Do you acknowledge that what is or isn’t morally ‘obvious’ varies from person to person? It seems like you’re just reverse engineering a moral system to best cohere with your subjective intuition.
Hanson wrote/said(?): “No other large community of expert advisers has anywhere near the economists' deserved reputation for consistently suggesting win-win deals.”
This is either very optimistic or dependent on the fact that no other group even tries to suggest win-win deals. The great successes of economists that come to mind for me are all negative - please stop shooting yourself in the foot. Deregulate communications so we can have cell phones. Stop conscripting soldiers. Where are the positive examples Hanson seems to have in mind?
I'm gathering ideas for a novel about an A-I Gadget that constrains government. I'm sure there are many novels with that exact theme being contemplated now.
The main idea is an A-I Constitution where the ink can leap-up off the parchment and smite the wrong-headed legislative body. The coercive ability of the A-I thing isn't established yet, but its purpose is to force the kind of majority any deliberative bodies must adhere to... super majority, qualified majority, relative majority or even unanimous.
But the A-I Gadget must be given and indeed the legislature has to know… what the purpose of the government is. So far all I have is… that all five quintiles must have ever-increasing economic wellbeing and the principle mechanism for doing that is getting strangers to trust each other. For example. People killing their pets just for fun will in no way harm the way people trust each other, so a law forbidding it will be unconstitutional. Well, that is, unless 96% think it’s self-evident. Then OK.
But the above debate makes me think a heavenly produced arbitrary morality should be considered over UI-o-SL; Universal Improvement of Standard of Living.
Your argument for the inferiority of "one sentence" moral theories is fundamentally fallacious.
Ultimately, if you believe there are real moral facts out there in the world, presumably there is some fact of the matter about what is moral in each case. And sure, there is a trivial sense in which you are more likely to be correct by opining only about fewer cases but it's the same sense in which you're more likely to be correct when you say this rock will fall than when you give a theory of gravity.
What the fact that all these simple theories have to bite bullets shows is that everyone has to bite bullets and all you're doing by being vague is avoiding answering those hard questions.
We need to focus on what it means to have a coherent moral theory in the first place. To begin with, one logically does have to base one's ethics on a "one sentence" final end if you are to avoid situations where the pursuit of a supposedly necessary value conflicts with the pursuit of another supposedly necessary value. A non-final value can be universally necessary (i.e. rise to the level of being an instrumental virtue) only if it always serves to optimize some unambiguous final end. Values that don't rise to that level may entail trade-offs against other values, so only optimization of a singular final end can provide a firm decision rule to govern such trade-offs.
Since David Hume's time, most philosophers have acknowledged this, but have balked at the idea that any facts about the universe necessitate the choice of a particular final end by someone who is free to choose among different ends. However, the same decision-making confusion that plagues a plurality of values that aren't governed by the optimization of an unambiguous final end also plagues the arbitrary choice of a final end that one is compelled to abandon because of the cognitive dissonance between one's chosen values and one's emotional response to the consequences of acting on those values. An ethical subjectivist can only bash his head against the wall only so many times before his arbitrary choice to maximize head bashing as his final end is refuted by reality. The relevant facts that force him to change his mind aren't "out there in the world" so to speak, but rather lodged in the construction of his own neural system.
If the purpose of ethics is to provide everyone with clear, consistent guidelines on how to rank different possible actions, then ethics must endorse values that align one's choices with what is psychologically sustainable for a human being as well as insisting on a singular standard for judging the instrumentality of all other values. In short, we have to reject the subjectivist revolt against ontological ethics in favor of an Epicurean-style hedonism. It is the psychological nature of man that provides the facts that bridge the "is-ought" gap. Epicurus, by the way, came up with such a psychological justification for the values of personal autonomy and self-sufficiency, so he was able to derive very libertarian-sounding ideas affirming private ownership, avoidance of politics, etc. on this basis.
"most philosophers have acknowledged this, but have balked at the idea that any facts about the universe necessitate the choice of a particular final end by someone who is free to choose among different ends"
I suppose that depends on who gets counted as a "philosopher" and what one means by "facts about the universe."
Among academics who responded to the 2020 Philpapers survey, only 51% said they subscribed to a naturalist metaphilosophy, while 62% described themselves as moral realists (which includes intuitionists, who don't qualify as appealing to "facts about the universe" in my estimation). It would be interesting to get a cross-tab breaking down what fraction of the moral realists describe themselves as ethical naturalists (and more specifically, would affirm that naturalism justifies a particular final end for all humans). Another point of interest is that consequentialists are a minority of the respondents (just over 30%), so we have the peculiar circumstance where a large fraction of the self-described moral realists don't think that the relevance of the facts they consider important involves natural causality affecting outcomes. But if the moral agent is indifferent to consequences, and in particular if the consequences don't impact one's ability to sustain arbitrary choices (as I mentioned above), then how do the facts of the universe dictate one's choice of a final end?
