Theorems of game theory are absolutely not moral facts.
Why not? What’s missing?
That’s just not what “moral facts” means. Theorems of game theory can be facts and they can be relevant to what you should do in certain situations where you might also consider moral theories, but they aren’t moral claims. A moral claim is something like “murder is wrong” or “slavery is acceptable”. On the other hand, “murder is illegal” or “slavery was legal in the Roman Empire and the Confederate States of America” are not the kind of moral facts I’m talking about, and they (and game theory theorems) don’t prove/disprove moral realism.
I’m trying to get you to define what “moral fact” is, and contrast it with the normative statements that I can prove, so that we can move past semantics. It’s my understanding that the literature uses the term to refer to something like categorical imperatives—pressures to do certain things that apply to all reasoning beings, regardless of who they are.
They can’t be infinitely strong pressures since obviously people sometimes do bad things, if there are bad things, but they have to have some motive force where they bind into the agent’s motivational system. And since they’re universal, they can’t bind to the agent’s terminal values. Thus, I claim, in order for a categorical imperative to make any sense, we must be able to see it show up in convergent instrumental strategy/subgoals.
Are all instrumentally convergent subgoals categorical imperatives (“moral facts”)? I don’t think so. From my perspective, a defining characteristic of the thing that I want to look at is that the pressure comes from the social fabric. The standard Omohundro drives of survival, rationality, resource acquisition, etc, are all just as applicable on a deserted island. But I claim that once you posit other agents, even if they’re powerless or distant or hypothetical, then there are arguments in the same space as “don’t defect against your clone your dumbass” that come into play.
What I’d really like is for you to taboo “moral fact” or “moral” or “wrong” or whatever and try saying the equivalent of “Theorems of game theory are absolutely not moral facts.”
Here’s how it caches out it my semantics: “Theorems of game theory are absolutely not [facts that bear on how any agent, regardless of who they are, ought to act in certain classes of situations, according to their own values, because of the acausal interplay (including the establishment of Schelling points, red lines, and other coordination mechanisms) between that agent and the other agents in the universe (including distant, causally disconnected places)].” But according to me, the theorems of game theory are extremely relevant, so you probably have a different notion of morality. What is it?
I wonder how similar Robi’s view on morality is to the idea that a fairly close equivalent of moral facts irreducible to game theory is the statement about consequences which are hard to trace or to explain.
Suppose that polyamory is net negative for most people who try it because such relationships bring genuine happiness to those who possess a rare quality and are fragile unless the participants possess the quality. IMO under these conditions Aella would expect people to be thoroughly tested to determine whether they possess the right qualities, then taking measures to ensure that incompatible people don’t do things like wasting time with each other. However, I expect such measures to be bottlenecked on things like it being hard to explain to participants why they would be unlikely to succeed, so the simplest measure in a society of those whom we don’t trust to be geniuses is to simply ban polyamory wholesale.
Similarly, if we trust the rumors that gentle-parenting-as-millenials-describe-it is hard to pull off in a manner which doesn’t produce a misaligned kid, then, once a cohort of kids parented that way emerges and is studied, the ideal world would have parents avoid this practice unless it is verified that they can succeed at gently raising the kid, and a world like ours would also require that parents don’t erroneously believe that they can.
However, my[1] example of WIMOPs hating hybrids would have Yudkowsky’s case against morality being given ensure that I, unlike Robi, don’t follow the WIMOPs’ anti-hybrid stance unless the hybrids are degrading in ways which are proven, but hard to explain to the commoner.
To be precise, the example was actually coined by a Russian extremist author, but the extremist had the fictional hybrids and their descendants actually degrade.
“Theorems of game theory are absolutely not [facts that bear on how any agent, regardless of who they are, ought to act in certain classes of situations, according to their own values, because of the acausal interplay (including the establishment of Schelling points, red lines, and other coordination mechanisms) between that agent and the other agents in the universe (including distant, causally disconnected places)].” But according to me, the theorems of game theory are extremely relevant,
I agree, theorems of game theory are extremely relevant to that thing you described.
so you probably have a different notion of morality. What is it?
