Morality is a human behavior. It is in some ways analogous to trade or language: a structured social behavior that has developed in a way that often approximates particular mathematical patterns.
All of these can be investigated both empirically and intellectually: you can go out and record what people actually do, and draw conclusions from it; or you can reason from first principles about what sorts of patterns are mathematically possible; or both. For instance, you could investigate trade either beginning from the histories of actual markets, or from principles of microeconomics. You could investigate language beginning from linguistic corpora and historical linguistics (“What sorts of language do people actually use? How do they use it?”); or from formal language theory, parsing, generative grammar, etc. (“What sorts of language are possible?”)
Some of the intellectual investigation of possible moralities we call “game theory”; others, somewhat less mathematical but more checked against moral intuition, “metaethics”.
Asking whether there are universal, objective moral principles is a little like asking whether there are universal, objective principles of economics. Sure, in one sense there are: but they’re not the sort of applied advice that people making moral or economic claims are usually looking for! There are no theorems of economics that give applied advice such as “real estate is always a good investment,” and there are no theorems of morality that say things like “it’s never okay to sleep with your neighbor’s wife”.
… is a little like asking whether there are universal, objective principles of economics. Sure, in one sense there are: but they’re not the sort of applied advice that people making moral or economic claims are usually looking for!
In seems in economics without much of a stretch you have things like:
buy low and sell high
don’t produce items for sale at price x that cost you y>x to produce.
don’t buy a productive asset that produces c cash per year for more than c/i where i is the risk free interest rate
I’m not saying I can do this trick with morality, but economics seems to produce piles of actionable results.
Morality is a human behavior. It is in some ways analogous to trade or language: a structured social behavior that has developed in a way that often approximates particular mathematical patterns.
All of these can be investigated both empirically and intellectually: you can go out and record what people actually do, and draw conclusions from it; or you can reason from first principles about what sorts of patterns are mathematically possible; or both. For instance, you could investigate trade either beginning from the histories of actual markets, or from principles of microeconomics. You could investigate language beginning from linguistic corpora and historical linguistics (“What sorts of language do people actually use? How do they use it?”); or from formal language theory, parsing, generative grammar, etc. (“What sorts of language are possible?”)
Some of the intellectual investigation of possible moralities we call “game theory”; others, somewhat less mathematical but more checked against moral intuition, “metaethics”.
Asking whether there are universal, objective moral principles is a little like asking whether there are universal, objective principles of economics. Sure, in one sense there are: but they’re not the sort of applied advice that people making moral or economic claims are usually looking for! There are no theorems of economics that give applied advice such as “real estate is always a good investment,” and there are no theorems of morality that say things like “it’s never okay to sleep with your neighbor’s wife”.
In seems in economics without much of a stretch you have things like:
buy low and sell high
don’t produce items for sale at price x that cost you y>x to produce.
don’t buy a productive asset that produces c cash per year for more than c/i where i is the risk free interest rate
I’m not saying I can do this trick with morality, but economics seems to produce piles of actionable results.