Did you miss the “N.B.” at the end of my post?
RichardChappell
Karma: 529
I agree that the soul hypothesis is not generally worth taking seriously. What I’m denying is that the existence of brain damage is good evidence for this.
That’s surely going to depend on the details of the non-naturalist view. Epiphenomenalism, for example, makes all the same empirical predictions as physicalism. (Though it might be harder to combine with a “soul” view—it goes more naturally with property dualism than substance dualism.)
But even Cartesian Interactionists, who see the brain as an “intermediary” between soul and body, should presumably expect brain damage to cause the body to be less responsive to the soul (just as in the radio analogy).
Or are you thinking of “non-naturalism” more broadly yet, to include views on which the brain has nothing whatsoever to do with the mind or its physical expression? I guess if one had not yet observed the world at all, this evidence would slightly lower one’s credence in non-naturalism by ruling out this most extreme hypothesis. But I take it that the more interesting question is whether this is any kind of evidence against particular non-naturalist views that people actually hold, like Cartesian Interactionism or Epiphenomenalism. (And if you think it is, I hope you’ll say a bit more to me to explain why...)
HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy
The tooth fairy example gets a variety of responses
Seriously? I’ve never heard anyone insist that the tooth fairy really exists (in the form of their mother). It would seem most contrary to common usage (in my community, at least) to use ‘Tooth Fairy’ to denote “whoever replaced the tooth under my pillow with a coin”. The magical element is (in my experience) treated as essential to the term and not a mere “connotation”.
I’ve heard of the saying you mention, but I think you misunderstand people when you interpret it literally. My response was not intended as some “peculiar” declaration of mind-independent meaning facts, but rather as a straightforward interpretation of what people who utter such claims have in mind when they do so. (Ask them, “Do you mean that the tooth fairy exists?” and I expect the response, “No, silly, I just mean that my mother is responsible for the coin under my pillow.”)
So, to clarify: I don’t think that there are free-floating “meaning” facts out there independently of our linguistic dispositions. I just dispute whether your definitions adequately capture the things that most people really care about (i.e. treat as essential) when using the terms in question.
It’s no excuse to say that metaethical reductionism “gets reality right” when the whole dispute is instead over whether they have accommodated (or rather eliminated) some concept of which we have a pre-theoretic grasp. Compare the theological reductionist thesis that “God is love”. Love exists, therefore God exists, voila! If someone pointed out that this view is needlessly misleading since love is not what most people mean to be talking about when they speak of ‘God’ (and it would be more honest to just admit one’s atheism), it would be no response to give a lecture about constellations and tinkerbell.
No, you learned that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, and that your mother was instead responsible for the observable phenomena that you had previously attributed to the tooth fairy.
(It’s a good analogy though. I do think that claiming that morality exists “as a computation” is a lot like claiming that the tooth fairy really exists “as one’s mother”.)
I’m not arguing for moral realism here. I’m arguing against metaethical reductionism, which leaves open either realism OR error theory.
For all I’ve said, people may well be mistaken when they attribute normative properties to things. That’s fine. I’m just trying to clarify what it is that people are claiming when they make moral claims. This is conceptual analysis, not metaphysics. I’m pointing out that what you claim to be the meaning of ‘morality’ isn’t what people mean to be talking about when they engage in moral discourse. I’m not presupposing that ordinary people have any great insight into the nature of reality, but they surely do have some idea of what their own words mean. Your contrary linguistic hypothesis seems completely unfounded.
Purported debates about the true meaning of “ought” reveal that everyone has their own balancing equation, and the average person thinks all others are morally obliged by objective morality to follow his or her equation.
You’re confusing metaethics and first-order ethics. Ordinary moral debates aren’t about the meaning of “ought”. They’re about the first-order question of which actions have the property of being what we ought to do. People disagree about which actions have this property. They posit different systematic theories (or ‘balancing equations’ as you put it) as a hypothesis about which actions have the property. They aren’t stipulatively defining the meaning of ‘ought’, or else their claim that “You ought to follow the prescriptions of balancing equation Y” would be tautological, rather than a substantive claim as it is obviously meant to be.
