On the other hand, what’s morality for? I thought the original intent was to improve life, not to make it impossible.
Morality? Original intent? To assert political influence among the tribe in a way that benefits yourself while simultaneously preventing yourself from making faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to yourself in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is prohibitively expensive.
OK, why do you think Harry is concerned with ethical behavior to all sentients?
I think there’s some evolutionary pressure on morality, so that it’s a mixture of requirements for behavior which improve the odds of survival for the group, maintain the status of high-status people, and/or are just people making things up because they sound cool/seemed like a good idea at the time/distinguish the group from other groups. People are encouraged to think of all three as the same sort of thing.
Ahh, but am I? Or am I a hufflepuff who does not base his value system on self-deception?
The original intent of the egg laid by hens was something to do with the reproduction of chickens. Yet as far as I’m concerned eggs are there to be separated white from yolk, whipped thoroughly and combined with the extract from artificially selected cane. Morals, ethics and values general are similar—what matters to me is not what the original intent was or causal factors but what my values happen to be right now. I get to choose which of my values I consider, well, part of ‘me’.
I note that maintaining the belief “the original intent of morality was to improve life”, or even “the intent of morality that can be inferred from human behavior is to improve life” is not necessarily a stable belief to hold. That is, exposure information from the world around them through either social observation or theoretical study will cause the belief to be discarded because it just isn’t, well, true. To refer to a well known exhortation by a source held here in disrepute: don’t build your house on sand!
OK, why do you think Harry is concerned with ethical behavior to all sentients?
It seems he took his intuitive value for ‘other thing that I can empathise with’ and applied it more generally than most. This is not a logical problem—there is a huge space of values that are internally coherent. Yet it does have implications that lead me to consider the values of Harry are only slightly preferable to those of Clippy. Optimizing the universe by those criteria would create an outcome that I personally (and I suggest most people) would not like all that much.
I think there’s some evolutionary pressure on morality, so that it’s a mixture of requirements for behavior which improve the odds of survival for the group, maintain the status of high-status people, and/or are just people making things up because they sound cool/seemed like a good idea at the time/distinguish the group from other groups. People are encouraged to think of all three as the same sort of thing.
My thinking is along similar lines… yet I divide the three modes from a slightly different perspective. I don’t put much weight on the ‘odds of survival for the group’ for example, although there is definitely a sense in which moral claims are meant to be interpreted as declarations of pro-social norms. I had tended to leave off ‘just making things up because they sound cool’ because I was focusing on the explicit political influences but come to think of it “seemed like a good idea at the time” probably does explain a lot!
If by “assert political influence,” you mean not accept garbage like the Pirate Game, and by “tribe” you mean any group of mammals. Obviously I’m using a broad definition of morality here.
...OK, I have little experience with the game Taboo, but people claim to have found 5 major instincts that together provide “mechanisms” for nearly all societal codes. I care more about the first two then the others.
Before, I linked to evidence that dogs care about Fairness in a way that seems to clearly increase their chance of surviving to reproduce in the wild. (Though I admit they’d likely never have to face the Pirate Game as such.) This study purports to show Empathy and its backward cousin Group Loyalty in mice.
Your examples seem to work by Authority, which I feel pretty confident exists in other animals (especially for children). It makes a certain amount of sense to describe rules of this nature as ways to assert political influence, provided we include unconscious political behavior and allow a wide range of motives for wanting to influence others.
“Purity” seems like a mindless animal’s version of germ theory.
On the other hand, what’s morality for? I thought the original intent was to improve life, not to make it impossible.
Morality? Original intent? To assert parental influence upon your unruly children in a way that gives you a moment’s peace while simultaneously preventing your children from making future faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to the little darlings, in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is just too complicated for those immature brains.
Elaine Morgan’s ideas about mankind’s physical origins may have been all wet, but I think she was right on when talking about where human society and language came from. Hint: it wasn’t created to satisfy the needs of adult male hunting bands.
Morality tends to become less necessary as one matures. It is also, as you allude, plays a less significant role in all-male social competition than in mixed group or all female competition. Yet to limiting it as you do to just children is a mistake. The role of morality is clearly visible outside of the family unit and used by and directed at adults.
Morality tends to become less necessary as one matures.
