Can you elaborate on Eliezer being a moral realist? Is there a summary anywhere or could you provide one?
Regarding this statement: “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. A moral antirealist can agree with this (I’m an antirealist, and I agree with it). Nothing about agreeing or disagreeing with that claim entails realism.
Your position sounds like antirealism to me, but I’m not sure if it would fit with any of the standard categories. A lot hinges on your statement that:
I would say that by calling a moral proposition true what we are primarily doing is advocating or condemning certain acts/people, rather than trying to create a correspondence between listeners’ beliefs and reality.
If you were claiming that moral claims, despite appearing to be saying things that were true or false, were actually, instead, used to condemn acts/people, that would sound like some type of expressivism/noncognitivism, but since you’re also trying to maintain use of the term “true,” I’m not sure what to make of it. Omnizoid’s suggestion of quasi-realism makes some sense since part of the goal is to maintain the ability to say that one’s moral claims are true while still treating them as largely serving an expressive role; those accounts hinge on deflationary views of truth though and it doesn’t sound exactly like you’re endorsing that.
I think the central question would be: Do you think that there are facts about what people morally should or shouldn’t do, or what’s morally good or bad, that are true independent of people’s goals, standards, or values? If yes, that’s moral realism. If not, that’s moral antirealism.
In 2008, which is a very long time ago, Eliezer wrote, hugely paraphrased:
There are tons of huge blobs of computation. Some of them look a lot like “Did anyone get killed? Are people happy? Are they in control of their own lives? …” If I were to know more, upgrade my various forms of brainpower, be presented with all the good-faith arguments about morality, etc etc then I would converge on one of those huge blobs that look a lot like “Did anyone get killed? Are people happy? Are they in control of their own lives? …” when I did moral reasoning. This huge blob of computation is what I call “right”. Right now, my moral intuitions are some evidence about the huge blob I’d converge to. Other humans would also converge to some huge blob of computation, and I have hopes it would look extremely similar to the one I would. Maybe it would even be identical! The reason this is plausible is because good-faith arguments about morality are likely to work similarly on similar intelligence architectures/implementations, and if we ended up with, say, 3 similar blobs, it seems fairly likely every(enhanced)one upon inspection of all 3 would choose the same 1. But at the very least there would be enormous overlaps. Regardless, “right” aka the blob of computation is a thing that exists no matter whether humans exist, and luckily our moral intuitions give us evidence of what that blob is. Certainly intelligences could exist which didn’t have good pathways to discovering it, and worse, don’t care about it, but we don’t like them. They’re “wrong”.
-”I think the central question would be: Do you think that there are facts about what people morally should or shouldn’t do, or what’s morally good or bad, that are true independent of people’s goals, standards, or values? If yes, that’s moral realism. If not, that’s moral antirealism.”
I certainly don’t believe that the truth of moral facts is dependent on people’s goals, standards, or values; the qualifier I would give is that our beliefs about moral facts are the same thing (tautologically) as our moral standards. So I guess I am a moral realist? Or maybe you are right that my position doesn’t fit into any of the standard categories. I guess it doesn’t matter, I was just curious...
-”Regarding this statement: “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. A moral antirealist can agree with this (I’m an antirealist, and I agree with it). Nothing about agreeing or disagreeing with that claim entails realism.”
Right, the litmus test was whether the statement is “true”. Sorry about being unclear.
I’m not sure if you’re a moral realist. What do you mean when you say this?
A moral realist may think that there are e.g., facts about what you should or shouldn’t do that you are obligated to comply with independent of whether doing so would be consistent with your goals, standards, or values. So, for instance, they would hold that you “should’t torture babies for fun,” regardless of whether doing so is consistent with your values. In doing so, they aren’t appeal to their own values, or anyone else’s values, but to facts about what’s morally right or wrong that are true without reference to, and in a way that doesn’t depend on, any particular evaluative standpoint.
-”In doing so, they aren’t appeal to their own values, or anyone else’s values, but to facts about what’s morally right or wrong that are true without reference to, and in a way that doesn’t depend on, any particular evaluative standpoint.”