I suspect that if one were to try to classify the metaethical premises of academics in the social sciences and humanities outside of philosophy departments, you would find moral realism a lot less prevalent. On the other hand, among non-academics who express philosophical opinions one would probably find large numbers of present and former followers of Ayn Rand who would greatly swell the ranks of ethical naturalists.
It is worth noting that the same survey indicated that only 13.4% of the respondents described their political philosophy as libertarian, while 44% indicated egalitarian, 27.3% indicated communitarian, and 20.5% indicated other.
Many of the very best minds that humankind has been able to muster have studied Physics and tried to determine the fundamental laws of the Universe. They have made extraordinary progress, and we have the Standard Model, and they are working out whether it's parts can be further unified.
It boggles my feeble mind in how accurate it is in modeling reality. And yet they are humble about flaws and limitations and contradictions.
i.e. a sustained assault on the problem for hundreds (or more depending on when you think it started) of years by the finest minds has given us these theories and backed by precise measurements, about inanimate objects with no free will, no emergent properties, etc.
And here we are talking about a species that evolved 6M years ago, through natural selection, with brains whose parts adapted during even earlier millennia against different evolutionary pressures, and who organize in large complex societies and whose study has been undertaken by nothing like the Newtons or Einsteins or Feynmans of this world, and we have compact moral codes expressible in one line?! LIBERTY! FREEDOM!
The Enlightenment is only 300 years old.
I'd say even Professor Kaplan's view has insufficient humility to say nothing about how utterly bonkers Professor Hansen's is.
I don't understand your point. I'm not claiming that either has a correct moral theory.
I think the physics analogy is a good one. Quantum mechanics is a highly counterintuitive theory though it's a simple one. Imagine someone arguing that simple theories of physics are less likely to be true because they all seem to be really counterintuitive and when you say: but whats you evidence that complex theories would do better they just say: well if I only tell you what's going to happen in a few cases you can't derive any counterintuitive aspects from what I said.
Sure, that's true but you didn't give a reason to think that complex theories are better. You just showed that if you shut up then we can't identify a specific criticism to make. If you want to argue that complex theories are better produce a complex theory that handles the same range of cases as the simple one and is more attractive.
When it comes to our understanding of ourselves, how we organize in societies, what is moral and immoral our understanding is primitive.
I'd say making confident claims about moral theory today would be like making confident claims that "the world rests on the back of a turtle" -- which is what some people believed, that was their best understanding at the time.
We have so much to understand before we can make compact claims about morality -- our understanding of free will, understanding of the conscious and subconscious brain, kinship, and so on.
This has nothing to do with whether ultimately laws are discovered and whether they are "simple" or not (as an aside, a vanishingly small number of our species can comprehend quantum mechanics, if you are one of those and can call it simple -- good for you! Simple (adj) easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty.)
We co-inhabit this planet with billions of other humans, many more of other species, and if we are lucky and if we persist, may be in a few thousand years or a few hundred thousand years we can get to laws approaching the rigor it takes to make bold claims about anything. We are a hair width removed from feces flinging monkeys.
If everyone agreed that there are real moral facts out there is the world, there would still be disagreement about how to generalize/state, interpret, and apply them. If enough exceptions show up in practice, this indicates that it is time to re-evaluate the moral generalization that the exceptions violate.
This is a close parallel to how precedent is supposed to work in common law. In both cases, we can be confident that errors will be made, and it is not obvious how to correct them. But a large number of anomalies is a strong indicator that modification is needed.
Sure, but one doesn't need to agree with others in order to observe, reason about, and make use of such facts for oneself.
Indeed, various authoritarian institutions tend to intentionally and unintentionally distort principles of valuation in ways that promote their own flourishing at the expense of the happiness of those who are taken in by their propaganda, so certain kinds of moral errors are likely to persist across much of society in spite of the objective evidence indicating that a modification of the prevailing beliefs is needed.
One has to summon up the courage to act on the basis of one's own intellectual and moral autonomy when the facts indicate such a course, not allow conformism and authoritarianism become a substitute for one's own understanding of the facts.
I agree that one doesn't need to agree with others in order to observe, reason about, and make use of such facts for oneself. What you say is relevant for an individual reflecting on his own behavior.
If he is going to interact with others, he has to worry about how compatible their moral theories are. A society has to converge on some agreed values or principles, or fall apart. If a society is composed of fallible agents, it is unlikely to get it perfectly right the first time.
Fallible agents will not have theories that are fully correct and cover every circumstance. When such agents have a dispute, they have to find agreed principles on which it can be resolved, if it is to be resolved rather than swept under the rug.
