And that’s what morality always was in the first place. It’s a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by “I don’t want you to kill people”, but if you can convince someone that “It is wrong to kill people”, then you’ve created conflict in that person’s desires.
I wonder, in the end, if people here truly want to “be rational” about morality. Myself, I’m not rational about morality, I go along with it. I don’t critique it in my personal life. For instance, I refuse to murder someone, no matter how rational it might be to murder someone.
Stick to epistemic rationality, and instrumental rationality, but avoid at all costs normative rationality, is my opinion.
And that’s what morality always was in the first place. It’s a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by “I don’t want you to kill people”, but if you can convince someone that “It is wrong to kill people”, then you’ve created conflict in that person’s desires.
This is a widespread but mistaken theory of morality. After all, we don’t—and can’t—convincingly say that just any old thing is “wrong”. Here, I’ll alternate between saying that actually wrong things are wrong, and saying that random things that you don’t want are wrong.
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to kill people.” Yup, it is.
You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to arrest me just because I stabbed this innocent bystander to death.” Yeah, right.
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to mug people.” No kidding.
You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to lock your door when you leave the house, because it’s wrong for you to do anything to prevent me from coming into your house and taking everything you own to sell on the black market”. Not convincing.
If there were nothing more to things being wrong than that you use the word “wrong” to get people to do things, then there would be no difference between these four attempts to get people to do something. But there is: in the first and third case, the claim that the action is wrong is true (and therefore makes a convincing argument). In the second and fourth case, the claim is false (and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument).
Sure, you can use the word “wrong” to get people to do things that you want them to do, but you can use a lot of words for that. For example, if you’re somebody’s mother and you want them to avoid driving when they’re very sleepy, you can tell them that it’s “dangerous” to drive in that condition. But as with the word “wrong”, you can’t use the word “dangerous” for just any situation, because it’s not true in just any situation. When a proposed action is really dangerous—or really wrong—then you can use that fact to convince them not to pursue that action. But it’s still a fact, independent of whether you use it to get other people to do things you want.
Objective ethics on LW? I’m a little shocked. This whole post is basically argument from popularity (perhaps more accurate to call it argument from convincingness). Judgments of valuation may be universal or quasi-universal, but they are always subjective. Words like “right” and “wrong” (and “innocent” and “own”) and other objective moralistic terms obscure this, so let me do some un-obscuring.
If there were nothing more to things being wrong than that you use the word “wrong” to get people to do things, then there would be no difference between these four attempts to get people to do something. But there is: in the first and third case, the claim that the action is wrong is true (and therefore makes a convincing argument). In the second and fourth case, the claim is false (and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument).
You have this backwards: The claim makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you call the claim “right”; or the claim makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you call the claim “wrong.”
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to kill people.” Yup, it is. You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to arrest me just because I stabbed this innocent bystander to death.”
Notice you had to tuck in the word “innocent,” which already implies your conclusion that it is “actually wrong” to harm the bystander.
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to mug people.” No kidding. You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to lock your door when you leave the house, because it’s wrong for you to do anything to prevent me from coming into your house and taking everything you own to sell on the black market”.
Here you used the word “own,” which again already implies your conclusion that it is wrong to steal it. Both examples are purely circular. Most people are disgusted by killing and theft, and they may be counterproductive from most people’s points of view, but that is just about all we can say about the matter—and all we need to say. We are disgusted, so we ban such actions.
Moral right and wrong are not objective facts. The fact that you and I subjectively experience a moral reaction to killing and theft may be an objective fact, but the wrongness itself is not objective, even though it may be universal or near-universal (that is, even though almost everyone else may feel the same way). Universal subjective valuation is not objective valuation (this latter term is, I contend, completely meaningless—unless someone can supply a useful definition).
Although he was speaking in the context of economics, Ludwig von Mises gave the most succinct explanation of why all valuation is subjective when he said, “We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”
You have this backwards: The claim makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you call the claim “right”; or the claim makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you call the claim “wrong.”
You could say that about any word in the English language. Let’s try this with the word “rain”. On many occasions, a person may say “it’s raining and therefore you should take an umbrella”. On some occasions this claim will be false and people will know that it’s false (e.g. because they looked out a window and saw that it wasn’t raining), and so the argument will not be convincing.
What you’re doing here can be applied to this rain scenario. You could say:
The claim makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you call the claim “right”; or the claim makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you call the claim “wrong.”
That is, the claim that it’s raining makes a convincing argument on some occasions, and on those occasions you call the claim “right”. On other occasions, the claim makes an unconvincing argument, and on those occasions you call the claim “wrong”.
So there, we’ve applied your theory about the concept of morality, to the concept of rain. Your theory could equally well be applied to any concept at all. That is, your theory is that when we are convinced by arguments that employ claims about morality, then we call the claims “right”. But you could equally well come up with the theory that when we are convinced by arguments that employ claims about rain, then we call the claims “right”.
So what have we demonstrated? With your help, we have demonstrated that in this respect, morality is like rain. And like everything else. Morality is like atoms. Morality is like gravity—in this respect. You have highlighted a property of morality which is shared by absolutely everything else in the universe that we have a word for. And this property is, that you can come up with this reverse theory of it, according to which we call claims employing the term “right” when we are convinced by arguments using those claims.
Notice you had to tuck in the word “innocent,” which already implies your conclusion that it is “actually wrong” to harm the bystander.
For me to be guilty of begging the question I would have to be trying to prove that a murder was committed in the hypothetical scenario. But it’s a hypothetical scenario in which it is specified that the person committed murder.
Here’s the hypothetical scenario, more explicit: someone has just committed a murder. He tells a cop, “it would be wrong for you to arrest me”. Since it is not, in fact, wrong for the cop to arrest him, then the argument is unconvincing. In this hypothetical scenario, the reason the argument is unconvincing is that it is not actually wrong for the cop to arrest him.
