Yes, I employed the ice-cream for two different metaphors. In the first case, the point I was making that , if you don’t believe in moral realism, any claims to ‘shoulds’ have no truth-value: they are either purely meaningless and have no referent (which is what I think an Error Theorist would say) or they are acting as mere preferences that you acquired for whatever subjective set of reasons and life experiences, and none more authoritative than another. In the second example, I was using ice-cream as providing a good example of why we can’t trust intuitions to be truth-bearing, but rather to being (for a give time and place) evolutionarily adaptive, which is kind of what I believe is the reason why people and societies develop strong moral intuitions and feelings.
I don’t think preferences, in the way I am taking about them, can be anything other than tier 3: at most, there is a psychological truth about them (they condense what you as an individual and messy, evolutionary rube-goldberg machine with a socio-historical context and impossible to recreate individual nuances of experience feel you value). Preferences don’t tell you anything about the external, physical world; as for the socially constructed social world and agreed-upon beliefs, preferences are generally causally dependent on these, but not completely so.
So yeah, we don’t agree on the plausibility of moral realism. I think I understand what the consequences of believing in it would be, but that doesn’t affect in any way how credible I find the concept to begin with. That leads me back to what start the chat from the notes I made: “how incredibly baffled I get when trying to understand moral realists”. My lack of understanding is not that their arguments are inconsistent given their premises, but rather that the premise seems to me plainly absurd, wishful thinking and an attempt, conscious or not, to rescue morality in a world without religion. And when I ask or look for clarifications of why a realist holds the belief, I just get extremely insatisfactory answers, almost all of which are variants of ’well, these are self-evident intuitions that I have”.
And when I ask or look for clarifications of why a realist holds the belief, I just get extremely insatisfactory answers, almost all of which are variants of ’well, these are self-evident intuitions that I have”.
Delete all the intuitions, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you’re left with a rock.
Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you’re left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies.
“Intuition”, as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality—there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an “intuition” in this sense—it’s just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera.
Fair enough. I’ve given a quick browse to the Yud post, but it is somewhat dense and requires more time than I have now (I’ll take a deeper look in the evening). I think it is fair to say that ultimately, ethical views rely on intuitions. Problem with this is that I would dispute we share them ‘even after subjecting them to reflective action’. I’ve been thinking much about ethics in the last, say, 6 or so years. I don’t think I had any intuition about moral realism to start with. I do remember liking then Kantian deontology, but the thought-process that led there was something like this:
1) I am secular, and can only accept rational, secular justifications for ethics
2) If ethical realism isn’t true, it doesn’t make sense at all to speak about ethics. It is just subjective preferences and/or useful evolutionary tricks for individual/group survival and multiplication.
Back then, I just disliked the consequences of 2, but the more I kept reading about ethics, as well as other stuff which I’ll bunch together as ‘evolutionary biology and psychology’, the more I felt that wanting ethical realism to be true was no different from wanting religion to be true. They were exactly the same sort of reference class, they had roughly the same sort of explanation for why they appear, for why they are individually appealing to us and for why they are useful tools for group coordination. I still feel like 0 intuition for ethical realism: I can have strong feelings about some stuff, but I can easily explain them away as a mere result of historically fit natural-and-social evolutionarily useful strategies that get coded in our genes and which we are indoctrinated and ‘aligned’ to interiorize since children. I grant the same truth-status to religion and ethical realism, which is none.
So these kinds of debates do feel rather circular if they just end up with ‘okay, I have these intuitions and you have yours. Have you reflectively examined yours? Then you should agree with me’. I do get one thing Yud says in the article, i.e., that it is probably more pragmatically useful just to focus on the object-level (“what do I do in this regard?”), but I feel it is going to just make me very unreceptive to any sort of ethical argumentation to change any of my current preferences or my anti-realist, contractualist view of stuff.
the more I felt that wanting ethical realism to be true was no different from wanting religion to be true.
Interesting...do you want it to be true? By my lights that’s not the same as having the intuition that it is true.
