Isn’t this just Indirect Consequentialism?
It’s worth noting that pretty much every consequentialist since J.S. Mill has stressed the importance of inculcating generally-reliable dispositions / character traits, rather than attempting to explicitly make utility calculations in everyday life. It’s certainly a good recommendation, but it seems misleading to characterize this as in any way at odds with the consequentialist tradition.
Deontology relies on things that do not happen after the act judged to judge the act. This leaves facts about times prior to and the time during the act to determine whether the act is right or wrong.
I’m not convinced that this ‘backward-looking vs. forward-looking’ contrast really cuts to the heart of the distinction. Note that consequentialists may accept an ‘holistic’ axiology according to which whether some future event is good or bad depends on what has previously happened. (For a simple example, retributivists may hold that it’s positively good when those who are guilty of heinous crimes suffer. But then in order to tell whether we should relieve Bob’s suffering, we need to look backwards in time to see whether he’s a mass-murderer.) It strikes me as misleading to characterize this as involving a form of “overlap” with deontological theories. It’s purely consequentialist in form; it merely has a more complex axiology than (say) hedonism.
The distinction may be better characterised in terms of the relative priority of ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Consequentialists take goodness (i.e. desirability, or what you ought to want) as fundamental, and thus have a teleological conception of action: the point of acting is to achieve some prior goal (which, again, needn’t be purely forward-looking). Deontologists reverse this. They begin with a conception of how one ought to act (e.g. in ways that would be universalizable, or justifiable to others, or respects everyone’s rights), and only subsequently derive the doppelganger’s conception of the good (as you put it: “what would the world look like if I follow theory X”).
An interesting consequence of this analysis is that so-called “rule consequentialism” turns out to be a borderline case: the good (what to want) is partly, but not entirely, prior to the right (how to act). I explain this in more detail in my post Analyzing Consequentialisms.
invested a lot of energy into training himself to think straight about things and respond to criticism either with adequate counterargument or by dropping the criticized belief
Maybe; I can’t say I’ve noticed that so much myself -- e.g. he just disappeared from this discussion when I refuted his assumptions about philosophy of language (that underpin his objection to zombies), but I haven’t seen him retract his claim that zombies are demonstrably incoherent.
Surely the truth about knowledge and justification isn’t correlated with which school you went to
It seems pretty likely that there is some correlation. (Suppose, without loss of generality, that some kind of epistemic externalism is true. Then some schools—the ones where externalism is popular—correlate with the production of true beliefs about epistemology.) The problem is just that we don’t know in advance which schools actually have it right.
Perhaps what you mean to suggest is that going to school X isn’t a sensitive method of belief formation. Even if what it taught was false (like school Y), you would still end up believing it (just as the students of Y do).
Then again, one could say much the same thing about being born into a religious cult (or a different historical epoch). I do consider myself lucky to have avoided such an epistemically stunted upbringing. But this kind of luck does not in any way undermine my present beliefs.
In Meta-Coherence vs. Humble Convictions, I suggest that what matters is how you assess the alternative epistemic position. If you really think it is just as well-informed and well-supported as your own, then this should undermine your present beliefs. Otherwise, it need not. To consider oneself the beneficiary of epistemic luck is not necessarily irresponsible. (Indeed, it’s arguably necessary to avoid radical skepticism!)
Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests
No, akrasia is acting against your better judgment. This comes apart from imprudence in both directions: (i) someone may be non-akratically imprudent, if they whole-heartedly endorse being biased towards the near; (ii) we may be akratic by failing to act according to other norms (besides prudence) that we reflectively endorse, e.g. morality.
Just want to flag that it’s not entirely obvious that we need to settle questions in meta-ethics in order to get the normative and applied ethics right. Why not just call for more work directly in the latter fields?
It’s confusing that you use the word ‘meta-ethics’ when talking about plain first-order ethics.
Moral Error and Moral Disagreement confronts this
Yeah, I’m the “Richard4” in the comments thread there :-)
Speakers Use Their Actual Language, so someone who uses ‘leg’ to mean leg or tail speaks truly when they say ‘dogs have five legs.’ But it remains the case that dogs have only four legs, and nobody can reasonably expect a ham sandwich to support hundreds of pounds of force. This is because the previous sentence uses English, not the counterfactual language we’ve been invited to imagine.
Correct. Eliezer has misunderstood rigid designation here.
The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today
But it—at least the “debate over intuitions” that I’m most familiar with—isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology. That is, the standard response to experimentalist critics (at least, in my corner of philosophy) is not to argue that intuitions are “reliable evidence”, but rather to deny that we are using them as evidence at all. On this view, what we appeal to as evidence is not the psychological fact of my having an intuition, but rather the propositional content being judged.
The purpose of thought experiments, on this view, is to enable one to grasp new evidence (namely, the proposition in question) that they hadn’t considered before. Of course, this isn’t a “neutral” methodology because only those who intuit the true proposition thereby gain genuine evidence. But the foolishness of such a “neutrality” constraint (and the associated “psychological” view of evidence) is one of the major lessons of contemporary epistemology (see, esp., Williamson).
