Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Moral Minds

Re: Moral Minds

mfarmer — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:17:23 -0000

Even if the intuition model is correct, reason is the primary tool to interpret all value-judgements, regardless whether the value-judements are learned or innate -- emotions are lightning-quick responses to ingrained value-judgements but only reason can slow the process and re-evaluate in order to act appropriately to the response given the context or real-life situations in which action is required. Reason is far more than a rationalization of an initial intuition -- it's the faculty that's constantly giving meaning and moral understanding. Reason doesn't shut off emotions in order to act with pure rationality, if used properly, it enriches emotions to enable a person to act morally based on the information accessible at the time. Weakening the role of reason makes it more likely our shared intutions will be guided by the most influential political party according to its ideas of correct moral action.

Re: Moral Minds

Gene Callahan — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:13:58 -0000

"But I think it’s a place to start when trying to think through the bindingness of morality in a non-spooky natural world."

Analytical philosophy in a nutshell:
1) Deny the primacy of consciousness in the world; and
2) Now notice how hard it is to explain everything, and exert great efforts to come up with ingenious way to avoid admitting 1) was an error.

Re: Moral Minds

Luka — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:55:36 -0000

Will, That's an interesting position. I hadn't quite thought of it as a possibility, I don't think. I find the problem of the bindingness of morality to be fascinating, though. I tend to be sympathetic to the Mackie-style error theory: all moral judgments are false because there are no moral facts. - Anyway, good post.

Re: Moral Minds

Jeff Lilly — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:03:54 -0000

And another thing!

You quote Rorty as claiming that the grammaticality of a sentence is rarely a matter of doubt, while moral dilemmas leave us uncertain. But he may not be comparing equivalent sets.

There are huge numbers of sentences whose grammaticality is in doubt. A frequently-studied instance is the so-called "parasitic gap", such as "Which paper did you read before you filed?" "What kind of person do you like whenever you meet?" and similar. Some people hate them, some people see nothing wrong with them, others are left in some kind of post-koan Zen state. These grammaticality judgements may be analogous to difficult moral quandaries.

On the other hand, depending on how you define "moral dilemma", there may be huge numbers of them that are easy to decide and hence are not usually counted as dilemmas. For example, should I smack my mother for no reason? The answer is obvious to anyone, as obvious as the grammaticality of "The dog is happy". These easy moral issues, which we solve quickly and unconsciously every day, may be analogous to standard grammatical sentences, which we produce quickly and unconsciously every day.

Note, too, that these easy moral questions are frequently mastered by the age of five to seven years, the same age that marks the mastery of the basics of one's native tongue. My seven-year-old knows that one never says "dog the happy is", and that stealing is morally wrong, regardless of whether you get caught. These laws of grammaticality and morality are unknown to most of the animal kingdom, regardless of how long they live. So Rorty's assertion that moral codes are not assimilated especially quickly is also on shaky ground.

Re: Moral Minds

Jeff Lilly — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 05:54:43 -0000

Will, I think you can be a little more careful about drawing the analogy between linguistics and morality.

It is true that every setting of the linguistic parameters produces a working language. And it is true that most linguists believe that no language is "better" than any other. But the second statement does not follow from the first!

One could easily imagine a case in which different parameter settings generate languages that are wildly different in terms of communicative efficiency, lyricism, their efficacy as a tool to help men get women into bed, or whatever scale you want to measure them with.

Linguists have found through OBSERVATION that all languages are about the same in terms of communicative efficiency and complexity. Chomsky's "Principles and Parameters" approach does NOT explain this!

One could try to explain this observational fact via evolutionary pressure, but that is not a view that Chomsky would endorse. He is, in fact, quite opposed to evolutionary just-so stories.

What does this mean for morality? It means you could easily have a generative, parameter-setting approach to morality, AND have some of the generated moralities be awful and others be great. The purpose of the parameters model would not be to judge moralities, but to predict the set of moralities that are possible for humans to hold. That, I think, would be a very worthy goal.

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:34:09 -0000

Rhad,

Well, that covers a lot of philosophy, so I'm hesitant to reply in detail. But, briefly.

About what I think, you did pretty well:

1) Not sure what you have in mind, but probably.
2) A kind of of non-essentialist Wittgensteinian/Kripkean combinatorialism will do.
3) There are no non-natural properties, so yes.
4) Yes.
5) No. Naturalizaing epistemology does remove norms, if you think of them as transcendental or immanent. Epistemic norms, like other norms, are either objective in an instrumental sense (if you're aiming at truth, then think this way) or conventional.
6) What needs to be reduced?
7) Some kind of complicated story about causal chains of designation.
8) I have a weird naturalized trope theory of laws.
9) Or the buddhists are right.

Re: Moral Minds

Rhadamanthus — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:32:39 -0000

Quine believed in sets! And thanks for the reply.

I think naturalism has at least nine problems:

1) Universals broadly construed
2) Modal properities and knowledge of them
3) Moral properties and knowledge of them
4) Moral responsibility
5) Epistemic norms and their grounding
6) Qualia
7) Intentionality, specifically real-world representation or 'aboutness'
8) The contingency of natural laws (why are there any?)
9) Selves

I guess you think:

1) Nominalists have the semantics
2) Quinean semantic reductions of modality work
3) Non-natural moral properties are queer
4) Compatibilism is true
5) Naturalizing epistemology won't remove epistemic norms
6) Qualia can be eliminated or reduced
7) Intentional properties can be reduced to informational or computational properties
8) Natural laws have no explanation or you're agnostic 9) Parfit's right.

Those are my guesses, having read your blog for some time.

How'd I do?

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:05:42 -0000

Luka, You know, I'm confused about whether I have an error theory or not. My view is starting to become a bit like Gilbert Harman's, which is relativistic. I guess I think that people's moral conceptions, as they understand them, are usually false, but that false conceptions can roughly track real, non-queer rightness and wrongness...

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:56:18 -0000

Rhadamanthus,

1) Everything is in space and time.
2) Because the best theories of the world quantify over nothint not in space and time. As the poet Quine said, "Nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought without some redistribution of microphysical states."
3) It is spooky to be outside space and time.

Re: Moral Minds

Luka — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 05:12:37 -0000

Will,

Just curious. Are you completely unsympathetic to an error theory about morality? Your comment about the problem of explaining the bindingness of morality in a natural world made me wonder...

Re: Moral Minds

Rhadamanthus — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:37:46 -0000

Non-naturalistic truthmakers for moral claims are not "spooky". They're just non-natural. So what? For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the problem is.

Let me ask three questions to you then, Will:

1) What is naturalism, on your view?
2) Why are you one?
3) Why are the alternatives "spooky"?

Re: Moral Minds

GilM — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:07:25 -0000

Well, if morality is innate, like linguistic capacity, perhaps Chomsky's own strong linguistic capacity is somehow related to his deficient moral capacity.