Thanks, this is exactly the feedback I was hoping to receive. :)
Basically, I want this post and the last one to be where Less Wrongers can send people whenever they appear confused about standard philosophical debates in moral theory: "Wait, stop. Go read lukeprog's article on this and then let me know if you still think the same thing."
I feel like your austere meta-ethicist is mostly missing the point. It's utterly routine for different people to have conflicting beliefs about whether a given act is moral*. And often they can have a useful discussion, at the end of which one or both participants change their beliefs. These conversations can happen without the participants changing their definitions of words like 'moral', and often without them having a clear definition at all.
[This is my first LW comment -- if I do something wrong, please bear with me]
This suggests that precise definiti...
When I have serious conversations with thoughtful religious people who have faith but no major theological training, I find it helpful to think of their statements about "God" as being statements about "all worldly optimization processes stronger than me that I don't have time to understand in very much detail like evolution, entropy, economics, democratic politics, organizational dynamics, similar regularities in the structure of the world that science hasn't started analyzing yet, plus many small activist groups throughout history, and a h...
I don't understand the terms "world of is" and "world of is not". Does "talking about world of is not" mean "deducing from false assumptions", or is there something more to it? Anyway, "talking about world of is" sounds like the worst kind of continental philosophy babble.
Else, the article is clear, comprehensible and well readable.
If we taboo and reduce, then the question of "...but is it good?" is out of place. The reply is: "Yes it is, because I just told you that's what I mean to communicate when I use the word-tool 'good' for this discussion. I'm not here to debate definitions; I'm here to get something done."
I just wanted to flag that a non-reductionist moral realist (like myself) is also "not here to debate definitions". See my post on The Importance of Implications. This is compatible with thinking well of the Open Question Argument, if we t...
Tangentially:
facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are mind-dependent facts
How so? (Note that a proposition may be in some sense about minds without its truth value being mind-dependent. E.g. "Any experience of red is an experience of colour" is true regardless of what minds exist. I would think the same is true of, e.g., "All else equal, pain is bad for the experiencer.")
That's why we need to decode the cognitive algorithms that generate our questions about value and morality. ... So how can the Empathic Metaethicist answer Alex's question? We don't know the details yet. For example, we don't have a completed cognitive neuroscience.
Assume you have a complete knowledge of all details of the way human brain works, and a detailed trace of the sequence of neurological events that leads people to ask moral questions. Then what?
My only guess is that you look this trace over using your current moral judgment, and decide that ...
The problem is not that there is no way to identify 'good' or 'right' (as used intuitively, without tabooing) with a certain X. The problem is that X is huge and complicated and we don't (yet) have access to its structure.
Strictly speaking, we can exhibit any definition of "good", even one that doesn't make any of the errors you pointed out, and still ask "Is it good?". The criteria for exhibiting a particular definition are ultimately non-rigorous, even if the selected definition is, so we can always examine them further.
Moore's arg...
In The Is_Ought Gap, Luke writes
If someone makes a claim of the 'ought' type, either they are talking about the world of is, or they are talking about the world of is not. If they are talking about the world of is not, then I quickly lose interest because the world of is not isn't my subject of interest.
Ironically, this is where I quickly lost interest in this article, because glib word-play isn't my subject of interest.
Consider this dialog:
Student: "Wise master, what ought I do?"
Wise master: "You ought to help the poor by giving 50% of your income to efficient charity and supporting the European-style welfare state."
Student: "Alright."
*student runs off and gives 50% of his or her income to efficient charity and supports the European-style welfare state
This dialog rings true as a fact about ought statements - once we become convinced of them, they do and should constrain our behavior.
But my dialogs and your dialogs contradict each other! Beca...
I think you are incorrect with regards to Hume's is-ought gap, although I find its relevance to be somewhat overstated. A hypothetical imperative such as your example relies on an equivocation between 'ought' as (1) a normative injunction and (2) conveying a possible causal pathway from here to there.
-
Here is the incorrect syllogism:
Premise 1: A desires C (is)
Premise 2: B will produce C (is)
Conclusion: A ought to do B (ought)
-
There is a hidden normative premise that is often ignored. It is
Premise 3: A should obtain its desires. (ought)
-
The correct syllogi...
Or, perhaps someone has a moral reductionism in mind during a particular use of 'ought' language. Perhaps by "You ought to be more forgiving" they really mean "If you are more forgiving, this is likely to increase the amount of pleasure in the world."
