Ethics as a black box function

Addendum: a response to a person who asked what, in this theory, makes ethics different from any other kind of preference.

I consider ideologies to be a belief structure that lies somewhere halfway between ethics and empirical beliefs, heavily blending in parts of both. In an ideology, empirical beliefs are promoted to a level where they gain a moral worth by themselves.

To answer your actual point, I would say that ethics really are just a special case of ordinary preferences. Normatively, there's no reason why a preference for a hamburger would be more important than a preference for not killing. Of course, ethics-related preferences tend to be much stronger than others, giving them extra worth.

What makes ethics special is their functional role for the organism. (From now on, I'll reference the original moral intuitions as "morals", and the theoretical structure an organism builds to explain them as "ethics".) Morals tend to be rather strongly experienced preferences, driving behavior quite strongly. In order to better plan for the future, an organism needs to know how it will react in different situations, so over time it observes its moral reactions in a variety of circumstances and builds an ethical model that best fits the data. (This is basically a variant of the "the self is a self-model" idea from philosophy of mind, applied to ethics: see e.g. http://xuenay.livejournal.com/318670.html )

Of course, we humans tend to confuse models for the real thing. "I experience moral repugnance at this situation, which could be explained if my moral intuitions thought that killing was wrong" becomes "killing is objectively wrong". Eventually we forget that the model was a model at all, and it becomes an ideology - a system where empirical beliefs about the nature of our morals have taken a moral value by themselves. Our morals aren't entirely untouchable black boxes, of course, and this kind of confusion may serve to actually shift our morals in the direction of the theory. And I'm not saying that the models must be mistaken - they may very well be correct.

How is it possible to discuss ethics in such a scenario? Well, it needs to be noted that there's also an additional reason for ethics are likely to have evolved. Building ethical models that predict moral behavior is useful not only for predicting your own behavior, but also that of others. I suspect that part of the instinctive dislike many people feel towards hypocrites is the fact that inconsistencies between theory and behavior means the hypocrites' behavior is harder to predict, thus making alliances with them less safe. This drives people towards adopting ethical theories which are more consistent internally, or that at least appear such to others. (This theory is closely related to Robin Hanson's theory of identity: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/a-theory-of-identity.html ) And since ethical theories also take a moral worth for the individuals themselves, this provides another method for how discussion can actually modify our ethical systems.

Most humans optimize their morality for their own well-being. A big reason why personal morality is subject to change is because an individual's morality will be workable for one social environment, and then when the environment changes, an individual's morality will suddenly be "out of sync" with the moralities of relevant people in the environment. Since incompatible moralities leads to difficulties in cooperation, this is a huge problem. At the same time, there are good reasons to have a reputation for stability. Thus the conflict of having an "incorrect" morality and not being able to change it drastically. I'd engage in more rambling about how the Stanford Prison Experiment supports this notion, but the point of this post is not to speculate on the interaction between identity and morality.

It would be desirable, then, to simply find what the "best" morality would be in terms of being compatible with various likely future environments, and stick with it. It seems like many of the candidates for these "optimal" all-purpose moralities are the broad moral theories under discussion.

Notice that most theoretical moral frameworks contain an element of fairness.

When morality is left to personal whim, the individual tends to modify their morality to favor themselves and their in-groups. Thus when they encounter others, especially ones outside their original groups, the individual's original morality comes into conflict with the new tribe, whose members have optimized their moralities for themselves and their own in-groups. Golden-rule-type ideas correct this, by having individuals consider the viewpoint of others (and thus, adjusting their morality to be more compatible with these viewpoints.)

If what I said is true, then moral "progress" tends to occur when social groups who have previously maintained prejudicial moralities find it necessary to work with groups they have previously discriminated against.

And if this is the case, the implications for moral philosophy are this: it would be profitable to put more focus on finding the reasons why morality differs between individuals, rather than get caught up in quandaries about our suboptimally egoistic moral intuitions.

Those "three tiers" sound a little bit like another classification I found useful, in Baron's "Thinking and Deciding". These are the normative, prescriptive and descriptive questions about thinking and decision making.

Descriptive models account for how people actually decide. Experimental results on biases fit in there. Normative theories are about how we should think; standards by which actual decisions can be evaluated. Expected utility fits in there.

Prescriptive models bridge the gap between the two: they are rules about how we can improve everyday thinking by bringing our decisions closer to what normative theories would advise. They account for the practical concerns of decision making, e.g. in some cases our resources (time, brainpower, etc.) are too limited for an exact computation according to the normative theory.

"Pick[ing] the moral frameworks which are best at justifying [our] ethical intuitions" is discussed at length in Rawls' Theory of Justice under the term "reflective equilibrium". It doesn't require that we hold our "ethical intuitions" as a fixed point; the process of working out (in advance and at leisure) consequences of normative models and comparing them with our intuitions may very well lead us to revise our intutions.

Reflective equilibrium is desirable from a prescriptive standpoint. When we are "in the thick of things" we usually will not have time to work out or moral positions on pen and paper, and will fall back on intuitions and heuristics. It is better to have trained those to yield the decisions we would wish ourselves to make if we could consider the situation in advance.

I hold that moral intuitions are nothing but learned prejudices. Historic examples from slavery to the divine right of kings to tortured confessions of witchcraft or Judaism to the subjugation of women to genocide all point to the fallibility of these 'moral intuitions'. There is absolutely no sense to the claim that its conclusions are to be adopted before those of a reasoned argument.

-Alonzo Fyfe

For instance, we might think that maximizing total welfare is always for the best, but then realize that we don't actually want to maximize total welfare if the people we consider our friends would be hurt.

Well, you have to understand what such a decision would actually look like. In order for a decision to truly maximize total welfare over all people, even as it "stabs your friends in the back", it would have to really increase total welfare, because this utility gain would have to at least cancel out the degradation of the value of friendship.

That is, if I expect my friendship with someone not to mean that they weight me higher than a random person in their utility function, friendship becomes less valuable, and an entire set of socially-beneficial activity enabled by friendship (e.g. lower cost of monitoring for cheating) contracts.

I think your hypothetical here has the same problem that presenting the true Prisoner's Dilemma has; in the true PD, it's hard to intuitively imagine a circumstance where utilities in the payoff matrix account for my compassion for my accomplice. Just the same, in the tradeoff your presented, it's hard to intuitively understand what kind of social gain could outweigh general degradation of friendship.

ETA: Okay, it's not that hard, but like with the true PD, such situations are rare: for example, if I were presented with the choice of "My twenty closest friends/loved ones die" vs. "All of humanity except me and my twenty closest die". But even then, if e.g. my friends have children not in the set of 20, it's still not clear that all of the twenty would prefer the second option!

This implies that people pick the moral frameworks which are best at justifying the ethical intuitions they already had.

The previous paragraph seemed to be arguing that people pick the moral frameworks which are best at describing the ethical intuitions they already had. Why do you choose this different interpretation?

I was previously puzzled over why so many smart people reject all forms of utilitarianism, as ultimately everyone has to perform some sort of expected utility calculations in order to make moral decisions at all

I don't see the necessity. Can you expand on that?

With enough practice, our intuitions may be shifted towards the consciously held stance, which may be a good or bad thing.

Quite. Changing the theory to fit the data seems to me preferable to the reverse.

I was unsure of whether or not to post this, as its contents seemed obvious in retrospect, especially for this crowd. Still, formulating the set of our ethical intuitions as a black box function was a new and useful metaphor for me when I came up with it, so I thought I'd post this and see whether it got any upvotes.