Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions.

The physical fact that humans are compelled by these sorts of logical facts is not one of the facts which makes saving the baby the right thing to do. If I did assert that this physical fact was involved, I would be a moral relativist and I would say the sorts of other things that moral relativists say, like "If we wanted to eat babies, then that would be the right thing to do."

The moral relativist who says that doesn't really disagree with you. The moral relativist considers a different property of algorithms to be the one that determines whether an algorithm is a morality, but this is largely a matter of definition.

For the relativist, an algorithm is a morality when it is a logic that compels an agent (in the limit of reflection, etc.). For you, an algorithm is a morality when it is the logic that in fact compels human agents (in the limit of reflection, etc.). That is why your view is a kind of relativism. You just say "morality" where other relativists would say "the morality that humans in fact have".

You also seem more optimistic than most relativists that all non-mutant humans implement very nearly the same compulsive logic. But other relativists admit that this is a real possibility, and they wouldn't take it to mean that they were wrong to be relativists.

If there is an advantage to the relativists' use of "morality", it is that their use doesn't prejudge the question of whether all humans implement the same compulsive logic.

Right, so a moral relativist is a kind of moral absolutist who believes that the One True Moral Rule is that you must do what is the collective moral will of the species you're part of.

I agree that it seems as though I just don't understand. Sometimes, I feel perched on the edge of understanding, feel a little dizzy, and decide I don't understand.

I don't claim to be representative in any way, but my stumbling block seems to be this idea about how saving babies is right. Since I don't feel strongly that saving babies is "right", whenever you write, "saving babies is the right thing to do", I translate this as, "X is the right thing to do" where X is something that is right, whatever that might mean. I leave that as a variable to see if it gets answered later.

Then you write, "What makes saving the baby the right thing to do is a logical fact about the subject matter of rightness - in this case, a pretty fast and primitive implication from the premises that are baked into that subject matter and which distinguish it from the subject matter of wrongness."

How is wrongness or rightness baked into a subject matter?

Of course there's a causal relation which explains the causal fact of this reference, but this causal explanation is not the same as the moral justification, and it's not appealed to as the moral justification

Of course it isn't, because we're doing meta-ethics here, and don't yet have access to the notion of "moral justification"; we're in the process of deciding which kinds of things will be used as "moral justification".

It's your metamorality that is human-dependent, not your morality; see my other comment.

To go a step further, moral disagreement doesn't require a language barrier at all.

"We and abolitionists are talking about a different subject matter and it is an error of the "computer translation programs" that the word comes out as "morality" in both cases. Morality is about how to create a proper relationship between races, everyone knows that and they happen to be right. If we could get past difficulties of the "translation", the abolitionists would agree with us about what is moral, we would agree with them about what is abolitionism."

Why can't morality be about satisfying your values?

Because that isn't how the term "morality" is typically used by humans. The "morality police" found in certain Islamic countries aren't life coaches. The Ten Commandments aren't conditional statements. When people complain about the decaying moral fabric of society, they're not talking about a decline in introspective ability.

Inherent to the concept of morality is the external imposition of values. (Not just decisions, because they also want you to obey the rules when they're not looking, you see?) Sociologically speaking, morality is a system for getting people to do unfun things by threatening ostracization.

Decision theory (and meta-decision-theory etc.) does not exist to analyze this concept (which is not designed for agents); it exists to replace it.

Note the word objective.

I disagree.

ETA: Note that an implication of what you said is that replying in that manner constitutes an assertion of higher status than the other person; this is exactly why it is irritating.

I think the manner in which komponisto was calling Eliezer a moral relativist deserves a more thorough answer. If I make an off-handed remark and someone disagrees with me, I find an off-handed remark fair. If I spend three paragraphs and get, "No," as a response I will be annoyed.

In this case, I side with komponisto.

I understand and agree with your point that the long list of terminal values that most humans share aren't the 'right' ones because they're values that humans have. If Omega altered the brain of every human so that we had completely different values, 'morality' wouldn't change.

Therefore, to be perfectly precise, byrnema would have to edit her comment to substitute the long list of values that humans happen to share for the word 'human', and the long list of values that Babyeaters happen to share for the word 'babyeating'.

