I also have this with my own internal moral scrutiny. If I accidentally buy an animal product, I find it quite easy to forgive myself. If I say something that could be misconstrued as rude, I will find myself thinking about it 10 years later. Makes no sense!
This seems like a really good objection to emotivism about morality. If morality is just about expressing emotions, rather than recognizing facts, why do our moral judgements so radically diverge from our emotions?
this seems similar to the view that most ‘moral’ positions or feelings are just aesthetic feelings—not in the sense that trumps shooter is less attractive than the mario guy, but that feelings of aesthetic disgust are produced by ‘immoral’ actions (can’t remember who i got this from).
someone being rude to a waitress, for example, may produce the same ‘eugh’ feeling in me than someone eating with their mouth open
Probably Jonathan Haidt! Very standard moral foundations theory stuff. Though he would say rudeness to a waitress violates a different moral foundation than chewing with your mouth open.
I don't think it's quite right to say they are "just" aesthetic feelings though: emotional reactions do exist for a reason. Historically, it was very useful to be disgusted by someone who flagrantly subverts social order, and often still is (insulting the tribal elder, being rude to the waitress; both bad and signs of a bad person!). The problem is that so much of modern life is out-of-distribution.
Also, I think moral intuitionists don't grasp how much of these emotional reactions are cultural. It's not *all* of them, but more than you'd think if you lived most of your life in a western country.
I wouldn't say that wrongness and immortality are orthogonal, just that they're imperfectly aligned. Most evil people are very unpleasant; many unpleasant people are actually evil.
I suspect that nicer people are slightly more likely to be vegetarian, as well, so the correlation is non-zero even at the other end. And effective altruists are generally nice.
However, I agree that the magnitude of the immortality is very disconnected with the magnitude of the wrongness. Eating meat is a very convincing example of that; so is building dangerous AIs.
Spoiler alert: the season finale opens with our charming serial killer hunched over a laptop. The camera pans across his desk, revealing piles of books by Bentham, Mills, and Parfit. On his laptop, the killer opens "EV calculations.xlsx" and starts madly entering numbers. His eyes scan down the columns, finally settling on the bottom row: EV = -3.5. He smiles, opens his drawer, and rips open a fresh box of black nitrile gloves...
I would like to propose something at the extreme right tail of the distribution of “things that matter morally but don't affect us emotionally.” I would propose that there is one thing that matters more than any other moral cause ever conceived, despite the fact that the amount of people caring or talking about it is, in my experience, almost zero. That singular cause is dedicating humanity’s future to a program of converting as much of the universe’s matter as possible into hedonium (a state of matter that maximizes conscious experience of pleasure per unit mass). As a hedonic utilitarian, I believe maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain are the only legitimate moral ends, and that once the possibility of converting all the vast unfeeling matter of the cosmos into minds feeling endless pleasure is contemplated, it becomes clear that it swamps all other causes in moral significance. Even increasing the odds that humanity's future involves converting the universe into hedonium by a fraction of a percent likely matters more than all advocacy against factory farming, human misery, and wild animal suffering combined, so vast is the potential sea of pleasure that has the possibility of being materialized. There is just simply so much matter in the universe that the possibility of converting even a tiny fraction of it into minds experiencing pleasure makes for billions, perhaps trillions of times more pleasure than ever could be experienced within the natural biosphere of earth. So while you continue to fight the good fight and advocate for shrimp and chickens (truly worthy causes in their own right!), I’ll keep prattling on about hedonium, as I believe that even potentially convincing anybody to make this outcome for the universe more likely is the single most significant moral action I can commit, regardless of how distant our own pathos might be from the calculus of maximizing universal pleasure.
I don't think most people think about morality very much. They just obey their conscience (or try to) and your conscience, IMHO, is just the presumed/anticipated disapproval of your peers.
