Robin writes: do you think your comments have a better than random chance of being true?
That’s tough to answer. It can be hard to distinguish the things I’ve stated with those who claim to disagree with me. Eliezer agrees that there is no “moral stuff”, but states that he has a different reaction (while I also deny having the reaction he denies). So what would it mean for my ideas to be false? It would mean that normative claims have some truth values, which in my interpretation means that Universe A where normative claim X is true must be detectably different from Universe B where normative claim X is false. If someone took a different interpretation that a claim can have truth value while that value makes no detectable difference it makes me wonder how different such a claim is from those of the type “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and why anyone would care about the truth value of such a claim. So if I am wrong it would essentially mean that normative facts can be empirically discovered in an objective manner. People have been trying to figure out what is “good” for an extremely long time, and there is not yet a generally agreed upon body of knowledge in that area nor any method for building one. Proponents of religions at least hold out the possibility of the divine manifesting itself to us or an afterlife in which we encounter it, but disagreements on norms seem as likely to be settled as an argument about what Sherlock Holmes’ favorite color was. So what would it mean if your views on the nature of morality were wrong?
If yes, why wouldn’t spending more time thinking about the subject improve one’s chances? Well, I don’t expect that I would become more wrong if I read and thought more, just as is the case with theology and astrology. I also likely wouldn’t become more wrong about any of those subjects (plus morality) if I spent more time reading the backs of cereal boxes. Sure, nobody has ever discovered any moral facts by reading them, but I already stated I didn’t think anyone had made any progress reading and thinking about ethics. It would certainly be odd if everyone else was incapable of making such discoveries but I was not.
If not, how could you enjoy making random claims? If you randomly picked a digit from 0 to 9 (inclusive) I could have a good time arguing that it was the best of the bunch (that’s why I can feel free to muse about waking up with a blue tentacle when I know it won’t happen). Eventually I would get bored of that and ask why we care what the best digit is, which is less resemblant of a “random” claim and more of the claim I’ve made which is in dispute here. To me arguments about what book/movie/etc is better than another are essentially the same, except that I get to pick which one I stick up for.
Douglas writes: You used an example of moral progress produced by a philosopher: the word consequentialist.
I first encountered consequentialism in verbal form with the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?”. I don’t know the philosopher who came up with it, but I can be confident that I would have come across it otherwise, even without reading any philosophy. I don’t consider the word “consequentialism” to be an advancement in ethics, it is more meta-ethics. It is not even generally agreed by people who disagree with me that consequentialism is true, so I don’t know how it can be considered an “advancement”. How much of an advancement in it in other fields if some facts are not established with any degree of certainty but the uncertain facts themselves are given names?
Anna writes if faith is taken out of the equation will people be more or less inclined to want to be moralistic.
I admitted to myself I was agnostic/atheist/agnotheist around when I came to the conclusion about morality discussed above, but I don’t think my behavior has really changed much. I suppose that back when I had strong religious beliefs I had planned not to do such things as having myself taken off life support in the event that such a thing was an issue because of the sinful nature of suicide, but that was far-off enough I can’t really know how I would have acted. Even then I didn’t really see anything wrong with other people deciding to do so, so perhaps I really didn’t change much.
Robin writes: do you think your comments have a better than random chance of being true? That’s tough to answer. It can be hard to distinguish the things I’ve stated with those who claim to disagree with me. Eliezer agrees that there is no “moral stuff”, but states that he has a different reaction (while I also deny having the reaction he denies). So what would it mean for my ideas to be false? It would mean that normative claims have some truth values, which in my interpretation means that Universe A where normative claim X is true must be detectably different from Universe B where normative claim X is false. If someone took a different interpretation that a claim can have truth value while that value makes no detectable difference it makes me wonder how different such a claim is from those of the type “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and why anyone would care about the truth value of such a claim. So if I am wrong it would essentially mean that normative facts can be empirically discovered in an objective manner. People have been trying to figure out what is “good” for an extremely long time, and there is not yet a generally agreed upon body of knowledge in that area nor any method for building one. Proponents of religions at least hold out the possibility of the divine manifesting itself to us or an afterlife in which we encounter it, but disagreements on norms seem as likely to be settled as an argument about what Sherlock Holmes’ favorite color was. So what would it mean if your views on the nature of morality were wrong?
If yes, why wouldn’t spending more time thinking about the subject improve one’s chances? Well, I don’t expect that I would become more wrong if I read and thought more, just as is the case with theology and astrology. I also likely wouldn’t become more wrong about any of those subjects (plus morality) if I spent more time reading the backs of cereal boxes. Sure, nobody has ever discovered any moral facts by reading them, but I already stated I didn’t think anyone had made any progress reading and thinking about ethics. It would certainly be odd if everyone else was incapable of making such discoveries but I was not.
If not, how could you enjoy making random claims? If you randomly picked a digit from 0 to 9 (inclusive) I could have a good time arguing that it was the best of the bunch (that’s why I can feel free to muse about waking up with a blue tentacle when I know it won’t happen). Eventually I would get bored of that and ask why we care what the best digit is, which is less resemblant of a “random” claim and more of the claim I’ve made which is in dispute here. To me arguments about what book/movie/etc is better than another are essentially the same, except that I get to pick which one I stick up for.
Douglas writes: You used an example of moral progress produced by a philosopher: the word consequentialist. I first encountered consequentialism in verbal form with the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?”. I don’t know the philosopher who came up with it, but I can be confident that I would have come across it otherwise, even without reading any philosophy. I don’t consider the word “consequentialism” to be an advancement in ethics, it is more meta-ethics. It is not even generally agreed by people who disagree with me that consequentialism is true, so I don’t know how it can be considered an “advancement”. How much of an advancement in it in other fields if some facts are not established with any degree of certainty but the uncertain facts themselves are given names?
Anna writes if faith is taken out of the equation will people be more or less inclined to want to be moralistic. I admitted to myself I was agnostic/atheist/agnotheist around when I came to the conclusion about morality discussed above, but I don’t think my behavior has really changed much. I suppose that back when I had strong religious beliefs I had planned not to do such things as having myself taken off life support in the event that such a thing was an issue because of the sinful nature of suicide, but that was far-off enough I can’t really know how I would have acted. Even then I didn’t really see anything wrong with other people deciding to do so, so perhaps I really didn’t change much.