EA - Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics? by Joe Carlsmith

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics?, published by Joe Carlsmith on February 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)"What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one? Could the blade cut; the fist grasp?"Virginia Woolf1. IntroductionEthical philosophy often tries to systematize. That is, it seeks general principles that will explain, unify, and revise our more particular intuitions. And sometimes, this can lead to strange and uncomfortable places.So why do it? If you believe in an objective ethical truth, you might talk about getting closer to that truth. But suppose that you don’t. Suppose you think that you’re “free to do whatever you want.” In that case, if “systematizing” starts getting tough and uncomfortable, why not just . stop? After all, you can always just do whatever’s most intuitive or common-sensical in a given case – and often, this is the choice the “ethics game” was trying so hard to validate, anyway. So why play?I think it’s a reasonable question. And I’ve found it showing up in my life in various ways. So I wrote a set of two essays explaining part of my current take. This is the first essay. Here I describe the question in more detail, give some examples of where it shows up, and describe my dissatisfaction with two places anti-realists often look for answers, namely:some sort of brute preference for your values/policy having various structural properties (consistency, coherence, etc), andavoiding money-pumps (i.e., sequences of actions that take you back to where you started, but with less money)In the second essay, I try to give a more positive account.Thanks to Ketan Ramakrishnan, Katja Grace, Nick Beckstead, and Jacob Trefethen for discussion.2. The problemThere’s some sort of project that ethical philosophy represents. What is it?2.1 Map-making with no territoryAccording to normative realists, it’s “figuring out the normative truth.” That is: there is an objective, normative reality “out there,” and we are as scientists, inquiring about its nature.Many normative anti-realists often adopt this posture as well. They want to talk, too, about the normative truth, and to rely on norms and assumptions familiar from the context of inquiry. But it’s a lot less clear what’s going on when they do.Perhaps, for example, they claim: “the normative truth this inquiry seeks is constituted by the very endpoint of this inquiry – e.g., reflective equilibrium, what I would think on reflection, or some such.” But what sort of inquiry is that? Not, one suspects, the normal kind. It sounds too . unconstrained. As though the inquiry could veer in any old direction (“maximize bricks!”), and thereby (assuming it persists in its course) make that direction the right one. In the absence of a territory – if the true map is just: whatever map we would draw, after spending ages thinking about what map to draw – why are we acting like ethics is a normal form of map-making? Why are we pretending to be scientists investigating a realm that doesn’t exist?2.2 Why curve-fit?My own best guess is that ethics – including the ethics that normative realists are doing, despite their self-conception – is best understood in a more active posture: namely, as an especially general form of deciding what to do. That is: there isn’t the one thing, figuring out what you should do, and then that other separate thing, deciding what to do. Rather, ethical thought is essentially practical. It’s the part of cognition that issues in action, rather than the part that “maps” a “territory.”But on this anti-realist conception of ethics, it can become unclear why the specific sort of thinking ethicists tend to engage in is worth doing. ...