I'm just curious how many of the utilitarians on here consider themselves to be realists.

I'm uncommitted. If there is any real morality, I think that the argument for it will be simple: 'goodness' is subjective, not in the sense of depending on personal opinion, but in the sense of being located in personal consciousness.

Closer to error theorist than anything else, though more like an error theorist error theorist (I think error theorists are asking the wrong question, even if they get the answer mostly right)

Non-realist. Moral statements are expressions of the emotions of the speaker.

Tentative moral realist here.

Closer to error theorist than anything else, though more like an error theorist error theorist (I think error theorists are asking the wrong question, even if they get the answer mostly right)

I'd be interested to hear your expand on this...

I have gradually become an über anti-realist, meaning that I don't think that there is an objective moral reality and that people are either confused or mistaken when they talk about objective morality as if it were a real thing or a real attribute of the universe.

There might be many ways to respond as an anti-realist. I think that my preferences are real and that preferences can often be observed objectively. For example, I hypothesize that people would prefer to drink a glass of water than to jump into a vat of boiling oil--this is a test able hypothesis. Preferences can sometimes be self-conflicting, like wanting to steal your neighbor's lawn chair but wanting everybody else on the planet to refrain from stealing from you. I think a judiciously rational person would seek to reduce such inconsistencies and focus on the rational consistency between one's own actions and one's contribution to the character of a society. Example: I want to live in a society in which people refrain from murdering each other, so I refrain from murdering others so that I do not contributed to the nature of a society that is contrary to my own preferences. I have found no objective moral principle that compels people to be rational, but I just do it (or try to do it). I might act on my preferences by leading others toward my version of judicious rationality, and irrational people might continue to work toward unfounded moral beliefs. I cannot claim that it is a violation of objective morality to to promote the morality from THorgRuTTen the volcano god, but it might be objectively irrational.

People generally share a few common interests (like desire for survival, personal autonomy, food, water...), and to the extent that they do so, they can develop a system of morality that derives from personal preferences and judicious rationality. People can also observe a great diversity of personal preferences in some areas. Perhaps the rational response is to refrain from forcing others to comply with your (arbitrary) personal preferences to the best degree that you can (a no-harm principle of enforcing your will on others). This is vaguely like voluntaryism (not voluntarism) when I go from a personal ethic to a political philosophy.

There is another anti-realism challenge to utilitarianism: if there is no objective morality, then there is no basis for the intrinsic value of happiness, well-being, physical or mental integrity, or any other such thing. Bentham's version of utilitarianism allowed for a preference-based system but suggested that people have a moral obligation to maximize utility. I no longer see a moral obligation to maximize utility as consistent with anti-realism. I do think that looking toward utility is a guide to what is rationally consistent with my personal preferences, but I object to a strict utility-maximization plan due to the lack of a coherent theory of measurement to support it. There is an entire division of philosophy focused on theories of measurement and scientific explanation, and none of it seems to support interpersonal counting and comparison of utility in a Benthamite way. Even the economists version of assigning probabilities to potential utilitarian outcomes is problematic because it completely ignores the theory of measurement for the underlying utility (it is adequate for predicting sales of toothpaste and cars but not for determining the true moral valence of actions).

tog wrote:Tentative moral realist here.

Closer to error theorist than anything else, though more like an error theorist error theorist (I think error theorists are asking the wrong question, even if they get the answer mostly right)

I'd be interested to hear your expand on this...

Won't have time to write on it for a while. Remind me in person if you remember and are still curious.

Unabashed non-natural moral realist, for instrumental reasons.

Like the Christians who know less about the historical Jesus than many atheists, I am confident in my belief in moral realism despite knowing relatively little about it. Moral realism provides additional motivation to do the right thing. If I believe doing that hewing to my values is consistent with some deep, non-physical aspect of the universe, I'll imbue it with more importance than if I think that morality is based on my emotions or that it's a mistaken concept altogether.

