Questions for Moral Realists

Thanks for linking that paper, I hand't encountered it and it seems useful.

What would it mean for there to be several?

That there are many possible moral intuitions or axioms that one could base one's morality on, with no objective criteria for saying which set of intuitions or axioms is the best one? Your basic axioms say that (to simplify a lot) personhood grants rights and morality is about respecting those rights, while a utilitarian could say that suffering is bad and pleasure is good and morality is about how to best minimize suffering and maximize pleasure. Since all morality ultimately reduces to some kinds of axioms that just have to be taken as granted, I am in turn confused about what it would even mean to say that there are is only one correct set of them. (There obviously is some set of axioms that is the only correct one for me, but moral realism seems to imply some set that would be the only correct one for everybody.)

Interesting thoughts. Definitely agree that morality comes from people, and specifically their interactions with each other. Although I would additionally clarify that in my case I consider morality (as opposed to a simple action decided by personal gain or benefit) comes from the interaction between sentients where one or more can act on another based on knowledge not only of their own state but the state of that other. This is because I consider any sentient to have some nonzero moral value to me, but am not sure if I would consider all of them persons. I am comfortable thinking of an ape or a dolphin as a person, but I think I do not give a mouse the same status. Nevertheless, I would feel some amount of moral wrongness involved in causing unnecessary pain to the mouse, since I believe such creatures to be sentient and therefore capable of suffering.

I'm not sure how the rest of my morality compares to yours, though. I don't think there is any one morality, or indeed that moral facts exist at all. Now, this does not mean that I subscribe to multiple moralities, especially those whose actions and consequences directly contradict each other. I simply believe that if one of my highest goals is the protection of sapient life, and someone else's highest goal is the destruction of it, I cannot necessarily expect that I can ever show them, with any facts about the world, that their morality is wrong. I could only say that it was a fact about the world that their morality is in direct contradiction with mine.

Now I don't believe that anything I've said above about morality (which was mostly metaethics anyway) precludes my existence or anyone else's existence as a moral actor. In fact, all people, by their capability to make decisions based on their knowledge of the present state of others, and their ability to extrapolate that state into the future based on their actions, are automatically moral actors in my view of things. I just don't necessarily think they always act in accordance with their own morals or have morals mutually compatible with my morals.

Nevertheless, I think that facts are very useful in discussing morality, because sometimes people are not actually in disagreement with each other's highest moral goals--they simply have a disagreement about facts and if that can be resolved, they can agree on a mutually compatible course of action.

the region they occupy is quite small for good reasons.

The region is exactly as large as it is. The fact that is has size, and is not a single point, tells you that our moralities are different. In some things, the difference will not matter, and in some it will. It seems we don't have any problem finding things to fight over. However small you want to say that the differences are, there's a lot of conflict over them.

The more I look around, the more I see people with fundamentally different ways of thinking and valuing. Now I suppose they have more commonality between them and banana slugs, and likely they would band together should the banana slugs rise up and launch a sneak attack. But these different kinds of people with different values often don't seem to want to live in the same world.

Hitchens writes in Newsweek magazine: “Winston Churchill ... found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis.”

(By the way, if anyone can find the original source from Churchill, I'd appreciate it.)

I'd also note that even having contextually identical moralities doesn't imply a lack of conflict. We could all be psychopaths. Some percentage of us are already there.

Viewed against the entirety of mindspace we are practically identical, and we have minds that care about that.

Seems like our minds care quite a lot about the differences, however small you think they are. The differences aren't small, by the measure of how much we care about them.

I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind.

I would very much doubt such an argument: most humans also share the same mechanisms for language learning, but still end up speaking quite different languages. (Yes, you can translate between them and learn new languages, but that doesn't mean that all languages are the same: there are things that just don't translate well from one language to another.) Global structure, local content.

I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind.

Having read the Meta-Ethics sequence, this is my belief too. Indeed, Elizier cares to index human-evaluation and pebblesorters-evaluation algorithms, by calling the first "morality" and the second "pebblesorting", but he is careful to avoid talking about Elizier-morality and MrMind-morality, or even Elizier-yesterday-morality and Elizier-today-morality.
Of course his aims were different, and compared to differently evolved aliens (or AI's) our morality is truly one of a kind.

But if we magnify our view on morality-space, I think it's impossible not to recognize that there are differences!

