One thing that frustrates me is when people assume that others are stupid or irrational on the basis of a moral disagreement. The thing is that the validity of a moral claim depends entirely on your moral intuitions, so somebodys moral claim coming off as irrational simply means that you have differing intuitions on what is moral! Moral reasoning is at its heart arational, both in the sense of most of our moral reasoning happening at a pre-verbal level that we have poor conscious access to and cant properly verbalize and thus formalize using language, and also in the sense that the validity of different inference steps is judged on the basis of your existing moral intuitions which cannot be derived from rational principles. (For supporting evidence for these claims, see: the is-ought gap, moral foundations theory, moral dumbfounding / social intuitionism, philosophys persistent failure to come up with a satisfactory formalization of ethics, limited human introspective access in general, the limited to extent to which formal ethical theories actually affect most peoples day-to-day behavior; see also lesswrong/lw/jyl/two_arguments_for_not_thinking_about_ethics_too/ ) None of this means that it would entirely impossible to change peoples minds about moral judgments based on debate, of course: we dont have strong moral intuitions about *everything*, and its possible for reason to affect the components that we dont have a strong intuition about, or to arrange them in a different framework. Im definitely not saying never try to change anyones mind about a moral question using verbal arguments, because obviously verbal arguments do work *sometimes*, and they may convince your audience if they dont convince the people youre talking with. Rather, what Im saying is just that you shouldnt assume that the person youre arguing with is an idiot simply because you disagree on a moral question: they *may* still be engaged in hopelessly biased and irrational reasoning, but to judge that, you should debate them on an empirical issue, not a moral one. That said, peoples rationality *can* be judged on the extent to which they seem to be misrepresenting empirical facts and claims to support their desired moral conclusions. But then you need to be careful to make sure that you really are judging their rationality based on their empirical-claims-that-happen-to-be-relevant-for-the-moral-disagreement, as opposed to judging their rationality based on their purely moral claims.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 05:17:04 +0000
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