That asserting there are moral facts is incompatible with the fact that people disagree about what they are?
No, I think there are moral facts and that people disagree about what they are. But such substantive disagreement is incompatible with Eliezer’s reductive view on which the very meaning of ‘morality’ differs from person to person. It treats ‘morality’ like an indexical (e.g. “I”, “here”, “now”), which obviously doesn’t allow for real disagreement.
Compare: “I am tall.” “No, I am not tall!” Such an exchange would be absurd—the people are clearly just talking past each other, since there is no common referent for ‘I’. But moral language doesn’t plausibly function like this. It’s perfectly sensible for one person to say, “I ought to have an abortion”, and another to disagree: “No, you ought not to have an abortion”. (Even if both are logically omniscient.) They aren’t talking past each other. Rather, they’re disagreeing about the morality of abortion.
What would you say to someone who does not share your intuition that such “objective” morality likely exists?
I’d say: be an error theorist! If you don’t think objective morality exists, then you don’t think that morality exists. That’s a perfectly respectable position. You can still agree with me about what it would take for morality to really exist. You just don’t think that our world actually has what it takes.
One related argument is the Open Question Argument: for any natural property F that an action might have, be it promotes my terminal values, or is the output of an Eliezerian computation that models my coherent extrapolated volition, or whatever the details might be, it’s always coherent to ask: “I agree that this action is F, but is it good?”
But the intuitions that any metaethics worthy of the name must allow for fundamental disagreement and fallibility are perhaps more basic than this. I’d say they’re just the criteria that we (at least, many of us) have in mind when insisting that any morality worthy of the name must be “objective”, in a certain sense. These two criteria are proposed as capturing that sense of objectivity that we have in mind. (Again, don’t you find something bizarrely subjectivist about the idea that we’re fundamentally morally infallible—that we can’t even question whether our fundamental values / CEV are really on the right track?)
The part about computation doesn’t change the fundamental structure of the theory. It’s true that it creates more room for superficial disagreement and fallibility (of similar status to disagreements and fallibility regarding the effective means to some shared terminal values), but I see this as an improvement in degree and not in kind. It still doesn’t allow for fundamental disagreement and fallibility, e.g. amongst logically omniscient agents.
(I take it to be a metaethical datum that even people with different terminal values, or different Eliezerian “computations”, can share the concept of a normative reason, and sincerely disagree about which (if either) of their values/computations is correctly tracking the normative reasons. Similarly, we can coherently doubt whether even our coherently-extrapolated volitions would be on the right track or not.)
malice implies poor motivations. Rather, the egalitarian instinct appears to be natural to most people.
Why the “rather”? How ‘natural’ an instinct is implies nothing about its moral quality.
It’s not entirely clear what you’re asking. Two possibilities, corresponding to my above distinction, are:
(1) What (perhaps more general) normatively significant feature is possessed by [saving lives for $500 each] that isn’t possessed by [saving mosquitoes for $2000 each]? This would just be to ask for one’s fully general normative theory: a utilitarian might point to the greater happiness that would result from the former option. Eventually we’ll reach bedrock (“It’s just a brute fact that happiness is good!”), at which point the only remaining question is....
(2) In what does the normative signifiance of [happiness] consist? That is, what is the nature of this justificatory status? What are we attributing to happiness when we claim that it is normatively justifying? This is where the non-naturalist insists that attributing normativity to a feature is not merely to attribute some natural quality to it (e.g. of “being the salient goal under discussion”—that’s not such a philosophically interesting property for something to have. E.g., I could know that a feature has this property without this having any rational significance to me at all).
(Note that it’s a yet further question whether our attributions of normativity are actually correct, i.e. whether worldly things have the normative properties that we attribute to them.)
I gather it’s this second question you had in mind, but again it’s crucial to carefully distinguish them since non-naturalist answers to the first question are obviously crazy.
People claim all sorts of justifications for ‘ought’ statements (aka normative statements).