Now, according to your own reverse theory of morality, the hypothetical scenario that I have specified in fact reduces to the following: someone is in a situation where his claims that it would be wrong to arrest him will go ignored by the cop in question. Therefore, the cop believes that it is right to arrest him.
But as I explained before, you can apply your reverse treatment to absolutely anything at all. Here’s an example: in this scenario, someone picks up an orange and says about the orange, “this is an apple”. Nobody is convinced by his assertion, and the reason nobody is convinced by his assertion is that the orange is, in fact, not an apple.
Now we can apply your reverse treatment to this scenario. Someone picks up something and says about it, “this is an apple”. Nobody is convinced by his assertion, and therefore they call his claim “wrong”.
Notice the reversal. In my description of the scenario, that the claim is wrong causes others to disbelieve the claim, because they can see with their own eyes that it is wrong. In your reverse description of the scenario, the primary fact is that people are not convinced by the claim, and the secondary fact which follows from the primary fact is that they call the claim “wrong”.
You’re not proving anything with the reversal, because you can apply the reversal to anything at all.
Here you used the word “own,” which again already implies your conclusion that it is wrong to steal it.
Once again, this is a hypothetical scenario in which it is specified that it would be stealing, and therefore wrong. I am not trying to prove that; I am specifying it to construct the scenario.
Although he was speaking in the context of economics, Ludwig von Mises gave the most succinct explanation of why all valuation is subjective when he said, “We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”
Absolutely, but morality is not personal preference any more than price is personal preference. These are separate subjects. Mises would not say, “I recognize that the price of gasoline is $4 not because it is $4; rather, the price of gasoline is $4 because I recognize it as $4, and if tomorrow I recognize it as $2 then it will be $2, whatever the gas station attendant says.” That would be absurd for him to say. The same applies to morality.
You have this backwards: The claim makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you call the claim “right”; or the claim makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you call the claim “wrong.”
So there, we’ve applied your theory about the concept of morality, to the concept of rain.
You misread me, though perhaps that was my fault. Does the bold help? I was talking about you (Constant), not “you” in the general sense. I wasn’t presenting a theory of morality; I was shedding light on yours by suggesting that you are only calling these things right or wrong because you find the arguments convincing.
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to kill people.” Yup, it is. You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to arrest me just because I stabbed this innocent bystander to death.”
Notice you had to tuck in the word “innocent,” which already implies your conclusion that it is “actually wrong” to harm the bystander.
For me to be guilty of begging the question I would have to be trying to prove that a murder was committed in the hypothetical scenario.
No, you’d have to be trying to justify your statement that “it is wrong to kill people,” which it seems you were (likewise for the theft example). Maybe your unusual phrasing confused me as to what you were trying to show with that. Anyway, the daughter posts seem to show we agree on more than it appears here, so bygones.
As for the rest about “[my] reverse theory of morality,” that’s all from the above misunderstanding. (Sorry to waste time with my unclear wording.)
You misread me, though perhaps that was my fault. Does the bold help? I was talking about you (Constant), not “you” in the general sense. I wasn’t presenting a theory of morality; I was shedding light on yours by suggesting that you are only calling these things right or wrong because you find the arguments convincing.
Okay, but even on this reading you could “shed” similar “light” on absolutely any term that I ever use. You’re not proving anything special about morality by that. To do that would require finding differences between morality and, say, rain, or apples. But if we were arguing about apples you could make precisely the same move that you made in this discussion about morality.
Here’s a parallel back-and-forth employing apples. Somebody says:
And that’s what the concept of apples always was in the first place. It’s a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do.
I reply:
[insert examples with apples] In the second and fourth case, the claim about apples is false (and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument).
Here, let me construct an example with apples. Somebody goes to Tiffany’s, points to a large diamond on display, and says to an employee, “that is an apple, therefore you should be willing to sell it to me for five dollars, which is a great price for an apple.” This claim is false, and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument.
Somebody replies:
You have this backwards: The claim about apples makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you [Constant] call the claim “right” [true*]; or the claim about apples makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you [Constant] call the claim “wrong” [false*].
* I interpret “right” and “wrong” here as meaning “true” and “false”, because claims are true or false, and these are referring to claims here.
To which they follow up:
I wasn’t presenting a theory of apples; I was shedding light on your theory of apples by suggesting that you are only calling these things right or wrong [these claims true or false **] because you find the arguments convincing.
** I am continuing the previous interpretation of “right” and “wrong” as meaning, in context here, “true” or “false”. If this is not what you meant then I can easily substitute in what you actually meant, make the corresponding changes, and make the same point as I am making here.
What all this boils down to is that my interlocutor is saying that I am only calling claims about apples true or false because I find the arguments that employ these claims convincing or unconvincing. For example, if I happen to be in Tiffany’s and somebody points to one of the big shiny glassy-looking things with an enormous price tag and says to an employee, “that is an apple, and therefore you should be happy to accept $5 for it”, then I will find that person’s argument unconvincing. My interlocutor’s point is that I am only calling that person’s claim (that that object is an apple) false because I find his argument (that the employee should sell it to him for $5) unconvincing.
Whereas my own account is as follows: I first of all find the person’s claim about the shiny glassy thing false. Then, as a consequence, I find his argument (that the employee should be happy to part with it for $5) unconvincing.
If you like I can come up with yet another example, taking place in Tiffany’s, dropping the apple, and introducing some action such as grabbing a diamond and attempting to leave the premises. I would have my account (that I, a bystander, saw the man grab the diamond, which I believed to be a wrong act, and therefore when security stopped him I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong), and you would have your reversed account (that I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong, and therefore, as a consequence, I believed his grabbing the diamond to be a wrong act).
