I have no idea what you mean by that. I don’t think value systems don’t come into it, I just think they are not isolated from rationality. And I am sceptical that you could predict any higher-level phenomenon from “the ground up”, whether its morality or mortgages.
I mean that value systems are a function of physically existing things, the way a 747 is a function of physically existing things, but we have no evidence suggesting that objective morality is an existing thing. We have standards by which we judge beauty, and we project those values onto the world, but the standards are in us, not outside of us. We can see, in reductionist terms, how the existence of ethical systems within beings, which would feel from the inside like the existence of an objective morality, would come about.
Create a reasoning engine that doesn’t have those ethical systems built into it, and it would have no reason to care about them.
Where is it proven they can be discarded?
You can’t build a tower on empty air. If a debate has been going on for hundreds of years, stretching back to an argument which rests on “this defies our moral intuitions, therefore it’s wrong,” and that was never addressed with “moral intuitions don’t work that way,” then the debate has failed to progress in a meaningful direction, much as a debate over whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound has if nobody bothers to dissolve the question.
All of them.
That’s not an example. Please provide an actual one.
Are you aware that that is basically what every crank says about some other field?
Sure, but it’s also what philosophers say about each other, all the time. Wittgenstein condemned practically all his predecessors and peers as incompetent, and declared that he had solved nearly the entirety of philosophy. Philosophy as a field is full of people banging their heads on a wall at all those other idiots who just don’t get it. “Most philosophers are incompetent, except for the ones who’re sensible enough to see things my way,” is a perfectly ordinary perspective among philosophers.
I mean that value systems are a function of physically existing things, the way a 747 is a function of physically existing things, but we have no evidence suggesting that objective morality is an existing thing.
But I wans’t saying that. I am arguing that moral claims truth values, that aren;t indexed to individuals or socieities.
That epistemic claim can be justified by appeal to an ontoogy including Moral Objects, but that is not how I am justifying it: my argument is based on rationality, as I have said many times.
We have standards by which we judge beauty, and we project those values onto the world, but the standards are in us, not outside of us.
We have standards by which we jusdge the truth values of mathematical claims, and they are inside us too,
and that doens’t stop mathematics being objective. Relativism requires that truthvalues are indexed to us, that there is one truth for me and another for thee. Being located in us, or being operated by us are not sufficient
criteria for being indexed to us.
We can see, in reductionist terms, how the existence of ethical systems within beings, which would feel from the inside like the existence of an objective morality, would come about.
We can see, in reductionistic terms, how the entities could converge on a unform set of truth values. There is nothing non reductionist about anything I have said. Reductionsm does not force one answer to metaethics.
reate a reasoning engine that doesn’t have those ethical systems built into it, and it would have no reason to care about them.
Provide evidence that ethics is a whole separate modue, and not part of general reasoning ability.
You can’t build a tower on empty air. If a debate has been going on for hundreds of years, stretching back to an argument which rests on “this defies our moral intuitions, therefore it’s wrong,” and that was never addressed with “moral intuitions don’t work that way,” then the debate has failed to progress in a meaningful direction, much as a debate over whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound has if nobody bothers to dissolve the question.
Please explain why moral intuitions don’t work that way.
Please provide some foundations for somethng that aren;t unjustofied by anything more foundationa.
That’s not an example. Please provide an actual one
You can select one at random. obviously.
Sure, but it’s also what philosophers say about each other, all the time.
No, philosophers don’t regularly accuse each other of being incpompetent..just of being wrong. There’s a difference.
Wittgenstein condemned practically all his predecessors and peers as incompetent, and declared that he had solved nearly the entirety of philosophy.
You are inferring a lot from one example.
Philosophy as a field is full of people banging their heads on a wall at all those other idiots who just don’t get it. “Most philosophers are incompetent, except for the ones who’re sensible enough to see things my way,” is a perfectly ordinary perspective among philosophers.
