I'm on board with a lot of Fundamental Uncertainty. Even some of the stuff that initially feels like a disagreement turns out not to be so. For example, in chapter 8, Gordon writes:
Over the course of the previous chapters, I've made the case that truth is fundamentally uncertain. It's not, as many believe, something fixed and eternal, nor is it a matter of pure opinion. Instead, the relative truth we know is grounded, not by absolute truth alone, but by our need for accurate world models to achieve the goals we care about.
My first thoughts upon reading this kind of thing are along the lines of "Wtf does it mean for "truth" to be "eternal"? Could you taboo that and give me an example of what you'd use it for?" -- which is exactly turning Gordon's take on truth in on itself, so point taken. Truth is grounded in care, and fundamentally uncertain. I'm with ya here. True enough.
It is because of this agreement that I find chapter 8: "Why does fundamental uncertainty matter?" to be the chapter that matters. My answer, however, is quite different:
It does not, and it can not.
By virtue of talking about the uncertainty which can not be reduced even in principle, we're talking about the part we can't do anything about. The part that there's no reason to care about, because nothing we do can change it.
Ah, but it's important to know that we can't change it! Right? Chapter 8 isn't about resolving the unresolvable, it's about knowing what is unresolvable so we don't waste time trying.
Except this too, we cannot know.
The problem with the "problem of the criterion" is that should we get the criterion wrong, it infects everything. We cannot know that our residual uncertainty is fundamental, because fundamental uncertainty applies here as well. We can't even fall back to "well, sure enough", because to the extent that there's little left, there's little left. To the extent that we have a lot of fundamental uncertainty, we're fundamentally unsure how much and where it is biting us.
We can never know that the "unresolvable" residual is fundamental, and therefore can never justify relaxing into sufficient certainty that the uncertainty is fundamental. If we keep going, we never know what we might learn that we believed to be unlearnable.
Taken all the way, fundamental uncertainty undoes its own relevance: Fundamental Uncertainty stops one step short.
The examples given in chapter 8 are good examples which look fundamentally uncertain, but which actually resolve for those who care to look.
Gordon writes:
Yet there are times when fundamental uncertainty blocks us from finding truth. As we'll explore in the coming chapters, we get into debates about what words like "man" and "woman" really mean, fight over whether it's right or wrong to eat meat, and struggle to know what's best to do, not because we can't reason carefully about these topics, but because fundamental uncertainty limits how precisely we can reason about them. As we'll see, no matter how smart or wise we are, fundamental uncertainty ultimately stands in our way of knowing all that we wish to know.
I don't think anyone is up against any fundamental limits of precision. It is, I argue, insufficiently careful -- or in the case of culture war, carefully misleading -- reasoning all the way down.
Let's start where Gordon starts, with definitions:
But few people get into fights about whether road maps and driving are better than trail maps and hiking. That's because there's relatively little at stake in such a situation, and it's similar for the definitions of most words. For example, herbal tea isn't technically "tea" unless it contains leaves of Camellia sinensis: it's a tisane. Even that is debatable, though, because "tisane" comes from a Greek word for barley.
The stakes don't predict the conflict. My brother is celiac, for example, so there's considerable stake in whether he's drinking a "tea" or a "tisane". However, never has he yelled at anyone for getting terms wrong and calling a tisane a "tea". When he has any inkling a drink might contain gluten, he asks "Does this drink contain gluten?". The rationalist move of "tabooing" words isn't limited to us rationalist dorks. When gluten matters, people will ask about gluten, and not risk miscommunication. Both tabooing and code switching between specific and loose meanings of words like "tea" are easy moves, available to anyone.
Yet the culture war battle over definitions has not resolved with "just taboo your terms!" spreading like wildfire. Why not? Why has "Adult human males who identify as adult human females are humans that identify as female!" not caught on? Why hasn't "The union of one man and one woman, inherently oriented toward procreation and family formation, is between a man and a woman"? Is it the extra syllables?
I jest. No one disagrees. No one cares to push back -- at least, no one who pushes back against the side using those definitions pushes back once stated plainly like that. So why does this not resolve everything? If celiacs can allow you to call a tisane a "tea" and just not drink it, if we can use the same spelling and pronunciation to refer both to wooden whacking sticks and flying rats, why doesn't that happen here?
