[SEQ RERUN] Is Morality Preference?

Am I only one who has serious trouble following presentations in a fictitious dialogue format such as this? The sum of my experience of the whole Obert/Subhan exchange and almost every intermediate step therein boils down to the line:

Subhan: "Fair enough. Where were we?"

Maybe better to say that Morality is a certain species of valuation.

It is a valuation of behavior, associated with different behaviors and emotions depending on the result of the valuation. When the valuation is positive, you get various flavors of increased liking and you reward, and then the valuation is negative, you get various flavors of disliking and you punish.

Note that the valuations are multiordinal - you may punish the person exhibiting the behavior, and punish those who don't punish the behavior, and punish those who don't say that they would punish behavior, ...

We're social creatures. We have evolved mechanisms for interacting with others. You have moral pattern recognition algorithms in your head which fire for some types of behavior, eliciting the moral emotional and behavioral reactions in turn. Being adaptive, learning creatures, those mechanisms are adaptable.

Obert tries to attack this in a number of ways.

First, by the language we use. We use "I want" in different contexts than "that's right", with different associated emotions and acitons. He's correct, but it doesn't really make his point. I want is also different from "that's yummy". Used for different kinds of valuations, resulting in different kinds of emotions and actions depending on how the valuation turns out. Does that make "yummy" not a preference, not a valuation?

Same thing for Obert's subsequent questioning of Surhan's psychological account of I want versus It is right. I agree with Obert's comment that Surhan's account is unrealistic. I agree that when someone says "It is moral", they are usually pinging different valuations than when they say "I want". Do we want people to do what is moral? Usually. But we also use want when we want to distinguish preferences from moral preferences as well, to distinguish the general from the specific.

Time and time again, Obert tries to make his point by showing that we don't use "moral' in the same way as "

It's useful to also distinguish between want and yummy, and similarly useful to distinguish between want and moral. A wise fellow once said:

Well, it may turn out that the moral thing to do was not the right thing to do.

Old Jean Luc makes a good point. Moral, as pinging our behavioral pattern matchers, pings only a subset of our values. When taken in total, we may not prefer the moral behavior over all alternatives. The yummy food may not be the right food, and the moral action may not be the right action. Life is full of trade offs.

Obert goes on to attack Subhan's contention that morality is what "society wants". I have an aversion to this view, but I'd note that recent work on analyzing the dimensions of morality has shown that for some people, obedience to the tribe is a very strong component of their morality. They've come up with six moral dimensions (or so), and found that people have fairly consistent preferences between the different dimensions. My morality algorithm rates social conformity low, and autonomy high.

I'd expect we could find the same kinds of patterns with yummy. You have different types of taste buds, and everyone's yummy detector will show different relative weightings for activation of the different types of taste buds. (Different weightings for different combinations too. I wonder if they've done that kind of combinatoric analysis for morality yet.)

The final attack on morality as preference concerned the advancement of morality.

Notice how this works. We evaluate all time, us versus all the different thems, and find that by our evalution, we've advanced. Hmmm. Do you think that people from a thousand years ago would necessarily agree with that evaluation? No? Oh, they're wrong. I see. But they'd say that we're wrong, right? "Yeah yeah, but they're really the ones who are wrong." Got it.

But I think advancement is actually possible, and even to be expected, on the preference account. People aren't all knowing. Over the years, you gain experience. It shouldn't be surprising that people get better at optimizing some valuation over time. Nor should it be surprising that the valuations change over time as our situation changes.

One thing I disagree with, which will likely be empirically verifiable, if it hasn't already been verified.

"I am not so sure; human cognitive psychology has not had time to change evolutionarily over that period.

I think it has had plenty of time. Not just our psychology, which one could partially attribute to societal changes, but the statistics of the genetic pool. Saw a recent study on the differential birth and child survival rates by income in the 18 century (19th?), We should expect income to have some correlates with genetics. Large differential birth rates in populations with genetic differences mean large shifts in population genetics.