So yeah, I get why someone who doesn't want to create this kind of confusion in his interlocutors would avoid saying "human-right" and "human-moral". The problem is that you're creating another kind of confusion.

See I think you miss understanding his response. I mean that is the only way I can interpret it to make sense.

Your insistence that it is not the right interpretation is very odd. I get that you don't want to trigger peoples cooperation instincts, but thats the only framework in which talking about other beings makes sense.

The morality you are talking about is the human-now-extended morality, (well closer to the less-wrong-now-extended morality) in that it is the morality that results from extending from the values humans currently have. Now you seem to have a categorization that need to categorize your own morality as different from others in order to feel right about imposing it? So you categorize it as simply morality, but your morality is is not necessarily my morality and so that categorization feels iffy to me. Now its certainly closer to mine then to the baby eaters, but I have no proof it is the same. Calling it simply Morality papers over this.

You're wrong. Despite how much I'd like to have a universal, ultimate, true morality, you can't create it out of whole cloth by defining it as "what-humans-value". That's pretending there's no reason to look up, because, "Look! It's right there in front of you. So be sure not to look up."

There can be a separable sense of "should" that indicates rationality. Thus, "we should sign the treaty" can be an interesting truth for both parties when the "should" is that of rationality, and true for both parties but only interesting from the human side when the "should" is a moral should.

This commits one to what philosophers call moral externalism, namely, the view that what is morally required is not necessarily rationally required. Which is not a reason to reject the view, but I expect it will be criticized.

If not CEV, then what? I define "right" to be criterion-set X, where X is, um, ... oh, is that the time?

this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance, and I feel that a sort of courtesy should be extended

Yes, but do you see why people get annoyed when you build that courtesy into your terminology?

I'm curious about how your idea handles an edge case. (I am merely curious - not to downplay curiosity, but you shouldn't consider it a reason to devote considerable brain-cycles on its own if it'd take considerable brain-cycles to answer, because I think your appropriation of moral terminology is silly and I won't find the answer useful for any specific purpose.)

The edge case: I have invented an alien species called the Zaee (for freeform roleplaying game purposes; it only recently occurred to me that they have bearing on this topic). The Zaee have wings, and can fly starting in early childhood. They consider it "loiyen" (the Zaee word that most nearly translates as "morally wrong") for a child's birth mother to continue raising her offspring (call it a son) once he is ready to take off for the first time; they deal with this by having her entrust her son to a friend, or a friend of the father, or, in an emergency, somebody who's in a similar bind and can just swap children with her. Someone who has a child without a plan for how to foster him out at the proper time (even if it's "find a stranger to swap with") is seen as being just as irresponsible as a human mother who had a child without a clue how she planned to feed him would be (even if it's "rely on government assistance").

There is no particular reason why a Zaee child raised to adulthood by his biological mother could not wind up within the Zaee-normal range of psychology (not that they'd ever let this be tested experimentally); however, they'd find this statement about as compelling as the fact that there's no reason a human child, kidnapped as a two-year-old from his natural parents and adopted by a duped but competent couple overseas, couldn't grow up to be a normal human: it still seems a dreadful thing to do, and to the child, not just to the parents.

When Zaee interact with humans they readily concede that this precept of their has no bearing on any human action whatever: human children cannot fly. And in the majority of other respects, Zaee are like humans in their - if you plopped a baby Zaee brain in a baby human body (and resolved the body dysphoria and aging rate issues) and he grew up on Earth, he'd be darned quirky, but wouldn't be diagnosed with a mental illness or anything.

Other possibly relevant information: when Zaee programmers program AIs (not the recursively self-improving kind; much more standard-issue sci-fi types), they apply the same principle, and don't "keep" the AIs in their own employ past a certain point. (A particular tradition of programming frequently has its graduates arrange beforehand to swap their AIs.) The AIs normally don't run on mobile hardware, which is irrelevant anyway, because the point in question for them isn't flight. However, Zaee are not particularly offended by the practice of human programmers keeping their own AIs indefinitely. The Zaee would be very upset if humans genetically engineered themselves to have wings from birth which became usable before adulthood and this didn't yield a change in human fostering habits. (I have yet to have cause to get a Zaee interacting with another alien species that can also fly in the game for which they were designed, but anticipate that if I did so, "grimly distasteful bare-tolerance" would be the most appropriate attitude for the Zaee in the interaction. They're not very violent.)

