I'm not a metaethicist, but I am a moral realist (I think there are facts about what really is morally right and wrong) and also -- bracketing some moments of skeptical weirdness -- a naturalist (I hold that scientific defensibility is essential to justification). Some people think that moral realism and naturalism conflict, since moral truths seem to lie beyond the reach of science. They hold that science can discover what is, but not what ought to be, that it can discover what people regard as ethical or unethical, but not what really is ethical or unethical.
Addressing this apparent conflict between moral realism and scientific naturalism (for example, in a panel discussion with Stephan Wolfram and others a few months ago), I find I have a somewhat different metaethical perspective than others I know.
Generally speaking, I favor what we might call a rational convergence model, in broadly the vein of Firth, Habermas, Railton, and Scanlon (bracketing what, to insiders, will seem like huge differences). An action is ethically good if it is the kind of action people would tend on reflection to endorse. Or, more cautiously, if it's the kind of action that certain types of observers, in certain types of conditions, would tend, upon certain types of reflection, to converge on endorsing.
Immediately, four things stand out about this metaethical picture:
(1.) It is extremely vague. It's more of a framework for a view than an actual view, until the types of observers, conditions, and reflection are specified.
(2.) It might seem to reverse the order of explanation. One might have thought that rational convergence, to the extent it exists, would be explained by observers noticing ethical facts that hold independently of any hypothetical convergence, not vice versa.
(3.) It's entirely naturalistic, and perhaps for that reason disappointing to some. No non-natural facts are required. We can scientifically address questions about what conclusions observers will tend to converge on. If you're looking for a moral "ought" that transcends every scientifically approachable "is" and "would", you won't find it here. Moral facts turn out just to be facts about what would happen in certain conditions.
(4.) It's stipulative and revisionary. I'm not saying that this is what ordinary people do mean by "ethical". Rather, I'm inviting us to conceptualize ethical facts this way. If we fill out the details correctly, we can get most of what we should want from ethics.
Specifying a bit more: The issue to which I've given the most thought is who are the relevant observers whose hypothetical convergence constitutes the criterion of morality? I propose: developmentally expensive and behaviorally sophisticated social entities, of any form. Imagine a community not just of humans but of post-humans (if any), and alien intelligences, and sufficiently advanced AI systems, actual and hypothetical. What would this diverse group of intelligences tend to agree on? Note that the hypothesized group is broader than humans but narrower than all rational agents. I'm not sure any other convergence theorist has conceptualized the set of observers in exactly this way. (I welcome pointers to relevant work.)
You might think that the answer would be the empty set: Such a diverse group would agree on nothing. For any potential action that one alien or AI system might approve of, we can imagine another alien or AI system who intractably disapproves of that action. But this is too quick, for two reasons:
First, my metaethical view requires only a tendency for members of this group to approve. If there are a few outlier species, no problem, as long as approval would be sufficiently widespread in a broad enough range of suitable conditions.
(Right, I haven't specified the types of conditions and types of reflection. Let me gesture vaguely toward conditions of extended reflection involving exposure to a wide range of relevant facts and exposure to a wide range of alternative views, in reflective conditions of open dialogue.)
Second, as I've emphasized, though the group isn't just humans, not just any old intelligent reasoner gets to be in the club. There's a reason I specify developmentally expensive and behaviorally sophisticated social entities. Developmental expense entails that life is not cheap. Behavioral sophistication entails (stipulatively, as I would define "behavioral sophistication") a capacity for structuring complex long-term goals, coordinating in sophisticated ways with others, and communicating via language at least as expressively flexible and powerful as human language. And sociality entails that such sophisticated coordination and communication happens in a complex, stable, social network of some sort.
To see how these constraints generate predictive power, consider the case of deception. It seems clear that any well-functioning society will need some communicative norms that favor truth-telling over deceit, if the communication is going to be useful. Similarly, there will need to be some norms against excessive freeloading. These needn't be exceptionless norms, and they needn't take the same form in every society of every type of entity. Maybe, even, there could be a few rare societies where deceiving those who are trying to cooperate with you is the norm; but you see how it would probably require a rare confluence of other factors for a society to function that way.