OK, so now it sounds like I am not a moral realist! I definitely think that by making a moral claim you are appealing to other people’s values, since other people’s values is the only thing that could possibly cause them to accept your moral claim. However, the moral claim is still of the form “X is true regardless of whether it is consistent with anyone’s values”.
A moral realist would think that there are facts about what is morally right or wrong that are true regardless of what anyone thinks about them. One way to put this is that they aren’t made true by our desires, goals, standards, values, beliefs, and so on. Rather, they are true in a way more like how claims about e.g., the mass of an object are true. Facts about the mass of an object aren’t made true by our believing them or preferring them to be the case.
-”One way to put this is that they aren’t made true by our desires, goals, standards, values, beliefs, and so on.”
OK, I am a moral realist under this formulation.
-”Rather, they are true in a way more like how claims about e.g., the mass of an object are true.”
I guess it depends on what you mean by “in a way more like”. Moral claims are pretty fundamentally different from physical claims, I don’t see how to get around that—one way to put it would be that the notions of right and wrong are not inductive generalizations over observed phenomena—another way to put it would be that the question “what does it mean for something to be right or wrong” is meaningless, the only meaningful question is “what do we mean when we say that something is right or wrong” (to which the answer is “we do not mean anything, rather we speak to advocate or condemn something”). But if you are just referring to some surface-level similarity like “neither of them is actually a secret way of referring to the speaker’s beliefs/opinions/values”, then sure.
Moral realists are going to differ with respect to what they think the metaphysical status of the moral facts are. Moral naturalists may see them roughly as a kind of natural fact, so moral facts might be facts about e.g., increases in wellbeing, while non-naturalists would maintain that moral facts aren’t reducible to natural facts.
in the sense that they can slightly misrepresent their own views. Since they don’t believe in stance independent moral facts, an accurate rendition of their views would include the stance as one of the arguments two a two place predicate.
“According to my stance, it is wrong to torture babies for fun”.
But that statement gives no reason for anyone to change their mind
Okay. Thanks. With respect, I disagree. I do not think that claims like “murder is wrong” or “pizza is tasty” in any way imply or even hint at normative realism about the claims in question. Both claims are completely consistent with antirealism, and it’s not at all clear to me how either would indicate some form of normative realism.
I am not sure the reason you gave, that it’s phrased as a one place predicate, is any kind of substantive indication of realism. I can grant that:
”Murder is wrong,” is more consistent with, and more likely to be an expression of a realist stance than “I disapprove of murder,” but whether it is more consistent with what someone would say if they were a realist about the issue in question relative to some other remark that is less likely to express realism doesn’t indicate in absolute terms that it meaningfully hints at realism. However, nothing bars a normative realist from expressing subjective attitudes, and nothing bars an antirealist from employing conventional assertoric language to express subjective (or more generally nonrealist) evaluative standards or normative judgments.
For one thing, expressions of our preferences often exclude any explicit qualification that they are our preferences because in many contexts it would violate Gricean maxims to explicitly indicate that something is a preference, or an expression of our subjective attitudes. To the extent that most people aren’t gastronomic realists, a statement like “chocolate ice cream is delicious” doesn’t need ”...in my opinion” at the end, or “I consider” at the beginning because this is implicit. People may include such qualifications explicitly, but typically only in contexts in which e.g., some contextual goal is relevant, such as not offending someone with a contrary opinion, or to emphasize that you are stating a contrary opinion.
They are compatible with anti realism in just the sense that they are lossy, inaccurate renditions of it.
For one thing, expressions of our preferences often exclude any explicit qualification that they are our preferences because in many contexts it would violate Gricean maxims to explicitly indicate that something is a preference, or an expression of our subjective attitudes
That would be true of casual conversati on, but not philosophical debate.
