All questions about the morality of actions can be restated as questions about the moral value of the states of the world that those actions give rise to.
All questions about the moral value of the states of the world can in principle be answered by evaluating those world-states in terms of the various things we’ve evolved to value, although actually performing that evaluation is difficult.
Questions about whether the moral value of states of the world should be evaluated in terms of the things we’ve evolved to value, as opposed to evaluated in terms of something else, can be answered by pointing out that the set of things we’ve evolved to value is what right means and is therefore definitionally the right set of things to use.
I consider that third point kind of silly, incidentally.
Well, it works OK if you give up on the idea that “right” has some other meaning, which he spent rather a long time in that sequence trying to convince people to give up on. So perhaps that’s the piece that failed to work.
I mean, once you get rid of that idea, then saying that “right” means the values we all happen to have (positing that there actually is some set of values X such that we all have X) is rather a lot like saying a meter is the distance light travels in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second… it’s arbitrary, sure, but it’s not unreasonable.
Personally, I would approach it from the other direction. “Maybe X is right, maybe it isn’t, maybe both, maybe neither. What does it matter? How would you ever tell? What is added to the discussion by talking about it? X is what we value; it would be absurd to optimize for anything else. We evaluate in terms of what we care about because we care about it; to talk about it being “right” or “not right,” insofar as those words don’t mean “what we value” and “what we don’t value”, adds nothing to the discussion.”
But saying that requires me to embrace a certain kind of pragmatism that is, er, socially problematic to be seen embracing.
My summary is pretty close to yours.
I would summarize it as:
All questions about the morality of actions can be restated as questions about the moral value of the states of the world that those actions give rise to.
All questions about the moral value of the states of the world can in principle be answered by evaluating those world-states in terms of the various things we’ve evolved to value, although actually performing that evaluation is difficult.
Questions about whether the moral value of states of the world should be evaluated in terms of the things we’ve evolved to value, as opposed to evaluated in terms of something else, can be answered by pointing out that the set of things we’ve evolved to value is what right means and is therefore definitionally the right set of things to use.
I consider that third point kind of silly, incidentally.
Yeah, that’s the bit that looks like begging the question. The sequence seems to me to fail to build its results from atoms.
Well, it works OK if you give up on the idea that “right” has some other meaning, which he spent rather a long time in that sequence trying to convince people to give up on. So perhaps that’s the piece that failed to work.
I mean, once you get rid of that idea, then saying that “right” means the values we all happen to have (positing that there actually is some set of values X such that we all have X) is rather a lot like saying a meter is the distance light travels in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second… it’s arbitrary, sure, but it’s not unreasonable.
Personally, I would approach it from the other direction. “Maybe X is right, maybe it isn’t, maybe both, maybe neither. What does it matter? How would you ever tell? What is added to the discussion by talking about it? X is what we value; it would be absurd to optimize for anything else. We evaluate in terms of what we care about because we care about it; to talk about it being “right” or “not right,” insofar as those words don’t mean “what we value” and “what we don’t value”, adds nothing to the discussion.”
But saying that requires me to embrace a certain kind of pragmatism that is, er, socially problematic to be seen embracing.