But laws and norms themselves can be fallible too. An individual reflecting on moral facts for himself can independently evaluate the mutual expediency of whatever laws and norms prevail in his society as well as evaluate his own personal conduct in light of those facts. One can disobey an unjust law or flout a repressive norm if observance of such a social rule results in intolerable misery. A "society" needs to fall apart if it isn't compatible with the moral facts that define the rational self-interest of each of its members.
Also, to some extent one can control the particular social context one places oneself in. Members of some subcultures may observe deviant norms that most of the rest of society disapproves of, but in a society where interactions are voluntary and peacefully-acquired ownership rights are enforced, there is no reason why a plurality of distinct social networks, each adhering to different norms, can't peacefully coexist--what threatens the continuity of the social order overall is when one group tries to coercively impose its particular norms on others. It is clashing tribes of culture warriors, each trying to force their preferred "agreement" on everyone else, and not the people who are inclined to mind their own business who tear a society apart.
Another point to bear in mind is that norms usually are nothing like contracts that arise through a reflective process of rational persuasion concerning the benefits offered to another, interactive negotiations to fix the specific terms, and overt mutual consent to those terms. Instead, a norm is usually adopted without one having to think a great deal about its compatibility with fundamental moral facts precisely because one observes or is instructed without any deeper rational analysis (by one's parents, friends, teachers, etc.) that the norm in question facilitates one's social interactions.
In many cases the facilitation of social cooperation is a sufficient justification for presuming in a given case that observance of a prevailing norm, obedience to an existing law, or communicating with the language used in the region one's resides in optimizes one's pursuit of happiness. However, a presumption in favor of existing norms, etc. is rebuttable--if your direct experience of the consequences or your understanding of more fundamental moral facts exposes the dysfunctionality of the existing social consensus, you can't lightly dismiss what your reason is telling you.
The importance of keeping an open mind about the utility of existing laws and norms implies that laws ought to be geared towards defending each person's moral autonomy (which is a necessity for one's pursuit of happiness in any event) and that norms ought to be a voluntary product of an on-going cultural evolution, combining a personal freedom of choice with a personal responsibility for the consequences of one's choices. The "agreement" on norms in a free society arises out of a spontaneous process of each adult being able to test their chosen values against their own personal experiences. A presumption in favor of traditional values often works better in a free society precisely because a free people will discard values that don't work for them and to embrace new values that work better. The values that survive the on-going process of voluntary experimentation and selection tend to be those that are most consonant with the moral facts about human nature. The main caveat against this (as I mentioned above) is that institutional influence on the propagation of norms can have a distorting effect on which values propagate the most efficiently. One has to take this into account when evaluating laws and norms.
An understanding of the spontaneous, decentralized nature of an on-going cultural evolution, coupled with an understanding of the caveats I mentioned, distinguishes secular individualists both from "progressives" who think that social consensus should be engineered by elite social planners in defiance of tradition and from religious conservatives who think that an infallible supernatural entity engraved the correct norms onto stone tablets and inspired various other authoritative writings of a dozen or so "prophets" a few thousand years ago, and therefore it is therefore wrong to consult one's experiences and to reason from those experiences to scrutinize the values prescribed by these ancient scriptures.
>But laws and norms themselves can be fallible too.
Indeed! That is part of what I am saying.
>A "society" needs to fall apart if it isn't compatible with the moral facts that define the rational self-interest of each of its members.
Fall apart, or preferably, allow agents to adjust how they interact so it doesn’t need to fall apart.
>there is no reason why a plurality of distinct social networks, each adhering to different norms, can't peacefully coexist
I think we are talking past each other. The context seems to say these statements contradict my previous reply, but I am not seeing the contradiction. Obviously different groups can have different norms, and interact one way sometimes and another way other times, depending on who they interact with. I am speaking of broad norms, for interacting with strangers. These are fairly basic, for a society with many such interactions.
>what threatens the continuity of the social order overall is when one group tries to coercively impose its particular norms on others.
Yep.
>An understanding of the spontaneous, decentralized nature of an on-going cultural evolution, coupled with an understanding of the caveats I mentioned, distinguishes secular individualists both from "progressives" who think that social consensus should be engineered by elite social planners in defiance of tradition and from religious conservatives who think that an infallible supernatural entity
The point was that even if we stipulate that everyone goes fully woke or comes to Jesus and believes there is one true answer, there will still be disagreement over the details, and need for a process of arbitration and reconciliation among disputants. Agreeing in the abstract that there is a correct answer doesn’t lead us unerringly to the answer, even if it exists.
Interesting as this is, I am not clear how where we have arrived relates to the comment I replied to above, or my reply.
>The point was that even if we stipulate that everyone goes
>fully woke or comes to Jesus and believes there is one true
>answer, there will still be disagreement over the details, and
>need for a process of arbitration and reconciliation among
>disputants. Agreeing in the abstract that there is a correct
>answer doesn’t lead us unerringly to the answer, even if it exists.
