ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You reject the possibility of objective morality, but I think you might also be rejecting moral error theory. I think this means that you land somewhere in the land of meta-ethical moral relativism. Of course, I think this also rejects the core underpinning of the project of consequentialism/utilitarianism as being an objective basis for morality. Is this about right?
Then, I think the next move in the relativist frame is to say that individuals simply adopt whatever axioms they choose to adopt. So, like, if someone adopted the axiom that Ponzi schemes are good or the axiom that Llama-7b is the best arbiter of their morality or the axiom that if there were a way to give ALL to two-year olds, it would be good to do so... then, that's just totally and completely fine. That's their axiom, and all that can be done is carrying out that axiom with basic and complicated mathematics. Is that about right?
Then, lets suppose that you and someone else have adopted different axioms. They adopted the axiom that it is good to give ALL to two-year olds (if such a thing were technologically possible), while you adopt the axiom that it is bad. Presumably, you would say that they have no objective grounds on which to claim that your axiomatic system is wrong, and likewise, you would have no objective grounds on which to claim that their axiomatic system is wrong. You would both just go about using basic and complicated mathematics to satisfy your respective axioms, you'd both just shut up and multiply, and no other statements can be made about the situation. Is that about right?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
See, this is why I sort of don't believe you when you say that we should just shut up and multiply. It doesn't seem like that's really what you think. If it's, "Shut up and multiply, but oh by the way, you definitely can't multiply," then it really means, "Shut up."
What on earth gives you that takeaway? It was never on the menu.
Because you're still saying stuff like:
I clearly stated that morality is fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent and as far as I can tell, there is no good reason to think that's not the case barring wishful thinking.
That does not sound like something I can just multiply to get. If so, you could also just multiply, and we'd get the same thing. Because that's the bit about empiricism. You know, the linked article that you linked.
Whereas, again, this:
You can perform utilitarian calculus
is option 2. That's not "fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent". It's a different option.
If, somehow you're actually an LLM, then you've achieved a working understanding of gestalt human morality simply by being fed an enormous amount of text and then doing multiplication (of matrices). It is obviously doable. A randomly instantiated neural net will predictably achieve it.
And this is a really weird option 3. So, yeah, I think you've again given me all three options. They're going to give me different answers. Which option is the right one? What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg.
Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?
Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?
Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?
Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?
Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.
A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action.
Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".
Violinist argument
I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.
I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.
A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.
You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.
So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I see a lot of Science by Obfuscation. It's frustrating, because when I'm asked to review one of these papers, I don't know on the front end whether it's garbage or is genuinely using interesting and esoteric techniques from another area of literature that I'm just not familiar with. The latter is a real possibility that I have to spend a lot of time figuring out. Thankfully, I've only very rarely had to throw up my hands and tell the editors that I personally can't figure out what they're on about, and that maybe someone else would be a better reviewer. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of my other experience is that once I can cut through their language to figure out what they're actually doing, I realize that it's really just dumb simple under the hood, and usually they don't really have any "contribution" over what has come before.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
As far as I'm concerned morality is arbitrary and inherently subjective
See, this is why I sort of don't believe you when you say that we should just shut up and multiply. It doesn't seem like that's really what you think. If it's, "Shut up and multiply, but oh by the way, you definitely can't multiply," then it really means, "Shut up."
Thankfully, consequentialism, especially utilitarianism, can be computed explicitly. Look at GiveWell or the EA movement for a good effort with the latter.
So, do you think this, or do you think that it's arbitrary, inherently subjective, and that we can't multiply?
Ah! I can make it really simple for you, without even getting into first principles:
Find a paper on building the Transformer architecture/RWKV/Mamba or whatever is in vogue these days. I presume NeurIPS will suffice.
Feed it a massive corpus of text. The scrapable internet is a good start.
Stir the pot. (This is where the matrix multiplications come in, for those curious)
Behold, an LLM with an intuitive understanding of morality.
Ok, so I guess now we have a third option. I could, 1) Shut up and multiply, but not multiply because that doesn't work, so just shut up, 2) Adopt consequentialism/utilitarianism and try to fire up a calculator, or 3) Just download some weights, hell, Llama-7b is enough, right? That'll then appropriately and accurately get me to a correct problem of evil?
