We seem to disagree on a fundamental level. I reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction: I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity. Rationality indeed does not determine values, in the same way that rationality does not determine cheese, but questions about morality and cheese should both be answered in a rational and factual manner all the same.
If someone tells me that they grew up in a culture where they were taught that eating cheese is a sin, then I’m sorry to be so blunt about it (ok, not really) but their culture is stupid and wrong.
I strongly reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction. I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity.
Interesting. That’s a rather basic and low-level disagreement.
So, let’s take a look at Alice and Bob. Alice says “I like the color green! We should paint all the buildings in town green!”. Bob says “I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”. Are these statements meaningless? Or are they reducible to factual matters?
By the way, your position was quite popular historically. The Roman Catholic church was (and still is) a big proponent.
I cannot speak for Sophronius of course, but here is one possible answer. It may be that morality is “objective” in the sense that Eliezer tried to defend in the metaethics sequence. Roughly, when someone says X is good they mean that X is part of of a loosely defined set of things that make humans flourish, and by virtue of the psychological unity of mankind we can be reasonably confident that this is a more-or-less well-defined set and that if humans were perfectly informed and rational they would end up agreeing about which things are in it, as the CEV proposal assumes.
Then we can confidently say that both Alice and Bob in your example are objectively mistaken (it is completely implausible that CEV is achieved by painting all buildings the color that Alice or Bob happens to like subjectively the most, as opposed to leaving the decision to the free market, or perhaps careful science-based urban planning done by a FAI). We can also confidently say that some real-world expressions of values (e.g. “Heretics should be burned at the stake”, which was popular a few hundred years ago) are false. Others are more debatable. In particular, the last two examples in Sophronius’ list are cases where I am reasonably confident that his answers are the correct ones, but not as close to 100%-epsilon probability as I am on the examples I gave above.
Roughly, when someone says X is good they mean that X is part of of a loosely defined set of things that make humans flourish, and by virtue of the psychological unity of mankind we can be reasonably confident that this is a more-or-less well-defined set and that if humans were perfectly informed and rational they would end up agreeing about which things are in it
Well, I can’t speak for other people but when I say “X is good” I mean nothing of that sort. I am pretty sure the majority of people on this planet don’t think of “good” this way either.
Then we can confidently say
Nope, you can say. If your “we” includes me then no, “we” can’t say that.
By “Then we can confidently say” I just meant “Assuming we accept the above analysis of morality, then we can confidently say…”. I am not sure I accept it myself; I proposed it as a way one could believe that normative questions have objective answers without straying as far form the general LW worldview as being a Roman Catholic.
By the way, the metaethical analysis I outlined does not require that people think consciously of something like CEV whenever they use the word “good”. It is a proposed explication in the Carnapian sense of the folk concept of “good” in the same way that, say, VNM utility theory is an explication of “rational”.
So, let’s take a look at Alice and Bob. Alice says “I like the color green! We should paint all the buildings in town green!”. Bob says “I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”. Are these statements meaningless? Or are they reducible to factual matters?
These statements are not meaningless. They are reducible to factual matters. “I like the colour blue” is a factual statement about Bob’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Bob’s brain). Presumably Bob is correct in his assertion, but if I know Bob well enough I might point out that he absolutely detests everything that is the colour blue even though he honestly believes he likes the colour blue. The statement would be false in that case.
Furthermore, the statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” follows logically from his previous statement about his preferences regarding blueness. Certainly, the more people are found to prefer blueness over greenness, the more evidence this provides in favour of the claim “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” which is itself reducible to “A large number of people including myself prefer for the buildings in this town to be blue, and I therefore favour painting them in this colour!”
Contrast the above with the statement “I like blue, therefore we should all have cheese”, which is also a should claim but which can be rejected as illogical. This should make it clear that should statements are not all equally valid, and that they are subject to logical rigour just like any other claim.
“I like the colour blue” is a factual statement about Bob’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Bob’s brain).
Let’s introduce Charlie.
“I think women should be barefoot and pregnant” is a factual statement about Charlie’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Charlie’s brain).
Furthermore, the statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” follows logically from his previous statement about his preferences regarding blueness.