Right. If everyone happens to stipulate a "one true answer" that in isn't stable in the psychological sense I described above (i.e. the answer isn't based on the facts concerning innate features of human nature), you tend to get sectarian splits between "fundamentalists" who insist on a literal application of the "one true answer" versus those who concede various _ad hoc_ tweaks to make the "one true answer" a better fit to their own experience of reality, and splits over the precise interpretation of the "one true answer" (as such a flawed answer is offered as a floating abstraction without foundation in the appropriate facts).
I'm inclined to the view that a correct common standard of value applicable to all humans does exist, but the nature of the evidence (much of which is introspective and analogized to others via indirect inferences) doesn't easily lend itself to any process of interpersonal arbitration or reconciliation.
There is also the problem that a detailed application of such a standard to one's own specific situation given one's own particular personality, social circumstances, etc. means that what is "correct" for one person isn't exactly the same as what is "correct" for another person. One ancient Greek source used the metaphor that the virtues provided by a correct philosophy function like rules of navigation to enable any person to get through life successfully as one seeks out their own destination, not a universal script that every person must follow like an actor in a play in order to be "good."
Sure, you can debate them. The problem is that simply not picking an answer isn't a reason to think you'll be able to give a better answer.
I have every reason to think that if you made Bryan sit down and list all his moral intuitions they would involve just as much bullet biting as Hanson's or feel deeply arbitrary.
I’m not sure we era thinking about the same thing.
Hanson seems to think we can find win-win solutions sitting in our armchairs, because we can imagine ourselves in the places of the participants, know what they know, want what they want. I think this is a recipe for error.
I am less certain I know what Caplan is suggesting as an alternative. My bias has me jumping to the idea that the people involved get to decide what is a win-win, or at least the most acceptable lose-lose; and if justice is at all transparent, they will converge to something fairly close to it. (If justice is obscure, or does not really exist, they may still,converge on something, and call it justice.) That of course assumes that no one gets to put a thumb on the scales of Justice. People will generalize from experience, make mistakes, and learn of those mistakes when participants want to make exceptions to the generalizations.
Ohh, I wasn't weighing in on that issue. Whether or not armchair reasoning is likely to be a helpful sort of thing seems highly empirical.
I'm just saying that Bryan doesn't actually have a good reason for concluding that more complex moral theories are more likely to be correct than one sentence such theories.
That would require looking at a complete complex moral theory (or actually the space of such theories) and arguing they generally performed better. All Bryan is doing is failing to give a complete moral account and then saying because Hanson's moral view requires bullet biting it's inferior...but that doesn't show it's the simplicity causing the issue rather than just the fact that any complete account of what is and isn't moral will have such disadvantages.
He is suggesting that moral theories like Hanson's (which he does characterize as a one sentence moral theory) are to be disfavored.
But, of course, Hanson isn't rejecting the idea of starting from intuitions about concrete cases. The difference is how willing should we be to revise our judgement on those cases if we find that they don't fit into our theoretical framework.
Almost everyone accepts that we should do some degree of this. If you don't there is no point in moral reasoning at all. You just go with your reaction to that case and don't need to inform it by any more general principle. But most of us feel some pressure to treat cases in some sense uniformly and realize that when we don't we are in danger of just reading our biases into our moral judgements. The disagreement here is about how much we should be inclined to do that and the argument that we should do less of it than Hanson would only works if you are arguing you are more likely to get to the truth when you favor simplicity/uniformity less.
How do we apply this trade off in real life? Does it mean we pass anti discrimination laws? Or allow more people to discriminate because that is their Liberty even if discrimination is economically inefficient.
Or take the example of Zoom shunting down Chinese dissidents accounts in 2020 at the behest of the CCP. They took the economically efficient approach and impinged the liberty of individuals to celebrate tiananmen square anniversary.
Should we wish Zoom was kicked out of China because they refused to shut down accounts? Should we go so far as to make it illegal to shut down accounts at the behest of foreign government if the participants are on US soil? Who’s Liberty here, dissidents, Zoom, foreign leaders?
Your supposed moral view is an unfalsifiable mirage if constructed like this: leaving room for ad hoc exceptions (judged by what standard?) results in not really having a theory at all.
Yeah, any set of visceral moral reactions, no matter how internally inconsistent and hypocritical, can be codified into a coherent moral system if you add enough exceptions. That’s the appeal of simple ‘one sentence’ moral philosophies: they’re simple. Just like how we prefer simple coherent scientific theories over endlessly adding epicycles to make an overly complicated theory fit.
Here is the video! https://vimeo.com/4310685
Do you acknowledge that what is or isn’t morally ‘obvious’ varies from person to person? It seems like you’re just reverse engineering a moral system to best cohere with your subjective intuition.
Hanson wrote/said(?): “No other large community of expert advisers has anywhere near the economists' deserved reputation for consistently suggesting win-win deals.”