Which one is the answer, because they're all different answers, and I suspect they'll give me different results. What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
On the topic of public transit, I recently listened to this podcast on the system in Santiago, Chile. However, the episode is almost twenty years old. It really makes me want to know what has happened since then. Does anybody have an idea of how to find a good source?
I rather like being playfully jocular or humorous. It really makes it plain and clear what's going on. Let me see if I can understand what you're saying. One can just pull some unprincipled definition of what counts as "evil" (or good)... any definition, literally does not matter. Like, your entire moral system could just be, "Ponzi schemes are good, actually," and that's it. That's all you've got. Then, we don't even need the bad old methods of calculation that required quaternions or elliptic curves; we can just add, subtract, and multiply. I'm not actually sure what to do in the next step. Is there another form of Bayes' rule that I can use to make progress? Maybe an inscrutable matrix form of it? I can't find one on Wikipedia. Maybe there's a NeurIPS paper you can link me to?
I'm not opposed to shutting up and multiplying, and I'm pretty good at coding. I just need to know what expression I'm supposed to use in my code. I'm tryna get to some way of commenting on the problem of evil.
This question is, in a strange way, sort of related to my own work that is squarely within my domain of expertise. There is a long history in the literature of a theoretical construct that is sort of related, in a way, to the actual thing we want to know. I observed that there are basically zero, AFAICT, papers out there that actually use the theoretical thing to go on and compute the thing that we actually want to know. It just doesn't seem to be a thing that you can actually do. So decades of papers just get to the point of the theoretical construct, and then stop. There is no actual coding of the thing we actually want - the thing that is actually useful - the thing that was the entire point of the investigation in the first place. It seems to be basically not possible to actually just shut up and compute it. And so the best paper of my career came at the problem from a completely different direction, saying that if we go a different route, we can have the thing that we want, with most of the properties that we were hoping to have. It has spawned a mini-literature of folks building on it now, since they're actually able to shut up and multiply now. So, by all means, let's figure out how to shut up and multiply our way from, "Ponzi schemes are good, actually," to a problem of evil. But it needs to be something that I can code, since that is the premise we're starting with.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Can one shut up and multiply their way to a problem of evil? Can you, like, multiply a quaternion by an elliptic curve, and it somehow pops out in there somewhere?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Maybe inflation just isn't something you can measure definitively?
I think this is pretty much it. The more I've been exposed to the problem, the more I've come around to the idea that measuring inflation is every and always a harder problem than you think. This remains true even after you've updated to thinking that it was harder than you thought before. I listen to a lot of EconTalk, and it comes up there time and time again. Best of Econtwitter just referred to the original Summers statement with, "file under: measuring inflation is always even more complicated than you think." You just have to make an obscene number of choices in the process, and they're kind of always having to deal with new products in an ad hoc way.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I've noticed him weaseling out of his own words, refusing to acknowledge clear evidence disproving his point, and in general engaging in convenient forgetfulness about the dozen times his claims were substantially rebutted.
Straight talk - is this grounds for banning now? ...because you're going to have a lot more work to do. Do you just need people to document it?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I clearly understand more than the basics of your position... I just had to drag it out of you. The only thing left in question is the clarity of your exposition. If you would like to continue having people misunderstand you, that is a problem of your own making. If you'd like to see if there are ways that you can be more clear, I am willing to help. I can also jump in threads in the future and try to head off any misconceptions that other Mottizans might have about your comments. Whatever it takes to help everyone understand each other better.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
If the only question left is how clear your early statements were, perhaps we could agree to put it up to a poll? You can even choose some venue other than TheMotte, so that we can get more normie opinions rather than folks who 'make everything way too complicated for their own good'. But especially if we do run the poll at TheMotte, I would suggest we use a different context, just to put a slight barrier in front of people who might recognize the original. Something like:
Suppose Alice is talking to Bob. Alice asks Bob, "Why do you think homosexual sex is wrong?" Bob replies, "Because I do. Having homosexual sex is wrong, especially for fleeting pleasure. My moral intuitions are based upon my upbringing, my experiences, the social forces brought to bear upon me and are largely immune to rational change. I can't think myself into believing that homosexual sex is moral." Alice persists, "But you are asexual and can't really speak to anyone valuing fleeting sexual pleasure; those people think it's fine." Bob responds, "Of course they think it's moral. Everyone thinks their own views are moral. But just because I understand that they think their beliefs are moral does not mean I have to agree they are correct. What is defined as moral is based upon what values they were inculcated with."
