My aim is to find a decent synthesis of human preferences. If someone has a specific metaethics and compelling reasons why we should follow that metaethics, I’d then defer to that. The fact I’m focusing my research on the synthesis is because I find that possibility very unlikely (the more work I do, the less coherent moral realism seems to become).
But, as I said, I’m not opposed to moral realism in principle. Looking over your post, I would expect that if 1, 4, 5, or 6 were true, that would be reflected in the synthesis process. Depending on how I interpret it, 2 would be partially reflected in the synthesis process, and 3 maybe very partially.
If there were strong evidence for 2 or 3, then we could either a) include them in the synthesis process, or b) tell humans about them, which would include them in the synthesis process indirectly.
Since I see the synthesis process as aiming for an adequate outcome, rather than an optimal one (which I don’t think exists), I’m actually ok with adding in some moral-realism or other assumptions, as I see this as making a small shift among adequate outcomes.
As you can see in this post, I’m also ok with some extra assumptions in how we combine individual preferences.
There’s also some moral-realism-for-humans variants, which assume that there are some moral facts which are true for humans specifically, but not for agents in general; this would be like saying there is a unique synthesis process. For those variants, and some other moral realist claims, I expect the process of figuring out partial preferences and synthesising them, will be useful building blocks.
But mainly, my attitude to most moral realist arguments, is “define your terms and start proving your claims”. I’d be willing to take part in such a project, if it seemed realistically likely to succeed.
I don’t think this is true for me, or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by the two scenarios.
You may not be the most typical of persons :-) What I mean is that if we divided people’s lifetimes by a third, or had a vicious totalitarian takeover, or made everyone live in total poverty, then people would find either of these outcomes quite bad, even if we increased lifetimes/democracy/GDP to compensate for the loss along one axis.
My aim is to find a decent synthesis of human preferences. If someone has a specific metaethics and compelling reasons why we should follow that metaethics, I’d then defer to that. The fact I’m focusing my research on the synthesis is because I find that possibility very unlikely (the more work I do, the less coherent moral realism seems to become).
But, as I said, I’m not opposed to moral realism in principle. Looking over your post, I would expect that if 1, 4, 5, or 6 were true, that would be reflected in the synthesis process. Depending on how I interpret it, 2 would be partially reflected in the synthesis process, and 3 maybe very partially.
If there were strong evidence for 2 or 3, then we could either a) include them in the synthesis process, or b) tell humans about them, which would include them in the synthesis process indirectly.
Since I see the synthesis process as aiming for an adequate outcome, rather than an optimal one (which I don’t think exists), I’m actually ok with adding in some moral-realism or other assumptions, as I see this as making a small shift among adequate outcomes.
As you can see in this post, I’m also ok with some extra assumptions in how we combine individual preferences.
There’s also some moral-realism-for-humans variants, which assume that there are some moral facts which are true for humans specifically, but not for agents in general; this would be like saying there is a unique synthesis process. For those variants, and some other moral realist claims, I expect the process of figuring out partial preferences and synthesising them, will be useful building blocks.
But mainly, my attitude to most moral realist arguments, is “define your terms and start proving your claims”. I’d be willing to take part in such a project, if it seemed realistically likely to succeed.
You may not be the most typical of persons :-) What I mean is that if we divided people’s lifetimes by a third, or had a vicious totalitarian takeover, or made everyone live in total poverty, then people would find either of these outcomes quite bad, even if we increased lifetimes/democracy/GDP to compensate for the loss along one axis.