Futhermore, the statement “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” follows logically from Charlie’s previous statement about his preferences regarding women.
I would expect you to say that Charlie is factually wrong. In which way is he factually wrong and Bob isn’t?
Certainly, the more people are found to prefer blueness over greenness, the more evidence this provides in favour of the claim “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”
The statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” is not a claim in need of evidence. It is a command, an expression of what Bob thinks should happen. It has nothing to do with how many people think the same.
Assuming “should” is meant in a moral sense, we can say that “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” is in fact a claim in need of evidence. Specifically, it says (to 2 decimal places) that we would all be better off / happier / flourish more if the buildings are painted blue. This is certainly true if it turns out the majority of the town really likes blue, so that they would be happier, but it does not entirely follow from Bob’s claim that he likes blue—if the rest of the town really hated blue, then it would be reasonable to say that their discomfort outweighed his happiness. In this case he would be factually incorrect to say “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”.
In contrast, you can treat “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” as a claim in need of evidence, and in this case we can establish it as false. Most obviously because the proposed situation would not be very good for women, and we shouldn’t do something that harms half the human race unnecessarily.
Not at all and I don’t see why would you assume a specific morality.
Bob says “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” to mean that it would make him happier and he doesn’t care at all about what other people around think about the idea.
Bob is not a utilitarian :-)
you can treat “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” as a claim in need of evidence
Exactly the same thing—Charlie is not a utilitarian either. He thinks he will be better off in the world where women are barefoot and pregnant.
But he says “We should” not “I want” because there is the implication that I should also paint the buildings blue. But if the only reason I should do so is because he wants me to, it raises the question of why I should do what he wants. And if he answers “You should do what I want because it’s what I want”, it’s a tautology.
Putin has a way of adding his wants to my wants, through fear, bribes, or other incentives. But then the direct cause of my actions would be the fear/bribe/etc, not the simple fact that he wants it.
Presumably, Bob doesn’t have a way of making me care about what he wants (beyond the extent to which I care about what a generic stranger wants). If he were to pay me, that would be different, but he can’t make me care simply because that’s his preference. When he says “We should paint the buildings blue” he’s saying “I want the buildings painted blue” and “You want the buildings painted blue”, but if I don’t want the buildings painted blue, he’s wrong.
Presumably, Bob doesn’t have a way of making me care about what he wants
Why not? Much of interactions in a human society are precisely ways of making others care what someone wants.
In any case, the original issue was whether Bob’s preference for blue could be described as “correct” or “wrong”. How exactly does Bob manage to get what he wants is neither here nor there.
he’s saying … “You want the buildings painted blue”
The original statement was “I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” His preference for blue can neither be right nor wrong, but the second sentence is something that can be ’correct” or “wrong”.
I wonder if that someone will make the logical step to insisting that moral egoists should be reeducated to make them change to a “valid” moral position :-/
In contrast, you can treat “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” as a claim in need of evidence, and in this case we can establish it as false. Most obviously because the proposed situation would not be very good for women
That’s just looking at one of the direct consequences, accepting for the sake of argument that most women would prefer not to be “barefoot and pregnant”. The problem is that, for these kinds of major social changes, the direct effects tend to be dominated by indirect effects and your argument makes no attempt to analyze the indirect effects.
Technically you are correct, so you can read my above argument as figuratively “accurate to one decimal place”. The important thing is that there’s nothing mysterious going on here in a linguistic or metaethical sense.
I partly agree, but a tradition that developed under certain conditions isn’t necessarily optimal under different conditions (e.g. much better technology and medicine, less need for manual labour, fewer stupid people (at least for now), etc.).
Otherwise, we’d be even better off just executing our evolved adaptations, which had even more time to develop.
accepting for the sake of argument that most women would prefer not to be “barefoot and pregnant”.
Depends on the context :-D In China a few centuries ago a woman quite reasonably might prefer to be barefoot (as opposed to have her feet tightly bound to disfigure them) and pregnant (as opposed to barren which made her socially worthless).
“I think women should be barefoot and pregnant” is a factual statement about Charlie’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Charlie’s brain).
Futhermore, the statement “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” follows logically from Charlie’s previous statement about his preferences regarding women.
