Hey, how's it going?

I'm not arguing this exactly because it makes it sound like there are morals, or right and wrong. I'm arguing that for whatever reason we developed the idea that things can be right or wrong, we simply never evolved out of it because it doesn't hurt our survival chances. We behave as if there is right and wrong and that doesn't reduce our chances of survival, it either has no impact or overall it has a positive impact. I'm arguing that our idea of right and wrong is a cognitive error, because there is no such thing.

Kinda of like a soldier on a battlefield kissing a crucifix before going over the top. If there is no god, then his ritual has zero external control/influence on whether or not he survives, the battle is indifferent to what he believes, the bullets and explosions don't care that he thinks he's being protected. But, it might influence his behaviour in a way that somehow benefits him, or more likely, his unit. Like a species level survival benefit. He might lose his own life but in the process take out a machine gun nest that was threatening the existence of his entire unit.


Hmm, exactly what I was thinking about why we've decided some things are 'wrong', and vice versa for 'right'.

I think it's interesting from a point of view of understanding what's really going on, and it could explain why we're so divided on morality, why moral values vary so much.

But what if the individuals with the mistaken beliefs (e.g. that there are moral facts) act in ways, as a result of that belief, that have an overall benefit to their species/group?

I doubt you believe in luck, I certainly don't, at least not in some form of luck that I think I can influence with rabbit's feet or some ritual or other. But what if this mistaken belief that there is a thing called luck motivates individuals to act in ways that benefit us overall? It would explain how luck isn't real and why we never evolved out of that tendency.

So, in a conversation about luck, I wouldn't want to discuss different types of luck, or what the rules are for discussing luck, I would simply be saying the same thing I'm saying about moral facts, that there is no such thing as luck and we should be trying to figure what else explains why we behave as if there is such a thing as luck.

The more I type it, the more the word 'luck' has lost all meaning for me It's just a noise right now.

I may just consider good luck a low probability beneficial event and bad luck a low probability detrimental effect, if you are talking about rabbits feet or walking under ladders then we may be using the same word but in significantly different ways.

I will come back to this on the question of morality but if we take the following proposition.

P1 There are no moral facts.

Then we can either discuss what the motivations for this view are but this will entail what this view denies and will require an agreement of terms, including objective and subjective morals, or we can discuss what this view implies, whether morality should retain its normativity. Both the arguments for and implications of are interesting but it doesn't start or stop with P1.

Why do you think the view is correct and what do you think the view being correct means?

Adaptions in evolutionary psychology merely mean the outcome of natural selection, basically the psychology equivalent of how the term is used in biology.

Yes you are right but the adaptations/mutations of evolutoinary psychology go beyond merely aiding the passing on of genes, at least I as I understand it from a quick search. I think these are different enough from genetic mutations but I am pretty far from the stuff that I'm comfortable with.

I have absolutely no idea why you PMed me an hour after making this post to point me to that you have made it. Pro tip: the reason I didn't reply because it was the middle of the night in north america, not because I can't scroll up a few posts. I'm also a little bit baffled that you don't seem to think I know you have been saying the two points that morality doesn't exist and that we evolved our sense of it.

More relevant for morality is people choosing -EV acts for their own person because they believe it is morally correct.

One way to think of morality is that it operates at the level of group advantages as a way of eliminating tragedy of the commons situations, where individuals going for small local +EV move (murdering a competitor, for instance) ends up hurting the group at large because membership in a group that doesn't murder its members routinely provides all sorts of evolutionary advantages, but groups aren't likely to form if there is a decent chance you get murdered. So we create a social rule against murder which helps group formation which helps individuals in the group which helps genes propagate.

This model doesn't argue that right and wrong exist, you were right the second time. It acts as an explanation for why we consider right from wrong.

I don't want to jump in here too much, I'm much more enjoying watching from above than being in the trenches, especially when I don't have much value to add.

Just because you are not subscribing to a particular form of moral nihilism your idea, that there is no right and wrong, is a nihilist thesis, it is a meta-ethical claim by virtue of it being about the existence of right and wrong.