Again, I googled “what is morality” and the default result was pretty good. It said:
Morality is the principles, values, and standards that determine what is right or wrong, good or bad.
From my perspective, a defining characteristic of the thing that I want to look at is that the pressure comes from the social fabric.
I’m not a moral relativist; I don’t believe that what’s right or wrong is decided by the beliefs of society or the context in which the action is taken. I believe there is no truth value to whether actions are objectively right or wrong.
Maybe “the social fabric” was the wrong way to phrase it. I mean something closer to “the possibility and nature of other agents in an idealized sense” (eg the way game theory is not single-player decision theory) not the specific society that the agent exists in.
And yeah, I get that you don’t agree with me. I was trying to describe my perspective, not yours.
I just googled “what are moral facts” and its answer is pretty good:
Moral facts are real truths about what actions are right, wrong, good, or bad.
They state what people ought to do or avoid.
What Moral Facts Cover
Right and wrong: Whether specific actions like lying or helping others are good or bad.
Obligations: What people have a duty to do.
Character traits: Whether traits like honesty or cruelty are good or bad.
Examples of Proposed Moral Facts
Torturing an innocent child for fun is wrong.
Unjustly killing another person is bad.S
howing kindness to others is good.
The Main Debate
Philosophers disagree about whether these facts actually exist.
Moral Realism: This view says moral facts are real. They exist independently of what humans think, just like math or physical facts.
Moral Anti-Realism: This view says moral facts do not exist. It claims that statements about right and wrong are only human opinions, emotions, or social rules.
I would add:
Moral facts are moral claims that are true.
My position is that there are no moral claims that have any truth values: none of them are true and none of them are false. They are not truth-apt; they are not in the category of things that can be true or false.
Regarding your game theory example, your claim that (because being the kind of agent who cooperates in the prisoner’s dilemma will benefit you in the long run) “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma” (where “should” means “is in your best interest/increases your expected utility”) is not a moral claim of the kind I am talking about. The claim that “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma”, where “should” means “it is morally good to cooperate”, is a moral claim, but is neither true nor false. I’m asking for any evidence that it, or any other moral claim, is true or false.
Yeah, I donno. This doesn’t feel like you’re tabooing things correctly. Imagine I put on the alien hat and pretend I don’t know these silly earth words. Tell me what morality is.
[UNTRANSLATABLE-1] facts are real truths about what actions are [UNTRANSLATABLE-2], [UNTRANSLATABLE-3], [UNTRANSLATABLE-4], or [UNTRANSLATABLE-5].
They state what people ought to do or avoid.
Sure. I claim “people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do. Is that an [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] fact? Why not?
What [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] Facts Cover
[UNTRANSLATABLE-2] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-3]: Whether specific actions like lying or helping others are [UNTRANSLATABLE-4] or [UNTRANSLATABLE-5].
[UNTRANSLATABLE-6]: What people have a [UNTRANSLATABLE-7] to do.
Character traits: Whether traits like honesty or cruelty are [UNTRANSLATABLE-4] or [UNTRANSLATABLE-5].
Examples of Proposed [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] Facts
Torturing an [UNTRANSLATABLE-8] child for fun is [UNTRANSLATABLE-3].
[UNTRANSLATABLE-9] killing another person is [UNTRANSLATABLE-5].
Showing kindness to others is [UNTRANSLATABLE-4].
The first and second examples are presumably things that are illegal, antisocial, and violations of the sorts of red-lines that can be drawn behind the veil of ignorance, among many other things. What makes them [UNTRANSLATABLE-3] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-5]? Are [UNTRANSLATABLE-3] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-5] synonyms? Do the [UNTRANSLATABLE-8] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-9] modifiers matter?
[UNTRANSLATABLE-1] facts are [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims that are true.
Sure. That’s basically what “fact” means.
My position is that there are no [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims that have any truth values: none of them are true and none of them are false. They are not truth-apt; they are not in the category of things that can be true or false.
Wait. If [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not in the category of things that can be true, then how can your WIMP example work? Didn’t you say you would change your mind if we detected WIMPs? How is this not in contradiction with the notion that it’s categorically not something that can be true?