I would expect you to say that Charlie is factually wrong. In which way is he factually wrong and Bob isn’t?
Charlie is, presumably, factually correct in that he thinks that he holds that view. However, while preferences regarding colour are well established, I am sceptical regarding the claim that this is an actual terminal preference that Charlie holds. It is possible that he finds pregnant barefeeted women attractive, in which case his statement gives valid information regarding his preferences which might be taken into account by others: In this case it is meaningful. Alternatively, if he were raised to think that this is a belief one ought to hold then the statement is merely signalling politics and is therefore of an entirely different nature.
“I like blue and want the town to be painted blue” gives factual info regarding the universe. “Women ought to be pregnant because my church says so!” does not have the primary goal of providing info, it has the goal of pushing politics.
Imagine a person holding a gun to your head and saying “You should give me your money”. Regardless of his use of the word “should”, he is making an implicit logical argument: 1) Giving me your money reduces your chances of getting shot by me 2) You presumably do not want to get shot 3) Therefore, you should give me your money
If you respond to the man by saying that morality is relative, you are rather missing the point.
The statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” is not a claim in need of evidence. It is a command, an expression of what Bob thinks should happen. It has nothing to do with how many people think the same.
I think you are missing the subtle hidden meanings of everyday discourse. Imagine Bob saying that the town should be painted blue. Then, someone else comes with arguments for why the town should not be painted Blue. Bob eventually agrees. “You are right”, he says, “that was a dumb suggestion”. The fact that exchanges like this happen all the time shows that Bob’s statement is not just a meaningless expression, but rather a proposal relying on implicit arguments and claims. Specifically, it relies on enough people in the village sharing his preference for blue houses that the notion will be taken seriously. If Bob did not think this to be the case, he probably would not have said what he did.
I am sceptical regarding the claim that [Charlie’s preference re: gender roles] is an actual terminal preference that Charlie holds. It is possible that he finds pregnant barefeeted women attractive [...] Alternatively, if he were raised to think that this is a belief one ought to hold then the statement is merely signalling politics and is therefore of an entirely different nature.
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.
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. I’m even willing to say that there’s evidence for that in the form of changing rates of violent crime, etc., although I’m sure the reactionaries in the audience will be quick to remind me of the technological and demographic factors with their fingers on the scale. But I don’t think we can claim to have strong evidence for this, in view of the variety of ethical systems that have come before us and the generally poor empirical grounding of ethical philosophy.
Until we do have that sort of evidence, I view the normative component of our ethics as fallible, and certainly not a good litmus test for general rationality.
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 :)
I am sceptical regarding the claim that this is an actual terminal preference that Charlie holds
Given that you know absolutely nothing about Charlie, a player in a hypothetical scenario, I find your scepticism entirely unwarranted. Fighting the hypothetical won’t get you very far.
So, is Charlie factually wrong? On the basis of what would you determine that Charlie’s belief is wrong and Bob’s isn’t?
Imagine a person holding a gun to your head and saying “You should give me your money”. … If you respond to the man by saying that morality is relative, you are rather missing the point.
Why would I respond like that? What does the claim that morality is relative have to do with threats of bodily harm?
I think you are missing the subtle hidden meanings of everyday discourse.
In this context I don’t care about the subtle hidden meanings. People who believe they know the Truth and have access to the Sole Factually Correct Set of Values tend to just kill others who disagree. Or at the very least marginalize them and make them third-class citizens. All in the name of the Glorious Future, of course.
Well, given that Charlie indeed genuinely holds that preference, then no he is not wrong to hold that preference. I don’t even know what it would mean for a preference to be wrong. Rather, his preferences might conflict with preferences of others, who might object to this state of reality by calling it “wrong”, which seems like the mind-projection fallacy to me. There is nothing mysterious about this.
Similarly, the person in the original example of mine is not wrong to think men kissing each other is icky, but he IS wrong to conclude that there is therefore some universal moral rule that men kissing each other is bad. Again, just because rationality does not determine preferences, does not mean that logic and reason do not apply to morality!
In this context I don’t care about the subtle hidden meanings. People who believe they know the Truth and have access to the Sole Factually Correct Set of Values tend to just kill others who disagree. Or at the very least marginalize them and make them third-class citizens. All in the name of the Glorious Future, of course.
