A funny argument for traditional morality

I think this is an argument for having your values written down somewhere, and maybe even for getting them from a source that is not original to you, but I don't think it is a good reason to base your values on Christianity. The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Here's another, unpolitical scenario about pulling back values

Consider a world where there are cosmic rays that can hit an agent's brain, but they home in on the part containing the utility function. Shielding from these rays is possible but expensive.

In this world, when an agent considers whether to invest in the expensive protection, it considers whether a version of it newly hit with a cosmic ray would remain loyal to the old version of it by keeping on maximizing the old utility function (with some weight) as well as the new cosmic ray begotten one.

Then, when a agent newly hit by a cosmic ray agent considers whether to remain loyal, it notices that if it doesn't, it's less likely to exist since it's predecessor would have invested in the protection, so it remains loyal.

Major issue: Christian ethics aren't stable. Polygamy, genocide, and slavery were all perfectly normal parts of life at various times during the development of the modern Christian faith. Those practices are frowned upon currently, at least in polite company. While many Christian ideas have in some way shaped current moral beliefs, their direct influence is much smaller than it is usually given credit for. And consider the CEV proposal. Early Christians thought that women and individuals of other races were not nearly as morally important as the males in their culture, but intelligent early Christians probably would have found the idea of gender and racial equality weird and moderately disconcerting, but not terrible. It might perhaps be analogous to if I told you that a few centuries from now, it would be regarded as a horrible, immoral belief to hold that a human's life was any more important than a Chimpanzee's (ie Trolley problems with two chimpanzees vs one human). That idea is weird and semi-disturbing, but it doesn't seem terrible. Drift of your moral feelings is fine. Just make sure you put some thought into what sort of direction you want your drift to be in.

Check out this puzzle of mine as well.

You’re a Cthulhu cultist and believe that Cthulhu will reward you by eating you first iff you perform painful ritual self-mutilation in His honor when the moon is full and would do so even if you believed that Cthulhu does not exist. You know, of course, that Cthulhu is a perfect predictor of mortals’ actions, so He knows what you would do.

One day you’re persuaded by an atheist’s arguments that Cthulhu doesn’t actually exist.

That night the moon is full. Do you perform the ritual?

Counterargument:

1. At least some of your values arose from your biology.
2. Probably, among those "biological" values is the value of allowing your other values to be edited by others around you. This is evidenced by the fact that all humans allow their values to be edited by others around them, unless they've already undergone extreme amounts of indoctrination (and probably even then).
3. Since you have not (I guess) undergone extreme amounts of indoctrination, there's no reason to expect that you no longer have that value.

as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.

People don't get their morals from books (much). Christians included.

The trouble is that there are multiple meanings of "moral values" here. There is the human instantiation, and the ideal decision agent instantiation. The ideal decision agent instantiation is used in 5. and a bit in 4. The human instantiation is used elsewhere.

Though usually these are pretty close and the approximation is useful, it can also run into trouble when you're talking specifically about things humans do that ideal decision agents don't do, and this is one of those things.

Specifically, 5. doesn't necessarily work for human values, since we're so inconsistent. People can go into isolation and just think and come out with different human values. How weird is that?!

Mostly, I think my ability to evaluate this argument is distorted beyond reliability by including the word "Christianity." So, first, let me try and taboo that word and generate a more generalized version of the argument:

1/2. My values are primarily learned from society, not innate.

1. There exists some tradition from which society's values were primarily derived.
   4/5. My values, once learned, can be later modified. Most such modifications are harmful from the perspective of those values.
2. Those (harmful) modifications can be countered by reverting to a reliable specification of the tradition from which society's values were primarily derived.
3. Therefore doing so is beneficial.

That's far from airtight, but it's not altogether unreasonable.

My major problem with it is that, once my values drift, there's no obvious reason why I should prefer my original values... so it's really more of an argument for continuing to follow that specification rather than for choosing to in the first place. But admittedly moral drift in the real world is usually not an all-or-nothing thing (that is, I can continue to mostly hold onto my core values even while I'm in the process of drifting away from them), so that's not a debilitating problem.

So yeah, I would accept a weak probabilistic form of the conclusion: all else being equal, it's usually beneficial for me to follow a reliable specification of yadda yadda.

And, sure, it follows from that that if there exists something called Christianity which is a reliable specification of yadda yadda, all else being equal, it's usually beneficial for me to follow Christianity.

