Moral Anti-Epistemology

I didn't give you anything to argue with

LOL. So, are you here for conversations or are you here to make undebatable pronouncements?

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The sad thing is it probably will (the rationalist's burden: aspiring to be more rational makes rationalizating harder, and you can't just tweak your moral map and your map of the just world/universe to fit your desired (self-)image).

What is it that counts, revealed preferences or stated preferences or preferences that are somehow idealized (if the person knew more, was smarter etc.)? I'm not sure the last option can be pinned down in a non-arbitrary way. This would leave us with revealed preferences and stated preferences, even though stated preferences are often contradictory or incomplete. It would be confused to think that one type of preferences are correct, whereas the others aren't. There are simply different things going on, and you may choose to focus on one or the other. Personally I don't intrinsically care about making people more agenty, but I care about it instrumentally, because it turns out that making people more agenty often increases their (revealed) concern for reducing suffering.

What does this make of the claim under discussion, that deontology could sometimes/often be a form of moral rationalizing? The point still stands, but it is qualified with a caveat, namely that it is only a rationalizing if we are talking about (informed/complete) stated preferences. For whatever that's worth. On LW, I assume it is worth a lot to most people, but there's no mistake being made if it isn't for someone.

I changed my mind midway through this post. Hopefully it still makes sense... I started disagreeing with you based on the first two thoughts that come to mind, but I'm now beginning to think you may be right.

So it's hard to see how timeless cooperation could be morally significant, since morality usually deals with terminal values, not instrumental goals.

I.

This statement doesn't really fit with the philosophy of morality. (At least as I read it.)

Consequentialism distinguishes itself from other moral theories by emphasizing terminal values more than other approaches to morality do. A consequentialist can have "No murder" as a terminal value, but that's different from a deontologist believing that murder is wrong or a Virtue Ethicist believing that virtuous people don't commit murder. A true consequentialist seeking to minimize the amount of murder that happens would be willing to commit murder to prevent more murder, but neither a deontologist nor a virtue ethicist would.

Contractualism is a framework for thinking about morality that presupposes that people have terminal values and their values sometimes conflict with each other's terminal values. It's a description of morality as a negotiated system of adopting/avoiding certain instrumental goals so that the people who implicitly negotiate the contract for their mutual benefit at attaining their terminal values. It says nothing about what kind of terminal values people should have.

II.

Discussions of morality focus on what people "should" do and what people "should" think, etc. The general idea of terminal values is that you have them and they don't change in response to other considerations. They're the fixed points that affect the way you think about what you want to accomplish with you instrumental goals. There's no point to discussing what kind of terminal values people "should" have. But in practice, people agree that there is a point to discussing what sorts of moral beliefs people should have.

III.

The psychological conditions that cause people to become immoral by most other people's standards have a lot to do with terminal values, but not anything to do with the kinds of terminal values that people talk about when they discuss morality.

Sociopaths are people who don't experience empathy or remorse. Psychopaths are people who don't experience empathy, remorse, or fear. Being able to feel fear is not the sort of thing that seems relevant to a discussion about morality... But that's not the same thing as saying that being able to feel fear is not relevant to a discussion about morality. Maybe it is.

Maybe what we mean by morality, is having the terminal values that arise from experiencing empathy, remorse, and fear the way most people experience these things in relation to the people they care about. That sounds like a really odd thing to say to me... but it also sounds pretty empirically accurate for nailing down what people typically mean when they talk about morality.

Are you sure? That meaning wasn't obvious to me?

I often got this as an objection to utilitarianism, the other premise being that utilitarianism is impractical for humans. I've talked to lots of people about ethics since I took high school philosophy classes, study philosophy at university, and have engaged in more than a hundred online discussions about ethics. The objection actually isn't that bad if you steelman it, maybe people are trying to say that they, as humans, care about many other things and would be overwhelmed with utilitarian obligations. (But there remains the question whether they care terminally about these other things, or whether they would self-modify to a perfect utilitarian robot if given the chance.)

There could be further considerations that can be brought to bear. Just because something is claimed as axiomatic , doesn't mean the buck has actually stopped.

There could be in some cases, if people find out they didn't really believe their axiom after all. But it can just as well be that the starting assumptions really are axiomatic. I think that the idea that terminal values are hardwired in the human brain, and will converge if you just give an FAI good instructions to get them out, is mistaken. There are billions of different ways of doing the extrapolation, and they won't all output the same. At the end of the day, the buck does have to stop somewhere, and where else could that be than where a person, after long reflection and an understanding of what she is doing, concludes that x are her starting assumptions and that's it.

I don't quite agree with the prominent LW-opinion that human values are complex. What is complex are human moral intuitions. But no one is saying that you need to take every intuition into account equally. Humans are very peculiar sort of agents in mind space, when you ask most people what their goal is in life, they do not know or they give you an answer that they will take back as soon as you point out some counterintuitive implications of what they just said. I imagine that many AI-designs would be such that the AIs are always clearly aware of their goals, and thus feel no need to ever engage in genuine moral philosophy. Of course, people do have a utility-function in form of revealed preferences, what they would do if you placed them in all sorts of situations, but is that the thing we are interested in when we talk of terminal values? I don't think so! It should at least be on the table that some fraction of my brain's pandemonium of voices/intuitions is stronger than the other fractions, and that this fraction makes up what I consider the rational part of my brain and the core part of my moral self-identity, and that I would, upon reflection, self-modify to an efficient robot with simple values. Personally I would do this, and I don't think I'm missing anything that would imply that I'm making any sort of mistake. Therefore, the view that all human values are necessarily complex seems mistaken to me.

Having multiple epistemologies with equally good answers us something of a disaster.

These different epistemologies have a lot in common. The exercise would always be "define you starting assumptions, then see which moves are goal-tracking, and which ones aren't". Ethical thought experiments for instance, or distinguishing instrumental values from terminal ones, are things that you need to do either way if you think about what your goals are, e.g. how you would want to act in all possible decision-situations.

I still don't know what you think is bad about bad deontology.

• It is often vague and lets people get away with not thinking things through. It feels like they have an answer, but most people would have no clue how to set the parameters for an AI that implemented their type of deontology (e.g. when dilemma situations become probabilistic, which is, of course, all the time).

• It contains discussion stoppers like "rights", even though, when you taboo the term, that just means "harming is worse than not-helping", which is a weird way to draw a distinction, because when you're in pain, you primarily care about getting out of it and don't first ask what the reason for it was. Related: It gives the air of being "about the victim", but it's really more about the agent's own moral intuitions, and is thus, not really other-regarding/impartial at all. This would be ok if deontologists were aware of it, but they often aren't. They object to utilitarianism on the grounds of it being "inhumane", instead of "too altruistic".

In general, you need to make many fewer assumptions that what is obvious to you is obvious to everybody.

Yes, I see that now. I thought I was mainly preaching to the choir and didn't think the details of people's metaethical views would matter for the main thoughts in my original post. It felt to me like I was saying something at risk of being too trivial, but maybe I should have picked better examples. I agree that this comment does a good job at what I was trying to get at.