Data scientist at MIRI
Robi Rahman
Karma: 216
Good questions; perhaps I made a mistake somewhere in my definition and I should go back and adjust it.
Suppose that the Christian God existed in a straightforward sense, entirely provable and possessing the all the power and status given to Him by the devout. In this world, if someone said “‘moral’ actions are those that follow the commandments of God”, you would say that (by definition) that can’t be a (sufficient) definition of morality, right?
No, then moral actions would have some real consequences, and that would distinguish them from immoral actions. For example, you’d be sent to hell or be smitten or whatever.
(It’d just be a claim about what God wants and/or the laws of God.)
In this case you’re supposing God is the true ruler of the universe and the laws of Christianity are fundamental to the universe in the same way that the laws of physics are in ours. So then moral realism would be true. (Laws of God, if God were real, are different in this respect than laws made by humans, which only apply in certain places and cease to be real if people stop believing in them.)
saying “‘moral’ actions are those that attract WIMPs” would not, according to you, be a sufficient condition because it’s merely a prediction of the consequences of the act.
No, because crucially, it’s a prediction of the consequences of the moral status of the act. For example, suppose moral realism is true and the correct ethical system is hedonic utilitarianism. Then it’s usually immoral to hit people because it hurts, unless they’re a masochist and enjoy pain, in which case it’s morally good to hit them. In that case the rightness or wrongness of your action (and whether the morality particles accumulate or leave) is determined not by what you’re physically doing but by the morality of doing it.
The unifying theme with your examples is that you’re giving counterfactual things that would make our human notion of morality real, but in our universe, in real life, those things do not exist and there is no fact of the matter on whether these morally charged things are truly good/bad.
Defining morality while tabooing moral, ethical, right, wrong, good, bad, ought, should, duty, obligation, permissible, virtue, and cognate words:
Humans sometimes classify actions, intentions, people, institutions, and outcomes using positive, negative, or neutral labels that supposedly do more than describe what happened, predict consequences, report a law or custom, state what anyone wants, or identify an effective means to a chosen end.
Central examples of things that receive these classifications concern causing pain, killing, deception, coercion, keeping promises, helping people in distress, and distributing burdens and benefits. They contrast with judgments about which chess move wins, which investment earns more money, which action is legal, which behavior is fashionable, or which policy best fulfills a specified utility function.
The disputed question is whether some applications of these labels accurately represent features or relations that are not made accurate merely by anyone’s preferences, commitments, conventions, or decisions. My position is that applying the labels expresses attitudes; it does not report an additional feature of the action.
By “morality” I mean the human practice of evaluating conduct from a standpoint that people present as not being indexed merely to what the actor wants, what advances a stipulated objective, what their society accepts, or what will be rewarded or punished. I think statements made from that standpoint express attitudes or opinions rather than describe another feature of the world.
Edit: the disputed term, “morality”, names this classificatory practice, and, if its judgments are made accurate by some feature of reality, whatever feature makes them accurate. (I claim there is no such feature of reality.)
From my perspective, morality is basically a branch of mathematics...
There’s also probably a bunch of moral laws that basically mean it’s never correct to try to escape through changing your values.
Want to explain how you’re getting “it’s never correct to try to escape [having to follow moral laws] by changing your values” purely from mathematics? Sounds highly dubious to me.
I guess I’m still curious why, on your view, moral claims are not simply false.
Let me try again to answer this. My position is:
You could imagine some counterfactual alternate universe, where moral claims are things that have evidence for or against them. Then they could be true or false.
But in real life, they are not that kind of thing. There is no such thing as direct evidence for or against any of them.
(There is indirect Bayesian evidence, e.g. many philosophy professors being ardent moral realists, so I have some small, nonzero credence that I’m mistaken. But that’s a feature of my epistemics and uncertainty, not of moral claims themselves.)
Great question. My current best understanding is that moral claims are the opinions of the claimants. (This falls under emotivism, which is a non-cognitivist variety of anti-realism.) However, there is a counterfactual possible world in which moral claims are not merely opinions but have empirical evidence for or against them. But in our real universe, as far as anyone has been able to tell, there is no such evidence of that sort.
So if the existence of WIMPS would render claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] true, then there are ways the world could be that would render [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims true or false. So [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are truth-apt.
No, because while the existence of WIMPs would show that some claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] were true, the non-existence of WIMPs leaves us with no way to assess the truth or falsehood of [UNTRANSLATABLE-1]. Since there are no WIMPs, as far as we know, claims about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] are still neither true nor false.
Let me rephrase my position without using the notion of truth-aptness.
There are no moral claims that are true or false. It is conceivable that in some hypothetical universe, there could be a state of the world where some moral claims are found to be true or false, but there’s no evidence that we are in such a universe.
I claim “people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do. Is that an [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] fact? Why not?
“people should cooperate against their clones in PD” is a statement about what people ought to do, where “ought” means “is in one’s self-interest”. It is not a statement about [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] because statements about what is in one’s self-interest are not the category of things that [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] is referring to.
If you’re Catholic, surely you believe that God has ordained the moral truths and the Bible is His revelation of those truths, and the Catholic Church is His appointed representatives on Earth, right? So the correct way to reason about moral truth is to (1) follow the Bible’s/Church’s instructions, or if they don’t specify what to do in some situation, (2) extrapolate from the Bible/Church? Right? Why would you instead do this other thing involving reasoning about game theoretic agents? Isn’t that worse than following the Church, or even in contradiction of it?
Yeah, I’m saying I think social fabric is not relevant to the cruxes of our disagreement.