You should accept this and work from within moral theory than from outside it, this is where it takes you.

I will clarify why it is important to understand the distinction if claiming a nihilist position. The nihilist denies that the properties of rightness or wrongness ever obtain. It is a denial of an objective property of an event or state of affairs. Subjectivism may accept this thesis and respond to the nihiiist by claiming that moral judgements are reports of the subjects mental state. The nihilist doesn't have to deny this but it makes all moral claims trivially true and carries no normative weight.

The theoretical implications of the view that there are no morally normative truths are complicated. The moral nihilist may still assert what we consider morally normative propositions merely denying the normative weight is moral. You can still make arguments that promote beneficience and prevent harm it's just that those arguments lack morally normative weight.

It's psychology, so there is always going to be various branches. As a general rule of thumb evolutionary psychology is mainly based on natural selection however. Not that even staunch evolutionary psychologists (well, except a precious few) would deny other sources of human behavior of course, but this would be his field.

I'll admittedly say that even as a psychologist myself, I generally prefer anthropology when it comes to studying the roots of human behavior. That said, the same debate permeates that field... still, in general I find it better at synthesizing various perspectives and using more sound methods.

So is this actually identifying 'right/wrong', or is it just thinking that we have, and that they exist and can be identified, but in fact they don't and something else entirely is happening?

In a conversation about luck, where my position was 'there is no such thing, something other than it actually being real explains why we think it's real' it might be useful to identify which area of philosophy covers concepts like luck, but it wouldn't be useful to discuss different types of luck, whether it's objective or subjective, Irish or Chinese, whether or not red is lucky and 13 isn't.

Thank you, that's a great post with a very useful explanation, I suspect that you aren't going to like my reply.

Everything you just said could be true (I'm sure it is) but it still wouldn't be the thing I'm trying to explore. In the same way that attitudes to, and models of ways to think about luck are irrelevant if there's no such thing, and I'm trying to figure out why we think there is, so with morals. If there is no right and wrong, if they're just figments of our imagination, then something explains why the behaviour of thinking that there is right/wrong has survived. I'm not trying to explore how we think about morality, I'm trying to explore why we think about morality, why we think there are these things called 'right' or 'wrong', why that type of thinking appears to have been selected for.

In this model, morality could be described as relative (even though it would be a meaningless distinction), because what is right/wrong would be whatever happens to afford a species level survival benefit in that particular environment at that particular time (E.g It's Wrong for us to kill babies, it's Right for Inuits to do it). And the most common objection to Moral Relativism, that it means morality can never 'improve' becomes redundant, it's the wrong paradigm. Moral behaviour can improve, if you want to think about it in those terms, it can change to whatever affords the best chances of survival. And through all this, right/wrong doesn't actually have to be real, we just have to think it is.

Haven't properly explored the perception thing yet.

Not much has been defined in this discussion, and that has really not made it easy to follow. In fact I suspect MB might be committing something akin to a reification of 'right' and 'wrong' in how he is considering their existence.

But regardless, your comment reminded me of something I had wanted to mention about how I think of morality, so I'll just throw this out there:

The Golden Rule, of course, is concerned with how you treat another, by using your own preferences as a guideline. An improvement to the Golden Rule is the Platinum Rule, by which you use the the others actual preferences as a guideline. Using a trite example, perhaps you love to be tickled, but the other person hates it. The Platinum Rule would help you behave according to the other persons actual preferences.

The improvement that comes with the Platinum Rule highlights the disagreement I have with your phrase above (What we consider immoral is that which we do not want to have happen to ourselves). I would put it this way (simplistically, anyway): What we consider immoral is recognising what someone does not want to have happen to them, and doing it anyway.

It might seem like a small change, in that it just switches the focus from oneself to the other person, but I think this is an important distinction in that morality is not about your preferences, but recognising those of the other person.

e.g. You ever hear in these discussions about morality something like "Well, the rapist thinks their action is Ok, so to them rape is a good action"? Well, using my definition from above, this just recognises the rapist's selfish personal preference, but barring psychiatric issues, the rapist is still well aware that their actions are abhorrent to their victim. So, the act is still immoral, the rapist is aware that they are behaving against the other person's preferences.