Gay men are already counted as "one of the girls" when it comes to girls night out, because in the ways that matter, often the fit is close enough. Why not say "Oh, it's women's night" with the implicit definition "fits in with these women in this way" when that's the appropriate definition, and use a different definition when it comes to sanctioning MMA fights? Why no satisfaction with the neologism "transwoman", which is sufficiently short and descriptive? While conservatives might quibble that the term for an adult human male identifying as a woman should be "transman" rather than "transwoman", that fight would be smaller, and everyone keeps reaching for the bigger fight. Who is going to fight with "Black Lives Matter Too", and why did neither side make that their slogan?
We could have clarity, at the cost of one more word. And yet, we spend many in ways that bury the shared factual agreement. We could use words in ways that account for context, as we normally do, yet here we do not. We act here as if words have One True Meaning, as if winning the fight over "What we say the definition is" imbues special significance to anything which meets the official definition.
If the problem were about fundamental uncertainty, why would we not use the solutions we use everywhere else when clarity is valued? Why would we do this, if there weren't already shared meaning in the word, that we're fighting over?
The explanation that predicts the observed behavior, is that culture war fights aren't about fundamental uncertainty at all. Culture war is about attempts to create artificial uncertainty, so that we can sneak in what we can't honestly argue for. The word means something, we all know what it is, and this is why there is perceived value in claiming the existing word instead of coining new terms.
Honest disagreement does not lead to fights. "I think the most important aspect of whether something is a 'tea' is just whether it's an infusion of plant stuff in water", "The presence of gluten is pretty important to me", "Oh, well in that context, yeah".
"Black lives matter", "Well yeah, all lives matter", "I'm glad you agree, but not everyone does so I feel it's important that we acknowledge that black lives matter too", "Oh. Fair. Yeah, black lives matter too".
How hard is this, really?
The cost of new words, or unclear words, is minimal when no one is trying to thumb the scale. We don't get pissy at each other when we recognize that we're all doing our honest best. If someone is getting upset, and the response isn't immediate de-escalation with new words in a visible "hands off the scale" move, that's a pretty strong indication that at least one side is trying to get away with not playing it straight.
Both sides know damn well they're fighting over connotations in a game with at least one dishonest player. Both would claim that the other side is the dishonest player. Fortunately, this is testable. If you want to know which side(s) are thumbing the scale, and how much, notice what happens when you suggest they clearly define the terms, and explain how their definition carves reality at the joints in useful ways.
Use the tools already argued for in Fundamental Uncertainty if you dare, and definitions will no longer be a sticking point for you -- neither in metaphysical questions or practical ones like "which bathroom to use?". The "uncertainty" here dissolves rather rapidly, in most cases.
After dissolving the camouflage that disguises the facts and values underneath "definitional" disputes, the next step is to decompose "values" into the factual predictions upon which they are built.
Is it right to take a finder's fee when one finds a wallet? How much fee and in which cases? I dunno. I am uncertain.
However, this is not fundamental uncertainty, unresolvable due to infinite regress of the criterion. This is something we could test. We could run the experiment. See which town ends up being the one you want to live in. That's the one with the right answer.
Try arguing that the moral thing to do is the thing that leads to no wallets getting returned, and everyone harmed more than helped. Try arguing that the place with good outcomes, where you want to live, isn't the one that is good. Not "argue that one could, theoretically, argue". Actually argue it. Can you generate an argument that you take seriously? It gets pretty hard to hold this position.
This is a move that's always available, even when non-trivial. Stealing heavily from the capstone post of my sequence on how to resolve disagreements that aren't obviously disagreements let alone resolvable:
Things don't bottom out at "Values difference!", because even if it's hard to see how "values" cash out in "truths", we still have to decide which values to prioritize, and there are better and worse ways to prioritize things.
If we run into a "Values difference!" of "Truth vs compassion" for example, then there's still a "way that things will play out if you prioritize truth" and a different "way that things will play out if you prioritize compassion". Sure, in the short term, watching someone's feelings get hurt by a tactless pushing of 'truth' won't change any minds, but that's just because the disagreement over implicit facts lies further in the future. If the community decays because of insufficient contact with truth, and people lose everyone they love, even the "compassion" favoring people will have something they can't ignore. If the community becomes nothing but fighting because shutting out truths relating to the value of compassion made things immediately fall apart, to never improve, then the "truth" favoring people won't be able to hold onto their perspective without shutting out truth themselves.