Which of the follow do you think best describes Bob's position?
a) There is no sense in which any moral claim about homosexual sex being wrong is "correct" or "incorrect"; there is no way to claim that homosexual sex is "wrong" or "not wrong". There are only different people who have different beliefs based on their own experiences/opinions. It is wrong for Bob to engage in homosexual sex, but it is not wrong for others to engage in homosexual sex, if their experiences/opinions consider it moral.
b) Homosexual sex is wrong, and people who claim that it is not wrong are incorrect in their assertion, even though they choose to define it as moral for themselves based upon the values that they were inculcated with.
Any modifications you would propose?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I don't think I'm making anything too complicated. I'm simply trying to find out if there is any room for rational argumentation on your view of the moral world, where we can say that certain statements have truth value... or whether it's all vibes-based. I think this last comment is by far the most clear embrace of the vibes-based view of the world. Whereas before, it was really hidden in language that seemed to imply other things.
And sure, I understand that you think that everyone else is just purely operating in a vibes-based way, too. That was the essence of what ZRslashRIFLE said, only much more compactly. I get that idea. I just sort of wish you had said that twenty comments ago, at least no later than when I linked to him. And I really hope you won't be so loose with your language in the future.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'm definitely siding more and more with ZRslashRIFLE that I'm going to have to just interpret your statements in terms of vibes. When you say that something is "correct" or "not correct", you just mean that you like it or don't like it. Not that it's like... "correct" or "not correct" as those words would be used in any other context. When you say that you think murdering people for religious reasons is moral/immoral, you mean, "According to my meta-ethical position, the moral truth of whether murdering people for religious reasons is wrong for me is irrelevant. Instead, I'm only pointing out that I think it would be wrong by THEIR worldview."
I will try to update when reading your comments in the future. I think this new language is going to be wildly difficult to remember.
But if I were to try one last time...
It doesn't matter on what axis "better" means in this context
I really think it does. Because best as I can tell, when you say "X is better", at this point, I guess it just means, "I like X more," and there are no more implications whatsoever. This is especially problematic, because you're using "better" as the sole explanation of "correct/not correct", meaning there are two stages of hidden meaning when you say that something is correct/not correct. The first stage is that you think it is just "better", not really "correct" or "not correct" in the sense of having a truth value. The second stage is that you think "better" is just "I like it". Meaning that when you say, in the future, that something is "correct" or "not correct", I pretty much have to filter it twice to mean "I like it" or "I don't like it". It honestly is no wonder why this theoretical haranguing leads to many of the excesses of wokeism; it really does make it seem like statements that appear at first glance to have truth value are really just expressions of personal feelings/emotions.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
since the moderator clearly saw that you were flipping the script
Nah. They said that part was okay.
belligerent attitude
You say "belligerent attitude". I say "simply responding to the swarm of people who jumped on me". What's "belligerent" about it? Later, they say it was "holistic", with no post actually being bad. Just that I replied to a lot of responders. I know enough to know that "holistic" means "bullshit", just like when it's used in university admissions or in academic journal reviews (I've seen this, and I've seen it get slapped down by the EIC). You just can't skewer the sacred without being viewed as "belligerent". I'm sure many historical atheist heroes were considered "belligerent" by the boot of the Catholic church that was stomping on them.
Calling trans people delusional might be how a lot of people genuinely feel on this site, but it doesn't add much light to the conversation.
I would suggest advocating for that rather than advocating for calling religious people delusional. It might actually get you what you want.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
If Christians believe religiously motivated murder is wrong
...but you were specifically trying to consider the opposite of that. This is why it is so confusing. This is the bit
Of course everyone (or nearly everyone) holds that their own views are moral. My near relatives who thought that murder was wrong, but that if it was a Catholic, well that is quite all right have no more objective source of morality than the IRA members who thought the opposite, and both sets were because of their experiences and values that were imparted to them by their families and communities. But just because I understand they think their beliefs are moral
before the "[I do not] have to agree they are correct" bit. Specifically that they don't believe that religiously motivated murder is wrong. So, you think that they are not correct about what?!
