Not everyone has the same intuition about the wrongness of slavery, though, and “they’re not us and they’re more use to us this way” is justification enough for some. People have divergent intuitions about empirical and logical propositions, too, but in those cases there’s an obvious (if not always practical) way to settle things: go and look, or find a (dis)proof. You can trivially demonstrate that 1+1â 3, but it’s hard to see how you could reject with nearly as much rigor even something as ridiculous as “it’s good to enslave people born on a Tuesday.” You could put the latter into a calculator if you defined “good” in minute detail, and if you copied the definition out of your own skull you could even get an output you’re justified in caring about, but try to claim fully mind-independent truth and you fall right into the Open Question. It still adds up to normality, though, to the extent that definitions of “good” converge under increasing knowledge, reflection, and discussion—probably a large extent, excluding a few sociopaths and other oddballs.
But maybe, as Eliezer’s been pointing out, I’m wrong to think 1+1=2 is mind-independently demonstrable either—really, in both cases, a mind needs to be running certain dynamics to appreciate the argument; it’s just harder to imagine a mind (that deserves the term) with different arithmetic dynamics than different moral dynamics.
(BTW, like Ben, I think novel interpretations of the Bible re: slavery were mostly rationalizations of already-changing fundamental values.)
Not everyone has the same intuition about the wrongness of slavery, though, and “they’re not us and they’re more use to us this way” is justification enough for some. People have divergent intuitions about empirical and logical propositions, too, but in those cases there’s an obvious (if not always practical) way to settle things: go and look, or find a (dis)proof. You can trivially demonstrate that 1+1â 3, but it’s hard to see how you could reject with nearly as much rigor even something as ridiculous as “it’s good to enslave people born on a Tuesday.” You could put the latter into a calculator if you defined “good” in minute detail, and if you copied the definition out of your own skull you could even get an output you’re justified in caring about, but try to claim fully mind-independent truth and you fall right into the Open Question. It still adds up to normality, though, to the extent that definitions of “good” converge under increasing knowledge, reflection, and discussion—probably a large extent, excluding a few sociopaths and other oddballs.
But maybe, as Eliezer’s been pointing out, I’m wrong to think 1+1=2 is mind-independently demonstrable either—really, in both cases, a mind needs to be running certain dynamics to appreciate the argument; it’s just harder to imagine a mind (that deserves the term) with different arithmetic dynamics than different moral dynamics.
(BTW, like Ben, I think novel interpretations of the Bible re: slavery were mostly rationalizations of already-changing fundamental values.)