Whenever we feel like "we're both looking at the same reality, and disagreeing over values", what that shows us isn't that truth "doesn't exist", or "is relative" in an absolute sense, but that we aren't yet aware of what implicit differences we're in disagreement over. One side might see white lies as deeply wrong, and not know why. The other side might see using 'truth' as an excuse to be mean as obviously wrong, a priori, because compassion is just what matters. But we can always dig one step deeper, and ask: Why is compassion what matters? Why is it wrong to white lie? What's the harm, in either case?
And when we look, we can start to notice. The harm in white lies is that it breaks contact with reality, increases the risk of crashing into unseen rocks, and of not even noticing that you're sinking and that this could be avoided. The harm in pushing truth without compassion is that the subtle insecurities that lead you to do it without compassion also give hints that your implicit attitudes aren't knowably true either -- and those will sink you in very specific ways too. Careful allegiance to truth gets you compassion as well, when it's true that compassion is good. Like when someone is in such a rough place that they judge risking a car wreck as better than staying at a party, and the implicit worldviews motivating "That's dumb!" turn out to be false. Or when a girl at a music festival is being a turd because of whatever reason, but whatever reason that actually exists and is sufficient to make responding to her with anger or contempt wrong.
Heck, let's make this as hard as possible: abortion!
If anything is about something fundamentally unresolvable, it ought to be the thing revolving around "are fetuses people with moral worth or clumps of cells with none?". There's no fact of the matter that can resolve this, right? Just definitions based on values?
Maybe you're a pro-choicer, or could empathize with someone who is. What do you think you will feel, as a pro-choicer who has had an abortion or two because it was socially supported, should you end up struggling with fertility later in life once you finally decided you're "ready" for a child? What do you think regret lingering on does to the values that brought you there, if you don't make sure to look away? Should you end up watching your friends grow old and childless, longing for what they had thrown away, will you still value their right to make mistakes the same?
Maybe you're "pro-life", or could empathize with someone who is. God forbid you end up in an IVF clinic, hearing that the only way you will bring life into this world involves trashing a few fertilized eggs. As God is shoving in your face the fact that the only way you are bringing life into this world, is by accepting death as well, might you notice that death is always the price of life? That if God were anti-death, humans wouldn't age. Hyenas wouldn't rip baby wildebeest out of the womb in the wild. Once the stakes are real enough to sober you, do you think you might realize that you really are pro-life, and that your "never abortion" stance was in opposition to what you truly care about?
These are empirical questions. There are experiences, which if experienced, will change people's mind about which values are important, and in which cases. The value one places on eating yummy Chinese food changes drastically and automatically after food poisoning. The value one places on their marriage can change drastically upon learning of infidelity, even as people try to forgive. The value one places on the life of a fetus depends on whether the future anticipated is one of joy and life or suffering and life cut short.
The criterion is more shared than the ideology. When you want a baby, and you value the life you could potentially bring into this world, then looking will tell you whether "It's better to have kids when ready!" was real or cope. Whether "Abortions are all turning away from God!" was real or cope. Even if we are not yet aware of the anticipations we hold, even if we claim otherwise, our values speak to our factual predictions relative to the care that lies beneath our claims.
What experiences are implied by the values one holds? What experiences would change minds? What experiences are likely to happen?
These aren't always easy to find, and rarely fit our prior expectations or else it wouldn't seem unresolvable in the first place. The "committed asexual" friend I had didn't have different "terminal values" around sex, and if you're looking in the realm of argument then maybe the criterion he leaned on there would have kept the disagreement unresolvable even in theory. Yet it wasn't unresolvable. He met a woman. A woman who showed him through experience that his values weren't what he thought they were.
These "values" which we hold so dear, what is it that we're holding to them for? What outcomes are we anticipating, if we didn't? What experiences would we have to have, in order to feel our sense of value shifting underneath us? It's not comfortable, is it?
That abortion you're mulling over, is it going to result in more life, down the line? Will broader perspective bring regret for bringing this child into the world before you can care for him or her? Or will it bring regret for not bringing him or her into this world?
Values are about facts. There's nothing special that makes them immune to regular old evidence, should we dare to look.
We can make this even harder by noticing the cases in which care diverges. Is it right for the strongest to get the whole pie, or for the pie to be shared?
This might depend on if you're asking the strong.
