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To expand on external source of 'ought': I saw a thought experiment somewhere -- what if you found the True Objective Source of Morality and it said something y

To expand on external source of 'ought': I saw a thought experiment somewhere -- what if you found the True Objective Source of Morality and it said something you don't like -- for example that murdering every 14th stranger you meet is justifiable. Thus are the moral laws of Universe. Society would then promptly adjust the laws to follow suit (it is a true source of morality after all). Would you then consider murdering 14th stranger you meet today if that brings you some benefit (outweighing the risk, etc)? If not, why not? (Any similarities to religious texts is intentional)

comex 7y ago
No... because the idea of an objective source of morality is meaningless. I 'ought' to murder someone – or else what? why should I? 'Ought' is fundamentally subjective, existing relative to an agent's basic goals. If I already believe that I ought to do X, an objective source of truth can convince me I ought to do Y by showing that Y will accomplish X. For example, I might at least consider murdering every 14th stranger I met... if you could somehow credibly demonstrate that doing so would save the lives of millions of people in the future. But no source, no matter how authoritative, can say I should murder every 14th stranger "just because" – or, for that matter, that I shouldn't. Morality only seems universal in our society because we're all human, and most of our morality is derived from emotional responses preprogrammed into the human brain as a product of evolution. To evaluate the morality of more complex actions, we build architectures of logic on top of those emotional responses, and there's plenty of room to argue about the best way to do so. But fundamentally, murder is bad because it feels bad, and it feels bad because we evolved to live in groups; that's all there is to it. Any arguments about how forbidding murder creates a more stable society are fundamentally secondary. At best they're explanations for why we evolved this way, and/or reasons to strengthen a pre-existing moral precept. They can also encourage us to suppress emotional responses inclining us toward murder, because those exist too... but the effect of the suppression is limited, and in practice people sometimes commit murder anyway. Importantly, though, the fact that my morality is in some sense 'arbitrary' does not mean I have to tolerate other arbitrary choices of morality. If some person or AI is strongly driven to kill lots of people or fill the universe with paperclips, I'm not sure I could argue that my morality is inherently superior. But I'm still going to try to stop them, because that's what my morality tells me to do.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Yep, that though experiment is specifically designed to show that idea of objective external source of morality is absurd. Internal source like you described is also objective, it is shared among all humans and based on objective realities of evolution and history. I bet psychopaths share significant portion of it with neurotypical humans as well -- they just have different weights among multiple contradicting heuristics and/or certain mechanisms working slightly differently.
dTal 7y ago
Far from a thought experiment, this is the exact scenario for most of the monotheisms. The Bible, for example, which is held to be the ultimate source of truth including moral, contains many passages condemning behaviour we find acceptable today, and condoning behaviour we would find abhorrent. Are its followers violent atavists? For the most part, no.

comex 7y ago

No... because the idea of an objective source of morality is meaningless. I 'ought' to murder someone – or else what? why should I? 'Ought' is fundamentally subjective, existing relative to an agent's basic goals. If I already believe that I ought to do X, an objective source of truth can convince me I ought to do Y by showing that Y will accomplish X. For example, I might at least consider murdering every 14th stranger I met... if you could somehow credibly demonstrate that doing so would save the lives of millions of people in the future. But no source, no matter how authoritative, can say I should murder every 14th stranger "just because" – or, for that matter, that I shouldn't. Morality only seems universal in our society because we're all human, and most of our morality is derived from emotional responses preprogrammed into the human brain as a product of evolution. To evaluate the morality of more complex actions, we build architectures of logic on top of those emotional responses, and there's plenty of room to argue about the best way to do so. But fundamentally, murder is bad because it feels bad, and it feels bad because we evolved to live in groups; that's all there is to it. Any arguments about how forbidding murder creates a more stable society are fundamentally secondary. At best they're explanations for why we evolved this way, and/or reasons to strengthen a pre-existing moral precept. They can also encourage us to suppress emotional responses inclining us toward murder, because those exist too... but the effect of the suppression is limited, and in practice people sometimes commit murder anyway. Importantly, though, the fact that my morality is in some sense 'arbitrary' does not mean I have to tolerate other arbitrary choices of morality. If some person or AI is strongly driven to kill lots of people or fill the universe with paperclips, I'm not sure I could argue that my morality is inherently superior. But I'm still going to try to stop them, because that's what my morality tells me to do.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Yep, that though experiment is specifically designed to show that idea of objective external source of morality is absurd. Internal source like you described is also objective, it is shared among all humans and based on objective realities of evolution and history. I bet psychopaths share significant portion of it with neurotypical humans as well -- they just have different weights among multiple contradicting heuristics and/or certain mechanisms working slightly differently.

dTal 7y ago

Far from a thought experiment, this is the exact scenario for most of the monotheisms. The Bible, for example, which is held to be the ultimate source of truth including moral, contains many passages condemning behaviour we find acceptable today, and condoning behaviour we would find abhorrent. Are its followers violent atavists? For the most part, no.