We have some in built valuations to behavior and reactions to those evaluations. Humans, like animals, judge behavior, with varying degrees or approval/disapproval, including rewards/punishments, Where we are likely different from animals is that we judge higher order behavior as well—not just the behavior, but the moral reaction to the behavior, then the moral reaction to the moral reaction to the behavior, etc.
Of course morality is real and can studied scientifically, just like anything else about us. The first thing to notice on studying is that we don’t have identical morality, just as we don’t have identical genes or identical histories. Some of the recent work on morality shows it comes in certain dimensions—fairness, autonomy, purity, group loyalty, etc,, and people tend to weigh these different factors both consistently for their own judgments, and differently compared to the judgments of others. I interpret that as us having relatively consistent pattern matching algorithms that identify dimensions of moral saliency, but less consistent weighting of those different dimensions.
That’s the funny thing is that what is termed “objective morality” is transparently nonsense once you look scientifically at morality. We’re not identical—obviously. We don’t have identical moralities—obviously. Any particular statistic of all actual human moralities, for any population of humans, will just be one from an infinitely many possible statistics—obviously. The attempt to “scientifically” identify the One True Statistic, a la Harris, is nonsense on stilts.
You’re about where I am.
We have some in built valuations to behavior and reactions to those evaluations. Humans, like animals, judge behavior, with varying degrees or approval/disapproval, including rewards/punishments, Where we are likely different from animals is that we judge higher order behavior as well—not just the behavior, but the moral reaction to the behavior, then the moral reaction to the moral reaction to the behavior, etc.
Of course morality is real and can studied scientifically, just like anything else about us. The first thing to notice on studying is that we don’t have identical morality, just as we don’t have identical genes or identical histories. Some of the recent work on morality shows it comes in certain dimensions—fairness, autonomy, purity, group loyalty, etc,, and people tend to weigh these different factors both consistently for their own judgments, and differently compared to the judgments of others. I interpret that as us having relatively consistent pattern matching algorithms that identify dimensions of moral saliency, but less consistent weighting of those different dimensions.
That’s the funny thing is that what is termed “objective morality” is transparently nonsense once you look scientifically at morality. We’re not identical—obviously. We don’t have identical moralities—obviously. Any particular statistic of all actual human moralities, for any population of humans, will just be one from an infinitely many possible statistics—obviously. The attempt to “scientifically” identify the One True Statistic, a la Harris, is nonsense on stilts.