Baby-Eating Aliens and humans have different views of the same subject matter
In the end, the subject matter that matters in an interaction between baby eaters and humans is what to do with the universe, and that’s the one I’m talking about.
But I just described two kinds of subject matter that are the only two kinds of subject matter I know about: physical facts and mathematical facts. “What should be done with the universe” invokes a criterion of preference, “should”, which compels humans but not Babyeaters. If you look at the fact that the Babyeaters are out trying to make a different sort of universe, and the fact that the humans are out trying to make the universe make the way it should look, and you call these two facts a “disagreement”, I don’t understand what physical fact or logical fact is supposed to be the common subject matter which is being referred-to. They do the babyeating thing, we do the right thing; that’s not a subject matter.
The rampant dismissal of so many restatements of your position has tempted me to try my own. Tell me if I’ve got it right or not:
There is a topic, which covers such subtopics as those listed here, which is the only thing in fact referred to by the English word “morality” and associated terms like “should” and “right”. It is an error to refer to other things, like eating babies, as “moral” in the same way it would be an error to refer to black-and-white Asian-native ursine creatures as “lobsters”: people who do it simply aren’t talking about morality. Once the subject matter of morality is properly nailed down, and all other facts are known, there’s no room for disagreement about morality, what ought to be done, what actions are wrong, etc. any more than there is about the bachelorhood of unmarried men. However, it happens that the vast majority kinds of possible minds don’t give a crap about morality, and while they might agree with us about what they should do, they wouldn’t find that motivating. Humans, as a matter of a rather lucky causal history, do care about morality, in much the same way that pebblesorters care about primes—it’s just one of the things we’re built to find worth thinking about and working towards. By a similar token, we are responsive to arguments about features of situations that give them moral character of one sort or another.
...sounds mostly good so far. Except that there’s plenty of justification for thinking about morality besides “it’s something we happen to think about”. They’re just… well… there’s no other way to put this… perfectly valid, moving, compelling, heartwarming, moral justifications. They’re actually better justifications than being compelled by some sort of ineffable transcendent compellingness stuff—if I’ve got to respond to something, those are just the sort of (logical) facts I’d want to respond to! (I think this may be the part Roko still doesn’t get.) Also, the “lucky causal history” isn’t luck at all, of course.
It’s also quite possible that human beings, from time to time, are talking about different subject matters when they have what looks like a moral disagreement; but this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance, and I feel that a sort of courtesy should be extended, to the extent of hearing out each other’s arguments and proceeding on the assumption that we actually are disagreeing about something.
I’m curious about how your idea handles an edge case. (I am merely curious—not to downplay curiosity, but you shouldn’t consider it a reason to devote considerable brain-cycles on its own if it’d take considerable brain-cycles to answer, because I think your appropriation of moral terminology is silly and I won’t find the answer useful for any specific purpose.)
The edge case: I have invented an alien species called the Zaee (for freeform roleplaying game purposes; it only recently occurred to me that they have bearing on this topic). The Zaee have wings, and can fly starting in early childhood. They consider it “loiyen” (the Zaee word that most nearly translates as “morally wrong”) for a child’s birth mother to continue raising her offspring (call it a son) once he is ready to take off for the first time; they deal with this by having her entrust her son to a friend, or a friend of the father, or, in an emergency, somebody who’s in a similar bind and can just swap children with her. Someone who has a child without a plan for how to foster him out at the proper time (even if it’s “find a stranger to swap with”) is seen as being just as irresponsible as a human mother who had a child without a clue how she planned to feed him would be (even if it’s “rely on government assistance”).
There is no particular reason why a Zaee child raised to adulthood by his biological mother could not wind up within the Zaee-normal range of psychology (not that they’d ever let this be tested experimentally); however, they’d find this statement about as compelling as the fact that there’s no reason a human child, kidnapped as a two-year-old from his natural parents and adopted by a duped but competent couple overseas, couldn’t grow up to be a normal human: it still seems a dreadful thing to do, and to the child, not just to the parents.
When Zaee interact with humans they readily concede that this precept of their has no bearing on any human action whatever: human children cannot fly. And in the majority of other respects, Zaee are like humans in their - if you plopped a baby Zaee brain in a baby human body (and resolved the body dysphoria and aging rate issues) and he grew up on Earth, he’d be darned quirky, but wouldn’t be diagnosed with a mental illness or anything.
Other possibly relevant information: when Zaee programmers program AIs (not the recursively self-improving kind; much more standard-issue sci-fi types), they apply the same principle, and don’t “keep” the AIs in their own employ past a certain point. (A particular tradition of programming frequently has its graduates arrange beforehand to swap their AIs.) The AIs normally don’t run on mobile hardware, which is irrelevant anyway, because the point in question for them isn’t flight. However, Zaee are not particularly offended by the practice of human programmers keeping their own AIs indefinitely. The Zaee would be very upset if humans genetically engineered themselves to have wings from birth which became usable before adulthood and this didn’t yield a change in human fostering habits. (I have yet to have cause to get a Zaee interacting with another alien species that can also fly in the game for which they were designed, but anticipate that if I did so, “grimly distasteful bare-tolerance” would be the most appropriate attitude for the Zaee in the interaction. They’re not very violent.)
And the question: Are the Zaee “interested in morality”? Are we interested in ? Do the two referents mean distinct concepts that just happen to overlap some or be compatible in a special way? How do you talk about this situation, using the words you have appropriated?
Eliezer, I don’t understand how you can say that the “lucky causal history” wasn’t luck, unless you also say “if humans had evolved to eat babies, babyeating would have been right.”
If it wouldn’t have been right even in that event, then it took a stupendous amount of luck for us to evolve in just such a way that we care about things that are right, instead of other things.
As I understand Eliezer’s position, when babyeater-humans say “right”, they actually mean babyeating. They’d need a word like “babysaving” to refer to what’s right.
Morality is what we call the output of a particular algorithm instantiated in human brains. If we instantiated a different algorithm, we’d have a word for its output instead.
I think Eliezer sees translating babyeater word for babyeating as “right” as an error similar to translating their word for babyeaters as “human”.
Ah, so moral justifications are better justifications because they feel good to think about. Ah, happy children playing… Ah, lovers reuniting… Ah, the Magababga’s chief warrior being roasted as dinner by our chief warrior who slew him nobly in combat...
I really don’t see why we should expect ‘morality’ to extrapolate to the same mathematical axioms if we applied CEV to different subsets of the population. Sure, you can just define the word morality to include the sum total of all human brains/minds/wills/opinions, but that wouldn’t change the fact that these people, given their druthers and their own algorithms would morally disagree. Evolutionary psychology is a very fine just-so story for many things that people do, but people’s, dare I say, aesthetic sense of right and wrong is largely driven by culture and circumstance. What would you say if omega looked at the people of earth and said, “Yes, there is enough agreement on what ‘morality’ is that we need only define 80,000 separate logically consistent moral algorithms to cover everybody!”
“Better” by the moral standard of betterness, or by a standard unconnected to morality itself?
if I’ve got to respond to something, those are just the sort of (logical) facts I’d want to respond to!
Want to respond to because you happen to be the sort of creature that likes and is interested in these facts, or for some reason external to morality and your interest therein?
It’s also quite possible that human beings, from time to time, are talking about different subject matters when they have what looks like a moral disagreement; but this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance
Why does this seem like a “drastic” assumption, even given your definition of “morality”?
I don’t see why I’d want to use an immoral standard. I don’t see why I ought to care about a standard unconnected to morality. And yes, I’m compelled by the sort of logical facts we name “moral justifications” physically-because I’m the sort of physical creature I am.
It’s drastic because it closes down the possibility of further discourse.
How about something like this: There’s a certain set of semi abstract criteria that we call ‘morality’. And we happen to be the sorts of beings that (for various reasons) happen to care about this morality stuff as opposed to caring about something else. should we care about morality? Well, what is meant by “should”? It sure seems like that’s a term that we use to simply point to the same morality criteria/computation. In other words, “should we care about morality” seems to translate to “is it moral to care about morality” or “apply morality function to ‘care about morality’ and check the output”
It would seem also that the answer is yes, it is moral to care about morality.
Some other creatures might somewhere care about something other than morality. That’s not a disagreement about any facts or theory or anything, it’s simply that we care about morality and they may care about something like “maximize paperclip production” or whatever.
But, of course, morality is better than paper-clip-ality. (And, of course, when we say “better”, we mean “in terms of those criteria we care about”… ie, morality again.)
It’s not quite circular. Us and the paperclipper creatures wouldn’t really disagree about anything. They’d say “turning all the matter in the solar system into paperclips is paperclipish”, and we’d agree. We’d say “it’s more moral not to do so”, and they’d agree.
The catch is that they don’t give a dingdong about morality, and we don’t give a dingdong about paperclipishness. And indeed that does make us better. And if they scanned our minds to see what we mean by “better”, they’d agree. But then, that criteria that we were referring to by the term “better” is simply not something the paperclippers care about.
“we happen to care about it” is not the justification. It’s moral is the justification. It’s just that our criteria for valid moral justification is, well… morality. Which is as it should be. etc etc.
Morality is seems to be an objective criteria. Actions can be judged good or bad in terms of morality. We simply happen to care about morality instead of something else. And this is indeed a good thing.
I don’t understand two sentences in a row. Not here, not in the meta-ethics sequence, not anywhere where you guys talk about morality.
I don’t understand why I seem to be cognitively fine on other topics on Less Wrong, but then all of a sudden am Flowers for Algernon here.
I’m not going to comment anymore on this topic; it just so happens meta-morality or meta-ethics isn’t something I worry about anyway. But I would like to part with the admonition that I don’t see any reason why LW should be separating so many words from their original meanings—“good”, “better”, “should”, etc. It doesn’t seem to be clarifying things even for you guys.
