election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
And I would say that this is simply not the case.
and i just explained why you're wrong.
Well no.
toby said:
To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one.that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines. you're not making a sophisticated argument.
It's difficult to make a particularly sophisticated argument about the definition of a word. You're just saying that it must mean this. You are wrong. Maybe the person is using the word thinking that there is an objective ethical system. Lots of people think that. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. That is what you seem to be missing. Check with everyone in the world who has ever used the word and make sure they agree with you about how they are using the word and get back to me.
If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included.
philosophers whose works i've read and who were cited in my ethics treatise:
Derek Parfit — All Souls College, Oxford; Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2011). The dominant moral philosopher of the late 20th century; source of the repugnant conclusion and the mere addition paradox, and of the reductionist view of personal identity that underwrites much of how veil arguments handle "who you might be."
John Rawls — Harvard, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century; A Theory of Justice (1971) introduced the veil of ignorance and the maximin/difference principle you criticize.
John Harsanyi — economist rather than philosopher, Berkeley, Nobel laureate 1994 for game theory; his 1953/1955 papers gave the expected-utility version of the veil argument and are the foundational text of utilitarian contractualism.
T.M. Scanlon — Harvard, What We Owe to Each Other (1998); the leading contemporary contractualist and the source of the "could not reasonably reject" standard.
David Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739); the is–ought passage in Book III is the origin of the whole meta-ethical problem.
J.L. Mackie — Oxford (University College), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977); the canonical statement of moral error theory and the argument from queerness.
Richard Joyce — Victoria University of Wellington, The Myth of Morality (2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006); the main figure in evolutionary debunking arguments and moral fictionalism.
Peter Singer — Princeton/Melbourne, Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics; the best-known living utilitarian.
Sam Harris — PhD in neuroscience, BA in philosophy from Stanford; not an academic philosopher. The Moral Landscape (2010) argues science can determine values.
Alex O'Connor — degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford; a public commentator, not an academic. Cited for the emotivist "boo, murder" line, which traces back to A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.
Non-philosophers cited on empirical grounds:
Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, Oxford, The Selfish Gene (1976); gene-level selection, no standing in ethics as such.
Jean-Baptiste André and Nicolas Baumard — evolutionary/cognitive scientists at ENS and Institut Jean Nicod; their Nash-bargaining model of fairness intuitions is the relevant work, and Baumard's The Origins of Fairness (2016) is the book-length version.
Plato — the euthyphro dilemma is from the Euthyphro, though you invoke it without naming him.
i did not yell at any of my philosophy professors in college in 1998 and 1999, but i did have some good arguments with them.
That's good, but your posts on here suggest to me that you expect the first lecture on an ethics course to begin: "Here are some ethical systems that people have come up with over the years. They are rubbish. Now here's utilitarianism..."
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@toby-pereira said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
It's difficult to make a particularly sophisticated argument about the definition of a word. You're just saying that it must mean this. You are wrong.
you have zero evidence of that. as i've pointed out, you cannot show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word "ought" could possibly refer to. it's just expressing a vibe.
this is so ethics 101 i don't know what else to say. maybe watch an accomplished philosopher explain.
Youtube VideoMaybe the person is using the word thinking that there is an objective ethical system.
that's exactly what i said!! they're expressing an opinion/vibe/emotion that they possibly (but wrongly) think is objective.
they, like you, cannot find any objective basis for this however.
Lots of people think that. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. That is what you seem to be missing.
LOL, that they are wrong is my whole point. so yes, it does matter.
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@clay, can you show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word ‘preference’ could possibly refer to?
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, can you show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word ‘preference’ could possibly refer to?
i already said utilities are subjective, by definition.
no one is claiming obama is objectively good. we are saying people have subject preferences for different outcomes.
and you can elicit those via revealed preference. e.g. would you take a guarantee of a million dollars, or a coin flip for 3 million.
dear. god. this is not complicated.
