Eliminating Morality - Part 2 (with Ethan Moore) copertina

Eliminating Morality - Part 2 (with Ethan Moore)

Eliminating Morality - Part 2 (with Ethan Moore)

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If you want to show your support for my newsletter/podcast, consider becoming a paid subscriber. The proceeds will be donated to animal welfare charities. Thanks for all the support!Without further delay, here is part 2 of my discussion with Ethan. Two eliminativists have surprisingly much to say to each other. For part 1 click here:Transcript[00:02] Walter Veit: All right. Zoom broke up this podcast episode because I am not a premium member: after 40 minutes you are automatically disconnected, unfortunately. Such is life. But to finish my point, there are a lot of choices we make in our lives, certain seemingly strange values you might decide to live under. I went to Japan last year around this time and saw some sumo wrestlers living together, dedicating their lives to this lifestyle. They have to follow certain rules. They have very strict eating regimes. For the moral abolitionist, there is nothing inherently wrong with someone just deciding, willy-nilly, to follow a certain set of rules. But you are then almost treating morality in a similar style: almost like a random set of rules you might choose to live by, rather than trying to attach anything beyond that.[01:11] Ethan Moore: Yes. I am always careful with things like this, because I do not want to take on the mantle of “anything goes”, which is always the brush with which error theory, let alone moral abolitionism, is tarred. There are standards we can subject our decisions to, but these would be standards of what I would call instrumental rationality. Take the person who decides to sit around counting blades of grass all day, the ideally coherent eccentric. If that really coheres with their goals, makes them happy and fulfils their desires, and they can sustain relationships alongside their grass-blade counting, who am I to fault them for it? On the principles of instrumental rationality, that is, you are instrumentally rational to the extent that you pursue the perceived probable means to your ends, they are being instrumentally rational. Of course, if the average person went about counting blades of grass, or devoting their life to sumo wrestling, that would probably be instrumentally irrational for most people, given their desires. But that is a matter of how their desires interact with the practices that lifestyle would require. In fairness, if I gave advice to a friend who was considering becoming a sumo wrestler, what I would ask them is: do you really care about this so much that you will give up all of these other things? Is that what you really care about? Rather than: no, you should not care about that, what is wrong with you? It is a very different orientation.[03:07] Walter Veit: You mentioned earlier that Bentham said natural rights should be thought of as nonsense upon stilts. And Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, takes up that idea and says: yes, it is nonsense, but it is useful nonsense. We might need it for ending conversations; “conversation stoppers”, he calls them. But given what you just said, I think not so. We do not actually want conversations to end by people just declaring that something is some kind of ultimate value. It would be better to talk about means and ends instead. Usually, if there is conflict between people, or if these conversations arise at all, it is because people do not understand why someone else wants to pursue certain ends or favours a certain policy. If you already understood, or were in agreement, there would be little reason to ask. So I think it would usually be better to let people explain, perhaps in excessive detail, what their beliefs are and what goals lead them to endorse a certain action or policy, because that could help us understand each other better. Especially in the culture wars, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding, where people attribute both the wrong goals and the wrong beliefs to the other side. And fair enough, often people do have wrong beliefs and strange goals, but not always. So trying to understand where other people are coming from can be quite useful for getting around conflicts, perhaps in many cases.[04:50] Ethan Moore: Absolutely, I would agree. Normally, the more incendiary the debate, the more misunderstanding is happening. I entirely agree with that, and a lot of my thesis is devoted to arguing it. We do not want conversations to stop. When these things matter to us, we want them to be protracted. We want to be clear on what we want and how to achieve our goals. And if we do have incompatible goals, we want to know about that, because then we know it is a matter of competition, or negotiation. We have these options, and it is good to know which options are available to us. If we have genuinely intractable, incompatible goals, then at least let us be honest about what we are doing: we are competing. That is what we do when we go to the ballot box. We compete with other people who have opposing goals, or at least that is what we think we are ...
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