What the SEP actually says is, “Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at face value—moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right,” and that’s it.
This is all a matter of misunderstanding the meaning of words, and nobody is objectively right or wrong about that, since the disagreement is widespread—I’m not the only one to complain.
To me, an unqualified “fact” is, by implication, a simple claim about the universe, not a fact about the person holding the belief in that fact. An unqualified “fact” should be true or false in itself, without requiring you to further specify you meant the instance-of-that-fact that applies to some particular person with particular moral beliefs.
If SEP’s usage of “fact” is taken to mean “a fact about the person holding the moral belief”, the fact being that the person does hold that belief, then I don’t understand what it would mean to say that there aren’t any moral facts (i.e. moral anti-realism). Would it mean to claim that people have no moral beliefs? That’s obviously false.
On Eliezer’s view, as I understand it, human!morality just is morality, simpliciter.
That’s exactly what bothers me—that he (and other people agree with this) redefines the word “morality” to mean human!morality, and this confuses people (I’m not the only one) who expect that word to mean something else, depending on context. (For example, the meta-concept of morality, as opposed to a concrete set of moral beliefs such as Eliezer!morality or humanity!morality.)
I agree that if everyone agreed to Eliezer’s usage, then discussing morality would be easier. But it’s just a fact that many people use the word differently from him. And when faced with such inconsistency, I would prefer that people either always qualify their usage, or taboo the word entirely.
To me, an unqualified “fact” is, by implication, a simple claim about the universe, not a fact about the person holding the belief in that fact.
It’s a fact that my height is less than six feet. It’s also a fact that I disapprove of torture. These are objective facts, not opinions or one person’s suspicions. It’s not just that I object to claims that I’m seven feet tall; such claims would be false. And if someone says of me that I approve of torture, they’re in error, as surely as if they said grass is red and ponies have seventeen hooves.
However, if when I say ‘torture is wrong’, I mean the fact that I disapprove of torture, I am using relativism. The statement “torture is wrong” is saying something about the speaker. But it’s also saying something about the listener; I expect the listener to react in some way to the idea I’m expressing. I don’t go around saying “torture is flooble”; I expect that listeners don’t assign any significance to floobleness, but they do to wrongness.
Relativism does not mean that moral claims become mere matters of passing fancy; it means that moral claims express preferences of particular minds (including speakers’ and listeners’); understanding them requires understanding something about the minds of those who make them.
Consider: As an English-speaker, you might find it distasteful if your neighbor named her daughter “Porn”. You might even think it was wrong, especially if you had concerns about how other English-speakers would react to a little girl named Porn. If you were a Thai-speaker living in a Thai language community, you probably wouldn’t see a problem, because “Porn” means “Blessing” in Thai and is a common female name. Understanding why the English-speaker is squicked by the idea of a little girl named Porn, but the Thai-speaker is not, requires knowing something about English and Thai languages, as well as about cultural responses to different sorts of mental imagery involving children.
But suppose that when I say “torture is wrong”, I mean “Any intelligent mind, no matter its origin, if it is capable of understanding what ‘torture’ means, will disapprove of torture.” That is, a relativisty-preferencey sort of “wrongness” follows from some fact that is true about all intelligent minds. That’s a very different claim. It’s a lot closer to what people tend to think of as “absolute, objective morality”.
Relativism does not mean that moral claims become mere matters of passing fancy; it means that moral claims express preferences of particular minds (including speakers’ and listeners’); understanding them requires understanding something about the minds of those who make them.
Understanding their content, understanding why the speaker considers them true, or understanding why they are
true-for_speaker?
Consider: As an English-speaker, you might find it distasteful if your neighbor named her daughter “Porn”. You might even think it was wrong, especially if you had concerns about how other English-speakers would react to a little girl named Porn. If you were a Thai-speaker living in a Thai language community, you probably wouldn’t see a problem, because “Porn” means “Blessing” in Thai and is a common female name. Understanding why the English-speaker is squicked by the idea of a little girl named Porn, but the Thai-speaker is not, requires knowing something about English and Thai languages, as well as about cultural responses to different sorts of mental imagery involving children.
Is the more general principle “don’t give your children embarrassing names” equally relative? How about “don’t embarass people in general ”? Or “don’t do unpleasant things to people in general”?
