Maybe that is our crux? I am inclined to Error Theory anti-realism. I think social norms are indeed just consensus equilibria, which doesn’t mean that it is just a vote thing. My claim is there is no ‘real’ about social norms (and ethics). If you abide by some axioms x, y, z on what your goals and/or what the goals of a community should be you can say ‘doing a, b, c makes the satisfaction of those goals more probable’. But you can’t say anything about the norms per se as to their ‘correctness’ or ‘incorrectness’ with respect to some base truth independent from the axioms.
I would be very suspicious of taking consensus as evidence for anything ‘real’ . That would have a first issue: at what moment in time and space is the consensus ‘real’ as opposed to other moments when the consensus is different? Is the historically rather strong lack of overall moral homogenousness evidence against its realness? At most, it just shows a community has arrived at some sort of agreement and temporary equilibrium on something, and it is likely to infer that consensus that last long probably track something which doesn’t have to be ‘truth’, but rather ‘usefulness for the survival and expansion of the community with said consensus’.
I think the art example actually works against your argument. What makes the Mona Lisa highly appreciated, much more than very similar paintings in the same reference class by the same author, is a series of historical accidents (like the fame that it accrued after having been famously stolen in 1911, with the consequent media fuss). The value of works of art is that of a consensus, even if it is not strictly that of the wide public, but of the bubble of people involved in ‘the art world’ (critics, artists, curators, patrons, etc...). Of course, there’s a spectrum between a stick figure and the Mona Lisa. Some would say that spectrum is not big when comparing a Pollock (which is basically just randomly dripping paint over a canvas, something that a gorilla or a young kid could do). But even those differences (ot technique, style, originality...) are ‘axioms’ the ‘art world’ changes from time to time.
I just feel that for stuff that’s not in tier one, you can’t really speak about ‘shoulds’. Not even there: there are no should with tier one either: there’s just truths about an external world that are independent of human desires and cognition. You can ignore or reject them, but reality will reassert itself in spite of your wishes, or those of the whole human community. You can ignore reality, at your peril. For tier 2, individuals seldom can go unscathed by ignoring or rejecting the societal shoulds, but they change with times and with movements in favor of changes in some directions. My claim is, with respect to shoulds, everything is of the same reference class as ‘I prefer vanilla ice-cream’ or ‘I prefer blue’.
there are no should with tier one either: there’s just truths about an external world that are independent of human desires and cognition. You can ignore or reject them, but reality will reassert itself in spite of your wishes, or those of the whole human community. You can ignore reality, at your peril.
The territory doesn’t change, agreed.
For tier 2, individuals seldom can go unscathed by ignoring or rejecting the societal shoulds, but they change with times and with movements in favor of changes in some directions.
I’m saying the map changes but the territory might not. When many thought slavery ok, that world was in some real way worse for it. Even though the norms did not reflect that at the time.
My claim is, with respect to shoulds, everything is of the same reference class as ‘I prefer vanilla ice-cream’ or ‘I prefer blue’.
This is the crux. Most of what I’ve been saying is provisional...I’m not certain. But this statement strikes me as utterly counterintuitive. I know this is fairly standard non-cognitivist claim...I just can’t imagine believing it practically. If someone attacks me physically, unprovoked, as I’m walking down the street, I don’t think “a norm has been broken” or “my preference is that you don’t do that.” I guess to be fair, I also don’t immediately think “your instrumental values are unaligned with your true terminal values,” haha. But I think I really believe that.
I don’t think I’ve understood your ‘I’m saying the map changes but the territory might not’ . Would you care to clarify? If I understand the analogy, you’re saying that in tier 1, there’s a territory (the natural world) that remains stable whatever maps (= human beliefs and interpretations of it) are made of it, whereas in tier 2, the map (also human beliefs and interpretations) changes but the territory (=moral truths?) might not?. I mean, my core claim here is that moral truths are a fictional territory which doesn’t really exist, except as a figment of people’s imaginations and as a useful social technology. So I would dispute that “When many thought slavery ok, that world was in some real way worse for it”. This just feels to me like some flavor of hindsight bias: given who you are, when you are alive and the set of values/beliefs of the society you belong to, you interiorize our moral values as something true and retroactively apply them as a benchmark, while assuming some sort of narrative of moral progress where our current configuration is at the very least a local maximum in some function that is growing to infinity. While I can share a distaste for slavery, I think describing the world with it as ‘worse’ simpliciter is meaningless. At most, you can say ‘Given my and my societies’s beliefs, which include a degree of moral delusions, by our standard a society with slavery can be described as ‘bad’ and ’worse″.