But I wans’t saying that. I am arguing that moral claims truth values, that aren;t indexed to individuals or socieities. That epistemic claim can be justified by appeal to an ontoogy including Moral Objects, but that is not how I am justifying it: my argument is based on rationality, as I have said many times.
I don’t understand, can you rephrase this?
We have standards by which we jusdge the truth values of mathematical claims, and they are inside us too, and that doens’t stop mathematics being objective. Relativism requires that truthvalues are indexed to us, that there is one truth for me and another for thee. Being located in us, or being operated by us are not sufficient criteria for being indexed to us.
The standards by which we judge the truth of mathematical claims are not just inside us. One object plus another object will continue to equal two objects whether or not there are any living beings to make that judgment. Math is not something we’ve created within ourselves, but something we’ve discovered and observed.
If our mathematical models ever stop being able to predict in advance the behavior of the universe, then we will have rather more reason to doubt that the math inside us is different from the math outside of us.
What evidence do we have that this is the case for morality?
Provide evidence that ethics is a whole separate modue, and not part of general reasoning ability.
My assertion is that, if we judge ethics as a rational system, innate values are among the axioms that the system is predicated on. You cannot prove the axioms of a system within that system, and an ethical system predicated on premises like “happiness is good” will not itself be able to prove the goodness of happiness.
While we could suppose that the axioms which our ethical systems are predicated on are objectively true, we have considerable reason to believe that we would have developed these axioms for adaptive reasons, even if there were no sense in which objective moral axioms exist, and we do not have evidence which suggests that objective, independently existing true moral axioms do exist.
Please explain why moral intuitions don’t work that way.
People can be induced to strongly support opposing responses to the same moral dilemma, just by rephrasing it differently to trigger different heuristics. Our moral intuitions are incoherent.
Please provide some foundations for somethng that aren;t unjustofied by anything more foundationa.
I don’t think I understand this, can you rephrase it?
You can select one at random. obviously.
I do not recall any creditable attempts, which places me in a disadvantaged position with respect to locating them. You’re the one claiming that they’re there at all, that’s why I’m asking you to do it.
No, philosophers don’t regularly accuse each other of being incpompetent..just of being wrong. There’s a difference.
Philosophers don’t usually accuse each other of being incompetent in their publications, because it’s not conducive to getting other philosophers to regard their arguments dispassionately, and that sort of open accusation is generally frowned upon in academic circles whether one believes it or not. They do regularly accuse each other of being comprehensively wrong for their entire careers. In my personal conversations with philosophers (and I never considered myself to have really taken a class, or attended a lecture by a visitor, if I didn’t speak with the person teaching it on a personal basis to probe their thoughts beyond the curriculum,) I observed a whole lot of frustration with philosophers who they think just don’t get their arguments. It’s unsurprising that people would tend to become so frustrated participating in a field that basically amounts to long running arguments extended over decades or centuries. Imagine the conversation we’re having now going on for eighty years, and neither of us has changed our minds. If you didn’t find my arguments convincing, and I hadn’t budged in all that time, don’t you’d think you’d start to suspect that I was particularly thick?
You are inferring a lot from one example.
I’m using an example illustrative of my experience.
Sounds to me like PrawnOfFate is saying that any sufficiently rational cognitive system will converge on a certain set of ethical goals as a consequence of its structure, i.e. that (human-style) ethics is a property that reliably emerges in anything capable of reason.
I’d say the existence of sociopathy among humans provides a pretty good counterargument to this (sociopaths can be pretty good at accomplishing their goals, so the pathology doesn’t seem to be indicative of a flawed rationality), but at least the argument doesn’t rely on counting fundamental particles of morality or something.
I would say so also, but PrawnOfFate has already argued that sociopaths are subject to additional egocentric bias relative to normal people and thereby less rational. It seems to me that he’s implicitly judging rationality by how well it leads to a particular body of ethics he already accepts, rather than how well it optimizes for potentially arbitrary values.
Well, I’m not a psychologist, but if someone asked me to name a pathology marked by unusual egocentric bias I’d point to NPD, not sociopathy.