I think that this state of affair can be explained in this way: while there's a psychological unity of mankind, it concerns only very primitive aspects of our lives: the existence of joy, sadness, the importance of sex, etc.
But our innermost and basic evaluation algorithm doesn't cover every aspects of our lives, mainly because our culture poses problems too new for a genetic solution to have been spread to the whole population.
Thus ad-hoc solutions, derived from culture and circumstances, step in: justice, fairness, laws, and so on. Those solutions may very well vary in time and space, and our brains being what they are, sometimes they overwrite what should have been the most primitive output.
When we talk about morality, we are usually already assuming the most primitive basic facts about human evaluation algorithm, and we try to argue about the finer point not covered by the genetic wiring of our brains, as for example if murder is always wrong.

In comparison with pebble-sorters or clipping AI, humanity exhibits a very narrow way of evaluating reality, to the point that you can talk about a single human-algorithm and call it "morality". But if you zoom in, it is clear that the bedrock of morality doesn't cover every problems that cultures naturally throw at pepole, and that's why you need to invent "patches" or "add-ons" to the original algorithm, in form of morality concepts like justice, fairness, the sacrality of life, etc. Obviously, different groups of people will come up with different patches. But there are add-ons that were invented a long time ago, and they are now so widespread and ingrained in certain group's education, that they feel as if they are part of the original primitive morality, while infact they are not. There are also new problems that require the (sometimes urgent) invention of new patches (e.g.: nuclear proliferation, genetic manipulation, birth control), and they are even more problematic and still in a state of transition nowadays.

Is this view unitary, or even realist? In my opinion, philosophical distinctions are too crude and simplicistic to categorize correctly the view of morality as "algorithm + local patches". Maybe it needs its whole new category, something like the "algorithmic theories of morality" (although the category of "synthetic etical naturalism" comes close to capture the concept).

The arguments around CEV suggest that these moral theories ought to converge.

In the practical sense, only something in particular can be done with the world, so if "morality" is taken to refer to the goal given to a world-optimizing AI, it should be something specific by construction. If we take "morality" as given by the data of individual people, we can define personal moralities for each of them that would almost certainly be somewhat different from each other. Given the task of arriving at a single goal for the world, it might prove useful to exploit the similarities between personal moralities, or to sidestep this concept altogether, but eventual "convergence" is more of a design criterion than a prediction. In a world that had both humans and pebblesorters in it, arriving at a single goal would still be an important problem, even though we wouldn't expect these goals to "naturally" converge under reflection.

I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind. Human minds do not occupy an arbitrary or even a particularly large region of mindspace: the region they occupy is quite small for good reasons. Likewise, the moral theories that human minds adopt occupy quite a small region of moralityspace. The arguments around CEV suggest that these moral theories ought to converge if we extrapolate enough. I am not sure if this exact argument is defended in a LW post.

This sounds like ethical subjectivism (that ethical sentences are propositions about the attitudes of people). I'm quite amenable to ethical subjectivism but it's an anti-realist position.

I think the standard LW argument for there being only one morality is based on the psychological unity of mankind.

I think you're mixing up CEV with morality. CEV is an instance of the strategy "cooperate with humans" in some sort of AI-building prisoner's dilemma. It gives the AI some preferences, and the only guarantee that those preferences will be good is that humans are similar.

There is "only one" "morality" (kinda) because when I say "this is right" I am executing a function, and functions are unique-ish. But Me.right can be different from You.right. You just happen to be wrong sometimes, because You.right isn't right, because when I say right I mean Me.right.

So that "good" from the first paragraph would be Me.good, not CEV.good.

That a conscious experience can be a good or bad physical occurrence is also a reality which can be felt and known with the highest possible certainty. This makes it rational, and an imperative, to follow it and care about it, to act in order to foster good conscious feelings and to prevent bad conscious feelings, because it is logical that this will make the universe better. This is acting ethically. Not acting accordingly is irrational and mistaken. Ethics is about realizing valuable states.

Why is fostering good conscious feelings and prevent bad conscious feelings necessarily correct? It is intuitive for humans to say we should maximize conscious experience, and that falls under the success theory that Peter talks about, but why is this necessarily the one true moral system?

You say

Ethics is about realizing valuable states.

But valuable to who? If there were a person who valued others being in pain, why would this person's views matter less?

Unlike the physical world, it seems that physical conscious perceptions can theoretically be anything.

Not quite anything, since the size and complexity of conscious thought is bounded by the human brain. But that is not relevant to this discussion of ethics.