As for the ice-cream example, I fail to see why realists says this type of statement is counterintuitive. What I imagine is that it hints at the fact that we interiorize and naturalize moral beliefs as roughly equivalent to scientific ones. I may feel ethics is an Error Theory without a referent, but like most people, I recoil at violence being exerted against the helpless. But this recoiling and the emotional effects are something I can easily not take serious as truth-describing, in just the same way as I can easily not take as ‘truth-describing’ that fatty, sugary foods are good for me, even if my brain rewards me for eating them. I’d say my base rate for scenarios like the one you depict is something like this:
a) Me, an animal with desires and needs, dislikes intensely being harmed or having my preferences (including not being hurt) violated.
b) Me also, an narturally and socially evolved animal that lives in a society with others, has interiorized and being indoctrinated about a set of rules about how to behave and what to expect with respect to other members of the community. These include notions of ‘Fairness’ which get abstracted and extrapolated from their real origin (in a relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer band in which no human is more powerful than the others combined, a way of ‘trimming’ the too violent and too pushy by ganging against him and killing him at night / from a distance / with numbers) to be assumed to be true and applicable to other groups of humans and/or to be expected from the Universe at large.
whereas in tier 2, the map (also human beliefs and interpretations) changes but the territory (=moral truths?) might not?
Yep, that’s what I was saying. If moral realism is correct, that’s how it works. (I think)
like most people, I recoil at violence being exerted against the helpless. But this recoiling and the emotional effects are something I can easily not take serious as truth-describing, in just the same way as I can easily not take as ‘truth-describing’ that fatty, sugary foods are good for me, even if my brain rewards me for eating them. I’d say my base rate for scenarios like the one you depict is something like this:
Well, your point was about preferring vanilla to other flavors, not about believing ice cream was good for you. Preferences are tier 2, the facts of “good for me” (depending how we define that) seem potentially tier 1.
But anyway, I think I get what you’re saying about preferences—we don’t really have a way to say what they “should” be, if indeed what they are is just a mess of biases and whatever we got from evolution etc. My point was that if moral realism is correct, they’re not that. They’re some sort of best-guess instrumental values we have derived from our terminal value of “the good.” But I admit I don’t have a testable experiment that could prove this...just the intuition that some actions we take have qualities and consequences that make reality more “good” or less “good.”
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).
Maybe that is our crux? I am inclined to Error Theory anti-realism. I think social norms are indeed just consensus equilibria, which doesn’t mean that it is just a vote thing. My claim is there is no ‘real’ about social norms (and ethics). If you abide by some axioms x, y, z on what your goals and/or what the goals of a community should be you can say ‘doing a, b, c makes the satisfaction of those goals more probable’. But you can’t say anything about the norms per se as to their ‘correctness’ or ‘incorrectness’ with respect to some base truth independent from the axioms.
I would be very suspicious of taking consensus as evidence for anything ‘real’ . That would have a first issue: at what moment in time and space is the consensus ‘real’ as opposed to other moments when the consensus is different? Is the historically rather strong lack of overall moral homogenousness evidence against its realness? At most, it just shows a community has arrived at some sort of agreement and temporary equilibrium on something, and it is likely to infer that consensus that last long probably track something which doesn’t have to be ‘truth’, but rather ‘usefulness for the survival and expansion of the community with said consensus’.
I think the art example actually works against your argument. What makes the Mona Lisa highly appreciated, much more than very similar paintings in the same reference class by the same author, is a series of historical accidents (like the fame that it accrued after having been famously stolen in 1911, with the consequent media fuss). The value of works of art is that of a consensus, even if it is not strictly that of the wide public, but of the bubble of people involved in ‘the art world’ (critics, artists, curators, patrons, etc...). Of course, there’s a spectrum between a stick figure and the Mona Lisa. Some would say that spectrum is not big when comparing a Pollock (which is basically just randomly dripping paint over a canvas, something that a gorilla or a young kid could do). But even those differences (ot technique, style, originality...) are ‘axioms’ the ‘art world’ changes from time to time.
