I bracketed the possibility of moral meaninglessness, I don’t have a strong argument against it. I think the relevance of “moral” is in possible principles it intuitively satiafies like the no P-evildoers principle. Intuitions about something can point towards different possible mathematical objects satisfying some of these intuitions. In some cases the mathematical object becomes a standard meaning of the term, in other cases not. So the exercise has to do with seeing what certain principles derived from moral intuitions would point to as possible mathematical objects.
I’m also distinguishing between the idea that moral facts are logically inferrable from physical facts (logical supervenience) from a weaker notion of derivability from T∗ which includes metaphysical and mathematical axioms. As an anology, a certain axiomatization of geometry may under-determine properties of triangles, yet perhaps those properties could be determined through additional metaphysical axioms ensuring that the triangles in the system really match a priori spatial intuition of triangles.
Unless I deeply misunderstand, this just moves the question out one level to “which axioms apply to moral calculus?”. For physical systems, we can propose axioms and test them against observations. When we find a set we cannot disprove, we call it good. What’s the equivalent process for moral observation?
I’m agnostic about p-zombies: I can’t detect qualia in other humans, though I give them the benefit of the doubt due to physical similarity with what I think is my experience-organ. I have no clue if y’all are zombies or not. I’m double-skeptical of p-evildoers, as I can’t even identify in myself what is talked about by “evil”, let alone knowing how others experience it.
See paragraph starting with “We don’t have the framework to rule this out, so far.”
A common sort of view is “Even if we knew all the physical facts, we wouldn’t know moral facts, because there is no way to get ought from is. Woe is us! We may never know the true morality even if we knew all physical facts!”
I think there is something wrong with this, specifically in that it seems morally supernaturalist. It’s asserting there is a real fact of the matter of morality, which isn’t determined by physical facts and so on. But that seems like the P-evildoers scenario. This person imagines that it is a possible state of affairs that the same physical person taking the same physical actions could have different moral properties.
I also think that, ironically, extreme skepticism of moral realism might indicate some sort of hidden metaphysical constraint applied to moral judgments, which point towards moral realism. As an example, perhaps someone asserts, “Morality has to be real, because normative actions and judgments are tied to the process of epistemology itself, e.g. checking claims and not lying.”. One sort of objection I’ve heard is “But this is too weak, it doesn’t rule out genocide being morally permissible”. That seems to show a pre-existing strong belief about morality, at least one conditional on moral realism.
I’m not going as far as to propose a specific axiom schema for morality, but I’m suggesting some general properties it should have. In cases like “temperature”, a scientific/physical definition displaces a more vague intuitive one. In the case of “morality”, that seems to be harder, because of people’s strong but un-formalized beliefs about it. Those strong beliefs, though, point towards possible constraints the axiomatic system must satisfy.
To go out on more of a limb, I think, conditional on moral naturalism, it is likely that morality is a physically local property, not depending on the actual facts of distant aliens (in contrast to theoretically accessible epistemic states about distant aliens). This is similar to the no P-evildoers principle, in that the same physical person taking the same physical actions can’t possibly have two incompatible moral properties which depend on very distant physical entities.
Woe is us! We may never know the true morality even if we knew all physical facts!”
I pretty strongly suspect that there is no such thing as “true morality”. There’s nothing to know, even if we know all the physical facts. We can know how individual segments of space-time (we call them “people”) process and model themselves and each other, but we already know a bit about that, and there’s no indication that it’s any deeper or more “true” than any other evolved cognition.
Genocide is morally impermissable in my mind, and in many modern humans. That’s an individual and group preference about the world. Preferences are physical facts in some sense, in that they’re embodied in the physics of brains. But they’re not fundamental nor universal in the way we normally think of physics.
I think that may be my confusion about this post—you’re exploring CONDITIONAL on moral realism, rather than trying to show that moral realism is correct. Thanks for the discussion, and helping me understand.
I bracketed the possibility of moral meaninglessness, I don’t have a strong argument against it. I think the relevance of “moral” is in possible principles it intuitively satiafies like the no P-evildoers principle. Intuitions about something can point towards different possible mathematical objects satisfying some of these intuitions. In some cases the mathematical object becomes a standard meaning of the term, in other cases not. So the exercise has to do with seeing what certain principles derived from moral intuitions would point to as possible mathematical objects.
I’m also distinguishing between the idea that moral facts are logically inferrable from physical facts (logical supervenience) from a weaker notion of derivability from T∗ which includes metaphysical and mathematical axioms. As an anology, a certain axiomatization of geometry may under-determine properties of triangles, yet perhaps those properties could be determined through additional metaphysical axioms ensuring that the triangles in the system really match a priori spatial intuition of triangles.
Unless I deeply misunderstand, this just moves the question out one level to “which axioms apply to moral calculus?”. For physical systems, we can propose axioms and test them against observations. When we find a set we cannot disprove, we call it good. What’s the equivalent process for moral observation?
I’m agnostic about p-zombies: I can’t detect qualia in other humans, though I give them the benefit of the doubt due to physical similarity with what I think is my experience-organ. I have no clue if y’all are zombies or not. I’m double-skeptical of p-evildoers, as I can’t even identify in myself what is talked about by “evil”, let alone knowing how others experience it.
See paragraph starting with “We don’t have the framework to rule this out, so far.”
A common sort of view is “Even if we knew all the physical facts, we wouldn’t know moral facts, because there is no way to get ought from is. Woe is us! We may never know the true morality even if we knew all physical facts!”
I think there is something wrong with this, specifically in that it seems morally supernaturalist. It’s asserting there is a real fact of the matter of morality, which isn’t determined by physical facts and so on. But that seems like the P-evildoers scenario. This person imagines that it is a possible state of affairs that the same physical person taking the same physical actions could have different moral properties.
I also think that, ironically, extreme skepticism of moral realism might indicate some sort of hidden metaphysical constraint applied to moral judgments, which point towards moral realism. As an example, perhaps someone asserts, “Morality has to be real, because normative actions and judgments are tied to the process of epistemology itself, e.g. checking claims and not lying.”. One sort of objection I’ve heard is “But this is too weak, it doesn’t rule out genocide being morally permissible”. That seems to show a pre-existing strong belief about morality, at least one conditional on moral realism.
I’m not going as far as to propose a specific axiom schema for morality, but I’m suggesting some general properties it should have. In cases like “temperature”, a scientific/physical definition displaces a more vague intuitive one. In the case of “morality”, that seems to be harder, because of people’s strong but un-formalized beliefs about it. Those strong beliefs, though, point towards possible constraints the axiomatic system must satisfy.
To go out on more of a limb, I think, conditional on moral naturalism, it is likely that morality is a physically local property, not depending on the actual facts of distant aliens (in contrast to theoretically accessible epistemic states about distant aliens). This is similar to the no P-evildoers principle, in that the same physical person taking the same physical actions can’t possibly have two incompatible moral properties which depend on very distant physical entities.
I pretty strongly suspect that there is no such thing as “true morality”. There’s nothing to know, even if we know all the physical facts. We can know how individual segments of space-time (we call them “people”) process and model themselves and each other, but we already know a bit about that, and there’s no indication that it’s any deeper or more “true” than any other evolved cognition.
Genocide is morally impermissable in my mind, and in many modern humans. That’s an individual and group preference about the world. Preferences are physical facts in some sense, in that they’re embodied in the physics of brains. But they’re not fundamental nor universal in the way we normally think of physics.
I think that may be my confusion about this post—you’re exploring CONDITIONAL on moral realism, rather than trying to show that moral realism is correct. Thanks for the discussion, and helping me understand.