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Feb 10, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell

Are you aware of Haidt's experiments/surveys where he tried to map the landscape of moral intuitions by asking a series of questions that often cause people to react with moral outrage, but they are stumped when asked to explain the reason?

Part of his conclusion was that harm was not the only practical basis for moral intuition. He identified 5 additional moral dimensions: fairness, authority, loyalty, liberty, and sanctity. He seems to think that these cannot be reduced to care/harm. Or at least, he was comfortable asking about thought experiments that violated these while stipulating that no one was harmed.

I suspect things are even more complicated than that. People can moralize custom and habit. Getting to the real fundamentals is difficult.

Philipa Foot argued that utilitarianism focused on only one virtue, benevolence, and that it failed to give room for other legitimate virtues.

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Yep, Haidt's taxonomy seems psychologically insightful. Though the philosophical implications he draws from this are deeply confused: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/09/psychologists-mangle-philosophy.html

E.g., I think it is simultaneously true that (i) many people's moral intuitions are shaped by considerations of "sanctity", "authority", etc., and (ii) those people are making mistakes. Sanctity, authority, etc., do not really matter in the slightest.

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And culture and psychology don’t matter in the slightest... to the universe. Does harm matter to the universe?

To whom do these things matter or not matter? Is it that they don’t matter, can’t matter, or that they should not matter?

Even if we stipulate that there is a fact of the matter, we should be humble about the possibility that we have grasped the truth.

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I'm puzzled by your first two paragraphs. Do you really not understand normative language? To say that sanctity etc. "does not really matter" is just to say that it *doesn't warrant concern*. Like how saying that a belief lacks credibility means that it doesn't warrant belief (or high credence). Adding "to the universe" to a normative claim is just silly: normative claims apply to rational agents, not the natural world.

I'm also puzzled by your final sentence. Are you being humble here? How confident are you in the possibility that you've grasped the following putative truth: "we should be humble about the possibility that we have grasped the truth." And what is the point of this assertion? Are you suggesting that other people should not venture to share their opinions on their own blogs (at least, not without much tedious hedging)? How confident are you in venturing that opinion, and what is the basis of your confidence?

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Perhaps we're talking past each other. You seem to intend “matter” to mean “have an effect beyond persons's mental states” while I was reading it as pretty much the reverse. For me, things matter if someone cares about them, and if no one cares they don’t matter.

As for my pontification, you got me. I was trying to tell you to stop being so dismissive in a polite way. I fail both as philosopher and diplomat.

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Oct 9, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell

About “Who cares about your rules, Deontology? Others’ lives matter more than that,” it is interesting that this is a very fundamental part of Judaism ("Pikuach nefesh" on Wikipedia explains it). My neighbor is an Orthodox Jewish woman so I have seen how this is important for her life - when she was a nurse she regularly broke Sabbath to help at the hospital when she saw them blinking their lights signifying that they needed her. (And she also justifies her track record in utilitarian terms - she emphasizes that she never lost a patient, even though she often broke hospital rules in order to accomplish that.)

However, there are then exceptions to this rule, certain things you can't do even to save a life (including idolatry, incest, and some sorts of murder), so in the end deontology trumps I suppose. But I do find it interesting how a blatant utilitarian exception to the otherwise extremely strict rule book with which my neighbor lives her life doesn't seem to lead her to question her faith on philosophical grounds. Like, couldn't you be saving lives in developing countries with all the money you spend on expensive kosher meat?

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Feb 10, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell

I feel like the disagreement here is not about meta-ethics but ethics and values. Your post suggests consequentialist meta-ethics must care only about individual preferences, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.

Let's take the example of Herostratus burning down the Temple of Artemis, but stipulate that no one was harmed or upset by this act. Was it still wrong?

A deontologist can say it was since Herostratus had wrong motives. A virtue ethicist can say it was since Herostratus behaved viciously. Can a consequentialist say it was wrong? Yes: this act reduced the amount of beauty in the world, and one can be a consequentialist about beauty.

And I don't feel like that's a prima facie absurd example. Certainly, I would prefer a dead world with a Temple of Artemis standing to a world of complete nothingness. How does suffering trade-off against beauty? I don't know, but it's far from obvious any amount of suffering is always more important.

Likewise, conservative sexual morality could still be consequentialist, just about values alien to our ethical systems. I think they are wrong, but because they have wrong priorities, not because they are deontologists.

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Author

Ah, I should clarify that I just mean that *our concern for other individuals* is independently comprehensible only when it tracks their real interests (rather than moralizing). But I agree that consequentialists might value other things entirely, such as aesthetic value. That can also make sense. But again, I'd suggest only in consequentialist form: a *moralized* form of environmentalism, e.g. that prioritizes "purity" preferences (like anti-nuclear) over actually improving environmental outcomes, seems like something we should also be skeptical about.

It's interesting to imagine a "consequentialized" version of these views. Like, someone who says, "I agree it's worse for people, so I don't hold this view for their sake, but I just directly care that nobody is ever used as a means (no matter how much worse off this makes each person in expectation)." Or, "I agree it's worse for the environment, so I don't hold this view for the environment's sake, but I just directly care that we prohibit nuclear power (no matter how much coal we burn in its place)." I guess you're right that these values are then simply *alien* rather than mystical.

But perhaps that's another way of getting at my point: these are values that seemingly *make no sense* to us when taken at face value. So when people hold them, they presumably must be doing something other than taking the values at face value: instead they've been imbued with an extra mystical essence of "objective rightness" that's needed to transform them into something comprehensible (believing, falsely, that they're part and parcel of properly valuing *individuals* or *the environment*). But in fact there is no such mystical transformative essence. We must instead take them at face value. And we then find that deontology rests on incomprehensibly alien values.

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Yep, conservative sexual morality could very obviously be consequentialist, given literal belief in God and Hell as often described.

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023

Surely at least some "conservative moralizing" is shorthand for avoiding likely future suffering, especially becuase biological reality isn't nearly as malleable as we can wish to believe in our youth.

I'm thinking of the 20yo woman who thiinks "body count" doesn't matter at all, and for very obvious evopsych reasons is more likely to be in a range of negative states at 40. The attitude that I believe will maximize consequences is much closer to her view than it is to a burqa, but there are still many who would call any deviation from her view at all "conservative moralizing". (Maybe you'd want to call her view "leftist moralizing", a similar deviation from rational consequentialism?)

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See footnote 1!

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Aha, duly noted.

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What counts as an independent reason? What are arbitrary rules dependent upon?

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Independent of one's buying into that particular metaphysical or ideological framework. As a test case, consider what it would make sense for a metaethical error theorist (who doesn't believe in any kind of objective morality) to care about. It would be perfectly comprehensible for a nihilist-in-theory to still share the utilitarian's concerns, and have generally beneficent concern for others in practice. That's a concern that can survive the loss of metaphysical underpinnings. By contrast, it would seem bizarre for an error theorist to share the concerns of the conservative sexual moralist, or (I suggest) the concerns of deontologists. Those seem like concerns that *depend* upon their metaphysical underpinnings to render them comprehensible.

Put another way, it seems like what I've called "moralized" reasons are in a sense *conditional* upon their being objectively morally correct. Whereas reasons of beneficence do not seem conditional in this way. (For example, I'd still endorse utilitarian norms even if I became an error theorist and ceased to believe in "morality" at all.)

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