My math-intuition says “that’s still not well-defined, such reasons may not exist”.
To which you might say “Well, there’s some probability they exist, and if they do exist, they trump everything else, so we should act as though they exist.”
My intuition says “But the rule of letting things that could exist be the dominant consideration seems really bad! I could invent all sorts of categories of things that could exist, that would trump everything I’ve considered so far. They’d all have some small probability of existing, and I could direct my actions any which way in this manner!” (This is what I was getting at with the “meta-oughtness” rule I was talking about earlier.)
To which you might say “But moral reasons aren’t some hypothesis I pulled out of the sky, they are commonly discussed and have been around in human discourse for millennia. I agree that we shouldn’t just invent new categories and put stock into them, but moral reasons hardly seem like a new category.”
And my response would be “I think moral reasons of the type you are talking about mostly came from the human tendency to anthropomorphize, combined with the fact that we needed some way to get humans to coordinate. Humans weren’t likely to just listen to rules that some other human made up, so the rules had to come from some external source. And in order to get good coordination, the rules needed to be followed, and so they had to have the property that they trumped any prudential reasons. This led us to develop the concept of rules that come from some external source and trump everything else, giving us our concept of moral reasons today. Given that our concept of “moral reasons” probably arose from this sort of process, I don’t think that “moral reasons” is a particularly likely thing to actually exist, and it seems wrong to base your actions primarily on moral reason. Also, as a corollary, even if there do exist reasons that trump all other reasons, I’m more likely to reject the intuition that it must come from some external source independent of humans, since I think that intuition was created by this non-truth-seeking process I just described.”
My math-intuition says “that’s still not well-defined, such reasons may not exist”.
To which you might say “Well, there’s some probability they exist, and if they do exist, they trump everything else, so we should act as though they exist.”
My intuition says “But the rule of letting things that could exist be the dominant consideration seems really bad! I could invent all sorts of categories of things that could exist, that would trump everything I’ve considered so far. They’d all have some small probability of existing, and I could direct my actions any which way in this manner!” (This is what I was getting at with the “meta-oughtness” rule I was talking about earlier.)
To which you might say “But moral reasons aren’t some hypothesis I pulled out of the sky, they are commonly discussed and have been around in human discourse for millennia. I agree that we shouldn’t just invent new categories and put stock into them, but moral reasons hardly seem like a new category.”
And my response would be “I think moral reasons of the type you are talking about mostly came from the human tendency to anthropomorphize, combined with the fact that we needed some way to get humans to coordinate. Humans weren’t likely to just listen to rules that some other human made up, so the rules had to come from some external source. And in order to get good coordination, the rules needed to be followed, and so they had to have the property that they trumped any prudential reasons. This led us to develop the concept of rules that come from some external source and trump everything else, giving us our concept of moral reasons today. Given that our concept of “moral reasons” probably arose from this sort of process, I don’t think that “moral reasons” is a particularly likely thing to actually exist, and it seems wrong to base your actions primarily on moral reason. Also, as a corollary, even if there do exist reasons that trump all other reasons, I’m more likely to reject the intuition that it must come from some external source independent of humans, since I think that intuition was created by this non-truth-seeking process I just described.”