It seems to me that right and wrong being objective, just like truth and falsehood, is what you’ve been trying to prove all this time. To equate “right and wrong” with “true and false” by assumption would be to, well you know, beg the question. It’s not surprising that it always comes back to circularity, because a circular argument is the same in effect as an unjustified assertion, and in fact that’s become the theme of not just our exchange here, but this entire thread: “objective ethics are true by assertion.”
I think we agreed elsewhere that ethical sentiments are at least quasi-universal; is there something else we needed to agree on? Because the rest just looks like wordplay to me.
To equate “right and wrong” with “true and false” by assumption would be to, well you know, beg the question.
I’m not equating moral right and wrong with true and false. I was disambiguating some ambiguous words that you employed. The word “right” is ambiguous, because in one context it can mean “morally righteous”, and in another context it can mean “true”. I disambiguated the words in a certain direction because of the immediate textual context. Apparently that was not what you meant. Okay—so ideally I should go back and disambiguate the words in the opposite direction. However, I can tell you right now it will come to the same result. I don’t really want to belabor this point so unless you insist, I’m not actually going to write yet another comment in which I disambiguate your terms “right” and ’wrong” in the moral direction.
Here, let me construct an example with apples. Somebody goes to Tiffany’s, points to a large diamond on display, and says to an employee, “that is an apple, therefore you should be willing to sell it to me for five dollars, which is a great price for an apple.” This claim is false, and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument.
But, ah, you can observe the properties of the object in question, and see that it has very few in common with the set of things that has generated the term “apple” in your mind, and many in common with “diamond”. Is this the same sense in which you say we can simply “recognize” things as fundamentally good or evil? That would make these terms refer to “what my parents thought was good or evil, perturbed by a generation of meaning-learning”. The problem there is—apples are generally recognizable. People disagree on what is right or wrong. Are even apples objective?
The problem there is—apples are generally recognizable. People disagree on what is right or wrong. Are even apples objective?
People can disagree about gray areas between any two neighboring terms. Take the word “apple”. Apple trees are, according to Wikipedia, the species “Malus domestica”. But as evolutionary biologists postulated (correctly, as it turns out), species are gradually formed over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, and the question of what is “the first apple tree” is a question for which there is no crystal clear answer, nor would there be even if we had a complete record of every ancestor of the apple tree going back to the one-celled organisms. Rather, the proto-species that gave rise to the apple tree gradually evolves into the apple tree, and about very early apple trees two fully informed rational people might very well disagree about which ones are apple trees and which ones are proto-apple trees. This is nothing other than the sorites problem, the problem of the heap, the problem of the vagueness of concepts. It is universal and is not specifically true about moral questions.
Morality is, I have argued, an aspect of custom. And it’s true that people can disagree, on occasion, about whether some particular act violates custom. So custom is, like apples, vague to some degree. Both apples and custom can be used as examples of the sorites problem, if you’re sick of talking about sand heaps. But custom is not radically indeterminate. Customs exist, just as apples exist.
Well I agree with this basically, and it reminds me of John Hasnas writing about customary legal systems. I find that when showing this to people I disagree with about ethics we usually end up in agreement:
In the absence of civil government, most people engage in productive activity in peaceful cooperation with their fellows. Some do not. A minority engages in predation, attempting to use violence to expropriate the labor or output of others. The existence of this predatory element renders insecure the persons and possessions of those engaged in production. Further, even among the productive portion of the population, disputes arise concerning broken agreements, questions of rightful possession, and actions that inadvertently result in personal injuries for which there is no antecedently established mechanism for resolution. In the state of nature, interpersonal conflicts that can lead to violence often arise.
What happens when they do? The existence of the predatory minority causes those engaged in productive activities to band together to institute measures for their collective security. Various methods of providing for mutual protection and for apprehending or discouraging aggressors are tried. Methods that do not provide adequate levels of security or that prove too costly are abandoned. More successful methods continue to be used. Eventually, methods that effectively discourage aggression while simultaneously minimizing the amount of retaliatory violence necessary to do so become institutionalized. Simultaneously, nonviolent alternatives for resolving interpersonal disputes among the productive members of the community are sought. Various methods are tried. Those that leave the parties unsatisfied and likely to resort again to violence are abandoned. Those that effectively resolve the disputes with the least disturbance to the peace of the community continue to be used and are accompanied by ever-increasing social pressure for disputants to employ them.
Over time, security arrangements and dispute settlement procedures that are well-enough adapted to social and material circumstances to reduce violence to generally acceptable levels become regularized. Members of the community learn what level of participation in or support for the security arrangements is required of them for the system to work and for them to receive its benefits. By rendering that level of participation or support, they come to feel entitled to the level of security the arrangements provide. After a time, they may come to speak in terms of their right to the protection of their persons and possessions against the type of depredation the security arrangements discourage, and eventually even of their rights to personal integrity and property. In addition, as the dispute settlement procedures resolve recurring forms of conflict in similar ways over time, knowledge of these resolutions becomes widely diffused and members of the community come to expect similar conflicts to be resolved in like manner. Accordingly, they alter their behavior toward other members of the community to conform to these expectations. In doing so, people begin to act in accordance with rules that identify when they must act in the interests of others (e.g., they may be required to use care to prevent their livestock from damaging their neighbors’ possessions) and when they may act exclusively in their own interests (e.g., they may be free to totally exclude their neighbors from using their possessions). To the extent that these incipient rules entitle individuals to act entirely in their own interests, individuals may come to speak in terms of their right to do so (e.g., of their right to the quiet enjoyment of their property).