I still feel like 0 intuition for ethical realism: I can have strong feelings about some stuff, but I can easily explain them away as a mere result of historically fit natural-and-social evolutionarily useful strategies that get coded in our genes and...
As we’ve touched on, reason can also be explained away as an evolutionary useful, gene encoded, quirk. But as you’ve said before, reason seems to reflect the way the world is. I think ethical intuitions do too.
So these kinds of debates do feel rather circular if they just end up with ’okay, I have these intuitions and you have yours.
The “strong feelings about some stuff”—the particular beliefs—aren’t the intuitions I’m defending. The intuition I think we share is that we have the strong feelings at all. We can explain it away, but it does seem to be a fact about how humans are. That doesn’t make it objective (tier 1) but maybe it’s intersubjective (tier 2). It seems like we might even agree on that...which means whether or not we call that moral realism is just arguing about words. And maybe that’s why Yud opts for the object level here—because the meta level is where we’re tempted to say, “If a person is murdered in cold blood, most everyone agrees that’s bad, but is it...objectively bad?”
Yes, I definitely agree that wanting something is not the same as having an intuition that it is true. But we humans are feeble creatures, and have to be on guard against ourselves, and of believing what we want to believe for no other reason than that it’s comforting. If ethical realism were true, it would grant a measure of certainty that I appreciate.
And yes, reason can be explained away an evolutionary useful, gene encoded, quirk, but it does seem to reflect the world by allowing us to make successful predictions about it. I fail to see how ethical intuitions do this. Unless it be the case that what you mean is something like ‘they allow us to coordinate with other humans better’, which is true, but doesn’t really further any truthfulness for those beliefs as such (like with religion). Humans, yes, are creatures with strong feelings about some stuff. More controversial, but possible if you restrict the range, is that all humans tend to have strong feels about some stuff (in some ratio like Haidt’s 90% chimp, 10% bee). But I still feel you can’t call this ‘realism’. Perhaps i am just too square-minded and restrictive in what I see as ‘real’, but I don’t get the impression, from reading realists, that they also stick to this brand of realism (which would further little or no arguments against reducing ethics to socially accepted and variable norms in both time and space with no particularly privileged ground).
Yes, I employed the ice-cream for two different metaphors. In the first case, the point I was making that , if you don’t believe in moral realism, any claims to ‘shoulds’ have no truth-value: they are either purely meaningless and have no referent (which is what I think an Error Theorist would say) or they are acting as mere preferences that you acquired for whatever subjective set of reasons and life experiences, and none more authoritative than another. In the second example, I was using ice-cream as providing a good example of why we can’t trust intuitions to be truth-bearing, but rather to being (for a give time and place) evolutionarily adaptive, which is kind of what I believe is the reason why people and societies develop strong moral intuitions and feelings.
I don’t think preferences, in the way I am taking about them, can be anything other than tier 3: at most, there is a psychological truth about them (they condense what you as an individual and messy, evolutionary rube-goldberg machine with a socio-historical context and impossible to recreate individual nuances of experience feel you value). Preferences don’t tell you anything about the external, physical world; as for the socially constructed social world and agreed-upon beliefs, preferences are generally causally dependent on these, but not completely so.
So yeah, we don’t agree on the plausibility of moral realism. I think I understand what the consequences of believing in it would be, but that doesn’t affect in any way how credible I find the concept to begin with. That leads me back to what start the chat from the notes I made: “how incredibly baffled I get when trying to understand moral realists”. My lack of understanding is not that their arguments are inconsistent given their premises, but rather that the premise seems to me plainly absurd, wishful thinking and an attempt, conscious or not, to rescue morality in a world without religion. And when I ask or look for clarifications of why a realist holds the belief, I just get extremely insatisfactory answers, almost all of which are variants of ’well, these are self-evident intuitions that I have”.
Delete all the intuitions, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you’re left with a rock.
Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you’re left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies.