I think that when something is understood—really understood—you can write it down in words. If you can’t describe an understanding, you don’t own it.
Huh? I’m asserting that most people, when they use words like “morality”, “should”(in a moral context), “better”(ditto), etc, are pointing at the same thing. That is, we think this sort of thing partly captures what people actually mean by the terms. Now, we don’t have full self knowledge, and our morality algorithm hasn’t finished reflecting (that is, hasn’t finished reconsidering itself, etc), so we have uncertainty about what sorts of things are or are not moral… But that’s a separate issue.
As far as the rest… I’m pretty sure I understand the basic idea. Anything I can do to help clarify it?
How about this: “morality is objective, and we simply happen to be the sorts of beings that care about morality as opposed to, say, evil psycho alien bots that care about maximizing paperclips instead of morality”
It looks circular to me. Of course, if you look hard enough at any views like this, the only choices are circles and terminating lines, and it seems almost an aesthetic matter which someone goes with, but this is such a small circle. It’s right to care about morality and to be moral because morality says so and morality possesses the sole capacity to identify “rightness”, including the rightness of caring about morality.
It’s more almost, well, I hate to say this, but more a matter of definitions.
ie, what do you MEAN by the term “right”?
Just keep poking your brain about that, and keep poking your brain about what you mean by “should” and what you actually mean by terms like “morality” and I think you’ll find that all those terms are pointing at the same thing.
It’s not so much “there’s this criteria of ‘rightness’ that only morality has the ability to measure” but rather an appeal to morality is what we mean when we say stuff like “‘should’ we do this? is it ‘right’?” etc...
The situation is more, well, like this:
Humans: “Morality says that, among other things, it’s more better and moral to be, well, moral. It is also moral to save lives, help people, bring joy, and a whole lot of other things”
Paperclipers: “having scanned your brains to see what you mean by these terms, we agree with your statement.”
Paperclippers: “Converting all the matter in your system into paperclips is paperclipish. Further, it is better and paperclipish to be paperclipish.”
Humans: “having scanned your minds to determine what you actually mean by those terms, we agree with your statement.”
Humans: “However, we don’t care about paperclipishness. We care about morality. Turning all the matter of our solar system (including the matter we are composed of) into paperclips is bad, so we will try to stop you.”
Paperclippers: “We do not care about morality. We care about paperclipishness. Resisting the conversion to paperclips is unpaperclipish. Therefore we will try to crush your resistance.”
This is very different from what we normally think of as circular arguments, which would be of the form of “A, therefore B, therefore A, QED”, while the other side would be “no! not A”
Here, all sides agree about stuff. It’s just that they value different things. But the fact of humans valuing the stuff isn’t the justification for valuing that stuff. The justification is that it’s moral. But the fact is that we happen to be moved by arguments like “it’s moral”, rather than the wicked paperclippers that only care about whether it’s paperclipish or not.
But why should I feel obliged to act morally instead of paperclippishly?
Circles seem all well and good when you’re already inside of them, but being inside of them already is kind of not the point of discussing meta-ethics.
Well, that’s not necessarily a moral sense of ‘should’, I guess—I’m asking whether I have any sort of good reason to act morally, be it an appeal to my interests or to transcendent moral reasons or whatever.
It’s generally the contention of moralists and paperclipists that there’s always good reason for everyone to act morally or paperclippishly. But proving that this contention itself just boils down to yet another moral/paperclippy claim doesn’t seem to help their case any. It just demonstrates what a tight circle their argument is, and what little reason someone outside of it has to care about it if they don’t already.
What do you mean by “should” in this context other than a moral sense of it? What would count as a “good reason”?
As far as your statement about both moralists and paperclippers thinking there are “good reasons”… the catch is that the phrase “good reasons” is being used to refer to two distinct concepts. When a human/moralist uses it, they mean, well… good, as opposed to evil.
A paperclipper, however, is not concerned at all about that standard. A paperclipper cares about what, well, maximizes paperclips.
It’s not that it should do so, but simply that it doesn’t care what it should do. Being evil doesn’t bother it any more than failing to maximize paperclips bothers you.
Being evil is clearly worse (where by “worse” I mean, well, immoral, bad, evil, etc...) that being good. But the paperclipper doesn’t care. But you do (as far as I know. If you don’t, then… I think you scare me). What sort of standard other than morality would you want to appeal to for this sort of issue in the first place?
What do you mean by “should” in this context other than a moral sense of it? What would count as a “good reason”?
By that I mean rationally motivating reasons.
But I’d be willing to concede, if you pressed, that ‘rationality’ is itself just another set of action-directing values. The point would still stand: if the set of values I mean when I say ‘rationality’ is incongruent with the set of values you mean when you say ‘morality,’ then it appears you have no grounds on which to persuade me to be directed by morality.
This is a very unsatisfactory conclusion for most moral realists, who believe that moral reasons are to be inherently objectively compelling to any sentient being. So I’m not sure if the position you’re espousing is just a complicated way of expressing surrender, or an attempt to reframe the question, or what, but it doesn’t seem to get us any more traction when it comes to answering “Why should I be moral?”
But you do (as far as I know. If you don’t, then… I think you scare me).
Duly noted, but is what I happen to care about relevant to this issue of meta-ethics?
Rationality is basically “how to make an accurate map of the world… and how to WIN (where win basically means getting what you “want” (where want includes all your preferences, stuff like morality, etc etc...)
Before rationality can tell you what to do, you have to tell it what it is you’re trying to do.
If your goal is to save lives, rationality can help you find ways to do that. If your goal is to turn stuff into paperclips, rationality can help you find ways to do that too.
I’m not sure I quite understand you mean by “rationally motivating” reasons.
As far as objectively compelling to any sentient (let me generalize that to any intelligent being)… Why should there be any such thing? “Doing this will help ensure your survival” “But… what if I don’t care about this?”
This is a very unsatisfactory conclusion for most moral realists, who believe that moral reasons are to be inherently objectively compelling to any sentient being.
According to the original post, strong moral realism (the above) is not held by most moral realists.
Well, my “moral reasons are to be...” there was kind of slippery. The ‘strong moral realism’ Roko outlined seems to be based on a factual premise (“All...beings...will agree...”), which I’d agree most moral realists are smart enough not to hold. The much more commonly held view seems to amount instead to a sort of … moral imperative to accept moral imperatives—by positing a set of knowable moral facts that we might not bother to recognize or follow, but ought to. Which seems like more of the same circular reasoning that Psy-Kosh has been talking about/defending.
What I’m saying is that when you say the word “ought”, you mean something. Even if you can’t quite articulate it, you have some sort of standard for saying “you ought do this, you ought not do that” that is basically the definition of ought.
I’m saying”this oughtness, whatever it is, is the same thing that you mean when you talk about ‘morality’. So “ought I be moral?” directly translates to “is it moral to be moral?”
I’m not saying “only morality has the authority to answer this question” but rather “uh… ‘is X moral?’ is kind of what you actually mean by ought/should/etc, isn’t it? ie, if I do a bit of a trace in your brain, follow the word back to its associated concepts, isn’t it going to be pointing/labeling the same algorithms that “morality” labels in your brain?
So basically it amounts to “yes, there’re things that one ought to do… and there can exist beings that know this but simply don’t care about whether or not they ‘ought’ to do something.”
It’s not that another being refuses to recognize this so much as they’d be saying “So what? we don’t care about this ‘oughtness’ business.” It’s not a disagreement, it’s simply failing to care about it.
What I’m saying is that when you say the word “ought”, you mean something. Even if you can’t quite articulate it, you have some sort of standard for saying “you ought do this, you ought not do that” that is basically the definition of ought.
I’d object to this simplification of the meaning of the word (I’d argue that ‘ought’ means lots of different things in different contexts, most of which aren’t only reducible to categorically imperative moral claims), but I suppose it’s not really relevant here.
I’m pretty sure we agree and are just playing with the words differently.
There are certain things one ought to do—and by ‘ought’ I mean you will be motivated to do those things, provided you already agree that they are among the ‘things one ought to do’
and
There is no non-circular answer to the question “Why should I be moral?”, so the moral realists’ project is sunk
seem to amount to about the same thing from where I sit. But it’s a bit misleading to phrase your admission that moral realism fails (and it does, just as paperclip realism fails) as an affirmation that “there are things one ought to do”.
The fact that some other creature might instead want to know the answer to the question “what is 6*7?” (which also has an objectively true answer) is irrelevant.
How does that make “what is 2+3?” less real?
Similarly, how does the fact that some other beings might care about something other than morality make questions of the form “what is moral? what should I do?” non objective?
It’s nothing to do with agreement. When you ask “ought I do this?”, well… to the extent that you’re not speaking empty words, you’re asking SOME specific question.
There is some criteria by which “oughtness” can be judged… that is, the defining criteria. It may be hard for you to articulate, it may only be implicitly encoded in your brain, but to the extent that word is a label for some concept, it means something.
I do not think you’d argue too much against this.
I make an additional claim: That that which we commonly refer to in these contexts by words like “Should”, “ought” and so on is the same thing we’re referring to when we say stuff like “morality”.
To me “what should I do?” and “what is the moral thing to do?” are basically the same question, pretty much.
“Ought I be moral?” thus would translate to “ought I be the sort of person that does what I ought to do?”
I think the answer to that is yes.
There may be beings that agree with that completely but take the view of “but we simply don’t care about whether or not we ought to do something. It is not that we disagree with your claims about whether one ought to be moral. We agree we ought to be moral. We simply place no value in doing what one ‘ought’ to do. Instead we value certain other things.” But screw them… I mean, they don’t do what they ought to do!