Morality is how one person's behaviour knowingly affects another person. And in writing such a short summary, I feel like I have just stated the obvious!

Is jailing the rapist immoral if they do not wish to be jailed?

I'm considering their non-existence (So that I can consider what might cause us to think they exist), and as such, I don't think it matters in what form people think that they might exist. E.g. Assuming that you don't believe in 'luck', in what form do you consider the existence of luck, such that you could deny it's existence so as to explore what might cause us to imagine that there is a thing called luck?

This seems a bit confused, in the post I replied to you suggested that you weren't making a claim regarding rightness or wrongness existing you were instead asking what if rightness and wrongness don't exist.

This appears to be a question about the implications of the view being true but now you are asking why we believe the view that there are are properties of rightness wrongness. Unfortunately this question involves considering the view that we think about morality because it actually is a thing.

At this point I'm not sure what it is you want to discuss, as I mentioned earlier there are interesting questions regarding the view that there is no morality, but the interesting questions either entail a discussion of why the view is correct, and by implication why moral realism is incorrect, at which point it is essential to define terms such as subjective / objective, or the interesting questions are what the implications of this view being correct are. You seem to have moved between these two questions in these posts.

What isn't interesting to me is assuming the view that moral properties don't exist and asking why people believe they do. The reason it's not interesting to me is that I believe they do exist.

What does it matter if the result is that the rapist is not free to commit rape and cause the society they are part of to break down because people are afraid of being raped? Or it prevents a murder, or several revenge killings.You can call it 'right', 'wrong', claim to even know which, but the only thing that might actually matter is that there has been a species level benefit. The group stayed intact. Justifications based on some idea that the act was 'right' or 'wrong' may simply be imaginary, just another in the long list of cognitive errors we make.

Not quite, I'm asking "if 'right/wrong' don't exist, what benefit is there to us thinking that they do and that we can identify them, why do we think like this?'

No, I don't think it does. This is like you saying 'Luck doesn't exist, what could explain why we have this behaviour?' And me insisting that 'luck is a thing, because lots of people have had ideas about it, and there are lots of models about it, and to have this discussion about why it doesn't exist we need to understand all the terminology and why red is lucky and white isn't'. No, we just need to start at 'luck isn't real, what else else is happening?'. If it's not luck, it's something else.

Ok. It surprises me that you're not willing to discuss something because you disagree with a starting positon, but ok. Or maybe I'll take a new tack and argue that right/wrong doesn't exist, it's simply a type 1 error, a mistake with low error-costs, a perceptual error within this adaptive threshold, a cognitive bias that overall has a survival benefit and the rest of the time has little to no negative impact. Like the guy who runs from the tiger that he believes is in the bush, but actually isn't, or the person who believes that a dog is more likely to kill them than their couch because they are making the Availability heuristic mistake, but it has no down side.

We are prone to error, evolved to make them, what if 'right/wrong' is just an error? What makes you want to believe that they are 'real'?

Which is the question I don't find interesting I'll expand on why below.

Firstly we would have to determine what we meant by luck, I may be talking of a lucky rabbit's foot while you are talking about a beneficial low probability event. This is why defining terms is important.

If we are agreed that the terms are the same and we are both talking about the rabbit's foot variety of luck I would want to convince you of why the view that luck exists is wrong. What I am not going to do is ask you to assume a conclusion you reject in order to speculate as to why people reject that conclusion. It doesn't make for an interesting discussion and isn't how a substantive argument goes. If you want to make a claim you should be prepared to defend it not require the other person assume it and start from there.

This is a much better approach though there are still problems with it. The question should be why do I think they are 'real' and another relevant question is why I think your hypothesis is wrong.

