I’ve had similar thoughts but formulated them a bit differently. It seems to me that most people have the same bedrock values, like “pain is bad”. Some moral disagreements are based on conflicts of interest, but most are importance disagreements instead. Basically people argue like “X! - No, Y!” when X and Y are both true, but they disagree on which is more important, all the while imagining that they’re arguing about facts. You can see it over and over on the internet.
Importance disagreements happen because most of our importance judgments are just absorbed uncritically from other people. When many people tell you that something is important, you tend to believe it and look for more info about it, which makes it self-reinforcing. For example, people can argue about the relative importance of freedom vs equality, but that doesn’t mean anything real—they just got stuck on different importance judgments which are both self-reinforcing. That’s also how echo chambers work, it can be tough to point out their factual beliefs but it’s always easy to see the shared importance judgment that people bond over.
I’m not sure how to fight that. You could ask yourself “am I right that something is important?” and look for objective answers based on bedrock values, but that seems hard. Maybe a good start is to ask yourself “what do I think is important and why?” and then just stare at the list for awhile.
I don’t agree with your pessimism. To re-use your example, if you formalize the utility created by freedom and equality, you can compare both and pick the most efficient policies.
Yeah, you can do that if you try. The only problem is that something like “freedom of association is important” itself feels important. The same thing happens with personal importance judgments, like “I care about becoming a published writer” or “being a good Christian matters to me”. They are self-defending.
I’ve had similar thoughts but formulated them a bit differently. It seems to me that most people have the same bedrock values, like “pain is bad”. Some moral disagreements are based on conflicts of interest, but most are importance disagreements instead. Basically people argue like “X! - No, Y!” when X and Y are both true, but they disagree on which is more important, all the while imagining that they’re arguing about facts. You can see it over and over on the internet.
Importance disagreements happen because most of our importance judgments are just absorbed uncritically from other people. When many people tell you that something is important, you tend to believe it and look for more info about it, which makes it self-reinforcing. For example, people can argue about the relative importance of freedom vs equality, but that doesn’t mean anything real—they just got stuck on different importance judgments which are both self-reinforcing. That’s also how echo chambers work, it can be tough to point out their factual beliefs but it’s always easy to see the shared importance judgment that people bond over.
I’m not sure how to fight that. You could ask yourself “am I right that something is important?” and look for objective answers based on bedrock values, but that seems hard. Maybe a good start is to ask yourself “what do I think is important and why?” and then just stare at the list for awhile.
I don’t agree with your pessimism. To re-use your example, if you formalize the utility created by freedom and equality, you can compare both and pick the most efficient policies.
Yeah, you can do that if you try. The only problem is that something like “freedom of association is important” itself feels important. The same thing happens with personal importance judgments, like “I care about becoming a published writer” or “being a good Christian matters to me”. They are self-defending.
I’m not sure what you mean.