Right—but there are surely also ultimate values.
Those are the ones that are expected to be resistant to change.
Correct. My current claim is that almost all of our moral values are instrumental, and thus subject to change as society evolves. And I find the source of our moral values in an egoism which is made more effective by reciprocity and social convention.
My position here is roughly that all ‘moral’ values are instrumental in this sense. They are ways of coordinating so that people don’t step on each other’s toes.
Not sure I completely believe that, but it is the theory I am trying on at the moment. :)
I think you are right to call attention to the issue of drift.
Drift is bad in a simple value—at least in agents that consider temporal consistency to be a component of rationality. But drift can be acceptable in those ‘values’ which are valued precisely because they are conventions.
It is not necessarily bad for a teen-age subculture if their aesthetic values (on makeup, piercing, and hair) drift. As long as they don’t drift too fast so that nobody knows what to aim for.
I think the argument is interesting and partly valid. Explaining which part I like will take some explanation.
Many of our problems thinking about morality, I think, arise from a failure to make a distinction between two different things.
Morality in daily life
Morality as an ideal
Morality of daily life is a social convention. It serves its societal and personal (egoistically prudent) function precisely because it is a (mostly) shared convention. Almost any reasonable moral code, if common knowledge, is better than no common code.
Morality as an ideal is the morality-of-daily-life toward which moral reformers should be trying to slowly shift their societies. A wise person will interpolate their behavior between the local morality-of-daily-life and their own morality-as-an-ideal. And probably closer to the local norm than to the personal ideal.
So, with that said, I think that your Christian friend’s argument is right-on wrt morality-of-daily-life. But it is inapplicable, IMHO, to morality-as-an-ideal.
ETA: I notice, after writing, that Manfred said something very similar.
I think you misinterpreted the context. I endorsed kin selection, together with discounting the welfare of non-kin. Someone (not me!) wishing to be a straight utilitarian and wishing to treat kin and non-kin equally needs to endorse group selection in order to give their ethical intuitions a basis in evolutionary psychology. Because it is clear that humans engage in kin recognition.
I have tried to suggest that bacterial purposes are ‘merely’ teleonomic -to borrow the useful term suggested by timtyler- but that human purposes must be of a different order. …
As soon as we start to talk about symbols and representation, I’m concerned that a whole new set of very thorny issues get introduced. I will shy away from these.
My position is that, to the extent that the notion of purpose is at all spooky, that spookiness was already present in a virus. The profound part of teleology is already there in teleonomy.
Which is not so say that humans are different from viruses only in degree. The are different in quality with regard to some other issues involved in rationality. Cognitive issues. Symbol processing issues. Issues of intentionality. But not issues of pure purpose and telos. So why don’t you and I just shy away from this conversation. We’ve both stated our positions with sufficient clarity, I think.
...seemed to me to be a kind of claim that a utilitarian could make with equal credibility.
Well, he could credibly make that claim if he could credibly assert that the ancestral environment was remarkably favorable for group selection.
… you’re now saying that you feel noble and proud that your values come from biological instead of cultural evolution...
What I actually said was “my own (genetic) instincts derive a kind of nobility from their origin …”. The value itself claims a noble genealogy, not a noble essence. If I am proud on its behalf, it is because that instinct has been helping to keep my ancestral line alive for many generations. I could say something similar for a meme which became common by way of selection at the individual or societal level. But what do I say about a selfish meme. That I am not the only person that it fooled and exploited? I’m going to guess that most people do have that kind of feeling.
… except possibly for the part about no prior metaphysical meaning.
I think I see the source of the difficulty now. My fault. BobTheBob mentioned the mistake of replicating with errors. I took this to be just one example of a possible mistake by a virus, and thought of several more—inserting into the wrong species of host, for example, or perhaps incorporating an instance of the wrong peptide into the viral shell after replicating the viral genome.
I then sought to define ‘mistake’ to capture the common fitness-lowering feature of all these possible mistakes. However, I did not make clear what I was doing and my readers naturally thought I was still dealing with a replication error as the only kind of mistake.
Sorry to have caused this confusion.