“what is 2+3?” has an objectively true answer. The fact that some other creature might instead want to know the answer to the question “what is 6*7?” (which also has an objectively true answer) is irrelevant.
Oh shit. I get it. Morality exists outside of ourselves in the same way that paperclips exists outside clippies.
Babyeating is justified by some of the same impulses as baby saving: protecting ones own genetic line.
It’s not necessarily as well motivated by the criteria of saving sentient creatures from pain, but you might be able to make an argument for it. Maybe if you took thhe opposite path and said not that pain was bad, but that sentience / long life/ grandchildren was good and baby eating was a “moral decision” for having grand children.
First part yes, rest… not quite. (or maybe I’m misunderstanding you?)
“Protecting one’s own genetic line” would be more the evolutionary reason. ie, part of the process that led to us valuing morality as opposed to valuing paperclips. (or, hypothetically fictionally alternately, part of the process that led to the Babyeaters valuing babyeating instead of valuing morality.)
But that’s not exactly a moral justification as much as it is part of an explanation of why we care about morality. We should save babies… because! ie, Babies (or people in general, for that matter) dying is bad. Killing innocent sentients, especially those that have had the least opportunity to live, is extra bad. The fact that I care about this is ultimately in part explained via evolutionary processes, but that’s not the justification.
The hypothetical Babyeaters do not care about morality. That’s kind of the point. It’s not that they’ve come to different conclusions about morality as much as the thing that they value isn’t quite morality in the first place.
I… don’t think so. One theory of morality is that killing death is bad. Sure, that’s at least a component of most moral systems, but there are certain circumstance under which killing is good or okay. Such as if the person you’re killing is a Nazi or a werewolf or if they are a fetus you could not support to adulthood or trying to kill you or a death row inmate guilty of a crime by rule of law.
Justifications for killing are often moral.
Babyeaters are, in a way at least possessing similarities to human morality, justified by giving the fewer remaining children a chance at a life with the guidance of adult babyeaters, and more resources since they don’t have to compete against millions of their siblings.
This allows babyeaters to develop something like empathy, affection, bonding, love and happiness for the surviving babyeater kind. Without this, babyeaters would be unable to make a babyeater society, and it’s really easy to apply utilitarianism to it in the same way utilitarian theory can apply utilitarian theory to human morality.
It’s also justified because it’s an individual sacrifice to your own genetic line, rather than the eating other babyeater’s children, which is the type of a grandchildren maximizer would do. The need of the many > The wants of the few, which also plays a part in various theories of morality.
I’d say they reached the same conclusion that we did about most things, it’s just they took necessary and important moral sacrifice, and turned it into a ritual that is now detached from morality.
It damn well sounds like we’re talking about the same thing. The only objection I can think of is that they re aliens and that that would be highly improbable, but if morality is just an evolutionary optimization strategy among intelligent minds, even something that could be computed mathematically, then it isn’t necessarily any more unlikely than that certain parts of human and plant anatomy would follow the Fibonacci sequence.
In some sense, the analogy between morality and arithmetics is right. On the other hand, the meaning of arithmetics can be described enough precisely, so that everybody means the same thing by using that word. Here, I don’t know exactly what you mean by morality. Yes, saving babies, not comitting murder and all that stuff, but when it comes to details, I am pretty sure that you will often find yourself disagreeing with others about what is moral. Of course, in your language, any such disagreement means that somebody is wrong about the fact. What I am uncomfortable with is the lack of unambiguous definition.
So, there is a computation named “morality”, but nobody knows what it exactly is, and nobody gives methods how to discover new details of the yet incomplete definition. Fair, but I don’t see any compelling argument why to attach words to only partly defined objects, or why to care too much about them. Seems to me that this approach pictures morality as an ineffable stuff, although of different kind than the standard bad philosophy does.
It seems you’ve encountered a curiosity-stopper, and are no longer willing to consider changes to your thoughts on morality, since that would be immoral. Is this the case?
However, it happens that the vast majority kinds of possible minds don’t give a crap about morality, and while they might agree with us about what they should do, they wouldn’t find that motivating.
What about the minds that disagree with us about what they should do, and yet do care about doing what they think they should? Would your position hold that it is unlikely for them to have a different list or that they must be mistaken about the list—that caring about what you “should” do means having the list we have?
What about the minds that disagree with us about what they should do, and yet do care about doing what they think they should?
How’d they end up with the same premises and different conclusions? Broken reasoning about implications, like the human practice of rationalization? Bad empirical pictures of the physical universe leading to poor policy? If so, that all sounds like a perfectly ordinary situation.
How’d they end up with the same premises and different conclusions?
They care about doing what is morally right, but they have different values. The baby-eaters, for example, thought it was morally right to optimize whatever they were optimizing with eating the babies, but didn’t particularly value their babies’ well-being.
Er, you might have missed the ancestor of this thread. In the conflict between fundamentally different systems of preference and value (more different than those of any two humans), it’s probably more confusing than helpful to use the word “should” with the other one. Thus we might introduce another word, should2, which stands in relation to the aliens’ mental constitution (etc) as should stands to ours.
This distinction is very helpful, because we might (for example) conclude from our moral reasoning that we should respect their moral values, and then be surprised that they don’t reciprocate, if we don’t realize that that aspect of should needn’t have any counterpart in should2. If you use the same word, you might waste time trying to argue that the aliens should do this or respect that, applying the kind of moral reasoning that is valid in extrapolating should; when they don’t give a crap for what they should do, they’re working out what they should2 do.
This is the interpretation I also have of Eliezer’s view, and it confuses me, as it applies to the story.
For example, I would expect aliens which do not value morality would be significantly more difficult to communicate with.
Also, the back story for the aliens gives a plausible argument for their actions as arising from a different path towards the same ultimate morality.
I interpreted the story as showing aliens which, as a quirk of their history and culture, have significant holes in their morality—holes which, given enough time, I would expect will disappear.
Also, the back story for the aliens gives a plausible argument for their actions as arising from a different path towards the same ultimate morality.
Really? Although babyeater_should coincides with akon_should on the notion of “toleration of reasonable mistakes” and on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it seems clear from the story that these functions wouldn’t converge on the topic of “eating babies”. (If the Superhappies had their way, both functions would just be replaced by a new “compromise” function, but neither the Babyeaters nor the humans want that, and it appears to be the wrong choice according to both babyeater_should and akon_should.)
I haven’t finished reading your meta-ethics sequence, so I apologize in advance if this is something that you’ve already addressed, but just from this exchange, I’m wondering:
Suppose that instead of talking about humans and Babyeaters, we talk about groups of humans with equally strong feelings of morality but opposite ideas about it. Suppose we take one person who feels moral when saving a little girl from being murdered, and another person who feels moral when murdering a little girl as punishment for having being raped. This seems closely analogous to your “Morality is about how to save babies, not eat them, everyone knows that and they happen to be right.” It would sound just as reasonable to say that everybody knows that morality is about saving children rather than murdering them, but sadly, it’s not the case that “everybody knows” this: as you know, there are cultures existing right now where a girl would be put to death by honestly morally-outraged elders for the abominable sin of being raped, horrifying though this fact is.
So let’s take two people (or two larger groups of people, if you prefer) from each of these cultures. We could have them imagine these actions as intensely as possible, and scan their brains for relevant electrical and chemical information, find out what parts of the brain are being used and what kinds of emotions are active. (If a control is needed, we could scan the brain of someone intensely imagining some action everyone would consider irrelevant to morality, such as brushing one’s teeth. I don’t think there are any cultures that deem that evil, are there?) If the child-rescuer and child-murderer seem to be feeling the same emotions, having the same experience of righteousness, when imagining their opposite acts, would you still conclude that it is a mistranslation/misuse to identify our word “morality” with whatever word the righteous-feeling child-murderer is using for what appears to be the same feeling? Or would you conclude that this is a situation where two people are talking about the same subject matter but have drastically opposing ideas about it?
If the latter is the case, then I do think I get the point of the Babyeater thought experiments: although they appear to us to have some mechanism of making moral judgments (judgments that we find horrible), this mechanism serves different cognitive functions for them than our moral intuition does for us, and it originated in them for different reasons. Therefore, they cannot be reasonably considered to be differently-calibrated versions of the same feature. Is that right?
If the child-rescuer and child-murderer seem to be feeling the same emotions, having the same experience of righteousness, when imagining their opposite acts, would you still conclude that it is a mistranslation/misuse to identify our word “morality” with whatever word the righteous-feeling child-murderer is using for what appears to be the same feeling?
Depends. If the child-murderer knew everything about the true state of affairs and everything about the workings of their own inner mind, would they still disagree with the child-rescuer? If so, then it’s pretty futile to pretend that they’re talking about the same subject matter when they talk about that-which-makes-me-experience-a-feeling-of-being-justified. It would be like if one species of aliens saw green when contemplating real numbers and another species of aliens saw green when contemplating ordinals; attempts to discuss that-which-makes-me-see-green as if it were the same mathematical subject matter are doomed to chaos. By the way, it looks to me like a strong possibility is that reasonable methods of extrapolating volitions will give you a spread of extrapolated-child-murderers some of which are perfectly selfish hedonists, some of which are child-rescuers, and some of which are Babyeaters.
And yes, this was the approximate point of the Babyeater thought experiment.
But I just described two kinds of subject matter that are the only two kinds of subject matter I know about: physical facts and mathematical facts.
Suppose I ask
What is rationality?
Is UDT the right decision theory?
What is the right philosophy of mathematics?
Am I asking about physical facts or logical/mathematical facts? It seems like I’m asking about a third category of “philosophical facts”.
We could say that the answer to “what is rationality” is whatever my meta-rationality computes, and hence reduce it to a physical+logical fact, but that really doesn’t seem to help at all.
These all sound to me like logical questions where you don’t have conscious access to the premises you’re using, and can only try to figure out the premises by looking at what seem like good or bad conclusions. But with respect to the general question of whether we are talking about (a) the way events are or (b) which conclusions follow from which premises, it sounds like we’re doing the latter. Other “philosophical” questions (like ‘What’s up with the Born probabilities?’ or ‘How should I compute anthropic probabilities?’) may actually be about (a).
Your answer seemed wrong to me, but it took me a long time to verbalize why. In the end, I think it’s a map/territory confusion.
For comparison, suppose I’m trying to find the shortest way from home to work by visualizing a map of the city. I’m doing a computation in my mind, which can also be viewed as deriving implications from a set of premises. But that computation is about something external; and the answer isn’t just a logical fact about what conclusions follow from certain premises.
When I ask myself “what is rationality?” I think the computation I’m doing in my head is also about something external to me, and it’s not just a logical question where I don’t have conscious access to the premises that I’m using, even though that’s also the case.
So my definition of moral realism would be that when I do the meta-moral computation of asking “what moral premises should I accept?”, that computation is about something that is not just inside my head. I think this is closer to what most people mean by the phrase.
Given the above, I think your meta-ethics is basically a denial of moral realism, but in such a way that it causes more confusion than clarity. Your position, if translated into the “shortest way to work” example, would be if someone told you that there is no fact of the matter about the shortest way to work because the whole city is just a figment of your imagination, and you reply that there is a fact of the matter about the computation in your mind, and that’s good enough for you to call yourself a realist.
When I ask myself “what is rationality?” I think the computation I’m doing in my head is also about something external to me
Well, if you’re asking about human rationality, then the prudent-way-to-think involves lots of empirical info about the actual flaws in human cognition, and so on. If you’re asking about rationality in the sense of probability theory, then the only reference to the actual that I can discern is about anthropics and possibly prudent priors—things like the Dutch Book Argument are math, which we find compelling because of our values.
If you think that we’re referring to something else—what is it, where is it stored? Is there a stone tablet somewhere on which these things are written, on which I can scrawl graffiti to alter the very fabric of rationality? Probably not—so where are the facts that the discourse is about, in your view?
I think “what is rationality” (and by that I mean ideal rationality) is like “does P=NP”. There is some fact of the matter about it that is independent of what premises we choose to, or happen to, accept. I wish I knew where these facts live, or exactly how it is that we have any ability to determine them, but I don’t. Fortunately, I don’t think that really weakens my argument much.
This is exactly what I refer to as a “logical fact” or “which conclusions follow from which premises”. Wasn’t that clear?
Actually, I guess it could be a bit less clear if you’re not already used to thinking of all math as being about theorems derived from axioms which are premise-conclusion links, i.e., if the axioms are true of a model then the theorem is true of that model. Which is, I think, conventional in mathematics, but I suppose it could be less obvious.
In the case of P!=NP, you’ll still need some axioms to prove it, and the axioms will identify the subject matter—they will let you talk about computations and running time, just as the Peano axioms identify the subject matter of the integers. It’s not that you can make 2 + 2 = 5 by believing differently about the same subject matter, but that different axioms would cause you to be talking about a different subject matter than what we name the “integers”.
Actually, I guess it could be a bit less clear if you’re not already used to thinking of all math as being about theorems derived from axioms which are premise-conclusion links
But that’s not all that math is. Suppose we eventually prove that P!=NP. How did we pick the axioms that we used to prove it? (And suppose we pick the wrong axioms. Would that change the fact that P!=NP?) Why are we pretty sure today that P!=NP without having a chain of premise-conclusion links? These are all parts of math; they’re just parts of math that we don’t understand.
ETA: To put it another way, if you ask someone who is working on the P!=NP question what he’s doing, he is not going to answer that he is trying to determine whether a specific set of axioms proves or disproves P!=NP. He’s going to answer that he’s trying to determine whether P!=NP. If those axioms don’t work out, he’ll just pick another set. There is a sense that the problem is about something that is not identified by any specific set of axioms that he happens to hold in his brain, that any set of axioms he does pick is just a map to a territory that’s “out there”. But according to your meta-ethics, there is no “out there” for morality. So why does it deserve to be called realism?
Perhaps more to the point, do you agree that there is a coherent meta-ethical position that does deserve to be called moral realism, which asserts that moral and meta-moral computations are about something outside of individual humans or humanity as a whole (even if we’re not sure how that works)?
I don’t see anything here that is not a mixture of physical facts and logical facts (that is, truths about causal events and truths about premise-conclusion links). Physical computers within our universe may be neatly described by compact axioms. Logic (in my not-uncommon view) deals with semantic implication: what is true in a model given that the axioms are true of it. If you prove P!=NP using axioms that happen to apply to the computers of this universe then P!=NP for them as well, and the axioms will have been picked out to be applicable to real physics—a mixture of physical fact and logical fact. I don’t know where logical facts are stored or what they are, just as I don’t yet know what makes the universe real, although I repose some confidence that the previous two questions are wrong—but so far I’m standing by my view that truths are about causal events, logical implications, or some mix of the two.
Axioms are that which mathematicians use to talk about integers instead of something else. You could also take the perspective of trying to talk about groups of two pebbles as they exist in the real world, and wanting your axioms to correspond to their behavior. But when you stop looking at the real world and close your eyes and try to do math, then in order to do math about something, like about the integers, about these abstract objects of thought that you abstracted away from the groups of pebbles, you need axioms that identify the integers in mathspace. And having thus gained a subject of discourse, you can use the axioms to prove theorems that are about integers because the theorems hold wherever the axioms hold. And if those axioms are true of physical reality from the appropriate standpoint, your conclusions will also hold of groups of pebbles.
Perhaps more to the point, do you agree that there is a coherent meta-ethical position that does deserve to be called moral realism, which asserts that moral and meta-moral computations are about something outside of individual humans or humanity as a whole (even if we’re not sure how that works)?
That depends; is morality a subject matter that we need premises to identify in subjectspace, in order to talk about morality rather than something else, stored in that same mysterious place as 2 + 2 = 4 being true of the integers but needing axioms to talk about the integers in the first place? Or are we talking about transcendent ineffable compelling stuff? The first view is, I think, coherent; I should think so, it’s my own. The second view is not.
I don’t see anything here that is not a mixture of physical facts and logical facts (that is, truths about causal events and truths about premise-conclusion links).
Eliezer, a couple of comments ago I switched my focus from whether there is more than just physical and logical facts to whether “morality” refers to something independent of humanity, like (as I claimed) “rationality”, “integer” and “P!=NP” do. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear, and I hope I’m not being logically rude here, but the topic is confusing to me and I’m trying different lines of thought. (BTW, what kind of fact is it that there are only two kinds of facts?)
Quoting some background from Wikipedia:
When the Peano axioms were first proposed, Bertrand Russell and others agreed that these axioms implicitly defined what we mean by a “natural number”. Henri Poincaré was more cautious, saying they only defined natural numbers if they were consistent; if there is a proof that starts from just these axioms and derives a contradiction such as 0 = 1, then the axioms are inconsistent, and don’t define anything.
My question is, how can these questions even arise in our minds, unless we already had a notion of “natural number” that is independent of Peano axioms? There is something about integers that compels us to think about them, and the compelling force is not a set of axioms that is stored in our minds or spread virally from one mathematician to another.
Maybe the compelling force is that in the world that we live in, there are objects (like pebbles) whose behaviors can be approximated by the behavior of integers. I (in apparent disagreement with you) think this isn’t the only compelling force (i.e., aliens who live in a world with no discrete objects would still invent integers), but it’s enough to establish that when we talk about integers we’re talking about something at least partly outside of ourselves.
To restate my position, I think it’s unlikely that “morality” refers to anything outside of us, but many people do believe that, and I can’t rule it out conclusively myself (especially given Toby Ord’s recent comments).
Actually, I guess it could be a bit less clear if you’re not already used to thinking of all math as being about theorems derived from axioms which are premise-conclusion links
But that’s not all that math is. Suppose we eventually prove that P!=NP. How did we pick the axioms that we used to prove it? (And suppose we pick the wrong axioms. Would that change the fact that P!=NP?) Why are we pretty sure today that P!=NP without having a chain of premise-conclusion links? These are all parts of math; they’re just parts of math that we don’t understand.
ETA: To put it another way, if you ask someone who is working on the P!=NP question, he is not going to answer that he is trying to determine whether a specific set of axioms proves or disproves P!=NP. He’s going to answer that he’s trying to determine whether P!=NP. If those axioms don’t work out, he’ll just pick another set. There is a sense that the problem is about something that is not identified by any specific set of axioms that he happens to hold in his brain, that any set of axioms he does pick is just a map to a territory that’s “out there”. But according to your meta-ethics, there is no “out there” for morality. So why does it deserve to be called realism?
ETA2: Perhaps more to the point, do you agree that there is a coherent meta-ethical position that does deserve to be called moral realism, which asserts that moral and meta-moral computations are about something outside of individual humans or humanity as a whole (even if we’re not sure how that works)?
The problem I have with this use of the words “should” and “good” is that it treats the them like semantic primitives, rather than functions of context. We use them in explicitly delimited contexts all the time:
“If you want to see why the server crashed, you should check the logs.”
“You should play Braid, if platformers are your thing.”
“You should invest in a quality fork, if you plan on eating many babies.”
“They should glue their pebble heaps together, if they want them to retain their primality.”
Since I’m having a hard time parting with the “should” of type “Goal context → Action on causal path to goal”, the only sense I can make out of your position is that “if your goal is [extensional reference to the stuff that compels humans]” is a desirable default context.
