Thanks for the lively discussion! We’ve covered a lot of ground, so I plan to try to condense what was said into a follow-up blog post making similar points as the OP but taking into account all of your clarifications.
I’m not sure how broadly you’re construing ‘meta-reactions’, i.e. would this include basically any moral view which a person might reach based on the ordinary operation of their intuitions and reason and would all of these be placed on an equal footing?
‘Meta-reactions’ are the subset of our universalizable preferences which express preferences over other preferences (and/or their relation). What it means to be ‘placed on equal footing’ is that all of these preferences are comparable. Which of them will take precedence in a certain judgement depends on the relative intensity of feeling for each preference. This stands in contrast to views such as total utilitarianism in which certain preferences are considered irrational and are thus overruled independently of the force with which we feel them.
more or less any moral argument could result from a process of people reflecting on their views and the views of others and seeking consistency
The key point here is ‘seeking consistency’: my view is that the extent to which consistency constraints are morally relevant is contingent on the individual. Any sort of consistency only carries force insofar as it is one of the given individual’s universalizable preferences. In a way, this view does ‘leave everything as it is’ for non-philosophers’ moral debates. I also have no problem with a population ethicist who sees eir task as finding functions which satisfy certain population ethics intuitions. My view only conflicts with population ethics and animal welfare ethics insofar as ey take eir conclusions as a basis for language policing. E.g. When an ethicist claims eir preferred population axiology has implications on understanding everyday uses of moral language.
I have in mind cases of moral thinking, such as the example I gave where we override disgust responses based on reflecting that they aren’t actually morally valuable.
Within my framework we may override disgust responses by e.g. observing that they are less strong than our other responses, or by observing that—unlike our other responses—they have multiple meta-reactions stacked against them (fairness, ‘call to universality’, etc.) and we feel those meta-reactions more strongly. I do not endorse coming up with a theory about moral value and then overriding our disgust responses because of the theoretical elegance or epistemological appeal of that theory. I’m not sure whether you have in mind the former or the latter case?
Thanks for the lively discussion! We’ve covered a lot of ground, so I plan to try to condense what was said into a follow-up blog post making similar points as the OP but taking into account all of your clarifications.
‘Meta-reactions’ are the subset of our universalizable preferences which express preferences over other preferences (and/or their relation). What it means to be ‘placed on equal footing’ is that all of these preferences are comparable. Which of them will take precedence in a certain judgement depends on the relative intensity of feeling for each preference. This stands in contrast to views such as total utilitarianism in which certain preferences are considered irrational and are thus overruled independently of the force with which we feel them.
The key point here is ‘seeking consistency’: my view is that the extent to which consistency constraints are morally relevant is contingent on the individual. Any sort of consistency only carries force insofar as it is one of the given individual’s universalizable preferences. In a way, this view does ‘leave everything as it is’ for non-philosophers’ moral debates. I also have no problem with a population ethicist who sees eir task as finding functions which satisfy certain population ethics intuitions. My view only conflicts with population ethics and animal welfare ethics insofar as ey take eir conclusions as a basis for language policing. E.g. When an ethicist claims eir preferred population axiology has implications on understanding everyday uses of moral language.
Within my framework we may override disgust responses by e.g. observing that they are less strong than our other responses, or by observing that—unlike our other responses—they have multiple meta-reactions stacked against them (fairness, ‘call to universality’, etc.) and we feel those meta-reactions more strongly. I do not endorse coming up with a theory about moral value and then overriding our disgust responses because of the theoretical elegance or epistemological appeal of that theory. I’m not sure whether you have in mind the former or the latter case?