuristics—if a particular preference appears only in adherents of a certain religion, and their justification for it is “the Triple Goddess revealed it to us”, it’s probably fairly shallow—but they’re nowhere near good enough to evaluate every ethical proposition, especially if it’s close to something generally thought of as a cultural universal.
The Wikipedia page on acid throwing describes it as endemic to a number of African and Central and South Asian countries, along with a few outside those regions, with religious cultures ranging from Islam through Hinduism and Buddhism. You may be referring to some subset of acid attacks (the word “daughter” doesn’t appear in the article), but if there is one, I can’t see it from here.
Fair enough. I largely agree with your analysis: I agree that preferences are complicated, and I would even go as far as to say that they change a little every time we think about them. That does make things tricky for those who want to build a utopia for all mankind! However, in every day life I think objections on such an abstract level aren’t so important. The important thing is that we can agree on the object level, e.g. sex is not actually sinful, regardless of how many people believe it is. Saying that sex is sinful is perhaps not factually wrong, but rather it belies a kind of fundamental confusion regarding the way reality works that puts it in the ‘not even wrong’ category. The fact that it’s so hard for people to be logical about their moral beliefs is actually precisely why I think it’s a good litmus test of rationality/clear thinking: If it were easy to get it right, it wouldn’t be much of a test.
Looking at that page I am still getting the impression that it’s primarily Islamic cultures that do this, but I’ll agree that calling it exclusively Islamic was wrong. Thanks for the correction :)