Why do you say they’re lossy or inaccurate renditions of it? My position on this is that statements like “murder is wrong” are simply normative claims, and they are in no way more indicative of realism or antirealism. I’m still not understanding why you think they’d indicate realism. Why presuppose that such statements have anything to do with expressing metanormative standards at all? They’re normative claims, not metaethical ones, and it’s not clear to me why we’d imagine a normative claim (i.e., a claim about something being right, wrong, permissible, impermissible, and so on) suggests any particular metanormative stance, unless such a stance were :
(a) explicitly accompanying the remark, e.g., “murder is objectively wrong”
(b) we had background knowledge about the speaker in question that would suggest they’re using that way, e.g., a moral realist says “murder is wrong”
or
(c) we had background knowledge about the degree to which such language was typically used to convey claims with particular metanormative presuppositions, e.g., we ran a bunch of surveys and discovered most people from the population the person is from are committed to moral realism
Without such information, I see no particular reason to presume such remarks hint at realism merely by examining the structure of the sentence.
That would be true of casual conversati on, but not philosophical debate.
I disagree. Such norms apply to philosophical conversations as well. For what it’s worth, I’m a moral antirealist and I use normative language all the time. I don’t think moral realists have any kind of monopoly on, or priority over, straightforward normative claims in any domain, because I don’t think normative claims hint at any particular metanormative standards.
Why do you say they’re lossy or inaccurate renditions of it?
Because they don’t make stance dependence explicit.
My position on this is that statements like “murder is wrong” are simply normative claims, and they are in no way more indicative of realism or antirealism.
My claim is that normative claims have subtypes. “subjectively wrong” doesn’t mean what “objectively wrong” means. In a way that’s your position , too, since you think subjective wrongness exists and objective wrongness doesn’t. You’re not making an noncommital statement because you think there is nothing to choose between objectivity and subjectivity.
They’re normative claims, not metaethical ones,
Metaethics, normative ethics , and object level ethics are different, but not entirely separate magisteria. For instance, utilitarianism implies that murder is sometimes justified. Likewise, realistic metaethics has implications for normative ethics ,not so much in terms of what is wrong , but in terms of how wrong it is.
If something is merely against your preferences, why should … actually, objectively …someone go to jail for it?
Which gets us back to the issue of slightly misrepresenting relativist views...leaving out the stance dependence makes the problem slightly harder to spot.
I don’t think the claims are stance independent, either, so I don’t think there’s any loss. In other words, I don’t think typical moral claims imply stance-independence or stance-dependence. They don’t imply or hint at any particular metaethical position at all. Why suppose that they do?
We don’t take causal claims like “It’s going to rain tomorrow” to imply a position on how to interpret quantum mechanics. Likewise, it may be that everyday moral claims are simply indeterminate with respect to metaethical presuppositions.
My claim is that normative claims have subtypes. “subjectively wrong” doesn’t mean what “objectively wrong” means.
I agree. But I don’t think these categories and distinctions regularly figure into everyday normative and evaluative claims. They’re philosophical inventions, and have little to do with what ordinary moral and normative discourse is about. At any rate, to the extent that some form of these notions does manifest, I don’t think we can readily read it off of the superficial appearance of seemingly fact-stating claims just by examining the structure of toy moral sentences in the abstract. If we want to know what people are doing when they make moral claims, we should be doing empirical work that involves examining actual instances of usage, not hypothetical ones.
In a way that’s your position , too, since you think subjective wrongness exists and objective wrongness doesn’t.
Depending on precisely what is meant by subjective wrongness, I don’t even believe some forms of that exist, either.
You’re not making an noncommital statement because you think there is nothing to choose between objectivity and subjectivity.
Sorry, not sure what you mean. Can you clarify or restate? The way I use moral and normative language is idiosyncratic and certainly doesn’t reflect ordinary usage. I’m discussing how other people use these terms, not how I use them. If someone wants to know how I use normative language I can just tell them. No need to speculate.
Likewise, realistic metaethics has implications for normative ethics ,not so much in terms of what is wrong , but in terms of how wrong it is.
What do you mean when you say that metaethics has implications for how wrong something is?
Which gets us back to the issue of slightly misrepresenting relativist views...leaving out the stance dependence makes the problem slightly harder to spot.
I’m not sure if what you’re referring to is my criticism of Carroll’s remark, but my criticism is that he characterizes relativism in terms of agent rather than appraiser relativism.
We don’t take causal claims like “It’s going to rain tomorrow” to imply a position on how to interpret quantum mechanics.