As you can see, it is not hard to bridge the is-ought gap.
I don't think it is impossible, but it is harder than you are making out. The examples given are not complete syllogisms, or other logical forms. It is easy to validly derive an ought form an is: you start with the factual statem...
[Re-post with correction]
Hi Luke,
I've questioned your metaethical views before (in your "desirist" days) and I think you're making similar mistakes now as then. But rather than rehash old criticisms I'd like to make a different point.
Since you claim to be taking a scientific or naturalized approach to philosophy I would expect you to offer evidence in support of your position. Yet I see nothing here specifically identified as evidence, and very little that could be construed as evidence. I don't see how your approach here is significantly differe...
Hi Luke,
I've questioned your metaethical views before (in your "desirist" days) and I think you're making similar mistakes now as then. But rather than rehash old criticisms I'd like to make a different point.
Since you claim to be taking a scientific or naturalized approach to philosophy I would expect you to offer evidence in support of your position. Yet I see nothing here specifically identified as evidence, and very little that could be construed as evidence. I don't see how your approach here is significantly different from the intuition-bas...
the Austere Metaethicist replies:
"Tell me what you mean by 'right', and I will tell you what is the right thing to do."
That is of course, not what is right, but what she thinks is right. So far, so subjective.
You may not know what you mean by 'right.' But let's not stop there. Here, let me come alongside you and help decode the cognitive algorithms that generated your question in the first place, and then we'll be able to answer your question. Then we can tell you what the right thing to do is.
Again, that is not the right thing, that is j...
Although I think this series of posts is interesting and mostly very well reasoned, I find the discussion about objectivity to be strangely crafted. At the risk of arguing about definitions: the hierarchy you lay out about objectivity is only remotely related to what I mean by objective, and my sense is that it doesn't cohere very well with common usage.
First, there seems no better reason to split off objective1 than objectiveA which is "software-independent facts". Okay, so I can't say anything objective about my web browser, just because we'v...
In jest, I'm going to accuse you of plagiarizing my work, then tell you two problems that I have with the approach that you've outlined, and then wax e-peen and say that mine is similar, but more instructive on moral discourse among all users of it.
My problem here is that we already have a common language (in terms of wants) which reduces "should" and provides the kind of plurality that you're seeking out of this approach, so there's no need to claim, "I'm using 'is good' to mean P," and then eek out a true statement whose truth is a ma...
Moral facts are objective3 if they are made true or false by facts independent of the opinions of humans, otherwise they are subjective3.
Are the words of this comment subjective3 (if we drop the specifier "moral" for a moment, given that this idea is not defined in this context)? They are determined by my reasoning, but they also obey the laws of physics. The notion of "independent" is not easy to make precise.
"He's an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?" This is a 'closed' question. The answer is obviously "Yes."
This is a false claim, unfortunately. Bachelor is not merely an "unmarried man", it is an "unmarried man who could've been married in his society" (as all the long-discussed things like "#My 5-year-old son is a bachelor" and "#The Pope is a bachelor" show). ETA: the part beginning with "who" is probably a presupposition rather than assertion ("The Pope is not a bachelor" is only felicitous if used as metalinguistic "The Pope cannot be described by the ...
Did the next few posts Luke mentions would be about empathic metaethics ever get written? I don't see them anywhere.
I'm commenting on the post-change "Is-Ought" section. It seems to me that most of the examples given of "ought" reductions do not support the conclusion that "the is-ought gap can be bridged", because the reductions are wrong. Anyone can propose a naturalistic definition of "ought", but at a minimum, to be right a translation of an "ought" statement into an "is" statement has to preserve the truth value of the "ought" statement, and most of the reductions listed fail to do so.
Take the fi...
Luke, what is the meta-purpose of this sequence? It seems that you are trying to dissolve the persisting confusion about ethics, but what is the underlying purpose? I doubt this sequence is a terminal goal of yours, am I wrong? The reason for my doubt is that, before you started writing this sequence, you decided to join the visiting fellows program at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Which makes me infer that the purpose of this sequence has to do with friendly AI research.
If I am right that the whole purpose of this sequence has to...
Here are some common uses of the objective/subjective distinction in ethics:
- Moral facts are objective1 if they are made true or false by mind-independent facts, otherwise they are subjective1.
- Moral facts are objective2 if they are made true or false by facts independent of the opinions of sentient beings, otherwise they are subjective2.
- Moral facts are objective3 if they are made true or false by facts independent of the opinions of humans, otherwise they are subjective3.
