Moral Complexities

by Eliezer Yudkowsky 11y4th Jul 200836 comments


Followup toThe Bedrock of Fairness

Discussions of morality seem to me to often end up turning around two different intuitions, which I might label morality-as-preference and morality-as-given.  The former crowd tends to equate morality with what people want; the latter to regard morality as something you can't change by changing people.

As for me, I have my own notions, which I am working up to presenting.  But above all, I try to avoid avoiding difficult questions.  Here are what I see as (some of) the difficult questions for the two intuitions:

  • For morality-as-preference:   
    • Why do people seem to mean different things by "I want the pie" and "It is right that I should get the pie"?  Why are the two propositions argued in different ways?   
    • When and why do people change their terminal values?  Do the concepts of "moral error" and "moral progress" have referents?  Why would anyone want to change what they want?   
    • Why and how does anyone ever "do something they know they shouldn't", or "want something they know is wrong"?  Does the notion of morality-as-preference really add up to moral normality?
  • For morality-as-given:   
    • Would it be possible for everyone in the world to be wrong about morality, and wrong about how to update their beliefs about morality, and wrong about how to choose between metamoralities, etcetera?  So that there would be a morality, but it would be entirely outside our frame of reference?  What distinguishes this state of affairs, from finding a random stone tablet showing the words "You should commit suicide"?   
    • How does a world in which a moral proposition is true, differ from a world in which that moral proposition is false?  If the answer is "no", how does anyone perceive moral givens?   
    • Is it better for people to be happy than sad?  If so, why does morality look amazingly like godshatter of natural selection?   
    • Am I not allowed to construct an alien mind that evaluates morality differently?  What will stop me from doing so?


Part of The Metaethics Sequence

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