Yet at the end of the day, "who gets the pie?" is a factual question. And I notice that appeals to the value of "fairness" will land with those otherwise getting no pie. Who, together, are strongest. I also notice that once the strong individual can see that he will get no pie if he tries to take the whole pie for himself, that this is the experience that will change his mind as well. For if he were built upon genes that did not rest upon this criterion, his ancestors would not have survived to build him. [1]
These are all purely factual questions, with ordinary uncertainty, which resolve disagreement in definitions and value, and coordinate our behavior. It is not always easy to see the full path to resolution at a glance, which is why I wrote my own book length sequence on the topic. Besides the ordinary problems of resolving uncertainty, the things that make these especially tricky, are our excuses to not look.
Excuses to not look are rarely chosen as such, for seeing a move as an attempt to excuse invalidates the excuse. Yet they are adopted, as apparent facts about reality which appear true. Or true enough, so long as the note of discord and importance thereof go unnoticed. Excuses disguise themselves as facts, as we fall unwittingly into the attractor.
"Fundamental Uncertainty" adds a meta layer to this mess.
A very sophisticated and general layer, produced through years of careful thought by someone clearly unable to stop looking without damn good justification. The concept of moral trades, motivated by recognition of moral uncertainty, is a good one. The concept of tabooing words, motivated by the recognition of definitions as useful conventions rather than Fundamental Truths, is also good.
At the same time, this delivery of useful truths comes with an uninvited stowaway. The rat that has snuck aboard this ship is the same kind of rat that sneaks aboard many: an excuse to stop looking.
If the culture war is "just about using words for different things", then we don't have to notice when people are advocating for definitions that are wrong, by the criteria a society can actually coordinate around, which we would all come to agree on if we were to stop pretending that disagreements are unresolvable.
Not noticing this gets us out of having to voice inconvenient truths and call out our ingroup, which is super convenient -- and progress halting.
If morality is fundamentally uncertain, then we no longer have obligation to figure out if we're wrong for slaughtering and eating all the animals -- which again, is super convenient, at risk of enabling atrocities.
Or on the other side, maybe our care for animals is misplaced, leading us to being bad to our fellow humans who we actually care about, in order to avoid looking "bad" to those whose judgements we care about.
It's certainly easier to have cease fires, and no doubt often practical as well. But it's not such a tempting option when we notice what we are giving up in order to avoid facing the uncertainty.
In order to justify these moves with "fundamental uncertainty", we need to know that we've reached the end of what can be known -- or at least, that we've made it close enough,and that the rest is at least probably irreducible.
Yet the more the possibility of a terminally misleading criterion limits our achievable certainty, the more it limits our certainty of anything. We can't even be "pretty sure" unless we're pretty sure there's not much left uncertain -- because if we think we're pretty sure that we're bad at nailing things down... how nailed down can that be?
That's just the theory. In practice, it gets worse.
How can we honestly say "No, but this time for realsies" or "I'm not uncertain about this being uncertain!" after time and time again, definitions, values, and even outright conflict turn out to be something there is a shared criterion for?
Fundamental Uncertainty, through very careful looking, notices the problem with thinking we can reach The Bedrock of Ultimate Objective Truth, and stops one step shy of noticing that it applies to the soft mushy intersubjectively useful truth as well.
At the end of the day, the uncertainty on which disagreements are built is not fundamental. Our inability to reach bedrock of certainty is not an obstacle to reaching a shared best guess, and a shared coordination of definitions, values, and behaviors.
Part of my meta criterion is to notice when others disagree, and to wonder what they might be seeing that I do not. And this is part of yours too, whether or not you have noticed. We're in this together, and while it's theoretically possible that our shared recursion up the ladder of criteria is insufficient to find truth, what we can do, and what we care to do, is climb toward our shared best guess. One thing we can be pretty sure we don't know, is that we won't find good reason to change our mind when we do.
The part that matters, for the actual stuff we care about in chapter 8, is ordinary uncertainty. Ordinary humility, honesty about what we anticipate, effort to figure out what that really is and how that squares with our meta criteria.
And by virtue of existing after all these years, we're already the kind of people who are compelled to look, when we recognize that the consequences touch that about which we care.
This isn't "might makes right". It's closer to "right makes might", but even that is misleading.
We define "right" by what succeeds in making durable power. That's why we don't call the government a "mob", and we call the protection money "taxes" and "part of the social contract" even though you never signed anything, rather than "extortion".
