I find the paragraph beginning with these two sentences, its examples misleading and unconvincing in the point about moral disagreement across time it tries to make:
Such ‘facts’ also change across time. We don’t have to travel back far to discover moral superstars holding moral views that would destroy them today.
I shall try to explain why, because such evidence seemed persuasive to me before I thought about it more; I made this account just for this comment after being a lurker for a while—I have found your previous posts about moral uncertainty quite interesting.
When comparing moral views across time to see if there is disagreement or agreement, we should see if there is an underlying principle that is stated by the person or one that can be inferred, which is different from the specific contextual judgement.
The application of the same principles across time to various concrete matters will widely vary depending on the context and information of the person applying them, that person’s capabilities. Therefore when seeking to determine moral agreement or disagreement with a specific judgement, one should not give examples of specific practical moral judgements without also giving information about the underlying motivation and factual view of the world associated with it.
One can see how much utilitarians with the same theory can diverge on what to do. But they disagree sometimes not in moral theory, but on things that are un-ambiguously empirical matters. So people can disagree on a specific moral judgment without that disagreement being of a moral nature. Because people across time differ quite a lot in their non-moral factual understanding of world, one would need to do research and interpretation from case to case to uncover the actual principles at play in various moral judgements which seem strange or disagreeable to us. Without trying to consider the moral rules or principles being applied, and the understanding of the world they are being applied to, how can we determine if we disagree with someone about a moral fact, or another fact about the world?
To give a simple example about how moral judgements and factual judgements are related: it is morally easy for us to see that killing witches was wrong, because there were no witches. The communities that burned witches may have differed morally from us, but there is enough moral agreement between us and them that if they had not believed in witches or those specific false instances of witches, they would not have burned them (even when there was lying about witches involved in historical contexts of witch burning, that lying took place in a community that believed in witches and wanted to punish them accordingly).
It would not make sense to say something like
But there’s about as much sense in blaming Gandhi for not sharing our modern, Western views on race as there is in blaming the Vikings for not having Netflix.
about the communities that burned witches. I think we can correctly say they were objectively mistaken to burn those witches. I’m not very sure about much involving morality, but that is the sort of modest ‘moral realism’ I am confident having when judging the historic moral decisions of past communities and individuals (I am not sure about the criteria for ‘blaming’ but I am confident we can say they were objectively wrong to do that, like about any other factual matter). The loosely held shared moral principle would be something like ‘do not kill people for entirely mistaken reasons’. I am not saying that will be the case, locating a shared moral principle, for every past moral decision we might disagree with. But for more complicated cases we really do have to research before determining if there is a genuinely moral disagreement IMO, rather than just stating various specific judgements we seem to disagree with.
So in the case of Marie Stopes and Gandhi, among other examples, I am unable to tell if I morally disagree with them based on the limited information given in the excerpt. I would need to know more about their view of the facts of the matters mentioned and try to understand and infer from what they have shared elsewhere, the moral views being applied (it is especially true in the case of innovative moral activists, that they will articulate their principles, so it is odd that the author does not tell us them).
I hope I have been convincing and reasonable about why we should be wary of telling what someone’s underlying moral view is and our agreement or disagreement with it from limited examples of the sort the author gives here; this is even more true for pre-modern cultures with very different understandings of the world, like the Malagasy and their taboos. How tightly wound implicit moral views and empirical views can be is clear with the case of communism, another example given. There is enough moral feeling, belief in common that many unusually-bad-to-us cases of moral behavior are also tied to a very different empirical view of the world.
One final note, regarding status games and morality. I think the fact that many people are urged into behavior considered moral by the expectations of others who find moral behavior praiseworthy, shows that the concept of morality can be objectively applied in scenarios well outside specific people having an autonomous intrinsically moral motivation. Not everyone wants to act morally even if they recognize an objective moral ideal, but often instrumentally is driven to engage in acts considered moral, or meeting the respectable moral minimum at least, by society for their own amoral reasons.
We can even imagine a world where no one acts for intrinsically moral reasons, but people still sometimes shape their actions around a concept of objective morality that arises because people are able to recognize their own selfish interests and recognize, want to reward someone ‘altruistically’ contributing to their interests or at least respecting them enough not to hurt them. I don’t think that world is ours, but I do think in our world many people do not have positive moral motivations for much of their behavior and moral reformers, saint-types are known as such for having unusually strong intrinsic moral motivations and for driving people to further live up to the moral ideals they merely superficially meet for instrumental reasons most of the time.
One can imagine ‘moral saints’ negotiating among various people’s selfish interests to find or push people into the positive sum outcome they themselves could not selfishly have gotten into. I do not think primarily moral agents and ‘enlightened’ selfish ones are necessarily opposed at all (this sort of negotiation is how one can picture a broader human cooperation / alignment in the context of powerful moral human agents, in relation to the power of an aligned artificial intelligence).
The desire to appear more moral than one really is adds a lot of treachery to moral discourse in all communities; moral theorizing can offend people through intruding on illusions about how selfish they are and this trickiness is surely one reason for less progress on clarifying moral objectivity than there would be otherwise. It seems likely that due to human moral imperfection there is ineliminable suboptimality in our actions and actual desires relative to all of our ideal moral concepts (even if they can genuinely partially motivate us in a more moral direction through their attraction as pure ideals), and that this shall be transferred to any agents that we create to satisfy us. It will probably be like Kant said, the learning of human values by an AI:
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made
I find the paragraph beginning with these two sentences, its examples misleading and unconvincing in the point about moral disagreement across time it tries to make:
I shall try to explain why, because such evidence seemed persuasive to me before I thought about it more; I made this account just for this comment after being a lurker for a while—I have found your previous posts about moral uncertainty quite interesting.