If you agree that “What should be done with the universe” is a different question than “What should be done with the universe if we want to maximize entropy as quickly as possible”, then either you’re agreeing that what we want causally affects should-ness, or you’re agreeing that the issue isn’t really “should”’s meaning, it’s what the goal context should be when not explicitly supplied. And you seem to be saying that it should be an extensional reference to commonplace human morality.
Mm… I can agree that a treaty has subject matter and is talked about by both parties, and refers to subsequent physical events. It has a treaty-kept-condition which is not quite the same thing as its being “true”. (Note: in the original story, no treaty was actually discussed with the Babyeaters.) Where does that put it on a fact/opinion chart?
In the end, the subject matter that matters in an interaction between baby eaters and humans is what to do with the universe, and that’s the one I’m talking about.
But I just described two kinds of subject matter that are the only two kinds of subject matter I know about: physical facts and mathematical facts. “What should be done with the universe” invokes a criterion of preference, “should”, which compels humans but not Babyeaters. If you look at the fact that the Babyeaters are out trying to make a different sort of universe, and the fact that the humans are out trying to make the universe make the way it should look, and you call these two facts a “disagreement”, I don’t understand what physical fact or logical fact is supposed to be the common subject matter which is being referred-to. They do the babyeating thing, we do the right thing; that’s not a subject matter.
The rampant dismissal of so many restatements of your position has tempted me to try my own. Tell me if I’ve got it right or not:
There is a topic, which covers such subtopics as those listed here, which is the only thing in fact referred to by the English word “morality” and associated terms like “should” and “right”. It is an error to refer to other things, like eating babies, as “moral” in the same way it would be an error to refer to black-and-white Asian-native ursine creatures as “lobsters”: people who do it simply aren’t talking about morality. Once the subject matter of morality is properly nailed down, and all other facts are known, there’s no room for disagreement about morality, what ought to be done, what actions are wrong, etc. any more than there is about the bachelorhood of unmarried men. However, it happens that the vast majority kinds of possible minds don’t give a crap about morality, and while they might agree with us about what they should do, they wouldn’t find that motivating. Humans, as a matter of a rather lucky causal history, do care about morality, in much the same way that pebblesorters care about primes—it’s just one of the things we’re built to find worth thinking about and working towards. By a similar token, we are responsive to arguments about features of situations that give them moral character of one sort or another.
...sounds mostly good so far. Except that there’s plenty of justification for thinking about morality besides “it’s something we happen to think about”. They’re just… well… there’s no other way to put this… perfectly valid, moving, compelling, heartwarming, moral justifications. They’re actually better justifications than being compelled by some sort of ineffable transcendent compellingness stuff—if I’ve got to respond to something, those are just the sort of (logical) facts I’d want to respond to! (I think this may be the part Roko still doesn’t get.) Also, the “lucky causal history” isn’t luck at all, of course.
It’s also quite possible that human beings, from time to time, are talking about different subject matters when they have what looks like a moral disagreement; but this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance, and I feel that a sort of courtesy should be extended, to the extent of hearing out each other’s arguments and proceeding on the assumption that we actually are disagreeing about something.
Yes, but do you see why people get annoyed when you build that courtesy into your terminology?
I’m curious about how your idea handles an edge case. (I am merely curious—not to downplay curiosity, but you shouldn’t consider it a reason to devote considerable brain-cycles on its own if it’d take considerable brain-cycles to answer, because I think your appropriation of moral terminology is silly and I won’t find the answer useful for any specific purpose.)
The edge case: I have invented an alien species called the Zaee (for freeform roleplaying game purposes; it only recently occurred to me that they have bearing on this topic). The Zaee have wings, and can fly starting in early childhood. They consider it “loiyen” (the Zaee word that most nearly translates as “morally wrong”) for a child’s birth mother to continue raising her offspring (call it a son) once he is ready to take off for the first time; they deal with this by having her entrust her son to a friend, or a friend of the father, or, in an emergency, somebody who’s in a similar bind and can just swap children with her. Someone who has a child without a plan for how to foster him out at the proper time (even if it’s “find a stranger to swap with”) is seen as being just as irresponsible as a human mother who had a child without a clue how she planned to feed him would be (even if it’s “rely on government assistance”).
There is no particular reason why a Zaee child raised to adulthood by his biological mother could not wind up within the Zaee-normal range of psychology (not that they’d ever let this be tested experimentally); however, they’d find this statement about as compelling as the fact that there’s no reason a human child, kidnapped as a two-year-old from his natural parents and adopted by a duped but competent couple overseas, couldn’t grow up to be a normal human: it still seems a dreadful thing to do, and to the child, not just to the parents.
When Zaee interact with humans they readily concede that this precept of their has no bearing on any human action whatever: human children cannot fly. And in the majority of other respects, Zaee are like humans in their - if you plopped a baby Zaee brain in a baby human body (and resolved the body dysphoria and aging rate issues) and he grew up on Earth, he’d be darned quirky, but wouldn’t be diagnosed with a mental illness or anything.
Other possibly relevant information: when Zaee programmers program AIs (not the recursively self-improving kind; much more standard-issue sci-fi types), they apply the same principle, and don’t “keep” the AIs in their own employ past a certain point. (A particular tradition of programming frequently has its graduates arrange beforehand to swap their AIs.) The AIs normally don’t run on mobile hardware, which is irrelevant anyway, because the point in question for them isn’t flight. However, Zaee are not particularly offended by the practice of human programmers keeping their own AIs indefinitely. The Zaee would be very upset if humans genetically engineered themselves to have wings from birth which became usable before adulthood and this didn’t yield a change in human fostering habits. (I have yet to have cause to get a Zaee interacting with another alien species that can also fly in the game for which they were designed, but anticipate that if I did so, “grimly distasteful bare-tolerance” would be the most appropriate attitude for the Zaee in the interaction. They’re not very violent.)
And the question: Are the Zaee “interested in morality”? Are we interested in ? Do the two referents mean distinct concepts that just happen to overlap some or be compatible in a special way? How do you talk about this situation, using the words you have appropriated?
Eliezer, I don’t understand how you can say that the “lucky causal history” wasn’t luck, unless you also say “if humans had evolved to eat babies, babyeating would have been right.”
If it wouldn’t have been right even in that event, then it took a stupendous amount of luck for us to evolve in just such a way that we care about things that are right, instead of other things.
Either that or there is a shadowy figure.
As I understand Eliezer’s position, when babyeater-humans say “right”, they actually mean babyeating. They’d need a word like “babysaving” to refer to what’s right.
Morality is what we call the output of a particular algorithm instantiated in human brains. If we instantiated a different algorithm, we’d have a word for its output instead.
I think Eliezer sees translating babyeater word for babyeating as “right” as an error similar to translating their word for babyeaters as “human”.
Precisely. So it was luck that we instantiate this algorithm, instead of a different one.
Ah, so moral justifications are better justifications because they feel good to think about. Ah, happy children playing… Ah, lovers reuniting… Ah, the Magababga’s chief warrior being roasted as dinner by our chief warrior who slew him nobly in combat...
I really don’t see why we should expect ‘morality’ to extrapolate to the same mathematical axioms if we applied CEV to different subsets of the population. Sure, you can just define the word morality to include the sum total of all human brains/minds/wills/opinions, but that wouldn’t change the fact that these people, given their druthers and their own algorithms would morally disagree. Evolutionary psychology is a very fine just-so story for many things that people do, but people’s, dare I say, aesthetic sense of right and wrong is largely driven by culture and circumstance. What would you say if omega looked at the people of earth and said, “Yes, there is enough agreement on what ‘morality’ is that we need only define 80,000 separate logically consistent moral algorithms to cover everybody!”
“Better” by the moral standard of betterness, or by a standard unconnected to morality itself?
Want to respond to because you happen to be the sort of creature that likes and is interested in these facts, or for some reason external to morality and your interest therein?
Why does this seem like a “drastic” assumption, even given your definition of “morality”?
I don’t see why I’d want to use an immoral standard. I don’t see why I ought to care about a standard unconnected to morality. And yes, I’m compelled by the sort of logical facts we name “moral justifications” physically-because I’m the sort of physical creature I am.
It’s drastic because it closes down the possibility of further discourse.
Is there some way in which this is not all fantastically circular?
How about something like this: There’s a certain set of semi abstract criteria that we call ‘morality’. And we happen to be the sorts of beings that (for various reasons) happen to care about this morality stuff as opposed to caring about something else. should we care about morality? Well, what is meant by “should”? It sure seems like that’s a term that we use to simply point to the same morality criteria/computation. In other words, “should we care about morality” seems to translate to “is it moral to care about morality” or “apply morality function to ‘care about morality’ and check the output”
It would seem also that the answer is yes, it is moral to care about morality.
Some other creatures might somewhere care about something other than morality. That’s not a disagreement about any facts or theory or anything, it’s simply that we care about morality and they may care about something like “maximize paperclip production” or whatever.
But, of course, morality is better than paper-clip-ality. (And, of course, when we say “better”, we mean “in terms of those criteria we care about”… ie, morality again.)
It’s not quite circular. Us and the paperclipper creatures wouldn’t really disagree about anything. They’d say “turning all the matter in the solar system into paperclips is paperclipish”, and we’d agree. We’d say “it’s more moral not to do so”, and they’d agree.
The catch is that they don’t give a dingdong about morality, and we don’t give a dingdong about paperclipishness. And indeed that does make us better. And if they scanned our minds to see what we mean by “better”, they’d agree. But then, that criteria that we were referring to by the term “better” is simply not something the paperclippers care about.
“we happen to care about it” is not the justification. It’s moral is the justification. It’s just that our criteria for valid moral justification is, well… morality. Which is as it should be. etc etc.