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@clay that does not answer the question. You rejected “ought” because it does not refer to an objective physical law of nature. “Preference” does not refer to one either. Saying that preferences are subjective and can be inferred from behavior simply replaces your original criterion with behavioral elicitation.
Granting that preferences are descriptively real, it still does not follow that satisfying or aggregating them is good. That is the normative premise you keep declining to examine.
You appear to accept that a preference can be a legitimate higher-order description of some material configuration. What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.
Anyway, this is beyond the scope of this forum.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
that does not answer the question. You rejected “ought” because it does not refer to an objective physical law of nature. “Preference” does not refer to one either.
okay, deep breath...
i did not "reject" ought. i rejected the idea that it is anything other than subjective preference.
of course we already know that "preference" refers to "subjective preference" so there's nothing to argue about there.
Granting that preferences are descriptively real, it still does not follow that satisfying or aggregating them is good.
it is good by definition. "satisfying my preference" is what "good" means.
That is the normative premise you keep declining to examine.
there's no such thing as "normativity". there's just subjective preference.
it's almost as if i thoroughly explained this umpteen times and am having to repeat myself.
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@clay, well then, at least we can be highly confident that you subjectively prefer aggregate utility maximization—and, on your account, that neither you nor anyone else has any substantive, non-preference-based reason to adopt that position.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, well then, at least we can be highly confident that you subjectively prefer aggregate utility maximization—and, on your account, that neither you nor anyone else has any substantive, non-preference-based reason to adopt that position.
this is nonsensical. aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer. you cannot "prefer" something other than aggregate utility maximization as that would be like saying "i prefer what i don't prefer."
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@clay “aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer.”
Unless there is a known feasible option that maximizes every individual’s utility simultaneously, with no interpersonal tradeoffs, that is simply false. Aggregate utility maximization maximizes the sum or expected sum of utilities, not each person’s utility.
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@clay I think you totally missed the point of what I was saying. The thing I was disputing was:
@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
Ethics 101 does not determine what a word means. Words are used in English by English-speaking people in many ways, some informal, some formal and with varying degrees of vagueness etc. It does not matter if someone's meaning for a word is at bottom incoherent or that the thing they mean doesn't exist in real life. The word doesn't then not mean what they were using it to mean. Experts in ethics do not have ownership of the word "ought". So:
as i've pointed out, you cannot show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word "ought" could possibly refer to. it's just expressing a vibe.
No, and I wasn't trying to. You just missed what I was saying. I'll repeat the example, but with a bit of added commentary for clarity.
Someone might say, "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
I initially said this doesn't fit your definition of "ought" above because he's not expressing a subjective preference. You countered by saying:
that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines.
(So therefore still a subjective preference.) But I then said actually, he could be referring, not to anyone's subjective preference, but to a moral framework that exists outside of his (or anyone else's) subjective preferences.
So therefore his use of the word "ought" does not refer to subjective preferences. It refers to this objective framework that he believes exists. Even if it doesn't exist. And however you cut it, it's still a long way from:
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
But I'm not sure how else to get the point across. OK, someone believes in ghosts. A ghost (by some definition) is the soul of a dead person that still in some manner inhabits our physical realm.
It doesn't matter if ghosts are real - this is what it means to be a ghost under this definition. Someone might say:
"A ghost is just an illusion. That's what it means to be a ghost."
It might be the case that all the ghosts that people have claimed to have seen are all illusions, and indeed that no "magical" ghosts exist, but this does not change the definition of what a ghost is. A definition can be of something that doesn't exist, or is at bottom incoherent.
That's all I'm saying. Words mean what people use them to mean. There is no dictionary in the sky that defines a word in a very specific way. And there is certainly nothing that cancels out the definition of a word based on the non-existence or incoherence of a concept.
If someone uses the word "ought" to refer to some objective morality, then that is what they are using the word to mean.
This is a silly argument anyway, and far removed from election by jury!
Edit - you do this routine of incredulity when you think people aren't getting what you're saying, but I could do the same on you here. Your lack of comprehension of what I am saying is staggering.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay “aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer.”