...teleology in nature is merely illusory, but the kind of teleology needed to make sense of rationality is not—it’s real. Can you live with this?
No, I cannot. It presumes (or is it argues?) that human rationality is not part of nature.
My apologies for using the phrase “illusion of teleology in nature”. It seems to have created confusion. Tabooing that use of the word “teleology”, what I really meant was the illusion that living things were fashioned by some rational agent for some purpose of that agent. Tabooing your use of the word, on the other hand, in your phrase “the kind of teleology needed to make sense of rationality” leads elsewhere. I would taboo and translate that use to yield something like “To make sense of rationality in an agent, one needs to accept/assume/stipulate that the agent sometimes acts with a purpose in mind. We need to understand ‘purpose’, in that sense, to understand rationality.”
Now if this is what you mean, then I agree with you. But I think I understand this kind of purpose, identifying it as the cognitive version of something like “being instrumental to survival and reproduction”. That is, it is possible for an outside observer to point to behaviors or features of a virus that are instrumental to viral survival and reproduction. At the level of a bacterium, there are second-messenger chemicals that symbolize or represent situations that are instrumental to survival and reproduction. At the level of the nematode, there are neuron firings serving as symbols. At the level of a human the symbols can be vocalizations: “I’m horny; how about you?”. I don’t see anything transcendently new at any stage in this progression, nor in the developmental progression that I offered as a substitute.
In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I don’t mean to be implying that people are bound by norms in virtue of possessing some special aura or other spookiness. I’m not giving a theory of the nature of norms—that’s just too hard. All I’m saying for the moment is that if you stick to purely natural science, you won’t find a place for them.
Let me try putting that in different words: “Norms are in the eye of the beholder. Natural science tries to be objective—to avoid observer effects. But that is not possible when studying rationality. It requires a different, non-reductionist and observer dependent way of looking at the subject matter.” If that is what you are saying, I may come close to agreeing with you. But somehow, I don’t think that is what you are saying.
A utilitarian might well be indifferent to the self-serving nature of the the meme. But, as I recall, you brought up the question in response to my suggestion that my own (genetic) instincts derive a kind of nobility from their origin in the biological process of natural selection for organism fitness. Would our hypothetical utilitarian be proud of the origin of his meme in the cultural process of selection for meme self-promotion?
Hmmm. I may be using “metaphysical” inappropriately here. I confess that I am currently reading something that uses “metaphysical” as a general term of deprecation, so some of that may have worn off. :)
Let me try to answer your excellent question by analogy to geometry, without abandoning “metaphysical”. As is well known, in geometry, many technical terms are given definitions, but it is impossible to define every technical term. Some terms (point, line, and on are examples) are left undefined, though their meanings is supplied implicitly by way of axioms. Undefined terms in mathematics correspond (in this analogy) to words with prior metaphysical meaning in philosophical discourse. You can’t define them, because their meaning is somehow “built in”.
To give a rather trivial example, when trying to generate a naturalistic definition of ought, we usually assume we have a prior metaphysical meaning for is.
Hope that helped.
With apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein, if we can’t talk about the singularity, maybe we should just remain silent. :)
I happen to agree with you that the SIAI mission will never be popular. But a part of the purpose of this website is to create more people willing and capable to work (directly or indirectly) on that mission. So, not mentioning FAI would be a bit counterproductive—at least at this stage.
Is this fair?
Not really. You started by making an argument that listed a series of stages (virus, bacterium, nematode, man) and claimed that at no stage along the way (before the last) were any kind of normative concepts applicable. Then, when I suggested the standard evolutionary explanation for the illusion of teleology in nature, you shifted the playing field. In option 1, you demand that I supply standard scientific expositions of the natural history of your chosen biological examples. In option 2 you suggest that you were just kidding in even mentioning viruses, bacteria and nematodes. Unless an organism has the cognitive equipment to make mistakes in probability theory, you simply are not interested in speaking about it normatively.
Do I understand that you are claiming that humans are qualitatively exceptional in the animal kingdom because the word “ought” is uniquely applicable to humans? If so, let me suggest a parallel sequence to the one you suggested starting from viruses. Zygote, blastula, fetus, infant, toddler, teenager, adult. Do you believe it is possible to tell a teenager what she “ought” to do? At what stage in development do normative judgements become applicable.