The SEP says that moral realism means thinking that (some) morality exists as objective fact, which can be discovered through thinking or experimentation or some other process which would lead all right-thinking minds to agree about it.
I took Chris’s meaning to be that moral realism (as defined by the SEP) says that moral claims are fact claims possessing truth values but says nothing about the discoverability or computability of those truth values. Your definition would have every moral realist insisting that every moral claim can be proven either true or false, but it seems to me that Chris’ definition allows moral realists to leave open Gödel-incompleteness status for moral claims, considering their truth or falsity to exist but be possibly incomputable, and still be moral realists. Or, to take no position on whether rational minds would come to the truth values of moral claims, only on whether the truth values existed. Your definition would exclude both of those from moral realism.
Chris, please correct me if this is not what you meant.
I have no problem with Godel-incompleteness, uncomputability, and so on in a system that allows you to state any moral proposition.
However: if a moral realist believes that “moral claims are fact claims possessing truth values”, then what does he belief regarding the proposition (1) “there exists at least one moral claim that can be proven true or false”? (Leaving aside claims that simply induce contradictions, are not well defined, etc.)
If he thinks such a claim exists, that is the same as saying there is a Universally Compelling Argument for or against that claim. And that is a logical impossibility. I can always construct a mind that is immune to any particular argument.
If he thinks no such claims exist, then it seems to be a kind of dualism—postulating a property “truth” of moral claims, which is not causally entangled with the physical world. It also seems pointless—why care about it if no actual mind can ever discover such truths?
ETA: talking about ‘proving’ claims true or false is a simplification. In reality we have degrees of beliefs in the truth-value of claims. But my point is that moral-realistic claims seem to be disengaged from reality; substitute “provide evidence for” in place of “prove” and my argument should still work.
If you needed my comment to decide that not understanding Chris’s comment is a much better hypothesis than not understanding Chris and SEP’s use of “fact,” then you have much worse problems than not understanding Chris’s comment.
I think the problem lies in your usage of the phrase “objective fact”.
For example, if I claim “broccoli is tasty”, my claim purports to report a fact. Plausibly, it purports to report a fact about me—namely, that I like broccoli. If someone else were to claim “broccoli is tasty”, her utterance would also purport to report a fact—plausibly, the fact that she likes broccoli. So two token utterances of the very same type may pick out different facts. If this is the case, “broccoli is tasty” is true when asserted by broccoli-lovers and false when asserted by broccoli-haters. This should not be surprising, provided that it is interpreted as a disguised indexical claim.
Clearly, there is no experimental process whereby all right-thinking people can conclude that broccoli is tasty (or, alternatively, that broccoli is not tasty), even though several right-thinking people can justifiably arrive at this conclusion (by eating broccoli and liking it, say). Crucially, this conclusion is consistent with being a realist about broccoli-tastiness, but inconsistent with thinking there are objective facts about broccoli-tastiness (as you use the term). Likewise, one can be a realist about morality without thinking there are objective facts about morality (again, as you use the term).
When I say “objective fact”, I mean (in context) a non-indexical one.
The original problem I raised was that some people who talked about things being “moral” meant those statements indexically, and others meant them objectively, and this created a lot of confusion.
one can be a realist about morality without thinking there are objective facts about morality (again, as you use the term).
I use the term “objective facts about morality” to mean “non-indexical facts which do not depend on picking out the person holding the moral beliefs”. Moral realism is the belief such objective facts about morality can and/or do exist.
Of course, one is free to interpret “moral realism” as you do—it’s a natural enough interpretation, and may even be the most common one among philosophers. However, this is not the definition given in the SEP. According to it, “moral realists are those who think that...moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right”. This does not entail that moral realists think that moral claims purport to report objective facts. But isn’t such a loose interpretation of “moral realism” vacuous? As you say:
If SEP’s usage of “fact” is taken to mean “a fact about the person holding the moral belief”, the fact being that the person does hold that belief, then I don’t understand what it would mean to say that there aren’t any moral facts (i.e. moral anti-realism).
The moral anti-realist can choose from among two main alternatives if she wishes to deny moral realism, which I understand as being committed to the following two theses: (1) moral claims purport to report some (not necessarily objective) facts, and (2) some moral claims are true. First, she can maintain that all moral claims are false, which is a plausible suggestion: perhaps our moral claims purport to be about some normative aspect of the world, but the world lacks this normative aspect. Second, she can maintain that no moral claims purport to report facts; instead, all moral claims express emotions. On this view, saying “setting cats on fire is wrong” is tantamount to exclaiming “Boo!” or “Ew!”