Unless there is a known feasible option that maximizes every individual’s utility simultaneously, with no interpersonal tradeoffs, that is simply false. Aggregate utility maximization maximizes the sum or expected sum of utilities, not each person’s utility.they are SAME THING, in expectation.
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@clay sure, if we all agree to hook ourselves up to the National Brain Swapping Initiative’s Brain-Swapper 2000 every time a new policy decision is made, you’re pretty much on the money.
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@toby-pereira said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
Ethics 101 does not determine what a word means.
i don't care if "ethics" does it, it's still obviously true that it does not "mean" anything. and it technically just communicates "i have a preference for this thing", and possibly also, "i wrongly believe that it's objectively true, because i do not realize it's subjective not objective."
A ghost (by some definition) is the soul of a dead person that still in some manner inhabits our physical realm.
It doesn't matter if ghosts are real - this is what it means to be a ghost under this definitionthere you've clearly named a specific concrete concept, whether it's real or not. you can draw a ghost even.
but no such thing exists for the word "ought". it has no actual meaning. it's just expressing a preference.
i beg of you to actually spend a few minutes learning what real philosophers say about this. here's alex o'connor saying essentially this: it's just expressing an emotion. it's not an actual semantically meaningful word.
this is just super elementary ethics and i cannot believe you're unfamiliar with it even after i've repeatedly pointed it out to you.
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@clay “real philosophers” say many different things about almost everything. I’ll repeat the main point that you did not address: What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay “real philosophers” say many different things about almost everything. I’ll repeat the main point that you did not address: What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.
this is word salad. give me a specific concrete definition of "ought".
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@clay Kant does a fair job of that, in direct contest with utilitarian ethics, through his categorical imperative, as one example. If you engaged with ethics as deeply as you claim, you would be well aware of that.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay Kant does a fair job of that, in direct contest with utilitarian ethics, through his categorical imperative, as one example. If you engaged with ethics as deeply as you claim, you would be well aware of that.
there is no alternative to utilitarian ethics. preference sovereignty principle says you cannot separate "ethics" from "what people would prefer", and preferences are maximized in in terms of expected utility.
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@clay you can plug your ears and say La La La all you like. Kantian ethics is a perfectly legitimate alternative to utilitarian ethics.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay you can plug your ears and say La La La all you like. Kantian ethics is a perfectly legitimate alternative to utilitarian ethics.
brutally false. i completely debunked kant indirectly at wonk.blog/ethics - and the massive gaping holes in his arguments are widely known.
The wonk.blog framework versus Kantian ethics
The axioms are directly contradictory
Preference sovereignty holds that no outcome is unethical if those subject to it would freely choose it fully informed. Kant's Formula of Humanity holds that one can act wrongly toward a person who has consented, and even toward oneself: suicide, selling an organ, consensual self-degradation are all forbidden because they treat humanity merely as a means. Kant needs the moral law to bind independently of inclination; that independence is the entire point of "categorical." The wonk.blog framework holds that any rule capable of overriding an informed preference is thereby refuted. There is no diplomatic middle. Kantian ethics is the purest available instance of the thing section viii declares fundamentally flawed.
Kant reified a heuristic and built a metaphysics under it
The rules-as-instruments reading in section viii applies to Kant more than to anyone. "Do not lie" is a cheap, fast, usually-correct approximation. Kant took the felt apodicticity of that rule and inferred that it must be a synthetic a priori truth of pure practical reason. On the wonk.blog account, the phenomenology of "this is simply forbidden, full stop" is exactly what an evolved fast rule feels like from the inside, because a rule that presented itself as revisable would be worse at its job. Kant mistook the introspective signature of a heuristic for evidence of its source.
The murderer-at-the-door case is the framework's section vi test run on Kant's own commitments and failing. Any rule appearing universal should be checked for whether informed agents would prefer its violation. The person hiding in the house would obviously prefer the lie. Kant knew this and bit the bullet in "On a Supposed Right to Lie," which is about as clean a demonstration as the literature offers that the rule was never intrinsic.
