The interesting question is still the one you didn’t answer yet:
If you found an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, and it said you should prefer something different from what you actually do prefer, what would you do?
I only see two possible answers, and only one of those seems likely to come from you (Peter) or Eugene.
The unlikely answer is “I wouldn’t do anything different”. Then I’d reply “So, morality makes no practical difference to your behavior?”, and then your position that morality is an important concept collapses in a fairly uninteresting way. Your position so far seems to have enough consistency that I would not expect the conversation to go that way.
The likely answer is “If I’m willpower-depleted, I’d do the immoral thing I prefer, but on a good day I’d have enough willpower and I’d do the moral thing. I prefer to have enough willpower to do the moral thing in general.” In that case, I would have to admit that I’m in the same situation, except with a vocabulary change. I define “preference” to include everything that drives a person’s behavior, if we assume that they aren’t suffering from false beliefs, poor planning, or purposeless behavior (like a seizure, for example). So if your behavior is controlled by a combination of preference and morality, then what I’m calling “preference” is the same as what you’re calling “preference and morality”. I am in the same situation in that when I’m willpower-depleted I do a poor job of acting upon consistent preferences (using my definition of the word), I do better when I have more willpower, and I want to have more willpower in general.
If I guessed your answer wrong, please correct me. Otherwise I’d want to fix the vocabulary problem somehow. I like using the word “preference” to include all the things that drive a person, so I’d prefer to say that your preference has two parts, perhaps an “amoral preference” which would mean what you were calling “preference” before, and “moral preference” would include what you were calling “morality” before, but perhaps we’d choose different words if you objected to those. The next question would be:
Okay, you’re making a distinction between amoral preference and moral preference. This distinction is obviously important to you. What makes it important?
...and I have no clue what your answer would be, so I can’t continue the conversation past that point without straightforward answers from you.
If you found an objective basis for saying what you should prefer, and it said you should prefer something different from what you actually do prefer, what would you do?
Follow morality.
Okay, you’re making a distinction between amoral preference and moral preference. This distinction is obviously important to you. What makes it important?
One way to illustrate this distinction is using Eliezer’s “murder pill”. If you were offered a pill that would reverse and/or eliminate a preference would you take it (possibly the offer includes paying you)? If the preference is something like preferring vanilla to chocolate ice cream, the answer is probably yes. If the preference is for people not to be murdered the answer is probably no.
One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.
One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.
If that’s a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn’t what you wanted.
Now if the thoughts people had about moral preferences that make them change were actually empirically meaningful and consistent with observation, rather than verbal manipulation consisting of undefinable terms that can’t be nailed down even with multiple days of Q&A, that would be worthwhile and not just a statement about psychology. But if we had such statements to make about morality, we would have been making them all this time and there would be clarity about what we’re talking about, which hasn’t happened.
One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.
If that’s a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn’t what you wanted.
That’s not a definition of morality but an explanation of one reason why the “murder pill” distinction is important.
...the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change.
If that’s a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn’t what you wanted.
If that’s a valid argument, then logic, mathematics, etc are branches of psychology.
Now if the thoughts people had about moral preferences that make them change were actually empirically meaningful and consistent with observation, rather than verbal manipulation consisting of undefinable terms that can’t be nailed down
Are you saying there has never been any valid moral discourse or persuasion?
If that’s a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn’t what you wanted.
If that’s a valid argument, then logic, mathematics, etc are branches of psychology.
There’s a difference between changing your mind because a discussion lead you to bound your rationality differently, and changing your mind because of suggestability and other forms of sloppy thinking. Logic and mathematics is the former, if done right. I haven’t seen much non-sloppy thinking on the subject of changing preferences.
I suppose there could be such a thing—Joe designed an elegant high-throughput gas chamber, he wants to show the design to his friends, someone tells Joe that this could be used for mass murder, Joe hadn’t thought that the design might actually be used, so he hides his design somewhere so it won’t be used. But that’s changing Joe’s belief about whether sharing his design is likely to cause mass murder, not changing Joe’s preference about whether he wants mass murder to happen.
Are you saying there has never been any valid moral discourse or persuasion?
No, I’m saying that morality is a useless concept and that what you’re calling moral discourse is some mixture of (valid change of beliefs based on reflection and presentation of evidence) and invalid emotional manipulation based on sloppy thinking involving, among other things, undefined and undefinable terms.
But that’s changing Joe’s belief about whether sharing his design is likely to cause mass murder, not changing Joe’s preference about whether he wants mass murder to happen.