If someone asks the awkward question “how do you know”, you need to drill down to something, if not all the way to QM, and not just repeat the claim.
But I don’t think these categories and distinctions regularly figure into everyday normative and evaluative claims. They’re philosophical inventions, and have little to do with what ordinary moral and normative discourse is about.
Yes, and they are useful inventions, because they provide a justification for doing things based on ethics, such as putting people in jail. If someone asks the awkward question “why should people go to jail for that”, you can’t answer it just by saying it’s against your preferences.
The realist case against relativism consists of a positive claim, that realism works, and a negative claim, that relativism doesn’t. If the positive claim fails, that doesn’t mean by itself that the negative claim fails. The relativist still needs to show that relativism can do the required real-world lifting.
I’ve referred to the need to justify real world ethical practices many times, without hearing any response from yourself.
If we want to know what people are doing when they make moral claims, we should be doing empirical work that involves examining actual instances of usage, not hypothetical ones.
That’s where I am starting from.
What I think they are doing is trying to form alliances and make changes in the real world. As I have said many times.
And I think they have good reasons to reject relativism as insufficiently committal. Even if realism isn’t the only alternative.
Can you elaborate on Eliezer being a moral realist? Is there a summary anywhere or could you provide one?
Regarding this statement: “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. A moral antirealist can agree with this (I’m an antirealist, and I agree with it). Nothing about agreeing or disagreeing with that claim entails realism.
Your position sounds like antirealism to me, but I’m not sure if it would fit with any of the standard categories. A lot hinges on your statement that:
If you were claiming that moral claims, despite appearing to be saying things that were true or false, were actually, instead, used to condemn acts/people, that would sound like some type of expressivism/noncognitivism, but since you’re also trying to maintain use of the term “true,” I’m not sure what to make of it. Omnizoid’s suggestion of quasi-realism makes some sense since part of the goal is to maintain the ability to say that one’s moral claims are true while still treating them as largely serving an expressive role; those accounts hinge on deflationary views of truth though and it doesn’t sound exactly like you’re endorsing that.
I think the central question would be: Do you think that there are facts about what people morally should or shouldn’t do, or what’s morally good or bad, that are true independent of people’s goals, standards, or values? If yes, that’s moral realism. If not, that’s moral antirealism.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right
In 2008, which is a very long time ago, Eliezer wrote, hugely paraphrased:
-”I think the central question would be: Do you think that there are facts about what people morally should or shouldn’t do, or what’s morally good or bad, that are true independent of people’s goals, standards, or values? If yes, that’s moral realism. If not, that’s moral antirealism.”
I certainly don’t believe that the truth of moral facts is dependent on people’s goals, standards, or values; the qualifier I would give is that our beliefs about moral facts are the same thing (tautologically) as our moral standards. So I guess I am a moral realist? Or maybe you are right that my position doesn’t fit into any of the standard categories. I guess it doesn’t matter, I was just curious...
-”Regarding this statement: “it’s wrong to torture babies for fun,” this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. A moral antirealist can agree with this (I’m an antirealist, and I agree with it). Nothing about agreeing or disagreeing with that claim entails realism.”
Right, the litmus test was whether the statement is “true”. Sorry about being unclear.
I’m not sure if you’re a moral realist. What do you mean when you say this?
A moral realist may think that there are e.g., facts about what you should or shouldn’t do that you are obligated to comply with independent of whether doing so would be consistent with your goals, standards, or values. So, for instance, they would hold that you “should’t torture babies for fun,” regardless of whether doing so is consistent with your values. In doing so, they aren’t appeal to their own values, or anyone else’s values, but to facts about what’s morally right or wrong that are true without reference to, and in a way that doesn’t depend on, any particular evaluative standpoint.
-”In doing so, they aren’t appeal to their own values, or anyone else’s values, but to facts about what’s morally right or wrong that are true without reference to, and in a way that doesn’t depend on, any particular evaluative standpoint.”
OK, so now it sounds like I am not a moral realist! I definitely think that by making a moral claim you are appealing to other people’s values, since other people’s values is the only thing that could possibly cause them to accept your moral claim. However, the moral claim is still of the form “X is true regardless of whether it is consistent with anyone’s values”.