That brings up some interesting questions concerning how we define rationality, though. Pathologies in psychology are defined in terms of interference with daily life, and the personality disorder spectrum in particular usually implies problems interacting with people or societies. That could imply either irreconcilable values or specific flaws in reasoning, but only the latter is irrational in the sense we usually use around here. Unfortunately, people are cognitively messy enough that the two are pretty hard to distinguish, particularly since so many human goals involve interaction with other people.
In any case, this might be a good time to taboo “rational”.
The standards by which we judge the truth of mathematical claims are not just inside us.
How do we judge claims about transfinite numbers?
One object plus another object will continue to equal two objects whether or not there are any living beings to make that judgment. Math is not something we’ve created within ourselves, but something we’ve discovered and observed.
If our mathematical models ever stop being able to predict in advance the behavior of the universe, then we will have rather more reason to doubt that the math inside us is different from the math outside of us.
Mathematics isn’t physics. Mathematicians prove theorems from axioms, not from experiments.
Provide evidence that ethics is a whole separate modue, and not part of general reasoning ability.
My assertion is that, if we judge ethics as a rational system, innate values are among the axioms that the system is predicated on.
Not necessarily. Eg, for utilitarians, values are just facts that are plugged into the metaethics to get concrete
actions.
You cannot prove the axioms of a system within that system, and an ethical system predicated on premises like “happiness is good” will not itself be able to prove the goodness of happiness.
Metaethical systems usually have axioms like “Maximising utility is good”.
While we could suppose that the axioms which our ethical systems are predicated on are objectively true, we have considerable reason to believe that we would have developed these axioms for adaptive reasons, even if there were no sense in which objective moral axioms exist, and we do not have evidence which suggests that objective, independently existing true moral axioms do exist.
I am not sure what you mean by “exist” here. Claims are objectively true if most rational minds converge on them. That doesn’t require Objective Truth to float about in space here.
Please explain why moral intuitions don’t work that way.
People can be induced to strongly support opposing responses to the same moral dilemma, just by rephrasing it differently to trigger different heuristics. Our moral intuitions are incoherent.
Does that mean we can;t use moral intuitions at all, or that they must be used with caution?
I don’t think I understand this, can you rephrase it?
Philosphers talk about intuitions, because that is the term for something foundational that seems
true, but can’t be justified by anything more foundational. LessWrongians don’t like intuitions,
but don’t see to be able to explain how to manage without them.
I do not recall any creditable attempts, which places me in a disadvantaged position with respect to locating them.
Did you post any comments explaining to the professional philosophers where they had gone wrong?
Imagine the conversation we’re having now going on for eighty years, and neither of us has changed our minds. If you didn’t find my arguments convincing, and I hadn’t budged in all that time, don’t you’d think you’d start to suspect that I was particularly thick?
I don;’t see the problem. Philosophical competence is largely about understanding the problem.
Mathematics isn’t physics. Mathematicians prove theorems from axioms, not from experiments.
Yes, but the fact that the universe itself seems to adhere to the logical systems by which we construct mathematics gives credence to the idea that the logical systems are fundamental, something we’ve discovered rather than producing. We judge claims about nonobserved mathematical constructs like transfinites according to those systems,
Metaethical systems usually have axioms like “Maximising utility is good”.
But utility is a function of values. A paperclipper will produce utility according to different values than a human.
I am not sure what you mean by “exist” here. Claims are objectively true if most rational minds converge on them. That doesn’t require Objective Truth to float about in space here.
Why would most rational minds converge on values? Most human minds converge on some values, but we share almost all our evolutionary history and brain structure. The fact that most humans converge on certain values is no more indicative of rational minds in general doing so than the fact that most humans have two hands is indicative of most possible intelligent species converging on having two hands.
Does that mean we can;t use moral intuitions at all, or that they must be used with caution?
It means we should be aware of what our intuitions are and what they’ve developed to be good for. Intuitions are evolved heuristics, not a priori truth generators.