“Intuition”, as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality—there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an “intuition” in this sense—it’s just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r5MSQ83gtbjWRBDWJ/the-intuitions-behind-utilitarianism
I agree with Yudkowsky on this. The consequences of ignoring our intutitions aren’t much better than the consequences of not questioning them at all.
Fair enough. I’ve given a quick browse to the Yud post, but it is somewhat dense and requires more time than I have now (I’ll take a deeper look in the evening). I think it is fair to say that ultimately, ethical views rely on intuitions. Problem with this is that I would dispute we share them ‘even after subjecting them to reflective action’. I’ve been thinking much about ethics in the last, say, 6 or so years. I don’t think I had any intuition about moral realism to start with. I do remember liking then Kantian deontology, but the thought-process that led there was something like this:
1) I am secular, and can only accept rational, secular justifications for ethics
2) If ethical realism isn’t true, it doesn’t make sense at all to speak about ethics. It is just subjective preferences and/or useful evolutionary tricks for individual/group survival and multiplication.
Back then, I just disliked the consequences of 2, but the more I kept reading about ethics, as well as other stuff which I’ll bunch together as ‘evolutionary biology and psychology’, the more I felt that wanting ethical realism to be true was no different from wanting religion to be true. They were exactly the same sort of reference class, they had roughly the same sort of explanation for why they appear, for why they are individually appealing to us and for why they are useful tools for group coordination. I still feel like 0 intuition for ethical realism: I can have strong feelings about some stuff, but I can easily explain them away as a mere result of historically fit natural-and-social evolutionarily useful strategies that get coded in our genes and which we are indoctrinated and ‘aligned’ to interiorize since children. I grant the same truth-status to religion and ethical realism, which is none.
So these kinds of debates do feel rather circular if they just end up with ‘okay, I have these intuitions and you have yours. Have you reflectively examined yours? Then you should agree with me’. I do get one thing Yud says in the article, i.e., that it is probably more pragmatically useful just to focus on the object-level (“what do I do in this regard?”), but I feel it is going to just make me very unreceptive to any sort of ethical argumentation to change any of my current preferences or my anti-realist, contractualist view of stuff.
Interesting...do you want it to be true? By my lights that’s not the same as having the intuition that it is true.
As we’ve touched on, reason can also be explained away as an evolutionary useful, gene encoded, quirk. But as you’ve said before, reason seems to reflect the way the world is. I think ethical intuitions do too.
The “strong feelings about some stuff”—the particular beliefs—aren’t the intuitions I’m defending. The intuition I think we share is that we have the strong feelings at all. We can explain it away, but it does seem to be a fact about how humans are. That doesn’t make it objective (tier 1) but maybe it’s intersubjective (tier 2). It seems like we might even agree on that...which means whether or not we call that moral realism is just arguing about words. And maybe that’s why Yud opts for the object level here—because the meta level is where we’re tempted to say, “If a person is murdered in cold blood, most everyone agrees that’s bad, but is it...objectively bad?”
Yes, I definitely agree that wanting something is not the same as having an intuition that it is true. But we humans are feeble creatures, and have to be on guard against ourselves, and of believing what we want to believe for no other reason than that it’s comforting. If ethical realism were true, it would grant a measure of certainty that I appreciate.
And yes, reason can be explained away an evolutionary useful, gene encoded, quirk, but it does seem to reflect the world by allowing us to make successful predictions about it. I fail to see how ethical intuitions do this. Unless it be the case that what you mean is something like ‘they allow us to coordinate with other humans better’, which is true, but doesn’t really further any truthfulness for those beliefs as such (like with religion). Humans, yes, are creatures with strong feelings about some stuff. More controversial, but possible if you restrict the range, is that all humans tend to have strong feels about some stuff (in some ratio like Haidt’s 90% chimp, 10% bee). But I still feel you can’t call this ‘realism’. Perhaps i am just too square-minded and restrictive in what I see as ‘real’, but I don’t get the impression, from reading realists, that they also stick to this brand of realism (which would further little or no arguments against reducing ethics to socially accepted and variable norms in both time and space with no particularly privileged ground).