A few religious thinkers (Kierkegaard) don’t think Abraham’s position was completely unique, and do think we should obey certain Voices without adequate evidence for 4, perhaps even without adequate evidence for 3. But these are outlier theories, and certainly don’t reflect the intuitions of most religious believers, who pay more lip service to belief-in-belief than actual service-service to belief-in-belief.
I think an analogous AI set-up would be:
Killing my son is immoral.
The monitor reads ‘Kill your son.’
The monitor’s display perfectly reflects the decisions of the AI I programmed.
I successfully programmed the AI to be perfectly moral.
What you call rejecting 3 is closer to rejecting 4, since it concerns my confidence that the AI is moral, not my confidence that the AI I programmed is the same as the entity outputting ‘Kill your son.’
I disagree, because I think the analogy between the (4) of each case should go this way:
(4a) Analysis of “morality” as equivalent to a logical structure extrapolatable from by brain state (plus other things) and that an AI can in principle compute <==> (4b) Analysis of “morality” as equivalent to a logical structure embodied in a unique perfect entity called “God”
These are both metaethical theories, a matter of philosophy. Then the analogy between (3) in each case goes:
(3a) This AI in front of me is accurately programmed to compute morality and display what I ought to do <==> (3b) This voice I hear is the voice of God telling me what I ought to do.
(3a) includes both your 3 and your 4, which can be put together as they are both empirical beliefs that, jointly, are related to the philosophical theory (4a) as the empirical belief (3b) is related to the philosophical theory (4b).
Makes sense. I was being deliberately vague about (4) because I wasn’t committing myself to a particular view of why Abraham is confident in God’s morality. If we’re going with the scholastic, analytical, logical-pinpointing approach, then your framework is more useful. Though in that case even talking about ‘God’ or a particular AI may be misleading; what 4 then is really asserting is just that morality is a coherent concept, and can generate decision procedures. Your 3 is then the empirical claim that a particular being in the world embodies this concept of a perfect moral agent. My original thought simply took your 4 for granted (if there is no such concept, then what are we even talking about?), and broke the empirical claim up into multiple parts. This is important for the Abraham case, because my version of 3 is the premise most atheists reject, whereas there is no particular reason for the atheists to reject my version of 4 (or yours).
We are mostly in agreement about the general picture, but just to keep the conversation going...
I don’t think (4) is so trivial or that (4a) and (4b) can be equated. For the first, there are other metaethical theories that I think wouldn’t agree with the common content of (4a) and (4b). These include relativism, error theory, Moorean non-naturalism, and perhaps some naive naturalisms (“the good just is pleasure/happiness/etc, end of story”).
For the second, I was thinking of (4a) as embedded in the global naturalistic, reductionistic philosophical picture that EY is elaborating and that is broadly accepted in LW, and of (4b) as embedded in the global Scholastic worldview (the most steelmanned version I know of religion). Obviously there are many differences between the two philosophies, both in the conceptual structures used and in very general factual beliefs (which as a Quinean I see as intertwined and inseparable at the most global level). In particular, I intended (4b) to include the claim that this perfect entity embodying morality actually exists as a concrete being (and, implicitly,that it has the other omni-properties attributed to God). Clearly atheists wouldn’t agree with any of this.
A few religious thinkers (Kierkegaard) don’t think Abraham’s position was completely unique, and do think we should obey certain Voices without adequate evidence for 4, perhaps even without adequate evidence for 3. But these are outlier theories, and certainly don’t reflect the intuitions of most religious believers, who pay more lip service to belief-in-belief than actual service-service to belief-in-belief.
I think an analogous AI set-up would be:
Killing my son is immoral.
The monitor reads ‘Kill your son.’
The monitor’s display perfectly reflects the decisions of the AI I programmed.
I successfully programmed the AI to be perfectly moral.
What you call rejecting 3 is closer to rejecting 4, since it concerns my confidence that the AI is moral, not my confidence that the AI I programmed is the same as the entity outputting ‘Kill your son.’
I disagree, because I think the analogy between the (4) of each case should go this way:
(4a) Analysis of “morality” as equivalent to a logical structure extrapolatable from by brain state (plus other things) and that an AI can in principle compute <==> (4b) Analysis of “morality” as equivalent to a logical structure embodied in a unique perfect entity called “God”
These are both metaethical theories, a matter of philosophy. Then the analogy between (3) in each case goes:
(3a) This AI in front of me is accurately programmed to compute morality and display what I ought to do <==> (3b) This voice I hear is the voice of God telling me what I ought to do.
(3a) includes both your 3 and your 4, which can be put together as they are both empirical beliefs that, jointly, are related to the philosophical theory (4a) as the empirical belief (3b) is related to the philosophical theory (4b).
Makes sense. I was being deliberately vague about (4) because I wasn’t committing myself to a particular view of why Abraham is confident in God’s morality. If we’re going with the scholastic, analytical, logical-pinpointing approach, then your framework is more useful. Though in that case even talking about ‘God’ or a particular AI may be misleading; what 4 then is really asserting is just that morality is a coherent concept, and can generate decision procedures. Your 3 is then the empirical claim that a particular being in the world embodies this concept of a perfect moral agent. My original thought simply took your 4 for granted (if there is no such concept, then what are we even talking about?), and broke the empirical claim up into multiple parts. This is important for the Abraham case, because my version of 3 is the premise most atheists reject, whereas there is no particular reason for the atheists to reject my version of 4 (or yours).
We are mostly in agreement about the general picture, but just to keep the conversation going...
I don’t think (4) is so trivial or that (4a) and (4b) can be equated. For the first, there are other metaethical theories that I think wouldn’t agree with the common content of (4a) and (4b). These include relativism, error theory, Moorean non-naturalism, and perhaps some naive naturalisms (“the good just is pleasure/happiness/etc, end of story”).
For the second, I was thinking of (4a) as embedded in the global naturalistic, reductionistic philosophical picture that EY is elaborating and that is broadly accepted in LW, and of (4b) as embedded in the global Scholastic worldview (the most steelmanned version I know of religion). Obviously there are many differences between the two philosophies, both in the conceptual structures used and in very general factual beliefs (which as a Quinean I see as intertwined and inseparable at the most global level). In particular, I intended (4b) to include the claim that this perfect entity embodying morality actually exists as a concrete being (and, implicitly,that it has the other omni-properties attributed to God). Clearly atheists wouldn’t agree with any of this.