# Thoughts on Moral Philosophy

I don't really feel that I personally have any special insight into moral philosophy, but nonetheless, some people may find it interesting or useful to know where I stand or the philosophers/perspectives that I do consider to have such insight.

That said, perhaps my most original offering is my three-paragaph post [On Disingenuity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PHy6K7DwM9uWdYM8Y/on-disingenuity):

> Suppose someone claims that all morality is relative, but when pressed on whether this would apply even to murder, they act evasive and refuse to give a clear answer. A critic might conclude that this person is disingenuous in refusing to accept the clear logical consequences of their belief.
> 
> However, imagine that there's a really strong social stigma against asserting that murder might not be bad, to the point of permanently damaging such a person's reputation, even though there's no consequence for making the actually stronger claim that all morality is relative. The relativist might therefore see the critic as the one who is disingenuous; trying to leverage social pressure against them instead of arguing on the basis of reason.
> 
> Thus in the right circumstances, each side can quite reasonably see the other as disingenuous. I suspect that everyone will have experienced both sides of the coin at different times depending on the issue being discussed.

I strongly dislike most arguments that morality is relative or subjective as they usually involve a bunch of handwaving and biting bullets which the proponent hasn't really thought through, but I also acknowledge that Hume's Is-Ought disjunction is quite devastating for the prospects of establishing an objective morality.

Derek Parfit makes the best attempt I've seen to get around this disjunction with a) his use of the [Future Tuesday](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/8w2x12/how_did_derek_parfit_prove_there_are_objective/) thought experiment to argue that some preferences are objectively more correct than others and b) by noting that people generally believe that we can have knowledge about mathematics despite its seemingly non-empirical nature and then noting that this suggests that we might be able to similarly have such a priori knowledge about morality. I didn't find his arguments completely persuasive, but I've only read summaries.

I find that discussions about moral philosophy are much more productive when we make a distinction between [Principled and Pragmatic Morality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DYsxK8MMhQdPn6grT/principled-vs-pragmatic-morality?fbclid=IwAR2_aYgwB91fbLxO6H0u3Bpxhwg9O-BJ_KOMj7Qoc9rLz4299K72-q0Z3Ds). For example, someone may endorse utilitarianism in principle, whilst rejecting it in practise because of the impossible burden of calculating expected values before every action or because they are worried that humans will tend to mostly just use it as an excuse to commit atrocities, while rejecting what its radical moral demands would mean for our lives.

Beyond this, I strongly endorse distinguishing [Terminal and Instrumental Values](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values) especially in combination with techniques like [Goal Factoring](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cu5C5KhkoXhrPMLFN/goal-factoring). In most cases I strongly decry [The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/), although I concede that it may have some value given the [difficulty of obtaining societal agreement on complex social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words) or as part of a [Conflict-Theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) style strategy (see [In Defence of Conflict Theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/no5devJYimRt8CAtt/in-defence-of-conflict-theory)).

As per Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I endorse the existential position that life is so complex that there's no set of rules that can always lead us towards the correct moral decision. Nonetheless, as a pragmatic adjustment, I concede that rules are necessary for social co-ordination and as a defence against motivated reasoning.

Even though I've only read a single chapter of Peter Unger's *Living High and Letting Die* I was really struck by his approach. While most philosophers aim to make thought experiments as simple as possible, Peter Unger tends to consider though experiments with more options and more complexity. His approach allows a better exploration of how moral psychology actually works, such as when adding or removing options changes our tendency to rank the other options. It seems inevitable that any moral argument will depend on intuitions and so it is vital to understand the best that we can how these are formed.

For example, he makes a very persuasive argument that for moral dilemmas like the trolley problem we tend to conceive as some people as being within the scope of the problem and some people being outside the scope of the problem, with us not having a right to harm people outside the scope to protect people inside the scope. As an illustration, people are much more willing to shift a trolley from a track containing five people to a track containing one person than to shift the train off the tracks where it'll go across a road and then hit someone in their own backyard. Since our conception of who is or isn't within a problem can be changed by adding or removing options, he argues very persuasively that this is a cognitive distortion.  
  
In terms of my actual moral position, I have a degree of sympathy towards utilitarianism as a principled morality. The distinction between acts and ommissions seems to be more of a matter of pragmatics than principle a) because it is more intrusive for the government to tell you to do things than for it to ban things and b) because we don't trust others enough to let them hurt some people in order to protect others.

Another reason I lean utilitarian is that it just feels that at some level of stakes we have to be willing to act for the greater good. While some people maintain that we are unjustified in sacrificing an innocent life even if it were necessary to save the whole world, that feels like a naive and overly sentimental position to me.  
  
That said, I don't feel endorse utilitarianism as a pricipled morality, largely because of the difficultly I have endorsing utility monsters.

With regards to the particular brand of utilitarianism, I strongly lean towards total utilitarianism. The Repugant Conclusion isn't as damaging as it first sounds because very even small amounts of positive utility are still positive, unlike say, if we were talking about distributions of money where living on less than a certain amount of money may lead to a life becoming net-negative. Additionally, the [Sadistic Conclusion](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Population_ethics) seems at least as bad as the Repugnant Conclusion, so comparatively, average utilitarianism is worse.

Pragmatically, I tend to endorse a somewhat unprincipled combination of utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics as utilitarianism helps us keep in mind consequences, deonotology defends us against motivated reasoning and virtue ethics helps us become better people.

I have a great appreciation of the elegance and appeal of Libertarianism, but I found Scott Alexander's [Non-Libertarian FAQ](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/) Persuasive. Ultimately, the price of pure libertarianism would be people dying on the streets or having their potential wasted and once we've conceded freedom as an absolute principle, it is hard to prevent libertarianism collapsing down to a form of utilitarianism.

Since this post was focused more on summarising my views rather than arguing for them, I've only really provided high-level justifications for my views. However, I'm quite happy to provide extra details in the comments.