> ethics typically implies some effort to systematize our pattern of response to the world; to notice the contradictions, tensions, and coherence-failures that arise when we do; and to revise our policies accordingly, into a more harmonious unity. But why do this?
I kept hoping that you would eventually explain why. Instead you kept talking about ethical intuition. I don't understand this at all. Why do philosophers continue to treat intuition as the benchmark for correctness? Where else does this work? Math? Science?
A yo-yo and a string cost $1.10, and the yo-yo is a dollar more than the string. Is the intuitive answer *really* the right one?
Or: What are we looking at when sunrise happens, the rotation of the Earth pointing our sky in different directions over time, or the Sun revolving around us? Is the intuitive answer *really* the right one?
I bring math and science up because, by relying on objective processes to verify claims, math and science have been *extremely* successful. Unless I've missed something, ethical philosophy as it's commonly practiced stands in stark contrast to these fields - we can be moral realists, anti-realists, utilitarians, whatever we like. You admit that your own intuitions clash with those of previous eras when you mention slavery; why continue to act as though your moral intuitions are important?
> And my sense is that more generally, he wants to avoid the sort of thing epistemic learned helplessness is supposed to protect against: namely, being tricked into stupid conclusions by listening to arguments.
Yeah, I definitely agree with your take there. That really wasn't Scott's best moment. Still, it's hard for me to be judgmental since philosophers are always doing this useless intuition thing; I wouldn't necessarily expect Scott Alexander to realize that on his own. Even without knowing why, he's noticing, correctly, that philosophers aren't making headway.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but section 3.1 ("Drowning children stuff") made me feel compelled to comment. That section makes it clear that "anti-realist" needs to be more clearly defined. For two major types of anti-realist that spring to my mind, there are very simple (albeit different) ways to respond to premises 1-3.
An error theorist like Mackie will just deny premises 1 and 2, and treat premise 3 as trivially true. Premises 1 and 2 are false because they erroneously presume the existence of properties which error theorists do not believe exist in this world—moral permissibility and moral impermissibility. Premise 3 is trivially true for the error theorist because moral facts don't exist, so of course there is no morally significant difference between letting a child drown in front of you and buying a suit instead of donating money to save a distant drowning child. There's also no morally significant difference between eating a sandwich and intentionally drowning a child, according to the error theorist. Again, this is because for the error theorist, there are no moral facts. The error theorist will admit there is some kind of difference between drowning a child and eating a sandwich, but it can't be a moral one, since that would imply the existence of moral properties, which the error theorist denies.
In contrast, an anti-realist who accepts Hare's universal prescriptivism—like Singer did when he wrote Famine, Affluence and Morality—would insist on giving up either 1, 2 or 3, because universal prescriptivism treats moral claims as universalizable imperatives that must satisfy a consistency constraint, and it's clearly inconsistent to accept 1-3.
Again, I haven't finished reading this article, but I feel like a lot of confusion could be avoided just by describing what you mean by anti-realist.
This was a fun read. One point--I think that there are compelling money pumps for the view you describe, though they're not pointed out by Gustafsson. I describe them here. The basic idea is that these sequential decisions violate the rule that the fact that some action gives you more future choices can't reduce the choiceworthiness of the act, combined with the fact that what matters for your decisions is the future options on your decision tree. But I agree, the anti-realist doesn't have a great reason to care much about being money pumped.
This was a fun read, I've mostly kept my distance from some of the more sophisticated ethical and meta-ethical topics, but after reading this I am probably going to spend some time reading up on some of the things I've missed and I am looking forward to your next post.
Personally I've never had any ethical beliefs or intuitions, nor felt the need for some sort of map, I've found some of the stuff in Bayesian epistemology interesting and useful but I really don't have any normative beliefs. On a maybe related note I have a very rich Bangladeshi friend who I asked a series of questions to a while ago in an attempt to gauge his utility function, and it just seemed all over the place, yet he's lived his life perfectly happy and has been very successful, his moral beliefs also seemed all over the place, so I'm just generally very sympathetic to people who don't want to play the philosophy game or systematize their beliefs or anything like that.
This isn't to say my preferences and desires haven't changed, I've found many essays and books and such that have really motivated me in all sorts of different directions, I've just never found any ethical or even broader philosophical arguments that motivate me in the same way that I suspect moral realists and such are motivated by such arguments.
I think using the infinite lizard example is bad because it smuggles in too many intuitions about welfare, value and personhood. If I choose to become a lizard i'm choosing to die for one thing. For another it feels like the lizard example has such intuitive force because being a lizard might be lexiographically worse than the epsilion-positive human life while being better than a net 0 life.