Are you using “morality” in some narrow technical sense, here? I ask because this statement seems so bizarrely false to me that it seems like you may have been saying something entirely different than my understanding of what you said.
I’m using a perfectly standard definition of morality. I can only assume you are using a different meaning of necessary.
Take, for example, ‘crossing the road’. Look both ways, hold hands, etc. That is all presented using the mechanism for morality. This is necessary for most young children because their ability to reason out natural consequences and actually make responsible judgements is undeveloped. As an adult you don’t need to to have a feeling when you cross the road that you may be transgressing on an absolute moral law. You take care because you know about the dangers of cars.
Then, on the social side of things, consider ‘please and thankyou’. It is presented as a moral obligation to children. Part of being a ‘good boy and girl’. Because children don’t have decades of experience and a theoretical grasp of the intricacies of deference to status and supplication. As people mature they learn when it is best to supplicate and when supplication would actually be detrimental. Heck, in the worst case following that moral literally get you killed.
I make no suggestion that abandoning ones ethics entirely is either a good thing or practical. I can only assume that is the ‘bizarrely false’ thing that you are talking about. Because the fact that morality is more useful for children than for adults seems blatantly obvious. Perplexed (although not myself) went as far as to say it is the sole reason for morality’s existence!
Okay, so you’re not using morality in the sense of a deep understanding of motivations and consequences which guide a person not to do things which may eventually harm them, but in the sense of rules for people to follow when they haven’t thought it through, or can’t think it through. I think that sufficiently explains our difference on this.
Take, for example, ‘crossing the road’. [...] That is all presented using the mechanism for morality. This is necessary for most young children [...]
Mine is still too young for us to let her cross the road unshepherded, but I’m certainly not presenting that sort of thing to her “using the mechanism for morality”; at least, I’m trying not to and so far as I can tell I’m succeeding. (I think my wife is doing likewise, but I don’t know for sure; we haven’t discussed the matter in depth.) When there’s something she mustn’t do for reasons of safety, we tell her “don’t do X, it’s dangerous and here’s why”. Seems to be working well so far.
Now, maybe however I present things my daughter interprets them using “the mechanism for morality” (e.g., if that’s automatically triggered by any sense of parental disapproval); it’s hard to tell. And maybe I, or my daughter, or both, are unusual. But a blanket statement that “That is all presented using the mechanism for morality” seems to me to need some actual justification which isn’t in evidence; it looks clearly false to me.
There is no other example you can think of where morality is useful for keeping young people from being hurt by environmental or social dangers that they are later able to handle in a more sophisticated, practical way, without the morals of children protecting them?
This may be an inferential distance that is too large to cross. Morality is something that many find hard to reduce.
Obviously I can think of any number of examples in which one could use “the mechanism of morality” to keep young children from being hurt. Your claim, however, was not merely that there are such examples; it was that in such cases “that is all presented using the mechanism of morality”. Not “could be presented”, not “is often presented”, not even “is usually presented”; simply “is presented”.
The (perhaps unreasonably strong) literal interpretation of this, with an honest-to-Cthulhu universal quantifier in it, seems to me to be demonstrably false, though of course if you bothered to say what you mean by “the mechanism of morality” it might turn out otherwise, since the childrearing practice I know best, namely my own, is firmly nonmoralistic about such things. It seems to me that weaker interpretations are at best in need of solid supporting evidence.
The time for worrying that you might be on the high side of a too-large inferential gap is after you have made a bona fide attempt to explain your position, found it not understood, and considered carefully whether the problem is that the other party is too stupid or ignorant to understand you or that what you’re saying doesn’t really make sense. In particular, the following exchange doesn’t seem reasonable to me:
Proponent: blah blah blah X blah blah blah.
Skeptic 1: I wonder if you have a nonstandard understanding of X.
Proponent: I’m using a perfectly standard definition of X. Blah blah blah X blah.
Skeptic 2: That second thing you said seems implausible to me, because blah blah blah blah.
Proponent: I think maybe you’re too stupid or ignorant for us to talk about this; the notion of X is hard for many people to reduce.
… because it surely can’t be true both that your usage of X is straightforward and standard and needs no elaboration and that when someone else disagrees with you in this area the problem a good inference is that you understand how to reduce X and they don’t.
