Thank you for introducing the position of the thesis. I started reading it a couple of times, but never got very far.
It’s a fine effort for correcting stupidity, but the argument given here shouldn’t be carried too far either. For example, a lot of the misleading points in the above quotes can be revealed by analogizing prior with utility, as two sides of (non-objective) preference. Factual judgments are not fundamentally different from moral judgments on the subjective-objective scale, but factual judgments can often be so clear that an argument for them can be called “logical”, or the judgments themselves can be called “facts” or “observations”, different people will agree for such facts universally, given them the feel of objectivity. Justifications are a tool of communication as well as a tool for removing incoherence from intuitive judgments, the error lies in overly increasing the confidence of your conclusion based on rationalization, not in augmenting the pre-existing conclusion with an argument that helps the opponent arrive at the same conclusion. While it’s easier to see how preferences can be different for different people, and so the moral argument won’t succeed in evoking the same judgment as a result of communication because it’s incorrect for the other person, the same also applies to the prior, but the updated priors get a benefit of tons of data to arrive at the same decision in the absence of reflective consistency, while moral claims starve from lack of experience. And so on, and so forth.
P.S. You can improve formatting of the article by fixing the html source which is accessible from the article editor toolbar.
Thank you for introducing the position of the thesis. I started reading it a couple of times, but never got very far.
It’s a fine effort for correcting stupidity, but the argument given here shouldn’t be carried too far either. For example, a lot of the misleading points in the above quotes can be revealed by analogizing prior with utility, as two sides of (non-objective) preference. Factual judgments are not fundamentally different from moral judgments on the subjective-objective scale, but factual judgments can often be so clear that an argument for them can be called “logical”, or the judgments themselves can be called “facts” or “observations”, different people will agree for such facts universally, given them the feel of objectivity. Justifications are a tool of communication as well as a tool for removing incoherence from intuitive judgments, the error lies in overly increasing the confidence of your conclusion based on rationalization, not in augmenting the pre-existing conclusion with an argument that helps the opponent arrive at the same conclusion. While it’s easier to see how preferences can be different for different people, and so the moral argument won’t succeed in evoking the same judgment as a result of communication because it’s incorrect for the other person, the same also applies to the prior, but the updated priors get a benefit of tons of data to arrive at the same decision in the absence of reflective consistency, while moral claims starve from lack of experience. And so on, and so forth.
P.S. You can improve formatting of the article by fixing the html source which is accessible from the article editor toolbar.