Hmm, that doesn't cover the way I understand "objective" and "su...
Sounds like a form of speaker relativism, with the 'empathetic' project being about going beyond merely saying that people are expressing different fundamental standards, values, etc. to developing ways to bring those out into the open.
In a sense, pluralistic moral reductionism can be considered a robust form of moral 'realism', in the same way that pluralistic sound reductionism is a robust form of sound realism. "Yes, there really is sound, and we can locate it in reality — either as vibrations or as mental auditory experiences
In a sense it can't be considered robust realism. The two meanings of "sound" don't lead to any confusion in practice: we know that powerful hi fis produce a lot of sound1 and we know that deaf people standing in front of the won't hear any soun...
If someone makes a claim of the 'ought' type, either they are talking about the world of is, or they are talking about the world of is not.
When people are talking about 'ought', they are frequently mean something that's different from 'is' but is like 'is' in that it's a primary concept. For them, 'ought' is not something that can be defined in terms of 'is'.
So IMO people who are talking about 'ought' often really are talking about the world of 'ought', and that's about all you can say about it.
...If they are talking about the world of is not, then I qu
Why stop with morality?For any debate about some X, you can shit that there is no real disagreement, and the two parties are just talking about two different things, X1 and X2, which you arrive at by treating one set of theoreticalclaims as the definition of X1 and the other as X2..
I don't think this dissolution of disputes is a good idea in general, because I think theories aren't definitions, and Ithink there are real disputes, and I'm suspicious of unuversal solvents. But I like tthe Sound example. But I dont like the morality example.. pluralism is bad for the sane reason that subhectivism is bad ... morality has a practical, aspect... laws are passed, sanctions handed out and those either happen or don't.
I'm confused. If this article promotes pluralistic moral reduction, why does Luke M. make a statement that sounds reductionaly singular rather than plural? I mean this statement here:
But moral terms and value terms are about what we want.
Isn't this a reduction of morality to a single thing, specifically, "what we want", i.e., desire?
Isn't this defining morality as the practice of acting on our desires? And does not this definition contradict other definitions/reductions?
Am I correct in (roughly) summarizing your conclusion in the following quote?
Yes, there really is morality, and we can locate it in reality — either as a set of facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, or as a set of facts about what an ideally rational and perfectly informed agent would prefer, or as some other set of natural facts.
If so, what is the logical difference between your theory and moral relativism? What if a person's set of natural facts for morality is "those acts which the culture I was born into deem to be moral"?
Update: I've had the pleasure of discussing some of the topics from this post in episode 87 of video-podcast 'Truth-Driven Thinking.'
I'm about to rewrite the section on the is-ought gap, for clarity, so here's a copy of the original text:
...Many claim that you cannot infer an 'ought' statement from a series of 'is' statements. The objection comes from Hume, who wrote that he was surprised whenever an argument made of is and is not propositions suddenly shifted to an ought or ought not claim without explanation.
Many of Hume's followers concluded that the problem is not just that this shift happens without adequate explanation, but that one can never derive an 'ought' claim from a series o
I miss the discussion (on LW in general) of an approach to ethics that strives to determine what actions should be unlawful for an agent, as opposed to, say, what probability distribution over actions is optimal for an agent. (And I don't mean "deontologic", as the "unlawfulness" can be predicated on the consequences.) If you criticize this comment for confusion of "descriptive ethics vs. normative ethics vs. metaethics", try to be constructive.
The Yudkowskian response is to point out that when cognitivists use the term 'good', their intuitive notion of 'good' is captured by a massive logical function that can't be expressed in simple statements
This is the weakest part of the argument. Why should anybody believe that there is a super complicated function that determines what is 'good'? What are the alternative hypotheses?
I can think of a much simpler hypothesis that explains all of the relevant facts. Our brains come equipped with a simple function that maps "is" statements to "...
I'm about to rewrite the section on the is-ought gap, for clarity, so here's a copy of the original text:
Many claim that you cannot infer an 'ought' statement from a series of 'is' statements. The objection comes from Hume, who wrote that he was surprised whenever an argument made of is and is not propositions suddenly shifted to an ought or ought not claim without explanation.
Many of Hume's followers concluded that the problem is not just that this shift happens without adequate explanation, but that one can never derive an 'ought' claim from a series of 'is' claims.
