Sure, there are plenty of moral relativists here; but given that Eliezer’s metaethics sequence explicitly contrasts itself with traditional moral relativism and that Luke’s moral reductionism sequence holds out several levels of the objective-subjective distinction (to each of which moral relativism gives the subjective answer) as open questions (pending the rest of the sequence), I’d say that the Less Wrong consensus is “reject naive moral realism” rather than “embrace moral relativism”.
Yeah, I definitely should. What I was trying to say was that most LWers think that morality is an aspect of minds, not an aspect of the outside world (no universal morality). I think I misunderstood the term, this time through wikipedia it seems that moral relativism rejects a common human morality. It appears I was using the word wrong.
Then you’re probably right about this being a standard position on LW, but you used wrong/misleading terminology. Rejection of universal morality might be a suitable description, though there are fine points this doesn’t capture, morality being “subjectively objective”, in the sense of everyone having their own “personally-objective” morality they can’t alter in any way (so that there is a possibility of getting it wrong and value in figuring out what it is).
(“Being an aspect of mind” also runs into problems, since there’s no clear dividing line that makes things other than your own mind absolutely useless in figuring out what (your) morality is.)
“Stop identifying with your opinions” is a classic Less Wrong idea, but moral relativism is not.
Perhaps it’s not an explicitly stated idea, but it’s probably a fairly common one.
Sure, there are plenty of moral relativists here; but given that Eliezer’s metaethics sequence explicitly contrasts itself with traditional moral relativism and that Luke’s moral reductionism sequence holds out several levels of the objective-subjective distinction (to each of which moral relativism gives the subjective answer) as open questions (pending the rest of the sequence), I’d say that the Less Wrong consensus is “reject naive moral realism” rather than “embrace moral relativism”.
You should perhaps unpack what you mean by the label “moral relativism” at this point.
Yeah, I definitely should. What I was trying to say was that most LWers think that morality is an aspect of minds, not an aspect of the outside world (no universal morality). I think I misunderstood the term, this time through wikipedia it seems that moral relativism rejects a common human morality. It appears I was using the word wrong.
Then you’re probably right about this being a standard position on LW, but you used wrong/misleading terminology. Rejection of universal morality might be a suitable description, though there are fine points this doesn’t capture, morality being “subjectively objective”, in the sense of everyone having their own “personally-objective” morality they can’t alter in any way (so that there is a possibility of getting it wrong and value in figuring out what it is).
(“Being an aspect of mind” also runs into problems, since there’s no clear dividing line that makes things other than your own mind absolutely useless in figuring out what (your) morality is.)