A moral realist would think that there are facts about what is morally right or wrong that are true regardless of what anyone thinks about them. One way to put this is that they aren’t made true by our desires, goals, standards, values, beliefs, and so on. Rather, they are true in a way more like how claims about e.g., the mass of an object are true. Facts about the mass of an object aren’t made true by our believing them or preferring them to be the case.
-”One way to put this is that they aren’t made true by our desires, goals, standards, values, beliefs, and so on.”
OK, I am a moral realist under this formulation.
-”Rather, they are true in a way more like how claims about e.g., the mass of an object are true.”
I guess it depends on what you mean by “in a way more like”. Moral claims are pretty fundamentally different from physical claims, I don’t see how to get around that—one way to put it would be that the notions of right and wrong are not inductive generalizations over observed phenomena—another way to put it would be that the question “what does it mean for something to be right or wrong” is meaningless, the only meaningful question is “what do we mean when we say that something is right or wrong” (to which the answer is “we do not mean anything, rather we speak to advocate or condemn something”). But if you are just referring to some surface-level similarity like “neither of them is actually a secret way of referring to the speaker’s beliefs/opinions/values”, then sure.
Moral realists are going to differ with respect to what they think the metaphysical status of the moral facts are. Moral naturalists may see them roughly as a kind of natural fact, so moral facts might be facts about e.g., increases in wellbeing, while non-naturalists would maintain that moral facts aren’t reducible to natural facts.
″...is wrong” rather than “is disapproved by me” hints at realism...but a lot of people are vague, and some people equivicatd deliberately.
I don’t think it hints at realism. Why do you think it does?
The wrongness is phrased as a one place predicate.
Why does that indicate realism? If someone says “Pizza is tasty” does that hint at gastronomic realism?
Yes. More so than “Pizza tastes good to me”.
Relativists can say
“it is wrong to torture babies for fun”
in the sense that they can slightly misrepresent their own views. Since they don’t believe in stance independent moral facts, an accurate rendition of their views would include the stance as one of the arguments two a two place predicate.
“According to my stance, it is wrong to torture babies for fun”.
But that statement gives no reason for anyone to change their mind
Okay. Thanks. With respect, I disagree. I do not think that claims like “murder is wrong” or “pizza is tasty” in any way imply or even hint at normative realism about the claims in question. Both claims are completely consistent with antirealism, and it’s not at all clear to me how either would indicate some form of normative realism.
I am not sure the reason you gave, that it’s phrased as a one place predicate, is any kind of substantive indication of realism. I can grant that:
”Murder is wrong,” is more consistent with, and more likely to be an expression of a realist stance than “I disapprove of murder,” but whether it is more consistent with what someone would say if they were a realist about the issue in question relative to some other remark that is less likely to express realism doesn’t indicate in absolute terms that it meaningfully hints at realism. However, nothing bars a normative realist from expressing subjective attitudes, and nothing bars an antirealist from employing conventional assertoric language to express subjective (or more generally nonrealist) evaluative standards or normative judgments.
For one thing, expressions of our preferences often exclude any explicit qualification that they are our preferences because in many contexts it would violate Gricean maxims to explicitly indicate that something is a preference, or an expression of our subjective attitudes. To the extent that most people aren’t gastronomic realists, a statement like “chocolate ice cream is delicious” doesn’t need ”...in my opinion” at the end, or “I consider” at the beginning because this is implicit. People may include such qualifications explicitly, but typically only in contexts in which e.g., some contextual goal is relevant, such as not offending someone with a contrary opinion, or to emphasize that you are stating a contrary opinion.
They are compatible with anti realism in just the sense that they are lossy, inaccurate renditions of it.
That would be true of casual conversati on, but not philosophical debate.