Morality is seems to be an objective criteria. Actions can be judged good or bad in terms of morality. We simply happen to care about morality instead of something else. And this is indeed a good thing.
I don’t understand two sentences in a row. Not here, not in the meta-ethics sequence, not anywhere where you guys talk about morality.
I don’t understand why I seem to be cognitively fine on other topics on Less Wrong, but then all of a sudden am Flowers for Algernon here.
I’m not going to comment anymore on this topic; it just so happens meta-morality or meta-ethics isn’t something I worry about anyway. But I would like to part with the admonition that I don’t see any reason why LW should be separating so many words from their original meanings—“good”, “better”, “should”, etc. It doesn’t seem to be clarifying things even for you guys.
I think that when something is understood—really understood—you can write it down in words. If you can’t describe an understanding, you don’t own it.
Huh? I’m asserting that most people, when they use words like “morality”, “should”(in a moral context), “better”(ditto), etc, are pointing at the same thing. That is, we think this sort of thing partly captures what people actually mean by the terms. Now, we don’t have full self knowledge, and our morality algorithm hasn’t finished reflecting (that is, hasn’t finished reconsidering itself, etc), so we have uncertainty about what sorts of things are or are not moral… But that’s a separate issue.
As far as the rest… I’m pretty sure I understand the basic idea. Anything I can do to help clarify it?
How about this: “morality is objective, and we simply happen to be the sorts of beings that care about morality as opposed to, say, evil psycho alien bots that care about maximizing paperclips instead of morality”
Does that help at all?
It looks circular to me. Of course, if you look hard enough at any views like this, the only choices are circles and terminating lines, and it seems almost an aesthetic matter which someone goes with, but this is such a small circle. It’s right to care about morality and to be moral because morality says so and morality possesses the sole capacity to identify “rightness”, including the rightness of caring about morality.
It’s more almost, well, I hate to say this, but more a matter of definitions.
ie, what do you MEAN by the term “right”?
Just keep poking your brain about that, and keep poking your brain about what you mean by “should” and what you actually mean by terms like “morality” and I think you’ll find that all those terms are pointing at the same thing.
It’s not so much “there’s this criteria of ‘rightness’ that only morality has the ability to measure” but rather an appeal to morality is what we mean when we say stuff like “‘should’ we do this? is it ‘right’?” etc...
The situation is more, well, like this:
Humans: “Morality says that, among other things, it’s more better and moral to be, well, moral. It is also moral to save lives, help people, bring joy, and a whole lot of other things”
Paperclipers: “having scanned your brains to see what you mean by these terms, we agree with your statement.”
Paperclippers: “Converting all the matter in your system into paperclips is paperclipish. Further, it is better and paperclipish to be paperclipish.”
Humans: “having scanned your minds to determine what you actually mean by those terms, we agree with your statement.”
Humans: “However, we don’t care about paperclipishness. We care about morality. Turning all the matter of our solar system (including the matter we are composed of) into paperclips is bad, so we will try to stop you.”
Paperclippers: “We do not care about morality. We care about paperclipishness. Resisting the conversion to paperclips is unpaperclipish. Therefore we will try to crush your resistance.”
This is very different from what we normally think of as circular arguments, which would be of the form of “A, therefore B, therefore A, QED”, while the other side would be “no! not A”
Here, all sides agree about stuff. It’s just that they value different things. But the fact of humans valuing the stuff isn’t the justification for valuing that stuff. The justification is that it’s moral. But the fact is that we happen to be moved by arguments like “it’s moral”, rather than the wicked paperclippers that only care about whether it’s paperclipish or not.
But why should I feel obliged to act morally instead of paperclippishly? Circles seem all well and good when you’re already inside of them, but being inside of them already is kind of not the point of discussing meta-ethics.
“should”
What do you mean by “should”? Do you actually mean anything by it other than an appeal to morality in the first place?
Well, that’s not necessarily a moral sense of ‘should’, I guess—I’m asking whether I have any sort of good reason to act morally, be it an appeal to my interests or to transcendent moral reasons or whatever.
It’s generally the contention of moralists and paperclipists that there’s always good reason for everyone to act morally or paperclippishly. But proving that this contention itself just boils down to yet another moral/paperclippy claim doesn’t seem to help their case any. It just demonstrates what a tight circle their argument is, and what little reason someone outside of it has to care about it if they don’t already.
What do you mean by “should” in this context other than a moral sense of it? What would count as a “good reason”?
As far as your statement about both moralists and paperclippers thinking there are “good reasons”… the catch is that the phrase “good reasons” is being used to refer to two distinct concepts. When a human/moralist uses it, they mean, well… good, as opposed to evil.
A paperclipper, however, is not concerned at all about that standard. A paperclipper cares about what, well, maximizes paperclips.
It’s not that it should do so, but simply that it doesn’t care what it should do. Being evil doesn’t bother it any more than failing to maximize paperclips bothers you.
Being evil is clearly worse (where by “worse” I mean, well, immoral, bad, evil, etc...) that being good. But the paperclipper doesn’t care. But you do (as far as I know. If you don’t, then… I think you scare me). What sort of standard other than morality would you want to appeal to for this sort of issue in the first place?
By that I mean rationally motivating reasons. But I’d be willing to concede, if you pressed, that ‘rationality’ is itself just another set of action-directing values. The point would still stand: if the set of values I mean when I say ‘rationality’ is incongruent with the set of values you mean when you say ‘morality,’ then it appears you have no grounds on which to persuade me to be directed by morality.
This is a very unsatisfactory conclusion for most moral realists, who believe that moral reasons are to be inherently objectively compelling to any sentient being. So I’m not sure if the position you’re espousing is just a complicated way of expressing surrender, or an attempt to reframe the question, or what, but it doesn’t seem to get us any more traction when it comes to answering “Why should I be moral?”
Duly noted, but is what I happen to care about relevant to this issue of meta-ethics?
Rationality is basically “how to make an accurate map of the world… and how to WIN (where win basically means getting what you “want” (where want includes all your preferences, stuff like morality, etc etc...)
Before rationality can tell you what to do, you have to tell it what it is you’re trying to do.
If your goal is to save lives, rationality can help you find ways to do that. If your goal is to turn stuff into paperclips, rationality can help you find ways to do that too.
I’m not sure I quite understand you mean by “rationally motivating” reasons.
As far as objectively compelling to any sentient (let me generalize that to any intelligent being)… Why should there be any such thing? “Doing this will help ensure your survival” “But… what if I don’t care about this?”
“doing this will bring joy” “So?”
etc etc… There are No Universally Compelling Arguments
According to the original post, strong moral realism (the above) is not held by most moral realists.
Well, my “moral reasons are to be...” there was kind of slippery. The ‘strong moral realism’ Roko outlined seems to be based on a factual premise (“All...beings...will agree...”), which I’d agree most moral realists are smart enough not to hold. The much more commonly held view seems to amount instead to a sort of … moral imperative to accept moral imperatives—by positing a set of knowable moral facts that we might not bother to recognize or follow, but ought to. Which seems like more of the same circular reasoning that Psy-Kosh has been talking about/defending.
What I’m saying is that when you say the word “ought”, you mean something. Even if you can’t quite articulate it, you have some sort of standard for saying “you ought do this, you ought not do that” that is basically the definition of ought.
I’m saying”this oughtness, whatever it is, is the same thing that you mean when you talk about ‘morality’. So “ought I be moral?” directly translates to “is it moral to be moral?”
I’m not saying “only morality has the authority to answer this question” but rather “uh… ‘is X moral?’ is kind of what you actually mean by ought/should/etc, isn’t it? ie, if I do a bit of a trace in your brain, follow the word back to its associated concepts, isn’t it going to be pointing/labeling the same algorithms that “morality” labels in your brain?
So basically it amounts to “yes, there’re things that one ought to do… and there can exist beings that know this but simply don’t care about whether or not they ‘ought’ to do something.”
It’s not that another being refuses to recognize this so much as they’d be saying “So what? we don’t care about this ‘oughtness’ business.” It’s not a disagreement, it’s simply failing to care about it.
I’d object to this simplification of the meaning of the word (I’d argue that ‘ought’ means lots of different things in different contexts, most of which aren’t only reducible to categorically imperative moral claims), but I suppose it’s not really relevant here.
I’m pretty sure we agree and are just playing with the words differently.
and
seem to amount to about the same thing from where I sit. But it’s a bit misleading to phrase your admission that moral realism fails (and it does, just as paperclip realism fails) as an affirmation that “there are things one ought to do”.
What’s failing?
“what is 2+3?” has an objectively true answer.
The fact that some other creature might instead want to know the answer to the question “what is 6*7?” (which also has an objectively true answer) is irrelevant.
How does that make “what is 2+3?” less real?
Similarly, how does the fact that some other beings might care about something other than morality make questions of the form “what is moral? what should I do?” non objective?
It’s nothing to do with agreement. When you ask “ought I do this?”, well… to the extent that you’re not speaking empty words, you’re asking SOME specific question.
There is some criteria by which “oughtness” can be judged… that is, the defining criteria. It may be hard for you to articulate, it may only be implicitly encoded in your brain, but to the extent that word is a label for some concept, it means something.
I do not think you’d argue too much against this.
I make an additional claim: That that which we commonly refer to in these contexts by words like “Should”, “ought” and so on is the same thing we’re referring to when we say stuff like “morality”.
To me “what should I do?” and “what is the moral thing to do?” are basically the same question, pretty much.
“Ought I be moral?” thus would translate to “ought I be the sort of person that does what I ought to do?”
I think the answer to that is yes.
There may be beings that agree with that completely but take the view of “but we simply don’t care about whether or not we ought to do something. It is not that we disagree with your claims about whether one ought to be moral. We agree we ought to be moral. We simply place no value in doing what one ‘ought’ to do. Instead we value certain other things.” But screw them… I mean, they don’t do what they ought to do!
