Which would mean that error is simply how far your beliefs/actions deviate from your personal moral values. In which case, the least-error prone morality is that everyone should do whatever they happen to do regardless of anything, since your error will be zero.Or that you’re always right no matter what you do, though that doesn’t make other people moral.

TLDR: thinking of morality in terms of minimizing error just doesn’t work.

But that wasn’t my main worry anyway. What do you think about the non-moral character of the pencil case and the other cases you base the minimal principle on? Shouldn’t the simple cases we’re basing the moral principle on be moral cases that we’d have moral intuitions about?

Unnamed, a simple pattern expressed in terms of complex creatures can still be a simple pattern. The pattern that exactly matches the data is “simple” in some sense, but not in the relevant curve-fitting sense.

Josh, I really meant my clarification; I’m talking primarily about goodness. But once we do talk about rightness a candidate simple comprehensive pattern there is that our intuition is usually that acts that increase goodness most are the most right.

One reason why this looks like a problem to me is that it means that you don’t have much of an explanation or moral theory – you’re not reducing goodness to anything more basic, just giving a rough cue for identifying it. A related issue is that your curve may only appear to be simple because you’re letting people’s minds do the complex work. Finally, if you’re going to incorporate people’s judgments about what is good, I don’t see a justification for picking out this subset of those judgments. Why not go all the way and make your rule “usually the things that people think are good really are good”? That pattern shows a similarly strong relationship (for the data points that you’ve chosen to focus on this rule is extremely highly correlated with your “wanting” rule), and it’s not clear which rule is simpler (if wanting something requires judging it to be good plus something else, then perhaps judging to be good is simpler).

You propose to look at simple cases, e.g. picking up a pencil one has dropped, and think they support the minimal morality principle of doing what one thinks will get one what one (and others?) wants. The idea is supposed to be that our moral intuition here would be that it’s okay or morally good or morally permissible to pick the pencil up.

(Note: In your response to Caplan, you say you’re not trying to develop principles of right action, only morally good outcomes. But this just seems inconsistent with what you say in the post. You frame all this in terms of what it would be “fine” or okay for the agent to do. But even if you reformulate your claims in terms of outcomes, your position here is supposed to be about moral theory in general. And assuming moral theory primarily involves outcomes is to assume, question-beggingly, some sort of consequentialism. Your points could be taken as providing some indirect argument for a sort of consequentialism, but it shouldn’t assume it.)

Back to the case: But intuitions about this pencil case (and the others you initially discuss in support of the minimal principle) don’t at all seem to be moral intuitions. This is an issue of prudence (or something similar). So I don’t see how our judgment about such a case should provide any support for a moral principle. Perhaps it supports some sort of normative principle about what we have reason to do or what we ought to do, but the reasons here don’t at all seem to deal with morality. To construct and evaluate moral principles based on moral intuitions, we’d need to look at simple moral cases, e.g. kicking babies for fun. And there I suspect the best explanation of the moral judgment will not be a principle involving getting what you (and others?) want.

(Note: I put “and others?” in there because it’s unclear to me whether you really take your minimal principle to be egoistic [doing what will satisfy the agent's wants] or preference-utilitarian [doing what will satisfy the wants of most people]. You say you’re going for the latter at one point in the post, but the initial principle you develop by looking at the simple cases seems to be the former. And it’s a big jump to go from the one to the other.)

Economists often sound alarmingly behaviorist to me. Personal aesthetic sensibilities are not necesserily reducible to quantifiable ‘goods and services’.

Trying to extract simple generalizations may may simply be the wrong approach – the fact that moral intuitions seem senstive to framing of specific situations may not indicate ‘noise’ as such, but rather be inherent in true morality itself, if in fact morality is genuinely highly sensitive to the specific context of each given situation. (i.e. complex and case-based, where no simple generalizations are possible).

>I find mjgeddes’ self-aggrandizing hand-waving on analogy trumping Bayes to be annoying

But analogy may well trump Bayes. Probability calculations rely on implicit universal generalizations, but a universal generalization intended to avoid ounterexamples must specify the exclusion of all such possible cases. This may not be possible for moral reasoning, which seems highly sensitive to the specific context of each case (see above). Thus analogical arguments can’t be reduced to inductive ones, and analogy beats Bayes.

A universal generalization intended to avoid
counterexamples must specify the exclusion of all such possible cases,
not just the relevant features in the actual case.