But why should this be? If someone makes a claim of the 'ought' type, either they are talking about the world of is, or they are talking about the world of is not. (What they're talking about is plausibly reducible to physics, or else it isn't.) If they are talking about the world of is not, then I quickly lose interest because the world of is not isn't my subject of interest. If they are making a claim about the world of is, then I ask them which part of the world of is they are discussing. I ask which ought-reductionism they have in mind.
Often, they have in mind a common ought-reductionism known as the hypothetical imperative. This is an ought of the kind: "If you desire to lose weight, then you ought to consume fewer calories than your burn." (But usually, people leave off the implied if statement, and simply say "You should eat less and exercise more.")
A hypothetical imperative (a kind of ought statement) reduces in a straightforward way to a prediction about reality (a kind of is statement). "If you desire to lose weight, then you ought to consume fewer calories than you burn" translates to the claim "If you consume fewer calories than you burn, then you will (or are, ceteris paribus, more likely to) fulfill your desire to lose weight."
Or, perhaps someone has a moral reductionism in mind during a particular use of 'ought' language. Perhaps by "You ought to be more forgiving" they really mean "If you are more forgiving, this is likely to increase the amount of pleasure in the world."
As you can see, it is not hard to bridge the is-ought gap. 'Ought' statements either collapse into the world of is (as with hypothetical imperatives or successful moral reductionisms), or else they collapse into the world of is not (as with Craig's moral theory of divine approval).
Part of the sequence: No-Nonsense Metaethics
Disputes over the definition of morality... are disputes over words which raise no really significant issues. [Of course,] lack of clarity about the meaning of words is an important source of error… My complaint is that what should be regarded as something to be got out of the way in the introduction to a work of moral philosophy has become the subject matter of almost the whole of moral philosophy...
Peter Singer
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If by 'sound' you mean 'acoustic vibrations in the air', the answer is 'Yes.' But if by 'sound' you mean an auditory experience in the brain, the answer is 'No.'
We might call this straightforward solution pluralistic sound reductionism. If people use the word 'sound' to mean different things, and people have different intuitions about the meaning of the word 'sound', then we needn't endlessly debate which definition is 'correct'.1 We can be pluralists about the meanings of 'sound'.
To facilitate communication, we can taboo and reduce: we can replace the symbol with the substance and talk about facts and anticipations, not definitions. We can avoid using the word 'sound' and instead talk about 'acoustic vibrations' or 'auditory brain experiences.'
Still, some definitions can be wrong:
Alex: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
Austere MetaAcousticist: Tell me what you mean by 'sound', and I will tell you the answer.
Alex: By 'sound' I mean 'acoustic messenger fairies flying through the ether'.
Austere MetaAcousticist: There's no such thing. Now, if you had asked me about this other definition of 'sound'...
There are other ways for words to be wrong, too. But once we admit to multiple potentially useful reductions of 'sound', it is not hard to see how we could admit to multiple useful reductions of moral terms.
Moral terms are used in a greater variety of ways than sound terms are. There is little hope of arriving at the One True Theory of Morality by analyzing common usage or by triangulating from the platitudes of folk moral discourse. But we can use stipulation, and we can taboo and reduce. We can use pluralistic moral reductionism2 (for austere metaethics, not for empathic metaethics).
Example #1:
Neuroscientist Sam Harris: Which is better? Religious totalitarianism or the Northern European welfare state?
Austere Metaethicist: What do you mean by 'better'?
Harris: By 'better' I mean 'that which tends to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures'.
Austere Metaethicist: Assuming we have similar reductions of 'well-being' and 'conscious creatures' in mind, the evidence I know of suggests that the Northern European welfare state is more likely to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures than religious totalitarianism.
Example #2:
Philosopher Peter Railton: Is capitalism the best economic system?
Austere Metaethicist: What do you mean by 'best'?
Railton: By 'best' I mean 'would be approved of by an ideally instrumentally rational and fully informed agent considering the question ‘How best to maximize the amount of non-moral goodness?' from a social point of view in which the interests of all potentially affected individuals are counted equally.
Austere Metaethicist: Assuming we agree on the meaning of 'ideally instrumentally rational' and 'fully informed' and 'agent' and 'non-moral goodness' and a few other things, the evidence I know of suggests that capitalism would not be approved of by an ideally instrumentally rational and fully informed agent considering the question ‘How best to maximize the amount of non-moral goodness?' from a social point of view in which the interests of all potentially affected individuals were counted equally.
Example #3:
Theologian Bill Craig: Ought we to give 50% of our income to efficient charities?
Austere Metaethicist: What do you mean by 'ought'?