FWIW, my old post ‘Zombie Rationality’ explores what I think the epiphenomenalist should say about the worry that “the upper-tier brain must be thinking meaningless gibberish when the upper-tier lips [talk about consciousness]”
One point to flag is that from an epiphenomenalist’s perspective, mere brains never really mean anything, any more than squiggles of ink do; any meaning we attribute to them is purely derivative from the meaning of appropriately-related thoughts (which, on this view, essentially involve qualia).
Another thing to flag is that epiphenomenalism needn’t imply that our thoughts are causally irrelevant, but merely their experiential component. It’d be a mistake to identify oneself with just one’s qualia (as Eliezer seems to attribute to the epiphenomenalist). It’s true that our qualia don’t write philosophy papers about consciousness. But we, embodied conscious persons, do write such papers. Of course, the causal explanation of the squiggles depends only on our physical parts. But the fact that the squiggles are about consciousness (or indeed anything at all) depends crucially upon the epiphenomenal aspects of our minds, in addition.
I sketched a brief Overview of Dennett’s book a few years ago, if that’s of any interest to people here...
It’s worth stressing that he’s really just explaining the “soft problem” of consciousness, i.e. its informational aspect rather than its qualitative aspect. But he does have lots of interesting stuff to say about the former. (And of course lots of folks here will agree with Dennett that the third personal data of “heterophenomenology” are all that need to be explained. I’m just flagging that he doesn’t say anything that’ll satisfy people who don’t share this assumption.)
The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning.
Another possibility is The Grim Aesthetic—an aversion to certain attitudes and practices that might be associated with cultures of deliberate “niceness”.
(Though even if those excesses are distasteful, that’s no reason not to be nice in the ordinary sense.)
It’s not unusual to count “thwarted aims” as a positive bad of death (as I’ve argued for myself in my paper Value Receptacles), which at least counts against replacing people with only slightly happier people (though still leaves open that it may be worthwhile to replace people with much happier people, if the extra happiness is sufficient to outweigh the harm of the first person’s thwarted ends).
I’m not sure what you have in mind here. We need to distinguish (i) the referent of a concept from (ii) its reference-fixing “sense” or functional role. The way I understood your view, the reference-fixing story for moral terms involves our (idealized) desires. But the referent is “rigid” in the sense that it’s picking out the content of our desires: the thing that actually fills the functional role, rather than the role-property itself.
Since our desires typically aren’t themselves about our desires, so it will turn out, on this story, that morality is not “about” desires. It’s about “love, friendship,” and all that jazz. But there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties. And that’s where desires come in (as I understand your view). Our moral concepts pick out these particular properties because they’re the contents of our idealized desires. But that’s not to say that therefore morality is “really” just about fulfilling any old desires. For that would be to neglect the part that rigid designation, and the distinction between reference and reference-fixing, plays in this story.
Does that capture your view? To further clarify: the point of appealing to “rigid designation” is just to explain how desires could play a reference-fixing role without being any part of the referent of moral talk (or what it is “about”). Isn’t that what you’re after? Or do you have some other reference-fixing story in mind?
Eliezer’s metaethics might be clarified in terms of the distinctions between sense, reference, and reference-fixing descriptions. I take it that Eliezer wants to use ‘right’ as a rigid designator to denote some particular set of terminal values, but this reference fact is fixed by means of a seemingly ‘relative’ procedure (namely, whatever terminal values the speaker happens to hold, on some appropriate [if somewhat mysterious] idealization). Confusions arise when people mistakenly read this metasemantic subjectivism into the first-order semantics or meaning of ‘right’.
In summary:
(i) ‘Right’ means, roughly, ‘promotes external goods X, Y and Z’
(ii) claim i above is true because I desire X, Y, and Z.
Note that Speakers Use Their Actual Language, so murder would still be wrong even if I had the desires of a serial killer. But if I had those violent terminal values, I would speak a slightly different language than I do right now, so that when KillerRichard asserts “Murder is right!” what he says is true. We don’t really disagree, but are instead merely talking past each other.
Virtues of the theory:
(a) By rigidifying on our actual, current desires (or idealizations thereupon), it avoids Inducing Desire Satisfactions.
(b) Shifting the subjectivity out to the metasemantic level leaves us with a first-order semantic proposal that at least does a better job than simple subjectivism at ‘saving the phenomena’. (It has echoes of Mark Schroeder’s desire-based view of reasons, according to which the facts that give us reasons are the propositional contents of our desires, rather than the desires themselves. Or something like that.)
(c) It’s naturalistic, if you find moral non-naturalism ‘spooky’. (Though I’d sooner recommend Mackie-style error theory for naturalists, since I don’t think (b) above is enough to save the phenomena.)
Objections
(1) It’s incompatible with the datum that substantive, fundamental normative disagreement is in fact possible. People may share the concept of a normative reason, even if they fundamentally disagree about which features of actions are the ones that give us reasons.
(2) The semantic tricks merely shift the lump under the rug, they don’t get rid of it. Standard worries about relativism re-emerge, e.g. an agent can know a priori that their own fundamental values are right, given how the meaning of the word ‘right’ is determined. This kind of (even merely ‘fundamental’) infallibility seems implausible.
(3) Just as simple subjectivism is an implausible theory of what ‘right’ means, so Eliezer’s meta-semantic subjectivism is an implausible theory of why ‘right’ means promoting external goods X, Y, Z. An adequately objective metaethics shouldn’t even give preferences a reference-fixing role.