Philosphers talk about intuitions, because that is the term for something foundational that seems true, but can’t be justified by anything more foundational. LessWrongians don’t like intuitions, but don’t see to be able to explain how to manage without them.
It seems like you’re equating intuitions with axioms here. We can (and should) recognize that our intuitions are frequently unhelpful at guiding us to he truth, without throwing out all axioms.
Did you post any comments explaining to the professional philosophers where they had gone wrong?
If I did, I don’t remember them. I may have, I may have felt someone else adequately addressed them, I may not have felt it was worth the bother.
It seems to me that you’re trying to foist onto me the effort of locating something which you were the one to testify was there in the first place.
I don;’t see the problem. Philosophical competence is largely about understanding the problem.
And philosophers frequently fall into the pattern of believing that other philosophers disagree with each other due to failure to understand the problems they’re dealing with.
In any case, I reject the notion that dismissing large contingents of philosophers as lacking in competence is a valuable piece of evidence with respect t crankishness, and if you want to convince me that I am taking a crankish attitude, you’ll need to offer some other evidence.
Yes, but the fact that the universe itself seems to adhere to the logical systems by which we construct mathematics gives credence to the idea that the logical systems are fundamental, something we’ve discovered rather than producing. We judge claims about nonobserved mathematical constructs like transfinites according to those systems,
But claims about transfinities don’t correspond directly to any object. Maths is “spun off” from other
facts, on your view. So, by analogy, moral realism could be “spun off” without needing any Form of the Good to correspond to goodness.
Metaethical systems usually have axioms like “Maximising utility is good”.
But utility is a function of values. A paperclipper will produce utility according to different values than a human.
You seem to be assumig that morality is about individual behaviour. A moral realist system like utiitarianism operates at the group level, and woud take paperclipper values into account along with all others. Utilitarianism doens’t care what values are, it just sums or averages them.
Or perhaps you are making the objection that an entity woud need moral values to care about the preferences of others in the first place. That is addressed by, another kind of realism, the rationality-based kind, which
starts from noting that rational agents have to have some value in common, because they are all rational.
Why would most rational minds converge on values?
a) they don’t have to converge on preferences, since thing like utilitariansim are preference-neutral.
b) they already have to some extent because they are rational
Most human minds converge on some values, but we share almost all our evolutionary history and brain structure. The fact that most humans converge on certain values is no more indicative of rational minds in general doing so than the fact that most humans have two hands is indicative of most possible intelligent species converging on having two hands.
I was talking about rational minds converging on the moral claims, not on values.. Rational minds can converge on
“maximise group utility” whilst what is utilitous varies considerably.
Philosphers talk about intuitions, because that is the term for something foundational that seems true, but can’t be justified by anything more foundational. LessWrongians don’t like intuitions, but don’t see to be able to explain how to manage without them.
It seems like you’re equating intuitions with axioms here.
Axioms are formal statements, intuitions are gut feelings tha are often used to justify axioms.
We can (and should) recognize that our intuitions are frequently unhelpful at guiding us to he truth, without throwing out all axioms.
There is another sense of “intuition” where someone feels that it’s going to rain tomorrow or something. They’re
not the foundational kind.
And philosophers frequently fall into the pattern of believing that other philosophers disagree with each other due to failure to understand the problems they’re dealing with.
But claims about transfinities don’t correspond directly to any object. Maths is “spun off” from other facts, on your view. So, by analogy, moral realism could be “spun off” without needing any Form of the Good to correspond to goodness.
Spun off from what, and how?
You seem to be assumig that morality is about individual behaviour. A moral realist system like utiitarianism operates at the group level, and woud take paperclipper values into account along with all others. Utilitarianism doens’t care what values are, it just sums or averages them.
Speaking as a utilitarian, yes, utilitarianism does care about what values are. If I value paperclips, I assign utility to paperclips, if I don’t, I don’t.
Or perhaps you are making the objection that an entity woud need moral values to care about the preferences of others in the first place. That is addressed by, another kind of realism, the rationality-based kind, which starts from noting that rational agents have to have some value in common, because they are all rational.