I might be able to convince myself that my obligations to others are minimal. Then I could lead a degenerate life, working part-time, meditating for a couple of hours a day, watching films. My belief in moral realism helps me to keep from straying onto that path. Moral realism is my secular religion.

Moral realism is quite intuitively plausible, so it doesn't take much to keep up my belief in it. I don't see any downsides. I'm not worried about being wrong, since I believe epistemic oughts arise only from moral oughts. Morality may demand strategic self-deception in certain cases. If this seems circular, it might be, but I'd like to hear a moral anti-realist tell me I shouldn't believe it.

Pat wrote:Like the Christians who know less about the historical Jesus than many atheists, I am confident in my belief in moral realism despite knowing relatively little about it. Moral realism provides additional motivation to do the right thing.

I was in a different situation that might be more similar to your situation that what you said. I believed in the intrinsic value of life (which is an assertion that objective moral value exists), but I knew it was irrational due to lack of any evidence to support the hypothesis that objective moral value exists. Despite knowing that it was irrational, I continued to believe in the intrinsic value of life for a relatively long time because I thought that discarding that belief would somehow force me to adopt terrible beliefs (like saying that there is nothing wrong with killing babies). I eventually discarded my belief in the intrinsic value of life, and I do not kill babies.

Pat wrote:I'm not worried about being wrong, since I believe epistemic oughts arise only from moral oughts.

hmmm. In other words "If objective morality does not exist, then I can do whatever the !@# I want!" This is a common interpretation of the moral realism debate. I propose that there is an alternative: rational consistency between your core preferences (perceived utility) in light of an accurate understanding of the effects of your actions on the universe. Instead of evaluating your actions according to objective morality, evaluate them in terms of rational consistency with your core preferences in light of knowledge of how your actions will affect the universe (and thereby affect you and things that concern you via indirect effects). I gave a little hint of this philosophy above, but either way, my beliefs have changed over time as a result of scrutinizing my beliefs, and they might continue to evolve.

That being said, I don't know your situation. In some cases, philosophical or religious beliefs perform an important function--like the motivational function that you mentioned or variations of it. I suspect that some people in some situations are not well-served by ruthless self-criticism of their own beliefs.

That's fascinating, Pat. Well, I probably won't try too hard to convince you otherwise. "but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matthew 18:6)

The main reason I can see not to believe in moral realism is if it infects your beliefs about the "arc of history" and such. For example, some believe that because suffering is objectively wrong, any sufficiently advanced AGI will realize this and act in the right way. Others believe that humanity continues to move closer and closer to the absolute moral truth, so we should trust our descendants to figure out the right answers about wild-animal suffering and the like without help from us. I think these are both mistaken. As long as your epistemology isn't distorted in this way (c.f., as long as you don't actually expect to find an invisible dragon in your garage), you should be fine.

rehoot wrote:There is an entire division of philosophy focused on theories of measurement and scientific explanation, and none of it seems to support interpersonal counting and comparison of utility in a Benthamite way.

Yew-Kwang Ng has argued otherwise:

Using axioms no stronger than those for the Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility hypothesis, with the recognition of finite sensibility, it is shown that the utility function derived by the N-M method is a neoclassical subjective utility function, contrary to the belief otherwise by prominent economists. This result is relevant for issues of utility measurability, social choice, etc. since it is subjective utility that is relevant for social choice.

I understood his paper at one point, but it was many years ago, so I'm afraid I can't argue for it at the moment. I also don't know the state of the art in the field.

All of that said, I'm not too concerned either said, because my intuition is that we should approximate Benthamite cardinalism as well as we can even if we can't rigorously justify our numerical assignments. Most of the time we can get close enough. And in some cases, we can't even plausibly be wrong -- e.g., when arguing that there's way more wild-animal suffering than human suffering on the planet.

Alan Dawrst wrote:rehoot wrote:There is an entire division of philosophy focused on theories of measurement and scientific explanation, and none of it seems to support interpersonal counting and comparison of utility in a Benthamite way.

I wrote a sentence that did not describe all of what I wanted to say. The sentence after that contains the qualification for the sentence that you quoted:

rehoot wrote:Even the economists version of assigning probabilities to potential utilitarian outcomes is problematic because it completely ignores the theory of measurement for the underlying utility (it is adequate for predicting sales of toothpaste and cars but not for determining the true moral valence of actions).

My access to that journal that you mentioned is limited to articles after 1997, but I have access to a newer one by the same author
Ng, Y.K. (1997). A case for happiness, cardinalism, and interpersonal comparibility. The Economic Journal, 107, 1848–1858.

The first article by Ng makes reference to an old but influential economic theory: Expected Utility. That theory is mostly a theory about the willingness to pay for something, not about any objective value under it. Ng tried to extend the theory.

In the 1997 article, he simply assumes that objective value exists without any rational explanation of how he reached that conclusion. The article is short, and his first argument is this: "happiness is the ultimate objective of most, if not all people" (p. 1848). The he says that money does not buy happiness (thereby shooting down the value of the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory). His explanation reveals his reliance on his own intuition: "The reasons are not difficult to see. Once the basic necessities and comforts of life are adequate, further consumption can actually make us worse off due to problems like excessive fat and cholesterol and stress. Our ways to increase happiness further then take on the largely competitive forms like attempting to keep up with or surpass the Joneses. From a social viewpoint, such consumption to sustain the competition continue to impose substantial environmental costs, making economic growth quite possibly happiness-decreasing (Ng and Wang, 1993). To avoid this sad outcome, a case can be made for increasing public expenditures (contrary to the currently popular view against public expenditures among economists) to safeguard the environment and to engage in research and development that will increase welfare (Ng. 1995a)" (p. 1849).

He simply asserts that his preferences to save the environment are objectively correct--he assumed away the most important challenge, which is to establish that those preferences are objectively correct. He seems to defeat his own claim to happiness by suggesting that people who eat too much are really not happy (in other words, Ng should be the one to determine which actions make people happy and if you want to eat an entire pizza, Ng will tell you that your own preference for what makes you happy is incorrect and you should use his list of what makes people happy).

His argument for treating measures of utility as interval scale (what economists call cardinality): "If we abstract away effects on other individuals and sentients, what I ultimately value is my net happiness... On the ground of evolutionary biology, daily experience, and interviews, I have reasons to believe that I am not an exception here but rather quite representative. Since, for myself, it is ultimately net happiness that I want, it has an especially compelling interpretation (for cardinal utility)" (p. 1851). In other words, he chooses happiness as the metric but addressed none of the measurement issues that he listed when he cited people who oppose his beliefs. Before you can measure something, you have to define it. I would say that there are ways to measure preferences for individual things and use approximation to compare those responses across individuals (psychologists do this all the time when they develop attitude or belief scales), but there is no objective way to weight support of one thing by one person (e.g., enjoyment of one lick of ice cream) against opposition against another thing by another person (e.g., opposition to torture). Counting them 1-to-one might seem objective until you substitute some content into the argument and try to determine if the moral weight is correct.

I don't know of a single document that is available on line (for free or otherwise) that covers all of the issues of measurement, validity, and scientific explanation to address the issue of interpersonal comparison of utility. Here is an article that is not terribly technical but mentions some important issues in representation (requires subscription): Luce & Suppes (2002). Representational Measurement Theory. Here is one that changed the way that psychologists measure latent variables (which would apply to utility) Meehl & Cronback (1955). Construct Validity in Psychological Tests, and their reference list is a good place to start. The Hempel and Oppenheim article from 1948 is also a really interesting look at scientific explanation, but you might have to read it a few times.

I wonder if the more rigorous argument in the article I cited is missing from "A case for happiness, cardinalism, and interpersonal comparibility." Not a big deal, since I don't have a strong attachment to these debates. I have a mildly good idea of how I think we should make these tradeoffs, and I'm not sure formal arguments would do much to change that unless they provided a compelling intuition pump for a counterintuitive conclusion.

Thanks for the other references -- you probably know more about this topic than I.

I was in a different situation that might be more similar to your situation that what you said. I believed in the intrinsic value of life (which is an assertion that objective moral value exists), but I knew it was irrational due to lack of any evidence to support the hypothesis that objective moral value exists.

Whether or not moral realism is true, it wouldn't require any more empirical evidence than mathematical realism would. It can only be determined through internal logic.

Despite knowing that it was irrational, I continued to believe in the intrinsic value of life for a relatively long time because I thought that discarding that belief would somehow force me to adopt terrible beliefs (like saying that there is nothing wrong with killing babies). I eventually discarded my belief in the intrinsic value of life, and I do not kill babies.

Maybe not, but I don't think you have a firm basis for criticizing people who do want to kill or torture babies.

Pat wrote:I'm not worried about being wrong, since I believe epistemic oughts arise only from moral oughts.

hmmm. In other words "If objective morality does not exist, then I can do whatever the !@# I want!" This is a common interpretation of the moral realism debate.

A lot of atheists seem to rationalize this conclusion away, I never really thought into it myself, but I think it's a common argument for (the usefulness of) moral realism because it's actually true. Not torturing people because you recognize another person's well-being as valuable vs. not doing so because it would make you feel guilty or because you want to think of yourself as an ethical person is a completely different basis for ethical behavior. The latter can only justify so much pro-social/co-operative behavior.

I propose that there is an alternative: rational consistency between your core preferences (perceived utility) in light of an accurate understanding of the effects of your actions on the universe. Instead of evaluating your actions according to objective morality, evaluate them in terms of rational consistency with your core preferences in light of knowledge of how your actions will affect the universe (and thereby affect you and things that concern you via indirect effects). I gave a little hint of this philosophy above, but either way, my beliefs have changed over time as a result of scrutinizing my beliefs, and they might continue to evolve.

I think the distinction preference utilitarians make between 'rational' and 'irrational' preferences is arbitrary and baseless or maybe I just don't understand the logic. Not killing other people is not rationally consistent with your preference to not be killed. It's only tactically wise for as long as other people will hold you accountable for killing someone else. Your preferences are about your life, not necessarily preserving life in general.

That being said, I don't know your situation. In some cases, philosophical or religious beliefs perform an important function--like the motivational function that you mentioned or variations of it. I suspect that some people in some situations are not well-served by ruthless self-criticism of their own beliefs.

Ruthless self-criticism of one's own beliefs are necessary for a logically consistent worldview and criticizing undesirable behavior or ideologies requires a logically coherent basis. Most people are better off when they're intellectually honest with themselves and free from cognitive dissonance.

There's nothing magical about moral realism. It's not logical to behave 'ethically' (ie. to consider the welfare of others) but it is logically consistent. If pain is bad, then some actions are morally bad whether they're considered morally bad or not. That doesn't mean that, logically, they 'ought' not to be undertaken, but they are bad actions. And there's really nothing far fetched or supernatural about the obvious and inherent goodness and badness of pleasure and pain. I might have gone on if I had the time.

And there's really nothing far fetched or supernatural about the obvious and inherent goodness and badness of pleasure and pain.

Any non-realists disagree? I'd be curious to hear why...

I don't think the words goodness and badness have any referent besides pleasure and pain, so the claim is effectively a tautology, like 'water is wet', telling us nothing about how to interact with the world.

Ubuntu wrote:There's nothing magical about moral realism. It's not logical to behave 'ethically' (ie. to consider the welfare of others) but it is logically consistent. If pain is bad, then some actions are morally bad whether they're considered morally bad or not. That doesn't mean that, logically, they 'ought' not to be undertaken, but they are bad actions. And there's really nothing far fetched or supernatural about the obvious and inherent goodness and badness of pleasure and pain. I might have gone on if I had the time.

Sound conclusions require true premises. I know that a rational ethic can be created from a single fundamental preference if that preference is inherently dichotomous (such as "survival"). The single-fundamental-preference approach could theoretically form the basis for unambiguous labeling of (some) behavior as rational or irrational with respect to the fundamental preference, but basing the fundamental preference on "pleasure and pain" cannot work because that would require an arbitrary system to define how to balance pleasure and pain. That being said, a "rational ethic" can't be "sound" unless somebody discovers an objective moral truth that says that we are morally compelled to adopt the given premises. There is no reason to suspect wide support from the conclusion of a truly rational ethic because people aren't built to value such things.

Anyway, if there is such thing as a perfectly rational ethic or perfectly sound ethic, it is most likely beyond the grasp of most (or all) people who are born with biological urges that are not driven by pure logic and an unadulterated quest for truth. I suspect that given the amount of time needed to develop abstract academic skills to think perfectly rationally (or anything close to it), it would be much more effective if humans could convince each other to spend some time cultivating a sense of compassion and to take the time to be considerate, even if such an approach requires some irrational sales pitch. People who think the opposite can and do influence the public via irrational means to get their way (e.g., corporate America).

You might think that I have dug a hole for myself by discounting the possibility of sound ethics and discarding the idea of moral realism. No. I think there are ways to view (a small number of) specific actions as irrational given a small number premises that are nearly universal. Perhaps more importantly, some arguments for defending some ethical beliefs can be shown to be clearly irrational (e.g., contradictory or relying on the existence of something for which there is no evidence as opposed to knowingly establishing an arbitrary preference). In the end, recognizing the clear irrationality of some beliefs combined with a small basis for identifying what is rational given premises that are not in dispute might help to build consensus for an ethical system that is not based on arbitrary fantasy. The entire process won't be strictly rational but might suffice for the purposes of gaining some common ground. I think utilitarianism was developed with the idea of functioning in this role, but I think it needs to be improved.

tog wrote:

Alan Dawrst wrote:And there's really nothing far fetched or supernatural about the obvious and inherent goodness and badness of pleasure and pain.

Any non-realists disagree? I'd be curious to hear why...

Let's say that pain is inherently bad--we can define bad as being pain. That does not strictly resolve any of the main ethical debates on social issues because there are many types of pain. Besides physical pain all I need to mention is one other type of pain: deprivation of liberty. Even the cost of death is difficult to balance against the cost of pain.

Now you are forced to find a way to balance the cost of physical pain and death against the pain of deprivation of somebody else's liberty. Is there an unambiguous way to measure the "cost" of preventing democratic elections and preventing freedom of speech and movement as a means of imposing martial law to avoid expected violence that would result from greater freedom? Maybe there is even a utilitarian argument for killing a few thousand protestors if it prevents a wider civil war that would cost even more lives---it depends on how you arbitrarily value liberty versus pain and death.

To answer your question more directly, I can't say that it is far-fetched or supernatural to say that pain is bad, the problem is related to measurement and using "bad" as a way to answer moral questions. It does seem strongly appealing to say that killing 10 randomly-selected people on the street for absolutely no reason is bad, but many questions that involve costs to one person and benefits to another are still quite difficult to answer. Perhaps the question that moral anti-realists would focus on is something like "can you demonstrate that the conclusion in a particular situation stems from our knowledge of objective moral truth." In the democracy question above, I would have to say no. In the random murder case, I would also say no even though I still oppose the idea of killing people at random.

My current idea is that I oppose killing people at random because my preference for survival implies that I have a preference to live in a world in which sentient beings refrain from killing one another. Killing people at random contradicts my preferences, so I oppose it.

I don't think the words goodness and badness have any referent besides pleasure and pain, so the claim is effectively a tautology, like 'water is wet', telling us nothing about how to interact with the world.

It may be tautological but tautology isn't necessarily fallacious and shouldn't be confused with circular reasoning. The concept of good and bad have no meaning outside of an emotional context, the very nature of pleasure is inherently good (ie. likeable) whether one regards their or anyone else's pleasure as good or desires it. I'm not arguing that people 'should' promote pleasure if by 'should' you mean they're 'supposed' to, they should if by 'should' you just mean that it would be objectively good or worth doing and it's inconsistent to distinguish between your pleasure and anyone else's.

There's nothing inside of me that gives a flying fuck about the death or suffering of the vast majority of human beings, including that of most "utilitarians", but I acknowledge that this is unethical on my part. Jesus fuck, I hate most of you like you could not believe. I don't think it's the idea that pleasure and pain are inherently good and bad that most people have as much difficulty taking seriously as it is the idea that pleasure and pain are *objectively* good and bad because we intuitively think of consciousness as being this vague, metaphysical thing that's somehow caused by physical activity in the brain as opposed to actually being objectively real physical phenomenon in the brain. Emotional states are as real as rocks, trees and plants, when I say that 'John is suffering' I'm not expressing a personal sentiment or feeling, I'm making a factual statement about the universe. John's pain is felt by him but it doesn't exist 'for him', it's a real 'thing' that exists in nature. Pleasure is inherently good + pleasure is objectively real = pleasure is objectively good.

basing the fundamental preference on "pleasure and pain" cannot work because that would require an arbitrary system to define how to balance pleasure and pain.

I don't understand.

-we can define bad as being pain. That does not strictly resolve any of the main ethical debates on social issues because there are many types of pain. Besides physical pain all I need to mention is one other type of pain: deprivation of liberty. Even the cost of death is difficult to balance against the cost of pain.

What all states of pain have in common is that they're inherently dis-likeable, some more so then others in terms of quantity but not quality.

-it depends on how you arbitrarily value liberty versus pain and death.

As counter-intuitive as it seems, I think that value is objective, so it's not a matter of what matters 'to' people but what matters objectively whether they think it matters or not.

My current idea is that I oppose killing people at random because my preference for survival implies that I have a preference to live in a world in which sentient beings refrain from killing one another. Killing people at random contradicts my preferences, so I oppose it.

Like I was saying, and this doesn't prove moral realism in any way, you can't criticize anyone's behavior without objective moral truths. You can criticize someone's logic if they believe that 3 + 3 = 4 because their belief is objectively wrong, you can't criticize someone's preference for Mozart over Bach (not whether or not they believe his music was more intellectually stimulating but more beautiful) if you disagree because it isn't objectively true that either of their music was beautiful or more so than the others', it's a matter of taste. You can prevent people from killing others as an anti-realist and try to persuade them on an emotional level, which can include pointing out that it's in their own self-interest to avoid jail, live in a society where they're less likely to be killed by co-operating with and respecting others, feel good about themselves etc. to not kill people but you can't criticize them for doing so.

Meta-ethical issues are important to me and are part of why I'm a utilitarian, though not directly.

I've been studying meta-ethics somewhat intensely (probably 1-2 hours a day) for about a year and a half now as a hobbyist autodidactic philosopher, while continuing formal undergraduate training as a political science and psychology major. Over that time, my thoughts on meta-ethics have shifted dramatically from moral realism to something I think is best represented by moral anti-realism.

End-Relational Ought

I'm a fan of Stephen Finlay's meta-ethical reduction of "ought". Basically, he argues that "ought" is a word that expresses a probabilistic relationship about what is most effective at satisfying a given end, and that end is either explicitly given or contextually assumed. For instance, we would hear "You ought not drive through that red light!" and reduce it to "You ought (in order that you obey the law) not drive through that red light!" and then reduce it further to "Driving through that red light is very likely to violate the law!"

Another example would be taking "You ought to donate large portions of your income to animal welfare charities!" would become "You ought (in order that you most reduce suffering) donate large portions of your income to animal welfare charities!", which becomes "Donating large portions of your income to animal welfare charities is likely to most reduce suffering".

This reduction seems to take the normative component out of ethics, yes. But that's because the normative component is not purely a descriptive fact, but actually an additional, more emotive part of the sentence. Usually, I think it is best described as a perlocutionary demand.

~

Various Moral Standards

The way it all plays out is that there are various moral standards (deontology, negative rights, utilitarianism, etc.) and these can be used to judge actions as moral or immoral. None of these standards are priveleged over another, so picking utilitarianism over deontology is, I'd argue, just a matter of personal preference. Likewise, even picking a moral standard over a non-moral one (or even a downright anti-moral one!) for evaluating action or being the standard about what you ought to do, is again a matter of personal preference.

I think most people care about moral standards, social standards (what society demands of you), etiquette, and pragmatic standards (what works out for your self-interest). I don't think there is an "ought" all-things-considered that lets you navigate between this view.

~

My Stance?

When you add up all of this, I think there are moral facts (descriptive facts about what satisfies a given moral standard), and some of these moral facts are true. So in that sense, I'm a realist. However, I deny that any one particular standard is meta-ethically overriding or meta-ethically priveleged, and think we choose our standards based on personal preference. So in that sense, I'm an anti-realist. I also think that emotive content is key to the normative salience of many moral statements, so in that sense I'm an emotivist (though very cognitivist).

Ultimately, I think that we could avoid confusion analytically by doing away with moral language and just talking about the standard individually -- not talk about what is morally right, but rather what reduces suffering. However, when we enter the public to speak persuasively, I think it is clear we should take advantage of the psychological impact of moral language.

I've started outlining these views on ethics in a much easier to follow manner and with much more elaboration on my blog. So far, I've written: "The Meaning of Morality", "Good and Ought as End-Relative", "Categorical Ought as Rhetorical Ought", '"Categorical Imperatives and Quadruple-Function Normativity", "The Is-Ought Gap", "Too Many Moralities".

I'd love some feedback.

Great post, Peter. I think I agree with basically everything you said. Your position seems to be fairly common -- is there a standard name for it?

peterhurford wrote:However, when we enter the public to speak persuasively, I think it is clear we should take advantage of the psychological impact of moral language.

Heh, yeah. In a blog post, I said:

Indeed, the reason why people started talking in terms of absolute morality may have been because it's more persuasive to say "God commands you to do X" or "Absolute morality commands you to do X" than it is to say "I would really like it if you did X and really dislike it if you didn't. Pretty please?"

BTW, your blog is very impressive. You've written a huge amount of good stuff for being just 20 years old.

peterhurford wrote:when we enter the public to speak persuasively, I think it is clear we should take advantage of the psychological impact of moral language.

Heh, that reminds me of this:

Brian Tomasik wrote:Your position seems to be fairly common -- is there a standard name for it?

I've been hearing that it's common, and I think it is shared by a lot of philosophers, but I've never seen it specifically written out meta-ethically like the way I have, though they are very similar to that of philosopher Stephen Finlay, who has given it the name end-relational theory.

Brian Tomasik wrote:BTW, your blog is very impressive. You've written a huge amount of good stuff for being just 20 years old.

Thanks, very much! I really like getting encouragement!

Arepo wrote:Heh, that reminds me of this

Haha, definitely!

I'd agree with the relevant parts of Peter's position. Though I don't think it is that common, at least not among academic philosophers (see eg the philpapers survey). It's probably common among the LessWrong crowd, transhumanists, and so forth.

Jesper Östman wrote:I'd agree with the relevant parts of Peter's position.

Are there any irrelevant parts that you do disagree with? I do want to strive even for irrelevant accuracy.