It is not a position which I have a particular vested interested in evangelising. I also know from experience and would in any case predict theoretically that when discussing morality there is a significant signalling cost to doing so from a detached descriptive perspective rather than from ‘within’ - even when not actually advocating anything ‘immoral’.
My initial statement was a casual observation of the way morality works—not a declaration that I would be willing to engage in a verbal duel with anyone who considered it ‘bizarrely false’. The chances of such a conversation being productive is negligible, so I am happy to leave you to disagree and would never presume to question your right to express disagreement or presume that any readers would consider the question resolved when disagreement remains.
I don’t disagree with ‘is often’, by the way and note now that there is a difference between ‘skeptic 1’ and ‘skeptic 2’ that changes the meaning of your claim somewhat.
Well, yes, there’s a difference between Skeptics 1 and 2, because they’re different people: just as randallsquared and gjm are different people. I wasn’t the person who called your statement “bizarrely false” and I have no wish for a verbal duel (though it sure seems like you’re trying to have one, for some reason) nor for a clash of evangelisms. What I was hoping for was a reasoned discussion.
Far be it from me, though, to insist that you bear a significant signalling cost. (Though I think you already paid it; anyone who’d be upset at a detached discussion of morality was probably already upset by your statement that morality becomes less important as one matures.)
[EDITED some hours after writing, to add: for that matter, those same people were presumably even more upset by your earlier comment about the original purpose of morality. It’s a bit late to be worrying about what those people might think of you.]
Well, yes, there’s a difference between Skeptics 1 and 2, because they’re different people
Yes, I got that and added the last bit at the end. That difference indicated to me that your own interest was limited to the specific example about road crossing. I conceded ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ there so I don’t think I have a substantial disagreement with you there.
It’s a bit late to be worrying about what those people might think of you.
True enough. They feel sufficiently ‘out group’ that different instincts are in play. The relevant factor is that it is a behaviour that I hold in utter contempt. And contempt is the one one emotion that I find has an unambiguously deleterious influence on thought. It makes me careless. (Not noticing a different commenter, for example.) It is better to avoid such situations all together. Hindsight suggests I should have downvoted and ignored Randall, rather than replying.
Agreed. But the context was “original intent”. Morality originated as a way to align children’s behavior with mother’s wishes. It then was discovered that it could be extended to align adult behaviors with tribal wishes.
Morality? Original intent? To assert political influence among the tribe in a way that benefits yourself while simultaneously preventing yourself from making faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to yourself in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is prohibitively expensive.
Always a pleasure to hear from the Slytherins.
OK, why do you think Harry is concerned with ethical behavior to all sentients?
I think there’s some evolutionary pressure on morality, so that it’s a mixture of requirements for behavior which improve the odds of survival for the group, maintain the status of high-status people, and/or are just people making things up because they sound cool/seemed like a good idea at the time/distinguish the group from other groups. People are encouraged to think of all three as the same sort of thing.
Ahh, but am I? Or am I a hufflepuff who does not base his value system on self-deception?
The original intent of the egg laid by hens was something to do with the reproduction of chickens. Yet as far as I’m concerned eggs are there to be separated white from yolk, whipped thoroughly and combined with the extract from artificially selected cane. Morals, ethics and values general are similar—what matters to me is not what the original intent was or causal factors but what my values happen to be right now. I get to choose which of my values I consider, well, part of ‘me’.
I note that maintaining the belief “the original intent of morality was to improve life”, or even “the intent of morality that can be inferred from human behavior is to improve life” is not necessarily a stable belief to hold. That is, exposure information from the world around them through either social observation or theoretical study will cause the belief to be discarded because it just isn’t, well, true. To refer to a well known exhortation by a source held here in disrepute: don’t build your house on sand!
It seems he took his intuitive value for ‘other thing that I can empathise with’ and applied it more generally than most. This is not a logical problem—there is a huge space of values that are internally coherent. Yet it does have implications that lead me to consider the values of Harry are only slightly preferable to those of Clippy. Optimizing the universe by those criteria would create an outcome that I personally (and I suggest most people) would not like all that much.