First, she can maintain that all moral claims are false, which is a plausible suggestion: perhaps our moral claims purport to be about some normative aspect of the world, but the world lacks this normative aspect.
That would still be discussing an objective claim—just one that happens to be false. On a part with discussing a mathematical proposition which is false, or an empirical hypothesis which is false: both of these are independent of the person who says them or believes in them. Just so, discussing normative aspects of the world—whether they exist or not, and whether they are as claimed or not—isn’t the same as discussing normative beliefs of a person.
So calling this moral anti-realism seems to use my sense of “moral realism” (objective fact), not the SEP’s.
Second, she can maintain that no moral claims purport to report facts; instead, all moral claims express emotions. On this view, saying “setting cats on fire is wrong” is tantamount to exclaiming “Boo!” or “Ew!”
In one way, this is again moral anti-realism in my sense of the phrase: the claim that morals don’t exist separately from the moral beliefs of concrete persons. (I hold this view.)
In another way, it can be read as a claim about what people mean when they talk about morals. In that case, the claim is plainly wrong, because many people are moral realists.
So to sum up, I’m afraid I still don’t see what it would mean to be a moral anti-realist in what you say is the SEP sense.
(For example, the meta-concept of morality, as opposed to a concrete set of moral beliefs such as Eliezer!morality or humanity!morality.)
But there isn’t a meta-concept of morality. If you try to abstract one, you just end up with something like “that which motivates”, which is empty unless you specify which specific minds can be motivated by it, and then you’re back where you started.
There are several different uses of morality, each which result from different meta-concepts. An Aristotelean, for example, would talk about morality as fitting a human’s purpose (as would a Christian), for example. Everybody uses the same word for several fundamentally different concepts, some of which have no or little basis in fact.
Different humans have somewhat different morals. I can still talk about “morals” in general, because they are a special kind of motivations in humans. Talking about morals in minds in general indeed makes little sense.
Talking about morals in minds in general indeed makes little sense.
To whom? AFAICS, if you have minds living in a community, and they can interact in ways that caus negative and positive utility to each other, then you the problem that morality solves...and that is a ery general set of conditions.
I think what Dan means is that different kinds of minds in different kinds of community might need quite different solutions to the problem of interacting effectively, which might lead to quite different notions of morality, and that if that’s true then you shouldn’t expect any single notion of morality to be universally applicable.
It’s often difficult to figure out which human preferences are moral v. amoral. That would be a vastly more challenging task for an alien species, such that we’d probably be better off in most cases by prohibiting ourselves from sorting alien values in that way.
This is all a matter of misunderstanding the meaning of words, and nobody is objectively right or wrong about that, since the disagreement is widespread—I’m not the only one to complain.
To me, an unqualified “fact” is, by implication, a simple claim about the universe, not a fact about the person holding the belief in that fact. An unqualified “fact” should be true or false in itself, without requiring you to further specify you meant the instance-of-that-fact that applies to some particular person with particular moral beliefs.
If SEP’s usage of “fact” is taken to mean “a fact about the person holding the moral belief”, the fact being that the person does hold that belief, then I don’t understand what it would mean to say that there aren’t any moral facts (i.e. moral anti-realism). Would it mean to claim that people have no moral beliefs? That’s obviously false.
That’s exactly what bothers me—that he (and other people agree with this) redefines the word “morality” to mean human!morality, and this confuses people (I’m not the only one) who expect that word to mean something else, depending on context. (For example, the meta-concept of morality, as opposed to a concrete set of moral beliefs such as Eliezer!morality or humanity!morality.)
I agree that if everyone agreed to Eliezer’s usage, then discussing morality would be easier. But it’s just a fact that many people use the word differently from him. And when faced with such inconsistency, I would prefer that people either always qualify their usage, or taboo the word entirely.
It’s a fact that my height is less than six feet. It’s also a fact that I disapprove of torture. These are objective facts, not opinions or one person’s suspicions. It’s not just that I object to claims that I’m seven feet tall; such claims would be false. And if someone says of me that I approve of torture, they’re in error, as surely as if they said grass is red and ponies have seventeen hooves.