The trolley section is a Kantian argument being dismantled
The recoil at pulling the lever, the doctrine of double effect, the means/ends distinction, all of it is Kantian in structure. The essay's veil treatment holds that the ex ante vote is 5-to-1 and unanimous, so the recoil is a bias about agency and physical proximity rather than a moral discovery. Greene's dual-process work is the empirical companion piece and would be worth citing in any expansion of that section: deontological verdicts track the affective, fast system and correlate with personal-force features carrying no plausible moral weight.
Mackie's queerness argument lands hardest on Kant
Section ix deploys queerness against moral facts in general. Kant's version is the most exposed: a noumenal realm outside space and time, a will that legislates universally, a faculty of pure practical reason that a spatiotemporal brain somehow accesses. Whatever the epistemic access story is supposed to be, it is not one. The essay's amendment to Mackie applies as well: Kant was not asserting a falsehood so much as elaborating an opinion he mistook for a discovery, at extraordinary length.
The parts of Kant that work are veil arguments in disguise
This is the strongest move the framework has available and the one that should lead. Kant's own argument for imperfect duties of beneficence in the Groundwork is that one cannot will a world in which no one helps anyone, because there are circumstances in which one would need others' help. That is positional uncertainty. It is Harsanyi with worse bookkeeping and a metaphysical superstructure bolted on top. Where Kant's arguments reduce to something like the veil, they are plausible; where they do not, they produce the murderer at the door and the ban on suicide. A reduction that explains both the successes and the failures of a rival theory is the good kind of critique.
Autonomy inverted
Kant's central value is autonomy, but Kantian autonomy means conformity to a law given by pure reason, which routinely forbids what the actual agent, informed, wants for himself. By the framework's lights that is heteronomy toward an abstraction. Preference sovereignty is the position that gives actual sovereignty to actual persons over their own lives.
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@clay, this appears to undermine itself at several important points. You claim to have completely debunked Kant, but then concede that your definitional move yields only a stalemate, that the genealogical critique cuts equally against your own foundation, that “free and fully informed” may smuggle in normativity, and that Kantian constitutivism remains a live dispute. Those concessions are incompatible with the claimed total refutation. I recommend writing the argument as explicit premises and implications; the problems should become apparent.
Even if we admit preference sovereignty, its own formulation is severely self-limiting. It applies only where all affected parties would freely and unanimously choose an outcome while fully informed. That in itself does not imply aggregate utility maximization in cases of conflicting interests. To derive aggregate utility maximization, Harsanyi must introduce additional assumptions through an identity-lottery construction. That construction can make aggregate utility numerically equivalent to the expected utility of a hypothetical identity-uncertain chooser, but it does not make that quantity identical to each actual person’s utility, nor does it establish why taking Harsanyi’s hypothetical standpoint is normatively authoritative.
What you have, in effect, is a selected collection of normative operations—idealized preference under conditions of rationality, freedom, and full information; identity uncertainty; expected-utility reasoning; and interpersonal aggregation—that define your ethical framework. Choosing different operations can and does yield competing ethical theories that you have not eliminated.
To be clear, some of those operations are at least superficially appealing. The preference-sovereignty principle is reasonable. The arguments that follow once we accept the normative premises built into Harsanyi’s construction may be perfectly valid. But those premises are exactly where justification is lacking, where competing alternatives are abundant, and where legitimate disagreement obviously exists.
We are clearly not getting anywhere, so I’ll offer my ultimate relevant point on this subject and stop. I think the election-by-jury concept is an interesting and reasonable proposal with compelling arguments in its support, and that while there are also completely valid concerns, it’s also plausible that those concerns could be effectively addressed with more collaborative examination and careful approaches to implementation. While it has superficially controversial aspects, engagement with the notion shows that it isn’t a wholly radical idea. I think there are also legitimate generalizations that are equally interesting and reasonable.