But there are other stories where the preference itself changes. “If you approve of womens rights, you should approve of Gay rights”.
No, I’m saying that morality is a useless concept and that what you’re calling moral discourse is some mixture of (valid change of beliefs based on reflection and presentation of evidence) and invalid emotional manipulation based on sloppy thinking involving, among other things, undefined and undefinable terms.
Everything is a mixture of the invalid and the valid. Why throw somethin out instead of doing it better?
“If you approve of womens rights, you should approve of Gay rights”.
IMO we should have gay rights because gays want them, not because moral suasion was used successfully on people opposed to gay rights. Even if your argument above worked, I can’t envision a plausible reasoning system in which the argument is valid. Can you offer one? Otherwise, it only worked because the listener was confused, and we’re back to morality being a special case of psychology again.
Everything is a mixture of the invalid and the valid. Why throw somethin out instead of doing it better?
Because I don’t know how to do moral arguments better. So far as I can tell, they always seems to wind up either being wrong, or not being moral arguments.
The likely answer is “If I’m willpower-depleted, I’d do the immoral thing I prefer, but on a good day I’d have enough willpower and I’d do the moral thing. I prefer to have enough willpower to do the moral thing in general.” In that case, I would have to admit that I’m in the same situation, except with a vocabulary change. I define “preference” to include everything that drives a person’s behavior,
But preference itself is influenced by reasoning and experience. The Preference theory focuses on proximate causes, but there are more distal ones too.
if we assume that they aren’t suffering from false beliefs, poor planning, or purposeless behavior (like a seizure, for example). So if your behavior is controlled by a combination of preference and morality, then what I’m calling “preference” is the same as what you’re calling “preference and morality”
I am not and never was using “preference” to mean something disjoint from morality.
If some preferences are moral preferences, then whole issue of morality is not disposed of by only talking about preferences. That is not an argument for nihilism
or relativism. You could have an epistemology where everything is talked about as belief, and the difference between true belief and false belief is ignored.
Okay, you’re making a distinction between amoral preference and moral preference. This distinction is obviously important to you. What makes it important?
If by a straightforward answer. you mean an answer framed in terms of some instrumental value that i fulfils, I can’t do that. I can only continue to challenge the
frame itself. Morality is already, in itself, the most important value. It isn’t “made” important by some greater good.
I am not and never was using “preference” to mean something disjoint from morality. If some preferences are moral preferences, then whole issue of morality is not disposed of by only talking about preferences.
There’s a choice you’re making here, differently from me, and I’d like to get clear on what that choice is and understand why we’re making it differently.
I have a bunch of things I prefer. I’d rather eat strawberry ice cream than vanilla, and I’d rather not design higher-throughput gas chambers. For me those two preferences are similar in kind—they’re stuff I prefer and that’s all there is to be said about it.
You might share my taste in ice cream and you said you share my taste in designing gas chambers. But for you, those two preferences are different in kind. The ice cream preference is not about morality, but designing gas chambers is immoral and that distinction is important for you.
I hope we all agree that the preference not to design high-throughput gas chambers is commonly and strongly held, and that it’s even a consensus in the sense that I prefer that you prefer not to design high-throughput gas chambers. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the question of why the distinction is important to you. For example, I could define the preferences of mine that can be easily desscribed without using the letter “s” to be “blort” preferences, and the others to be non-blort, and rant about how we all need to distinguish blort preferences from non-blort preferences, and you’d be left wondering “Why does he care?”
And the answer would be that there is no good reason for me to care about the distinction between blort and non-blort preferences. The distinction is completely useless. A given concept takes mental effort to use and discuss, so the decision to use or not use a concept is a pragmatic one: we use a concept if the mental effort of forming it and communicating about it is paid for by the improved clarity when we use it. The concept of blort prefrerences does not improve the clarity of our thoughts, so nobody uses it.
The decision to use the concept of “morality” is like any other decision to define and use a concept. We should use it if the cost of talking about it is paid for by the added clarity it brings. If we don’t use the concept, that doesn’t change whether anyone wants to build high-throughput gas chambers—it just means that we don’t have the tools to talk about the difference in kind between ice cream flavor preferences and gas chamber building preferences. If there’s no use for such talk, then we should discard the concept, and if there is a use for such talk, we should keep the concept and try to assign a useful and clear meaning to it.
So what use is the concept of morality? How do people benefit from regarding ice cream flavor preferences as a different sort of thing from gas chamber building preferences?
