All of LanceSBush's Comments + Replies

The descriptive task of determining what ordinary moral claims mean may be more relevant to questions about whether there are objective moral truths than is considered here. Are you familiar with Don Loeb's metaethical incoherentism? Or the empirical literature on metaethical variability? I recommend Loeb's article, "Moral incoherentism: How to pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat." The title itself indicates what Loeb is up to.

Whoops. I can see how my responses didn't make my own position clear.

I am an anti-realist, and I think the prospects for identifying anything like moral truth are very low. I favor abandoning attempts to frame discussions of AI or pretty much anything else in terms of converging on or identifying moral truth.

I consider it a likely futile effort to integrate important and substantive discussions into contemporary moral philosophy. If engaging with moral philosophy introduces unproductive digressions/confusions/misplaced priorities into the discussion it ... (read more)

It's certainly possible that this is the case, but looking for the kind of solution that would satisfy as many people as possible certainly seems like the thing we should try first and only give it up if it seems impossible, no?

Sure. That isn't my primary objection though. My main objection is that that even if we pursue this project, it does not achieve the heavy metaethical lifting you were alluding to earlier. It doesn’t demonstrate nor provide any particularly good reason to regard the outputs of this process as moral truth.

Well, the ideal case wo

Hi Kaj,

Even if we found the most agreeable available set of moral principles, that amount may turn out not to constitute the vast majority of people. It may not even reach a majority at all. It is possible that there simply is no moral theory that is acceptable to most people. People may just have irreconcilable values. You state that:

“For empirical facts we can come up with objective tests, but for moral truths it looks to me unavoidable - due to the is-ought gap - that some degree of "truth by social consensus" is the only way of figuring out w... (read more)

Thanks for the excellent reply.

Greene would probably not dispute that philosophers have generally agreed that the difference between the lever and footbridge cases are due to “apparently non-significant changes in the situation”

However, what philosophers have typically done is either bit the bullet and said one ought to push, or denied that one ought to push in the footbridge case, but then feel the need to defend commonsense intuitions by offering a principled justification for the distinction between the two. The trolley literature is rife with attempt... (read more)

I agree that defining human values is a philosophical issue, but I would not describe it as "not a psychological issue at all." It is in part a psychological issue insofar as understanding how people conceive of values is itself an empirical question. Questions about individual and intergroup differences in how people conceive of values, distinguish moral from nonmoral norms, etc. cannot be resolved by philosophy alone.

I am sympathetic to some of the criticisms of Greene's work, but I do not think Berker's critique is completely correct, though ... (read more)

I am a psychology PhD student with a background in philosophy/evolutionary psychology. My current research focuses on two main areas: effective altruism and the nature of morality and in particular the psychology of metaethics. My motivation for pursuing the former should be obvious, but my rationale for pursuing the latter is in part self-consciously about the third bullet point, "Defining just what it is that human values are." More basic than even defining what those values are, I am interested in what people take values themselves to be. For ... (read more)

Tom, that isn't the only way the term "moral anti-realism" is used. Sometimes it is used to refer to any metaethical position which denies substantive moral realism. This can include noncognitivism, error theory, and various forms of subjectivism/constructivism. This is typically how I use it.

For one thing, since I endorse metaethical variability/indeterminacy, I do not believe traditional descriptive metaethical analyses provide accurate accounts of ordinary moral language anyway. I think error theory works best in some cases, noncognitivism (p... (read more)

Hi Evan,

I study philosophy and would identify as a moral anti-realist. Like you, I am generally inclined to regard attempts to refer to moral statements as true or false as (in some cases) category mistakes, though in other cases I think they are better translated as cognitive but false (i.e. some moral discourse is captured by one or more error theories), and in other cases moral claims are both coherent and true, but trivial - for instance, a self-conscious subjectivist who deliberately uses moral terms to convey their preferences. Unfortunately, I think... (read more)