Or now, when you say:
(as I obviously think my moral view is "better" than theirs otherwise I would hold their moral views, not the ones I currently do)
What does "better" have to do with "correct"? What truth value... or what thing... or where is the concept that you are talking about?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Oh wow, I did actually somehow read SlowBoy wrong. I went back and checked and everything. Whoops.
In any event, I'm not claiming that hiding your atheism is the rhetorical trick you're using. I think it's that your meta-ethical position shouldn't allow you to respond in ways that heavily imply that you're speaking about a generic moral truth of the matter. In response to a now-corrected-reading of SlowBoy's comment, you could have said something like, "According to my meta-ethical position, the moral truth of whether murdering people for religious reasons is wrong for me is irrelevant. Instead, I'm only pointing out that I think it would be wrong by THEIR worldview," which is the position that you have now spent pages more word count getting around to saying. Does this at least correctly portray your position? That would be significantly more clear and not require all this follow-up. The only downside is that it wouldn't allow you to imply that you think that "religiously-motivated killing is wrong" is a generic moral truth.
I probably didn't have much of a sense of what you were actually meaning to say, given your meta-ethical position, until much much later. In fact, rereading now, I see a shred here, where you say:
Of course everyone (or nearly everyone) holds that their own views are moral. My near relatives who thought that murder was wrong, but that if it was a Catholic, well that is quite all right have no more objective source of morality than the IRA members who thought the opposite, and both sets were because of their experiences and values that were imparted to them by their families and communities. But just because I understand they think their beliefs are moral does not mean i have to agree they are correct.
But this leads to still the same confusion, which is probably why I spent so much time getting you to say that you really really really just committed yourself to the meta-ethical position that you're claiming. Statements like this are damn near impossible to parse, given your meta-ethical position. You don't have to agree that they are "correct"? "Correct" about what? What truth-value is in question here? Certainly not the truth value of, "Religiously-motivated killing is wrong," because you have expressly declined the possibility of such statements. The truth value of, "Religiously-motivated killing is wrong to them"? I mean, you just said that their experiences and values and community and stuff means that this statement is false. Like, full stop. What is there for you to think is "incorrect"? Incorrect about the truth value of their moral statement? I don't think so. Incorrect about something concerning Christianity? Very weird, and would require a very different type of argument than what I see anywhere. Incorrect about how the results would look from the perspective of others? Seems irrelevant. At the very least, I think this is not a paragon of clarity.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I have been trying to get clarification on "slurs", but it hasn't been forthcoming. "Delusional" is an item of serious lack of clarity in the rules. Your cite really rested the entire "irrational" claim on, "The essential danger for people of any belief system is becoming dogmatic and therefore irrational." Which is pretty weaksauce and is probably ignored by most people, because it's just not really what people mean when they use the term. Here's an example that didn't even say delusional, just the weaksauce about kid gloves (c.f. unmodded).
I agree that there should be consistency, but I don't know that you actually agree. Most folks everywhere want their sacred positions protected.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I mean, you're missing alllll sorts of qualifiers that would be needed in order to accommodate your meta-ethical position. Like, you could have easily said, "You think that Catholics and Protestants think that violent terrorism between Catholics and Protestants...." But you didn't. Because you wanted to heavily imply that there was a generic moral truth of the matter. It is only after pressed that you revealed that this was a slight of hand.
Moreover, when SlowBoy clarified that he didn't believe in god, it would be a clear indicator that he was not asking for an answer of the type that your meta-ethical position would allow without specific qualification. Again, I think you just shrugged this aside in order to be able to imply that you were speaking about a generic moral truth of the matter... just playing hide-and-seek, violating the norms of discourse. I just ask that you be on the lookout for this conflation in the future and be more precise to avoid confusion. I'll try to help keep an eye out.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
game theory at least posits what the best option is under a series of conditions. The fact that distributed social behaviors match that somewhat is an indicator there might be some truth to it.
Do they? There's a whole field of behavioral economics that shows alllll sorts of situations where people tend not to do the "rational" thing. Some settings have more or less adherence. I don't see what conclusions follow.
