Category Archives: Morality

Regarding Minimal Morality, Bryan Caplan complains:

Robin Hanson has come up with the least plausible moral principle since “Might makes right”: “Usually it is fine to do what you want, to get what you want.”  Robin manages to make his principle seem less crazy by focusing on mundane self-regarding activities. … When is it not fine to do what you want, to get what you want?  When you’re preventing other people from doing what they want, to get what they want.  But what if you want to prevent other people from doing what they want, to get what they want?

Let me clarify:

1. I was focused on moral intuitions about goodness of outcomes, not rightness of actions.  I set aside issues of when it is wrong to do good, or not wrong to not do good.
2. Wanting to want, wanting others to want, and wanting others’ wants to be frustrated, all count as wants, and can be weighed just like ordinary wants when considering outcome goodness.
3. I was only trying to argue that most case-specific moral intuitions on goodness fit the pattern that it is usually good for someone to get more of what they want, if everyone else gets the same of what they want, and no other special considerations apply.  Elsewhere I told Bryan why economic efficiency is a good metric if goodness increases as each person gets more of what they want.

(Inspired by my conversation with Will Wilkinson.)

In a typical moral philosophy paper, an author proposes a principle to summarize his specific intuitions about some relatively narrow range of situations.  For example, he might propose a principle to account for his intuitions about variations on a scenario wherein passerbys learn one or more folks are downing in a lake.  This practice makes sense if such intuitions are very reliable, but much less sense if intuitions are very unreliable, as clues about moral truth.

In the ordinary practice of fitting a curve to a set of data points, the more noise one expects in the data, the simpler a curve one fits to that data.  Similarly, when fitting moral principles to the data of our moral intuitions, the more noise we expect in those intuitions, the simpler a set of principles we should use to fit those intuitions.  (This paper elaborates.)

The fact that our moral intuitions depend greatly on how situations are framed, differ greatly across individuals within a culture, and vary greatly across cultures, suggests lots of noise in our moral intuitions.  The fact that moral philosophers don’t much trust the intuitions of non-moral-philosophers shows they agree error rates are high.  So I wonder: what moral beliefs should we hold in the limit of expecting very large errors in our moral intuitions?

It seems to me that in this situation we should rely most on the simplest most consistent pattern we can find in our case-specific moral intuitions.  And it seems to me that this simplest pattern is  just our default rule, i.e., what we think folks should do in the usual case where no other special considerations apply.  Which is simply: usually it is fine to do what you want, to get what you want, [added: if no one else cares.]
Continue reading "Minimal Morality" »

A New Scientist book review:

Some possible responses:

1. Apparent animal "morality" isn't real morality, because it lacks human factor X.
2. To the extent animal morality differs from human, animals are just wrong.
3. Each species only intuitively knows what it is moral for that species to do.
4. Creature have preferences and social norms; there is no further "morality."

Psychological Science told us "Haters Cheat Less"; now it tells us "Self-Haters Donate More":

So when can it be good to make people feel bad about themselves, so that they will be good to others?

From a recent Psychological Science:

So folks will cheat less when they believe outsiders cheat more.  When can this justify preaching that other nations, religions, races, genders, etc. are evil or immoral?