Eliezer, I have an objection to your metaethics and I don’t think it’s because I mixed levels:
If I understood your metaethics correctly, then you claim that human morality consists of two parts: a list of things that we value(like love, friendship, fairness etc), and what we can call “intuitions” that govern how our terminal values change when we face moral arguments. So we have a kind of strange loop (in the Hofstadterian sense); our values judge if a moral argument is valid or not, and the valid moral arguments change our terminal values. I think I accept this. It explains quite nicely a lot of questions, like where does moral progress comes from.
What I am skeptic about is the claim that if a person hears enough moral arguments, their values will always converge to a single set of values, so you could say that his morality approximates some ideal morality that can be found if you look deep enough into his brain.
I think it’s plausible that the initial set of moral arguments that the person hears will change considerably his list of values, so that his morality will diverge rather than converge, and there won’t be any “ideal morality” that he is approximating.
Note that I am talking about a single human that hears different sets of moral arguments, and not about the convergence of moralities across all humans (which is a different matter altogether)
Also note that this is a purely empirical objection; I am asking for empirical evidence that supports your metaethics
Eliezer, I have an objection to your metaethics and I don’t think it’s because I mixed levels:
If I understood your metaethics correctly, then you claim that human morality consists of two parts: a list of things that we value(like love, friendship, fairness etc), and what we can call “intuitions” that govern how our terminal values change when we face moral arguments. So we have a kind of strange loop (in the Hofstadterian sense); our values judge if a moral argument is valid or not, and the valid moral arguments change our terminal values. I think I accept this. It explains quite nicely a lot of questions, like where does moral progress comes from. What I am skeptic about is the claim that if a person hears enough moral arguments, their values will always converge to a single set of values, so you could say that his morality approximates some ideal morality that can be found if you look deep enough into his brain. I think it’s plausible that the initial set of moral arguments that the person hears will change considerably his list of values, so that his morality will diverge rather than converge, and there won’t be any “ideal morality” that he is approximating.
Note that I am talking about a single human that hears different sets of moral arguments, and not about the convergence of moralities across all humans (which is a different matter altogether)
Also note that this is a purely empirical objection; I am asking for empirical evidence that supports your metaethics