> ethics typically implies some effort to systematize our pattern of response to the world; to notice the contradictions, tensions, and coherence-failures that arise when we do; and to revise our policies accordingly, into a more harmonious unity. But why do this?
I kept hoping that you would eventually explain why. Instead you kept talking about ethical intuition. I don't understand this at all. Why do philosophers continue to treat intuition as the benchmark for correctness? Where else does this work? Math? Science?
A yo-yo and a string cost $1.10, and the yo-yo is a dollar more than the string. Is the intuitive answer *really* the right one?
Or: What are we looking at when sunrise happens, the rotation of the Earth pointing our sky in different directions over time, or the Sun revolving around us? Is the intuitive answer *really* the right one?
I bring math and science up because, by relying on objective processes to verify claims, math and science have been *extremely* successful. Unless I've missed something, ethical philosophy as it's commonly practiced stands in stark contrast to these fields - we can be moral realists, anti-realists, utilitarians, whatever we like. You admit that your own intuitions clash with those of previous eras when you mention slavery; why continue to act as though your moral intuitions are important?
> And my sense is that more generally, he wants to avoid the sort of thing epistemic learned helplessness is supposed to protect against: namely, being tricked into stupid conclusions by listening to arguments.
Yeah, I definitely agree with your take there. That really wasn't Scott's best moment. Still, it's hard for me to be judgmental since philosophers are always doing this useless intuition thing; I wouldn't necessarily expect Scott Alexander to realize that on his own. Even without knowing why, he's noticing, correctly, that philosophers aren't making headway.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but section 3.1 ("Drowning children stuff") made me feel compelled to comment. That section makes it clear that "anti-realist" needs to be more clearly defined. For two major types of anti-realist that spring to my mind, there are very simple (albeit different) ways to respond to premises 1-3.
An error theorist like Mackie will just deny premises 1 and 2, and treat premise 3 as trivially true. Premises 1 and 2 are false because they erroneously presume the existence of properties which error theorists do not believe exist in this world—moral permissibility and moral impermissibility. Premise 3 is trivially true for the error theorist because moral facts don't exist, so of course there is no morally significant difference between letting a child drown in front of you and buying a suit instead of donating money to save a distant drowning child. There's also no morally significant difference between eating a sandwich and intentionally drowning a child, according to the error theorist. Again, this is because for the error theorist, there are no moral facts. The error theorist will admit there is some kind of difference between drowning a child and eating a sandwich, but it can't be a moral one, since that would imply the existence of moral properties, which the error theorist denies.
In contrast, an anti-realist who accepts Hare's universal prescriptivism—like Singer did when he wrote Famine, Affluence and Morality—would insist on giving up either 1, 2 or 3, because universal prescriptivism treats moral claims as universalizable imperatives that must satisfy a consistency constraint, and it's clearly inconsistent to accept 1-3.
Again, I haven't finished reading this article, but I feel like a lot of confusion could be avoided just by describing what you mean by anti-realist.
This was a fun read. One point--I think that there are compelling money pumps for the view you describe, though they're not pointed out by Gustafsson. I describe them here. The basic idea is that these sequential decisions violate the rule that the fact that some action gives you more future choices can't reduce the choiceworthiness of the act, combined with the fact that what matters for your decisions is the future options on your decision tree. But I agree, the anti-realist doesn't have a great reason to care much about being money pumped.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-simpler-argument-for-completeness?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
This was a fun read, I've mostly kept my distance from some of the more sophisticated ethical and meta-ethical topics, but after reading this I am probably going to spend some time reading up on some of the things I've missed and I am looking forward to your next post.
Personally I've never had any ethical beliefs or intuitions, nor felt the need for some sort of map, I've found some of the stuff in Bayesian epistemology interesting and useful but I really don't have any normative beliefs. On a maybe related note I have a very rich Bangladeshi friend who I asked a series of questions to a while ago in an attempt to gauge his utility function, and it just seemed all over the place, yet he's lived his life perfectly happy and has been very successful, his moral beliefs also seemed all over the place, so I'm just generally very sympathetic to people who don't want to play the philosophy game or systematize their beliefs or anything like that.
This isn't to say my preferences and desires haven't changed, I've found many essays and books and such that have really motivated me in all sorts of different directions, I've just never found any ethical or even broader philosophical arguments that motivate me in the same way that I suspect moral realists and such are motivated by such arguments.
I think using the infinite lizard example is bad because it smuggles in too many intuitions about welfare, value and personhood. If I choose to become a lizard i'm choosing to die for one thing. For another it feels like the lizard example has such intuitive force because being a lizard might be lexiographically worse than the epsilion-positive human life while being better than a net 0 life.