I find the response of the LW community schizophrenic. If someone writes a post advocating moral realism, they get jumped on for being religious. Yet when I wrote this post asking whether there is some evolution-free moral code that should influence the choices of organism-designers, I got jumped on for even presenting as one possibility that moral realism might be false.
Claiming that the “naturalistic fallacy” is a fallacy is, I think, identical to defending moral realism. You can’t even define the naturalistic fallacy without presuming moral realism.
Your post was poorly received because it tackled a confusing topic, and failed to bring clarity. All of the supposed counter-arguments are just confabulations. I expect Less Wrongers to jump on any attempt to analyze morality in abstract terms, regardless of its conclusion, because there’s an extensive body of philosophical literature showing that such attempts produce only concentrated confusion.
Also, you shouldn’t expect different individuals within a community to all advocate consistent positions. If they did, that would mean that either the question was an easy one and not worthy of further discussion, or the community was broken and suffering from groupthink.
I agree with jimrandomh. One should expect different people to have different opinions. Furthermore, we’re most likely to respond to things that we find obviously wrong—thus, where the community is not in consensus, expect to be ‘jumped on’ no matter which position you advocate.
I find the response of the LW community schizophrenic. If someone writes a post advocating moral realism, they get jumped on for being religious. Yet when I wrote this post asking whether there is some evolution-free moral code that should influence the choices of organism-designers, I got jumped on for even presenting as one possibility that moral realism might be false.
Claiming that the “naturalistic fallacy” is a fallacy is, I think, identical to defending moral realism. You can’t even define the naturalistic fallacy without presuming moral realism.
Your post was poorly received because it tackled a confusing topic, and failed to bring clarity. All of the supposed counter-arguments are just confabulations. I expect Less Wrongers to jump on any attempt to analyze morality in abstract terms, regardless of its conclusion, because there’s an extensive body of philosophical literature showing that such attempts produce only concentrated confusion.
Also, you shouldn’t expect different individuals within a community to all advocate consistent positions. If they did, that would mean that either the question was an easy one and not worthy of further discussion, or the community was broken and suffering from groupthink.
I agree with jimrandomh. One should expect different people to have different opinions. Furthermore, we’re most likely to respond to things that we find obviously wrong—thus, where the community is not in consensus, expect to be ‘jumped on’ no matter which position you advocate.
-a moral realist of sorts