I believe you have pegged me quite wrongly, sir! I only care about truth, not Truth. And yes, I do have access to some truths, as of course do you. Saying that logic and reason apply to morality and that therefore all moral claims are not equally valid (they can be factually wrong or entirely nonsensical) is quite a far cry from heralding in the Third Reich. The article on Less Wrong regarding the proper use of doubt seems pertinent here.
Well, given that Charlie indeed genuinely holds that preference, then no he is not wrong to hold that preference.
I am confused. Did I misunderstand you or did you change your mind?
Earlier you said that “should” kind of questions have single correct answers (which means that other answers are wrong). A “preference” is more or less the same thing as a “value” in this context, and you staked out a strong position:
I reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction: I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity. … but questions about morality … should … be answered in a rational and factual manner all the same.
Since statements of facts can be correct or wrong and you said there is no “fact-value distinction”, then values (and preferences) can be correct or wrong as well. However in the parent post you say
I don’t even know what it would mean for a preference to be wrong.
If you have a coherent position in all this, I don’t see it.
I think you misunderstood me. Of course I don’t mean that the terms “facts” and “values” represent the same thing. Saying that a preference itself is wrong is nonsense in the same way that claiming that a piece of cheese is wrong is nonsensical. It’s a category error. When I say I reject a strict fact-value dichotomy I mean that I reject the notion that statements regarding values should somehow be treated differently from statements regarding facts, in the same way that I reject the notion of faith inhabiting a separate magistrate from science (i.e. special pleading). So my position is that when someone makes a moral claim such as “don’t murder”, they better be able to reduce that to factual statements about reality or else they are talking nonsense.
For example, “sex is sinful!” usually reduces to “I think my god doesn’t like sex”, which is nonsense because there is no such thing. On the other hand, if someone says “Stealing is bad!”, that can be reduced to the claim that allowing theft is harmful to society (in a number of observable ways), which I would agree with. As such I am perfectly comfortable labelling some moral claims as valid and some as nonsense.
Saying that a preference itself is wrong is nonsense in the same way that claiming that a piece of cheese is wrong is nonsensical. It’s a category error.
is compatible with this sentence
I reject the notion that statements regarding values should somehow be treated differently from statements regarding facts
I am distinguishing between X and statements regarding X. The statement “Cheese is wrong” is nonsensical. The statement “it’s nonsensical to say cheese is wrong” is not nonsensical. Values and facts are not the same, but statements regarding values and facts should be treated the same way.
Similarly: Faith and Science are not the same thing. Nonetheless, I reject the notion that claims based on faith should be treated any differently from scientific claims.
Similarly: Faith and Science are not the same thing. Nonetheless, I reject the notion that claims based on faith should be treated any differently from scientific claims.
Do you also reject the notion that claims about mathematics and science should be treated differently?
In the general sense that all claims must abide by the usual requirements of validity and soundness of logic, sure.
In fact, you might say that mathematics is really just a very pure form of logic, while science deals with more murky, more complicated matters. But the essential principle is the same: You better make sure that the output follows logically from the input, or else you’re not doing it right.
We seem to disagree on a fundamental level. I reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction: I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity. Rationality indeed does not determine values, in the same way that rationality does not determine cheese, but questions about morality and cheese should both be answered in a rational and factual manner all the same.
If someone tells me that they grew up in a culture where they were taught that eating cheese is a sin, then I’m sorry to be so blunt about it (ok, not really) but their culture is stupid and wrong.
Interesting. That’s a rather basic and low-level disagreement.
So, let’s take a look at Alice and Bob. Alice says “I like the color green! We should paint all the buildings in town green!”. Bob says “I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”. Are these statements meaningless? Or are they reducible to factual matters?
By the way, your position was quite popular historically. The Roman Catholic church was (and still is) a big proponent.
I cannot speak for Sophronius of course, but here is one possible answer. It may be that morality is “objective” in the sense that Eliezer tried to defend in the metaethics sequence. Roughly, when someone says X is good they mean that X is part of of a loosely defined set of things that make humans flourish, and by virtue of the psychological unity of mankind we can be reasonably confident that this is a more-or-less well-defined set and that if humans were perfectly informed and rational they would end up agreeing about which things are in it, as the CEV proposal assumes.
