I don’t consider myself a consequentialist, but I do support effective altruism. I don’t believe a set of ethics, e.g., consequentialism as a whole, has a truth-value, because I don’t believe ethics corresponds to truth. It lacks truth-value because it lacks truth-function; to ask if consequentialism is ‘true or false’ is a category error. That’s my perspective. I used to think this was moral anti-realism, but apparently some moral anti-realists also believe consequentialism could be true. That confuses me. Anyway, I allow the possibility that moral realism might be true, and hence, consequentialism, or another normative model of the world, could also be “true”. While I’m open to changing my mind to such in the future, I literally can’t fathom what that would mean, or what believing that would feel like. Note I respect positions holding ethics or morality can be a function of truth, but I’m not willing to debate them in these comments. I’d be at a loss of words for defending my position, while I doubt others could change my mind. Practically, I’ll only change my mind by learning more on my own, which I intend to do.
On the other hand, I, uh, in the past have intuited on the foundations of morality more deeply than I would expect most others uneducated in philosophy do. I lack any formal education in philosophy. I have several friends who study philosophy formally or informally, and have received my knowledge of philosophy exclusively from Wikipedia, friends, LessWrong, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Anyway, I realized at my core I feel it’s unacceptable there would be a different morality for different people. That is, ideally, everyone who share the same morals. In practice, both out of shame and actual humility, I tend not to claim among others my morals are superior. I let others live with their values as I live with mine. A lot of this behavior on my part may be engendered and normalized being raised in a pluralistic, secular, Western, democratic, and politically correct culture.
My thoughts were requested, so here’s my input. I expect my perspective on ethics is weird among supporters of effective altruism, and also the world at large. So, I’m an outlier among outliers whose opinion isn’t likely worth putting much weight on.
I have a good friend who is a thorough-going hedonistic act utilitarian and a moral anti-realist (I might come to accept this conjunction myself). He’s a Humean about the truth of utilitarianism. That is, he thinks that utilitarianism is what an infinite number of perfectly rational agents would converge upon given an infinite period of time. Basically, he thinks that it’s the most rational way to act, because it’s basically a universalization of what everyone wants.
I study philosophy and would identify as a moral anti-realist. Like you, I am generally inclined to regard attempts to refer to moral statements as true or false as (in some cases) category mistakes, though in other cases I think they are better translated as cognitive but false (i.e. some moral discourse is captured by one or more error theories), and in other cases moral claims are both coherent and true, but trivial—for instance, a self-conscious subjectivist who deliberately uses moral terms to convey their preferences. Unfortunately, I think matters are messier than this, in that I don’t even think ordinary moral language has any determinate commitment, much of the time, to any particular metaethical stance, so there is no uniform, definitive way of stating what moral terms even mean—because they don’t mean one thing, and often simply have nothing to do with the sorts of meanings philosophers want to extract out of them. This position is known as metaethical variability/indeterminacy.
Even though I reject that morality is about anything determinate and coherent, I also endorse utilitarianism insofar as I take it to be an accurate statement of my own values/preferences.
So, I suppose you can add at least one person to the list of people who are EAs that share something roughly in line with your metaethical views.
I don’t consider myself a consequentialist, but I do support effective altruism. I don’t believe a set of ethics, e.g., consequentialism as a whole, has a truth-value, because I don’t believe ethics corresponds to truth. It lacks truth-value because it lacks truth-function; to ask if consequentialism is ‘true or false’ is a category error. That’s my perspective. I used to think this was moral anti-realism, but apparently some moral anti-realists also believe consequentialism could be true. That confuses me. Anyway, I allow the possibility that moral realism might be true, and hence, consequentialism, or another normative model of the world, could also be “true”. While I’m open to changing my mind to such in the future, I literally can’t fathom what that would mean, or what believing that would feel like. Note I respect positions holding ethics or morality can be a function of truth, but I’m not willing to debate them in these comments. I’d be at a loss of words for defending my position, while I doubt others could change my mind. Practically, I’ll only change my mind by learning more on my own, which I intend to do.
On the other hand, I, uh, in the past have intuited on the foundations of morality more deeply than I would expect most others uneducated in philosophy do. I lack any formal education in philosophy. I have several friends who study philosophy formally or informally, and have received my knowledge of philosophy exclusively from Wikipedia, friends, LessWrong, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Anyway, I realized at my core I feel it’s unacceptable there would be a different morality for different people. That is, ideally, everyone who share the same morals. In practice, both out of shame and actual humility, I tend not to claim among others my morals are superior. I let others live with their values as I live with mine. A lot of this behavior on my part may be engendered and normalized being raised in a pluralistic, secular, Western, democratic, and politically correct culture.
My thoughts were requested, so here’s my input. I expect my perspective on ethics is weird among supporters of effective altruism, and also the world at large. So, I’m an outlier among outliers whose opinion isn’t likely worth putting much weight on.
Hey Evan, your position is called non-cognitivism.
I have a good friend who is a thorough-going hedonistic act utilitarian and a moral anti-realist (I might come to accept this conjunction myself). He’s a Humean about the truth of utilitarianism. That is, he thinks that utilitarianism is what an infinite number of perfectly rational agents would converge upon given an infinite period of time. Basically, he thinks that it’s the most rational way to act, because it’s basically a universalization of what everyone wants.
Hi Evan,
I study philosophy and would identify as a moral anti-realist. Like you, I am generally inclined to regard attempts to refer to moral statements as true or false as (in some cases) category mistakes, though in other cases I think they are better translated as cognitive but false (i.e. some moral discourse is captured by one or more error theories), and in other cases moral claims are both coherent and true, but trivial—for instance, a self-conscious subjectivist who deliberately uses moral terms to convey their preferences. Unfortunately, I think matters are messier than this, in that I don’t even think ordinary moral language has any determinate commitment, much of the time, to any particular metaethical stance, so there is no uniform, definitive way of stating what moral terms even mean—because they don’t mean one thing, and often simply have nothing to do with the sorts of meanings philosophers want to extract out of them. This position is known as metaethical variability/indeterminacy.
Even though I reject that morality is about anything determinate and coherent, I also endorse utilitarianism insofar as I take it to be an accurate statement of my own values/preferences.
So, I suppose you can add at least one person to the list of people who are EAs that share something roughly in line with your metaethical views.