Great to see your thoughts on vegetarianism fleshed out. Interesting to see you grew up vegetarian. I think the health risks of veganism in infancy and childhood are sufficiently real that I preferred to raise my daughter non-vegan and transitioned to eating humanely sourced animal products. That said, you seem to have turned out okay!
I find Huemer’s moral realism so difficult to grasp. When I react negatively to seeing an animal in pain, there is some physical causal explanation underlying that connection. This is because the physical universe is causally closed. The reason we don’t have to posit a specific evolutionary hypothesis is because all an evolutionary hypothesis would do is explain why that specific causal mechanism that connects the animal’s pain with my own distress got set up. If you believe the universe is causally closed such an explanation must exist, even if we don’t know what it is. Invoking a “moral fact” is one explanation too many, it is overdetermined. I don’t know if Huemer is a theist but the only way I can make sense of moral realism is if god is intervening in the causal flow of events, beaming intuitions to people. The problem of moral realism isn’t an epistemic problem of “our moral intuitions might be wrong,” it’s a metaphysical problem that these is no sense to the idea of our moral intuitions being right or wrong.
Objective moral facts are supposed to explain our moral intuitions --> moral beliefs --> moral behavior and (supposed) cross-cultural convergence on liberalism
AFAIK Huemer is a platonist about mathematics and about ethics. So moral facts are supposed to explain the truth of (at least some) of our positive ethical judgements, but are not supposed to cause anything. It’s not like number 7 causes something to happen, there are just true statements that one can make about number 7.
How are moral facts supposed to fit into the picture of a causally closed physical universe? How does invoking such a moral fact add to our ability to explain behaviour?
The motivation for affirming the moral facts isn't to add to our ability to explain behaviour, so showing they don't explain behavior doesn't undermine them. If I say pain is bad, I'm not trying to identify the causal connections between aspects of the physical world; I'm making an evaluative statement.
It seems like you are conceiving of the moral facts as supervenient somehow on the phsycial world, which is not the standard view. Saying pain is bad is analogous to saying the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or identifying the one billionth digit of pi; these are (alleged) necessary truths that would hold regardless of the particulars of the physical world.
What’s preventing there from existing a being who is biologically constituted to place positive value on “immoral” states of affairs and negative value on “moral” states of affairs? In what sense would such a being be “making a mistake”? No consequences seem to follow from someone’s fundamental moral intuitions being “in error,” which is why I find it very hard to grasp why it even makes sense to speak of “facts” or “error.”
No consequences seem to follow from affirming the various false theories of the JFK assasination or the origins of the universe, but that doesn't mean there's no fact of the matter about what happened. Your logic seems to entail total skepticism about knowledge.
The reason we don’t have to posit a specific evolutionary hypothesis is because all an evolutionary hypothesis would do is explain why that specific causal mechanism that connects the animal’s pain with my own distress got set up.
I don’t think that emotions are as closely tied to ethics as you assume they are. You might be more upset about stranger killing your dog than about the Holocaust, but you recognize intellectually that the latter is far worse.
If you believe the universe is causally closed such an explanation must exist, even if we don’t know what it is.
Don’t see how it’s relevant or why should we believe in the principle of causal closure of the physical. It’s not like there are some moral particles or fields somewhere, ethical facts are supposed to be abstract facts just like mathematical truths.
Nathan has the origins of woke exactly right. Unfortunately, Huemer seems like he has a bad case of blank-slateism...
Regarding vegetarianism, if we weren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat? ...okay, bad joke. I agree with Huemer that we really need to move toward a more humane treatment of animals raised for food. Factory farming has gotten out of control.
Finally, evolution doesn't stop at the neck up... It seems to me that the onus is on Huemer to show why evolution isn't responsible for our ethical beliefs... that's what Occam's razor would require.
It seems to me that the onus is on Huemer to show why evolution isn't responsible for our ethical beliefs...
It doesn’t seem to me like he is saying that at all. The question is whether our moral intuitions are adaptations or byproducts of evolution. It’s not like every human trait is an adaptation. It might be that intelligence was useful for survival and reproduction and intelligence enables us to have roughly correct ethical intuitions.
If people had the intuition that pleasure is bad, I would count this as good evidence against evolutionary debunking accounts of morality. A pretty popular utilitarian Substacker explicitly wrote that he thinks pain is bad because it seems bad to him when he himself experiences it, and he extends that to other beings. Well, it's not hard to see why evolution would make it seem that way. I'm not sure if Huemer takes exactly that tack.
More generally, it's obvious to me at least that our moral intuitions are reasonably well adapted to promote our survival as conscious beings. If you think moral facts are just ontologically real things which did not arise from evolution, then it's not clear why this should be the case. There would be no particular reason why we couldn't have a moral intuition in favor of self-destructive, pointless or nonsensical behavior. So here the odds ratio is in favor of the evolutionary debunking explanation.
What is Huemer’s explanation for why this oppositional culture didn’t arise among other opressed minorities like Jews, Chinese in Malaysia etc. and exists among blacks not just in the United States, but also in Brazil, South Africa…?
Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think Huemer was necessarily defending the oppositional cultural theory--just arguing that one can reasonably oppose wokism by subscribing to it.
He did seem to imply in Progressive Myths that “acting white” accusation or single parenthood among blacks explained racial differences in test scores. As far as I remember from Murray-Flynn debate (people can find it on YouTube), studies don’t show that single parenthood predicts lower IQ in children after adjusting for maternal IQ. According to Fryer (2009), Hispanics popularity falls even more than blacks’ with rising GPA, yet the former have higher IQs than the latter.
Put differently, evaluated at the sample mean, a one-standard-deviation increase in grades is associated with roughly a .103-standard-deviation decrease in social status for blacks and a .171-standard-deviation decrease for Hispanics. For students with a 3.5 out of 4.0 grade point average or better, the magnitude of the racial difference is three times as large.
Furthermore, according to the study, the acting white phenomenon has almost zero impact on test scores, so it makes it dubious that it explains in any way IQ differences.
Test scores, in lieu of grades, provide different results. The coefficient on the race-achievement interaction is -.003 (.023) for blacks and -.04 (.021) for Hispanics. This is surprising, but quite consistent with the intuition behind ‘acting white,’ assuming that test scores are less observable by one’s peer group than grades. In particular, grades are likely more observable to peers than test scores. In an environment where ‘acting white’ exists, one would expect to see a steeper (negative) relationship between grades and social status.
It is also consistent with the finding that conscientiousness correlates with GPA, but not IQ or standardized test performance.
Great to see your thoughts on vegetarianism fleshed out. Interesting to see you grew up vegetarian. I think the health risks of veganism in infancy and childhood are sufficiently real that I preferred to raise my daughter non-vegan and transitioned to eating humanely sourced animal products. That said, you seem to have turned out okay!
I find Huemer’s moral realism so difficult to grasp. When I react negatively to seeing an animal in pain, there is some physical causal explanation underlying that connection. This is because the physical universe is causally closed. The reason we don’t have to posit a specific evolutionary hypothesis is because all an evolutionary hypothesis would do is explain why that specific causal mechanism that connects the animal’s pain with my own distress got set up. If you believe the universe is causally closed such an explanation must exist, even if we don’t know what it is. Invoking a “moral fact” is one explanation too many, it is overdetermined. I don’t know if Huemer is a theist but the only way I can make sense of moral realism is if god is intervening in the causal flow of events, beaming intuitions to people. The problem of moral realism isn’t an epistemic problem of “our moral intuitions might be wrong,” it’s a metaphysical problem that these is no sense to the idea of our moral intuitions being right or wrong.
Moral realism isn’t a causal explanation for any phenomena though.
Objective moral facts are supposed to explain our moral intuitions --> moral beliefs --> moral behavior and (supposed) cross-cultural convergence on liberalism
AFAIK Huemer is a platonist about mathematics and about ethics. So moral facts are supposed to explain the truth of (at least some) of our positive ethical judgements, but are not supposed to cause anything. It’s not like number 7 causes something to happen, there are just true statements that one can make about number 7.
By phenomena in this context I mean observable behavior
How are moral facts supposed to fit into the picture of a causally closed physical universe? How does invoking such a moral fact add to our ability to explain behaviour?
The motivation for affirming the moral facts isn't to add to our ability to explain behaviour, so showing they don't explain behavior doesn't undermine them. If I say pain is bad, I'm not trying to identify the causal connections between aspects of the physical world; I'm making an evaluative statement.
It seems like you are conceiving of the moral facts as supervenient somehow on the phsycial world, which is not the standard view. Saying pain is bad is analogous to saying the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or identifying the one billionth digit of pi; these are (alleged) necessary truths that would hold regardless of the particulars of the physical world.
What’s preventing there from existing a being who is biologically constituted to place positive value on “immoral” states of affairs and negative value on “moral” states of affairs? In what sense would such a being be “making a mistake”? No consequences seem to follow from someone’s fundamental moral intuitions being “in error,” which is why I find it very hard to grasp why it even makes sense to speak of “facts” or “error.”
No consequences seem to follow from affirming the various false theories of the JFK assasination or the origins of the universe, but that doesn't mean there's no fact of the matter about what happened. Your logic seems to entail total skepticism about knowledge.
The reason we don’t have to posit a specific evolutionary hypothesis is because all an evolutionary hypothesis would do is explain why that specific causal mechanism that connects the animal’s pain with my own distress got set up.
I don’t think that emotions are as closely tied to ethics as you assume they are. You might be more upset about stranger killing your dog than about the Holocaust, but you recognize intellectually that the latter is far worse.
If you believe the universe is causally closed such an explanation must exist, even if we don’t know what it is.
Don’t see how it’s relevant or why should we believe in the principle of causal closure of the physical. It’s not like there are some moral particles or fields somewhere, ethical facts are supposed to be abstract facts just like mathematical truths.
Nathan has the origins of woke exactly right. Unfortunately, Huemer seems like he has a bad case of blank-slateism...
Regarding vegetarianism, if we weren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat? ...okay, bad joke. I agree with Huemer that we really need to move toward a more humane treatment of animals raised for food. Factory farming has gotten out of control.
Finally, evolution doesn't stop at the neck up... It seems to me that the onus is on Huemer to show why evolution isn't responsible for our ethical beliefs... that's what Occam's razor would require.
It seems to me that the onus is on Huemer to show why evolution isn't responsible for our ethical beliefs...
It doesn’t seem to me like he is saying that at all. The question is whether our moral intuitions are adaptations or byproducts of evolution. It’s not like every human trait is an adaptation. It might be that intelligence was useful for survival and reproduction and intelligence enables us to have roughly correct ethical intuitions.
If people had the intuition that pleasure is bad, I would count this as good evidence against evolutionary debunking accounts of morality. A pretty popular utilitarian Substacker explicitly wrote that he thinks pain is bad because it seems bad to him when he himself experiences it, and he extends that to other beings. Well, it's not hard to see why evolution would make it seem that way. I'm not sure if Huemer takes exactly that tack.
More generally, it's obvious to me at least that our moral intuitions are reasonably well adapted to promote our survival as conscious beings. If you think moral facts are just ontologically real things which did not arise from evolution, then it's not clear why this should be the case. There would be no particular reason why we couldn't have a moral intuition in favor of self-destructive, pointless or nonsensical behavior. So here the odds ratio is in favor of the evolutionary debunking explanation.
What is Huemer’s explanation for why this oppositional culture didn’t arise among other opressed minorities like Jews, Chinese in Malaysia etc. and exists among blacks not just in the United States, but also in Brazil, South Africa…?
Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think Huemer was necessarily defending the oppositional cultural theory--just arguing that one can reasonably oppose wokism by subscribing to it.
Indeed, cultural explanations for racial disparities have many obvious logical and factual problems, as I've discussed: https://ncofnas.com/p/thomas-sowells-wishful-thinking-about
He did seem to imply in Progressive Myths that “acting white” accusation or single parenthood among blacks explained racial differences in test scores. As far as I remember from Murray-Flynn debate (people can find it on YouTube), studies don’t show that single parenthood predicts lower IQ in children after adjusting for maternal IQ. According to Fryer (2009), Hispanics popularity falls even more than blacks’ with rising GPA, yet the former have higher IQs than the latter.
Put differently, evaluated at the sample mean, a one-standard-deviation increase in grades is associated with roughly a .103-standard-deviation decrease in social status for blacks and a .171-standard-deviation decrease for Hispanics. For students with a 3.5 out of 4.0 grade point average or better, the magnitude of the racial difference is three times as large.
Furthermore, according to the study, the acting white phenomenon has almost zero impact on test scores, so it makes it dubious that it explains in any way IQ differences.
Test scores, in lieu of grades, provide different results. The coefficient on the race-achievement interaction is -.003 (.023) for blacks and -.04 (.021) for Hispanics. This is surprising, but quite consistent with the intuition behind ‘acting white,’ assuming that test scores are less observable by one’s peer group than grades. In particular, grades are likely more observable to peers than test scores. In an environment where ‘acting white’ exists, one would expect to see a steeper (negative) relationship between grades and social status.
It is also consistent with the finding that conscientiousness correlates with GPA, but not IQ or standardized test performance.