Then we can confidently say that both Alice and Bob in your example are objectively mistaken (it is completely implausible that CEV is achieved by painting all buildings the color that Alice or Bob happens to like subjectively the most, as opposed to leaving the decision to the free market, or perhaps careful science-based urban planning done by a FAI). We can also confidently say that some real-world expressions of values (e.g. “Heretics should be burned at the stake”, which was popular a few hundred years ago) are false. Others are more debatable. In particular, the last two examples in Sophronius’ list are cases where I am reasonably confident that his answers are the correct ones, but not as close to 100%-epsilon probability as I am on the examples I gave above.
Well, I can’t speak for other people but when I say “X is good” I mean nothing of that sort. I am pretty sure the majority of people on this planet don’t think of “good” this way either.
Nope, you can say. If your “we” includes me then no, “we” can’t say that.
By “Then we can confidently say” I just meant “Assuming we accept the above analysis of morality, then we can confidently say…”. I am not sure I accept it myself; I proposed it as a way one could believe that normative questions have objective answers without straying as far form the general LW worldview as being a Roman Catholic.
By the way, the metaethical analysis I outlined does not require that people think consciously of something like CEV whenever they use the word “good”. It is a proposed explication in the Carnapian sense of the folk concept of “good” in the same way that, say, VNM utility theory is an explication of “rational”.
These statements are not meaningless. They are reducible to factual matters. “I like the colour blue” is a factual statement about Bob’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Bob’s brain). Presumably Bob is correct in his assertion, but if I know Bob well enough I might point out that he absolutely detests everything that is the colour blue even though he honestly believes he likes the colour blue. The statement would be false in that case.
Furthermore, the statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” follows logically from his previous statement about his preferences regarding blueness. Certainly, the more people are found to prefer blueness over greenness, the more evidence this provides in favour of the claim “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” which is itself reducible to “A large number of people including myself prefer for the buildings in this town to be blue, and I therefore favour painting them in this colour!”
Contrast the above with the statement “I like blue, therefore we should all have cheese”, which is also a should claim but which can be rejected as illogical. This should make it clear that should statements are not all equally valid, and that they are subject to logical rigour just like any other claim.
Let’s introduce Charlie.
“I think women should be barefoot and pregnant” is a factual statement about Charlie’s preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Charlie’s brain).
Futhermore, the statement “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” follows logically from Charlie’s previous statement about his preferences regarding women.
I would expect you to say that Charlie is factually wrong. In which way is he factually wrong and Bob isn’t?
The statement “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” is not a claim in need of evidence. It is a command, an expression of what Bob thinks should happen. It has nothing to do with how many people think the same.
Assuming “should” is meant in a moral sense, we can say that “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” is in fact a claim in need of evidence. Specifically, it says (to 2 decimal places) that we would all be better off / happier / flourish more if the buildings are painted blue. This is certainly true if it turns out the majority of the town really likes blue, so that they would be happier, but it does not entirely follow from Bob’s claim that he likes blue—if the rest of the town really hated blue, then it would be reasonable to say that their discomfort outweighed his happiness. In this case he would be factually incorrect to say “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!”.
In contrast, you can treat “We should make sure women remain barefoot and pregnant” as a claim in need of evidence, and in this case we can establish it as false. Most obviously because the proposed situation would not be very good for women, and we shouldn’t do something that harms half the human race unnecessarily.
Not at all and I don’t see why would you assume a specific morality.
Bob says “We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” to mean that it would make him happier and he doesn’t care at all about what other people around think about the idea.
Bob is not a utilitarian :-)
Exactly the same thing—Charlie is not a utilitarian either. He thinks he will be better off in the world where women are barefoot and pregnant.
But he says “We should” not “I want” because there is the implication that I should also paint the buildings blue. But if the only reason I should do so is because he wants me to, it raises the question of why I should do what he wants. And if he answers “You should do what I want because it’s what I want”, it’s a tautology.
