Thanks! That makes sense, and I should have said earlier that I already suspected I likely understood your point and you expressed yourself well – it’s just that (1) I’m always hesitant to put words in people’s mouths, so I didn’t want to say I was confident I could paraphrase your position, and (2) whenever you make posts about metaethics, I’m wondering “oh no, does this apply to me, am I one of the people who is doing the thing he says one shouldn’t do?,” and so I was interested in prompting you to be more concrete about what level of detailedness someone’s confident opinion in that area would have to be before you think they reveal themselves as overconfident.
By “metaethics” I mean “the nature of values/morality”, which I think is how it’s used in academic philosophy.
Yeah, makes sense. I think academic use is basically that with some added baggage that adds mostly confusion. If I were to sum up what I think the use is in academic philosophy, I would say “the nature of values/morality, at a very abstract level and looked at from the lens of analyzing language.” For some reason, academic philosophy is oddly focused on the nature of moral language rather than morality/values directly. (I find it a confusing/unhelpful tradition of, “Language comes first, then comes the territory.”) As a result, classical metaethical positions at best say pretty abstract things about what values are. They might say things like “Values are irreducible (nonnaturalism)” or “Values can be reduced to nonmoral terminology like desires/goals, conscious states, etc. (naturalism),” but without actually telling us the specifics of that connection/reduction. If we were to ask, “Well, how can we know what the right values are?”—then it’s not the case that most metaethicists would consider themselves obviously responsible for answering it! Sure, they might have a personal take, but they may write about their personal take in a way that doesn’t connect their answer to why they endorse a high-level metaethical theory like nonnaturalist moral realism.
Basically, there are (at least) two ways to do metaethics, metaethics via analysis of moral language and metaethics via observation of how people do normative ethics in applied contexts like EA/rationality/longtermism. Academic philosophy does one while LW does the other. And so, to academic philosophers, if they read a comment like the one Jan Kulveit left here about metaethics, my guess is that they would think he’s confusing metaethics for something else entirely (like maybe, “applied ethics but done in a circumspect way, with awareness of the contested and possibly under-defined nature of what we’re even trying to do”).
Thanks! That makes sense, and I should have said earlier that I already suspected I likely understood your point and you expressed yourself well – it’s just that (1) I’m always hesitant to put words in people’s mouths, so I didn’t want to say I was confident I could paraphrase your position, and (2) whenever you make posts about metaethics, I’m wondering “oh no, does this apply to me, am I one of the people who is doing the thing he says one shouldn’t do?,” and so I was interested in prompting you to be more concrete about what level of detailedness someone’s confident opinion in that area would have to be before you think they reveal themselves as overconfident.
Yeah, makes sense. I think academic use is basically that with some added baggage that adds mostly confusion. If I were to sum up what I think the use is in academic philosophy, I would say “the nature of values/morality, at a very abstract level and looked at from the lens of analyzing language.” For some reason, academic philosophy is oddly focused on the nature of moral language rather than morality/values directly. (I find it a confusing/unhelpful tradition of, “Language comes first, then comes the territory.”) As a result, classical metaethical positions at best say pretty abstract things about what values are. They might say things like “Values are irreducible (nonnaturalism)” or “Values can be reduced to nonmoral terminology like desires/goals, conscious states, etc. (naturalism),” but without actually telling us the specifics of that connection/reduction. If we were to ask, “Well, how can we know what the right values are?”—then it’s not the case that most metaethicists would consider themselves obviously responsible for answering it! Sure, they might have a personal take, but they may write about their personal take in a way that doesn’t connect their answer to why they endorse a high-level metaethical theory like nonnaturalist moral realism.
Basically, there are (at least) two ways to do metaethics, metaethics via analysis of moral language and metaethics via observation of how people do normative ethics in applied contexts like EA/rationality/longtermism. Academic philosophy does one while LW does the other. And so, to academic philosophers, if they read a comment like the one Jan Kulveit left here about metaethics, my guess is that they would think he’s confusing metaethics for something else entirely (like maybe, “applied ethics but done in a circumspect way, with awareness of the contested and possibly under-defined nature of what we’re even trying to do”).