My thinking is along similar lines… yet I divide the three modes from a slightly different perspective. I don’t put much weight on the ‘odds of survival for the group’ for example, although there is definitely a sense in which moral claims are meant to be interpreted as declarations of pro-social norms. I had tended to leave off ‘just making things up because they sound cool’ because I was focusing on the explicit political influences but come to think of it “seemed like a good idea at the time” probably does explain a lot!
If by “assert political influence,” you mean not accept garbage like the Pirate Game, and by “tribe” you mean any group of mammals. Obviously I’m using a broad definition of morality here.
No, I don’t mean that and it isn’t exactly the kind of game morality is set up to handle.
But it is an interesting link and the progression is far from intuitive.
...OK, I have little experience with the game Taboo, but people claim to have found 5 major instincts that together provide “mechanisms” for nearly all societal codes. I care more about the first two then the others.
Before, I linked to evidence that dogs care about Fairness in a way that seems to clearly increase their chance of surviving to reproduce in the wild. (Though I admit they’d likely never have to face the Pirate Game as such.) This study purports to show Empathy and its backward cousin Group Loyalty in mice.
Your examples seem to work by Authority, which I feel pretty confident exists in other animals (especially for children). It makes a certain amount of sense to describe rules of this nature as ways to assert political influence, provided we include unconscious political behavior and allow a wide range of motives for wanting to influence others.
“Purity” seems like a mindless animal’s version of germ theory.
(Edited once for clarity in the first paragraph.)
Morality? Original intent? To assert parental influence upon your unruly children in a way that gives you a moment’s peace while simultaneously preventing your children from making future faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to the little darlings, in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is just too complicated for those immature brains.
Elaine Morgan’s ideas about mankind’s physical origins may have been all wet, but I think she was right on when talking about where human society and language came from. Hint: it wasn’t created to satisfy the needs of adult male hunting bands.
Morality tends to become less necessary as one matures. It is also, as you allude, plays a less significant role in all-male social competition than in mixed group or all female competition. Yet to limiting it as you do to just children is a mistake. The role of morality is clearly visible outside of the family unit and used by and directed at adults.
Are you using “morality” in some narrow technical sense, here? I ask because this statement seems so bizarrely false to me that it seems like you may have been saying something entirely different than my understanding of what you said.
I’m using a perfectly standard definition of morality. I can only assume you are using a different meaning of necessary.
Take, for example, ‘crossing the road’. Look both ways, hold hands, etc. That is all presented using the mechanism for morality. This is necessary for most young children because their ability to reason out natural consequences and actually make responsible judgements is undeveloped. As an adult you don’t need to to have a feeling when you cross the road that you may be transgressing on an absolute moral law. You take care because you know about the dangers of cars.
Then, on the social side of things, consider ‘please and thankyou’. It is presented as a moral obligation to children. Part of being a ‘good boy and girl’. Because children don’t have decades of experience and a theoretical grasp of the intricacies of deference to status and supplication. As people mature they learn when it is best to supplicate and when supplication would actually be detrimental. Heck, in the worst case following that moral literally get you killed.
I make no suggestion that abandoning ones ethics entirely is either a good thing or practical. I can only assume that is the ‘bizarrely false’ thing that you are talking about. Because the fact that morality is more useful for children than for adults seems blatantly obvious. Perplexed (although not myself) went as far as to say it is the sole reason for morality’s existence!
Okay, so you’re not using morality in the sense of a deep understanding of motivations and consequences which guide a person not to do things which may eventually harm them, but in the sense of rules for people to follow when they haven’t thought it through, or can’t think it through. I think that sufficiently explains our difference on this.
Sounds about right to me.
Mine is still too young for us to let her cross the road unshepherded, but I’m certainly not presenting that sort of thing to her “using the mechanism for morality”; at least, I’m trying not to and so far as I can tell I’m succeeding. (I think my wife is doing likewise, but I don’t know for sure; we haven’t discussed the matter in depth.) When there’s something she mustn’t do for reasons of safety, we tell her “don’t do X, it’s dangerous and here’s why”. Seems to be working well so far.
Now, maybe however I present things my daughter interprets them using “the mechanism for morality” (e.g., if that’s automatically triggered by any sense of parental disapproval); it’s hard to tell. And maybe I, or my daughter, or both, are unusual. But a blanket statement that “That is all presented using the mechanism for morality” seems to me to need some actual justification which isn’t in evidence; it looks clearly false to me.