In short, the inconveniences of the state of nature represent problems that human beings must overcome to lead happy and meaningful lives. In the absence of an established civil government to resolve these problems for them, human beings must do so for themselves. They do this not through coordinated collective action, but through a process of trial and error in which the members of the community address these problems in any number of ways, unsuccessful attempts to resolve them are discarded, and successful ones are repeated, copied by others, and eventually become widespread practices. As the members of the community conform their behavior to these practices, they begin to behave according to rules that specify the extent of their obligations to others, and, by implication, the extent to which they are free to act at their pleasure. Over time, these rules become invested with normative significance and the members of the community come to regard the ways in which the rules permit them to act at their pleasure as their rights. Thus, in the state of nature, rights evolve out of human beings’ efforts to address the inconveniences of that state. In the state of nature, rights are solved problems.
Ah, okay! We don’t disagree then. Thanks for clearing that up!
ETA: Actually, with that clarification, I’d expect many others to agree as well—at least, it seems like what you mean by “custom” and what other posters have called “stuff people want you to do” coincide.
An important point is that nobody gets to unilaterally decide what is or is not custom. That’s in contrast to, say, personal preference, which each person does get to decide for themselves.
Right. Though I’d argue that custom implies that morality is objective, and therefore that custom can be incorrect, so that someone can coherently say that their own society’s customs are immoral (though probably from within a subculture that supports those alternate customs).
But as with the word “wrong”, you can’t use the word “dangerous” for just any situation, because it’s not true in just any situation.
Not a good analogy. The objective element of ‘wrong’ is entirely different in nature to that of ‘dangerous’ even though by many definitions it does, in fact, exist.
Not a good analogy. The objective element of ‘wrong’ is entirely different in nature to that of ‘dangerous’ even though by many definitions it does, in fact, exist.
The word “danger” illustrates a point about logic. The logical point is that the fact that X is often used to persuade people does not mean that the nature of X is that it is ” a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do”. The common use of the word “danger” is an illustration of this logical point. The illustration is correct.
Upvoted to both of you for an interesting discussion. It has reached the point it usually does in metaethics where I have to ask for someone to explain:
What the hell does it mean for something to be objectively wrong?
(This isn’t targeted at you specifically wedrifid, it just isn’t clear to me what the objectivity of “wrongness” could possibly refer to)
Yeah, no one can ever seem to explain what “objectively wrong” would even mean. That’s because to call an action wrong is to imply that there is a negative value placed on that action, and for that to be the case you need a valuer. Someone has to do the valuing. Maybe a large group of people—or maybe everyone—values the action negatively, but that is still nothing more than a bunch of individuals engaging in subjective valuation. It may be universal subjective valuation, or maybe they think it’s God’s subjective valuation, but if so it seems better to spell that out plainly than to obscure it with the authoritative- and scientific-sounding modifier objective.
The fact that something is done by a subject doesn’t necessarily make it subjective. It takes a subject to add 2 and 2, but the answer is objective.
There are many ideas as to what “objectively right” could mean. Two of Kant’s famous suggestions are “act only on that maxim you would wish to be universal law” and “treat people always as ends and never as means”.
A hard question. But I will try to give a brief answer.
Morality is an aspect of social custom. Roughly, it is those customs that are enforced especially vigorously. But an important here is that while some customs are somewhat arbitrary and vary from place to place, other customs are much less arbitrary. It is these least arbitrary moral customs that we most commonly think of as universal morality applicable to and recognized by all humanity.
Here’s an example: go anywhere in the world as a tourist, and (in full view of a lot of typical people who are minding their own business, maybe traveling, maybe buying or selling, maybe chatting) push somebody in front of a train, killing them. Just a random person. See how people around you react. Recommendation: do this as a thought experiment, not an actual experiment. I’ll tell you right now how people around the world will react: they’ll be horrified, and they’ll try to detain you or incapacitate you, possibly kill you. They will have a word in their language for what you just did, which will translate very well to the English word “murder”.
But why is this? Why aren’t customs fully arbitrary? This puzzle, I think, is best understood if we think of society as a many-player game. That is, we apply the concepts of game theory to the problem. Custom is a Nash equilibrium. To follow custom is to act in accordance with your equilibrium strategy in this Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibria are not fully arbitrary—and this explains right away at least the general point that customs are not fully arbitrary.
While not arbitrary, Nash equilibria are not necessarily unique, particularly since different societies exist in different environmental conditions, and so different societies can have different sets of customs. However, the customs of all societies around the world, or at least all societies with very few exceptions, share common elements. People across the world will be appalled if you kill someone arbitrarily. People across the world will also be appalled (though probably not as much) if you steal from a vendor—and their concept of what it is to steal from a vendor will be very familiar to you. You’re not in great danger of visiting a foreign country and accidentally committing what they consider to be shoplifting, unless you are very careless. I recommend that if something seems to be a free sample, you check with the vendor to make sure that it is indeed a free sample before helping yourself to it. As long as you are not a complete fool, you should be okay in foreign lands, because your internalized concepts of what it is to steal or to rob, what it is to murder, what it is to assault, very closely match those of the locals.
Some people think, “murder is wrong because it is illegal, and law is created by government, so what is wrong is defined by government.” But I think that social customs are for the most part not created by government, and I think that the laws against murder, against robbery, and so on, follow the customary prohibitions, rather than creating them.
By the way, it’s possible that I’ve mis-applied game theory, though I think that the concept of the Nash equilibrium is simple enough that a beginner like me should be able to understand it. My knowledge of it is spotty and I plan to remedy this over the next several months, so if I’ve made a mistake here hopefully I will not repeat it.
I don’t know about the Nash equilibria, but I agree with most everything you’ve written here. I’d just prefer to call that (quasi-)universal subjective ethics, and to use language that reflects that, as there are exceptions—call them psychopaths or whatever, but in the interest of accuracy. And the other problem with the objectivist interpretation of custom is that sometimes customs do have to change, and sometimes customs are barbaric. It seems that what you were getting at with “actually wrong” in your initial post was the idea that these kind of moral sentiments are universal, which I can buy, but even that is a bit of a leaky generalization.
