Occlusions of Moral Knowledge

post by herschel (hrs) · 2023-12-25T05:55:16.529Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://brothernin.substack.com/p/occlusions-of-moral-knowledge

Contents

  Moral Knowledge
  Occlusions
  Consequences
None
No comments

I want to discuss a notion of moral knowledge, and ways in which it can be occluded. I think these sorts of occlusions are upstream of some vital conversations that aren’t getting anywhere.

Moral Knowledge

We have some sort of innate capacity to apprehend goodness, beauty, rightness, etc. Presumably there's some standard term elsewhere for this, but I will call this moral knowledge.

Moral knowledge isn't necessarily about explicit theories of morality. My term might evoke some connotation of formality, moral propositions, etc. etc.--none of that is really what's meant. Moral knowledge comes before "morality", it's experientially basic and common to all people. (There's some diversity, obviously, which is part of what I want to discuss.)

This is in many respects different from episteme, and from the kinds of knowledge that we are normally used to including under 'epistemology'. I'm not necessarily attached to the term I've chosen, but I think it's fairly apt. At some point later I want to discuss some attempts towards moral or spiritual epistemics.

Occlusions

There are quite common reports in my circles of people doing psychedelics, meditation, therapy etc. and having experiences of "openings", after which they are aware of or sensitive to some aspect of experience which was previously invisible, or unavailable, or whatever. Similar reports also come from a cluster of contemporary contemplative traditions, and also align with some variously older spiritual and mystical traditions.

These reports often go along the lines of "wow, this was always happening but I could never feel it," or "suddenly I realized that the person in front of me was actually real," "I've been disowning this part of myself my whole life," etc., including even "I could see that we're all just love loving love." Note, btw, these ones are all (caricatured) reports of sudden changes, which are pithier, but many reported openings are gradual.

At least for some chunk of these, people often refer to experience without, or before, such openings as 'dissociated'. This is often a sloppy term, and the meanings used for it vary widely, but it's still helpful. Also, note that access to these not-dissociated states often fluctuates with various patterns.

Fine, so obviously some of these are going to be ontologically or metaphysically problematic to somebody, probably even all of them. People will sometimes deny having emotions at all, or that emotions even exist, etc. etc. I'm not going to deal with this too much, maybe that's a conversation for later if people take enough offense. I'll say, indeed these reports exist, and furthermore I take them to be largely real in aggregate (if individual ones are perhaps confused, or partially confabulated, or whatever.) Unsurprisingly, they also accord with my experience.

I suppose I'd like to be able to write this in a way which is convincing to anyone. I think someone whose priors are far enough from mine will take a bunch of this to just be BS, or irrelevant, and I can't really help that. Perhaps I can say: this should be revealing about something, at least to say that there are different ways of apprehending moral knowledge, and yours might be at least sparser compared to to someone else's.

I'll leave discussion of etiology or causal models out of this post.

Consequences

A swath of divisions that I currently see revolve around these questions. I've seen some attempts to try to bridge this gap which have felt to me really confused and inept on both sides.

Assuming you take seriously this "gap" in ways of knowing, it should give you pause. If the process of the apprehension of moral knowledge is occluded, then probably information is being left out in your determinations, which, for moral knowledge, are upstream of everything else that matters.

0 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.