It might be more wrong to assassinate Trump than it is to kill a random dude because when you go after a candidate running for office you are not only trying to kill them but also deprive their supporters their right to vor for their preferred candidate. It's an attack on democracy as well as the individual.
This charity https://taimaka.org/ says it can save a human life for about 1600 dollars using the same formula as give well. Do you think they're legit?
If we're arguing against the "morality as emotions" standpoint, can we do away with emotionally loading every sentence you write about meat-eating?
To steelman you, I think what you're trying to do is get people who do eat meat and recognize it as wrong to have a visceral emotional response to it, in order to (theoretically) get them to stop eating meat. If this were the case though (that people can be conditioned to have a specific emotional response to something), they probably would have already stopped after reading about what happens in the factory farming industry.
I just don't like the idea of saying "Disgust as a basis for morality is wrong. Anyway, here's some disgust-based morality rhetoric!"
Yes. A quest of a moral being is to recallibrate one's aesthetical intuitions to better fit ethical ones.
> Luigi Mangione
I don't think you've properly engaged with Brian Thompson's assassination on philosophical grounds. Previously you've argued for pushing a fat man under the trolley with expectation that it will prevent it from runing over several people as a morally right thing to do. Isn't what Luigi Mangione has alledgedly done, basically this but saving much more people in expectation?
Aren't you commiting the exact same mistake you are critisizing here? You don't like violence and cheering for it on aesthetical grounds, but it doesn't mean that the violent act is necessary morally bad. Did you actually do some utility calculations? Or did you simply go with the vibe?
I also have this with my own internal moral scrutiny. If I accidentally buy an animal product, I find it quite easy to forgive myself. If I say something that could be misconstrued as rude, I will find myself thinking about it 10 years later. Makes no sense!
This seems like a really good objection to emotivism about morality. If morality is just about expressing emotions, rather than recognizing facts, why do our moral judgements so radically diverge from our emotions?
this seems similar to the view that most ‘moral’ positions or feelings are just aesthetic feelings—not in the sense that trumps shooter is less attractive than the mario guy, but that feelings of aesthetic disgust are produced by ‘immoral’ actions (can’t remember who i got this from).
someone being rude to a waitress, for example, may produce the same ‘eugh’ feeling in me than someone eating with their mouth open
Probably Jonathan Haidt! Very standard moral foundations theory stuff. Though he would say rudeness to a waitress violates a different moral foundation than chewing with your mouth open.
I don't think it's quite right to say they are "just" aesthetic feelings though: emotional reactions do exist for a reason. Historically, it was very useful to be disgusted by someone who flagrantly subverts social order, and often still is (insulting the tribal elder, being rude to the waitress; both bad and signs of a bad person!). The problem is that so much of modern life is out-of-distribution.
Also, I think moral intuitionists don't grasp how much of these emotional reactions are cultural. It's not *all* of them, but more than you'd think if you lived most of your life in a western country.
I wouldn't say that wrongness and immortality are orthogonal, just that they're imperfectly aligned. Most evil people are very unpleasant; many unpleasant people are actually evil.
I suspect that nicer people are slightly more likely to be vegetarian, as well, so the correlation is non-zero even at the other end. And effective altruists are generally nice.
However, I agree that the magnitude of the immortality is very disconnected with the magnitude of the wrongness. Eating meat is a very convincing example of that; so is building dangerous AIs.
Another good example of this is how people react to eating dogs vs eating pigs. Both are equally wrong, but one elicits a stronger emotional response.
That's what convinced me to stop reading pigs.
Spoiler alert: the season finale opens with our charming serial killer hunched over a laptop. The camera pans across his desk, revealing piles of books by Bentham, Mills, and Parfit. On his laptop, the killer opens "EV calculations.xlsx" and starts madly entering numbers. His eyes scan down the columns, finally settling on the bottom row: EV = -3.5. He smiles, opens his drawer, and rips open a fresh box of black nitrile gloves...