Pardon me. I deleted my comment before I noticed that someone had replied. (I didn’t think replying to Constant was going to be beneficial. To be honest I didn’t share your perception of interestingness of the conversation, even though I was a participant.)
What the hell does it mean for something to be objectively wrong?
Very little practically speaking. It is a somewhat related concept to subjectively objective. It doesn’t make the value judgements any less subjective it is just that they happen to be built into the word definitions themselves. It doesn’t make words like ‘should’ and ‘wrong’ any more useful when people with different values are arguing it just takes one of the meanings of ‘should’ as it is used practically and makes it explicit. I think the sophisticated name may be something related to moral cognitivism, probably with a ‘realism’ thrown in somewhere for good measure.
I am not comparing the objectivity of “danger” to the objectivity of “wrong”. I am not stating or implying that their objectivity is the same or similar. I am using the word “danger” as an illustration of a point. The point is correct, and the illustration is correct. That “danger” has different objectivity from “wrong” is not relevant to the point I was illustrating.
There is an objective sense in which an analogy is good or bad, related closely to the concept of reference class tennis. Having one technical similarity does not make an analogy an appropriate one and certainly does not prevent it from being misleading. This example of ‘for example’ is objectively ‘bad’.
And that’s what morality always was in the first place. It’s a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by “I don’t want you to kill people”, but if you can convince someone that “It is wrong to kill people”, then you’ve created conflict in that person’s desires.
That’s one of the things morality has been, and it could indeed be the main thing, but my point above is it all depends on what the person means. Even though getting other people to do something might be the main and most important role of moral language historically, it only invites confusion to overgeneralize here—though I know how tempting it is to simplify all this ethical nonsense floating around in one fell swoop. Some people do simply use “ought” to mean, “It is in your best interest to,” without any desire to get the person to do something. Some people mean “God would disapprove,” and maybe they really don’t care if that makes you refrain from doing it or not, but they’re just letting you know. These little counterexamples ruin the generalization, then we’re back to square one.
I think the only way to really simplify ethics is to acknowledge that people mean all sorts of things by it, and let each person—if anyone cares—explain what they intended in each case.
No, scratch that. The reason ethics is so confused is precisely because people have tried to simplify a whole bunch of disparate-but-somewhat-interrelated notions into a single type of phrasing. A full explanation of everything that is called “ethics” would require examination of religion, politics, sociology, psychology, and much more.
For most things that we think we want ethics for, such as AI, instead of trying to figure out that complex of sundry notions shoehorned into the category of ethics, I think we’d be better off just assiduously hugging the query for each question we want to answer about how to get the results we want in the “moral” sphere (things that hit on your moral emotions, like empathy, indignation, etc.). Mostly I’m interested in this series of posts for the promise it presents for doing away with most of the confusion generated by wordplay such as “objective ethics,” which I consider to be just an artifact of language.
And that’s what morality always was in the first place. It’s a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do. No one would be convinced by “I don’t want you to kill people”, but if you can convince someone that “It is wrong to kill people”, then you’ve created conflict in that person’s desires.
I wonder, in the end, if people here truly want to “be rational” about morality. Myself, I’m not rational about morality, I go along with it. I don’t critique it in my personal life. For instance, I refuse to murder someone, no matter how rational it might be to murder someone.
Stick to epistemic rationality, and instrumental rationality, but avoid at all costs normative rationality, is my opinion.
This is a widespread but mistaken theory of morality. After all, we don’t—and can’t—convincingly say that just any old thing is “wrong”. Here, I’ll alternate between saying that actually wrong things are wrong, and saying that random things that you don’t want are wrong.
Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to kill people.” Yup, it is. You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to arrest me just because I stabbed this innocent bystander to death.” Yeah, right. Actually wrong: “it’s wrong to mug people.” No kidding. You just don’t want it: “it’s wrong for you to lock your door when you leave the house, because it’s wrong for you to do anything to prevent me from coming into your house and taking everything you own to sell on the black market”. Not convincing.
If there were nothing more to things being wrong than that you use the word “wrong” to get people to do things, then there would be no difference between these four attempts to get people to do something. But there is: in the first and third case, the claim that the action is wrong is true (and therefore makes a convincing argument). In the second and fourth case, the claim is false (and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument).
Sure, you can use the word “wrong” to get people to do things that you want them to do, but you can use a lot of words for that. For example, if you’re somebody’s mother and you want them to avoid driving when they’re very sleepy, you can tell them that it’s “dangerous” to drive in that condition. But as with the word “wrong”, you can’t use the word “dangerous” for just any situation, because it’s not true in just any situation. When a proposed action is really dangerous—or really wrong—then you can use that fact to convince them not to pursue that action. But it’s still a fact, independent of whether you use it to get other people to do things you want.
Objective ethics on LW? I’m a little shocked. This whole post is basically argument from popularity (perhaps more accurate to call it argument from convincingness). Judgments of valuation may be universal or quasi-universal, but they are always subjective. Words like “right” and “wrong” (and “innocent” and “own”) and other objective moralistic terms obscure this, so let me do some un-obscuring.
You have this backwards: The claim makes a convincing argument (to you and many others), therefore you call the claim “right”; or the claim makes an unconvincing argument against the action, therefore you call the claim “wrong.”
Notice you had to tuck in the word “innocent,” which already implies your conclusion that it is “actually wrong” to harm the bystander.
Here you used the word “own,” which again already implies your conclusion that it is wrong to steal it. Both examples are purely circular. Most people are disgusted by killing and theft, and they may be counterproductive from most people’s points of view, but that is just about all we can say about the matter—and all we need to say. We are disgusted, so we ban such actions.