Why do you say they’re lossy or inaccurate renditions of it? My position on this is that statements like “murder is wrong” are simply normative claims, and they are in no way more indicative of realism or antirealism. I’m still not understanding why you think they’d indicate realism. Why presuppose that such statements have anything to do with expressing metanormative standards at all? They’re normative claims, not metaethical ones, and it’s not clear to me why we’d imagine a normative claim (i.e., a claim about something being right, wrong, permissible, impermissible, and so on) suggests any particular metanormative stance, unless such a stance were :
(a) explicitly accompanying the remark, e.g., “murder is objectively wrong”
(b) we had background knowledge about the speaker in question that would suggest they’re using that way, e.g., a moral realist says “murder is wrong”
or
(c) we had background knowledge about the degree to which such language was typically used to convey claims with particular metanormative presuppositions, e.g., we ran a bunch of surveys and discovered most people from the population the person is from are committed to moral realism
Without such information, I see no particular reason to presume such remarks hint at realism merely by examining the structure of the sentence.
I disagree. Such norms apply to philosophical conversations as well. For what it’s worth, I’m a moral antirealist and I use normative language all the time. I don’t think moral realists have any kind of monopoly on, or priority over, straightforward normative claims in any domain, because I don’t think normative claims hint at any particular metanormative standards.
Because they don’t make stance dependence explicit.
My claim is that normative claims have subtypes. “subjectively wrong” doesn’t mean what “objectively wrong” means. In a way that’s your position , too, since you think subjective wrongness exists and objective wrongness doesn’t. You’re not making an noncommital statement because you think there is nothing to choose between objectivity and subjectivity.
Metaethics, normative ethics , and object level ethics are different, but not entirely separate magisteria. For instance, utilitarianism implies that murder is sometimes justified. Likewise, realistic metaethics has implications for normative ethics ,not so much in terms of what is wrong , but in terms of how wrong it is.
If something is merely against your preferences, why should … actually, objectively …someone go to jail for it?
Which gets us back to the issue of slightly misrepresenting relativist views...leaving out the stance dependence makes the problem slightly harder to spot.
I don’t think the claims are stance independent, either, so I don’t think there’s any loss. In other words, I don’t think typical moral claims imply stance-independence or stance-dependence. They don’t imply or hint at any particular metaethical position at all. Why suppose that they do?
We don’t take causal claims like “It’s going to rain tomorrow” to imply a position on how to interpret quantum mechanics. Likewise, it may be that everyday moral claims are simply indeterminate with respect to metaethical presuppositions.
I agree. But I don’t think these categories and distinctions regularly figure into everyday normative and evaluative claims. They’re philosophical inventions, and have little to do with what ordinary moral and normative discourse is about. At any rate, to the extent that some form of these notions does manifest, I don’t think we can readily read it off of the superficial appearance of seemingly fact-stating claims just by examining the structure of toy moral sentences in the abstract. If we want to know what people are doing when they make moral claims, we should be doing empirical work that involves examining actual instances of usage, not hypothetical ones.
Depending on precisely what is meant by subjective wrongness, I don’t even believe some forms of that exist, either.
Sorry, not sure what you mean. Can you clarify or restate? The way I use moral and normative language is idiosyncratic and certainly doesn’t reflect ordinary usage. I’m discussing how other people use these terms, not how I use them. If someone wants to know how I use normative language I can just tell them. No need to speculate.
What do you mean when you say that metaethics has implications for how wrong something is?
I’m not sure if what you’re referring to is my criticism of Carroll’s remark, but my criticism is that he characterizes relativism in terms of agent rather than appraiser relativism.
If someone asks the awkward question “how do you know”, you need to drill down to something, if not all the way to QM, and not just repeat the claim.
Yes, and they are useful inventions, because they provide a justification for doing things based on ethics, such as putting people in jail. If someone asks the awkward question “why should people go to jail for that”, you can’t answer it just by saying it’s against your preferences.
The realist case against relativism consists of a positive claim, that realism works, and a negative claim, that relativism doesn’t. If the positive claim fails, that doesn’t mean by itself that the negative claim fails. The relativist still needs to show that relativism can do the required real-world lifting.
I’ve referred to the need to justify real world ethical practices many times, without hearing any response from yourself.
That’s where I am starting from.
What I think they are doing is trying to form alliances and make changes in the real world. As I have said many times. And I think they have good reasons to reject relativism as insufficiently committal. Even if realism isn’t the only alternative.