Regarding your game theory example, your claim that (because being the kind of agent who cooperates in the prisoner’s dilemma will benefit you in the long run) “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma” (where “should” means “is in your best interest/increases your expected utility”) is not a [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claim of the kind I am talking about. The claim that “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma”, where “should” means “it is [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] [UNTRANSLATABLE-4] to cooperate”, is a [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claim, but is neither true nor false. I’m asking for any evidence that it, or any other [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claim, is true or false.
Cool. I hear you that you don’t consider categorical imperatives to be [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] facts. But I still don’t know what you mean by [UNTRANSLATABLE-1]. Help! 👽
Defining morality while tabooing moral, ethical, right, wrong, good, bad, ought, should, duty, obligation, permissible, virtue, and cognate words:
Humans sometimes classify actions, intentions, people, institutions, and outcomes using positive, negative, or neutral labels that supposedly do more than describe what happened, predict consequences, report a law or custom, state what anyone wants, or identify an effective means to a chosen end.
Central examples of things that receive these classifications concern causing pain, killing, deception, coercion, keeping promises, helping people in distress, and distributing burdens and benefits. They contrast with judgments about which chess move wins, which investment earns more money, which action is legal, which behavior is fashionable, or which policy best fulfills a specified utility function.
The disputed question is whether some applications of these labels accurately represent features or relations that are not made accurate merely by anyone’s preferences, commitments, conventions, or decisions. My position is that applying the labels expresses attitudes; it does not report an additional feature of the action.
By “morality” I mean the human practice of evaluating conduct from a standpoint that people present as not being indexed merely to what the actor wants, what advances a stipulated objective, what their society accepts, or what will be rewarded or punished. I think statements made from that standpoint express attitudes or opinions rather than describe another feature of the world.
Edit: the disputed term, “morality”, names this classificatory practice, and, if its judgments are made accurate by some feature of reality, whatever feature makes them accurate. (I claim there is no such feature of reality.)
(Much of the content there is redundant with what I’ve written in this thread.)
Responding more directly to your definition, I claim that the mathematical notion of fairness can match your notion of morality. If someone offers a 9:1 split in the ultimatum game, the unfairness of that action
is not about what happened (it’s about the disconnect between what happened and the Schelling point of FDT agents)
is not a prediction of the consequences (the other agent might reject or accept depending on who they are)
is not about a human law or custom
is not a statement about what any particular person wants (the FDT Schelling point is an objective, mathematical property)
is not a statement about the effective means to a chosen end (if the offerer is playing against a CDT agent it’s an effective move; if they’re playing against an FDT agent it’s not effective; it’s unfair regardless)
Distributing benefits is a central example of the situation where this kind of concept gets applied, and a central example of a moral situation.
Would you accept “fairness realism” as a crux? Like, if you agreed that fairness is a real property, would it constitute an update about whether morality is a real property? If fairness isn’t related to morality, why not? I think your definition admits it.
I want to check a few things to make sure I understand:
Suppose that the Christian God existed in a straightforward sense, entirely provable and possessing the all the power and status given to Him by the devout. In this world, if someone said “‘moral’ actions are those that follow the commandments of God”, you would say that (by definition) that can’t be a (sufficient) definition of morality, right? (It’d just be a claim about what God wants and/or the laws of God.)
Suppose that it turned out that, in all situations, lying was bad for all people, in terms of their own values, because of subtle, but real, reasons (eg their souls later go to hell). This wouldn’t be sufficient to say “lying is bad” (in the moral sense), because it’s merely “an effective means to a chosen end.” Yes?
If there were tiny, hard-to-detect fundamental particles (“WIMPs”) that gravitate towards people who donate to charity and are repelled by those who commit murder, saying “‘moral’ actions are those that attract WIMPs” would not, according to you, be a sufficient condition because it’s merely a prediction of the consequences of the act. How does this square with your earlier goalpost?
Good questions; perhaps I made a mistake somewhere in my definition and I should go back and adjust it.
Suppose that the Christian God existed in a straightforward sense, entirely provable and possessing the all the power and status given to Him by the devout. In this world, if someone said “‘moral’ actions are those that follow the commandments of God”, you would say that (by definition) that can’t be a (sufficient) definition of morality, right?