Craig: By 'ought' I mean 'approved of by an essentially just and loving God'.
Austere Metaethicist: Your definition doesn't connect to reality. It's like talking about atom-for-atom 'indexical identity' even though the world is made of configurations and amplitudes instead of Newtonian billiard balls. Gods don't exist.
But before we get to empathic metaethics, let's examine the standard problems of metaethics using the framework of pluralistic moral reductionism.
One standard debate in metaethics is cognitivism vs. noncognitivism. Alexander Miller explains:
Consider a particular moral judgement, such as the judgement that murder is wrong. What sort of psychological state does this express? Some philosophers, called cognitivists, think that a moral judgement such as this expresses a belief.
Beliefs can be true or false: they are truth-apt, or apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity. So cognitivists think that moral judgements are capable of being true or false.
On the other hand, non-cognitivists think that moral judgements express non-cognitive states such as emotions or desires. Desires and emotions are not truth-apt. So moral judgements are not capable of being true or false.3
But why should we expect all people to use moral judgments like "Stealing is wrong" to express the same thing?4
Some people who say "Stealing is wrong" are really just trying to express emotions: "Stealing? Yuck!" Others use moral judgments like "Stealing is wrong" to express commands: "Don't steal!" Still others use moral judgments like "Stealing is wrong" to assert factual claims, such as "stealing is against the will of God" or "stealing is a practice that usually adds pain rather than pleasure to the world."
It may be interesting to study all such uses of moral discourse, but this post focuses on addressing cognitivists, who use moral judgments to assert factual claims. We ask: Are those claims true or false? What are their implications?
Is morality objective or subjective? It depends which moral reductionism you have in mind, and what you mean by 'objective' and 'subjective'.
Here are some common5 uses of the objective/subjective distinction in ethics:
Now, consider Harris' reduction of morality to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. His theory of morality is objective3 and objective2, because facts about well-being are independent of anyone's opinion. Even if the Nazis had won WWII and brainwashed everybody to have the opinion that torturing Jews was moral, it would remain true that torturing Jews does not increase the average well-being of conscious creatures. But Harris' theory of morality is not objective1, because facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are mind-dependent facts.
Or, consider Craig's theory of morality in terms of divine approval. His theory doesn't connect to reality, but still: is it objective or subjective? Craig's theory says that moral facts are objective3, because they don't depend on human opinion (God isn't human). But his theory doesn't say that morality is objective2 or objective1, because for him, moral facts depend on the opinion of a sentient being: God.
A warning: ambiguous terms like 'objective' and 'subjective' are attractors for sneaking in connotations. Craig himself provides an example. In his writings and public appearances, Craig insists that only God-based morality can be objective.6 What does he mean by 'objective'? On a single page,7 he uses 'objective' to mean "independent of people's opinions" (objective2) and also to mean "independent of human opinion" (objective3). I'll assume he means that only God-based morality can be objective3, because God-based morality is clearly not objective2 (Craig's God is a person, a sentient being).
And yet, Craig says that we need God in order to have objective3 morality as if this should be a big deal. But hold on. Even a moral code defined in terms of the preferences of Washoe the chimpanzee is objective3. So not only is Bill's claim that only God-based morality can be objective3 false (because Harris' moral theory is also objective3), but also it's trivially easy to come up with a moral theory that is 'objective' in Craig's (apparent) sense of the term (that is, objective3).8
Moreover, Harris' theory of morality is objective in a 'stronger' sense than Craig's theory of morality is. Harris' theory is objective3 and objective2, while Craig's theory is merely objective3. Whether he's doing it consciously or not, I wonder if Craig is using the word 'objective' to try to sneak in connotations that don't actually apply to his claims once you pay attention to what Craig actually means by the word 'objective'. If Craig told his audience that we need God for morality to be 'objective' in the same sense that morality defined in terms of the preferences of a chimpanzee is 'objective', would this still still have his desired effect on his audience? I doubt it.
Once you've stipulated your use of 'objective' and 'subjective', it is often trivial to determine whether a given moral reductionism is 'objective' or 'subjective'. But what of it? What force should those words carry after you've tabooed them? Be careful not to sneak in connotations that don't belong.
Is morality relative or absolute? Again, it depends which moral reductionism you have in mind, and what you mean by 'relative' and 'absolute'. Again, we must be careful about sneaking in connotations.
"He's an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?" This is a 'closed' question. The answer is obviously "Yes."