While the physical world has no ethical value except from conscious perceptions, conscious perceptions can be ethical value, and only by being good or bad conscious perceptions, or feelings. This seems to be so by definition, because ethical value is being good or bad.

Should I interpret this as you defining ethics as good and bad feelings?

That a conscious experience can be a good or bad physical occurrence is also a reality which can be felt and known with the highest possible certainty. This makes it rational, and an imperative, to follow it and care about it, to act in order to foster good conscious feelings and to prevent bad conscious feelings

So, do you endorse wireheading?

While the physical world has no ethical value except from conscious perceptions, conscious perceptions can be ethical value, and only by being good or bad conscious perceptions, or feelings. This seems to be so by definition, because ethical value is being good or bad.

That a conscious experience can be a good or bad physical occurrence is also a reality which can be felt and known with the highest possible certainty.

A bit unclear, but I'm assuming you mean something like "we have good or bad (technically, pleasant or unpleasant) conscious experiences, and we know this with great certainty". That seems fine.

This makes it rational, and an imperative, to follow it and care about it, to act in order to foster good conscious feelings and to prevent bad conscious feelings, because it is logical that this will make the universe better.

Why? This is the whole core of the disagreement, and you're zooming over it way too fast. Even for ourselves, our wanting systems and our liking systems are not well aligned - we want things we don't like, and vice-versa. A preference utilitarian would say our wants are the most important; you seem to disagree, focusing on the good/bad aspect instead. But what logical reason would there be to follow one or the other?

You seem to get words to do too much of the work. We have innate senses of positivity and negativity for certain experiences; we also have an innate sense that morality exists. But those together do not make positive experiences good "by definition" (nor does calling them "good" rather than "positive").

But those are relatively minor points - if there was a single consciousness in the universe, them maybe your argument could get off the ground. But we have many current and potential consciousnesses, with competing values and conscious experiences. You seem to be saying that we should logically be altruists, because we have conscious experiences. I agree we should be altruists; but that's a personal preference, and there's no logic to it. Following your argument (consciousness before physics) one could perfectly become a solipsist, believing only one's own mind exists, and ignoring others. Or your could be a racist altruist, preferring certain individuals or conscious experiences. Or you could put all experiences together on an infinite numbers of comparative scales (there is no intrinsic measure to compare the quality of two positive experiences in different people).

But in a way, that's entirely a moot point. Your claim is that a certain ethics logically follows from our conscious reality. There I must ask you to prove it. State your assumptions, show your claims, present the deductions. You'll need to do that, before we can start critiquing your position properly.

That people have personal identities is false; they are mere parts of the universe. This is clear upon advanced philosophical analysis, but can be hard to understand for those who haven't thought much about it. An objective and impersonal perspective is called for. For this reason it is rational for all beings to 'act ethically' not only for themselves but also for all other beings in the same universe. For an explanation of why personal identities don't exist, what is relevant for the question of why acting ethically in a collective rather than selfish sense, see this brief essay: https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonatas-müller/universal-identity/10151189314697917

Right now I see this as perhaps the most challenging and serious form of moral realism, so I definitely intend to take time and care to study it. I'll have to get back to you, as I think I said I would before.

I don't directly apprehend anything as the being "good" or the "bad" in the moral realist sense and I don't count other peoples' accounts of directly apprehending such things as evidence (especially since schizophrenics and theists exist).

Thanks for this reply. I lack the time to consider it at the moment, but look forward to circling back and engaging with it in the near future.

But "morality the referent," the algorithm that takes in a situation like "punching puppies" and returns "punching puppies is right" or "punching puppies is wrong," wouldn't change - people can refer to a different algorithm when they said "morality," but they can't change the thing I refer to. Articulated in this post.

I don't disagree with that. But I think it's a mistake for someone to leap from talking about "my morality" to "morality (in general)". Perhaps this is what projectivists get at?

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Because humans have some abstract things that influence our actions, and morality, as written about by humans, is used to describe human actions. I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' puddle: "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?'"

I don't quite understand your use of the analogy.

This seems to me to be an ad populum fallacy. Just because everyone acts as if there is one, true morality doesn't make it so. Or am I missing something?

The great commonalities between humans might make many of our moralities very similar, but I think there are some differences. For one example, I think eating (factory farmed) meat is a great moral wrong, but I don't think there's anything, even in principle, I could say to convince some other people to share my view.