No, then moral actions would have some real consequences, and that would distinguish them from immoral actions. For example, you’d be sent to hell or be smitten or whatever.
(It’d just be a claim about what God wants and/or the laws of God.)
In this case you’re supposing God is the true ruler of the universe and the laws of Christianity are fundamental to the universe in the same way that the laws of physics are in ours. So then moral realism would be true. (Laws of God, if God were real, are different in this respect than laws made by humans, which only apply in certain places and cease to be real if people stop believing in them.)
saying “‘moral’ actions are those that attract WIMPs” would not, according to you, be a sufficient condition because it’s merely a prediction of the consequences of the act.
No, because crucially, it’s a prediction of the consequences of the moral status of the act. For example, suppose moral realism is true and the correct ethical system is hedonic utilitarianism. Then it’s usually immoral to hit people because it hurts, unless they’re a masochist and enjoy pain, in which case it’s morally good to hit them. In that case the rightness or wrongness of your action (and whether the morality particles accumulate or leave) is determined not by what you’re physically doing but by the morality of doing it.
The unifying theme with your examples is that you’re giving counterfactual things that would make our human notion of morality real, but in our universe, in real life, those things do not exist and there is no fact of the matter on whether these morally charged things are truly good/bad.
In this case you’re supposing God is the true ruler of the universe and the laws of Christianity are fundamental to the universe in the same way that the laws of physics are in ours. So then moral realism would be true. (Laws of God, if God were real, are different in this respect than laws made by humans, which only apply in certain places and cease to be real if people stop believing in them.)
Is the word “fundamental” important here? Like, suppose I say that I’m an economic realist, in that I believe that the laws of economics apply to our universe, but I don’t think they’re “fundamental” in the way that (some) laws of physics are. Rather, I think they apply to complex structures (eg humans and aliens) that meet certain criteria (marketplace dynamics).
(Sorry, I hadn’t attempted the taboo exercise yet, I was trying one more time at just giving the straightforward definition. Might retry but with all morality words tabooed, if I have time.)
Wait. If [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not in the category of things that can be true, then how can your WIMP example work? Didn’t you say you would change your mind if we detected WIMPs? How is this not in contradiction with the notion that it’s categorically not something that can be true?
Sorry. Clarifying: they are not things that it is categorically impossible for them to be true; they are things that have no evidence for their truth-aptness. If WIMPs were discovered then I would realize they are indeed in the category of truth-apt things.
I mean, I don’t see why discovering WIMPs would move [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims from not being truth-apt to being truth-apt. Truth-aptness is a claim about the meanings of words, not about the world. If a claim is truth-apt, that means there are ways the world could be that would render it true or false. So if the existence of WIMPS would render claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] true, then there are ways the world could be that would render [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims true or false. So [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt.
A hypothesis: maybe you don’t mean to say that [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not truth-apt. Rather, you mean to say that you can’t think of any truth-condition for [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims that isn’t absurd on its face. If this is your state of mind wrt [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims, then 1. [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt, but 2. they are almost certainly false, but 3. it’s not categorically impossible for them to be true (since there are certain outlandish states of the world that could render them true if they obtained, but those states of the world seem absurd on their face to you). This would also explain why you’re having some trouble saying what [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] does mean, since all the specific hypotheses (e.g. WIMPS) sound so absurd that they couldn’t be what people in general mean by [UNTRANSLATABLE-1].
Or, in the jargon: I am guessing that maybe you’re not a non-cognitivist, but rather an error theorist. (As it turns out, A.J. Ayer, the arch-noncognitivist, upon hearing J.L. Mackie, the arch-error theorist, give a talk, reportedly said that that’s what he should have said all along.)
Sorry if I’m being rude by proposing a hypothesis about what you “actually mean” that contradicts what you’ve explicitly said you mean. Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you or if you still think “not truth-apt” accurately expresses what you meant.
So if the existence of WIMPS would render claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] true, then there are ways the world could be that would render [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims true or false. So [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt.
No, because while the existence of WIMPs would show that some claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] were true, the non-existence of WIMPs leaves us with no way to assess the truth or falsehood of [UNTRANSLATABLE-1]. Since there are no WIMPs, as far as we know, claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] are still neither true nor false.