Similarly, if the entities are developmentally expensive, a resource-constrained society won't function well if they are sacrificed willy-nilly without sufficient cause. The acquisition of information will presumably also tend to be valued -- both short-term practically applicable information and big-picture understandings that might yield large dividends in the long term. Benevolence will be valued, too: Reasoners in successful societies will tend to appreciate and reward those who help them and others on whom they depend. Again, there will be enormous variety in the manifestation of the virtues of preserving others, preserving resources, acquiring knowledge, enacting benevolence, and so on.
Does this mean that if the majority of alien lifeforms breathe methane, it will be morally good to replace Earth's oxygen with methane? Of course not! Just as a cross-cultural collaboration of humans can recognize that norms should be differently implemented in different cultures when conditions differ, so also will recognition of local conditions be part of the hypothetical group's informed reflection concerning the norms on Earth. Our diverse group of intelligent alien reasoners will see the value of contextually relativized norms: On Earth, it's good not to let things get too hot or too cold. On Earth, it's good for the atmosphere to have more oxygen than methane. On Earth, given local biology and our cognitive capacities, such-and-such communicative norms seem to work for humans and such-and-such others not to work.
Maybe some of these alien reasoners would be intractably jingoistic: Antareans are the best and should wipe out all other species! It's a heinous moral crime to wear blue! My thought is that in a diverse group of aliens, given plenty of time for reflection and discussion, and the full range of relevant information, such jingoistic ideas will overall tend to fare poorly with a broad audience.
I'm asking you to imagine a wide diversity of successfully cooperative alien (and possibly AI) species -- all of them intelligent, sophisticated, social, and long-lived -- looking at each other and at Earth, entering conversation with us, patiently gathering the information they need, and patiently ironing out their own disagreements in open dialogue. I think they will tend to condemn the Holocaust and approve of feeding your children. I think we can surmise this by thinking about what norms would tend to arise in general among developmentally expensive, behaviorally sophisticated social entities, and then considering how intelligent, thoughtful entities would apply those norms to the situation on Earth, given time and favorable conditions to reflect. I propose that we think of an action as "ethical" or "unethical" to the extent it would tend to garner approval or disapproval under such hypothetical conditions.
It needn't follow that every act is determinately ethically good or bad, or that there's a correct scalar ranking of the ethical goodness or badness of actions. There might be persistent disagreements even in these hypothesized circumstances. Maybe there would be no overall tendency toward convergence in puzzle cases, or tragic dilemmas, or when important norms of approximately equal weight come into conflict. It's actually, I submit, a strength of the alien convergence model that it permits us to make sense of such irresolvability. (We can even imagine the degree of hypothetical convergence varying independently of goodness and badness. About Action A, there might be almost perfect convergence on its being a little bit good. About Action B, in contrast, there might be 80% convergence on its being extremely good.)
Note that, unlike many other naturalistic approaches that ground ethics specifically in human sensibilities, the metaethics of alien convergence is not fundamentally relativistic. What is morally good depends not on what humans (or aliens) actually judge to be good but rather on what a hypothetical congress of socially sophisticated, developmentally expensive humans, post-humans, aliens, sufficiently advanced AI, and others of the right type would judge to be good. At the same time, this metaethics avoids committing to the implausible claim that all rational agents (including short-lived, solitary ones) would tend to or rationally need to approve of what is morally good.
20 comments:
Your metaethics look to me as relying on "wise men and women" or "wise beings" and in that regard resemble traditional cultures; is that on purpose?
Also it downplays true, justified, belief- or justifies belief based on complex reflection on vast and rich experience.
Would their be specialists on various domains of life experience? Would women be at an advantage in other domains?