And the question: Are the Zaee "interested in morality"? Are we interested in ? Do the two referents mean distinct concepts that just happen to overlap some or be compatible in a special way? How do you talk about this situation, using the words you have appropriated?

Eliezer, I don't understand how you can say that the "lucky causal history" wasn't luck, unless you also say "if humans had evolved to eat babies, babyeating would have been right."

If it wouldn't have been right even in that event, then it took a stupendous amount of luck for us to evolve in just such a way that we care about things that are right, instead of other things.

Either that or there is a shadowy figure.

Ah, so moral justifications are better justifications because they feel good to think about. Ah, happy children playing... Ah, lovers reuniting... Ah, the Magababga's chief warrior being roasted as dinner by our chief warrior who slew him nobly in combat...

I really don't see why we should expect 'morality' to extrapolate to the same mathematical axioms if we applied CEV to different subsets of the population. Sure, you can just define the word morality to include the sum total of all human brains/minds/wills/opinions, but that wouldn't change the fact that these people, given their druthers and their own algorithms would morally disagree. Evolutionary psychology is a very fine just-so story for many things that people do, but people's, dare I say, aesthetic sense of right and wrong is largely driven by culture and circumstance. What would you say if omega looked at the people of earth and said, "Yes, there is enough agreement on what 'morality' is that we need only define 80,000 separate logically consistent moral algorithms to cover everybody!"

They're actually better justifications

"Better" by the moral standard of betterness, or by a standard unconnected to morality itself?

if I've got to respond to something, those are just the sort of (logical) facts I'd want to respond to!

Want to respond to because you happen to be the sort of creature that likes and is interested in these facts, or for some reason external to morality and your interest therein?

It's also quite possible that human beings, from time to time, are talking about different subject matters when they have what looks like a moral disagreement; but this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance

Why does this seem like a "drastic" assumption, even given your definition of "morality"?

However, it happens that the vast majority kinds of possible minds don't give a crap about morality, and while they might agree with us about what they should do, they wouldn't find that motivating.

What about the minds that disagree with us about what they should do, and yet do care about doing what they think they should? Would your position hold that it is unlikely for them to have a different list or that they must be mistaken about the list -- that caring about what you "should" do means having the list we have?

There remains a third option in addition to evolutionary hardwired stuff and ineffable, transcendent stuff.

Also, the back story for the aliens gives a plausible argument for their actions as arising from a different path towards the same ultimate morality.

Really? Although babyeater_should coincides with akon_should on the notion of "toleration of reasonable mistakes" and on the Prisoner's Dilemma, it seems clear from the story that these functions wouldn't converge on the topic of "eating babies". (If the Superhappies had their way, both functions would just be replaced by a new "compromise" function, but neither the Babyeaters nor the humans want that, and it appears to be the wrong choice according to both babyeater_should and akon_should.)

Your answer seemed wrong to me, but it took me a long time to verbalize why. In the end, I think it's a map/territory confusion.

For comparison, suppose I'm trying to find the shortest way from home to work by visualizing a map of the city. I'm doing a computation in my mind, which can also be viewed as deriving implications from a set of premises. But that computation is about something external; and the answer isn't just a logical fact about what conclusions follow from certain premises.

When I ask myself "what is rationality?" I think the computation I'm doing in my head is also about something external to me, and it's not just a logical question where I don't have conscious access to the premises that I'm using, even though that's also the case.

So my definition of moral realism would be that when I do the meta-moral computation of asking "what moral premises should I accept?", that computation is about something that is not just inside my head. I think this is closer to what most people mean by the phrase.

Given the above, I think your meta-ethics is basically a denial of moral realism, but in such a way that it causes more confusion than clarity. Your position, if translated into the "shortest way to work" example, would be if someone told you that there is no fact of the matter about the shortest way to work because the whole city is just a figment of your imagination, and you reply that there is a fact of the matter about the computation in your mind, and that's good enough for you to call yourself a realist.