This may sound really obvious in retrospect, but Evan G. Williams’ 2015 paper (summarized here) felt pretty convincing to me that conditional upon moral realism being broadly true, we’re all almost certainly unknowingly guilty of large moral atrocities.
There’s several steps here that I think is interesting:
We may believe that this is a problem only for the “rest” of society; as enlightened vegan cosmopolitan longtermists, we see all the moral flaws that others do not.
But this just has both a really bad historical track record and isn’t very logically convincing, see below
The inductive argument: No society that thinks of itself as just historically has been devoid of what we now consider grave moral wrongs.
Further, we’re in a time of upheaval. A society that has everything right likely is only a generation removed from a society that has almost everything right.
The disjunctive argument: There are so many different ways that we could be morally wrong that we may/may not be aware of, and many of them are in tension with each other.
Hedging (e.g. don’t eat insects on the off chance insects have moral value)does not robustly work as a strategy to mitigate unknown ongoing moral catastrophe.
Because of the disjunction above, and the sheer number of ways we could be wrong.
Even though I’m not a moral realist, I feel like this paper had a substantial effect on how I view the demands of morality, and over the years I’ve slowly internalized the message that this type of thing is hard (I’m also maybe 15% less optimistic about moral hedging as a robust strategy than I otherwise would’ve been if I hadn’t read this paper).
These points feel so obvious in retrospect that I’d be surprised if they weren’t all covered before 2015, so I’d be interested in whether philosophers and philosophy students here can point to earlier sources.
This may sound really obvious in retrospect, but Evan G. Williams’ 2015 paper (summarized here) felt pretty convincing to me that conditional upon moral realism being broadly true, we’re all almost certainly unknowingly guilty of large moral atrocities.
There’s several steps here that I think is interesting:
We may believe that this is a problem only for the “rest” of society; as enlightened vegan cosmopolitan longtermists, we see all the moral flaws that others do not.
But this just has both a really bad historical track record and isn’t very logically convincing, see below
The inductive argument: No society that thinks of itself as just historically has been devoid of what we now consider grave moral wrongs.
Further, we’re in a time of upheaval. A society that has everything right likely is only a generation removed from a society that has almost everything right.
The disjunctive argument: There are so many different ways that we could be morally wrong that we may/may not be aware of, and many of them are in tension with each other.
Hedging (e.g. don’t eat insects on the off chance insects have moral value)does not robustly work as a strategy to mitigate unknown ongoing moral catastrophe.
Because of the disjunction above, and the sheer number of ways we could be wrong.
Even though I’m not a moral realist, I feel like this paper had a substantial effect on how I view the demands of morality, and over the years I’ve slowly internalized the message that this type of thing is hard (I’m also maybe 15% less optimistic about moral hedging as a robust strategy than I otherwise would’ve been if I hadn’t read this paper).
These points feel so obvious in retrospect that I’d be surprised if they weren’t all covered before 2015, so I’d be interested in whether philosophers and philosophy students here can point to earlier sources.