Why does their being rational demand that they have values in common? Being rational means that they necessarily share a common process, namely rationality, but that process can be used to optimize many different, mutually contradictory things. Why should their values converge?
I was talking about rational minds converging on the moral claims, not on values.. Rational minds can converge on “maximise group utility” whilst what is utilitous varies considerably.
So what if a paperclipper arrives at “maximize group utility,” and the only relevant member of the group which shares its conception of utility is itself, and its only basis for measuring utility is paperclips? The fact that it shares the principle of maximizing utility doesn’t demand any overlap of end-goal with other utility maximizers.
Axioms are formal statements, intuitions are gut feelings tha are often used to justify axioms.
But, as I’ve pointed out previously, intuitions are often unhelpful, or even actively misleading, with respect to locating the truth.
If our axioms are grounded in our intuitions, then entities which don’t share our intuitions will not share our axioms.
So do they call for them to be fired?
No, but neither do I, so I don’t see why that’s relevant.
Request accepted, I’m not sure if he’s being deliberately obtuse, but I think this discussion probably would have borne fruit earlier if it were going to. I too often have difficulty stepping away from a discussion as soon as I think it’s unlikely to be a productive use of my time.
What is your basis for the designation ? I am not arguing with your suggestion (I was leaning in the same direction myself), I’m just genuinely curious. In other words, why do you believe that PrawnOfFate is a troll, and not someone who is genuinely confused ?
In other words, why do you believe that PrawnOfFate is a troll, and not someone who is genuinely confused ?
“Troll” is a somewhat fuzzy label. Sometimes when I am wanting to be precise or polite and avoid any hint of Fundamental Attribution Error I will replace it with the rather clumsy or verbose “person who is exhibiting a pattern of behaviour which should not be fed”. The difference between “Person who gets satisfaction from causing disruption” and “Person who is genuinely confused and is displaying an obnoxiously disruptive social attitude” is largely irrelevant (particularly when one has their Hansonian hat on).
If there was a word in popular use that meant “person likely to be disruptive and who should not be fed” that didn’t make any assumptions or implications of the intent of the accused then that word would be preferable.
I am not sure I can expalin that succintly at the moment. It is also hard to summarise how you get from counting apples to transfinite numbers.
Why does their being rational demand that they have values in common? Being rational means that they necessarily share a common process, namely rationality, but that process can be used to optimize many different, mutually contradictory things. Why should their values converge?
Rationality is not an automatic process, it is skill that has to be learnt and consciously applied. Individuals will only
be rational if their values prompt them to. And rationality itself implies valuing certain things (lack of bias, non arbitrariness).
So what if a paperclipper arrives at “maximize group utility,” and the only relevant member of the group which shares its conception of utility is itself, and its only basis for measuring utility is paperclips? The fact that it shares the principle of maximizing utility doesn’t demand any overlap of end-goal with other utility maximizers.
Utilitarians want to maximise the utiity of their groups, not their own utility. They don;t have to believe the utlity of others
is utilitous to them, they just need to feed facts about group utility into an aggregation function. And, using the same facts and same function, different utilitarians will converge. That’s kind of the point.
But, as I’ve pointed out previously, intuitions are often unhelpful, or even actively misleading, with respect to locating the truth.
Compared to what? Remember, I am talking about foundational intuitions, the kind at the bottom of the stack. The empirical method of locating the truth rests on the intuition that the senses reveal a real external world. Which I share. But what proves it? That’s the foundational issue.
I mean that value systems are a function of physically existing things, the way a 747 is a function of physically existing things, but we have no evidence suggesting that objective morality is an existing thing. We have standards by which we judge beauty, and we project those values onto the world, but the standards are in us, not outside of us. We can see, in reductionist terms, how the existence of ethical systems within beings, which would feel from the inside like the existence of an objective morality, would come about.
Create a reasoning engine that doesn’t have those ethical systems built into it, and it would have no reason to care about them.