This is either very optimistic or dependent on the fact that no other group even tries to suggest win-win deals. The great successes of economists that come to mind for me are all negative - please stop shooting yourself in the foot. Deregulate communications so we can have cell phones. Stop conscripting soldiers. Where are the positive examples Hanson seems to have in mind?
Just in Time. Thanks.
I'm gathering ideas for a novel about an A-I Gadget that constrains government. I'm sure there are many novels with that exact theme being contemplated now.
The main idea is an A-I Constitution where the ink can leap-up off the parchment and smite the wrong-headed legislative body. The coercive ability of the A-I thing isn't established yet, but its purpose is to force the kind of majority any deliberative bodies must adhere to... super majority, qualified majority, relative majority or even unanimous.
But the A-I Gadget must be given and indeed the legislature has to know… what the purpose of the government is. So far all I have is… that all five quintiles must have ever-increasing economic wellbeing and the principle mechanism for doing that is getting strangers to trust each other. For example. People killing their pets just for fun will in no way harm the way people trust each other, so a law forbidding it will be unconstitutional. Well, that is, unless 96% think it’s self-evident. Then OK.
But the above debate makes me think a heavenly produced arbitrary morality should be considered over UI-o-SL; Universal Improvement of Standard of Living.
Your argument for the inferiority of "one sentence" moral theories is fundamentally fallacious.
Ultimately, if you believe there are real moral facts out there in the world, presumably there is some fact of the matter about what is moral in each case. And sure, there is a trivial sense in which you are more likely to be correct by opining only about fewer cases but it's the same sense in which you're more likely to be correct when you say this rock will fall than when you give a theory of gravity.
What the fact that all these simple theories have to bite bullets shows is that everyone has to bite bullets and all you're doing by being vague is avoiding answering those hard questions.
We need to focus on what it means to have a coherent moral theory in the first place. To begin with, one logically does have to base one's ethics on a "one sentence" final end if you are to avoid situations where the pursuit of a supposedly necessary value conflicts with the pursuit of another supposedly necessary value. A non-final value can be universally necessary (i.e. rise to the level of being an instrumental virtue) only if it always serves to optimize some unambiguous final end. Values that don't rise to that level may entail trade-offs against other values, so only optimization of a singular final end can provide a firm decision rule to govern such trade-offs.
Since David Hume's time, most philosophers have acknowledged this, but have balked at the idea that any facts about the universe necessitate the choice of a particular final end by someone who is free to choose among different ends. However, the same decision-making confusion that plagues a plurality of values that aren't governed by the optimization of an unambiguous final end also plagues the arbitrary choice of a final end that one is compelled to abandon because of the cognitive dissonance between one's chosen values and one's emotional response to the consequences of acting on those values. An ethical subjectivist can only bash his head against the wall only so many times before his arbitrary choice to maximize head bashing as his final end is refuted by reality. The relevant facts that force him to change his mind aren't "out there in the world" so to speak, but rather lodged in the construction of his own neural system.
If the purpose of ethics is to provide everyone with clear, consistent guidelines on how to rank different possible actions, then ethics must endorse values that align one's choices with what is psychologically sustainable for a human being as well as insisting on a singular standard for judging the instrumentality of all other values. In short, we have to reject the subjectivist revolt against ontological ethics in favor of an Epicurean-style hedonism. It is the psychological nature of man that provides the facts that bridge the "is-ought" gap. Epicurus, by the way, came up with such a psychological justification for the values of personal autonomy and self-sufficiency, so he was able to derive very libertarian-sounding ideas affirming private ownership, avoidance of politics, etc. on this basis.
I'd very much dispute this suggestion:
"most philosophers have acknowledged this, but have balked at the idea that any facts about the universe necessitate the choice of a particular final end by someone who is free to choose among different ends"
Just the opposite.
I suppose that depends on who gets counted as a "philosopher" and what one means by "facts about the universe."
Among academics who responded to the 2020 Philpapers survey, only 51% said they subscribed to a naturalist metaphilosophy, while 62% described themselves as moral realists (which includes intuitionists, who don't qualify as appealing to "facts about the universe" in my estimation). It would be interesting to get a cross-tab breaking down what fraction of the moral realists describe themselves as ethical naturalists (and more specifically, would affirm that naturalism justifies a particular final end for all humans). Another point of interest is that consequentialists are a minority of the respondents (just over 30%), so we have the peculiar circumstance where a large fraction of the self-described moral realists don't think that the relevance of the facts they consider important involves natural causality affecting outcomes. But if the moral agent is indifferent to consequences, and in particular if the consequences don't impact one's ability to sustain arbitrary choices (as I mentioned above), then how do the facts of the universe dictate one's choice of a final end?
I suspect that if one were to try to classify the metaethical premises of academics in the social sciences and humanities outside of philosophy departments, you would find moral realism a lot less prevalent. On the other hand, among non-academics who express philosophical opinions one would probably find large numbers of present and former followers of Ayn Rand who would greatly swell the ranks of ethical naturalists.