Imagine Vladimir Putin visiting a Russian village and declaring “We should paint all the buildings blue!”
Suddenly “You should do what I want because it’s what I want” is not a tautology any more but an excellent reason to get out your paint brush :-/
Putin has a way of adding his wants to my wants, through fear, bribes, or other incentives. But then the direct cause of my actions would be the fear/bribe/etc, not the simple fact that he wants it.
And what difference does that make?
Presumably, Bob doesn’t have a way of making me care about what he wants (beyond the extent to which I care about what a generic stranger wants). If he were to pay me, that would be different, but he can’t make me care simply because that’s his preference. When he says “We should paint the buildings blue” he’s saying “I want the buildings painted blue” and “You want the buildings painted blue”, but if I don’t want the buildings painted blue, he’s wrong.
Why not? Much of interactions in a human society are precisely ways of making others care what someone wants.
In any case, the original issue was whether Bob’s preference for blue could be described as “correct” or “wrong”. How exactly does Bob manage to get what he wants is neither here nor there.
No, he is not saying that.
The original statement was “I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!” His preference for blue can neither be right nor wrong, but the second sentence is something that can be ’correct” or “wrong”.
Without specifying a particular value system, no, it can not.
Full circle back to the original.
There already is an existing value system—what Bob and I already value.
I think we’re pretty close to someone declaring that egoism isn’t a valid moral position, again.
I wonder if that someone will make the logical step to insisting that moral egoists should be reeducated to make them change to a “valid” moral position :-/
That’s just looking at one of the direct consequences, accepting for the sake of argument that most women would prefer not to be “barefoot and pregnant”. The problem is that, for these kinds of major social changes, the direct effects tend to be dominated by indirect effects and your argument makes no attempt to analyze the indirect effects.
Technically you are correct, so you can read my above argument as figuratively “accurate to one decimal place”. The important thing is that there’s nothing mysterious going on here in a linguistic or metaethical sense.
But in a practical sense these things can’t be computed from first principals, so it is necessary to rely on tradition at least to some extent.
I partly agree, but a tradition that developed under certain conditions isn’t necessarily optimal under different conditions (e.g. much better technology and medicine, less need for manual labour, fewer stupid people (at least for now), etc.).
Otherwise, we’d be even better off just executing our evolved adaptations, which had even more time to develop.
Revealed preferences of women buying shoes and contraception?
Depends on the context :-D In China a few centuries ago a woman quite reasonably might prefer to be barefoot (as opposed to have her feet tightly bound to disfigure them) and pregnant (as opposed to barren which made her socially worthless).
Charlie is, presumably, factually correct in that he thinks that he holds that view. However, while preferences regarding colour are well established, I am sceptical regarding the claim that this is an actual terminal preference that Charlie holds. It is possible that he finds pregnant barefeeted women attractive, in which case his statement gives valid information regarding his preferences which might be taken into account by others: In this case it is meaningful. Alternatively, if he were raised to think that this is a belief one ought to hold then the statement is merely signalling politics and is therefore of an entirely different nature.
“I like blue and want the town to be painted blue” gives factual info regarding the universe. “Women ought to be pregnant because my church says so!” does not have the primary goal of providing info, it has the goal of pushing politics.
Imagine a person holding a gun to your head and saying “You should give me your money”. Regardless of his use of the word “should”, he is making an implicit logical argument:
1) Giving me your money reduces your chances of getting shot by me
2) You presumably do not want to get shot
3) Therefore, you should give me your money
If you respond to the man by saying that morality is relative, you are rather missing the point.
I think you are missing the subtle hidden meanings of everyday discourse. Imagine Bob saying that the town should be painted blue. Then, someone else comes with arguments for why the town should not be painted Blue. Bob eventually agrees. “You are right”, he says, “that was a dumb suggestion”. The fact that exchanges like this happen all the time shows that Bob’s statement is not just a meaningless expression, but rather a proposal relying on implicit arguments and claims. Specifically, it relies on enough people in the village sharing his preference for blue houses that the notion will be taken seriously. If Bob did not think this to be the case, he probably would not have said what he did.
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.