Sufficiently durable atrocities don't become right by virtue of being durable. But the sufficient durability does become evidence about something real and important. If "taxes are wrong", but every functioning civilization has them, why? Your belief that it's an atrocity is your belief. On what do you base this belief? Is your belief more durable in contact with reality than the thing which you diagnose as "an atrocity"? What happens when you try to create a civilization without taxes?
Nazis gaining power is evidence that they were doing something right which enabled power and coordination... and our moral intuitions that they're still wrong proved correct when Adolf offed himself for being a loser. The fact that we all coordinated vigorously enough to stop them, while they were too busy running extermination camps to direct all their efforts to winning the war, isn't a coincidence.
I'm on board with a lot of Fundamental Uncertainty. Even some of the stuff that initially feels like a disagreement turns out not to be so. For example, in chapter 8, Gordon writes:
My first thoughts upon reading this kind of thing are along the lines of "Wtf does it mean for "truth" to be "eternal"? Could you taboo that and give me an example of what you'd use it for?" -- which is exactly turning Gordon's take on truth in on itself, so point taken. Truth is grounded in care, and fundamentally uncertain. I'm with ya here. True enough.
It is because of this agreement that I find chapter 8: "Why does fundamental uncertainty matter?" to be the chapter that matters. My answer, however, is quite different:
It does not, and it can not.
By virtue of talking about the uncertainty which can not be reduced even in principle, we're talking about the part we can't do anything about. The part that there's no reason to care about, because nothing we do can change it.
Ah, but it's important to know that we can't change it! Right? Chapter 8 isn't about resolving the unresolvable, it's about knowing what is unresolvable so we don't waste time trying.
Except this too, we cannot know.
The problem with the "problem of the criterion" is that should we get the criterion wrong, it infects everything. We cannot know that our residual uncertainty is fundamental, because fundamental uncertainty applies here as well. We can't even fall back to "well, sure enough", because to the extent that there's little left, there's little left. To the extent that we have a lot of fundamental uncertainty, we're fundamentally unsure how much and where it is biting us.
We can never know that the "unresolvable" residual is fundamental, and therefore can never justify relaxing into sufficient certainty that the uncertainty is fundamental. If we keep going, we never know what we might learn that we believed to be unlearnable.
Taken all the way, fundamental uncertainty undoes its own relevance: Fundamental Uncertainty stops one step short.
The examples given in chapter 8 are good examples which look fundamentally uncertain, but which actually resolve for those who care to look.
Gordon writes:
I don't think anyone is up against any fundamental limits of precision. It is, I argue, insufficiently careful -- or in the case of culture war, carefully misleading -- reasoning all the way down.
Let's start where Gordon starts, with definitions:
The stakes don't predict the conflict. My brother is celiac, for example, so there's considerable stake in whether he's drinking a "tea" or a "tisane". However, never has he yelled at anyone for getting terms wrong and calling a tisane a "tea". When he has any inkling a drink might contain gluten, he asks "Does this drink contain gluten?". The rationalist move of "tabooing" words isn't limited to us rationalist dorks. When gluten matters, people will ask about gluten, and not risk miscommunication. Both tabooing and code switching between specific and loose meanings of words like "tea" are easy moves, available to anyone.
Yet the culture war battle over definitions has not resolved with "just taboo your terms!" spreading like wildfire. Why not? Why has "Adult human males who identify as adult human females are humans that identify as female!" not caught on? Why hasn't "The union of one man and one woman, inherently oriented toward procreation and family formation, is between a man and a woman"? Is it the extra syllables?
I jest. No one disagrees. No one cares to push back -- at least, no one who pushes back against the side using those definitions pushes back once stated plainly like that. So why does this not resolve everything? If celiacs can allow you to call a tisane a "tea" and just not drink it, if we can use the same spelling and pronunciation to refer both to wooden whacking sticks and flying rats, why doesn't that happen here?
Gay men are already counted as "one of the girls" when it comes to girls night out, because in the ways that matter, often the fit is close enough. Why not say "Oh, it's women's night" with the implicit definition "fits in with these women in this way" when that's the appropriate definition, and use a different definition when it comes to sanctioning MMA fights? Why no satisfaction with the neologism "transwoman", which is sufficiently short and descriptive? While conservatives might quibble that the term for an adult human male identifying as a woman should be "transman" rather than "transwoman", that fight would be smaller, and everyone keeps reaching for the bigger fight. Who is going to fight with "Black Lives Matter Too", and why did neither side make that their slogan?