(EDIT: minor changes to last paragraph.)
I just want to know, what is six by nine?
“nobody writes jokes in base 13” :)
Oh shit. I get it. Morality exists outside of ourselves in the same way that paperclips exists outside clippies.
Babyeating is justified by some of the same impulses as baby saving: protecting ones own genetic line.
It’s not necessarily as well motivated by the criteria of saving sentient creatures from pain, but you might be able to make an argument for it. Maybe if you took thhe opposite path and said not that pain was bad, but that sentience / long life/ grandchildren was good and baby eating was a “moral decision” for having grand children.
First part yes, rest… not quite. (or maybe I’m misunderstanding you?)
“Protecting one’s own genetic line” would be more the evolutionary reason. ie, part of the process that led to us valuing morality as opposed to valuing paperclips. (or, hypothetically fictionally alternately, part of the process that led to the Babyeaters valuing babyeating instead of valuing morality.)
But that’s not exactly a moral justification as much as it is part of an explanation of why we care about morality. We should save babies… because! ie, Babies (or people in general, for that matter) dying is bad. Killing innocent sentients, especially those that have had the least opportunity to live, is extra bad. The fact that I care about this is ultimately in part explained via evolutionary processes, but that’s not the justification.
The hypothetical Babyeaters do not care about morality. That’s kind of the point. It’s not that they’ve come to different conclusions about morality as much as the thing that they value isn’t quite morality in the first place.
I… don’t think so. One theory of morality is that killing death is bad. Sure, that’s at least a component of most moral systems, but there are certain circumstance under which killing is good or okay. Such as if the person you’re killing is a Nazi or a werewolf or if they are a fetus you could not support to adulthood or trying to kill you or a death row inmate guilty of a crime by rule of law.
Justifications for killing are often moral.
Babyeaters are, in a way at least possessing similarities to human morality, justified by giving the fewer remaining children a chance at a life with the guidance of adult babyeaters, and more resources since they don’t have to compete against millions of their siblings.
This allows babyeaters to develop something like empathy, affection, bonding, love and happiness for the surviving babyeater kind. Without this, babyeaters would be unable to make a babyeater society, and it’s really easy to apply utilitarianism to it in the same way utilitarian theory can apply utilitarian theory to human morality.
It’s also justified because it’s an individual sacrifice to your own genetic line, rather than the eating other babyeater’s children, which is the type of a grandchildren maximizer would do. The need of the many > The wants of the few, which also plays a part in various theories of morality.
I’d say they reached the same conclusion that we did about most things, it’s just they took necessary and important moral sacrifice, and turned it into a ritual that is now detached from morality.
It damn well sounds like we’re talking about the same thing. The only objection I can think of is that they re aliens and that that would be highly improbable, but if morality is just an evolutionary optimization strategy among intelligent minds, even something that could be computed mathematically, then it isn’t necessarily any more unlikely than that certain parts of human and plant anatomy would follow the Fibonacci sequence.
Only in the sense that “2 + 2 = 4” is not fantastically circular.
In some sense, the analogy between morality and arithmetics is right. On the other hand, the meaning of arithmetics can be described enough precisely, so that everybody means the same thing by using that word. Here, I don’t know exactly what you mean by morality. Yes, saving babies, not comitting murder and all that stuff, but when it comes to details, I am pretty sure that you will often find yourself disagreeing with others about what is moral. Of course, in your language, any such disagreement means that somebody is wrong about the fact. What I am uncomfortable with is the lack of unambiguous definition.
So, there is a computation named “morality”, but nobody knows what it exactly is, and nobody gives methods how to discover new details of the yet incomplete definition. Fair, but I don’t see any compelling argument why to attach words to only partly defined objects, or why to care too much about them. Seems to me that this approach pictures morality as an ineffable stuff, although of different kind than the standard bad philosophy does.
It seems you’ve encountered a curiosity-stopper, and are no longer willing to consider changes to your thoughts on morality, since that would be immoral. Is this the case?
Wha? No. But you’d have to offer me a moral reason, as opposed to an immoral one.
How about amoral reasons? Are those okay?
...I’d like to see an example?
Under your definition I’m not sure if such things exist; I was mostly being silly.
What about the minds that disagree with us about what they should do, and yet do care about doing what they think they should? Would your position hold that it is unlikely for them to have a different list or that they must be mistaken about the list—that caring about what you “should” do means having the list we have?
How’d they end up with the same premises and different conclusions? Broken reasoning about implications, like the human practice of rationalization? Bad empirical pictures of the physical universe leading to poor policy? If so, that all sounds like a perfectly ordinary situation.
They care about doing what is morally right, but they have different values. The baby-eaters, for example, thought it was morally right to optimize whatever they were optimizing with eating the babies, but didn’t particularly value their babies’ well-being.
Er, you might have missed the ancestor of this thread. In the conflict between fundamentally different systems of preference and value (more different than those of any two humans), it’s probably more confusing than helpful to use the word “should” with the other one. Thus we might introduce another word, should2, which stands in relation to the aliens’ mental constitution (etc) as should stands to ours.
This distinction is very helpful, because we might (for example) conclude from our moral reasoning that we should respect their moral values, and then be surprised that they don’t reciprocate, if we don’t realize that that aspect of should needn’t have any counterpart in should2. If you use the same word, you might waste time trying to argue that the aliens should do this or respect that, applying the kind of moral reasoning that is valid in extrapolating should; when they don’t give a crap for what they should do, they’re working out what they should2 do.
(This is more or less the same argument as in Moral Error and Moral Disagreement, I think.)
I’m not sure. How can there be any confusion when I say they “do care about doing what they think they should?” I clearly mean should2 here.
I think it’s perfectly clear. Eliezer seems to disapprove of this usage and I think he claims that it is not clear, but I’m less sure of that.
I propose that a moral relativist is someone who like this usage.
There remains a third option in addition to evolutionary hardwired stuff and ineffable, transcendent stuff.
This is the interpretation I also have of Eliezer’s view, and it confuses me, as it applies to the story.
For example, I would expect aliens which do not value morality would be significantly more difficult to communicate with.
Also, the back story for the aliens gives a plausible argument for their actions as arising from a different path towards the same ultimate morality.
I interpreted the story as showing aliens which, as a quirk of their history and culture, have significant holes in their morality—holes which, given enough time, I would expect will disappear.
Really? Although babyeater_should coincides with akon_should on the notion of “toleration of reasonable mistakes” and on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it seems clear from the story that these functions wouldn’t converge on the topic of “eating babies”. (If the Superhappies had their way, both functions would just be replaced by a new “compromise” function, but neither the Babyeaters nor the humans want that, and it appears to be the wrong choice according to both babyeater_should and akon_should.)
I haven’t finished reading your meta-ethics sequence, so I apologize in advance if this is something that you’ve already addressed, but just from this exchange, I’m wondering:
Suppose that instead of talking about humans and Babyeaters, we talk about groups of humans with equally strong feelings of morality but opposite ideas about it. Suppose we take one person who feels moral when saving a little girl from being murdered, and another person who feels moral when murdering a little girl as punishment for having being raped. This seems closely analogous to your “Morality is about how to save babies, not eat them, everyone knows that and they happen to be right.” It would sound just as reasonable to say that everybody knows that morality is about saving children rather than murdering them, but sadly, it’s not the case that “everybody knows” this: as you know, there are cultures existing right now where a girl would be put to death by honestly morally-outraged elders for the abominable sin of being raped, horrifying though this fact is.
So let’s take two people (or two larger groups of people, if you prefer) from each of these cultures. We could have them imagine these actions as intensely as possible, and scan their brains for relevant electrical and chemical information, find out what parts of the brain are being used and what kinds of emotions are active. (If a control is needed, we could scan the brain of someone intensely imagining some action everyone would consider irrelevant to morality, such as brushing one’s teeth. I don’t think there are any cultures that deem that evil, are there?) If the child-rescuer and child-murderer seem to be feeling the same emotions, having the same experience of righteousness, when imagining their opposite acts, would you still conclude that it is a mistranslation/misuse to identify our word “morality” with whatever word the righteous-feeling child-murderer is using for what appears to be the same feeling? Or would you conclude that this is a situation where two people are talking about the same subject matter but have drastically opposing ideas about it?
If the latter is the case, then I do think I get the point of the Babyeater thought experiments: although they appear to us to have some mechanism of making moral judgments (judgments that we find horrible), this mechanism serves different cognitive functions for them than our moral intuition does for us, and it originated in them for different reasons. Therefore, they cannot be reasonably considered to be differently-calibrated versions of the same feature. Is that right?
Depends. If the child-murderer knew everything about the true state of affairs and everything about the workings of their own inner mind, would they still disagree with the child-rescuer? If so, then it’s pretty futile to pretend that they’re talking about the same subject matter when they talk about that-which-makes-me-experience-a-feeling-of-being-justified. It would be like if one species of aliens saw green when contemplating real numbers and another species of aliens saw green when contemplating ordinals; attempts to discuss that-which-makes-me-see-green as if it were the same mathematical subject matter are doomed to chaos. By the way, it looks to me like a strong possibility is that reasonable methods of extrapolating volitions will give you a spread of extrapolated-child-murderers some of which are perfectly selfish hedonists, some of which are child-rescuers, and some of which are Babyeaters.
And yes, this was the approximate point of the Babyeater thought experiment.
Suppose I ask
What is rationality?
Is UDT the right decision theory?
What is the right philosophy of mathematics?
Am I asking about physical facts or logical/mathematical facts? It seems like I’m asking about a third category of “philosophical facts”.
