I may be a little slow and missing something, but here are my jumbled thoughts.
I found moral nihilism convincing for a brief time. The argument seems convincing: just about any moral statement you can think of, some people on earth have rejected it. You can’t appeal to universal human values… we’ve tried, and I don’t think there’s a single one that has stood up to scrutiny as actually being literally universal. You always end up having to say, “Well, those humans are aberrant and evil.”
Then I realized that there must be something more complicated going on. Else how explain the fact that I am curious about what is moral? I’ve changed my mind on moral questions—pretty damn foundational ones. I’ve experienced moral ignorance (“I don’t know what is right here.”) I don’t interact with morality as a preference. Or, when I do, sometimes I remember not to, and pull myself back.
I know people who claim to interact with morality as a preference -- only “I want to do this,” never “I must do this.” I’m skeptical. If you could really have chosen any set of principles … why did you happen to choose principles that match pretty well with being a person of integrity? Quite a coincidence, that.
It’s the curiosity and ignorance that really stumps me. I can be as curious about moral matters, or feel ignorant about moral matters, as about anything else. Why would I be curious, if not to learn how things really are? Is curiosity just another thing I have a preference for?
But It’s weird to talk about a preference for curiosity, because I’m not sure that if you say “I want to be curious” that you’re actually being curious. Curiosity is “I want to know why the sky is blue.” It refers to something. I doubt it’s coherent to make a principle of curiosity. (Curiosity is one of the Virtues of Rationality, but it’s understood that you aren’t curious by force of will, or by deciding to value curiosity. You’re curious only if you want to know the answer.)
I’ve been reading Bury the Chains, a history of British abolitionism, and the beginning does give the impression of morals as something to be either discovered or invented.
The situation starts with vast majority in Britain not noticing there was anything wrong with slavery. A slave ship captain who later became a prominent abolitionist is working improving his morals—by giving up swearing.
Once slavery became a public issue, opposition to it grew pretty quickly, but the story was surprising to me because I thought of morals as something fairly obvious.
Yes!
And I think the salient point is not only that 18th century Englishmen didn’t think slavery was wrong—again, it’s a fact that people disagree radically about morals—but that the story of the abolition of slavery looks a lot like people learning for the first time that it was wrong. Changing their minds in response to seeing a diagram of a slave ship, for instance. “Oh. Wow. I need to update.” (Or, to be more historically accurate, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”)
I suspect that, at an evolutionary equilibrium, we wouldn’t have the concept of “morality”. There would be things we would naturally want to do, and things we would naturally not want to do; but not things that we thought we ought to want to do but didn’t.
I don’t know if that would apply to reflective equilibrium.
I think agents in reflective equilibrium would (almost, but not quite, by definition) not have “morality” in that sense (unsatisfied higher-order desires, though that’s definitely not the local common usage of “morality”) except in some very rare equilibria with higher-order desires to remain inconsistent. However, they might value humans having to work to satisfy their own higher-order desires.
I may be a little slow and missing something, but here are my jumbled thoughts.
I found moral nihilism convincing for a brief time. The argument seems convincing: just about any moral statement you can think of, some people on earth have rejected it. You can’t appeal to universal human values… we’ve tried, and I don’t think there’s a single one that has stood up to scrutiny as actually being literally universal. You always end up having to say, “Well, those humans are aberrant and evil.”
Then I realized that there must be something more complicated going on. Else how explain the fact that I am curious about what is moral? I’ve changed my mind on moral questions—pretty damn foundational ones. I’ve experienced moral ignorance (“I don’t know what is right here.”) I don’t interact with morality as a preference. Or, when I do, sometimes I remember not to, and pull myself back.
I know people who claim to interact with morality as a preference -- only “I want to do this,” never “I must do this.” I’m skeptical. If you could really have chosen any set of principles … why did you happen to choose principles that match pretty well with being a person of integrity? Quite a coincidence, that.
It’s the curiosity and ignorance that really stumps me. I can be as curious about moral matters, or feel ignorant about moral matters, as about anything else. Why would I be curious, if not to learn how things really are? Is curiosity just another thing I have a preference for?
But It’s weird to talk about a preference for curiosity, because I’m not sure that if you say “I want to be curious” that you’re actually being curious. Curiosity is “I want to know why the sky is blue.” It refers to something. I doubt it’s coherent to make a principle of curiosity. (Curiosity is one of the Virtues of Rationality, but it’s understood that you aren’t curious by force of will, or by deciding to value curiosity. You’re curious only if you want to know the answer.)
I’ve been reading Bury the Chains, a history of British abolitionism, and the beginning does give the impression of morals as something to be either discovered or invented.
The situation starts with vast majority in Britain not noticing there was anything wrong with slavery. A slave ship captain who later became a prominent abolitionist is working improving his morals—by giving up swearing.
Once slavery became a public issue, opposition to it grew pretty quickly, but the story was surprising to me because I thought of morals as something fairly obvious.
Yes! And I think the salient point is not only that 18th century Englishmen didn’t think slavery was wrong—again, it’s a fact that people disagree radically about morals—but that the story of the abolition of slavery looks a lot like people learning for the first time that it was wrong. Changing their minds in response to seeing a diagram of a slave ship, for instance. “Oh. Wow. I need to update.” (Or, to be more historically accurate, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”)
This is an excellent question. I think it’s curiosity about where reflective equilibrium would take you.
I suspect that, at an evolutionary equilibrium, we wouldn’t have the concept of “morality”. There would be things we would naturally want to do, and things we would naturally not want to do; but not things that we thought we ought to want to do but didn’t.
I don’t know if that would apply to reflective equilibrium.
I think agents in reflective equilibrium would (almost, but not quite, by definition) not have “morality” in that sense (unsatisfied higher-order desires, though that’s definitely not the local common usage of “morality”) except in some very rare equilibria with higher-order desires to remain inconsistent. However, they might value humans having to work to satisfy their own higher-order desires.