It is worth noting that the same survey indicated that only 13.4% of the respondents described their political philosophy as libertarian, while 44% indicated egalitarian, 27.3% indicated communitarian, and 20.5% indicated other.
I don't think this is accurate.
Some background:
Many of the very best minds that humankind has been able to muster have studied Physics and tried to determine the fundamental laws of the Universe. They have made extraordinary progress, and we have the Standard Model, and they are working out whether it's parts can be further unified.
It boggles my feeble mind in how accurate it is in modeling reality. And yet they are humble about flaws and limitations and contradictions.
i.e. a sustained assault on the problem for hundreds (or more depending on when you think it started) of years by the finest minds has given us these theories and backed by precise measurements, about inanimate objects with no free will, no emergent properties, etc.
And here we are talking about a species that evolved 6M years ago, through natural selection, with brains whose parts adapted during even earlier millennia against different evolutionary pressures, and who organize in large complex societies and whose study has been undertaken by nothing like the Newtons or Einsteins or Feynmans of this world, and we have compact moral codes expressible in one line?! LIBERTY! FREEDOM!
The Enlightenment is only 300 years old.
I'd say even Professor Kaplan's view has insufficient humility to say nothing about how utterly bonkers Professor Hansen's is.
I don't understand your point. I'm not claiming that either has a correct moral theory.
I think the physics analogy is a good one. Quantum mechanics is a highly counterintuitive theory though it's a simple one. Imagine someone arguing that simple theories of physics are less likely to be true because they all seem to be really counterintuitive and when you say: but whats you evidence that complex theories would do better they just say: well if I only tell you what's going to happen in a few cases you can't derive any counterintuitive aspects from what I said.
Sure, that's true but you didn't give a reason to think that complex theories are better. You just showed that if you shut up then we can't identify a specific criticism to make. If you want to argue that complex theories are better produce a complex theory that handles the same range of cases as the simple one and is more attractive.
> I don't understand your point
I'll try again!
When it comes to our understanding of ourselves, how we organize in societies, what is moral and immoral our understanding is primitive.
I'd say making confident claims about moral theory today would be like making confident claims that "the world rests on the back of a turtle" -- which is what some people believed, that was their best understanding at the time.
We have so much to understand before we can make compact claims about morality -- our understanding of free will, understanding of the conscious and subconscious brain, kinship, and so on.
This has nothing to do with whether ultimately laws are discovered and whether they are "simple" or not (as an aside, a vanishingly small number of our species can comprehend quantum mechanics, if you are one of those and can call it simple -- good for you! Simple (adj) easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty.)
We co-inhabit this planet with billions of other humans, many more of other species, and if we are lucky and if we persist, may be in a few thousand years or a few hundred thousand years we can get to laws approaching the rigor it takes to make bold claims about anything. We are a hair width removed from feces flinging monkeys.
If everyone agreed that there are real moral facts out there is the world, there would still be disagreement about how to generalize/state, interpret, and apply them. If enough exceptions show up in practice, this indicates that it is time to re-evaluate the moral generalization that the exceptions violate.
This is a close parallel to how precedent is supposed to work in common law. In both cases, we can be confident that errors will be made, and it is not obvious how to correct them. But a large number of anomalies is a strong indicator that modification is needed.
Sure, but one doesn't need to agree with others in order to observe, reason about, and make use of such facts for oneself.
Indeed, various authoritarian institutions tend to intentionally and unintentionally distort principles of valuation in ways that promote their own flourishing at the expense of the happiness of those who are taken in by their propaganda, so certain kinds of moral errors are likely to persist across much of society in spite of the objective evidence indicating that a modification of the prevailing beliefs is needed.
One has to summon up the courage to act on the basis of one's own intellectual and moral autonomy when the facts indicate such a course, not allow conformism and authoritarianism become a substitute for one's own understanding of the facts.
I agree that one doesn't need to agree with others in order to observe, reason about, and make use of such facts for oneself. What you say is relevant for an individual reflecting on his own behavior.
If he is going to interact with others, he has to worry about how compatible their moral theories are. A society has to converge on some agreed values or principles, or fall apart. If a society is composed of fallible agents, it is unlikely to get it perfectly right the first time.
Fallible agents will not have theories that are fully correct and cover every circumstance. When such agents have a dispute, they have to find agreed principles on which it can be resolved, if it is to be resolved rather than swept under the rug.
But laws and norms themselves can be fallible too. An individual reflecting on moral facts for himself can independently evaluate the mutual expediency of whatever laws and norms prevail in his society as well as evaluate his own personal conduct in light of those facts. One can disobey an unjust law or flout a repressive norm if observance of such a social rule results in intolerable misery. A "society" needs to fall apart if it isn't compatible with the moral facts that define the rational self-interest of each of its members.
