If you say “A better describes human morality than B”, you’re just making an anthropologist-like statement about the behavior code of a certain tribe (“humans”).
Well, you make a good point. They’re not strictly identical since “better describes human morality than” has an interpretation which has different truth values in counterfactual worlds full of murderers, whereas “better describes morality than” is explicitly independent of the counterfactual values of humans. So… I retract my statement, I guess?
I mean, I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”, which is a statement about what is right and wrong, and not a statement about what humans in any particular counterfactual world might think is “right” and “wrong”. Just because in this world “human morality” and “morality” have the same referent, and because assuming that orthonormal was talking anthropologically about humans would be a weird thing to do.
(I blame language, for having no built-in support for making this “dereferencing” explicit, except by actually pasting the referent itself in, as I did in ‘I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”’.)
“Morality” != “human morality”.
If you say “A better describes human morality than B”, you’re just making an anthropologist-like statement about the behavior code of a certain tribe (“humans”).
Well, you make a good point. They’re not strictly identical since “better describes human morality than” has an interpretation which has different truth values in counterfactual worlds full of murderers, whereas “better describes morality than” is explicitly independent of the counterfactual values of humans. So… I retract my statement, I guess?
I mean, I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”, which is a statement about what is right and wrong, and not a statement about what humans in any particular counterfactual world might think is “right” and “wrong”. Just because in this world “human morality” and “morality” have the same referent, and because assuming that orthonormal was talking anthropologically about humans would be a weird thing to do.
(I blame language, for having no built-in support for making this “dereferencing” explicit, except by actually pasting the referent itself in, as I did in ‘I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”’.)