Let me rephrase my position without using the notion of truth-aptness.
There are no moral claims that are true or false. It is conceivable that in some hypothetical universe, there could be a state of the world where some moral claims are found to be true or false, but there’s no evidence that we are in such a universe.
I guess I’m still curious why, on your view, moral claims are not simply false. Like, the view that moral claims can never be true or false makes sense to me (standard non-cognitivist view). And the view that moral claims are all false, perhaps because they all make a false presupposition (e.g. the existence of WIMPs) makes sense to me (standard error-theory view). But I’m not sure what would motivate the view that, if something like WIMPs existed, then moral claims would be true, but in the actual world, where WIMPs don’t exist, moral claims are neither true nor false. What’s keeping you from just saying they’re all false? (Not saying this view is incoherent, per se, just very puzzled as to what would motivate you to hold it.)
Great question. My current best understanding is that moral claims are the opinions of the claimants. (This falls under emotivism, which is a non-cognitivist variety of anti-realism.) However, there is a counterfactual possible world in which moral claims are not merely opinions but have empirical evidence for or against them. But in our real universe, as far as anyone has been able to tell, there is no such evidence of that sort.
I guess I’m still curious why, on your view, moral claims are not simply false.
Let me try again to answer this. My position is:
You could imagine some counterfactual alternate universe, where moral claims are things that have evidence for or against them. Then they could be true or false.
But in real life, they are not that kind of thing. There is no such thing as direct evidence for or against any of them.
(There is indirect Bayesian evidence, e.g. many philosophy professors being ardent moral realists, so I have some small, nonzero credence that I’m mistaken. But that’s a feature of my epistemics and uncertainty, not of moral claims themselves.)
I claim “people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do. Is that an [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] fact? Why not?
“people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do, where “ought” means “is in one’s self-interest”. It is not a statement about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] because statements about what is in one’s self-interest are not the category of things that [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] is referring to.
That’s just not what “moral facts” means. Theorems of game theory can be facts and they can be relevant to what you should do in certain situations where you might also consider moral theories, but they aren’t moral claims. A moral claim is something like “murder is wrong” or “slavery is acceptable”. On the other hand, “murder is illegal” or “slavery was legal in the Roman Empire and the Confederate States of America” are not the kind of moral facts I’m talking about, and they (and game theory theorems) don’t prove/disprove moral realism.
I’m trying to get you to define what “moral fact” is, and contrast it with the normative statements that I can prove, so that we can move past semantics. It’s my understanding that the literature uses the term to refer to something like categorical imperatives—pressures to do certain things that apply to all reasoning beings, regardless of who they are.
They can’t be infinitely strong pressures since obviously people sometimes do bad things, if there are bad things, but they have to have some motive force where they bind into the agent’s motivational system. And since they’re universal, they can’t bind to the agent’s terminal values. Thus, I claim, in order for a categorical imperative to make any sense, we must be able to see it show up in convergent instrumental strategy/subgoals.
Are all instrumentally convergent subgoals categorical imperatives (“moral facts”)? I don’t think so. From my perspective, a defining characteristic of the thing that I want to look at is that the pressure comes from the social fabric. The standard Omohundro drives of survival, rationality, resource acquisition, etc, are all just as applicable on a deserted island. But I claim that once you posit other agents, even if they’re powerless or distant or hypothetical, then there are arguments in the same space as “don’t defect against your clone your dumbass” that come into play.
What I’d really like is for you to taboo “moral fact” or “moral” or “wrong” or whatever and try saying the equivalent of “Theorems of game theory are absolutely not moral facts.”
Here’s how it caches out it my semantics: “Theorems of game theory are absolutely not [facts that bear on how any agent, regardless of who they are, ought to act in certain classes of situations, according to their own values, because of the acausal interplay (including the establishment of Schelling points, red lines, and other coordination mechanisms) between that agent and the other agents in the universe (including distant, causally disconnected places)].” But according to me, the theorems of game theory are extremely relevant, so you probably have a different notion of morality. What is it?
I wonder how similar Robi’s view on morality is to the idea that a fairly close equivalent of moral facts irreducible to game theory is the statement about consequences which are hard to trace or to explain.
