Moral Judgments, 2Dism, and Attitudinal Commitments

There's an interesting new paper in Ethics, Moral Realism and Two-Dimensional Semantics by Tim Henning, which offers a lot of opportunities for disagreement. The abstract:

Moral realists can, and should, allow that the truth-conditional content of moral judgments is in part attitudinal. I develop a two-dimensional semantics that embraces attitudinal content while preserving realist convictions about the independence of moral facts from our attitudes. Relative to worlds “considered as counterfactual,” moral terms rigidly track objective, response-independent properties. But relative to different ways the actual world turns out to be, they nonrigidly track whatever properties turn out to be the objects of our relevant attitudes. This theory provides realists with a satisfactory account of Moral Twin Earth cases and an improved response to Blackburn’s supervenience argument.

There are some clever formal moves in the paper, but on a substantive level it does not strike me as very promising. Here's why...

Philanthropy Interview

I was recently interviewed about optimal philanthropy by Alex from OK So What Now?. Follow the link for the full episode (which includes interviews with a psychologist and an economist). Alex was kind enough to send me an mp3 of just our section to post here.

I should flag that this is an edited version, so the audio stream has been cut and moved around a bit. E.g. There's a bit early on where my answer shifts to a slightly different topic, but the question Alex had asked in the meantime was cut out, so I come off as inexplicably rambly! But other than that, I'm pretty happy with the result, and the interview itself was lots of fun.

Error-Adjusted Expected Value

Holden at GiveWell has posted a very interesting analysis of Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally. I've always been suspicious of the idea that we should treat rough subjective estimates of risk (e.g., an "X% probability" that [insert scary futuristic technology here] will destroy the world) equivalently to robustly established probabilities (e.g., an X% chance that a large asteroid will hit the earth within a century). Holden's analysis backs up this intuition, by appealing to the idea that we need to adjust "explicit expected value" calculations by the variance in our "estimate error".

The upshot: robustly established estimates count for nearly their full weight, whereas highly uncertain estimates should barely move us away from our priors. To illustrate: "It seems fairly clear that a restaurant with 200 Yelp reviews, averaging 4.75 stars, ought to outrank a restaurant with 3 Yelp reviews, averaging 5 stars." Why? Because a mere three reviews is not robust enough evidence to shift us far from our prior expectation (i.e. that the restaurant is just average).

Anyway, this strikes me as a very important (and intuitive) result, which my rough summary here doesn't really do justice to. So, go read the whole thing!

Knowing What Matters (draft)

A pdf draft of my paper, 'Knowing What Matters' (forthcoming in Peter Singer (ed.), Does Anything Really Matter? Responses to Parfit) is now online.

Abstract:

Parfit's On What Matters offers a rousing defence of non-naturalist normative realism against pressing metaphysical and epistemological objections. He addresses skeptical arguments based on (i) the causal origins of our normative beliefs, and (ii) the appearance of pervasive moral disagreement. In both cases, he concedes the first step to the skeptic, but draws a subsequent distinction with which he hopes to stem the skeptic's advance. I argue, however, that these distinctions cannot bear the weight that Parfit places on them. A successful moral epistemology must take a harder line with the skeptic, insisting that moral knowledge can be had by those with the right kind of psychology -- no matter the evolutionary origin of the psychology, nor whether we can demonstrate its reliability over the alternatives.

Along the way, I also (1) argue against Street's "normative lottery" analogy; (2) argue that her constructivist view is self-defeating; (3) introduce an "internalist" version of reliabilism; and (4) offer an analysis of when it makes a difference whether some possible disagreement is actual.

I still have a couple of months to put on the finishing touches, so any suggestions would be most welcome!

Fishy Relativism

Paul Boghossian recently wrote a great piece for the NYT on moral relativism (though the general inability of commentators to understand even such a clearly argued article as this makes me pessimistic about the educational prospects of public philosophy). He argues that those who reject moral "absolutes" (or objective facts) should naturally be led to nihilism rather than relativism, so that maintaining our normative practices commits us to accepting moral objectivity. (Non-cognitivist options seem to be bracketed for purposes of this argument, though I suspect that many self-identified "relativists" would really endorse some form of expressivism on informed reflection.)

Stanley Fish has now responded with a post which reveals that he has completely misunderstood the argument.