We could have clarity, at the cost of one more word. And yet, we spend many in ways that bury the shared factual agreement. We could use words in ways that account for context, as we normally do, yet here we do not. We act here as if words have One True Meaning, as if winning the fight over "What we say the definition is" imbues special significance to anything which meets the official definition.
If the problem were about fundamental uncertainty, why would we not use the solutions we use everywhere else when clarity is valued? Why would we do this, if there weren't already shared meaning in the word, that we're fighting over?
The explanation that predicts the observed behavior, is that culture war fights aren't about fundamental uncertainty at all. Culture war is about attempts to create artificial uncertainty, so that we can sneak in what we can't honestly argue for. The word means something, we all know what it is, and this is why there is perceived value in claiming the existing word instead of coining new terms.
Honest disagreement does not lead to fights. "I think the most important aspect of whether something is a 'tea' is just whether it's an infusion of plant stuff in water", "The presence of gluten is pretty important to me", "Oh, well in that context, yeah".
"Black lives matter", "Well yeah, all lives matter", "I'm glad you agree, but not everyone does so I feel it's important that we acknowledge that black lives matter too", "Oh. Fair. Yeah, black lives matter too".
How hard is this, really?
The cost of new words, or unclear words, is minimal when no one is trying to thumb the scale. We don't get pissy at each other when we recognize that we're all doing our honest best. If someone is getting upset, and the response isn't immediate de-escalation with new words in a visible "hands off the scale" move, that's a pretty strong indication that at least one side is trying to get away with not playing it straight.
Both sides know damn well they're fighting over connotations in a game with at least one dishonest player. Both would claim that the other side is the dishonest player. Fortunately, this is testable. If you want to know which side(s) are thumbing the scale, and how much, notice what happens when you suggest they clearly define the terms, and explain how their definition carves reality at the joints in useful ways.
Use the tools already argued for in Fundamental Uncertainty if you dare, and definitions will no longer be a sticking point for you -- neither in metaphysical questions or practical ones like "which bathroom to use?". The "uncertainty" here dissolves rather rapidly, in most cases.
After dissolving the camouflage that disguises the facts and values underneath "definitional" disputes, the next step is to decompose "values" into the factual predictions upon which they are built.
Is it right to take a finder's fee when one finds a wallet? How much fee and in which cases? I dunno. I am uncertain.
However, this is not fundamental uncertainty, unresolvable due to infinite regress of the criterion. This is something we could test. We could run the experiment. See which town ends up being the one you want to live in. That's the one with the right answer.
Try arguing that the moral thing to do is the thing that leads to no wallets getting returned, and everyone harmed more than helped. Try arguing that the place with good outcomes, where you want to live, isn't the one that is good. Not "argue that one could, theoretically, argue". Actually argue it. Can you generate an argument that you take seriously? It gets pretty hard to hold this position.
This is a move that's always available, even when non-trivial. Stealing heavily from the capstone post of my sequence on how to resolve disagreements that aren't obviously disagreements let alone resolvable:
Things don't bottom out at "Values difference!", because even if it's hard to see how "values" cash out in "truths", we still have to decide which values to prioritize, and there are better and worse ways to prioritize things.
If we run into a "Values difference!" of "Truth vs compassion" for example, then there's still a "way that things will play out if you prioritize truth" and a different "way that things will play out if you prioritize compassion". Sure, in the short term, watching someone's feelings get hurt by a tactless pushing of 'truth' won't change any minds, but that's just because the disagreement over implicit facts lies further in the future. If the community decays because of insufficient contact with truth, and people lose everyone they love, even the "compassion" favoring people will have something they can't ignore. If the community becomes nothing but fighting because shutting out truths relating to the value of compassion made things immediately fall apart, to never improve, then the "truth" favoring people won't be able to hold onto their perspective without shutting out truth themselves.
Whenever we feel like "we're both looking at the same reality, and disagreeing over values", what that shows us isn't that truth "doesn't exist", or "is relative" in an absolute sense, but that we aren't yet aware of what implicit differences we're in disagreement over. One side might see white lies as deeply wrong, and not know why. The other side might see using 'truth' as an excuse to be mean as obviously wrong, a priori, because compassion is just what matters. But we can always dig one step deeper, and ask: Why is compassion what matters? Why is it wrong to white lie? What's the harm, in either case?