I just feel that for stuff that’s not in tier one, you can’t really speak about ‘shoulds’. Not even there: there are no should with tier one either: there’s just truths about an external world that are independent of human desires and cognition. You can ignore or reject them, but reality will reassert itself in spite of your wishes, or those of the whole human community. You can ignore reality, at your peril. For tier 2, individuals seldom can go unscathed by ignoring or rejecting the societal shoulds, but they change with times and with movements in favor of changes in some directions. My claim is, with respect to shoulds, everything is of the same reference class as ‘I prefer vanilla ice-cream’ or ‘I prefer blue’.
The territory doesn’t change, agreed.
I’m saying the map changes but the territory might not. When many thought slavery ok, that world was in some real way worse for it. Even though the norms did not reflect that at the time.
This is the crux. Most of what I’ve been saying is provisional...I’m not certain. But this statement strikes me as utterly counterintuitive. I know this is fairly standard non-cognitivist claim...I just can’t imagine believing it practically. If someone attacks me physically, unprovoked, as I’m walking down the street, I don’t think “a norm has been broken” or “my preference is that you don’t do that.” I guess to be fair, I also don’t immediately think “your instrumental values are unaligned with your true terminal values,” haha. But I think I really believe that.
I don’t think I’ve understood your ‘I’m saying the map changes but the territory might not’ . Would you care to clarify? If I understand the analogy, you’re saying that in tier 1, there’s a territory (the natural world) that remains stable whatever maps (= human beliefs and interpretations of it) are made of it, whereas in tier 2, the map (also human beliefs and interpretations) changes but the territory (=moral truths?) might not?. I mean, my core claim here is that moral truths are a fictional territory which doesn’t really exist, except as a figment of people’s imaginations and as a useful social technology. So I would dispute that “When many thought slavery ok, that world was in some real way worse for it”. This just feels to me like some flavor of hindsight bias: given who you are, when you are alive and the set of values/beliefs of the society you belong to, you interiorize our moral values as something true and retroactively apply them as a benchmark, while assuming some sort of narrative of moral progress where our current configuration is at the very least a local maximum in some function that is growing to infinity. While I can share a distaste for slavery, I think describing the world with it as ‘worse’ simpliciter is meaningless. At most, you can say ‘Given my and my societies’s beliefs, which include a degree of moral delusions, by our standard a society with slavery can be described as ‘bad’ and ’worse″.
As for the ice-cream example, I fail to see why realists says this type of statement is counterintuitive. What I imagine is that it hints at the fact that we interiorize and naturalize moral beliefs as roughly equivalent to scientific ones. I may feel ethics is an Error Theory without a referent, but like most people, I recoil at violence being exerted against the helpless. But this recoiling and the emotional effects are something I can easily not take serious as truth-describing, in just the same way as I can easily not take as ‘truth-describing’ that fatty, sugary foods are good for me, even if my brain rewards me for eating them. I’d say my base rate for scenarios like the one you depict is something like this:
a) Me, an animal with desires and needs, dislikes intensely being harmed or having my preferences (including not being hurt) violated.
b) Me also, an narturally and socially evolved animal that lives in a society with others, has interiorized and being indoctrinated about a set of rules about how to behave and what to expect with respect to other members of the community. These include notions of ‘Fairness’ which get abstracted and extrapolated from their real origin (in a relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer band in which no human is more powerful than the others combined, a way of ‘trimming’ the too violent and too pushy by ganging against him and killing him at night / from a distance / with numbers) to be assumed to be true and applicable to other groups of humans and/or to be expected from the Universe at large.
Yep, that’s what I was saying. If moral realism is correct, that’s how it works. (I think)
Well, your point was about preferring vanilla to other flavors, not about believing ice cream was good for you. Preferences are tier 2, the facts of “good for me” (depending how we define that) seem potentially tier 1.
But anyway, I think I get what you’re saying about preferences—we don’t really have a way to say what they “should” be, if indeed what they are is just a mess of biases and whatever we got from evolution etc. My point was that if moral realism is correct, they’re not that. They’re some sort of best-guess instrumental values we have derived from our terminal value of “the good.” But I admit I don’t have a testable experiment that could prove this...just the intuition that some actions we take have qualities and consequences that make reality more “good” or less “good.”
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).