Handwaving Morality
Contra HWFO on morality
Following a time-honored Bentham’s Newsletter tradition of writing articles about various random topics when I really should be studying for finals.
I have boring political views. They’re mostly sort of milquetoast and liberal, with the most interesting bit being my support of non-interventionist foreign policy. But I spend a lot of time reading articles from people who are not boring liberals, and the best is probably HWFO (short for
(hence the clever pun in the title)). This article, for instance, decreased my confidence a bit in my non-interventionist foreign policy, showing that global war decreased dramatically during the terms of many presidents who I think have bad foreign policies—here’s an illustrative chart:
Does anyone know why there was a massive increase in deaths in Africa around the start of Biden’s presidency?
This article, about ways in which men and women are mistreated, serves to at least significantly challenge the default belief that women are treated much worse than men, which everyone on the left seems to believe as an article of faith, even when they don’t have any reason to believe it and haven’t looked into the topic carefully. So I was excited to see that HWFO—my favorite right-wing critic of most of my beliefs—had written an article about morality. I was less excited when I read the article and found that it included the sorts of errors typical of people who have not thought much about the topic—bizarre extrapolations from banal empirical claims to the nonexistence of objective morality.
HWFO seems to be a moral relativist of some sort. He begins his article by writing:
We don’t do morality around here.
Well, we sorta do, but not in the way that every other blog in the universe does nowadays when they say “my morals are right and those other guys are wrong and therefore you should continue reading my blog because your own morals align with mine. Like and Subscribe to advance your morals!”
Subjectivism is a very implausible view. We should believe things that seem obvious unless given a reason to doubt them. But subjectivism seems maximally implausible. It implies that the wrongness of, say, baby torture depends on some person or group’s attitude towards baby torture. But that doesn’t seem right! If everyone in the world approved of baby torture, it would still be wrong.
In order, then, to have a reason to accept subjectivism, HWFO would have to provide an argument against moral realism that rests on premises more plausible than the premise “no person’s attitude makes baby torture wrong.” He writes:
The problem with being a culture war analyst and a fan of history is that the more you learn the more you realize that morals are relative.
No less than 500 years ago we had an empire just across our southern border with incredible civil works, cities, temples, culture, religion, and mathematics, that revolved entirely around sacrificing virgins and babies to make the sun come up. 500 years isn’t a long time. The Azteca haven’t gone away, they’re still here, but now they watch soccer and drink Modelo and reroof my house. They’re very moral people, so they certainly weren’t objectively evil back then. Their society just had absurdly different rules than ours that look foreign to us.
So the argument is that different cultures have had very different views of morality. But how in the world is that supposed to show that it’s subjective? Different societies have had just as much diversity in the supernatural entities they believe in—that doesn’t mean that whether Brahman exists or Allah does is subjective. Societies have had radically different scientific views, with many thinking that the Earth was flat and the Earth revolved around the sun. But that doesn’t mean that geocentrism was true for them! Societies can be deluded.
Lots of relativists seem to be persuaded by the following argument:
People disagree radically about morality.
???
Therefore, morality is subjective.
But what’s premise 2 supposed to be? It can’t just be “if cultures disagree about some topic then the truth is subjective,” because that would imply that science is subjective and the truth of religious claims.
I’m reminded of South Park’s underpants gnomes—their first step was to get a bunch of underpants and their ultimate aim was world domination. When asked about how stockpiling underpants would lead to world domination, they’d say “that’s only step one.” Okay but what is step two supposed to be? With HWFO’s argument, what is step 2, that links moral disagreement to subjectivism?
I raised this objection to HWFO. He wrote:
We had human sacrifice here 500 years ago, we had slavery 150 years ago. In another 100 years they might consider you to be evil for eating meat. Are you evil?
But this misses the point completely. Slavery was evil not because we now disapprove of it but because it is objectively evil—it caused lots of gratuitous suffering. Eating animals is wrong for the same reason. Morality isn’t determined by societal consensus—it’s determined by moral truths. I know HWFO rejects that view, but he hasn’t given a reason to reject it—he’s just pointed out widespread agreement that applies to numerous areas where there is objective truth.
This happens a lot when people who aren’t philosophically equipped try to reason about philosophy. They’ll give totally confused arguments, where it’s not clear how one would make the core claim precise (seriously, try making a syllogism out of HWFO’s argument). But they’ll act like it settles the issue. This happens even with quite smart people—e.g. Hawking—because philosophy is tricky, subtle, and easy to get wrong, especially if you haven’t thought very hard about it or talked much with people who disagree with you. When people don’t get physics, they assume that there’s some hidden knowledge that they’re missing, but when people don’t get philosophy, they’ll assume it’s naive nonsense.