And considering the moral dimension in particular, since punishment and reward are large parts of the moral response, that gives a directed component to genetic evolution. Kill off everyone you see displaying a certain phenotype and breed only the phenotypes you like, and you can make a lot of progress very quickly.

But this gets rather tiresome. I don't think Subhan is a worthy champion for "morality as preference", so cleaning up his mess doesn't really amount to much. Likely Surhan would feel the same about me. That's the limitation of these kinds of Socratic dialogues - they're only as convincing as the champion that loses.

I've tried instead to give some positive account of my views of morality as preference, how it works, and how it answers the usual objections against it, along with the commentary on Obert and Subhan. I really don't think it's that complicated once you treat human beings as evolved social creatures.

Is morality 1) a kind of preference with a somewhat different set of emotional flavors associated with it or 2) something which has a true-or-falseness beyond preference?

For me to credit 2) (Morality is true), I would need to know that 2) is a statement that is actually distinguishable in the world from 1). Someone tells me electrons attract other electrons, we do a test, turns out to be false, electrons repel other electrons is a true statement beyond preference. Someone else tells me electrons repel each other because they hate each other. Maybe some day we will learn how to talk to electrons, but until then this is not testable, not tested, and so the people who come down on each side of this question are not talking about truth.

Someone tells me Morality has falsifiable truths in it, where is the experimental test? Name a moral proposition and describe the test to determine its falsehood or truthiness. If the proponent of moral truth did this, I missed it an need to be reminded.

If you believe that there are moral truths, but you cannot propose a test to verify a single one of them, you are engaged in a form of belief that is different from believing in things which are falsifiable and have been found true. I am happy to label this difference "scientific" or "fact-based" but of course the danger of labels is they carry freight from their pasts. But however you choose to label it, is their a proponent of the existence of moral truth who can propose a test, or will these proponents accept that "moral truth is more like truths about electrons hating each other and less like truths about electrons repelling each other?"

Note that in discussing the proposition "electrons hate each other" I actually proposed a test of it's truth, but pointed out we did not yet know how to do that test. If we say "we will NEVER know how to do that test, its just dopey" are we saying something scientific? Something testable? I THINK not, I think this is an unscientific claim. But maybe some chain of scientific discovery will put us in a place where we can test statements about what will NEVER be knowable. I personally do not know how to do that now, though. So if I hold an opinion that electrons neither hate nor love each other, I hold it as an opinion, knowing it might be true, it might be false, and/or it might be meaningless in the real world.

So then what of Moral "Truths?" For the moment, at my state of knowledge, they are like statements about the preferences of electrons. Maybe there are moral truths but I don't know how to learn any of them as facts and I am not aware of anyone who has presented a moral truth and a test for its truthiness. Maybe some day...

But in the meantime, everybody who tells me there are moral truths and especially anybody who tells me "X is one of those moral truths" gets tossed in the dustbin labeled "people who don't know the difference between opinion and truth." Is murder wrong, is that a fact? If by murder you mean killing people, you cannot find a successful major civilization that has EVER appeared to believe that. Self-defense, protection of those labeled "innocent," are observed to justify homicide in societies that I am aware of.

But suppose by murder we mean "unjustifiable homicide? Well then you are either in tautology land (murder is defined as killing which is wrong) or you have kicked the can down the road to a discussion of what justifies homicide, and now you need to propose tests of your hypotheses about what justifies homicide.

So even if there is "moral truth," if you can't propose a test for for any moral truths, you are happily joining the cadre of people who know the truth of whether electrons hate each other or not.

Morality is often a warped form of our desires. Our values, for the most part, are a generalization and categorization of our desires; another way of putting it is that our desires are specific cases of our values (for example, for life, freedom, comfort, and so on) though our desires are more fundamental. Many moral claims, then turn around and make specific claims based on the abstract values. This specific (desire) -> abstract (value) -> specific (moral claim) is one reason our moral claims often seem so incompatible with our actual desires. Please note that I am not saying this always, nor necessarily usually, happens.