You can’t build a tower on empty air. If a debate has been going on for hundreds of years, stretching back to an argument which rests on “this defies our moral intuitions, therefore it’s wrong,” and that was never addressed with “moral intuitions don’t work that way,” then the debate has failed to progress in a meaningful direction, much as a debate over whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound has if nobody bothers to dissolve the question.
That’s not an example. Please provide an actual one.
Sure, but it’s also what philosophers say about each other, all the time. Wittgenstein condemned practically all his predecessors and peers as incompetent, and declared that he had solved nearly the entirety of philosophy. Philosophy as a field is full of people banging their heads on a wall at all those other idiots who just don’t get it. “Most philosophers are incompetent, except for the ones who’re sensible enough to see things my way,” is a perfectly ordinary perspective among philosophers.
But I wans’t saying that. I am arguing that moral claims truth values, that aren;t indexed to individuals or socieities. That epistemic claim can be justified by appeal to an ontoogy including Moral Objects, but that is not how I am justifying it: my argument is based on rationality, as I have said many times.
We have standards by which we jusdge the truth values of mathematical claims, and they are inside us too, and that doens’t stop mathematics being objective. Relativism requires that truthvalues are indexed to us, that there is one truth for me and another for thee. Being located in us, or being operated by us are not sufficient criteria for being indexed to us.
We can see, in reductionistic terms, how the entities could converge on a unform set of truth values. There is nothing non reductionist about anything I have said. Reductionsm does not force one answer to metaethics.
Provide evidence that ethics is a whole separate modue, and not part of general reasoning ability.
Please explain why moral intuitions don’t work that way.
Please provide some foundations for somethng that aren;t unjustofied by anything more foundationa.
You can select one at random. obviously.
No, philosophers don’t regularly accuse each other of being incpompetent..just of being wrong. There’s a difference.
You are inferring a lot from one example.
Nope.
I don’t understand, can you rephrase this?
The standards by which we judge the truth of mathematical claims are not just inside us. One object plus another object will continue to equal two objects whether or not there are any living beings to make that judgment. Math is not something we’ve created within ourselves, but something we’ve discovered and observed.
If our mathematical models ever stop being able to predict in advance the behavior of the universe, then we will have rather more reason to doubt that the math inside us is different from the math outside of us.
What evidence do we have that this is the case for morality?
My assertion is that, if we judge ethics as a rational system, innate values are among the axioms that the system is predicated on. You cannot prove the axioms of a system within that system, and an ethical system predicated on premises like “happiness is good” will not itself be able to prove the goodness of happiness.
While we could suppose that the axioms which our ethical systems are predicated on are objectively true, we have considerable reason to believe that we would have developed these axioms for adaptive reasons, even if there were no sense in which objective moral axioms exist, and we do not have evidence which suggests that objective, independently existing true moral axioms do exist.
People can be induced to strongly support opposing responses to the same moral dilemma, just by rephrasing it differently to trigger different heuristics. Our moral intuitions are incoherent.
I don’t think I understand this, can you rephrase it?
I do not recall any creditable attempts, which places me in a disadvantaged position with respect to locating them. You’re the one claiming that they’re there at all, that’s why I’m asking you to do it.
Philosophers don’t usually accuse each other of being incompetent in their publications, because it’s not conducive to getting other philosophers to regard their arguments dispassionately, and that sort of open accusation is generally frowned upon in academic circles whether one believes it or not. They do regularly accuse each other of being comprehensively wrong for their entire careers. In my personal conversations with philosophers (and I never considered myself to have really taken a class, or attended a lecture by a visitor, if I didn’t speak with the person teaching it on a personal basis to probe their thoughts beyond the curriculum,) I observed a whole lot of frustration with philosophers who they think just don’t get their arguments. It’s unsurprising that people would tend to become so frustrated participating in a field that basically amounts to long running arguments extended over decades or centuries. Imagine the conversation we’re having now going on for eighty years, and neither of us has changed our minds. If you didn’t find my arguments convincing, and I hadn’t budged in all that time, don’t you’d think you’d start to suspect that I was particularly thick?
