Hmm, I don’t buy the P-evildoer argument because I think it’s smuggling in what you’re trying to prove. The move from “P-evildoers seem inconceivable to me” to “therefore moral facts must supervene on physical facts” only seems to work if you already believe in some kind of natural morality. If “morality” is instead simply behavioral norms, then it all falls apart because of course there can be people who adopt different norms, though those norms may be better or worse for getting people what they want.
For what it’s worth, I’m more sympathetic to game theoretic arguments about optimal norms, which ends up looking kind of like a Kantian conception of morality, but with all the metaphysical baggage of Kant dropped.
As I said, I was bracketing moral meaninglessness and moral trivialism rather than arguing against them. It’s possible that your view would count as moral meaninglessness (if moral statements taken as properties of possible worlds are simply ill-typed, since they instead relations between possible worlds and something else.… though that raises the question of why that something else isn’t wrapped into the possible world).
There are people who adopt different norms but they behave different. So this wouldn’t be a case of a single physical person having multiple possible norms.
I suppose you could say that the moral properties specify a matrix of how each physical agent in a universe judges each other physical agent. Then the same physically identical person could be judged multiple ways, but the same universe generates the same judgments. And the mapping from physical universes to these matrices is necessary across possible worlds.
My intuition is that, for similar reasons as to why the judgments of dieties causing different moral judgments of the same physical person is implausible, so it is also implausible that how morally someone is acting requires further facts of who is judging them. This would be like, in the case of the matrix of moral judgments, the moral properties of a person’s actions depend on which distant aliens exist, because different distant aliens would have different judgments of this person’s actions. But my intuition is rather that the moral properties of the person’s actions are more local than that, they don’t depend on further facts about physically distant entities.
Hmm, I don’t buy the P-evildoer argument because I think it’s smuggling in what you’re trying to prove. The move from “P-evildoers seem inconceivable to me” to “therefore moral facts must supervene on physical facts” only seems to work if you already believe in some kind of natural morality. If “morality” is instead simply behavioral norms, then it all falls apart because of course there can be people who adopt different norms, though those norms may be better or worse for getting people what they want.
For what it’s worth, I’m more sympathetic to game theoretic arguments about optimal norms, which ends up looking kind of like a Kantian conception of morality, but with all the metaphysical baggage of Kant dropped.
As I said, I was bracketing moral meaninglessness and moral trivialism rather than arguing against them. It’s possible that your view would count as moral meaninglessness (if moral statements taken as properties of possible worlds are simply ill-typed, since they instead relations between possible worlds and something else.… though that raises the question of why that something else isn’t wrapped into the possible world).
There are people who adopt different norms but they behave different. So this wouldn’t be a case of a single physical person having multiple possible norms.
I suppose you could say that the moral properties specify a matrix of how each physical agent in a universe judges each other physical agent. Then the same physically identical person could be judged multiple ways, but the same universe generates the same judgments. And the mapping from physical universes to these matrices is necessary across possible worlds.
My intuition is that, for similar reasons as to why the judgments of dieties causing different moral judgments of the same physical person is implausible, so it is also implausible that how morally someone is acting requires further facts of who is judging them. This would be like, in the case of the matrix of moral judgments, the moral properties of a person’s actions depend on which distant aliens exist, because different distant aliens would have different judgments of this person’s actions. But my intuition is rather that the moral properties of the person’s actions are more local than that, they don’t depend on further facts about physically distant entities.