From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2002 - 00:54:27 MST
Eliezer writes
> > Question: does my avowal that "It is MORALLY WRONG that x!"
> > means only "I and most people disapprove of x" make me a
> > moral relativist?
>
> I suspect that the weight you put on "only", in that sentence, is
> asserting the nonexistence of *something*, but it's not quite clear what.
> It's possible that the something you assert the nonexistence of makes
> you a moral relativist.
I should have left out the word "only" and should have
written "mean" instead of "means".
> For example, if I avowed that "It is UNTRUE that X!" means only "I and
> most people disbelieve in X", I would be a relativist.
I agree that that is a reasonable way to use the words.
> If I innocently noticed that disbelief and untruth have
> *something* to do with each other, I would have uncovered
> a critical fact about the nature and referent of this
> thing called "truth", but not the only critical fact.
>
> Another critical fact about this thing called "truth" is that people
> sometimes go from believing things are true to believing they are untrue.
> What is it that causes you to go from approving of something to
> disapproving of it?
Morality for me is like data fitting. I definitely and
determinably disapprove of (all other things being equal)
people starving, kittens undergoing torture, and stupid
actions being more rewarded than intelligent ones, to
mention only a few. From the set of data points like these,
I generalize, and decide my approvals and disapprovals on
the basis of similarity. In deciding a new situation,
whether, for example, a duplicate should die, I can only
strive for consistency and to approve or disapprove so
as to minimize the tension between particular cases.
So I change my mind when less familiar cases come to
seem more similar to certain cases than they did before.
Sometimes this results from new information, e.g., we
may learn something about brain function that makes
a class of experience appear to more closely resemble
some particular different case than it used to.
For example, consider the thought experiment of an ur-society
consisting of just a man and a woman (on an island, say).
They can choose between (a) having no children (b) having
a child, but then painlessly killing him at age 12. Upon
reflection (many would say too much reflection), and letting
X be the personality of the child, then (a) comes to
resemble X never having a chance at life at all, and never
having any good experiences, while (b) comes to resemble
someone's life which, though good while it lasted, ceased
to attain immortality. So in ur-society, as is so often
the case, life turns out to be better than death, and choice
(a) is what I approve of.
Since your foregoing example, logic, and good word usage
suggests that I am a moral relativist, I mainly wonder why
most moral relativists seem to me to stand for nothing at
all, and to have no strong preferences. They might approve
of sati in India, and disapprove of exactly the same process
---incinerating a woman---elsewhere.
Lee
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