One more thought, you seem to make it an expertise like humor or literary criticism- yet experts disagree, often- plus, there will be politics involved and unsavory sorts might wangle themselves into such a committee for self advantage, inevitably
Thanks for the comments, Howard!
I'm not sure why you think this approach would downplay complex reflection on vast and rich experience. I don't develop the point about conditions of reflection apart from saying "conditions of extended reflection involving exposure to a wide range of relevant facts and exposure to a wide range of alternative views, in reflective conditions of open dialogue". A diverse range of people (including of course diverse genders) with rich experience (necessary for awareness of the "relevant facts") would belong in this hypothetical group.
On expert disagreement: Yes, disagreement is sometimes intractable. That's a feature of this metaethical view, not a flaw. Experts don't meaningfully disagree about the badness of the Holocaust or the goodness of feeding your children. They do disagree about what to do in puzzle cases. There are moral facts about the first and maybe not about the second, if the disagreement would be genuninely intractable among a diverse and sufficiently well-informed group of experts.
On political wrangling: This is a hypothetical group, not an actual group, so no one wrangles to get in. We're considering what *would happen if*, not recruiting actual people to an actual committee.
No I think the opposite about your approach
If we can see ourselves on either side of a wide running uncrossable river...
...wondering how to cross the river without losing lives, one side are all women, the other side all men...
Isn't it evolution's hypotheticals are for building bridges of any kind as needed...
...in the ethics and morality of purpose (to be) here...
I'm not a moral realist, but if I saw this kind of convergence among disparate alien species, I might well be tempted to revisit that conclusion. Although it seems like all the stipulations to make them like us in relevant ways, sort of stacks the deck. It'd be more convincing if that convergence happened regardless. But I suspect we don't have the imagination for how strange alien intelligences can be, along with their social strategies, and still be successful.
SelfAware: Yes, I'm intentionally trying to stack the deck in a certain way -- hopefully not *too* much! I also agree that we might be limited in our appreciation of the possibilities of alien strangeness; though I also think that some thinkers (e.g., Lem) probably go too far in thinking that aliens (social, developmentally expensive, and intelligent) might be radically incomprehensible. There will still need to be basic psychological functions like perception, memory, acquisition of resources, planning, and self-monitoring:
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2014/10/possible-psychology-of-matrioshka-brain.html
Who Remember 'The Guardian Of The Galaxy'.
I’m curious what role consciousness might play in this theory? An unusual (to me) quirk of this story is that zombie intelligences seem like they would also be expected to converge (conditional on your story about other sophisticated intelligences converging being true), and therefore also act morally (in their treatment of each other for instance). This isn’t itself so surprising; zombie agents also have evolutionary payoffs from coordination, and so it seems plausible that they’ll have moral-looking behaviours. But it does seem surprising to call this morality: it seems like a behavioural simulacrum of morality to me, and if this “counts”, I’d be somewhat disappointed to know that the moral sentiments I harbour have an equivalent status. And disappointed that people coordinating with me and treating me well is equally moral as treating a zombie well.
Maybe you think that appropriate sensitivity to consciousness is part of first order ethics rather than meta ethics? That zombies would converge to caring about non zombies but not about themselves? But it would be surprising if sophisticated zombies had this behaviour, I think.
Deep stuff. I need to read it all, again, in order to decide if there is anything I can say about it. For now, am reminded of Dennett's characterization between Zombies and Zimboes...
Hi Eric:
I used to read Childhood and Society by Erikson and one thing he said there, perhaps unoriginally, that there is in morality a golden rule, namley the golden rule- it's almost like you belive that there is a moral law akin to the law of gravity, there to be discovered. But wht if the wise people or aliens said something really horrible and ridiculous? Then they aren't really wise, you'd say. Either you have a foreordained conclusion or you ignore real differences that are there.
Not sure that came out right.
It just seems you're stipulating morality by rubber stamping it with "wise beings"
"Wise beings" have been "human all too human," haven't they?