That said, I've never seen anything that matches that description in the real world.

When scrutinizing an argument, one good heuristic is to focus on vague words like "many" and aim for a more robust version. The argument has several such words: "many" in #1, "strongly" and "many" in #3, "full of" in #4, "most" in #5.

For instance, does "many of my moral values" stand for 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99% of your values in that argument? How strong an impression does the argument make on you depending on which of these rough quantifiers you substitute for "many"? (Subsidiary question - when talking about "your values", how many distinct things are we talking about?)

The "nature" vs "nurture" debate is just as vigorous in the philosophy of morals as it is regarding intelligence, so any of the above answers is probably held by some fraction of the population to be at least defensible.

Even the phrase "Christian values" is a potentially slippery one, allowing much shifting of goal posts. So the argument should probably start by unpacking that phrase into a more definite list. (Do we mean the Ten Commandments? Of these I recognize about three as describing "my values", which would falsify #3 as far as I'm concerned.)

Similarly you would be on a better footing to evaluate this argument if you had, as Alicorn suggests, an explicit list of what you think your values are.

The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda. lso my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values. A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.

The argument assumes change is necessarily for the worse. People can aquire new values whilst seeing them as an improvement. If it is possible to meta-evaluate values this way, then you should seek to improve your values any way you can. if it is not possible to meta-evaluate values, then you don't know that your existing values are optimal or any good at all. Keeping them out of sheer conservatism is not rational. Although one could make a half hearted wisdom-of-the-crowds argument.

The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.

Hm, at this point it sounds similar to the point Phil Goetz was making in "Reason as memetic immune disorder".

There is moral error and moral disagreement. If your values change because of moral disagreement between your past and future self, that is something you'd want to prevent. If, however, you are simply correcting your moral error, this should be encouraged. In this case, your future self is acting more moral than you are by your current belief system, since he understands it better.

I think most of my change in morality will be due to correcting moral error. As such, in a matter of dispute, I trust my future self over my present self.

As Alicorn says, provided you are averse to values drift, this is an argument towards writing your values down and using that as a periodic anchor. Not only is it not clear what Christianity's values actually are (witness the tremendous proliferation of interpretations among Christians in outright defiance of other interpretations,) making this change itself constitutes a shift in your values to satisfy someone else's agenda in ways that are harmful with respect to your current values.

The argument has merit, but the conclusion (7) needs to be replaced with something more appropriate in light of (3). You should edit your values to more closely match an amalgam of the many influences that affected you. Or better yet, as Alicorn says, have your values written down somewhere. Including your acceptance of rational change - which puts an interesting twist on the whole deal.

Can anyone explain why, in a rapidly changing world, we need "absolute" and "eternal" morality?

First of all, this may be an attempt to change your value system and I want you to bear that in mind while reading this post.

1: Seems to be a statement of fact which there is a lot of evidence for and I don't have a problem with.

2: Seems to be a reasonable conclusion from 1.

3: Seems to be a conclusion for people living in the United States which has SOME evidence backing it, but there do exist counter arguments against that such as here But rather than sidetracking this, I'll just link a google search and let you draw their own conclusions.

4: I feel like one interpretation of 4 includes your brother himself, you, me, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. I mean, I'm actively trying to convince you of something when making this post. If I don't explicitly caveat myself with "This may be an attempt to change your value system and I want you to bear that in mind while reading this post." then you might fairly consider the attempt to be "while I'm not looking."

5: This isn't guaranteed to be true for all people, although it may be true for you. It is entirely possible to get into a value system that you DON'T like and would like to drift out of. Depression is a good example of this, although there may be others. He does account for this by saying "Most" but see my comment on #6.

6: As an example of "while I'm not looking." calling the drift in values "Insidious deterioration." may affect your perception of an argument on a subtle level. Was the fact that a drift in values was "Insidious deterioration." ever backed up? Some types of value changes feel like that to me, but others don't. Some types of value changes feel more like a lightbulb of enlightment going off. I feel like the argument is trying to fast talk me here. "Most drift is harmful, so YOUR drift is insidious deteroration." feels like it is present in the argument as an underlying assumption and is not being sufficiently backed up.

7: Considering what I discussed about 3-6, I don't think I agree with the QED.

I think the argument is interesting and partly valid. Explaining which part I like will take some explanation.

Many of our problems thinking about morality, I think, arise from a failure to make a distinction between two different things.

