In general, I’d like to offer (without proof) the following rationalist ethical inequality:
Your true valuation of all consequences + a good decision theory ≥ any particular deontology.
Where ‘≥’ is defined, of course, as “gives better expected consequences than”. It’s the obvious tautology but bizarrely enough people do get it wrong enough that it’s worth making a post on!
Aren’t they the same thing? If A describes morality better than B, clearly you should_morality follow A more than you should_morality follow B. And vice versa.
If you say “A better describes human morality than B”, you’re just making an anthropologist-like statement about the behavior code of a certain tribe (“humans”).
Well, you make a good point. They’re not strictly identical since “better describes human morality than” has an interpretation which has different truth values in counterfactual worlds full of murderers, whereas “better describes morality than” is explicitly independent of the counterfactual values of humans. So… I retract my statement, I guess?
I mean, I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”, which is a statement about what is right and wrong, and not a statement about what humans in any particular counterfactual world might think is “right” and “wrong”. Just because in this world “human morality” and “morality” have the same referent, and because assuming that orthonormal was talking anthropologically about humans would be a weird thing to do.
(I blame language, for having no built-in support for making this “dereferencing” explicit, except by actually pasting the referent itself in, as I did in ‘I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”’.)
Where ‘≥’ is defined, of course, as “gives better expected consequences than”. It’s the obvious tautology but bizarrely enough people do get it wrong enough that it’s worth making a post on!
Huh. I took ‘≥’ to mean “better describes human morality than”
In which case the claim is just false. That does not better describe human morality.
It seemed a normative ‘≥’ to me.
Aren’t they the same thing? If A describes morality better than B, clearly you should_morality follow A more than you should_morality follow B. And vice versa.
“Morality” != “human morality”.
If you say “A better describes human morality than B”, you’re just making an anthropologist-like statement about the behavior code of a certain tribe (“humans”).
Well, you make a good point. They’re not strictly identical since “better describes human morality than” has an interpretation which has different truth values in counterfactual worlds full of murderers, whereas “better describes morality than” is explicitly independent of the counterfactual values of humans. So… I retract my statement, I guess?
I mean, I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”, which is a statement about what is right and wrong, and not a statement about what humans in any particular counterfactual world might think is “right” and “wrong”. Just because in this world “human morality” and “morality” have the same referent, and because assuming that orthonormal was talking anthropologically about humans would be a weird thing to do.
(I blame language, for having no built-in support for making this “dereferencing” explicit, except by actually pasting the referent itself in, as I did in ‘I assumed that Jack meant “better describes morality than”’.)