However, if when I say ‘torture is wrong’, I mean the fact that I disapprove of torture, I am using relativism. The statement “torture is wrong” is saying something about the speaker. But it’s also saying something about the listener; I expect the listener to react in some way to the idea I’m expressing. I don’t go around saying “torture is flooble”; I expect that listeners don’t assign any significance to floobleness, but they do to wrongness.
Relativism does not mean that moral claims become mere matters of passing fancy; it means that moral claims express preferences of particular minds (including speakers’ and listeners’); understanding them requires understanding something about the minds of those who make them.
Consider: As an English-speaker, you might find it distasteful if your neighbor named her daughter “Porn”. You might even think it was wrong, especially if you had concerns about how other English-speakers would react to a little girl named Porn. If you were a Thai-speaker living in a Thai language community, you probably wouldn’t see a problem, because “Porn” means “Blessing” in Thai and is a common female name. Understanding why the English-speaker is squicked by the idea of a little girl named Porn, but the Thai-speaker is not, requires knowing something about English and Thai languages, as well as about cultural responses to different sorts of mental imagery involving children.
But suppose that when I say “torture is wrong”, I mean “Any intelligent mind, no matter its origin, if it is capable of understanding what ‘torture’ means, will disapprove of torture.” That is, a relativisty-preferencey sort of “wrongness” follows from some fact that is true about all intelligent minds. That’s a very different claim. It’s a lot closer to what people tend to think of as “absolute, objective morality”.
Understanding their content, understanding why the speaker considers them true, or understanding why they are true-for_speaker?
Is the more general principle “don’t give your children embarrassing names” equally relative? How about “don’t embarass people in general ”? Or “don’t do unpleasant things to people in general”?
That is how Chris and SEP are using the term.
Then I don’t understand Chris’s comment. I said:
And Chris replied:
I took Chris’s meaning to be that moral realism (as defined by the SEP) says that moral claims are fact claims possessing truth values but says nothing about the discoverability or computability of those truth values. Your definition would have every moral realist insisting that every moral claim can be proven either true or false, but it seems to me that Chris’ definition allows moral realists to leave open Gödel-incompleteness status for moral claims, considering their truth or falsity to exist but be possibly incomputable, and still be moral realists. Or, to take no position on whether rational minds would come to the truth values of moral claims, only on whether the truth values existed. Your definition would exclude both of those from moral realism.
Chris, please correct me if this is not what you meant.
I have no problem with Godel-incompleteness, uncomputability, and so on in a system that allows you to state any moral proposition.
However: if a moral realist believes that “moral claims are fact claims possessing truth values”, then what does he belief regarding the proposition (1) “there exists at least one moral claim that can be proven true or false”? (Leaving aside claims that simply induce contradictions, are not well defined, etc.)
If he thinks such a claim exists, that is the same as saying there is a Universally Compelling Argument for or against that claim. And that is a logical impossibility. I can always construct a mind that is immune to any particular argument.
If he thinks no such claims exist, then it seems to be a kind of dualism—postulating a property “truth” of moral claims, which is not causally entangled with the physical world. It also seems pointless—why care about it if no actual mind can ever discover such truths?
ETA: talking about ‘proving’ claims true or false is a simplification. In reality we have degrees of beliefs in the truth-value of claims. But my point is that moral-realistic claims seem to be disengaged from reality; substitute “provide evidence for” in place of “prove” and my argument should still work.
If you needed my comment to decide that not understanding Chris’s comment is a much better hypothesis than not understanding Chris and SEP’s use of “fact,” then you have much worse problems than not understanding Chris’s comment.
I knew I didn’t understand something about Chris’s comment when I first read it. Could you explain it and help me understand, please?
I think the problem lies in your usage of the phrase “objective fact”.
For example, if I claim “broccoli is tasty”, my claim purports to report a fact. Plausibly, it purports to report a fact about me—namely, that I like broccoli. If someone else were to claim “broccoli is tasty”, her utterance would also purport to report a fact—plausibly, the fact that she likes broccoli. So two token utterances of the very same type may pick out different facts. If this is the case, “broccoli is tasty” is true when asserted by broccoli-lovers and false when asserted by broccoli-haters. This should not be surprising, provided that it is interpreted as a disguised indexical claim.