Morality is already, in itself, the most important value.
I hope we’re agreed that there are two different kinds of things here—the strongly held preference to not design high-throughput gas chambers is a different kind of thing from the decision to label that preference as a moral one. The former influences the options available to a well-organized mass murderer, and the latter determines the structure of conversations like this one. The former is a value, the latter is a choice about how words label things. I claim that if we understand what is going on, we’ll all prefer to make the latter choice pragmatically.
You’ve written quite a lot of words but you’re still stuck on the idea that all importance is instrumental importance, importance for something that doesn’t need to be impoitant in itself. You should care about morality because it is a value and values are definitionally what is important and what should be cared about. If you suddenly started liking vanilla.nothing important would change. You wouldn’t stop
being you, and your new self wouldn’t be someone your old self would hate. That wouldn’t be the case if you suddenly started liking murder or gas chambers. You don’t now like people who like those things, and you wouldn’t now want to become one.
I claim that if we understand what is going on, we’ll all prefer to make the latter choice pragmatically.
If we understand what is going on , we should make the choice correctly—that
is, according to rational norms. If morality means something other than the merely
pragmatic, we should not label the pragmatic as the moral. And it must mean something different because it is an open, investigatable question whether some instrumentally useful thing is also ethically good, whereas questions like “is the pragmatic useful”
are trivial and tautologous.
You should care about morality because it is a value and values are definitionally what is important and what should be cared about.
You’re not getting the distinction between morality-the-concept-worth-having and morality-the-value-worth-enacting.
I’m looking for a useful definition of morality here, and if I frame what you say as a definition you seem to be defining a preference to be a moral preference if it’s strongly held, which doesn’t seem very interesting. If we’re going to have the distinction, I like Eugene’s proposal that a moral preference is one that’s worth talking about better, but we need to make the distinction in such a way that something doesn’t get promoted to being a moral preference just because people are easily deceived about it. There should be true things to say about it.
and if I frame what you say as a definition you seem to be defining a preference to be a moral preference if it’s strongly held,
But what I actually gave as a definition is the concept of morality is the concept
of ultimate value and importance. A concept which even the nihilists need so that they
can express their disbelief in it. A concept which even social and cognitive scientists need so they can describe the behaviour surrounding it.
You are apparently claiming there is some important difference between a strongly held preference and something of ultimate value and importance. Seems like splitting hairs to me. Can you describe how those two things are different?
Just because you do have a stongly held preference, it doesn’t mean you should. The difference between true beliefs and fervently held ones is similar.
Just because you do have a stongly held preference, it doesn’t mean you should. The difference between true beliefs and fervently held ones is similar.
One can do experiments to determine whether beliefs are true, for the beliefs that matter. What can one do with a preference to figure out if it should be strongly held?
If that question has no answer, the claim that the two are similar seems indefensible.
Empirical content. That is, a belief matters if it makes or implies statements about things one might observe.
So it doesn’t matter if it only affects what you will do?
If I’m thinking for the purpose of figuring out my future actions, that’s a plan, not a belief, since planning is relevant when I haven’t yet decided what to do.
I suppose beliefs about other people’s actions are empirical.
I’ve lost the relevance of this thread. Please state a purpose if you wish to continue, and if I like it, I’ll reply.
The interesting question is still the one you didn’t answer yet:
I only see two possible answers, and only one of those seems likely to come from you (Peter) or Eugene.
The unlikely answer is “I wouldn’t do anything different”. Then I’d reply “So, morality makes no practical difference to your behavior?”, and then your position that morality is an important concept collapses in a fairly uninteresting way. Your position so far seems to have enough consistency that I would not expect the conversation to go that way.
The likely answer is “If I’m willpower-depleted, I’d do the immoral thing I prefer, but on a good day I’d have enough willpower and I’d do the moral thing. I prefer to have enough willpower to do the moral thing in general.” In that case, I would have to admit that I’m in the same situation, except with a vocabulary change. I define “preference” to include everything that drives a person’s behavior, if we assume that they aren’t suffering from false beliefs, poor planning, or purposeless behavior (like a seizure, for example). So if your behavior is controlled by a combination of preference and morality, then what I’m calling “preference” is the same as what you’re calling “preference and morality”. I am in the same situation in that when I’m willpower-depleted I do a poor job of acting upon consistent preferences (using my definition of the word), I do better when I have more willpower, and I want to have more willpower in general.