You still seem to be conflating justification-giving properties with the property of being justified. Non-naturalists emphatically do not appeal to non-natural properties to justify our ought-claims. When explaining why you ought to give to charity, I’ll point to various natural features—that you can save a life for $500 by donating to VillageReach, etc. It’s merely the fact that these natural features are justifying, or normatively important, which is non-natural.
Thanks, this is helpful. I’m interested in your use of the phrase “source of normativity” in:
The only source of normativity I think exists is the hypothetical imperative
This makes it sound like there’s a new thing, normativity, that arises from some other thing (e.g. desires, or means/ends relationships). That’s a very realist way of talking.
I take it that what you really want to say something more like, “The only kind of ‘normativity’-talk that’s naturalistically reducible and hence possibly true is hypothetical imperatives—when these are understood to mean nothing more than that a certain means-end relation holds.” Is that right?
I’d then understand you as an error theorist, since “being a means-end relationship”, like “being red”, is not even in the same ballpark as what I mean by “being normative”. (It might sometimes have normative importance, but as we learn from Parfit, that’s a very different thing.)
Thanks for this reply. I share your sense that the word ‘moral’ is unhelpfully ambiguous, which is why I prefer to focus on the more general concept of the normative. I’m certainly not going to stipulate that motivational internalism is true of the normative, though it does seem plausible that there’s something irrational about someone who acknowledges that they really ought (all things considered) to phi and yet fails to do so. (I don’t doubt that it’s possible for someone to form the judgment without any corresponding motivation though, as it’s always possible for people to be irrational!)
I trust that we all have a decent pre-theoretic grasp of normativity (or “ought-ness”). The question then is whether this phenomenon that we have in mind (i) is reducible to some physical property, and (ii) actually exists.
Error theory (answering ‘no’ and ‘no’ to the two questions above) seems the most natural position for the physicalist. And it sounds like you may be happy to agree that you’re really an error theorist about normativity (as I mean it). But then I’m puzzled by what you take yourself to be doing in this series. Why even use moral/normative vocabulary at all, rather than just talking about the underlying natural properties that you really have in mind?
P.S. What work is the antecedent doing in your conditional?
If you want to torture children, you should_ToTortureChildren volunteer as a babysitter.
Why do you even need the modus ponens? Assuming that “should_ToTortureChildren” just means “what follows is an effective means to torturing children”, then isn’t the consequent just plain true regardless of what you want? (Perhaps only someone with the relevant desire will be interested in this means-ends fact, but that’s true of many unconditional facts.)
That doesn’t really answer my question. Let me try again. There are two things you might mean by “mind dependent”.
(1) You might just mean “makes some reference to the mind”. So, for example, the necessary truth that “Any experience of red is an experience of colour” would also count as “mind-dependent” in this sense. (This seems a very misleading usage though.)
(2) More naturally, “mind dependent” might be taken to mean that the truth of the claim depends upon certain states of mind actually existing. But “pain is bad for people” (like my example above) does not seem to be mind-dependent in this sense.
Which did you have in mind?
As I argue elsewhere:
“Hypothetical imperatives thus reveal patterns of normative inheritance. But their highlighted ‘means’ can’t inherit normative status unless the ‘end’ in question had prior normative worth. A view on which there are only hypothetical imperatives is effectively a form of normative nihilism—no more productive than an irrigation system without any water to flow through it.”
(Earlier in the post explains why hypothetical imperatives aren’t reducible to mere empirical statements of a means-ends relationship.)
I tentatively favour non-naturalist realism over non-naturalist error theory, but my purpose in my previous comment was just to flag the latter option as one that physicalists should take (very) seriously.
Thanks, that’s helpful. Two (related) possible replies for the afterlife believer:
(1) The Y-component is replaceable: brains play the Y role while we’re alive, but we get some kind of replacement device in the afterlife (which qualifies as “us”, rather than a “replica of us”, due to persisting soul identity).
(2) The brain is only needed for physical expressions of mentality (“talking”, etc.), and we revert to purely non-physical mental functioning in the afterlife.
These are silly views, of course, but I’m not yet convinced that the existence of brain damage makes them any more so than they were to begin with. (They seem pretty natural developments of the substance dualist view, rather than big bullets they have to bite.)