Very interesting read! I broadly agree with Silas’ comment, and am collecting some of my own thoughts on the matter… Hopefully will be able to give a full write-up of where I am tonight, and/or maybe it will turn into its own post in a day or two.
Ok, this is a bit disorganized and very under-thought, so I might try to write up a neater post soon, but I strongly disagree with what you say about moral disagreement (heh).
Everyone as a kid thinks sex is pretty gross—but then they get used to it, get comfortable with it, and start to think of it as something good and beautiful. The negative reaction you describe gay men as having, initially, to gay sex seems way more analogous to that situation than to a straight man's disgust at gay sex.
> It’s a very common experience for gay men to initially feel disgust and shame at their attractions, but then gradually reduce those feelings of disgust and shame as they expose themselves more and more to homosexual acts and homosexual culture.
Replace "gay" with "straight" and "homosexual" with "heterosexual," and I think the sentence still rings true. (Especially straight men in more prudish cultures, the ones that tend to pride themselves on being exceptionally virtuous.)
Bathhouses seem like an extreme example to me. Arguing, "a man should not be doing extremely sexually explicit things with another man in public" is legit, but it's a subset of "people should not be doing extremely sexually explicit things in public." A peck on the cheek, or even on the lips, is a different situation entirely.
Your example of the rioters is also interesting to me. I think you're right that no one described had a very robust intuition against *rioting* itself, but obviously everyone disagreed about which rioters were justified in their rioting and which weren't! You admit that the riots weren't morally equivalent—and a leftist would agree. Your moral intuitions are in conflict!
"But aren't those just conflicting *political* opinions?"
Yeah, but I think it'd be really strange if we all had vastly different political opinions—vastly different visions of what a just and good society looked like—without also having vastly different moral intuitions. Do you think that all political disagreement just comes from different beliefs about empirical approaches? Or might we all have somewhat different visions of what society should look like? If it's the latter, what separates that from a claim that our moral intuitions are different?
Now, if I'm right, if our intuitions actually do conflict a lot of the time, then I think my argument stays pretty sound. We should be engaged in the iterative intution-pumping process you describe, yes—but we should be working hard to find patterns in our answers and to abstract away to very general moral principles. I think it's likelier that we'll be able to find broad agreement up there—find consistently intuitive answers like "pain is bad"—than down at the level of "gay is gross" or "shit-eating is wrong."
Hopefully I've neither terribly misunderstood what you're saying, nor been terribly unclear!
On the shit point, I honestly just don't find myself having an intuition that eating poop is inherently morally wrong. Maybe I'm just too lost in the sauce or something, but even when I try as best I can, I don't have any noticable intuition of wrongness about eating poop. I of course think its very imprudent, disgusting, and whatnot, but morally I don't see much of anything wrong with it.
Like, if I saw someone eating some shit, I would feel bad for them, and think that they were harming themselves, etc., but I certainly wouldn't feel the urge to punish them, or consider them morally blameworthy for what they did.
Of course they're doing the small harm of causing a disgust reaction in me, but that isn't something about the inherent wrongness of the action, so to that extent I'll agree that there's something *a little* wrong with it (as well as other side-effects like disease-spread and so on).
On the point about intuitions, I broadly agree with your approach, and I suspect we may have misunderstood each other a bit. I agree that we should start with clear cases, and work out a unified theory to accommodate these through reflective equilibrium, etc.
My point was simply this: Our moral intuitions are only about cases where the facts are held fixed, not about the actual world. Our intuitions about actual cases are contingent on what inferences we make about the descriptive state of the actual world, which are subject to revision--and descriptive evidence or moral theories cannot be overturned by our moral judgements in the actual world.
To illustrate: Suppose I see someone burning a child alive. I obviously infer that that is immoral. But that is only because I infer, based on my observations etc., that the child feels pain and whatnot. If I then find out that the child is a philosophical zombie, I revise my model of what the actual world is like, and the moral judgement I made prior to this new descriptive knowledge no longer has any weight for my actual valuation of the case.
It sounds to me like your disagreement more comes down to the fact that you think the shrimp-pain world isn't bad, regardless of whether it's the actual world or a hypothetical one. I of course disagree with this (I think other clearer intuitions, combined with things like scope insensitivity may undercut how much you should trust your shrimp-intuition), but that's more of a first-order moral disagreement than a methodological one, and I actually think we may agree more or less on the general methodology.
Question; what set of steps would you need to reason through in order for you to come to the conclusion: “My intuition is pointed me in a certain direction, but these intuitions seem wrong“
Do moral intuitions and adaptive behavior have to align? If so why? If they don’t align it seems like we would have lost our ability to apprehend them or care to obey them long ago due to natural selection.
It could be adaptive on a societal level in a subsidiarity kind of way. Like it is useful for people to have someone who would go to great lengths to help you and people doing well is good for society. You can only practically take on this role for a few people, thus the parental role in and of itself is useful even if it would be ideal, individually, to take on that role with a relative.
I agree that we can have a moral obligation to do something maladaptive. My point was more that the practice of adoption was adaptive because of my argument above (adoption good for society, better society is good for individuals). That is enough, I think (maybe not?), to save the intuition from evolutionary interference (my worry from the first comment).
“I am not totally opposed to homosexuality and I think it is sometimes acceptable for homosexuals to have sexual relationships with each other.”
Under what circumstances is it acceptable for homosexuals to have sexual relations with each other? The magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches otherwise:
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”
Very interesting read! I broadly agree with Silas’ comment, and am collecting some of my own thoughts on the matter… Hopefully will be able to give a full write-up of where I am tonight, and/or maybe it will turn into its own post in a day or two.
Ok, this is a bit disorganized and very under-thought, so I might try to write up a neater post soon, but I strongly disagree with what you say about moral disagreement (heh).
