but the claim "dying is bad" is a moral judgement and therefore subjective. That is, the only sense in which "dying is bad" is a true claim is by interpreting it as "I prefer that people won't die."

Then by extension you have to say that medical science has no normative force. If it's just subjective, then when medicine says you ought not to smoke if you want to avoid lung cancer, they're completely unjustified when they say ought not to.

David,

Again, this is fantastic. Thank you.

"Nor are actual moral judgements simply about conscious experience. Almost everyone values many things other than conscious experience."

Without getting too far into this, (I simply want to assume consequentialism, as most EA's would be some variety of that) I think you've misread us here. At root, the other things get imbued with value only by derivation from consciousness. The implicit claim here is that a universe void of consciousness is a universe similarly void of value - there would be nothing around to make value judgements.

Moral judgements aren't simply about consciousness, but they reduce ultimately to how they move the character of conscious experience, including in a broad sense. Valuing my car isn't simply about my conscious experience in the moment, but about how it makes my life easier; I can be more economically productive getting around faster etc. These other goals all affect the character of my conscious experience, however. Being prosperous vs impoverished, freedom of mobility etc., these are all felt experiences.

Even theistic moral claims, homosexuality is bad etc., are about making sure your conscious experience stays positive, or more positive. Those experiences just happen to be a) in the next life, or b) in God's mind, i.e. his approving of you and your piety is a conscious experience. This is all we mean by saying all moral judgements come down to changes in conscious experience. In terms of language, I could have made that clearer and maybe hedged it a bit more.

This looks like non-scientific, non-physical claim. How would you cash this out in purely naturalistic, non-normative terms and once you have done so, why should we care about it?

I think you're confused about consciousness, and maybe about what we're saying about consciousness. If you don't agree that there is a Nagelian "what it is like" inherently present in conscious experience, I don't know how to convince you. But that's all we mean by "coloured" already with a kind of character; consciousness has a feeling about it. Similarly, if you're problem is with the claim that some "colours" are inherently bad, I don't know how to convince you. Hence the line in the essay, if you think the manner in which suffering forever is bad is somehow on par with judgements of taste, e.g. "I like vanilla over chocolate", I don't think you're playing the same game, or with enough seriousness.

Following from this, I'm glad you're familiar with the literature so again, we're assuming some form of physicalist metaphysics. Personally, I favour materialism (e.g. 'Scientific Materialism' of Mario Bunge), as it is not ruthlessly reductive. Bracketing that can of worms, consciousness is, under this image, just another material thing. Granted, we don't have a full science of it yet, but we know there are neural correlates of consciousness. So the "what it is like", the colour of consciousness, is nonetheless material, and amenable to scientific inquiry. The representational theory of mind, for example, posits that the character of consciousness is exhausted by the representational contents therein. Again, if representational contents are going to be reducible (in some sense) to neural structures or emergent features of such structures, then the claim about conscious experience is entirely scientific. The experience of consciousness is a natural phenomenon.

I can see a merit in moving myself closer to the worst possible misery in lots of circumstances. For example, I can reasonably prefer to starve myself to death in pursuit of other goals which have nothing to do with conscious experience (of myself or others).

We can concede that there could be consequential merits in starving, in certain circumscribed situations. Hunger strikes, for example, allow you to reach a political goal, or you want to sacrifice your food to save a number of other people from dying. However, that does have lots to do with the conscious experience of you or others, i.e. you want increased pay, freedom from oppression, or to save their lives so they can continue having conscious experiences. These all make reference to experiential changes in consciousness. I'd be interested to know a worthwhile goal, that has nothing to do with the conscious experience of anyone, which starving yourself to death allows you to reach.

We did stipulate forced starvation, however, alluding to the non-voluntary nature of suffering in the developing world. And the point was more about conscious merit, not consequential merit. Find something intrinsically okay with the experience of forced starvation, as in the experience itself, without reference to secondary goals or outcomes. This is about the initial point that experiences in consciousness aren't merely subjective, like judgements of taste.

It seems for your purposes you are committed to insisting that there's a simple single answer to the question of which is better, lest you end up being relativists about plumbing. But why think this is the case?

Absolutely not. There's an entire section about pluralism and objectivity vs relativism and absolutism where we say this explicitly. There are innumerable trade-offs to evaluate, but that doesn't prevent you from commenting objectively about those trade-offs, and that will involve reference to material facts. Should I eat an entire jar of nutella right now? It might make me extremely happy, but then there are trade-offs about sugar intake on my health to take into account. There might not be an answer to this trade-off involving long/short-term health risk of nutella vs conscious delight, but that doesn't change the biochemical facts about sugar intake on human health, or my root assumption that I shouldn't eat poison. If I was on the verge of diabetes, and we could determine that one more sugar binge would throw me over the edge, then we'd need to update based on these material facts. The trade-off has become clearer now.