Also, to some extent one can control the particular social context one places oneself in. Members of some subcultures may observe deviant norms that most of the rest of society disapproves of, but in a society where interactions are voluntary and peacefully-acquired ownership rights are enforced, there is no reason why a plurality of distinct social networks, each adhering to different norms, can't peacefully coexist--what threatens the continuity of the social order overall is when one group tries to coercively impose its particular norms on others. It is clashing tribes of culture warriors, each trying to force their preferred "agreement" on everyone else, and not the people who are inclined to mind their own business who tear a society apart.
Another point to bear in mind is that norms usually are nothing like contracts that arise through a reflective process of rational persuasion concerning the benefits offered to another, interactive negotiations to fix the specific terms, and overt mutual consent to those terms. Instead, a norm is usually adopted without one having to think a great deal about its compatibility with fundamental moral facts precisely because one observes or is instructed without any deeper rational analysis (by one's parents, friends, teachers, etc.) that the norm in question facilitates one's social interactions.
In many cases the facilitation of social cooperation is a sufficient justification for presuming in a given case that observance of a prevailing norm, obedience to an existing law, or communicating with the language used in the region one's resides in optimizes one's pursuit of happiness. However, a presumption in favor of existing norms, etc. is rebuttable--if your direct experience of the consequences or your understanding of more fundamental moral facts exposes the dysfunctionality of the existing social consensus, you can't lightly dismiss what your reason is telling you.
The importance of keeping an open mind about the utility of existing laws and norms implies that laws ought to be geared towards defending each person's moral autonomy (which is a necessity for one's pursuit of happiness in any event) and that norms ought to be a voluntary product of an on-going cultural evolution, combining a personal freedom of choice with a personal responsibility for the consequences of one's choices. The "agreement" on norms in a free society arises out of a spontaneous process of each adult being able to test their chosen values against their own personal experiences. A presumption in favor of traditional values often works better in a free society precisely because a free people will discard values that don't work for them and to embrace new values that work better. The values that survive the on-going process of voluntary experimentation and selection tend to be those that are most consonant with the moral facts about human nature. The main caveat against this (as I mentioned above) is that institutional influence on the propagation of norms can have a distorting effect on which values propagate the most efficiently. One has to take this into account when evaluating laws and norms.
An understanding of the spontaneous, decentralized nature of an on-going cultural evolution, coupled with an understanding of the caveats I mentioned, distinguishes secular individualists both from "progressives" who think that social consensus should be engineered by elite social planners in defiance of tradition and from religious conservatives who think that an infallible supernatural entity engraved the correct norms onto stone tablets and inspired various other authoritative writings of a dozen or so "prophets" a few thousand years ago, and therefore it is therefore wrong to consult one's experiences and to reason from those experiences to scrutinize the values prescribed by these ancient scriptures.
>But laws and norms themselves can be fallible too.
Indeed! That is part of what I am saying.
>A "society" needs to fall apart if it isn't compatible with the moral facts that define the rational self-interest of each of its members.
Fall apart, or preferably, allow agents to adjust how they interact so it doesn’t need to fall apart.
>there is no reason why a plurality of distinct social networks, each adhering to different norms, can't peacefully coexist
I think we are talking past each other. The context seems to say these statements contradict my previous reply, but I am not seeing the contradiction. Obviously different groups can have different norms, and interact one way sometimes and another way other times, depending on who they interact with. I am speaking of broad norms, for interacting with strangers. These are fairly basic, for a society with many such interactions.
>what threatens the continuity of the social order overall is when one group tries to coercively impose its particular norms on others.
Yep.
>An understanding of the spontaneous, decentralized nature of an on-going cultural evolution, coupled with an understanding of the caveats I mentioned, distinguishes secular individualists both from "progressives" who think that social consensus should be engineered by elite social planners in defiance of tradition and from religious conservatives who think that an infallible supernatural entity
The point was that even if we stipulate that everyone goes fully woke or comes to Jesus and believes there is one true answer, there will still be disagreement over the details, and need for a process of arbitration and reconciliation among disputants. Agreeing in the abstract that there is a correct answer doesn’t lead us unerringly to the answer, even if it exists.
Interesting as this is, I am not clear how where we have arrived relates to the comment I replied to above, or my reply.
>The point was that even if we stipulate that everyone goes
>fully woke or comes to Jesus and believes there is one true
>answer, there will still be disagreement over the details, and
>need for a process of arbitration and reconciliation among
>disputants. Agreeing in the abstract that there is a correct
>answer doesn’t lead us unerringly to the answer, even if it exists.