Everyone as a kid thinks sex is pretty gross—but then they get used to it, get comfortable with it, and start to think of it as something good and beautiful. The negative reaction you describe gay men as having, initially, to gay sex seems way more analogous to that situation than to a straight man's disgust at gay sex.
> It’s a very common experience for gay men to initially feel disgust and shame at their attractions, but then gradually reduce those feelings of disgust and shame as they expose themselves more and more to homosexual acts and homosexual culture.
Replace "gay" with "straight" and "homosexual" with "heterosexual," and I think the sentence still rings true. (Especially straight men in more prudish cultures, the ones that tend to pride themselves on being exceptionally virtuous.)
Bathhouses seem like an extreme example to me. Arguing, "a man should not be doing extremely sexually explicit things with another man in public" is legit, but it's a subset of "people should not be doing extremely sexually explicit things in public." A peck on the cheek, or even on the lips, is a different situation entirely.
Your example of the rioters is also interesting to me. I think you're right that no one described had a very robust intuition against *rioting* itself, but obviously everyone disagreed about which rioters were justified in their rioting and which weren't! You admit that the riots weren't morally equivalent—and a leftist would agree. Your moral intuitions are in conflict!
"But aren't those just conflicting *political* opinions?"
Yeah, but I think it'd be really strange if we all had vastly different political opinions—vastly different visions of what a just and good society looked like—without also having vastly different moral intuitions. Do you think that all political disagreement just comes from different beliefs about empirical approaches? Or might we all have somewhat different visions of what society should look like? If it's the latter, what separates that from a claim that our moral intuitions are different?
Now, if I'm right, if our intuitions actually do conflict a lot of the time, then I think my argument stays pretty sound. We should be engaged in the iterative intution-pumping process you describe, yes—but we should be working hard to find patterns in our answers and to abstract away to very general moral principles. I think it's likelier that we'll be able to find broad agreement up there—find consistently intuitive answers like "pain is bad"—than down at the level of "gay is gross" or "shit-eating is wrong."
Hopefully I've neither terribly misunderstood what you're saying, nor been terribly unclear!
I appreciate the response!
On the shit point, I honestly just don't find myself having an intuition that eating poop is inherently morally wrong. Maybe I'm just too lost in the sauce or something, but even when I try as best I can, I don't have any noticable intuition of wrongness about eating poop. I of course think its very imprudent, disgusting, and whatnot, but morally I don't see much of anything wrong with it.
Like, if I saw someone eating some shit, I would feel bad for them, and think that they were harming themselves, etc., but I certainly wouldn't feel the urge to punish them, or consider them morally blameworthy for what they did.
Of course they're doing the small harm of causing a disgust reaction in me, but that isn't something about the inherent wrongness of the action, so to that extent I'll agree that there's something *a little* wrong with it (as well as other side-effects like disease-spread and so on).
On the point about intuitions, I broadly agree with your approach, and I suspect we may have misunderstood each other a bit. I agree that we should start with clear cases, and work out a unified theory to accommodate these through reflective equilibrium, etc.
My point was simply this: Our moral intuitions are only about cases where the facts are held fixed, not about the actual world. Our intuitions about actual cases are contingent on what inferences we make about the descriptive state of the actual world, which are subject to revision--and descriptive evidence or moral theories cannot be overturned by our moral judgements in the actual world.
To illustrate: Suppose I see someone burning a child alive. I obviously infer that that is immoral. But that is only because I infer, based on my observations etc., that the child feels pain and whatnot. If I then find out that the child is a philosophical zombie, I revise my model of what the actual world is like, and the moral judgement I made prior to this new descriptive knowledge no longer has any weight for my actual valuation of the case.
It sounds to me like your disagreement more comes down to the fact that you think the shrimp-pain world isn't bad, regardless of whether it's the actual world or a hypothetical one. I of course disagree with this (I think other clearer intuitions, combined with things like scope insensitivity may undercut how much you should trust your shrimp-intuition), but that's more of a first-order moral disagreement than a methodological one, and I actually think we may agree more or less on the general methodology.
Very interesting.
LAST I CHECKED IM AN INTP SO YA IVE GOT INTUITION ON DECK
Question; what set of steps would you need to reason through in order for you to come to the conclusion: “My intuition is pointed me in a certain direction, but these intuitions seem wrong“
It would need to conflict with a stronger intuition.
https://open.substack.com/pub/clementpaulus/p/recursive-praxis-living-the-collapse?r=5c1ys6&utm_medium=ios
Do moral intuitions and adaptive behavior have to align? If so why? If they don’t align it seems like we would have lost our ability to apprehend them or care to obey them long ago due to natural selection.
I don't think they always have to align. You should go to great lengths to help an adoptive child, even though it's not adaptive to do so.
It could be adaptive on a societal level in a subsidiarity kind of way. Like it is useful for people to have someone who would go to great lengths to help you and people doing well is good for society. You can only practically take on this role for a few people, thus the parental role in and of itself is useful even if it would be ideal, individually, to take on that role with a relative.
There are differences of degree.
Your degree of moral obligation exceeds the degree of adaptiveness in that case.
I agree that we can have a moral obligation to do something maladaptive. My point was more that the practice of adoption was adaptive because of my argument above (adoption good for society, better society is good for individuals). That is enough, I think (maybe not?), to save the intuition from evolutionary interference (my worry from the first comment).
“I am not totally opposed to homosexuality and I think it is sometimes acceptable for homosexuals to have sexual relationships with each other.”
Under what circumstances is it acceptable for homosexuals to have sexual relations with each other? The magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches otherwise:
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_two/chapter_two/article_6/ii_the_vocation_to_chastity.html
Intuition? I think you mean pre-mental cognition of the forms...