In contrast, said G.E. Moore, all questions of the type "Such and such is X, but is it good?" are open questions. It feels like you can always ask, "Yes, but is it good?" In this way, Moore resists the identification of 'morally good' with any set of natural facts. This is Moore's Open Question Argument. Because some moral reductionisms do identify 'good' or 'right' with a particular X, those reductionisms had better have an answer to Moore.
The Yudkowskian response is to point out that when cognitivists use the term 'good', their intuitive notion of 'good' is captured by a massive logical function that can't be expressed in simple statements like "maximize pleasure" or "act only in accordance with maxims you could wish to be a universal law without contradiction." Even if you think everything you want (or rather, want to want) can be realized by (say) maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures, you're wrong. Your values are more complex than that, and we can't see the structure of our values. That is why it feels like an open question remains no matter which simplistic identification of "Good = X" you choose.
The problem is not that there is no way to identify 'good' or 'right' (as used intuitively, without tabooing) with a certain X. The problem is that X is huge and complicated and we don't (yet) have access to its structure.
But that's the response to Moore after righting a wrong question - that is, when doing empathic metaethics. When doing mere pluralistic moral reductionism, Moore's argument doesn't apply. If we taboo and reduce, then the question of "...but is it good?" is out of place. The reply is: "Yes it is, because I just told you that's what I mean to communicate when I use the word-tool 'good' for this discussion. I'm not here to debate definitions; I'm here to get something done."9
(This section rewritten for clarity.)
Many claim that you cannot infer an 'ought' statement from a series of 'is' statements. The objection comes from Hume, who said he was surprised whenever an argument made of is and is not propositions suddenly shifted to an ought or ought not claim, without explanation.10
The solution is to make explicit the bridge from 'ought' statements to 'is' statements.
Perhaps the arguer means something non-natural by 'ought', such as 'commanded by God' or 'in accord with irreducible, non-natural facts about goodness' (see Moore). If so, I would reject that premise of the argument, because I'm a reductionist. At this point, our discussion might need to shift to a debate over the merits of reductionism.
Or perhaps by 'you ought to X' the arguer means something fully natural, such as:
Or, the speaker may have in mind a common ought-reductionism known as the hypothetical imperative. This is an ought of the kind: "If you desire to lose weight, then you ought to consume fewer calories than your burn." (But usually, people leave off the implied if statement, and simply say "You should eat less and exercise more.")
A hypothetical imperative (as some use it) can be translated from 'ought' to 'is' in a straightforward way: "If you desire to lose weight, then you ought to consume fewer calories than you burn" translates to the claim "If you consume fewer calories than you burn, then you will (or are, ceteris paribus, more likely to) fulfill your desire to lose weight."11
Or, the speaker may be using 'ought' to communicate something only about other symbols (example: Bayes' Rule), leaving the bridge from 'ought' to 'is' to be built when the logical function represented by his use of 'ought' is plugged into a theory that refers to the world.
But one must not fall into the trap of thinking that a definition you've stipulated (aloud or in your head) for 'ought' must match up to your intended meaning of 'ought' (to which you don't have introspective access). In fact, I suspect it never does, which is why the conceptual analysis of 'ought' language can go in circles for centuries, and why any stipulated meaning of 'ought' is a fake utility function. To see clearly to our intuitive concept of ought, we'll have to try empathic metaethics (see below).
But whatever our intended meaning of 'ought' is, the same reasoning applies. Either our intended meaning of 'ought' refers (eventually) to the world of math and physics (in which case the is-ought gap is bridged), or else it doesn't (in which case it fails to refer).12
So, does all this mean that we can embrace moral realism, or does it doom us to moral anti-realism? Again, it depends on what you mean by 'realism' and 'anti-realism'.
In a sense, pluralistic moral reductionism can be considered a robust form of moral 'realism', in the same way that pluralistic sound reductionism is a robust form of sound realism. "Yes, there really is sound, and we can locate it in reality — either as vibrations in the air or as mental auditory experiences, however you are using the term." In the same way: "Yes, there really is morality, and we can locate it in reality — either as a set of facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, or as a set of facts about what an ideally rational and perfectly informed agent would prefer, or as some other set of natural facts."
But in another sense, pluralistic moral reductionism is 'anti-realist'. It suggests that there is no One True Theory of Morality. (We use moral terms in a variety of ways, and some of those ways refer to different sets of natural facts.) And as a reductionist approach to morality, it might also leave no room for moral theories which say there are universally binding moral rules for which the universe (e.g. via a God) will hold us accountable.