• Morality in daily life
• Morality as an ideal

Morality of daily life is a social convention. It serves its societal and personal (egoistically prudent) function precisely because it is a (mostly) shared convention. Almost any reasonable moral code, if common knowledge, is better than no common code.

Morality as an ideal is the morality-of-daily-life toward which moral reformers should be trying to slowly shift their societies. A wise person will interpolate their behavior between the local morality-of-daily-life and their own morality-as-an-ideal. And probably closer to the local norm than to the personal ideal.

So, with that said, I think that your Christian friend's argument is right-on wrt morality-of-daily-life. But it is inapplicable, IMHO, to morality-as-an-ideal.

ETA: I notice, after writing, that Manfred said something very similar.

Isn't there a hidden problem with values taking other values as their arguments? If I can value having a particular value, I can possibly construct self-referential paradoxical values like V = value of not having value V, and empty values like V = value of having value V. A value system including value W = value of preserving other values, W included seems to be of that kind, and I am not sure whether it can be transformed into a consistent decision algorithm.

On the other hand, look at what happens if we avoid self-reference by introducing distinct types of values, where the 0th order values can speak only about external world states and n-th order meta-values can speak only about the external world and m<n-th order values. I assume that the Christian (or more generally any traditional) values all belong to the 0th order rank. Let's also assume that we have a 1st-order meta-value of preserving all 0th-order values. But what prevents this meta-value from drifting away? Seems that without an infinite chain of meta-values there is no way how to prevent drift. Can people hold an infinite chain of meta-values?

Now, let's leave the possibility of the value-preservation meta-value drift aside, and look at how this meta-value is exactly implemented. Does it say "try to minimise the integral of Abs(d value/dt)", or does it say "try to minimise the integral of Abs(value(t)-value(t0)), where t0 is some arbitrary instant"? If the former is the case, the meta-value doesn't encourage you to periodically revise your values with respect to some written stable standard. If an infinitesimal drift accidentally slips through your value-preservation guards, once the guards wake up they shall protect the new value set, not try to return back to the original one. Only if the latter is the case the funny argument holds water. But I suspect that the former description is more accurate, evidenced by how few people strive to return to their past values.

drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values

True. And that drift would be beneficial from the perspective of your new, drifted-to values.

But neither of those statements have any bearing on whether value drift (in general or any specific instance thereof) is good or bad.

All values, wherever they come from, need to be re-examined on their own merit. At one point slavery was thought to be acceptable by a lot of people. If you grew up in that society, you would probably inherit that belief as well. There are very likely similar beliefs that you have right now, that were given to you by some source you find credible (society, the Bible, or LW) that you might be better off not having. That's why you need to examine every single belief that you have aside from its source. You can't assume they are automatically correct because they fit a moral framework, unless you are also absolutely certain that moral framework is right. And proving that a moral framework is right requires a LOT of evidence.

More specifically:

3) What about all the other people in this world. Many of their morality is based on principles have little to do with Christianity or the Bible per se. Are they automatically wrong? Automatically right? What makes Christianity special? If you were in their shoes, you could do this step by step argument for Buddhism or Islam or in fact any other moral framework.

4) Just because it will further their own agenda, doesn't mean it won't benefit you.

5) Consistency for the sake of consistency is bad.

6) The book can be interpreted in multitude of ways. In fact, every time you read the Bible, or any other book, your interpretation will be slightly different.

Your brother makes an excellent point, which is something I’ve always found amusing about atheists: despite their professed godlessness, their values have an uncanny resemblance to those of their Judeo-Christian heritage. It’s extremely difficult to find an atheist who takes his/her atheism seriously and is willing to really think “outside the book” about what kinds of morality are possible and act upon those ideas. Very few can resist the moral inertia of their culture; those who do are generally thought of as “evil”.

As an example, I have no trouble imagining a scientific civilization that is brutally unegalitarian, aggressive, atheistic, polygamous, Eugenicist, Darwinian, etc. in its values; in fact this would be my preference. As another example, I've always found the Star Trek Mirror Universe more appealing and more human than the normal one. But to espouse such ideas in a society dominated by Judeo-Christian values is to be labeled a “Nazi,” etc. We in the West are mentally colonized by these values from day one, even (or perhaps especially) here on this forum of rationalist moralists, and it is very difficult to find truly free thinkers who are willing to challenge the prevailing ethos.