If I guessed your answer wrong, please correct me. Otherwise I’d want to fix the vocabulary problem somehow. I like using the word “preference” to include all the things that drive a person, so I’d prefer to say that your preference has two parts, perhaps an “amoral preference” which would mean what you were calling “preference” before, and “moral preference” would include what you were calling “morality” before, but perhaps we’d choose different words if you objected to those. The next question would be:
...and I have no clue what your answer would be, so I can’t continue the conversation past that point without straightforward answers from you.
Follow morality.
One way to illustrate this distinction is using Eliezer’s “murder pill”. If you were offered a pill that would reverse and/or eliminate a preference would you take it (possibly the offer includes paying you)? If the preference is something like preferring vanilla to chocolate ice cream, the answer is probably yes. If the preference is for people not to be murdered the answer is probably no.
One of the reasons this distinction is important is that because of the way human brains are designed, thinking about your preferences can cause them to change. Furthermore, this phenomenon is more likely to occur with high level moral preferences, then with low level amoral preferences.
If that’s a definition of morality, then morality is a subset of psychology, which probably isn’t what you wanted.
Now if the thoughts people had about moral preferences that make them change were actually empirically meaningful and consistent with observation, rather than verbal manipulation consisting of undefinable terms that can’t be nailed down even with multiple days of Q&A, that would be worthwhile and not just a statement about psychology. But if we had such statements to make about morality, we would have been making them all this time and there would be clarity about what we’re talking about, which hasn’t happened.
That’s not a definition of morality but an explanation of one reason why the “murder pill” distinction is important.
If that’s a valid argument, then logic, mathematics, etc are branches of psychology.
Are you saying there has never been any valid moral discourse or persuasion?
There’s a difference between changing your mind because a discussion lead you to bound your rationality differently, and changing your mind because of suggestability and other forms of sloppy thinking. Logic and mathematics is the former, if done right. I haven’t seen much non-sloppy thinking on the subject of changing preferences.
I suppose there could be such a thing—Joe designed an elegant high-throughput gas chamber, he wants to show the design to his friends, someone tells Joe that this could be used for mass murder, Joe hadn’t thought that the design might actually be used, so he hides his design somewhere so it won’t be used. But that’s changing Joe’s belief about whether sharing his design is likely to cause mass murder, not changing Joe’s preference about whether he wants mass murder to happen.
No, I’m saying that morality is a useless concept and that what you’re calling moral discourse is some mixture of (valid change of beliefs based on reflection and presentation of evidence) and invalid emotional manipulation based on sloppy thinking involving, among other things, undefined and undefinable terms.
But there are other stories where the preference itself changes. “If you approve of womens rights, you should approve of Gay rights”.
Everything is a mixture of the invalid and the valid. Why throw somethin out instead of doing it better?
IMO we should have gay rights because gays want them, not because moral suasion was used successfully on people opposed to gay rights. Even if your argument above worked, I can’t envision a plausible reasoning system in which the argument is valid. Can you offer one? Otherwise, it only worked because the listener was confused, and we’re back to morality being a special case of psychology again.
Because I don’t know how to do moral arguments better. So far as I can tell, they always seems to wind up either being wrong, or not being moral arguments.
They are not going to arrive without overcoming opposition somehow.
Does that mean your “because gays/women want them” isn’t valid? Why offer it then?
Because you reject them?
But preference itself is influenced by reasoning and experience. The Preference theory focuses on proximate causes, but there are more distal ones too.
I am not and never was using “preference” to mean something disjoint from morality. If some preferences are moral preferences, then whole issue of morality is not disposed of by only talking about preferences. That is not an argument for nihilism or relativism. You could have an epistemology where everything is talked about as belief, and the difference between true belief and false belief is ignored.
If by a straightforward answer. you mean an answer framed in terms of some instrumental value that i fulfils, I can’t do that. I can only continue to challenge the frame itself. Morality is already, in itself, the most important value. It isn’t “made” important by some greater good.
There’s a choice you’re making here, differently from me, and I’d like to get clear on what that choice is and understand why we’re making it differently.
I have a bunch of things I prefer. I’d rather eat strawberry ice cream than vanilla, and I’d rather not design higher-throughput gas chambers. For me those two preferences are similar in kind—they’re stuff I prefer and that’s all there is to be said about it.
You might share my taste in ice cream and you said you share my taste in designing gas chambers. But for you, those two preferences are different in kind. The ice cream preference is not about morality, but designing gas chambers is immoral and that distinction is important for you.
