Pigliucci’s comment on Yudkowsky’s and Dai’s stance on morality and logic
So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.
But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html
When we talk about morality, we are talking about those contingent facts, and once we’ve pinned down precisely what the consequences of those contingent facts are, we have picked out a logical object. We are not trying to explain why we picked this logical object and not some other logical object—that is anchored by contingent facts about humanity, evolutionary biology, etc. We are just trying to describe this logical object.
This point might be made more clearly by Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps. Why the pebblesorting people choose to sort pebbles one way and not another way is anchored by contingent facts about pebblesorting people, evolutionary biology, etc. But the algorithm that decides how the pebblesorting people sort pebbles is a logical object.
It doesn’t matter where our morality comes from (except insofar as this helps us figure out what it is); wherever it came from, it’s still the same morality.
Mainstream philosophy translation: moral concepts rigidly designate certain natural properties. However, precisely which properties these are was originally fixed by certain contingent facts about the world we live in and human history.
Hence the whole “If the world had been different, then what is denoted by “morality” would have been different, but those actions would still be immoral (given what “morality” actually denotes)” thing.
This position is sometimes referred to as “sythetic ethical naturalism”.
This helped me a lot. Thanks.
So according to you morality is not only relative..it’s subjective. Interesting But in this article I’m pretty sure he was addressing the commonly agreed upon ‘most good for the most people’ morality. I’d go so far as to say that, that is morality.
Your words have many connotations. ‘Subjective’ and ‘relative’ are often misunderstood at the best of times. If you could taboo these, we’d see where any real disagreement lay.
Also, I don’t see any more disagreement here. ‘Greatest good for the greatest number’ is a calculation to be made. If that statement sums up all of ethics, then it is a logical fact, not a physical one. I can’t shoot your fact to make it different. We can simply turn the criterion for ‘good’ into a computation, so that we input physical facts, and it comes out with advice on what to do next.
Even if this morality isn’t grounded in the ‘nature of the universe’, if this is all that we care about, then the computation is still a logical thing(y). Even if evolution adapted us to desire this, if this statement is the summation of all ethical facts, then that wouldn’t change the computation. Which computation we’re interested in is a product of contingent facts, physical, evolutionary ones. This doesn’t change the fact, that, when we compute the greatest ‘good’ for the greatest ‘number’, we’re talking about a computation that’s substrate neutral. And logical.
You’re probably right about the subjective/relative thing. He admits that things like this are contextually based while being marxist enough to say that the context itself doesn’t matter, only that the logic is able to work within it.
Ethics are inherently logical, not physical. Obviously you can’t shoot it but you can disprove their value easily enough by attacking what they’re contingent on. Not all logic is created equal, and don’t bring evolution into it. You can just as easily say that this is the common belief imprinted onto us by society only because the masters society us to be more easy to rule. Considering many other things, this is probably the case.
I don’t understand most of what you’re saying.
You’ve said that according to [Qiaochu_Yuan] ethics is contextually based, although context itself doesn’t matter.
In the last comment, you seemed to agree with the gist of the idea.
In your earlier comment, you said
The word ‘but’ sounded like a counter-argument. I don’t see the counter argument. If you have found a problem with what Qiaochu_Yuan said, could you elucidate it please. Without referring to Marxism, or anything else political.
To clear everything up: The first in the op argues morality as logic because it isn’t logic “all the way down”. Yuan is saying that all the way down doesn’t matter because it works within its own context and that, that is all that matters. Obviously this is wrong; creating a context just so you can work within it to prove your point is known as a strawman. The logic of the context is just as important as the logic it contains.
....I don’t see why. We can tell a story about how our desires came into being, through psychology and the like, but when we ask ‘what do we do right now?’ the calculation doesn’t need to refer to those facts. It oughtn’t—they aren’t related to the moral calculation.
The post on the importance of macro-optimization over micro basically explains it. Macro optimization creats the context for micro optimization.
It is unclear to me what your purpose in making this a full discussion thread is. A seemingly random comment on an somehwat related blog does not need to be promoted to the level of a full thread without any explanation or comment.
Fair enough, though it is really hard to say what’s supposed to go to the open thread (which really should be sticky so that it is bit more accesible). Massimo Pigliucci is a fairly known figure in the rationalist/skeptic/naturalist community. That doesn’t mean that I endorse his views (by far not—and not specifically for this article).
As a counter-example a seemingly random comment on an somehwat related blog got a full blown reply from Luke (meaning his reply to Mark Linsenmayer), though part of your critique is that I didn’t comment on the article (unlike Luke), which is fair enough—the reason being that I’m not familiar enough with Eliezer’s original post.
It seems to me that a big problem with discussions between Massimo and EY is that EY is a hardcore reductionist (The sciences are, at base, just physics) and Massimo is not. It seems like they’re talking past each other, and it’s hard to tell which are valid points in the light of that confusion.
To me their expressed views on the matter seemed very similar.
Massime explicitly denies reductionism, and Eliezer says that reductionism is the only good way to do philosophy. I’m not sure how you’re getting a similarity.
They both tie ethics with the nature of humanlike creatures, but their structural-functional rather than physical nature.
Eliezer knows that.
From a comment on Massimo’s blog...
daedalus writes:
Massimo writes:
I don’t think Eliezer would agree with this, however, so it looks like there is a real difference of opinion between them. See Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment for the perfect reply.
I don’t know, but Eliezer’s view of morality just isn’t confusing to me. I pretty much got it by reading Three Worlds Collide, and I haven’t read his metaethics sequence yet. From reading that, it’s really obvious that Eliezer knows that “[morality] is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth”.
So maybe the confused could give Three Worlds Collide a try.
P.S. I also read lukeprog on desirism back on Common Sense Atheism. That could be part of the reason I was able to pick up on Eliezer’s view of metaethics more easily.
Culture isn’t biological, though I get what he means, culture is an inherent byproduct of intelligent life. But culture itself is an axiom built on a singular intelligence. This singular, relative intelligence comes first. You don’t experience through the minds of society, but only your own mind. Think about the idiocy in your own mind putting the minds of others before itself. It makes no logical sense. If you want to argue of a “greater good”, which for the most part is fluff, it’s basically arguing from a hivemind point of view. A mind coming from all collectively Let’s take a look at this mind: it’s composed of a number of very different minds. To any sane person this mind would appear batshit crazy Now imagine of one mind took over all of the others in this hivemind. That’s sanity
No matter which point you argue from, logic is nothing but a higher form of selfishness