Here is a cite for sorites. Couldn’t resist the pun.
As you may have noticed, that definition was labeled as a “first attempt”. It captures some of our intuitions about morality, but not all. In particular, its biggest weakness is that it fails to satisfy moral realists for precisely the reason you point out.
I have a second quill in my quiver. But before using it, I’m going to split the concept of morality into two pieces. One piece is called “de facto morality”. I claim that the definition I provided in the grandparent is a proper reductionist definition of de facto morality and captures many of (some) people’s intuitions about morality. The second piece is called “ideal morality”. This piece is essentially what de facto morality ought to be.
So, your conformist may well be automatically in the right with respect to de facto morality. But it is possible for a moral reformer to point out that he and all of his fellows are in the wrong with respect to ideal morality. That is, the reformer claims that the society would be better off if its de facto conventions were amended from their present unsatisfactory status to become more like the ideal. And, I claim, given the right definition of “society would be better off”, this “ideal morality” can be given an objective and naturalistic definition.
For more details, see Binmore—Game Theory and the Social Contract
Outstanding comment—particularly the point at the end about the candle cooling the room.
It might be worthwhile to produce a sequence of postings on the control systems perspective—particularly if you could use better-looking block diagrams as illustrations. :)
Consider then a virus particle … Surely there is nothing in biochemistry, genetics or other science which implies there is anything our very particle ought to do. It’s true that we may think of it as having the goal to replicate itself, and consider it to have made a mistake if it replicates itself inaccurately, but these conceptions do not issue from science. Any sense in which it ought to do something, or is wrong or mistaken in acting in a given way, is surely purely metaphorical (no?).
No. The distinction between those viral behaviors that tend to contribute to the virus replicating and those viral behaviors that do not contribute does issue from science. It is not a metaphor to call actions that detract from reproduction “mistakes” on the part of the virus, any more than it is a metaphor to call certain kinds of chemical reactions “exothermic”. There is no ‘open question’ issue here—“mistake”, like “exothermic”, does not have any prior metaphysical meaning. We are free to define it as we wish, naturalistically.
So much for the practical ought, the version of ought for which ought not is called a mistake because it generates consequences contrary to the agent’s interests. What about the moral ought, the version of ought for which ought not is called wrong? Can we also define this kind of ought naturalistically? I think that we can, because once again I deny that “wrong” has any prior metaphysical meaning. The trick is to make the new (by definition) meaning not clash too harshly with the existing metaphysical connotations.
How is this for a first attempt at a naturalistic definition of the moral ought as a subset of the practical ought? An agent morally ought not to do something iff it tends to generate consequences contrary to the agent’s interests, those negative consequences arising from the reactions of disapproval coming from other agents.
In general, it is not difficult at all to define either kind of ought naturalistically, so long as one is not already metaphysically committed to the notion that the word ‘ought’ has a prior metaphysical meaning.
This article lists the top Google+ users by # of followers. Worth a chuckle.
ETA: in general, bare links are usually not appreciated here. Still, here are two more links to interesting articles in the tech blogosphere discussing Google+.
You may have missed a subtlety in my comment. In your grandparent, you said “people’s thoughts and words are a byproduct …”. In my comment, I suggested “Thoughts are at one with …”. I didn’t mention words.
If we are going to focus on words rather than thoughts, then I am more willing to accept your model. Spoken words are indeed behaviors—behaviors that purport to be accurate reports of thoughts, but probably are not.
Perhaps we should taboo “thought”, since we may not be intending the word to designate the same phenomenon.
I take this to be an elliptical way of suggesting that Yvain is offering a false dichotomy in suggesting a choice between the notion of thoughts being in control of the processes determining behavior and the notion of thoughts being a byproduct of those processes.
I agree. Thoughts are at one with (are a subset of) the processes that determine behavior.
I think that the point is that emergence is in the mind of the observer. If the observer is describing the situation at the particle level, then superconductivity is not there regardless of the size of the collection of particles considered. But, when you describe things at the flowing-electric-fluid level, then superconductivity may emerge.