What matters are the facts, not whether labels like 'realism' or 'anti-realism' apply to 'morality'.
But pluralistic moral reductionism satisfies only a would-be austere metaethicist, not an empathic metaethicist.
Recall that when Alex asks how she can do what is right, the Austere Metaethicist replies:
Tell me what you mean by 'right', and I will tell you what is the right thing to do. If by 'right' you mean X, then Y is the right thing to do. If by 'right' you mean P, then Z is the right thing to do. But if you can't tell me what you mean by 'right', then you have failed to ask a coherent question, and no one can answer an incoherent question.
Alex may reply to the Austere Metaethicist:
Okay, I'm not sure exactly what I mean by 'right'. So how do I do what is right if I'm not sure what I mean by 'right'?
The Austere Metaethicist refuses to answer this question. The Empathic Metaethicist, however, is willing to go the extra mile. He says to Alex:
You may not know what you mean by 'right.' But let's not stop there. Here, let me come alongside you and help decode the cognitive algorithms that generated your question in the first place, and then we'll be able to answer your question. Then we can tell you what the right thing to do is.
This may seem like too much work. Would we be motivated to decode the cognitive algorithms producing Albert and Barry's use of the word 'sound'? Would we try to solve 'empathic meta-acoustics'? Probably not. We can simply taboo and reduce 'sound' and then get some work done.
But moral terms and value terms are about what we want. And unfortunately, we often don't know what we want. As such, we're unlikely to get what we really want if the world is re-engineered in accordance with our current best guess as to what we want. That's why we need to decode the cognitive algorithms that generate our questions about value and morality.
So how can the Empathic Metaethicist answer Alex's question? We don't know the details yet. For example, we don't have a completed cognitive neuroscience. But we have some ideas, and we know of some open problems that may admit of progress once more people understand them. In the next few posts, we'll take our first look at empathic metaethics.13
Previous post: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
1 Some have objected that the conceptual analysis argued against in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory is not just a battle over definitions. But a definition is "the formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc.", and a conceptual analysis is (usually) a "formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc." in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The goal of a conceptual analysis is to arrive at a definition for a term that captures our intuitions about its meaning. The process is to bash our intuitions against others' intuitions until we converge upon a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that captures them all. But consider Barry and Albert's debate over the definition of 'sound'. Why think Albert and Barry have the same concept in mind? Words mean slightly different things in different cultures, subcultures, and small communities. We develop different intuitions about their meaning based on divergent life experiences. Our intuitions differ from each other's due to the specifics of unconscious associative learning and attribution substitution heuristics. What is the point of bashing our intuitions about the meaning of terms against each other for thousands of pages, in the hopes that we'll converge on a precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Even if we can get Albert and Barry to agree, what happens when Susan wants to use the same term, but has slightly differing intuitions about its meaning? And, let's say we arrive at a messy set of 6 necessary and sufficient conditions for the intuitive meaning of the term. Is that going to be as useful for communication as one we consciously chose because it carved-up thingspace well? I doubt it. The IAU's definition of 'planet' is more useful than the folk-intuitions definition of 'planet'. Folk intuitions about 'planet' evolved over thousands of years and different people have different intuitions which may not always converge. In 2006, the IAU used modern astronomical knowledge to carve up thingspace in a more useful and informed way than our intuitions do.
A passage from Bertrand Russell (1953) is appropriate. Russell said that many philosophers reminded him of
the shopkeeper of whom I once asked the shortest way to Winchester. He called to a man in the back premises:
"Gentleman wants to know the shortest way to Winchester."
"Winchester?" an unseen voice replied.
"Aye."
"Way to Winchester?"
"Aye."
"Shortest way?"
"Aye."
"Dunno."
He wanted to get the nature of the question clear, but took no interest in answering it. This is exactly what modern philosophy does for the earnest seeker after truth. Is it surprising that young people turn to other studies?