Moral right and wrong are not objective facts. The fact that you and I subjectively experience a moral reaction to killing and theft may be an objective fact, but the wrongness itself is not objective, even though it may be universal or near-universal (that is, even though almost everyone else may feel the same way). Universal subjective valuation is not objective valuation (this latter term is, I contend, completely meaningless—unless someone can supply a useful definition).
Although he was speaking in the context of economics, Ludwig von Mises gave the most succinct explanation of why all valuation is subjective when he said, “We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”
You could say that about any word in the English language. Let’s try this with the word “rain”. On many occasions, a person may say “it’s raining and therefore you should take an umbrella”. On some occasions this claim will be false and people will know that it’s false (e.g. because they looked out a window and saw that it wasn’t raining), and so the argument will not be convincing.
What you’re doing here can be applied to this rain scenario. You could say:
That is, the claim that it’s raining makes a convincing argument on some occasions, and on those occasions you call the claim “right”. On other occasions, the claim makes an unconvincing argument, and on those occasions you call the claim “wrong”.
So there, we’ve applied your theory about the concept of morality, to the concept of rain. Your theory could equally well be applied to any concept at all. That is, your theory is that when we are convinced by arguments that employ claims about morality, then we call the claims “right”. But you could equally well come up with the theory that when we are convinced by arguments that employ claims about rain, then we call the claims “right”.
So what have we demonstrated? With your help, we have demonstrated that in this respect, morality is like rain. And like everything else. Morality is like atoms. Morality is like gravity—in this respect. You have highlighted a property of morality which is shared by absolutely everything else in the universe that we have a word for. And this property is, that you can come up with this reverse theory of it, according to which we call claims employing the term “right” when we are convinced by arguments using those claims.
For me to be guilty of begging the question I would have to be trying to prove that a murder was committed in the hypothetical scenario. But it’s a hypothetical scenario in which it is specified that the person committed murder.
Here’s the hypothetical scenario, more explicit: someone has just committed a murder. He tells a cop, “it would be wrong for you to arrest me”. Since it is not, in fact, wrong for the cop to arrest him, then the argument is unconvincing. In this hypothetical scenario, the reason the argument is unconvincing is that it is not actually wrong for the cop to arrest him.
Now, according to your own reverse theory of morality, the hypothetical scenario that I have specified in fact reduces to the following: someone is in a situation where his claims that it would be wrong to arrest him will go ignored by the cop in question. Therefore, the cop believes that it is right to arrest him.
But as I explained before, you can apply your reverse treatment to absolutely anything at all. Here’s an example: in this scenario, someone picks up an orange and says about the orange, “this is an apple”. Nobody is convinced by his assertion, and the reason nobody is convinced by his assertion is that the orange is, in fact, not an apple.
Now we can apply your reverse treatment to this scenario. Someone picks up something and says about it, “this is an apple”. Nobody is convinced by his assertion, and therefore they call his claim “wrong”.
Notice the reversal. In my description of the scenario, that the claim is wrong causes others to disbelieve the claim, because they can see with their own eyes that it is wrong. In your reverse description of the scenario, the primary fact is that people are not convinced by the claim, and the secondary fact which follows from the primary fact is that they call the claim “wrong”.
You’re not proving anything with the reversal, because you can apply the reversal to anything at all.
Once again, this is a hypothetical scenario in which it is specified that it would be stealing, and therefore wrong. I am not trying to prove that; I am specifying it to construct the scenario.
Absolutely, but morality is not personal preference any more than price is personal preference. These are separate subjects. Mises would not say, “I recognize that the price of gasoline is $4 not because it is $4; rather, the price of gasoline is $4 because I recognize it as $4, and if tomorrow I recognize it as $2 then it will be $2, whatever the gas station attendant says.” That would be absurd for him to say. The same applies to morality.
You misread me, though perhaps that was my fault. Does the bold help? I was talking about you (Constant), not “you” in the general sense. I wasn’t presenting a theory of morality; I was shedding light on yours by suggesting that you are only calling these things right or wrong because you find the arguments convincing.
No, you’d have to be trying to justify your statement that “it is wrong to kill people,” which it seems you were (likewise for the theft example). Maybe your unusual phrasing confused me as to what you were trying to show with that. Anyway, the daughter posts seem to show we agree on more than it appears here, so bygones.
As for the rest about “[my] reverse theory of morality,” that’s all from the above misunderstanding. (Sorry to waste time with my unclear wording.)
Okay, but even on this reading you could “shed” similar “light” on absolutely any term that I ever use. You’re not proving anything special about morality by that. To do that would require finding differences between morality and, say, rain, or apples. But if we were arguing about apples you could make precisely the same move that you made in this discussion about morality.
Here’s a parallel back-and-forth employing apples. Somebody says:
I reply:
Here, let me construct an example with apples. Somebody goes to Tiffany’s, points to a large diamond on display, and says to an employee, “that is an apple, therefore you should be willing to sell it to me for five dollars, which is a great price for an apple.” This claim is false, and therefore makes for an unconvincing argument.
Somebody replies:
* I interpret “right” and “wrong” here as meaning “true” and “false”, because claims are true or false, and these are referring to claims here.
To which they follow up:
** I am continuing the previous interpretation of “right” and “wrong” as meaning, in context here, “true” or “false”. If this is not what you meant then I can easily substitute in what you actually meant, make the corresponding changes, and make the same point as I am making here.
What all this boils down to is that my interlocutor is saying that I am only calling claims about apples true or false because I find the arguments that employ these claims convincing or unconvincing. For example, if I happen to be in Tiffany’s and somebody points to one of the big shiny glassy-looking things with an enormous price tag and says to an employee, “that is an apple, and therefore you should be happy to accept $5 for it”, then I will find that person’s argument unconvincing. My interlocutor’s point is that I am only calling that person’s claim (that that object is an apple) false because I find his argument (that the employee should sell it to him for $5) unconvincing.