When comparing moral views across time to see if there is disagreement or agreement, we should see if there is an underlying principle that is stated by the person or one that can be inferred, which is different from the specific contextual judgement.
The application of the same principles across time to various concrete matters will widely vary depending on the context and information of the person applying them, that person’s capabilities. Therefore when seeking to determine moral agreement or disagreement with a specific judgement, one should not give examples of specific practical moral judgements without also giving information about the underlying motivation and factual view of the world associated with it.
One can see how much utilitarians with the same theory can diverge on what to do. But they disagree sometimes not in moral theory, but on things that are un-ambiguously empirical matters. So people can disagree on a specific moral judgment without that disagreement being of a moral nature. Because people across time differ quite a lot in their non-moral factual understanding of world, one would need to do research and interpretation from case to case to uncover the actual principles at play in various moral judgements which seem strange or disagreeable to us. Without trying to consider the moral rules or principles being applied, and the understanding of the world they are being applied to, how can we determine if we disagree with someone about a moral fact, or another fact about the world?
To give a simple example about how moral judgements and factual judgements are related: it is morally easy for us to see that killing witches was wrong, because there were no witches. The communities that burned witches may have differed morally from us, but there is enough moral agreement between us and them that if they had not believed in witches or those specific false instances of witches, they would not have burned them (even when there was lying about witches involved in historical contexts of witch burning, that lying took place in a community that believed in witches and wanted to punish them accordingly).
It would not make sense to say something like
about the communities that burned witches. I think we can correctly say they were objectively mistaken to burn those witches. I’m not very sure about much involving morality, but that is the sort of modest ‘moral realism’ I am confident having when judging the historic moral decisions of past communities and individuals (I am not sure about the criteria for ‘blaming’ but I am confident we can say they were objectively wrong to do that, like about any other factual matter). The loosely held shared moral principle would be something like ‘do not kill people for entirely mistaken reasons’. I am not saying that will be the case, locating a shared moral principle, for every past moral decision we might disagree with. But for more complicated cases we really do have to research before determining if there is a genuinely moral disagreement IMO, rather than just stating various specific judgements we seem to disagree with.
So in the case of Marie Stopes and Gandhi, among other examples, I am unable to tell if I morally disagree with them based on the limited information given in the excerpt. I would need to know more about their view of the facts of the matters mentioned and try to understand and infer from what they have shared elsewhere, the moral views being applied (it is especially true in the case of innovative moral activists, that they will articulate their principles, so it is odd that the author does not tell us them).
I hope I have been convincing and reasonable about why we should be wary of telling what someone’s underlying moral view is and our agreement or disagreement with it from limited examples of the sort the author gives here; this is even more true for pre-modern cultures with very different understandings of the world, like the Malagasy and their taboos. How tightly wound implicit moral views and empirical views can be is clear with the case of communism, another example given. There is enough moral feeling, belief in common that many unusually-bad-to-us cases of moral behavior are also tied to a very different empirical view of the world.
One final note, regarding status games and morality. I think the fact that many people are urged into behavior considered moral by the expectations of others who find moral behavior praiseworthy, shows that the concept of morality can be objectively applied in scenarios well outside specific people having an autonomous intrinsically moral motivation. Not everyone wants to act morally even if they recognize an objective moral ideal, but often instrumentally is driven to engage in acts considered moral, or meeting the respectable moral minimum at least, by society for their own amoral reasons.
We can even imagine a world where no one acts for intrinsically moral reasons, but people still sometimes shape their actions around a concept of objective morality that arises because people are able to recognize their own selfish interests and recognize, want to reward someone ‘altruistically’ contributing to their interests or at least respecting them enough not to hurt them. I don’t think that world is ours, but I do think in our world many people do not have positive moral motivations for much of their behavior and moral reformers, saint-types are known as such for having unusually strong intrinsic moral motivations and for driving people to further live up to the moral ideals they merely superficially meet for instrumental reasons most of the time.
One can imagine ‘moral saints’ negotiating among various people’s selfish interests to find or push people into the positive sum outcome they themselves could not selfishly have gotten into. I do not think primarily moral agents and ‘enlightened’ selfish ones are necessarily opposed at all (this sort of negotiation is how one can picture a broader human cooperation / alignment in the context of powerful moral human agents, in relation to the power of an aligned artificial intelligence).
The desire to appear more moral than one really is adds a lot of treachery to moral discourse in all communities; moral theorizing can offend people through intruding on illusions about how selfish they are and this trickiness is surely one reason for less progress on clarifying moral objectivity than there would be otherwise. It seems likely that due to human moral imperfection there is ineliminable suboptimality in our actions and actual desires relative to all of our ideal moral concepts (even if they can genuinely partially motivate us in a more moral direction through their attraction as pure ideals), and that this shall be transferred to any agents that we create to satisfy us. It will probably be like Kant said, the learning of human values by an AI: