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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham talks about "moral fashions": http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

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I may be starting a longer debate here (and I hope not to), but at least the beauty of moral objectivism is that there would be an independent basis for right/wrong even if the moral “fashions” change.

I try to put this objectivism into practice by defining a goal and deciding whether actions are meeting the goal or not (i.e good or bad), but of course that’s a more pragmatic take than what moral objectivism really is.

A belief in moral objectivism makes fashionable beliefs more dangerous, because those within a given fashion would think they were objectively right. It's the "this time is different" of morality.

> those within a given fashion would think they were objectively right

You seem to have just described subjectivism though.

I think the point is that as humans we have limited perspectives and most of us aren't even aware of those limitations. It is likely not possible for us to come up with any moral rules that are in any way objective. Anything that we come up with is influenced by out human perspective and therefore nothing is truly objective.

I think moral fashions tend to pertain to especially indirect and tenuous consequences. The morality of the supposed consequences themselves aren't usually at issue, it's the causation.

Problem is determining what that independent basis is, and how to derive moral objective truths from it.

I was hesitant to use the phrase “moral objectivism” because what I’m talking about is more moral pragmatism where a goal is defined and good or bad is objectively measured against that goal. What I’ve learned from experience is that where a goal is defined, there is very rarely any confusion about what is a good/bad action. Of course as applied to society where multiple cultures and large nation-stayes exist, we’ll have disagreements about what the goal of cooperation is, but that seems more to me a discussion about politics and conflict instead of ethics itself.

As an example: if we agree that the goal of our species is to live for as long as possible and we look specifically at the threat of climate change, then based on that goal, we could immediately identify whether any given economic activity is good or bad based on its effects on the environment, which would be based on empirical data.

Some people may deny the truthfulness of the data (which then creates “climate change deniers”), but at the core of the people who disagree isn’t so much about doubting the facts, but really, they just disagree that the goal of our species is to survive for as long as possible, and it’s likely that they believe that our goal is to use up as much of the earth as possible within every single person’s lifetime.

> a goal is defined and good or bad is objectively measured against that goal

This seems like standard rational empiricism? Employing reason and observation to benchmark things against predefined values. The difficulty of course is in determining those values in the first place.

This is close to utilitarian ethics. The problem is that, taken to the extreme, it is easy to yield obviously wrong moral decisions.

For example, if we define 'survive as long as possible' as having 1+ humans alive, we might decide we should kill 1/2 of the population (Thanos did nothing wrong).

But that's not obviously wrong, if the alternative really is human extinction with 100% probability.

The true difficulty with utilitarianism is properly defining the metric to be optimized.

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