I’m using an example illustrative of my experience.
Sounds to me like PrawnOfFate is saying that any sufficiently rational cognitive system will converge on a certain set of ethical goals as a consequence of its structure, i.e. that (human-style) ethics is a property that reliably emerges in anything capable of reason.
I’d say the existence of sociopathy among humans provides a pretty good counterargument to this (sociopaths can be pretty good at accomplishing their goals, so the pathology doesn’t seem to be indicative of a flawed rationality), but at least the argument doesn’t rely on counting fundamental particles of morality or something.
I would say so also, but PrawnOfFate has already argued that sociopaths are subject to additional egocentric bias relative to normal people and thereby less rational. It seems to me that he’s implicitly judging rationality by how well it leads to a particular body of ethics he already accepts, rather than how well it optimizes for potentially arbitrary values.
Well, I’m not a psychologist, but if someone asked me to name a pathology marked by unusual egocentric bias I’d point to NPD, not sociopathy.
That brings up some interesting questions concerning how we define rationality, though. Pathologies in psychology are defined in terms of interference with daily life, and the personality disorder spectrum in particular usually implies problems interacting with people or societies. That could imply either irreconcilable values or specific flaws in reasoning, but only the latter is irrational in the sense we usually use around here. Unfortunately, people are cognitively messy enough that the two are pretty hard to distinguish, particularly since so many human goals involve interaction with other people.
In any case, this might be a good time to taboo “rational”.
Since no claim has a probability of 1.0, I only need to argue that a clear majority of rational minds converge.
How do we judge claims about transfinite numbers?
Mathematics isn’t physics. Mathematicians prove theorems from axioms, not from experiments.
Not necessarily. Eg, for utilitarians, values are just facts that are plugged into the metaethics to get concrete actions.
Metaethical systems usually have axioms like “Maximising utility is good”.
I am not sure what you mean by “exist” here. Claims are objectively true if most rational minds converge on them. That doesn’t require Objective Truth to float about in space here.
Does that mean we can;t use moral intuitions at all, or that they must be used with caution?
Philosphers talk about intuitions, because that is the term for something foundational that seems true, but can’t be justified by anything more foundational. LessWrongians don’t like intuitions, but don’t see to be able to explain how to manage without them.
Did you post any comments explaining to the professional philosophers where they had gone wrong?
I don;’t see the problem. Philosophical competence is largely about understanding the problem.
Yes, but the fact that the universe itself seems to adhere to the logical systems by which we construct mathematics gives credence to the idea that the logical systems are fundamental, something we’ve discovered rather than producing. We judge claims about nonobserved mathematical constructs like transfinites according to those systems,
But utility is a function of values. A paperclipper will produce utility according to different values than a human.
Why would most rational minds converge on values? Most human minds converge on some values, but we share almost all our evolutionary history and brain structure. The fact that most humans converge on certain values is no more indicative of rational minds in general doing so than the fact that most humans have two hands is indicative of most possible intelligent species converging on having two hands.
It means we should be aware of what our intuitions are and what they’ve developed to be good for. Intuitions are evolved heuristics, not a priori truth generators.
It seems like you’re equating intuitions with axioms here. We can (and should) recognize that our intuitions are frequently unhelpful at guiding us to he truth, without throwing out all axioms.
If I did, I don’t remember them. I may have, I may have felt someone else adequately addressed them, I may not have felt it was worth the bother.
It seems to me that you’re trying to foist onto me the effort of locating something which you were the one to testify was there in the first place.
And philosophers frequently fall into the pattern of believing that other philosophers disagree with each other due to failure to understand the problems they’re dealing with.
In any case, I reject the notion that dismissing large contingents of philosophers as lacking in competence is a valuable piece of evidence with respect t crankishness, and if you want to convince me that I am taking a crankish attitude, you’ll need to offer some other evidence.