Clearly, there is no experimental process whereby all right-thinking people can conclude that broccoli is tasty (or, alternatively, that broccoli is not tasty), even though several right-thinking people can justifiably arrive at this conclusion (by eating broccoli and liking it, say). Crucially, this conclusion is consistent with being a realist about broccoli-tastiness, but inconsistent with thinking there are objective facts about broccoli-tastiness (as you use the term). Likewise, one can be a realist about morality without thinking there are objective facts about morality (again, as you use the term).
When I say “objective fact”, I mean (in context) a non-indexical one.
The original problem I raised was that some people who talked about things being “moral” meant those statements indexically, and others meant them objectively, and this created a lot of confusion.
I use the term “objective facts about morality” to mean “non-indexical facts which do not depend on picking out the person holding the moral beliefs”. Moral realism is the belief such objective facts about morality can and/or do exist.
Of course, one is free to interpret “moral realism” as you do—it’s a natural enough interpretation, and may even be the most common one among philosophers. However, this is not the definition given in the SEP. According to it, “moral realists are those who think that...moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right”. This does not entail that moral realists think that moral claims purport to report objective facts. But isn’t such a loose interpretation of “moral realism” vacuous? As you say:
The moral anti-realist can choose from among two main alternatives if she wishes to deny moral realism, which I understand as being committed to the following two theses: (1) moral claims purport to report some (not necessarily objective) facts, and (2) some moral claims are true. First, she can maintain that all moral claims are false, which is a plausible suggestion: perhaps our moral claims purport to be about some normative aspect of the world, but the world lacks this normative aspect. Second, she can maintain that no moral claims purport to report facts; instead, all moral claims express emotions. On this view, saying “setting cats on fire is wrong” is tantamount to exclaiming “Boo!” or “Ew!”
That would still be discussing an objective claim—just one that happens to be false. On a part with discussing a mathematical proposition which is false, or an empirical hypothesis which is false: both of these are independent of the person who says them or believes in them. Just so, discussing normative aspects of the world—whether they exist or not, and whether they are as claimed or not—isn’t the same as discussing normative beliefs of a person.
So calling this moral anti-realism seems to use my sense of “moral realism” (objective fact), not the SEP’s.
In one way, this is again moral anti-realism in my sense of the phrase: the claim that morals don’t exist separately from the moral beliefs of concrete persons. (I hold this view.)
In another way, it can be read as a claim about what people mean when they talk about morals. In that case, the claim is plainly wrong, because many people are moral realists.
So to sum up, I’m afraid I still don’t see what it would mean to be a moral anti-realist in what you say is the SEP sense.
But there isn’t a meta-concept of morality. If you try to abstract one, you just end up with something like “that which motivates”, which is empty unless you specify which specific minds can be motivated by it, and then you’re back where you started.
There are several different uses of morality, each which result from different meta-concepts. An Aristotelean, for example, would talk about morality as fitting a human’s purpose (as would a Christian), for example. Everybody uses the same word for several fundamentally different concepts, some of which have no or little basis in fact.
Literally true in isolation, but so completely irrelevant to this thread, I can only describe this comment as a lie.
Different humans have somewhat different morals. I can still talk about “morals” in general, because they are a special kind of motivations in humans. Talking about morals in minds in general indeed makes little sense.
To whom? AFAICS, if you have minds living in a community, and they can interact in ways that caus negative and positive utility to each other, then you the problem that morality solves...and that is a ery general set of conditions.
I think what Dan means is that different kinds of minds in different kinds of community might need quite different solutions to the problem of interacting effectively, which might lead to quite different notions of morality, and that if that’s true then you shouldn’t expect any single notion of morality to be universally applicable.
Or they might not. It isn’t at all obvious.
I came up with the meta-concept “behaving with positive regard to the preferences of others”. Does that suffer from those problems?
I f everyone agreed to EY’s usage, disucssing alien morality would be more difficult.
How so? You can just say “alien values”.
Not all values are moral.
It’s often difficult to figure out which human preferences are moral v. amoral. That would be a vastly more challenging task for an alien species, such that we’d probably be better off in most cases by prohibiting ourselves from sorting alien values in that way.
That isn’t a good reason to subsume moral values under values in the human case.
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If everyone agreed on any one usage, that would be far better than everyone disagreeing.
True enough. But I think for the members of LW to adopt EY’s usage would move us further away from that point, not closer.