#ironism

FWIW I don’t mean capital-U Utilitarian specifically so much as “some beliefs are more useful than others”; my point there is mostly that the /existence/ of superior beliefs is uncontroversial even from a skeptical standpoint, despite that (as you say) we can never agree about which beliefs are superior

I’m pretty sure I disagree with you.  (Would that be sufficient to prove the claim non-non-controversial?)

Like, I believe that some beliefs are superior to others.  In particular, my beliefs are superior to others’.  They are superior according to the standard of being more in line with my beliefs.

My values are (almost?) tautologically superior to other possible sets of values, when evaluated with respect to my values.  But I’m aware that this is tautological, and that I’m not really saying anything there.  And by someone else’s values, their values are superior to mine.  (I sometimes express this as the claim that you can’t say “better” without specifying “better for what?”).

Yeah but that’s not a generalizable tool for “what method produces correct ethical thinking?”

Sure.  But now we’re just exposing the deep flaws in the concept of “correct ethical thinking”.

In order to decide what ethical beliefs are better, we need to know what we think “better” means.  And that means we need an ethical framework.  

There’s no view from nowhere; you can’t judge ethical frameworks without first adopting an ethical framework.  So any time you ask how to do that, you’ve already taken a wrong turn.

You can see this really clearly in @discoursedrome‘s original post, which begins:

At least in the abstract, everyone can probably agree that some beliefs and opinions are more ethical than others, even if only in a utilitarian sense, and that, other factors aside, a person who holds an ethical belief or opinion is a better person than one who holds a less ethical alternative.

And sure, I’ll agree that from a utilitarian viewpoint we can judge ethical beliefs relative to each other.  (From a utilitarian viewpoint, utilitarianism comes out looking pretty good!)  But without (explicitly or implicitly) choosing an ethical standard, you can’t evaluate ethical beliefs relative to each other.

Did you read Scott’s post?

Have any of you read the Hippocratic Oath? It’s crazy! You swear that you’ll hold the person who taught you medicine as dear as your own parents, and give them money if they ever need it. You swear never to practice surgery, because that’s barbers’ work. You swear never to gossip or tell secrets, even outside the context of medicine. No doctor follows all these things.

And the point is, no one actually means that.  No one thinks you’re swearing to teach your med school professors’ children for no pay, and no one will consider you to be violating an oath if you don’t.  No one takes that claim seriously, no one thinks you’re making it seriously, and therefore it’s not dishonest to “swear” it without intending to uphold it.

The fact that you immediately assumed I was talking about the one part of the Hippocratic Oath that people know and care about is kind of my point.

That said, “First do no harm” is kind of bullshit.  First in a trolley problem way: Can you shove someone roughly out of the way to get to a dude having a heart attack in time?  

And second in an informed-consent-to-risks sort of way.  Some treatments are risky but potentially helpful.  I’m a big proponent of the right-to-try stuff and letting terminal patients (consent to) test experimental treatments.   But that is probably a violation of an oath to do no harm.

This is why it's not a lie to tell a fairy tale. Or, you know, to engage in self-deprecating humor, or sarcastically say "and obviously no one would ever do anything that silly". These are all denotatively false statements, but they aren't lies because they aren't interpreted to mean their denotation.

If you stand up and take the Hippocratic Oath at the end of a MD graduation, the meaning you create isn't "listen to these specific words and hold me to them". The meaning you create is "I have just graduated from medical school and am participating in the ritual that accompanies that graduation." And subsequently "violating" that "oath" doesn't say anything about your trustworthiness, because no one was interpreting you as making a serious promise to begin with.

(In the limiting case: if you're acting in a play on stage and your character swears an oath, you would never expect that oath to be binding on the actor. Even though the actor just stood up in front of a thousand people and spoke the oath!)

And you ask "But then how can we distinguish real oaths from performative oaths?" And the answer is that there's no shortcut because all communication is contextual. But we should take seriously promises that are offered seriously in a serious context. And we should take performatively promises that are offered performatively in a performative context.

There's a corollary question, which is where this started on the subject of marriage vows. How can you force other people to take your oath seriously, rather than performatively?

And the answer is, you can't. Meaning is created contextually through communities, and if your community chooses to interpret your words as meaning one thing you can't stop them. (Much like you can't use a slur and then explain "but I mean this lovingly!" You might genuinely mean it lovingly; but that doesn't matter if that's not the meaning it creates for your audience).

In your marriage, you can make a serious oath to your spouse, and both of you can intend that seriously, and it will be a serious oath. As binding on you as your conscience and your spouse dictate.

You can make the oath in front of a community that chooses to accept that oath as serious. And then the community can hold you to the oath, and bind you to it, as much as you abide by that community's norms and wish to remain a member of that community.

Scott presents a ladder of levels we can handle things at:

Explicit models

Emotional reactions

Reified metaphysical essences

Endorsed values based on the essence

and treats these as basically a hierarchy: the top is more sophisticated, and the bottom more abstracted and visceral.

I think his hierarchy makes sense as a causal pathway: the benefits we can see in the explicit model (evolutionarily) lead to emotional reactions, which lead to us reifying our heuristics as a real essence of the thing, and then expressing values about those reified essences.

But I don’t think that as experienced, they stack neatly into a hierarchy the way Scott describes. In particular, I’m strongly in favor of the top and bottom, while opposed to the middle two.

Obviously, if you can build a good, sophisticated, accurate model of something, that’s good for understanding it. And you should use that model if you have it and it works.

And on the other hand, Scott is completely right that our values have to come from somewhere; “wanting people to be happy and healthy” is just as evolutionarily rooted as “wanting green space” or “wanting revenge”. Despite Sam Harris’s philosophical naivete, you can’t remove all possible value judgments from your ethical code.

But metaphysical essences don’t exist. That’s why they have to be reified in the first place. No one ever talks about reifying a chair. And treating metaphysical essences as things that matter leads to a lot of both confused and generally shitty thinking. To my mind, taking metaphysical essences seriously is basically Public Enemy Number 1.

Emotional reactions do exist, obviously. But my experience of the world is of emotional reactions that can mostly be controlled and retrained; I want people to make their emotional reactions subservient to both their endorsed values and their explicit models. (Yes, I know that this is much harder than I’m making it sound. I can dream big).

Ryan (and many similar figures) was treated unreasonably sympathetically by much of the media, in a way that didn't really reflect the facts on the ground.

And this was a good thing, because for civic health there needs to be some opposition figure who's taken seriously. If the New York Times reports that all the republican leadership are con men, for a lot of people that undermines trust in the Times.

We can see exactly that happening right now. Most of the media is reporting that Trump is a dishonest, ignorant, fradul-committing con man with mob ties. And they're reporting this because it's correct! But among a big (20-30%?) swath of the country, that's discrediting the media, not Trump.

The media had to treat some Republican leader as serious. It needed to for its own financial health. And it needed to for civic health, so that political discourse could keep feeling somewhat like discourse.