Whereas my own account is as follows: I first of all find the person’s claim about the shiny glassy thing false. Then, as a consequence, I find his argument (that the employee should be happy to part with it for $5) unconvincing.
If you like I can come up with yet another example, taking place in Tiffany’s, dropping the apple, and introducing some action such as grabbing a diamond and attempting to leave the premises. I would have my account (that I, a bystander, saw the man grab the diamond, which I believed to be a wrong act, and therefore when security stopped him I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong), and you would have your reversed account (that I was not persuaded by his claims that he had done nothing wrong, and therefore, as a consequence, I believed his grabbing the diamond to be a wrong act).
It seems to me that right and wrong being objective, just like truth and falsehood, is what you’ve been trying to prove all this time. To equate “right and wrong” with “true and false” by assumption would be to, well you know, beg the question. It’s not surprising that it always comes back to circularity, because a circular argument is the same in effect as an unjustified assertion, and in fact that’s become the theme of not just our exchange here, but this entire thread: “objective ethics are true by assertion.”
I think we agreed elsewhere that ethical sentiments are at least quasi-universal; is there something else we needed to agree on? Because the rest just looks like wordplay to me.
I’m not equating moral right and wrong with true and false. I was disambiguating some ambiguous words that you employed. The word “right” is ambiguous, because in one context it can mean “morally righteous”, and in another context it can mean “true”. I disambiguated the words in a certain direction because of the immediate textual context. Apparently that was not what you meant. Okay—so ideally I should go back and disambiguate the words in the opposite direction. However, I can tell you right now it will come to the same result. I don’t really want to belabor this point so unless you insist, I’m not actually going to write yet another comment in which I disambiguate your terms “right” and ’wrong” in the moral direction.
But, ah, you can observe the properties of the object in question, and see that it has very few in common with the set of things that has generated the term “apple” in your mind, and many in common with “diamond”. Is this the same sense in which you say we can simply “recognize” things as fundamentally good or evil? That would make these terms refer to “what my parents thought was good or evil, perturbed by a generation of meaning-learning”. The problem there is—apples are generally recognizable. People disagree on what is right or wrong. Are even apples objective?
People can disagree about gray areas between any two neighboring terms. Take the word “apple”. Apple trees are, according to Wikipedia, the species “Malus domestica”. But as evolutionary biologists postulated (correctly, as it turns out), species are gradually formed over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, and the question of what is “the first apple tree” is a question for which there is no crystal clear answer, nor would there be even if we had a complete record of every ancestor of the apple tree going back to the one-celled organisms. Rather, the proto-species that gave rise to the apple tree gradually evolves into the apple tree, and about very early apple trees two fully informed rational people might very well disagree about which ones are apple trees and which ones are proto-apple trees. This is nothing other than the sorites problem, the problem of the heap, the problem of the vagueness of concepts. It is universal and is not specifically true about moral questions.
Morality is, I have argued, an aspect of custom. And it’s true that people can disagree, on occasion, about whether some particular act violates custom. So custom is, like apples, vague to some degree. Both apples and custom can be used as examples of the sorites problem, if you’re sick of talking about sand heaps. But custom is not radically indeterminate. Customs exist, just as apples exist.
Well I agree with this basically, and it reminds me of John Hasnas writing about customary legal systems. I find that when showing this to people I disagree with about ethics we usually end up in agreement:
The quote from John Hasnas seems to be very close to my own view.
Ah, okay! We don’t disagree then. Thanks for clearing that up!
ETA: Actually, with that clarification, I’d expect many others to agree as well—at least, it seems like what you mean by “custom” and what other posters have called “stuff people want you to do” coincide.
An important point is that nobody gets to unilaterally decide what is or is not custom. That’s in contrast to, say, personal preference, which each person does get to decide for themselves.
Right. Though I’d argue that custom implies that morality is objective, and therefore that custom can be incorrect, so that someone can coherently say that their own society’s customs are immoral (though probably from within a subculture that supports those alternate customs).
Not a good analogy. The objective element of ‘wrong’ is entirely different in nature to that of ‘dangerous’ even though by many definitions it does, in fact, exist.
The word “danger” illustrates a point about logic. The logical point is that the fact that X is often used to persuade people does not mean that the nature of X is that it is ” a way of getting other people to do otherwise than what they wanted to do”. The common use of the word “danger” is an illustration of this logical point. The illustration is correct.
The objectivity of ‘danger’ is entirely different to that of ‘wrong’. As such using it as an argument here is misleading and confused.
Upvoted to both of you for an interesting discussion. It has reached the point it usually does in metaethics where I have to ask for someone to explain:
What the hell does it mean for something to be objectively wrong?
(This isn’t targeted at you specifically wedrifid, it just isn’t clear to me what the objectivity of “wrongness” could possibly refer to)
Yeah, no one can ever seem to explain what “objectively wrong” would even mean. That’s because to call an action wrong is to imply that there is a negative value placed on that action, and for that to be the case you need a valuer. Someone has to do the valuing. Maybe a large group of people—or maybe everyone—values the action negatively, but that is still nothing more than a bunch of individuals engaging in subjective valuation. It may be universal subjective valuation, or maybe they think it’s God’s subjective valuation, but if so it seems better to spell that out plainly than to obscure it with the authoritative- and scientific-sounding modifier objective.
The fact that something is done by a subject doesn’t necessarily make it subjective. It takes a subject to add 2 and 2, but the answer is objective.