Jesper Östman wrote:Though I don't think it is that common, at least not among academic philosophers (see eg the philpapers survey). It's probably common among the LessWrong crowd, transhumanists, and so forth.

That's been my experience as well. I think it's a bit hard to say because it's uncertain whether this position is "realism" or "anti-realism". For instance, little bits of both realist Singer's "The Expanding Circle" and anti-realist Mackie's "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong" seem to indicate agreement with this theory. (Singer uses "morally ought" and distinguishes it from "pragmatically ought"; Mackie agrees that hypothetical imperatives can form a basis for an "ethics" replacement, even if it cannot rightfully be called "ethics"). Though neither outlines the theory outright.

(Also, for those searching around, I've heard this theory elsewhere also called "meta-ethical contextualism".)

The difficulty with non-cognitivism (or contextualism, relativism or what have you) is that there is some fact of the matter as to what consequences things have.

I prefer X to Y and that is a sufficient objective reason why X is "better". It may not be the best reason, or even a good reason, but I have difficulty accepting any meta-ethical viewpoint that doesn't acknowledge my desire in some way.

xodarap wrote:The difficulty with non-cognitivism (or contextualism, relativism or what have you) is that there is some fact of the matter as to what consequences things have.

Non-cognitivism, contextualism, and relativism (while two different theories*) do not deny that there is a fact of the matter to what consequences things have. They just deny something else, saying either:
1.) there is no fact of the matter as to whether a consequence is better than another consequence, and that any expression suggesting such is a purely emotional outburst (non-cognitivism)
2.) there is indeed a fact of the matter to whether a consequence is better than another consequence given a body of information and a standard of evaulation, but no fact of the matter as to whether something is better simpliciter (ie no standard).

xodarap wrote:I prefer X to Y and that is a sufficient objective reason why X is "better". It may not be the best reason, or even a good reason, but I have difficulty accepting any meta-ethical viewpoint that doesn't acknowledge my desire in some way.

The standard of morality you want to accept and use to measure action against is your personal stance, so what I take you to be expressing here is that you would not prefer a standard that doesn't acknowledge your (presumably non-moral) preference.

That, however, wouldn't deny that your preference may be completely ignored by other moral systems (such as any system that doesn't aggregate preferences, like deontology). On my meta-ethical view, these moral systems remain true, regardless of your preferences toward them.

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*Note: I take contextualism and relativism to be synonymous here, though there are multiple, mutually exclusive types of relativism/contextualism.

That, however, wouldn't deny that your preference may be completely ignored by other moral systems (such as any system that doesn't aggregate preferences, like deontology). On my meta-ethical view, these moral systems remain true, regardless of your preferences toward them.

To draw an analogy: suppose I claim that Post's correspondence problem is undecidable. You disagree. So I show you a reduction to the halting problem, and you say "Fine, but now I don't believe the halting problem is undecidable." So I do the little diagonalization, and you still disagree, then I derive why diagonalizations are correct from basic logic and you say "Well, I just don't believe in these logic principles."

At some point, we'll reach an axiom, and I'll just have to say: "Look, any system which doesn't follow these principles just doesn't cohere with the world." That's not to say you have to believe me, or that using other axioms could be interesting. It's just that they don't relate to the real world.

That's my position on metaethics: certain theories cohere better with the world than others. Which is not to say there can be no dispute about ethics, but merely there can be no more dispute than in science in general.

Peter:

Agreed on Singer and Mackie.

In general I'm dubious about theories which make general claims about moral semantics without grounding them in strong experimental philosophy research on how people in fact use moral terms. AFAIK no theory of moral semantics has such empirical grounding, and it seems plausible to me that different groups of people might use moral terms in slightly different ways. However, this is not relevant, I believe, since not very much hangs on people's use of such terms (might be useful to know for purposes of making persuasive aruguments - but I do not think such experimental philosophy is the most effective investment in trying to become more persuasive):