There is no other example you can think of where morality is useful for keeping young people from being hurt by environmental or social dangers that they are later able to handle in a more sophisticated, practical way, without the morals of children protecting them?
This may be an inferential distance that is too large to cross. Morality is something that many find hard to reduce.
Obviously I can think of any number of examples in which one could use “the mechanism of morality” to keep young children from being hurt. Your claim, however, was not merely that there are such examples; it was that in such cases “that is all presented using the mechanism of morality”. Not “could be presented”, not “is often presented”, not even “is usually presented”; simply “is presented”.
The (perhaps unreasonably strong) literal interpretation of this, with an honest-to-Cthulhu universal quantifier in it, seems to me to be demonstrably false, though of course if you bothered to say what you mean by “the mechanism of morality” it might turn out otherwise, since the childrearing practice I know best, namely my own, is firmly nonmoralistic about such things. It seems to me that weaker interpretations are at best in need of solid supporting evidence.
The time for worrying that you might be on the high side of a too-large inferential gap is after you have made a bona fide attempt to explain your position, found it not understood, and considered carefully whether the problem is that the other party is too stupid or ignorant to understand you or that what you’re saying doesn’t really make sense. In particular, the following exchange doesn’t seem reasonable to me:
Proponent: blah blah blah X blah blah blah.
Skeptic 1: I wonder if you have a nonstandard understanding of X.
Proponent: I’m using a perfectly standard definition of X. Blah blah blah X blah.
Skeptic 2: That second thing you said seems implausible to me, because blah blah blah blah.
Proponent: I think maybe you’re too stupid or ignorant for us to talk about this; the notion of X is hard for many people to reduce.
… because it surely can’t be true both that your usage of X is straightforward and standard and needs no elaboration and that when someone else disagrees with you in this area the problem a good inference is that you understand how to reduce X and they don’t.
It is not a position which I have a particular vested interested in evangelising. I also know from experience and would in any case predict theoretically that when discussing morality there is a significant signalling cost to doing so from a detached descriptive perspective rather than from ‘within’ - even when not actually advocating anything ‘immoral’.
My initial statement was a casual observation of the way morality works—not a declaration that I would be willing to engage in a verbal duel with anyone who considered it ‘bizarrely false’. The chances of such a conversation being productive is negligible, so I am happy to leave you to disagree and would never presume to question your right to express disagreement or presume that any readers would consider the question resolved when disagreement remains.
I don’t disagree with ‘is often’, by the way and note now that there is a difference between ‘skeptic 1’ and ‘skeptic 2’ that changes the meaning of your claim somewhat.
Well, yes, there’s a difference between Skeptics 1 and 2, because they’re different people: just as randallsquared and gjm are different people. I wasn’t the person who called your statement “bizarrely false” and I have no wish for a verbal duel (though it sure seems like you’re trying to have one, for some reason) nor for a clash of evangelisms. What I was hoping for was a reasoned discussion.
Far be it from me, though, to insist that you bear a significant signalling cost. (Though I think you already paid it; anyone who’d be upset at a detached discussion of morality was probably already upset by your statement that morality becomes less important as one matures.)
[EDITED some hours after writing, to add: for that matter, those same people were presumably even more upset by your earlier comment about the original purpose of morality. It’s a bit late to be worrying about what those people might think of you.]
Yes, I got that and added the last bit at the end. That difference indicated to me that your own interest was limited to the specific example about road crossing. I conceded ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ there so I don’t think I have a substantial disagreement with you there.
True enough. They feel sufficiently ‘out group’ that different instincts are in play. The relevant factor is that it is a behaviour that I hold in utter contempt. And contempt is the one one emotion that I find has an unambiguously deleterious influence on thought. It makes me careless. (Not noticing a different commenter, for example.) It is better to avoid such situations all together. Hindsight suggests I should have downvoted and ignored Randall, rather than replying.
Agreed. But the context was “original intent”. Morality originated as a way to align children’s behavior with mother’s wishes. It then was discovered that it could be extended to align adult behaviors with tribal wishes.
That is my story and I’m sticking to it.