[ExI] Morality

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-01-07 17:11, John Clark wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2011, at 7:39 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
>> While the epistemic basis for religions is clearly bad, I doubt there
>> is much science itself can say about the correctness of morality.
>
> Yes, but there isn't much religion can say about morality either, except
> that it's bad because God says it's bad; and if that is the basis of
> morality then it makes the statement "God is good" circular and vacuous.

And if God wants you to do something because it is good to do, then you 
should do it anyway since it is good to do - no need to invoke God to 
motivate it. It is an old classic, commonly ascribed to Socrates. Annoys 
believers nicely.


>> it is pretty easy to show how many moral systems are self-contradictory
>
> I'd say that no moral system is entirely free from self contradiction.
> You probably already know about the moral thought experiments devised by
> Judith Jarvis Thomson:

I have experienced more trolley problems than you can imagine :-) 
Variants are about as common in ethics as E coli bacteria are in 
biology. I even got the chance to name the "Snowy San Fransico trolley 
problem" devised by a colleague (in which the fat man is sliding on a 
sled downhill to potentially block the trolley, but if he had not hit 
the trolley he would (hypothetically) slid further and hit a lever that 
would have stopped the trolley - it all made sense in the right context, 
or so I was told :-) ).


> Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much
> more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's
> the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second
> scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all
> cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and
> crocodiles for south american indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2
> was more evil too. So there most be some code of behavior built into our
> DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent;
> Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that
> extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is.

But wait a bit. That everybody feels a certain way doesn't mean it is 
true. I can easily device some food that everybody would find utterly 
disgusting, yet was harmless and very nutritional. If our reactions are 
evolved, that doesn't mean they are correct - we have evolved a lot of 
things that are not optimal.

Exactly what this trolley problem situation tells us about ethics is 
very debated. Some people think it does show that folk ethics is wrong, 
and people should use properly designed ethical systems. Others think it 
indicates that academic ethics doesn't "get it" (my favorite example is 
how engineering students refuse to play the game, and instead devise 
ways of stopping the trolley).

My own take is that ethicists should pay more attention to moral 
cognition - which is a messy area where evolutionary psychology, 
cognitive neuroscience, social and cultural factors and heavens know 
what else interact to produce our moral thinking. The dilemmas so 
beloved in academia are rarely the big moral problems in real life: 
there we usually know what is right, it is just that we don't do it. 
Fixing acrasia through a drug might do more for improving our species 
than any amount of philosophizing... maybe.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University