There is no single simple answer sometimes, that doesn't change the fact that at root there are simple assumptions about health and longevity though, and the material facts will constrain how you can objectively move towards or away from them. Similarly, new facts will shed light on those currently difficult or trivial scenarios. Just like the cucumber and celery example, it could turn out that in the future we discover that cucumbers inhibit some kind of protein synthesis and reliably increase cancer risk. The answer about which one to eat will immediately become nontrivial in that case, they're no longer just as good as each other. You ought not to eat cucumber if you want to avoid cancer now.

There is no doubt an infinite number of ways to have equally good plumbing arrangements, almost every house will be idiosyncratic in how it balances those considerations you listed. That doesn't stop us from saying there are objectively bad ones. Lead pipes are bad, for example. Pipes that leak and therefore don't get water to their respective taps are bad. That's all we have to admit. Balancing the rest could be completely trivial, until we discover evidence to suggest that it's not. We're pluralists about plumbing, not relativists.

Hi David,

I really don't think I can reply without rewriting the essay again. I feel like I've addressed those concerns already (or at least attempted to do so) in the body of the essay, and you've found them unsatisfactory, so we'd just be talking passed each other.

Your replies are much appreciated though.

You're banking on the general moral consensus just being one that favours you, or coincides with your subjectivist take on morality. There can be no moral 'progress' if that is the case. We could be completely wrong when we say taking slaves is a bad thing, if the world was under ISIS control and the consensus shared by most people is that morality comes from a holy book.

Both these comments are zeroing in on the same issue which is at the core of the essay. The thesis above is deflationary about morality and ethics - the central point is that there is no separate realm of moral significance or quality, added on top of and divorced from material facts.

The chain is that 1) the only thing that possesses, in and of itself, a tint in value whilst still being an entirely material quantity is conscious experience. This move assumes materialism/physicalism, which is mostly uncontroversial now among scientists and philosophers alike.

2) We know the kinds of conscious experiences that are bad. Dying famished and hungry is not merely subjective. It is a subjective state, but one that is universally and always negative. This is not a moral assignment - it is an observable, material fact about the world and about psychological states.

3) The material conditions that lead to changes in conscious experiences are amenable to objective inquiry. The same external stimuli may move different people in different conscious directions, but we can study that relationship objectively. "Dying is bad" is not always a true claim in medical science - it depends on the material context. If you can't save people from the WPW, killing them could be a good thing. This is the principle that euthanasia leans on. Sometimes dying is better, in light of the facts about the further possibility for positive conscious experiences. That doesn't make medical science subjective.

4) The only "non-empirical" assumption you have to make is that what we mean by bad or wrong is movement of consciousness towards, or setting up systems that reliably contain people within, a negative state-space of consciousness.

5) This is how all other physical sciences operate.

We don't try to give additional argument to demonstrate that those properties are moral properties, we argue that moral properties are a subset of natural properties. In the same sense that 'health' is a subset of biological properties, or 'good plumbing' is a subset of various structural/engineering & hydrodynamic properties. Everything we value makes reference to material facts and their utility towards a goal set which must be assumed. But only in the case of morality does anyone ever demand a secondary and unreachable standard of objectivity.

Our thesis is therefore a realist, but deflationary (or 'naturalised') position on morality.

"why satisfy my own preferences?"

That's the lynch pin. You don't have to. You can be utterly incapable of actually following through on what you've deemed is a logical behaviour, yet still comment on what is objectively right or wrong. (this goes back to your original comment too)

There are millions of obese people failing to immediately start and follow through on diets and exercise regimes today. This is failing to satisfy their preferences - they have an interest in not dying early, which being obese reliably correlates with. It ostensibly looks like they don't value health and longevity on the basis of their outward behaviour. This doesn't make the objectivity of health science any less real. If you do want to avoid premature death and if you do value bodily nourishment, then their approach is wrong. You can absolutely fail to satisfy your own preferences.

Asking the further questions of, "why satisfy my own preferences?", or "what act in a logically consistent fashion?", just drift us into the realm of radical scepticism. This is an utterly unhelpful position to hold - you can go nowhere from there. "Why trust my sense data are sometimes veridical?" ...you don't have to, but you'd be mad not to.

Thanks for your remarks.

The is-ought distinction wasn't discussed explicitly to help include those unfamiliar with Hume. However, the opening section of the essay attempts to establish morality as just another domain of the physical world. There are no moral qualities over and above the ones we can measure, either a) in the consequences of an act, or b) in the behavioural profiles or personality traits in people that reliably lead to certain acts. Both these things are physical (or, at least, material in the latter case), and therefore measurable. Science studies physical reality, and the ambit of morality is a subset of physical reality. Therefore, science studies morality too.

The essay is silent on 'hedonistic' utilitarianism (we do not endorse it, either), as again, a) we think these aren't useful terms with which to structure the debate with as wide an audience as possible, and b) because they are concerns outside the present scope. This essay focuses on establishing the moral domain as just a subset of the physical, and therefore, that there will be moral facts to be obtained scientifically - even if we don't know how to obtain them just yet. How to perfectly balance competing interests, for example, is for a later discussion. First, convincing people that you actually can do that with any semblance of objectivity is required. The baby needs to walk before it can run.

We discuss cross-cultural claims in the section on everyday empiricism.