2 Compare also to the biologist's 'species concept pluralism' and the philosopher's 'art concept pluralism.' See Uidhir & Magnus (2011). Also see 'causal pluralism' (Godfrey-Smith, 2009; Cartwright, 2007), 'theory concept pluralism' (Magnus, 2009) and, especially, 'metaethical contextualism' (Bjornsson & Finlay, 2010) or 'metaethical pluralism' or 'metaethical ambivalence' (Joyce, 2011). Joyce quotes Lewis (1989), who wrote that some concepts of value refer to things that really exist, and some concepts don't, and what you make of this situation is largely a matter of temperament:
What to make of the situation is mainly a matter of temperament. You can bang the drum about how philosophy has uncovered a terrible secret: there are no values! ... Or you can think it better for public safety to keep quiet and hope people will go on as before. Or you can declare that there are no values, but that nevertheless it is legitimate—and not just expedient—for us to carry on with value-talk, since we can make it all go smoothly if we just give the name of value to claimants that don't quite deserve it... Or you can think it an empty question whether there are values: say what you please, speak strictly or loosely. When it comes to deserving a name, there's better and worse but who's to say how good is good enough? Or you can think it clear that the imperfect deservers of the name are good enough, but only just, and say that although there are values we are still terribly wrong about them. Or you can calmly say that value (like simultaneity) is not quite as some of us sometimes thought. Myself, I prefer the calm and conservative responses. But as far as the analysis of value goes, they're all much of a muchness.
Joyce concludes that, for example, the moral naturalist and the moral error theorist may agree with each other (when adopting each other's own language):
[Metaethical ambivalence] begins with a kind of metametaethical enlightenment. The moral naturalist espouses moral naturalism, but this espousal reflects a mature decision, by which I mean that the moral naturalist doesn't claim to have latched on to an incontrovertiblerealm of moral facts of which the skeptic is foolishly ignorant, but rather acknowledges that this moral naturalism has been achieved only via a non-mandatory piece of conceptual precisification. Likewise, the moral skeptic champions moral skepticism, but this too is a sophisticated verdict: not the simple declaration that there are no moral values and that the naturalist is gullibly uncritical, but rather a decision that recognizes that this skepticism has been earned only by making certain non-obligatory but permissible conceptual clarifications.
...The enlightened moral naturalist doesn't merely (grudgingly) admit that the skeptic is warranted in his or her views, but is able to adopt the skeptical position in order to gain the insights that come from recognizing that we live in a world without values. And the enlightened moral skeptic goes beyond (grudgingly) conceding that moral naturalism is reasonable, but is capable of assuming that perspective in order to gain whatever benefits come from enjoying epistemic access to a realm of moral facts.
3 Miller (2003), p. 3.
4 I changed the example moral judgment from "murder is wrong" to "stealing is wrong" because the former invites confusion. 'Murder' often means wrongful killing.
5 Also see Jacobs (2002), starting on p. 2.
6 The first premise of one of his favorite arguments for God's existence is "If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist."
7 Craig (2010), p. 11.
8 It's also possible that Craig intended a different sense of objective than the ones explicitly given in his article. Perhaps he meant objective4: "morality is objective4 if it is not grounded in the opinion of non-divine persons."
9 Also see Moral Reductionism and Moore's Open Question Argument.
10 Hume (1739), p. 469. The famous paragraph is:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
11 For more on reducing certain kinds of normative statements, see Finlay (2010).
12 Assuming reductionism is true. If reductionism is false, then of course there are problems for pluralistic moral reductionism as a theory of austere (but not empathic) metaethics. The clarifications in the last three paragraphs of this section are due to discussions with Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov.
13 My thanks to Steve Rayhawk and Will Newsome for their feedback on early drafts of this post.
Bjornsson & Finlay (2010). Metaethical contextualism defended. Ethics, 121: 7-36.
Craig (2010). Five Arguments for God. The Gospel Coalition.
Cartwright (2007).Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics. Cambridge University Press.
Godfrey-Smith (2009). Causal pluralism. In Beebee, Hitchcock, & Menzies (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation (pp. 326-337). Oxford University Press.
Hume (1739). A Treatise on Human Nature. John Noon.
Finlay (2010). Normativity, Necessity and Tense: A Recipe for Homebaked Normativity. In Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 5 (pp. 57-85). Oxford University Press.
Jacobs (2002). Dimensions of Moral Theory. Wiley-Blackwell.
Joyce (2011).Metaethical pluralism: How both moral naturalism and moral skepticism may be permissible positions. In Nuccetelli & Seay (eds.), Ethical Naturalism: Current Debates. Cambridge University Press.
Lewis (1989). Dispositional theories of value. Part II. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 63: 113-137.
Magnus (2009). What species can teach us about theory.
Miller (2003). An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Polity.
Russell (1953). The cult of common usage. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 12: 305-306.
Uidhir & Magnus (2011). Art concept pluralism. Metaphilosophy, 42: 83-97.