And when we look, we can start to notice. The harm in white lies is that it breaks contact with reality, increases the risk of crashing into unseen rocks, and of not even noticing that you're sinking and that this could be avoided. The harm in pushing truth without compassion is that the subtle insecurities that lead you to do it without compassion also give hints that your implicit attitudes aren't knowably true either -- and those will sink you in very specific ways too. Careful allegiance to truth gets you compassion as well, when it's true that compassion is good. Like when someone is in such a rough place that they judge risking a car wreck as better than staying at a party, and the implicit worldviews motivating "That's dumb!" turn out to be false. Or when a girl at a music festival is being a turd because of whatever reason, but whatever reason that actually exists and is sufficient to make responding to her with anger or contempt wrong.
Heck, let's make this as hard as possible: abortion!
If anything is about something fundamentally unresolvable, it ought to be the thing revolving around "are fetuses people with moral worth or clumps of cells with none?". There's no fact of the matter that can resolve this, right? Just definitions based on values?
Maybe you're a pro-choicer, or could empathize with someone who is. What do you think you will feel, as a pro-choicer who has had an abortion or two because it was socially supported, should you end up struggling with fertility later in life once you finally decided you're "ready" for a child? What do you think regret lingering on does to the values that brought you there, if you don't make sure to look away? Should you end up watching your friends grow old and childless, longing for what they had thrown away, will you still value their right to make mistakes the same?
Maybe you're "pro-life", or could empathize with someone who is. God forbid you end up in an IVF clinic, hearing that the only way you will bring life into this world involves trashing a few fertilized eggs. As God is shoving in your face the fact that the only way you are bringing life into this world, is by accepting death as well, might you notice that death is always the price of life? That if God were anti-death, humans wouldn't age. Hyenas wouldn't rip baby wildebeest out of the womb in the wild. Once the stakes are real enough to sober you, do you think you might realize that you really are pro-life, and that your "never abortion" stance was in opposition to what you truly care about?
These are empirical questions. There are experiences, which if experienced, will change people's mind about which values are important, and in which cases. The value one places on eating yummy Chinese food changes drastically and automatically after food poisoning. The value one places on their marriage can change drastically upon learning of infidelity, even as people try to forgive. The value one places on the life of a fetus depends on whether the future anticipated is one of joy and life or suffering and life cut short.
The criterion is more shared than the ideology. When you want a baby, and you value the life you could potentially bring into this world, then looking will tell you whether "It's better to have kids when ready!" was real or cope. Whether "Abortions are all turning away from God!" was real or cope. Even if we are not yet aware of the anticipations we hold, even if we claim otherwise, our values speak to our factual predictions relative to the care that lies beneath our claims.
What experiences are implied by the values one holds? What experiences would change minds? What experiences are likely to happen?
These aren't always easy to find, and rarely fit our prior expectations or else it wouldn't seem unresolvable in the first place. The "committed asexual" friend I had didn't have different "terminal values" around sex, and if you're looking in the realm of argument then maybe the criterion he leaned on there would have kept the disagreement unresolvable even in theory. Yet it wasn't unresolvable. He met a woman. A woman who showed him through experience that his values weren't what he thought they were.
These "values" which we hold so dear, what is it that we're holding to them for? What outcomes are we anticipating, if we didn't? What experiences would we have to have, in order to feel our sense of value shifting underneath us? It's not comfortable, is it?
That abortion you're mulling over, is it going to result in more life, down the line? Will broader perspective bring regret for bringing this child into the world before you can care for him or her? Or will it bring regret for not bringing him or her into this world?
Values are about facts. There's nothing special that makes them immune to regular old evidence, should we dare to look.
We can make this even harder by noticing the cases in which care diverges. Is it right for the strongest to get the whole pie, or for the pie to be shared?
This might depend on if you're asking the strong.
Yet at the end of the day, "who gets the pie?" is a factual question. And I notice that appeals to the value of "fairness" will land with those otherwise getting no pie. Who, together, are strongest. I also notice that once the strong individual can see that he will get no pie if he tries to take the whole pie for himself, that this is the experience that will change his mind as well. For if he were built upon genes that did not rest upon this criterion, his ancestors would not have survived to build him. [1]
These are all purely factual questions, with ordinary uncertainty, which resolve disagreement in definitions and value, and coordinate our behavior. It is not always easy to see the full path to resolution at a glance, which is why I wrote my own book length sequence on the topic. Besides the ordinary problems of resolving uncertainty, the things that make these especially tricky, are our excuses to not look.