I will start by saying that I only have a weak commitment to moral realism but I believe non cognitivism and error theories are false. I am prepared to argue both positions but have a stronger commitment to cognitivism than I do realism. However I believe there are a range of plausible realist theories that have explanatory power and better reflect our intuitions. I believe that we can subject our moral intuitions to reason and provide normative reasons for and against certain acts. I think it is possible to evaluate states of affairs as better and worse and we can derive moral properties from the difference.

With regard to your hypothesis did you ever read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow? I recall zumby recommending it as an introduction to cognitive psychology. The primary thesis is that we have two systems 1 is quick automatic without voluntary control and 2 is effortful and computational. My claim is that if moral properties exist they are identified by system 2 and are not subject to the same range of cognitive bias that system 1's duties are. It is defensible to say that rational deliberation, the means by which we come to understand moral facts if they exist, has been selected for. It is a very different claim to suggest that the outputs from that process have been.

Fair question, but this is about refining what is meant by [im]moral (I admitted my earlier definition to be 'simplistic'). It's where the discussion gets more interesting though, isn't it?! You have to remain intellectually honest and watch yourself for question-begging and so on. For instance, a hypothetical I heard recently was whether it would still be immoral if the rapist committed the act toward an unconscious, unaware victim (perhaps they were in a coma), that no-one other than the rapist would ever discover what had happened, and that the rapist took every safety precaution possible against pregnancy and STD's. My point being that while it still seems like it should be considered immoral, you shouldn't expand the definition just to make something fit that you think should.

Moreover, just because a course of action is immoral does not mean it should be avoided. Perhaps it is immoral to jail the rapist *, but it would be even more immoral not to jail them. This is what moral dilemma's are often about: identifying/aggregating all the moral and immoral components of some event, and making a decision accordingly.


As for that hypothetical, I don't think that the victim being unaware of the rapist's behaviour changes anything since my definition focuses on the person committing the action being aware of the other person's preferences - these preferences would not disappear whenever that person goes to sleep (or falls into a coma). But it did make me pause and think, at least for a moment.


* If you look at less emotionally charged crimes, e.g. mandatory minimum drug sentencing, there's a lot of support that they are immoral. But that's getting off topic.

You raise a couple of interesting points that I may return to, I think your point has merit but I think the platinum rule a better guide to harm than moral. Behaviours that ignore or act against relevant actors preferences is to do the relevant actor a harm. Hence jailing the rapist does them a harm, but whether an act is (im)moral depends on whether the harm is justified. It is about calculating the relevant harms, of jailing and not jailing the rapist, and reaching a verdict as to what course of action is im(moral).

I agree a lot of sentencing is immoral but because the harm caused is unjustified.

If lucky means having positive outcomes happen more often than they are expected, and unfortunate outcomes happen less often than they are expected, then why couldn't we call someone lucky, without accepting that something called luck 'exists'?

How about greed, does that 'exist'?
Isn't it better understood as the description of certain kinds of behaviour?

...

Sometimes moral nihilism is described as being concerned with the existence of intrinsic right and wrong, and this is where I get stumped. What does this really mean? Similarly, it might say that it is concerned with whether something is right or wrong in and of itself.

I find this difficult to understand, as I think of rightness or wrongness as something we evaluate or conclude about a particular kinds of behaviour.

If asked Is killing another person intrinsically wrong, or wrong in and of itself, I don't really understand what that means when phrased in that way.

(perhaps it means I just stubbed my brain on a corner of the naturalistic fallacy!?)


Earlier, you agreed that being spat on would make you feel a certain way:

This sounds a lot like how I would describe something that is 'wrong', i.e. something immoral. If so, then your reaction seems to agree the behaviour to be wrong. But if not, then what do you even mean by 'right' and 'wrong'?

What MB can do is turn to psychology moral and evolutionary to build out an account of how certain beliefs have been advantageous and why we have come to hold them or consider certain acts in immoral or moral terms. There may be some support for his general view and the different paradigm he is talking of can be understood as psychology rather than morality.

Couldn't I just similarly say that it doesn't matter if you call it a "special species benefit"?

If Mightyboosh started using the terms 'good' and 'evil' instead of 'right' or 'wrong', wouldn't you all agree with his hypothesis that they don't exist?