Right. If everyone happens to stipulate a "one true answer" that in isn't stable in the psychological sense I described above (i.e. the answer isn't based on the facts concerning innate features of human nature), you tend to get sectarian splits between "fundamentalists" who insist on a literal application of the "one true answer" versus those who concede various _ad hoc_ tweaks to make the "one true answer" a better fit to their own experience of reality, and splits over the precise interpretation of the "one true answer" (as such a flawed answer is offered as a floating abstraction without foundation in the appropriate facts).
I'm inclined to the view that a correct common standard of value applicable to all humans does exist, but the nature of the evidence (much of which is introspective and analogized to others via indirect inferences) doesn't easily lend itself to any process of interpersonal arbitration or reconciliation.
There is also the problem that a detailed application of such a standard to one's own specific situation given one's own particular personality, social circumstances, etc. means that what is "correct" for one person isn't exactly the same as what is "correct" for another person. One ancient Greek source used the metaphor that the virtues provided by a correct philosophy function like rules of navigation to enable any person to get through life successfully as one seeks out their own destination, not a universal script that every person must follow like an actor in a play in order to be "good."
Sure, you can debate them. The problem is that simply not picking an answer isn't a reason to think you'll be able to give a better answer.
I have every reason to think that if you made Bryan sit down and list all his moral intuitions they would involve just as much bullet biting as Hanson's or feel deeply arbitrary.
I’m not sure we era thinking about the same thing.
Hanson seems to think we can find win-win solutions sitting in our armchairs, because we can imagine ourselves in the places of the participants, know what they know, want what they want. I think this is a recipe for error.
I am less certain I know what Caplan is suggesting as an alternative. My bias has me jumping to the idea that the people involved get to decide what is a win-win, or at least the most acceptable lose-lose; and if justice is at all transparent, they will converge to something fairly close to it. (If justice is obscure, or does not really exist, they may still,converge on something, and call it justice.) That of course assumes that no one gets to put a thumb on the scales of Justice. People will generalize from experience, make mistakes, and learn of those mistakes when participants want to make exceptions to the generalizations.
Ohh, I wasn't weighing in on that issue. Whether or not armchair reasoning is likely to be a helpful sort of thing seems highly empirical.
I'm just saying that Bryan doesn't actually have a good reason for concluding that more complex moral theories are more likely to be correct than one sentence such theories.
That would require looking at a complete complex moral theory (or actually the space of such theories) and arguing they generally performed better. All Bryan is doing is failing to give a complete moral account and then saying because Hanson's moral view requires bullet biting it's inferior...but that doesn't show it's the simplicity causing the issue rather than just the fact that any complete account of what is and isn't moral will have such disadvantages.
Did he conclude that more complex moral theories are more likely to be correct than one sentence such theories? That wasn’t what I got from the post.
“Sensible moral reasoning begins with concrete, specific cases. […] From there, we can start to generalize. ”
He is suggesting that moral theories like Hanson's (which he does characterize as a one sentence moral theory) are to be disfavored.
But, of course, Hanson isn't rejecting the idea of starting from intuitions about concrete cases. The difference is how willing should we be to revise our judgement on those cases if we find that they don't fit into our theoretical framework.
Almost everyone accepts that we should do some degree of this. If you don't there is no point in moral reasoning at all. You just go with your reaction to that case and don't need to inform it by any more general principle. But most of us feel some pressure to treat cases in some sense uniformly and realize that when we don't we are in danger of just reading our biases into our moral judgements. The disagreement here is about how much we should be inclined to do that and the argument that we should do less of it than Hanson would only works if you are arguing you are more likely to get to the truth when you favor simplicity/uniformity less.
It might have been better to pass federal laws against state laws enforcing discrimination.
How do we apply this trade off in real life? Does it mean we pass anti discrimination laws? Or allow more people to discriminate because that is their Liberty even if discrimination is economically inefficient.
Or take the example of Zoom shunting down Chinese dissidents accounts in 2020 at the behest of the CCP. They took the economically efficient approach and impinged the liberty of individuals to celebrate tiananmen square anniversary.
Should we wish Zoom was kicked out of China because they refused to shut down accounts? Should we go so far as to make it illegal to shut down accounts at the behest of foreign government if the participants are on US soil? Who’s Liberty here, dissidents, Zoom, foreign leaders?
Your supposed moral view is an unfalsifiable mirage if constructed like this: leaving room for ad hoc exceptions (judged by what standard?) results in not really having a theory at all.
Yeah, any set of visceral moral reactions, no matter how internally inconsistent and hypocritical, can be codified into a coherent moral system if you add enough exceptions. That’s the appeal of simple ‘one sentence’ moral philosophies: they’re simple. Just like how we prefer simple coherent scientific theories over endlessly adding epicycles to make an overly complicated theory fit.
Do you really expect a theory to cover all cases appropriately, or do you conclude that theories are useless?
Good examples. I should add them to my list. He isn't even a utilitarian? He just wants to maximize gdp?
https://open.substack.com/pub/diomavro/p/35-bullets-for-utilitarians-to-bite?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=a2utq