Just a note- Luigi Mangioni is still only the accused killer, who has previously declared himself to be the patsy. Everyone gets their day in court!
I would like to propose something at the extreme right tail of the distribution of “things that matter morally but don't affect us emotionally.” I would propose that there is one thing that matters more than any other moral cause ever conceived, despite the fact that the amount of people caring or talking about it is, in my experience, almost zero. That singular cause is dedicating humanity’s future to a program of converting as much of the universe’s matter as possible into hedonium (a state of matter that maximizes conscious experience of pleasure per unit mass). As a hedonic utilitarian, I believe maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain are the only legitimate moral ends, and that once the possibility of converting all the vast unfeeling matter of the cosmos into minds feeling endless pleasure is contemplated, it becomes clear that it swamps all other causes in moral significance. Even increasing the odds that humanity's future involves converting the universe into hedonium by a fraction of a percent likely matters more than all advocacy against factory farming, human misery, and wild animal suffering combined, so vast is the potential sea of pleasure that has the possibility of being materialized. There is just simply so much matter in the universe that the possibility of converting even a tiny fraction of it into minds experiencing pleasure makes for billions, perhaps trillions of times more pleasure than ever could be experienced within the natural biosphere of earth. So while you continue to fight the good fight and advocate for shrimp and chickens (truly worthy causes in their own right!), I’ll keep prattling on about hedonium, as I believe that even potentially convincing anybody to make this outcome for the universe more likely is the single most significant moral action I can commit, regardless of how distant our own pathos might be from the calculus of maximizing universal pleasure.
I don't think most people think about morality very much. They just obey their conscience (or try to) and your conscience, IMHO, is just the presumed/anticipated disapproval of your peers.
Is this a subtweet of the Lyman Stone shrimp controversy or am I reading too much into it?
No, though I might write an article about that. Just so stupid!
You should write about Lyman’s recent note he wrote about Glenn’s egg price article. It’s just so obviously motivated reasoning.
It might be more wrong to assassinate Trump than it is to kill a random dude because when you go after a candidate running for office you are not only trying to kill them but also deprive their supporters their right to vor for their preferred candidate. It's an attack on democracy as well as the individual.
It might be more wrong but it is less obviously wrong.
*vote lol
You really should quit writing that various things are "obvious" when a. they're not obvious and b. plenty of people explicitly disagree with them.
Try asking a friend if they think the statement in question is obvious, or think about whether you've ever seen anyone endorse the opposite view.
This charity https://taimaka.org/ says it can save a human life for about 1600 dollars using the same formula as give well. Do you think they're legit?
If we're arguing against the "morality as emotions" standpoint, can we do away with emotionally loading every sentence you write about meat-eating?
To steelman you, I think what you're trying to do is get people who do eat meat and recognize it as wrong to have a visceral emotional response to it, in order to (theoretically) get them to stop eating meat. If this were the case though (that people can be conditioned to have a specific emotional response to something), they probably would have already stopped after reading about what happens in the factory farming industry.
I just don't like the idea of saying "Disgust as a basis for morality is wrong. Anyway, here's some disgust-based morality rhetoric!"
> Wrongness and Dislikability are Orthogonal
Yes. A quest of a moral being is to recallibrate one's aesthetical intuitions to better fit ethical ones.
> Luigi Mangione
I don't think you've properly engaged with Brian Thompson's assassination on philosophical grounds. Previously you've argued for pushing a fat man under the trolley with expectation that it will prevent it from runing over several people as a morally right thing to do. Isn't what Luigi Mangione has alledgedly done, basically this but saving much more people in expectation?
Aren't you commiting the exact same mistake you are critisizing here? You don't like violence and cheering for it on aesthetical grounds, but it doesn't mean that the violent act is necessary morally bad. Did you actually do some utility calculations? Or did you simply go with the vibe?
I doubt that the vast majority of people would actually support the character in YOU or Mangione.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/luigi-mangione-approval-poll-gen-z