Excuses to not look are rarely chosen as such, for seeing a move as an attempt to excuse invalidates the excuse. Yet they are adopted, as apparent facts about reality which appear true. Or true enough, so long as the note of discord and importance thereof go unnoticed. Excuses disguise themselves as facts, as we fall unwittingly into the attractor.
"Fundamental Uncertainty" adds a meta layer to this mess.
A very sophisticated and general layer, produced through years of careful thought by someone clearly unable to stop looking without damn good justification. The concept of moral trades, motivated by recognition of moral uncertainty, is a good one. The concept of tabooing words, motivated by the recognition of definitions as useful conventions rather than Fundamental Truths, is also good.
At the same time, this delivery of useful truths comes with an uninvited stowaway. The rat that has snuck aboard this ship is the same kind of rat that sneaks aboard many: an excuse to stop looking.
If the culture war is "just about using words for different things", then we don't have to notice when people are advocating for definitions that are wrong, by the criteria a society can actually coordinate around, which we would all come to agree on if we were to stop pretending that disagreements are unresolvable.
Not noticing this gets us out of having to voice inconvenient truths and call out our ingroup, which is super convenient -- and progress halting.
If morality is fundamentally uncertain, then we no longer have obligation to figure out if we're wrong for slaughtering and eating all the animals -- which again, is super convenient, at risk of enabling atrocities.
Or on the other side, maybe our care for animals is misplaced, leading us to being bad to our fellow humans who we actually care about, in order to avoid looking "bad" to those whose judgements we care about.
It's certainly easier to have cease fires, and no doubt often practical as well. But it's not such a tempting option when we notice what we are giving up in order to avoid facing the uncertainty.
In order to justify these moves with "fundamental uncertainty", we need to know that we've reached the end of what can be known -- or at least, that we've made it close enough, and that the rest is at least probably irreducible.
Yet the more the possibility of a terminally misleading criterion limits our achievable certainty, the more it limits our certainty of anything. We can't even be "pretty sure" unless we're pretty sure there's not much left uncertain -- because if we think we're pretty sure that we're bad at nailing things down... how nailed down can that be?
That's just the theory. In practice, it gets worse.
How can we honestly say "No, but this time for realsies" or "I'm not uncertain about this being uncertain!" after time and time again, definitions, values, and even outright conflict turn out to be something there is a shared criterion for?
Fundamental Uncertainty, through very careful looking, notices the problem with thinking we can reach The Bedrock of Ultimate Objective Truth, and stops one step shy of noticing that it applies to the soft mushy intersubjectively useful truth as well.
At the end of the day, the uncertainty on which disagreements are built is not fundamental. Our inability to reach bedrock of certainty is not an obstacle to reaching a shared best guess, and a shared coordination of definitions, values, and behaviors.
Part of my meta criterion is to notice when others disagree, and to wonder what they might be seeing that I do not. And this is part of yours too, whether or not you have noticed. We're in this together, and while it's theoretically possible that our shared recursion up the ladder of criteria is insufficient to find truth, what we can do, and what we care to do, is climb toward our shared best guess. One thing we can be pretty sure we don't know, is that we won't find good reason to change our mind when we do.
The part that matters, for the actual stuff we care about in chapter 8, is ordinary uncertainty. Ordinary humility, honesty about what we anticipate, effort to figure out what that really is and how that squares with our meta criteria.
And by virtue of existing after all these years, we're already the kind of people who are compelled to look, when we recognize that the consequences touch that about which we care.
Probably.
This isn't "might makes right". It's closer to "right makes might", but even that is misleading.
We define "right" by what succeeds in making durable power. That's why we don't call the government a "mob", and we call the protection money "taxes" and "part of the social contract" even though you never signed anything, rather than "extortion".
Sufficiently durable atrocities don't become right by virtue of being durable. But the sufficient durability does become evidence about something real and important. If "taxes are wrong", but every functioning civilization has them, why? Your belief that it's an atrocity is your belief. On what do you base this belief? Is your belief more durable in contact with reality than the thing which you diagnose as "an atrocity"? What happens when you try to create a civilization without taxes?
Nazis gaining power is evidence that they were doing something right which enabled power and coordination... and our moral intuitions that they're still wrong proved correct when Adolf offed himself for being a loser. The fact that we all coordinated vigorously enough to stop them, while they were too busy running extermination camps to direct all their efforts to winning the war, isn't a coincidence.