We could say that the answer to “what is rationality” is whatever my meta-rationality computes, and hence reduce it to a physical+logical fact, but that really doesn’t seem to help at all.
These all sound to me like logical questions where you don’t have conscious access to the premises you’re using, and can only try to figure out the premises by looking at what seem like good or bad conclusions. But with respect to the general question of whether we are talking about (a) the way events are or (b) which conclusions follow from which premises, it sounds like we’re doing the latter. Other “philosophical” questions (like ‘What’s up with the Born probabilities?’ or ‘How should I compute anthropic probabilities?’) may actually be about (a).
Your answer seemed wrong to me, but it took me a long time to verbalize why. In the end, I think it’s a map/territory confusion.
For comparison, suppose I’m trying to find the shortest way from home to work by visualizing a map of the city. I’m doing a computation in my mind, which can also be viewed as deriving implications from a set of premises. But that computation is about something external; and the answer isn’t just a logical fact about what conclusions follow from certain premises.
When I ask myself “what is rationality?” I think the computation I’m doing in my head is also about something external to me, and it’s not just a logical question where I don’t have conscious access to the premises that I’m using, even though that’s also the case.
So my definition of moral realism would be that when I do the meta-moral computation of asking “what moral premises should I accept?”, that computation is about something that is not just inside my head. I think this is closer to what most people mean by the phrase.
Given the above, I think your meta-ethics is basically a denial of moral realism, but in such a way that it causes more confusion than clarity. Your position, if translated into the “shortest way to work” example, would be if someone told you that there is no fact of the matter about the shortest way to work because the whole city is just a figment of your imagination, and you reply that there is a fact of the matter about the computation in your mind, and that’s good enough for you to call yourself a realist.
Well, if you’re asking about human rationality, then the prudent-way-to-think involves lots of empirical info about the actual flaws in human cognition, and so on. If you’re asking about rationality in the sense of probability theory, then the only reference to the actual that I can discern is about anthropics and possibly prudent priors—things like the Dutch Book Argument are math, which we find compelling because of our values.
If you think that we’re referring to something else—what is it, where is it stored? Is there a stone tablet somewhere on which these things are written, on which I can scrawl graffiti to alter the very fabric of rationality? Probably not—so where are the facts that the discourse is about, in your view?
I think “what is rationality” (and by that I mean ideal rationality) is like “does P=NP”. There is some fact of the matter about it that is independent of what premises we choose to, or happen to, accept. I wish I knew where these facts live, or exactly how it is that we have any ability to determine them, but I don’t. Fortunately, I don’t think that really weakens my argument much.
This is exactly what I refer to as a “logical fact” or “which conclusions follow from which premises”. Wasn’t that clear?
Actually, I guess it could be a bit less clear if you’re not already used to thinking of all math as being about theorems derived from axioms which are premise-conclusion links, i.e., if the axioms are true of a model then the theorem is true of that model. Which is, I think, conventional in mathematics, but I suppose it could be less obvious.
In the case of P!=NP, you’ll still need some axioms to prove it, and the axioms will identify the subject matter—they will let you talk about computations and running time, just as the Peano axioms identify the subject matter of the integers. It’s not that you can make 2 + 2 = 5 by believing differently about the same subject matter, but that different axioms would cause you to be talking about a different subject matter than what we name the “integers”.
Is this starting to sound a little familiar?
But that’s not all that math is. Suppose we eventually prove that P!=NP. How did we pick the axioms that we used to prove it? (And suppose we pick the wrong axioms. Would that change the fact that P!=NP?) Why are we pretty sure today that P!=NP without having a chain of premise-conclusion links? These are all parts of math; they’re just parts of math that we don’t understand.
ETA: To put it another way, if you ask someone who is working on the P!=NP question what he’s doing, he is not going to answer that he is trying to determine whether a specific set of axioms proves or disproves P!=NP. He’s going to answer that he’s trying to determine whether P!=NP. If those axioms don’t work out, he’ll just pick another set. There is a sense that the problem is about something that is not identified by any specific set of axioms that he happens to hold in his brain, that any set of axioms he does pick is just a map to a territory that’s “out there”. But according to your meta-ethics, there is no “out there” for morality. So why does it deserve to be called realism?
Perhaps more to the point, do you agree that there is a coherent meta-ethical position that does deserve to be called moral realism, which asserts that moral and meta-moral computations are about something outside of individual humans or humanity as a whole (even if we’re not sure how that works)?
I don’t see anything here that is not a mixture of physical facts and logical facts (that is, truths about causal events and truths about premise-conclusion links). Physical computers within our universe may be neatly described by compact axioms. Logic (in my not-uncommon view) deals with semantic implication: what is true in a model given that the axioms are true of it. If you prove P!=NP using axioms that happen to apply to the computers of this universe then P!=NP for them as well, and the axioms will have been picked out to be applicable to real physics—a mixture of physical fact and logical fact. I don’t know where logical facts are stored or what they are, just as I don’t yet know what makes the universe real, although I repose some confidence that the previous two questions are wrong—but so far I’m standing by my view that truths are about causal events, logical implications, or some mix of the two.
Axioms are that which mathematicians use to talk about integers instead of something else. You could also take the perspective of trying to talk about groups of two pebbles as they exist in the real world, and wanting your axioms to correspond to their behavior. But when you stop looking at the real world and close your eyes and try to do math, then in order to do math about something, like about the integers, about these abstract objects of thought that you abstracted away from the groups of pebbles, you need axioms that identify the integers in mathspace. And having thus gained a subject of discourse, you can use the axioms to prove theorems that are about integers because the theorems hold wherever the axioms hold. And if those axioms are true of physical reality from the appropriate standpoint, your conclusions will also hold of groups of pebbles.
That depends; is morality a subject matter that we need premises to identify in subjectspace, in order to talk about morality rather than something else, stored in that same mysterious place as 2 + 2 = 4 being true of the integers but needing axioms to talk about the integers in the first place? Or are we talking about transcendent ineffable compelling stuff? The first view is, I think, coherent; I should think so, it’s my own. The second view is not.
Eliezer, a couple of comments ago I switched my focus from whether there is more than just physical and logical facts to whether “morality” refers to something independent of humanity, like (as I claimed) “rationality”, “integer” and “P!=NP” do. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear, and I hope I’m not being logically rude here, but the topic is confusing to me and I’m trying different lines of thought. (BTW, what kind of fact is it that there are only two kinds of facts?)
Quoting some background from Wikipedia:
My question is, how can these questions even arise in our minds, unless we already had a notion of “natural number” that is independent of Peano axioms? There is something about integers that compels us to think about them, and the compelling force is not a set of axioms that is stored in our minds or spread virally from one mathematician to another.
Maybe the compelling force is that in the world that we live in, there are objects (like pebbles) whose behaviors can be approximated by the behavior of integers. I (in apparent disagreement with you) think this isn’t the only compelling force (i.e., aliens who live in a world with no discrete objects would still invent integers), but it’s enough to establish that when we talk about integers we’re talking about something at least partly outside of ourselves.
To restate my position, I think it’s unlikely that “morality” refers to anything outside of us, but many people do believe that, and I can’t rule it out conclusively myself (especially given Toby Ord’s recent comments).
Properly no they are not part of math, they are part of Computer Science, i.e. a description of how computations actually happen in the real world.
That is the missing piece that determines what axioms to use.
But that’s not all that math is. Suppose we eventually prove that P!=NP. How did we pick the axioms that we used to prove it? (And suppose we pick the wrong axioms. Would that change the fact that P!=NP?) Why are we pretty sure today that P!=NP without having a chain of premise-conclusion links? These are all parts of math; they’re just parts of math that we don’t understand.
ETA: To put it another way, if you ask someone who is working on the P!=NP question, he is not going to answer that he is trying to determine whether a specific set of axioms proves or disproves P!=NP. He’s going to answer that he’s trying to determine whether P!=NP. If those axioms don’t work out, he’ll just pick another set. There is a sense that the problem is about something that is not identified by any specific set of axioms that he happens to hold in his brain, that any set of axioms he does pick is just a map to a territory that’s “out there”. But according to your meta-ethics, there is no “out there” for morality. So why does it deserve to be called realism?
ETA2: Perhaps more to the point, do you agree that there is a coherent meta-ethical position that does deserve to be called moral realism, which asserts that moral and meta-moral computations are about something outside of individual humans or humanity as a whole (even if we’re not sure how that works)?
The problem I have with this use of the words “should” and “good” is that it treats the them like semantic primitives, rather than functions of context. We use them in explicitly delimited contexts all the time:
“If you want to see why the server crashed, you should check the logs.”
“You should play Braid, if platformers are your thing.”
“You should invest in a quality fork, if you plan on eating many babies.”
“They should glue their pebble heaps together, if they want them to retain their primality.”
Since I’m having a hard time parting with the “should” of type “Goal context → Action on causal path to goal”, the only sense I can make out of your position is that “if your goal is [extensional reference to the stuff that compels humans]” is a desirable default context.
If you agree that “What should be done with the universe” is a different question than “What should be done with the universe if we want to maximize entropy as quickly as possible”, then either you’re agreeing that what we want causally affects should-ness, or you’re agreeing that the issue isn’t really “should”’s meaning, it’s what the goal context should be when not explicitly supplied. And you seem to be saying that it should be an extensional reference to commonplace human morality.
I didn’t say that the babyeaters/humans have a factual disagreement. They have a war or a treaty, which is the really important prediction here.
Mm… I can agree that a treaty has subject matter and is talked about by both parties, and refers to subsequent physical events. It has a treaty-kept-condition which is not quite the same thing as its being “true”. (Note: in the original story, no treaty was actually discussed with the Babyeaters.) Where does that put it on a fact/opinion chart?
It looks like you can disagree about values as well as facts.