Suppose that polyamory is net negative for most people who try it because such relationships bring genuine happiness to those who possess a rare quality and are fragile unless the participants possess the quality. IMO under these conditions Aella would expect people to be thoroughly tested to determine whether they possess the right qualities, then taking measures to ensure that incompatible people don’t do things like wasting time with each other. However, I expect such measures to be bottlenecked on things like it being hard to explain to participants why they would be unlikely to succeed, so the simplest measure in a society of those whom we don’t trust to be geniuses is to simply ban polyamory wholesale.
Similarly, if we trust the rumors that gentle-parenting-as-millenials-describe-it is hard to pull off in a manner which doesn’t produce a misaligned kid, then, once a cohort of kids parented that way emerges and is studied, the ideal world would have parents avoid this practice unless it is verified that they can succeed at gently raising the kid, and a world like ours would also require that parents don’t erroneously believe that they can.
However, my[1] example of WIMOPs hating hybrids would have Yudkowsky’s case against morality being given ensure that I, unlike Robi, don’t follow the WIMOPs’ anti-hybrid stance unless the hybrids are degrading in ways which are proven, but hard to explain to the commoner.
To be precise, the example was actually coined by a Russian extremist author, but the extremist had the fictional hybrids and their descendants actually degrade.
I agree, theorems of game theory are extremely relevant to that thing you described.
Again, I googled “what is morality” and the default result was pretty good. It said:
I’m not a moral relativist; I don’t believe that what’s right or wrong is decided by the beliefs of society or the context in which the action is taken. I believe there is no truth value to whether actions are objectively right or wrong.
Maybe “the social fabric” was the wrong way to phrase it. I mean something closer to “the possibility and nature of other agents in an idealized sense” (eg the way game theory is not single-player decision theory) not the specific society that the agent exists in.
And yeah, I get that you don’t agree with me. I was trying to describe my perspective, not yours.
Yeah, I’m saying I think social fabric is not relevant to the cruxes of our disagreement.
I just googled “what are moral facts” and its answer is pretty good:
I would add:
Moral facts are moral claims that are true.
My position is that there are no moral claims that have any truth values: none of them are true and none of them are false. They are not truth-apt; they are not in the category of things that can be true or false.
Regarding your game theory example, your claim that (because being the kind of agent who cooperates in the prisoner’s dilemma will benefit you in the long run) “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma” (where “should” means “is in your best interest/increases your expected utility”) is not a moral claim of the kind I am talking about. The claim that “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma”, where “should” means “it is morally good to cooperate”, is a moral claim, but is neither true nor false. I’m asking for any evidence that it, or any other moral claim, is true or false.
Yeah, I donno. This doesn’t feel like you’re tabooing things correctly. Imagine I put on the alien hat and pretend I don’t know these silly earth words. Tell me what morality is.
Sure. I claim “people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do. Is that an [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] fact? Why not?
The first and second examples are presumably things that are illegal, antisocial, and violations of the sorts of red-lines that can be drawn behind the veil of ignorance, among many other things. What makes them [UNTRANSLATABLE-3] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-5]? Are [UNTRANSLATABLE-3] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-5] synonyms? Do the [UNTRANSLATABLE-8] and [UNTRANSLATABLE-9] modifiers matter?
Sure. That’s basically what “fact” means.
Wait. If [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not in the category of things that can be true, then how can your WIMP example work? Didn’t you say you would change your mind if we detected WIMPs? How is this not in contradiction with the notion that it’s categorically not something that can be true?
Cool. I hear you that you don’t consider categorical imperatives to be [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] facts. But I still don’t know what you mean by [UNTRANSLATABLE-1]. Help! 👽
Defining morality while tabooing moral, ethical, right, wrong, good, bad, ought, should, duty, obligation, permissible, virtue, and cognate words:
Humans sometimes classify actions, intentions, people, institutions, and outcomes using positive, negative, or neutral labels that supposedly do more than describe what happened, predict consequences, report a law or custom, state what anyone wants, or identify an effective means to a chosen end.
