I was just thinking about this the other day, and I think this is a very good idea.
BerryPick6
Karma: 681
I’m worried about the long-term prospects of this idea. I think most of the participants are students. During the first summer vacation season we’ll likely see a big drop in participation.
I think you’re probably right about that. I’m a pretty regular user, but I don’t intend to log on at all starting in August. Still, it is enormously useful and effective for me at the moment.
You don’t tend to find much detailed academic discussion regarding metaethical philosophy on the blogosphere at all.
Disclaimers: strictly comparing it to other subjects which I consider similar from an outside view, and supported only by personal experience and observation.
First off, I think your observations about terminal values are spot-on, and I was always confused by how little we actually talk about these queer entities known as terminal values.
This discussion reminds me a bit of Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other. His formulation of moral discourse strikes me as a piece of Meta-Moral philosophy: ‘An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject’, since he seems to be dealing with what we would term terminal values without referring to them as such, but I may be off-base here.
An upvote isn’t quite what I’m looking for here. Why is there no “this post is the best” button?
People were using webcams but not voicecomm, even though tinychat supports it. I’m not sure if that’s an intentional norm or not.
I’m pretty sure it’s intentional. Chatting is just less disruptive when it’s only text-based.
If we go with OpenMeetings and have need of a server, that may be of use.
We tried out mqrius’ server and encountered a few difficulties, but I have no idea what was causing them, so it could just be that OM is a bit shaky.
I think the more popular options for pomo times would be 25⁄5 and 50⁄10. That’s what we’ve been doing in the tinychat, anyways...
I really, really hope this goes through, since this co-working experiment is currently paying huge dividends for me.
To my eternal embarrassment, I was, as a youth, quite taken in by “The Bible Code.” Very taken in, actually. That ended suddenly when someone directed to the material written by your father and McKay (I think?). Small world, I guess? :)
Are you, by any chance, related to Dror?
Actually you deontology says you should NOT push the fat man . Consequentialism says you should.
I’m quite aware of that.
it is hard to make sense of that. If a theory is correct, then what it states is correct. D and U make opposite recommendations about the fat man, so you cannot say that they are both indiffernt with regard to your rather firm intuition about this case.
At this point, I simply must tap out. I’m at a loss at how else to explain what you seem to be consistently missing in my questions, but DaFranker is doing a very good job of it, so I’ll just stop trying.
moral theories are tested by their ability to match moral intuition,
Really? This is news to me. I guess Moore was right all along...
Deontology says you should push the fat man under the trolley, and various other examples that are well known in the literature.
This would still be the case, even if Deonotology was false. This leads me to strongly suspect that whether or not it is true is a meaningless question. There is no test I can think of which would determine its veracity.
any two theories which make differnt objectlevle predictions can likelwise have truth values.
Would you mind giving three examples of cases where Deontology being true gives different predictions than Consequentialism being true? This is another extension of the original question posed, which you’ve been dodging.
eg. mugging an old lady is the instrumentally-right way of scoring my next hit of heroin, but it isn’t morally-right
Just like moving queen to E3 is instrumentallly-right when playing chess, but not morally right. The difference is that in the chess and heroin examples, a specific reference point is being explicitly plucked out of thought-space (Right::Chess; Right::Scoring my next hit,) which doesn’t refer to me at all. Mugging an old woman may or may not be moral, but deciding that solely based on whether or not it helps me score heroin is a category error.
Unsolved-at-time-T doesn’t mean unsolvable. Ask Andrew Wyles.
I’m no good at math, but it’s my understanding that there was an idea of what it would look like for someone to solve Fermat’s Problem even before someone actually did so. I’m skeptical that ‘solving metaethics’ is similar in this respect.
That woudl be the case of “right way” meant “morally-right way”.
That’s just how I understand that word. ‘Right for me to do’ and ‘moral for me to do’ refer to the same things, to me. What differs in your understanding of the terms?
If metaethics were just obviously unsolveable, someone would have noticed.
Remind me what it would look like for metaethics to be solved?
By comparing them to abstract formulas, which don’t have truth values … as opposed to equations, which, do, and to applied maths,which does, and theories, which do...
I’ll concede I may have misinterpreted them. I guess we shall wait and see what DF has to say about this.
I have no idea why you would say that. Belief in objective morality is debatable but not silly in the way belief in unicorns is. The question of what is right is also about the most important question there is.
I never said belief in “objective morality” was silly. I said that trying to decide whether to use U or D by asking “which one of these is the right way to resolve conflicts of interest?” when accepting one or the other necessarily changes variables in what you mean by the word ‘right’ and also, maybe even, the word ‘resolve’, sounds silly.
I don’t know why you would want to say you have an explanation of morality when you are an error theorist.
Error theorists are cognitivists. The sentence you quoted makes me think DaFranker is a noncognitivist (or a deflationary cognitivist,) he is precisely asking you what it would mean for U or D to have truth values.
I also don’t know why you are an error theorist. U-ism and D-ology are rival answers to the question “what is the right way to resolve conflicts of interest?”.
When they are both trying to give accounts of what it would mean for something to be “right”, it seems this question becomes pretty silly.
What would it be like if utilitarianism is true?
I think you’ve just repeated his question.
How so?
...So, what “am” I? What labels do I “get”, having hereby cited, to the best of my understanding, the primary points and positions of all the sides of the debates here, with in my mind no contradiction whatsoever in any of the above?
If I’ve understood your position correctly, it’s extremely similar to what I would call the “high-level LW metaethical consensus.” Luke’s sequence on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism, Eliezer’s more recent posts about metaethics and a few posts by Jack all illustrate comparable theories to yours. If others have written extensively about metaethics on LW, I may have missed them.
It does make for boring company in certain circumstances, though, and having well-thought out political positions is high-status, despite the mindkilling involved.
Although, I suppose, if you didn’t live in a community that engaged in political opinion status games, this would be the way to go.