Hi Eric and thanks for an interesting post! My sense is that views on which moral facts consist in facts about hypothetical attitudes are usually not seen as forms of moral realism, since it does not entail that there are (relevantly) *mind-independent* moral facts. Of course people are free to use the label "realism" in any way they want, but this sort of view does seem to have important similarities to e.g. forms of constructivism. Perhaps this is roughly comparable to how primitivism about colors might seem to be a more "substantial" form of realism about colors than dispositionalism about colors (if we consider dispositionalism a form of realism at all). Is this something you have thoughts on?
I hope you do not close this off. I intend to say more about metaethics, and, moreover, metaphysics which grow in the same patch. It may become long.
Maybe you won't mind? I will not submit, until I have nailed it....never, if I don't.
No worries.
So here’s a thought: you introduce this by talking about what developmentally expensive and socially complex beings would approve and disapprove. But the reasoning for particular conclusions often appeals to what’s needed for societies of such beings to be stable and successful over time. But on the face of it these could point in different directions. Most obviously, reflective thought might convince most intelligent beings of anti-natalism. And I worry that things like animal ethics (or outgroup consideration geberally) might be a wedge: under tight resource constraints, there might be a strong tendency for socially complex beings to converge on exploiting non-complex (and/or developmentally cheap) beings. But I don’t think I’d accept that as morally authoritative.
(I also wonder about beings that aren’t in fact the product of a complex society or evolutionary process subject to these kinds of constraints. Like, maybe at some time in the future most human-like intelligences will be produced by some weird technological process that’s basically independent of actual social cooperation. Do we stop counting them as socially complex?)
'Do moral truths seem to lie beyond the reach of science'...
...Or are we just lying in wait for 'physical grounding' to wake our deepest semantic functions and behaviors into one's own-my own reality...
Can't get a grip or put a wrap on this, therefore, I abstain.
Sorry, realized I should phrase part of my comment more clearly. When I say: "under tight resource constraints, there might be a strong tendency for socially complex beings to converge on exploiting non-complex (and/or developmentally cheap) beings"
I mean that social groups to do ruthlessly exploit animals are likely to be more successful over time (more sources of protein, etc.), and so socially complex beings will be likely to grow up in social groups that do that. But this isn't obviously authoritative about the morality of it.
Paul, towards abstaining from griping and wrapping, I like Epictetus...
...“It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”
Hi all! Anon, Jul 25: Right, it's not as realist as some might like. But (1.) In general the idea that social facts are somehow less "real" than physical facts is not something I subscribe to; and (2.) Mind-dependence sounds like it implies that the facts vary depending on contingent features of minds, which is *not* an implication of the view, since the hypothetical convergence does not depend, for example, on contingent features about human minds (because humanity is one negligible input into the final result). For these reasons, I think it's reasonable, and I prefer, to think of myself of as a moral realist.
Luke: Thanks for those interesting cases!
On antinatalism: I am inclined to agree that entities of the sort described would converge on recognizing the value of complex entities of their sort and thus would probably generally tend to reject antinatalism. That this seems to be a consequence of my metaethics I regard as a positive thing.
On animal exploitation: I am inclined to think that entities of the sort described would converge on seeing less cognitively sophisticated entities (nonhuman animals and the like) as valuable but of lesser value than they themselves are, which again to me seems like the right result. Would they converge on an exploitative approach? I hope not. I think the trend we see in human thinking over time has been toward seeing nonhuman animals as having substantial intrinsic value and deserving serious moral consideration, and as the literature on animal ethics seems to suggest, the people who think relatively more about these issues and are informed of facts about, say, factory farming, tend not to disagree much about this fact. My conjecture is that in the larger congress I imagine, informed reflection would generate the same result. Why? My conjecture: Informed reflection leads us to see certain things as intrinsically valuable in us; we then see some of those same things in other entities that resemble us. Rationalizations that draw huge divides without good reason tend not to survive long-term critical reflection.
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