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I appreciate you bearing with me!
It's almost 7 am, and I have gone from being delirious from lack of sleep to my body grudgingly acknowledging that circadian rhytms are mere suggestions. Whether the newfound sense of mental clarity that proceeds is warranted or not, you be the judge haha.
After doing my best to parse what you've said (quite clearly and lucidly, so any misunderstanding probably reflects more on me than you, it seems to me that your stance is that moral objectivity is not categorically ruled out by the fact that are our perceptions of morality are filtered through our subjective consciousness, whereas I prefer to begin from what might be called closer to Occam's Razor, in that I don't want to postulate the existence of more ontologies than strictly necessary.
Those aren't conflicting claims, as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong.
A more salient difference might be that even if objective morality somehow exists, I do not see any way to measure it or even recognize it were it to appear before me, which seems to make it a bit moot. What would such a hypothetical mechanism even be like? What might someone, in possession of objective morality, use to convince me of it beyond the fact I find it compelling, which I also accept as a valid means of assessing subjective morality, and hence can't be the sole criterion by which I decide if it's objective or subjective!
See, while I think it is both necessary and better for one's sanity to accept the world as it appears (accounting for concordance between one's sensory streams), it is entirely possible that my perception of a tiger approaching me is not proof of a "real" tiger. I could be hallucinating. I could be in a VR simulation. (Bayesian reasoning does rule out a "perfect" proof, namely one that raises your posterior probability to either 1 or 0, unless you started with it as an axiomatic prior, in which case you can never change your mind)
I have no principled way to rule that out, but I am also pragmatic enough to keep whistling, or in this case, run away while screaming my lungs out for help.
So while I choose to treat a vivid qualia of a tiger coming for my ass as objective reality, that is not conclusive. Just to make it doubly clear, I think objective reality probably exists, at some level, ignoring things like observer-dependency in QM (I understand, possibly erroneously, that the wave function is objective and unique, while the observed solutions are subject/observer dependent, though in this case a photon or a helium atom count as observers). Even if it doesn't, I consider it useful. Similarly, you won't find me doing anything particularly unethical by public opinion in my normal life, because while I think it's a social fiction, I find it a useful one, while simultaneously not conflating that as making it true.
In other words, I cannot disprove solipsism. But I can and do choose to act as if it's not the case. And so I will, until someone can convince me it's possible to do otherwise.
I find myself confused. Surely you see that in every instance here, there is necessarily an observer involved, who is the subject of any measurement?
If someone asks you how fast your car is going, if you say 60 mph and that this is an objective fact untethered from comparison to any other object, that is simply an incoherent statement.
Certainly. But the standards are themselves subjective preferences, even if they're convergent because of upstream factors.
Same as above.
For certain widely accepted reasons for should, but once again, I don't see that sufficient for universality. To quibble, what if my goals are less than civil? If I'm driving a truck-of-peace or a killdozer, I might very well want to do the very opposite. That is once again subjective.
I'm not sure I agree with the former statement, but my stance is that even if moral relativism doesn't have any bearings on the existence of objective morality, why at all should I assume the latter exists at all?
And for the final sentence, it seems to me weird to even use the word objective when you're acknowledging that it varies from entity to entity, and time/circumstance.
To draw an analogy from physics again, the laws of physics themselves can be said to be objectively true. They don't depend on the observer at all (or at least they don't if you consider a hypothetical GUT that works in the edge cases where the Standard Model breaks down). Those same objective laws say that something like velocity, or the energy of a system, is helplessly and unavoidably subjective, only meaningful when you define an observer in a particular frame of reference (and in the case of heat/entropy, even the information available to the observer, such as for Maxwell's Demon).
It seems to me that there is no reason, beyond yearning, for there to be an objective morality in the same sense that there exists an objective and universal set of laws of physics.
You seem to say it can't be ruled out. I say it is highly unlikely to be true, precisely because it can't be ruled in.
To circle all the way back:
But I'm doing the precise opposite of that! There are people who make that claim, I deny it. If they are correct in their claims of objective morality, I expect it to mean something stronger than merely describing a system of morality that even just happens to be maximally compelling to the maximum number of humans. I would go so far as to say that I don't see it as logically necessary for such a hypothetical objective ethics to even be palatable or understandable.
And further, my understanding of my own morality has implications for all sorts of other nonhuman entities, such as animals of less than human intelligence (I assign them negligible moral worth in general), hypothetical aliens, AI, be it the ones we have today or their superintelligent descendants and so on. A system of morality that only applies to humans is less than ideal for me, regardless of objectivity.
And AI is a big deal. Half the reason I care about ethics at all is because the question of what formulation we ought to put into superintelligent beings so as to maximize our values. Not necessarily my values, because I'm not that powerful, but there are obviously more egalitarian formulations of ethics that I consider more palatable.
Again, thank you for such a comprehensive reply! I'll address some of your points here and will have to digest and sit on the rest, before considering a reply. You've given me some juicy things to think about.
I think we largely agree on this. Epistemologically, I think this question remains open and debatable. But I also think that moral facts are empirically discoverable in principle and analyzable.
Hmm. I wasn't anticipating the introduction of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM to come into this. At a first pass, my only contribution is to say that it's becoming fairly well agreed upon that the CI is bunk pseudoscience, most of which is only taught to undergraduates due to lingering path dependencies and historical happenstances that took place during the development of physics. Most people these days prefer the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which does fully preserve a completely mechanistic, material, objective view of the external world.
Here you're simply talking about the hypothetical imperative. But all categorical imperatives ultimately reduce back down to the hypothetical imperative, and deontology ultimately reduces down to consequentialism. This sits at the heart of the example I was trying to provide at the bottom half of my last statement.
The unpacking of the rest of your response I will have to think about!
Hmm, if I gave you the impression I endorse the Copenhagen Interpretation, that was in error. While I obviously lack the physics background to make a conclusive judgement (and even physicists disagree on how to interpret the implications of the maths they all agree on), I lean towards the MWI myself.
When I talk about observations, I am vaguely gesturing at the fact that an observer within a particular world only appreciates a single sample from the universal wave function.
Mein gott, this is why I refuse to read traditional philosophical works, why use many words when few do? (Referring to the unnecessarily verbose and confusing way Kant went about saying that some goals/policies are simply downstream consequences of other goals and preferences). Even the naming scheme is awful, if you told someone there exists something called the hypothetical imperative (or the categorical one), you will just bamboozle them if they didn't already know what meant haha.
I do happen to agree with you, in that I, sincerely, if uncharitably, think that self-proclaimed Deontologists are Consequentialists in denial. Even the Categorical Imperatives are backed by what can be roughly described as rule utilitarianism, which may very well be the optimal strategy for a computationally-bounded utilitarian/consequentialist agent.
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