RE: What you should answer. If the question is concerning morality of religiously-motivated killing, and you are not religious, then your answer that you think is completely confined to only applying to your non-religious particular self would be utterly vacuous. It would be like saying, "I don't think lions should eat people," and hiding the fact that you really mean, "I don't think that I should eat people, but I am not a lion, and I don't actually have anything relevant to say about what lions should/shouldn't do." It violates the norms of discourse to play this slight of hand. Vastly better to speak plainly and state what your actual position is. However, if you find brevity to be too valuable to you, in the future, I can try to endeavor to chime in with the appropriate caveats as I find time. I think it will save a lot of people much confusion.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Obviously, the tools used to rationally investigate morality are going to be different from the tools used to rationally investigate science. Same as how the tools used to rationally investigate history are different. That doesn't seem to be much of an impediment to rational inquiry into the nature of any of those things.
For example looking at the prisoner's dilemma, the idea of not snitching on each other isn't reasoned out by actual prisoners.
Sure, and on many scientific matters, there are tons of nonrational folks out there who don't reason their way into their positions, either. Again, not an impediment to the possibility of using a rational approach. I think it would be perfectly fine to have a rational approach to game theory in order to understand a rational, objective methodology for answering hypothetical imperatives (e.g., if you're being interrogated and your payoff function is such and such, you should do such and such). That many folks are mere adapters rather than rational agents WRT science or game theory doesn't imply much about whether science or game theory have an objective quality.
yes if Bob is from culture which believes (and he concurs with this) that eating the dead will condemn their souls to an eternity of torment then probably it would continue to be immoral for him, even while Sally is lighting up the cook fire.
Ok. I think we have the most important conclusion at this point. Your perspective is that the truth value of a moral judgment depends on the individual. So, in the future, when people ask you why you think that murdering people is wrong (even for silly-sounding religious disputes), I think it would be more accurate for you to say that it would be wrong for you to do such a thing, but your meta-ethical position is that it may be entirely morally right for others to do this sort of thing.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I think when you convince someone of a change to their morality, it is not because they consciously and rationally change. So they can't just decide to either accept or reject your argument based upon a rational approach. They may protest and argue against you, only to find that over some time of it percolating in their subconscious their position has changed. I don't know if I would call it vibes as opposed to a kind of below conscious thought approach. Some of the arguments that might be used to change someone's opinion may well be rational, but the way that is integrated into their belief system is not. What we see as feelings or beliefs are complex interactions of thought processes we are not consciously aware of. But that doesn't mean it is as simple as vibes.
One might (and many have) say the same about scientific reasoning. "Science progresses one funeral at a time," and all that. That some people become emotionally attached to ideas rather than progressing rationally does not imply much about the underlying plausibility of rational inquiry. The entire premise of rational inquiry is that this is possible for scientific truths, even though not all humans actually do so in a perfectly rational fashion. It's the reason why we promote norms of rationality on the topic. If we fail to have this for morality, then there is no reason to promote norms of rationality for morality. Ergo, the list of things like cancel culture, etc.
The only way the truth can be judged is within the context of the position
One can, and there is a long philosophical history of, distinguishing the concept of contingent moral facts. That is, one can easily simply distinguish the statements, "It is immoral to cannibalize the dead in normal situations," and, "It is moral to cannibalize the dead in certain, extreme situations." Not needing to take a position on any specifics here; instead, pointing out that contingent moral facts are clearly not a problem whatsoever.
It seems that you are claiming something different from mere contingent moral facts. It seems that you are claiming that the truth-value of moral statements depends on the individual involved (or perhaps their society), apart from any contingent, situational distinctions. That is, would you say that one could conclude, "It is true that Sally can morally cannibalize the dead in Extreme Situation X, but it is false that Bob can morally cannibalize the dead in exactly the same Extreme Situation X"? Would you say that one could come to these conclusions by way of reasoning about Sally and Bob's respective upbringings/dispositions/etc.?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'll preface by saying that I don't think people are rational
I would like some more explanation of this in context of (1). You say that people can come to an agreement on how to practically deal with mismatched moral intuitions or that you can convince someone that they should adopt your moral precepts; do you think that this can be done rationally, or that it's just done based on vibes?
2
I read this as saying that the truth-value of a moral judgment is simply attached to an individual. Perhaps attached to a society. That is, a moral judgment could have value "true" for one individual and value "false" for a different individual. As such, there is no "truth-value" to such moral judgments; simply true statements about opinions of individuals (and possibly societies). I'm not really sure why you're opposed to simply saying this outright.
Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.
Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.
You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.
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