But claims about transfinities don’t correspond directly to any object. Maths is “spun off” from other facts, on your view. So, by analogy, moral realism could be “spun off” without needing any Form of the Good to correspond to goodness.
You seem to be assumig that morality is about individual behaviour. A moral realist system like utiitarianism operates at the group level, and woud take paperclipper values into account along with all others. Utilitarianism doens’t care what values are, it just sums or averages them.
Or perhaps you are making the objection that an entity woud need moral values to care about the preferences of others in the first place. That is addressed by, another kind of realism, the rationality-based kind, which starts from noting that rational agents have to have some value in common, because they are all rational.
a) they don’t have to converge on preferences, since thing like utilitariansim are preference-neutral.
b) they already have to some extent because they are rational
I was talking about rational minds converging on the moral claims, not on values.. Rational minds can converge on “maximise group utility” whilst what is utilitous varies considerably.
Axioms are formal statements, intuitions are gut feelings tha are often used to justify axioms.
There is another sense of “intuition” where someone feels that it’s going to rain tomorrow or something. They’re not the foundational kind.
So do they call for them to be fired?
Spun off from what, and how?
Speaking as a utilitarian, yes, utilitarianism does care about what values are. If I value paperclips, I assign utility to paperclips, if I don’t, I don’t.
Why does their being rational demand that they have values in common? Being rational means that they necessarily share a common process, namely rationality, but that process can be used to optimize many different, mutually contradictory things. Why should their values converge?
So what if a paperclipper arrives at “maximize group utility,” and the only relevant member of the group which shares its conception of utility is itself, and its only basis for measuring utility is paperclips? The fact that it shares the principle of maximizing utility doesn’t demand any overlap of end-goal with other utility maximizers.
But, as I’ve pointed out previously, intuitions are often unhelpful, or even actively misleading, with respect to locating the truth.
If our axioms are grounded in our intuitions, then entities which don’t share our intuitions will not share our axioms.
No, but neither do I, so I don’t see why that’s relevant.
Designating PrawnOfFate a probable troll or sockpuppet. Suggest terminating discussion.
Request accepted, I’m not sure if he’s being deliberately obtuse, but I think this discussion probably would have borne fruit earlier if it were going to. I too often have difficulty stepping away from a discussion as soon as I think it’s unlikely to be a productive use of my time.
What is your basis for the designation ? I am not arguing with your suggestion (I was leaning in the same direction myself), I’m just genuinely curious. In other words, why do you believe that PrawnOfFate is a troll, and not someone who is genuinely confused ?
Combined behavior in other threads. Check the profile.
“Troll” is a somewhat fuzzy label. Sometimes when I am wanting to be precise or polite and avoid any hint of Fundamental Attribution Error I will replace it with the rather clumsy or verbose “person who is exhibiting a pattern of behaviour which should not be fed”. The difference between “Person who gets satisfaction from causing disruption” and “Person who is genuinely confused and is displaying an obnoxiously disruptive social attitude” is largely irrelevant (particularly when one has their Hansonian hat on).
If there was a word in popular use that meant “person likely to be disruptive and who should not be fed” that didn’t make any assumptions or implications of the intent of the accused then that word would be preferable.
I am not sure I can expalin that succintly at the moment. It is also hard to summarise how you get from counting apples to transfinite numbers.
Rationality is not an automatic process, it is skill that has to be learnt and consciously applied. Individuals will only be rational if their values prompt them to. And rationality itself implies valuing certain things (lack of bias, non arbitrariness).
Utilitarians want to maximise the utiity of their groups, not their own utility. They don;t have to believe the utlity of others is utilitous to them, they just need to feed facts about group utility into an aggregation function. And, using the same facts and same function, different utilitarians will converge. That’s kind of the point.
Compared to what? Remember, I am talking about foundational intuitions, the kind at the bottom of the stack. The empirical method of locating the truth rests on the intuition that the senses reveal a real external world. Which I share. But what proves it? That’s the foundational issue.