I think “morality” as we discuss it and as I use it has many realish properties—I think things would be good or bad whether or not moral agents had ever come to exist (so long as moral patients did), I think we can be uncertain about which theory of ethics is “right” to begin with, and I don’t think the debate to resolve this uncertainty is ultimately semantic. I think ethics has most of the stuff real things have except for the “being real” part.
I’m not super confident on this, but I note that most sorts of explanations of what ethics is either fall into the category of dubious empirical predictions “ethics is the one theory all rational beings would converge on given enough time and thought”, or a muddled version of just restating a normative ethics theory “ethics is some hypothetical ideal contract between distinct agents, or what is good for all beings taken together”.
Maybe more personally, I think that any explanation of what we mean by “objective ethics” would have to be something that, if we programmed a perfect superintelligence to determine what the correct answer to it was, I would be satisfied deferring to whatever answer it gave without further explanation. To borrow/restate a thought experiment of Brian Tomasik’s, if a perfect “ethicsometer” told me that the correct ethical theory was torturing as many squirels as possible, I would have just learned that I don’t care about ethics. I would go further than this though and say that the ethicsometer had failed to even satisfy what I mean by “ethics”. I’ve been recommended Simon Blackburn’s work on this, it seems possible I have a view most like what he calls “quasi-realism”.
I think “morality” as we discuss it and as I use it has many realish properties—I think things would be good or bad whether or not moral agents had ever come to exist (so long as moral patients did), I think we can be uncertain about which theory of ethics is “right” to begin with, and I don’t think the debate to resolve this uncertainty is ultimately semantic. I think ethics has most of the stuff real things have except for the “being real” part.
I’m not super confident on this, but I note that most sorts of explanations of what ethics is either fall into the category of dubious empirical predictions “ethics is the one theory all rational beings would converge on given enough time and thought”, or a muddled version of just restating a normative ethics theory “ethics is some hypothetical ideal contract between distinct agents, or what is good for all beings taken together”.
Maybe more personally, I think that any explanation of what we mean by “objective ethics” would have to be something that, if we programmed a perfect superintelligence to determine what the correct answer to it was, I would be satisfied deferring to whatever answer it gave without further explanation. To borrow/restate a thought experiment of Brian Tomasik’s, if a perfect “ethicsometer” told me that the correct ethical theory was torturing as many squirels as possible, I would have just learned that I don’t care about ethics. I would go further than this though and say that the ethicsometer had failed to even satisfy what I mean by “ethics”. I’ve been recommended Simon Blackburn’s work on this, it seems possible I have a view most like what he calls “quasi-realism”.