There are many ideas as to what “objectively right” could mean. Two of Kant’s famous suggestions are “act only on that maxim you would wish to be universal law” and “treat people always as ends and never as means”.
This encapsulates my thoughts on metaethics entirely.
A hard question. But I will try to give a brief answer.
Morality is an aspect of social custom. Roughly, it is those customs that are enforced especially vigorously. But an important here is that while some customs are somewhat arbitrary and vary from place to place, other customs are much less arbitrary. It is these least arbitrary moral customs that we most commonly think of as universal morality applicable to and recognized by all humanity.
Here’s an example: go anywhere in the world as a tourist, and (in full view of a lot of typical people who are minding their own business, maybe traveling, maybe buying or selling, maybe chatting) push somebody in front of a train, killing them. Just a random person. See how people around you react. Recommendation: do this as a thought experiment, not an actual experiment. I’ll tell you right now how people around the world will react: they’ll be horrified, and they’ll try to detain you or incapacitate you, possibly kill you. They will have a word in their language for what you just did, which will translate very well to the English word “murder”.
But why is this? Why aren’t customs fully arbitrary? This puzzle, I think, is best understood if we think of society as a many-player game. That is, we apply the concepts of game theory to the problem. Custom is a Nash equilibrium. To follow custom is to act in accordance with your equilibrium strategy in this Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibria are not fully arbitrary—and this explains right away at least the general point that customs are not fully arbitrary.
While not arbitrary, Nash equilibria are not necessarily unique, particularly since different societies exist in different environmental conditions, and so different societies can have different sets of customs. However, the customs of all societies around the world, or at least all societies with very few exceptions, share common elements. People across the world will be appalled if you kill someone arbitrarily. People across the world will also be appalled (though probably not as much) if you steal from a vendor—and their concept of what it is to steal from a vendor will be very familiar to you. You’re not in great danger of visiting a foreign country and accidentally committing what they consider to be shoplifting, unless you are very careless. I recommend that if something seems to be a free sample, you check with the vendor to make sure that it is indeed a free sample before helping yourself to it. As long as you are not a complete fool, you should be okay in foreign lands, because your internalized concepts of what it is to steal or to rob, what it is to murder, what it is to assault, very closely match those of the locals.
Some people think, “murder is wrong because it is illegal, and law is created by government, so what is wrong is defined by government.” But I think that social customs are for the most part not created by government, and I think that the laws against murder, against robbery, and so on, follow the customary prohibitions, rather than creating them.
By the way, it’s possible that I’ve mis-applied game theory, though I think that the concept of the Nash equilibrium is simple enough that a beginner like me should be able to understand it. My knowledge of it is spotty and I plan to remedy this over the next several months, so if I’ve made a mistake here hopefully I will not repeat it.
I don’t know about the Nash equilibria, but I agree with most everything you’ve written here. I’d just prefer to call that (quasi-)universal subjective ethics, and to use language that reflects that, as there are exceptions—call them psychopaths or whatever, but in the interest of accuracy. And the other problem with the objectivist interpretation of custom is that sometimes customs do have to change, and sometimes customs are barbaric. It seems that what you were getting at with “actually wrong” in your initial post was the idea that these kind of moral sentiments are universal, which I can buy, but even that is a bit of a leaky generalization.
Pardon me. I deleted my comment before I noticed that someone had replied. (I didn’t think replying to Constant was going to be beneficial. To be honest I didn’t share your perception of interestingness of the conversation, even though I was a participant.)
Very little practically speaking. It is a somewhat related concept to subjectively objective. It doesn’t make the value judgements any less subjective it is just that they happen to be built into the word definitions themselves. It doesn’t make words like ‘should’ and ‘wrong’ any more useful when people with different values are arguing it just takes one of the meanings of ‘should’ as it is used practically and makes it explicit. I think the sophisticated name may be something related to moral cognitivism, probably with a ‘realism’ thrown in somewhere for good measure.
I am not comparing the objectivity of “danger” to the objectivity of “wrong”. I am not stating or implying that their objectivity is the same or similar. I am using the word “danger” as an illustration of a point. The point is correct, and the illustration is correct. That “danger” has different objectivity from “wrong” is not relevant to the point I was illustrating.
There is an objective sense in which an analogy is good or bad, related closely to the concept of reference class tennis. Having one technical similarity does not make an analogy an appropriate one and certainly does not prevent it from being misleading. This example of ‘for example’ is objectively ‘bad’.
That’s one of the things morality has been, and it could indeed be the main thing, but my point above is it all depends on what the person means. Even though getting other people to do something might be the main and most important role of moral language historically, it only invites confusion to overgeneralize here—though I know how tempting it is to simplify all this ethical nonsense floating around in one fell swoop. Some people do simply use “ought” to mean, “It is in your best interest to,” without any desire to get the person to do something. Some people mean “God would disapprove,” and maybe they really don’t care if that makes you refrain from doing it or not, but they’re just letting you know. These little counterexamples ruin the generalization, then we’re back to square one.
I think the only way to really simplify ethics is to acknowledge that people mean all sorts of things by it, and let each person—if anyone cares—explain what they intended in each case.
No, scratch that. The reason ethics is so confused is precisely because people have tried to simplify a whole bunch of disparate-but-somewhat-interrelated notions into a single type of phrasing. A full explanation of everything that is called “ethics” would require examination of religion, politics, sociology, psychology, and much more.
For most things that we think we want ethics for, such as AI, instead of trying to figure out that complex of sundry notions shoehorned into the category of ethics, I think we’d be better off just assiduously hugging the query for each question we want to answer about how to get the results we want in the “moral” sphere (things that hit on your moral emotions, like empathy, indignation, etc.). Mostly I’m interested in this series of posts for the promise it presents for doing away with most of the confusion generated by wordplay such as “objective ethics,” which I consider to be just an artifact of language.