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. I’m even willing to say that there’s evidence for that in the form of changing rates of violent crime, etc., although I’m sure the reactionaries in the audience will be quick to remind me of the technological and demographic factors with their fingers on the scale. But I don’t think we can claim to have strong evidence for this, in view of the variety of ethical systems that have come before us and the generally poor empirical grounding of ethical philosophy.
Until we do have that sort of evidence, I view the normative component of our ethics as fallible, and certainly not a good litmus test for general rationality.
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 :)
Given that you know absolutely nothing about Charlie, a player in a hypothetical scenario, I find your scepticism entirely unwarranted. Fighting the hypothetical won’t get you very far.
So, is Charlie factually wrong? On the basis of what would you determine that Charlie’s belief is wrong and Bob’s isn’t?
Why would I respond like that? What does the claim that morality is relative have to do with threats of bodily harm?
In this context I don’t care about the subtle hidden meanings. People who believe they know the Truth and have access to the Sole Factually Correct Set of Values tend to just kill others who disagree. Or at the very least marginalize them and make them third-class citizens. All in the name of the Glorious Future, of course.
Well, given that Charlie indeed genuinely holds that preference, then no he is not wrong to hold that preference. I don’t even know what it would mean for a preference to be wrong. Rather, his preferences might conflict with preferences of others, who might object to this state of reality by calling it “wrong”, which seems like the mind-projection fallacy to me. There is nothing mysterious about this.
Similarly, the person in the original example of mine is not wrong to think men kissing each other is icky, but he IS wrong to conclude that there is therefore some universal moral rule that men kissing each other is bad. Again, just because rationality does not determine preferences, does not mean that logic and reason do not apply to morality!
I believe you have pegged me quite wrongly, sir! I only care about truth, not Truth. And yes, I do have access to some truths, as of course do you. Saying that logic and reason apply to morality and that therefore all moral claims are not equally valid (they can be factually wrong or entirely nonsensical) is quite a far cry from heralding in the Third Reich. The article on Less Wrong regarding the proper use of doubt seems pertinent here.
I am confused. Did I misunderstand you or did you change your mind?
Earlier you said that “should” kind of questions have single correct answers (which means that other answers are wrong). A “preference” is more or less the same thing as a “value” in this context, and you staked out a strong position:
Since statements of facts can be correct or wrong and you said there is no “fact-value distinction”, then values (and preferences) can be correct or wrong as well. However in the parent post you say
If you have a coherent position in all this, I don’t see it.
I think you misunderstood me. Of course I don’t mean that the terms “facts” and “values” represent the same thing. Saying that a preference itself is wrong is nonsense in the same way that claiming that a piece of cheese is wrong is nonsensical. It’s a category error. When I say I reject a strict fact-value dichotomy I mean that I reject the notion that statements regarding values should somehow be treated differently from statements regarding facts, in the same way that I reject the notion of faith inhabiting a separate magistrate from science (i.e. special pleading). So my position is that when someone makes a moral claim such as “don’t murder”, they better be able to reduce that to factual statements about reality or else they are talking nonsense.
For example, “sex is sinful!” usually reduces to “I think my god doesn’t like sex”, which is nonsense because there is no such thing. On the other hand, if someone says “Stealing is bad!”, that can be reduced to the claim that allowing theft is harmful to society (in a number of observable ways), which I would agree with. As such I am perfectly comfortable labelling some moral claims as valid and some as nonsense.
I don’t see how this sentence
is compatible with this sentence
I am distinguishing between X and statements regarding X. The statement “Cheese is wrong” is nonsensical. The statement “it’s nonsensical to say cheese is wrong” is not nonsensical. Values and facts are not the same, but statements regarding values and facts should be treated the same way.
Similarly: Faith and Science are not the same thing. Nonetheless, I reject the notion that claims based on faith should be treated any differently from scientific claims.
Do you also reject the notion that claims about mathematics and science should be treated differently?
In the general sense that all claims must abide by the usual requirements of validity and soundness of logic, sure.
In fact, you might say that mathematics is really just a very pure form of logic, while science deals with more murky, more complicated matters. But the essential principle is the same: You better make sure that the output follows logically from the input, or else you’re not doing it right.
My point is that what constitutes “validity” and “soundness of logic” differs between the two domains.