I hope we all agree that the preference not to design high-throughput gas chambers is commonly and strongly held, and that it’s even a consensus in the sense that I prefer that you prefer not to design high-throughput gas chambers. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the question of why the distinction is important to you. For example, I could define the preferences of mine that can be easily desscribed without using the letter “s” to be “blort” preferences, and the others to be non-blort, and rant about how we all need to distinguish blort preferences from non-blort preferences, and you’d be left wondering “Why does he care?”
And the answer would be that there is no good reason for me to care about the distinction between blort and non-blort preferences. The distinction is completely useless. A given concept takes mental effort to use and discuss, so the decision to use or not use a concept is a pragmatic one: we use a concept if the mental effort of forming it and communicating about it is paid for by the improved clarity when we use it. The concept of blort prefrerences does not improve the clarity of our thoughts, so nobody uses it.
The decision to use the concept of “morality” is like any other decision to define and use a concept. We should use it if the cost of talking about it is paid for by the added clarity it brings. If we don’t use the concept, that doesn’t change whether anyone wants to build high-throughput gas chambers—it just means that we don’t have the tools to talk about the difference in kind between ice cream flavor preferences and gas chamber building preferences. If there’s no use for such talk, then we should discard the concept, and if there is a use for such talk, we should keep the concept and try to assign a useful and clear meaning to it.
So what use is the concept of morality? How do people benefit from regarding ice cream flavor preferences as a different sort of thing from gas chamber building preferences?
I hope we’re agreed that there are two different kinds of things here—the strongly held preference to not design high-throughput gas chambers is a different kind of thing from the decision to label that preference as a moral one. The former influences the options available to a well-organized mass murderer, and the latter determines the structure of conversations like this one. The former is a value, the latter is a choice about how words label things. I claim that if we understand what is going on, we’ll all prefer to make the latter choice pragmatically.
You’ve written quite a lot of words but you’re still stuck on the idea that all importance is instrumental importance, importance for something that doesn’t need to be impoitant in itself. You should care about morality because it is a value and values are definitionally what is important and what should be cared about. If you suddenly started liking vanilla.nothing important would change. You wouldn’t stop being you, and your new self wouldn’t be someone your old self would hate. That wouldn’t be the case if you suddenly started liking murder or gas chambers. You don’t now like people who like those things, and you wouldn’t now want to become one.
If we understand what is going on , we should make the choice correctly—that is, according to rational norms. If morality means something other than the merely pragmatic, we should not label the pragmatic as the moral. And it must mean something different because it is an open, investigatable question whether some instrumentally useful thing is also ethically good, whereas questions like “is the pragmatic useful” are trivial and tautologous.
You’re not getting the distinction between morality-the-concept-worth-having and morality-the-value-worth-enacting.
I’m looking for a useful definition of morality here, and if I frame what you say as a definition you seem to be defining a preference to be a moral preference if it’s strongly held, which doesn’t seem very interesting. If we’re going to have the distinction, I like Eugene’s proposal that a moral preference is one that’s worth talking about better, but we need to make the distinction in such a way that something doesn’t get promoted to being a moral preference just because people are easily deceived about it. There should be true things to say about it.
But what I actually gave as a definition is the concept of morality is the concept of ultimate value and importance. A concept which even the nihilists need so that they can express their disbelief in it. A concept which even social and cognitive scientists need so they can describe the behaviour surrounding it.
You are apparently claiming there is some important difference between a strongly held preference and something of ultimate value and importance. Seems like splitting hairs to me. Can you describe how those two things are different?
Just because you do have a stongly held preference, it doesn’t mean you should. The difference between true beliefs and fervently held ones is similar.
One can do experiments to determine whether beliefs are true, for the beliefs that matter. What can one do with a preference to figure out if it should be strongly held?
If that question has no answer, the claim that the two are similar seems indefensible.
What makes them matter?
Reason about it?
Empirical content. That is, a belief matters if it makes or implies statements about things one might observe.
Can you give an example? I tried to make one at http://lesswrong.com/lw/5eh/what_is_metaethics/43fh, but it twisted around into revising a belief instead of revising a preference.
So it doesn’t matter if it only affects what you will do?
If I’m thinking for the purpose of figuring out my future actions, that’s a plan, not a belief, since planning is relevant when I haven’t yet decided what to do.
I suppose beliefs about other people’s actions are empirical.
I’ve lost the relevance of this thread. Please state a purpose if you wish to continue, and if I like it, I’ll reply.