(Sorry, I hadn’t attempted the taboo exercise yet, I was trying one more time at just giving the straightforward definition. Might retry but with all morality words tabooed, if I have time.)
Wait. If [UNTRANSLATABLE-1] claims are not in the category of things that can be true, then how can your WIMP example work? Didn’t you say you would change your mind if we detected WIMPs? How is this not in contradiction with the notion that it’s categorically not something that can be true?
Sorry. Clarifying: they are not things that it is categorically impossible for them to be true; they are things that have no evidence for their truth-aptness. If WIMPs were discovered then I would realize they are indeed in the category of truth-apt things.
Great question, though I will note that my stance is not that any particular moral theory is the right one, it is that none of them are truth-apt or have any evidence supporting them (other than people intuitively feeling that they’re true).
Suppose that we discovered that the WIMOPs obey most parts of traditional morality and have the quirk of having extremist views on interracial interactions: different races have different Lebensraums and living not in one’s Lebensraum or creating hybrids is prohibited, but ONLY by the WIMOPs, not because hybrids are prone to degeneration.
If you presented this discovery, I would admit that my position is wrong, because then there would be moral claims (e.g. “living outside of one’s Lebensraum is immoral”) that have evidence supporting them.
I’m pointing to the fact that a lot of literature exists that makes in-depth arguments for why realism is true.
Yes, I’m familiar with much of that literature and as far as I’m aware, none of it provides evidence that moral claims are truth-apt.
In fact I’ve never even heard a moral realist propose any real-world experiment that could provide evidence for moral realism even in principle.
I’ve never heard a moral realist claim that their position can be supported experimentally.
I never said that moral realists claim their positions can be supported experimentally, or that experiments are necessary to establish moral realism. I was just giving an example of something that would demonstrate that I’m wrong. To clarify: there is a plethora of types of possible evidence which, if they existed, would convince me of moral realism (of which empirical experiments would be a sufficient example), but moral realists fail to meet the very low bar of presenting any of them.
The evolutionary argument against intuition has been addressed by e.g. Parfit in On What Matters. I’m not sure his defense is correct, but you can’t claim that Parfit simply doesn’t understand evolution.
Derek Parfit was very smart, probably smarter than I am, and I haven’t read his specific defense of ethical intuitionism against the evolutionary debunking anti-realist argument. I am willing to read it if you think it’s airtight. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to be wrong, having heard this category of argument many times before. I would also guess that yes, his belief in it has a defeater that he never materialized, which is him having a better understanding of evolution.
“Theorems of game theory are absolutely not [facts that bear on how any agent, regardless of who they are, ought to act in certain classes of situations, according to their own values, because of the acausal interplay (including the establishment of Schelling points, red lines, and other coordination mechanisms) between that agent and the other agents in the universe (including distant, causally disconnected places)].” But according to me, the theorems of game theory are extremely relevant,
I agree, theorems of game theory are extremely relevant to that thing you described.
so you probably have a different notion of morality. What is it?
Again, I googled “what is morality” and the default result was pretty good. It said:
Morality is the principles, values, and standards that determine what is right or wrong, good or bad.
From my perspective, a defining characteristic of the thing that I want to look at is that the pressure comes from the social fabric.
I’m not a moral relativist; I don’t believe that what’s right or wrong is decided by the beliefs of society or the context in which the action is taken. I believe there is no truth value to whether actions are objectively right or wrong.
I just googled “what are moral facts” and its answer is pretty good:
Moral facts are real truths about what actions are right, wrong, good, or bad.
They state what people ought to do or avoid.
What Moral Facts Cover
Right and wrong: Whether specific actions like lying or helping others are good or bad.
Obligations: What people have a duty to do.
Character traits: Whether traits like honesty or cruelty are good or bad.
Examples of Proposed Moral Facts
Torturing an innocent child for fun is wrong.
Unjustly killing another person is bad.S
howing kindness to others is good.
The Main Debate
Philosophers disagree about whether these facts actually exist.
Moral Realism: This view says moral facts are real. They exist independently of what humans think, just like math or physical facts.
Moral Anti-Realism: This view says moral facts do not exist. It claims that statements about right and wrong are only human opinions, emotions, or social rules.
I would add:
Moral facts are moral claims that are true.
My position is that there are no moral claims that have any truth values: none of them are true and none of them are false. They are not truth-apt; they are not in the category of things that can be true or false.
Regarding your game theory example, your claim that (because being the kind of agent who cooperates in the prisoner’s dilemma will benefit you in the long run) “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma” (where “should” means “is in your best interest/increases your expected utility”) is not a moral claim of the kind I am talking about. The claim that “you should cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma”, where “should” means “it is morally good to cooperate”, is a moral claim, but is neither true nor false. I’m asking for any evidence that it, or any other moral claim, is true or false.
The “weakly interacting moral particles” thought experiment is offering a very easy goalpost, which moral realists fail to meet. It is an example—sufficient, but certainly not necessary—of something that would refute my position that moral claims are not truth-apt. If it were true, you could back up the claim “murder is wrong” with the physical observation that murderers lose their morality particles.
Troll: “Lots of smart people describe themselves as moral realists, and even, like Max, become more aligned with moral realism over time as smart adults (instead of being indoctrinated as kids). This is more likely to be observed if moral realism is true than if moral realism is false, therefore it is real-world evidence. QED.”
You’re joking but I really do consider the bolded sentence to be evidence for moral realism—in fact, it’s the strongest evidence for moral realism I’ve been able to find.
But there are many better explanations for lots of smart people believing a false thing, that have much more evidence supporting them, than moral realism actually being true.
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