Central examples of things that receive these classifications concern causing pain, killing, deception, coercion, keeping promises, helping people in distress, and distributing burdens and benefits. They contrast with judgments about which chess move wins, which investment earns more money, which action is legal, which behavior is fashionable, or which policy best fulfills a specified utility function.
The disputed question is whether some applications of these labels accurately represent features or relations that are not made accurate merely by anyone’s preferences, commitments, conventions, or decisions. My position is that applying the labels expresses attitudes; it does not report an additional feature of the action.
By “morality” I mean the human practice of evaluating conduct from a standpoint that people present as not being indexed merely to what the actor wants, what advances a stipulated objective, what their society accepts, or what will be rewarded or punished. I think statements made from that standpoint express attitudes or opinions rather than describe another feature of the world.
Edit: the disputed term, “morality”, names this classificatory practice, and, if its judgments are made accurate by some feature of reality, whatever feature makes them accurate. (I claim there is no such feature of reality.)
I’m not sure where to put the link, but I compiled a bunch of my thoughts on the topic and wrote them up as a blog post: https://utopiandreams.substack.com/p/moral-law
(Much of the content there is redundant with what I’ve written in this thread.)
Responding more directly to your definition, I claim that the mathematical notion of fairness can match your notion of morality. If someone offers a 9:1 split in the ultimatum game, the unfairness of that action
is not about what happened (it’s about the disconnect between what happened and the Schelling point of FDT agents)
is not a prediction of the consequences (the other agent might reject or accept depending on who they are)
is not about a human law or custom
is not a statement about what any particular person wants (the FDT Schelling point is an objective, mathematical property)
is not a statement about the effective means to a chosen end (if the offerer is playing against a CDT agent it’s an effective move; if they’re playing against an FDT agent it’s not effective; it’s unfair regardless)
Distributing benefits is a central example of the situation where this kind of concept gets applied, and a central example of a moral situation.
Would you accept “fairness realism” as a crux? Like, if you agreed that fairness is a real property, would it constitute an update about whether morality is a real property? If fairness isn’t related to morality, why not? I think your definition admits it.
Excellent. Thanks for the real taboo!
I want to check a few things to make sure I understand:
Suppose that the Christian God existed in a straightforward sense, entirely provable and possessing the all the power and status given to Him by the devout. In this world, if someone said “‘moral’ actions are those that follow the commandments of God”, you would say that (by definition) that can’t be a (sufficient) definition of morality, right? (It’d just be a claim about what God wants and/or the laws of God.)
Suppose that it turned out that, in all situations, lying was bad for all people, in terms of their own values, because of subtle, but real, reasons (eg their souls later go to hell). This wouldn’t be sufficient to say “lying is bad” (in the moral sense), because it’s merely “an effective means to a chosen end.” Yes?
If there were tiny, hard-to-detect fundamental particles (“WIMPs”) that gravitate towards people who donate to charity and are repelled by those who commit murder, saying “‘moral’ actions are those that attract WIMPs” would not, according to you, be a sufficient condition because it’s merely a prediction of the consequences of the act. How does this square with your earlier goalpost?
Good questions; perhaps I made a mistake somewhere in my definition and I should go back and adjust it.
No, then moral actions would have some real consequences, and that would distinguish them from immoral actions. For example, you’d be sent to hell or be smitten or whatever.
In this case you’re supposing God is the true ruler of the universe and the laws of Christianity are fundamental to the universe in the same way that the laws of physics are in ours. So then moral realism would be true. (Laws of God, if God were real, are different in this respect than laws made by humans, which only apply in certain places and cease to be real if people stop believing in them.)
No, because crucially, it’s a prediction of the consequences of the moral status of the act. For example, suppose moral realism is true and the correct ethical system is hedonic utilitarianism. Then it’s usually immoral to hit people because it hurts, unless they’re a masochist and enjoy pain, in which case it’s morally good to hit them. In that case the rightness or wrongness of your action (and whether the morality particles accumulate or leave) is determined not by what you’re physically doing but by the morality of doing it.
The unifying theme with your examples is that you’re giving counterfactual things that would make our human notion of morality real, but in our universe, in real life, those things do not exist and there is no fact of the matter on whether these morally charged things are truly good/bad.
