📰 Subjectivism and Moral Authority - LessWrong

Lots of people I know think that what you should do depends, ultimately, on your contingent patterns of care and concern (suitably idealized), as opposed to some sort of objective “normative reality.”

Ultimately, if we haven’t already “taken a side” — if we abstract away from both your perspective and Clippy’s perspective (and, also, from our own contingent values) — there’s nothing about reality itself that pulls us back towards one side or another.

I imagine feeling like I’m in a position to look them in the eye and say something like: “Stop.” That is, to speak with a kind of finality; to stand on a certain type of bedrock. I’m not just saying or signaling: “I don’t want you to do this,” or “he doesn’t want you to do this,” or “I and others are ready to fight/blame/punish you if you keep doing this,” or “you wouldn’t want to do this, if you understood better,” or any combination of these. Indeed, I am not just “informing them” of anything.

I may try to stop them, and I may succeed, but I am not merely “imposing” my will on them, as they imposed theirs on the homeless man. My will feels like it is not merely mine, and not even merely mine and his (though his is centrally important). It’s rooted in something deeper, beyond both of us; something that seems, to me at least, ancient, and at the core of things; something in the face of which they should tremble; something whose force should hurl them back against the alleyway walls.

What is this “something,” this ground it feels like you’re standing on, in cases like these? I’m going to leave it unspecified for now. But whatever it is, it gives, or seems to give, the homeless man, and those who stand with him against these cruel men, a certain type of “authority.”

Still, it seems plausible to me that something like this notion of “authority” is core to our basic picture of morality. This is something that Stephen Darwall has written a lot about; he calls the perspective we take up, in addressing these men with statements like “Stop,” the “second-person standpoint” — a standpoint he thinks essentially structured by relationships of authority to address claims (understood as something like moral commands) to one another.

Here’s another way of putting this. On a naive, economics-flavored subjectivism, the basic picture is one of agents with different utility functions and beliefs, and that’s all. The naive realism just discussed adds one more element to this picture: namely, the “True” utility function. Great. But the notion of “authority” — and with it, the notion of “obligation,” or of being “bound” by a standard external to yourself — doesn’t actually yet have an obvious place in either picture.

This is related, I think, to the sense in which consequentialists have always had a bit of trouble with the notion of “obligation.”

I am not, here, going to attempt an analysis of what moral obligation or authority consists in, or what a particularly subjectivist account of it might look like. I’ll note, though, that I’m interested in views on which at least part of what gives rise to the moral authority at stake in cases like the beating described above is something about norms that a very wide variety of suitably cooperative and sophisticated agents have strong reason to commit (perhaps from some idealized, veil-of-ignorance type perspective) to abiding by and enforcing.

We might imagine such norms as operative, for example, in some vision of a world in which agents who care about very different things — as different, even, as paperclips and pleasure — manage to avoid the needless destruction of conflict, to act in mutually beneficial ways, and to make adequate space for each to pursue their own ends, conditional on respecting the rights of others to do so as well (see e.g. here).

By telling the men to stop, you are, implicitly, including them in this vision, and the community of agents committed to it, and holding them to the expectations this commitment involves. And in this sense, your address to them is a form of respect; they are not yet, in your eyes, beyond the pale, to treated as mere forces of nature, like tigers and avalanches (albeit, cognitively sophisticated ones), rather than members — however norm-violating — of something collective, some sort of “we.”

I’m not sure how far this picture of authority stemming from cooperative norms will really go, but I think it goes some of the way, at least, to ameliorating the sense in which it can seem, on subjectivism, that one is merely imposing one’s contingent will upon the world, or on agents like the cruel men.

Perhaps the universe itself does not care about those norms; but agents, in general, have reason to care.

I’ll admit, though, that even as I write this, it doesn’t feel like it really captures my intuitive reaction to the cruelty I described above. Really, what it feels like is just: when they kick that homeless man, God roars in anger. What they are doing is wrong, wrong, wrong. It needs to stop, they should be stopped, that’s all, stop them.

Sometimes I imagine learning, against what currently appear to me the strong odds, that some form of non-naturalist moral realism is true. I imagine someone far wiser than I telling me this, and asking: did you really think that it was just some subjective thing, or some sort of complex game-theory decision-theory thing? Didn’t a part of you know, really, the whole time?