Something Deeply Funny

Hilarious debate I discovered combing through the journal of absolute truth, which I use to segue to make a profound point about different philosophical starting points

Recently, scrolling through the journal of absolute truth, I came across a very funny debate. The topic is whether it’s ever okay to lie. The answer is, of course, yes. Consider the following thought experiments.

1 Aliens will infinitely torture all humans unless you lie to your friend Fred about something trivial.

2 The nazi’s come to you and ask your if you have Jews in your attic. You do.

3 A person asks you if their dress looks nice. You know that if you say no, they will kill themselves.

4 You can lie once to prevent yourself from ever lying, when you know, probabilistically, that you will tell some future lies.

These cases seem to settle the question—yes, of course you should lie. Lying is often bad, but it isn’t the case that you should never do it. One who denies the force of these intuitions has a radically different (and in my view crazy) starting point from my own.

It’s interesting just how different people’s starting points are. I recently was chatting with a catholic and the conversation turned to the topic of homosexuality. The catholic argued that it was objectionable, because one is misusing faculties that are supposed to be used for a different purpose. The example that was used to establish that one shouldn’t misuse faculties was as follows. Suppose one ate a meal on the ark of the covenant. Surely that would be wrong, my conversational partner suggested?

Of course, to me, this is not at all obvious. In fact, not only is it not obvious, I have precisely no intuitions that it’s wrong to eat a meal on the ark of the covenant. Similarly, the intuitions I appealed to held no weight with my conversational partner (I, of course, was only able to provide a miniscule slice of my cumulative case for utilitarianism). We had virtually no shared premises, which made it hard to converge.

One of the reasons I’ve become less interested in meta-ethics over time, is that I think that a lot of it just hinges on fundamentally different intuitions. While in the domain of normative ethics, I think it’s possible to consult a vast range of possible intuitions and holistically compare them, in meta-ethics, there only seem to be a few intuitions that the realists have that the antirealists don’t.

1 There are irrational desires, e.g. future Tuesday indifference.

2 There are things that are mind independently bad, e.g. infant torture.

I strongly have both intuitions, but if one doesn’t, there isn’t much more to be said.

This point is not original to me, or even to Graham Oppy, though he’s made it many times. It unfortunately turns out that one person’s knock down argument will have an argument that another person will clearly reject. I don’t have super profound things to say about this topic, unlike Nathan Ormond, beyond that this means we should be more modest in our assumptions, and try harder to avoid confirmation bias. It’s very easy to find a series of arguments that all seem correct to you and assume that they’re undeniable, when in reality, they stem from earlier things you’ve already assumed.