Is the word “fundamental” important here? Like, suppose I say that I’m an economic realist, in that I believe that the laws of economics apply to our universe, but I don’t think they’re “fundamental” in the way that (some) laws of physics are. Rather, I think they apply to complex structures (eg humans and aliens) that meet certain criteria (marketplace dynamics).
(Sorry, I hadn’t attempted the taboo exercise yet, I was trying one more time at just giving the straightforward definition. Might retry but with all morality words tabooed, if I have time.)
Sorry. Clarifying: they are not things that it is categorically impossible for them to be true; they are things that have no evidence for their truth-aptness. If WIMPs were discovered then I would realize they are indeed in the category of truth-apt things.
I mean, I don’t see why discovering WIMPs would move [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims from not being truth-apt to being truth-apt. Truth-aptness is a claim about the meanings of words, not about the world. If a claim is truth-apt, that means there are ways the world could be that would render it true or false. So if the existence of WIMPS would render claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] true, then there are ways the world could be that would render [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims true or false. So [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt.
A hypothesis: maybe you don’t mean to say that [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not truth-apt. Rather, you mean to say that you can’t think of any truth-condition for [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims that isn’t absurd on its face. If this is your state of mind wrt [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims, then 1. [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt, but 2. they are almost certainly false, but 3. it’s not categorically impossible for them to be true (since there are certain outlandish states of the world that could render them true if they obtained, but those states of the world seem absurd on their face to you). This would also explain why you’re having some trouble saying what [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] does mean, since all the specific hypotheses (e.g. WIMPS) sound so absurd that they couldn’t be what people in general mean by [UNTRANSLATABLE-1].
Or, in the jargon: I am guessing that maybe you’re not a non-cognitivist, but rather an error theorist. (As it turns out, A.J. Ayer, the arch-noncognitivist, upon hearing J.L. Mackie, the arch-error theorist, give a talk, reportedly said that that’s what he should have said all along.)
Sorry if I’m being rude by proposing a hypothesis about what you “actually mean” that contradicts what you’ve explicitly said you mean. Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you or if you still think “not truth-apt” accurately expresses what you meant.
No, because while the existence of WIMPs would show that some claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] were true, the non-existence of WIMPs leaves us with no way to assess the truth or falsehood of [UNTRANSLATABLE-1]. Since there are no WIMPs, as far as we know, claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] are still neither true nor false.
Let me rephrase my position without using the notion of truth-aptness.
There are no moral claims that are true or false. It is conceivable that in some hypothetical universe, there could be a state of the world where some moral claims are found to be true or false, but there’s no evidence that we are in such a universe.
I guess I’m still curious why, on your view, moral claims are not simply false. Like, the view that moral claims can never be true or false makes sense to me (standard non-cognitivist view). And the view that moral claims are all false, perhaps because they all make a false presupposition (e.g. the existence of WIMPs) makes sense to me (standard error-theory view). But I’m not sure what would motivate the view that, if something like WIMPs existed, then moral claims would be true, but in the actual world, where WIMPs don’t exist, moral claims are neither true nor false. What’s keeping you from just saying they’re all false? (Not saying this view is incoherent, per se, just very puzzled as to what would motivate you to hold it.)
Great question. My current best understanding is that moral claims are the opinions of the claimants. (This falls under emotivism, which is a non-cognitivist variety of anti-realism.) However, there is a counterfactual possible world in which moral claims are not merely opinions but have empirical evidence for or against them. But in our real universe, as far as anyone has been able to tell, there is no such evidence of that sort.
Let me try again to answer this. My position is:
You could imagine some counterfactual alternate universe, where moral claims are things that have evidence for or against them. Then they could be true or false.
But in real life, they are not that kind of thing. There is no such thing as direct evidence for or against any of them.
(There is indirect Bayesian evidence, e.g. many philosophy professors being ardent moral realists, so I have some small, nonzero credence that I’m mistaken. But that’s a feature of my epistemics and uncertainty, not of moral claims themselves.)
“people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do, where “ought” means “is in one’s self-interest”. It is not a statement about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] because statements about what is in one’s self-interest are not the category of things that [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] is referring to.