Comments on Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”

i.

I gather that reading this article and wanting to argue with or about it is a sort of tradition.  I apologize if I’m covering overly well-trodden ground.

ii.

Anscombe is enjoyable to read and she covers a number of interesting points in a short space.  This puts her far ahead of MacIntyre, the other virtue ethicist I’ve read, who makes perhaps one or two discernible claims about morality per hundred pages, carefully hidden among impressive arrangements of meta-claims about how great his claims are and how the other guys’ claims, like, totally suck.  Moreover, Anscombe just comes off as a person who wants to think and communicate seriously about ideas in a way that MacIntyre does not.

I think that is the last positive thing I have to say in this post.

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uploadedyudkowsky:

“Yes,” said the old man in a tone of deep satisfaction. “That was indeed it. You have never been allowed to talk your way out of a logical trap. And before you ask the philosopher’s stone question, you might be interested to know that I do not use the stone as a way of confirming a theory of gravity, as some have suggested. Rather, I get up in the morning and make an appeal to the stone - whatever I can get my hands on - and then wait for a logical paradox to arise, so that, I hope, I will not have to explain the logical paradox to you.”

The Old Alchemist of Ancient Persia sighed. “So you have made an appeal to an item of non-probability, and it has generated a consequence which you know will not alter its original form? But to call that a ‘logical paradox’ is too mild a term -”

The Old Man of Lake Wobegon paused.

“It is a logical paradox,” the Old Man of Lake Wobegon said in a low voice. “For my part, I confess that I am greatly puzzled. I am equally puzzled as to why you would appeal to a rock that does not exist.”

The bearded old man of the mountains did not look toward the forest. “I appeal to one more rock,” the Old Man said. “To the last rock.”

The last rock vanished.

From the last rock rose a line of sight and sound that no one saw coming.

“You know,” said the last man of the forest, “that there is a principle known as Occam’s Razor. I speak openly to you all, so that we may all benefit from its lessons. Occam’s Razor says that when there is anything we can all see, the benefit of an argument goes to those who present their case. When you can all see something that exists, and are both willing to see it exist, it does not usually pay to explain to one person why it is unlikely to happen, and to another person why it is more likely. Occam’s Razor is more difficult to understand than Godel’s Deterministic Fulfillment; but, you may be sure, we must try to apply it all to our particular cases.”

The four of them gazed upward.

As though by great unspoken rules, the trees had all become still.

The last man of the forest approached the last rock. “I am Medb, the bryist. I climb only trees.”

The last man of the forest spoke a word, which split the air into twenty halves, each with a opposite opposite to hear.

“I am Kalthhorin the blacksmith. I forge only metals.”

“I am Mokrax the black-robed, the last of the Druids of the Waning Moon. I speak only of the Forces that burn in the depths of the sky, the powers of heaven and earth. I know no other.”

The last man of the forest sat down cross-legged on a trunk. “My name is Gynaston, the red-haired shepherd. I only know the stars. My ancestors came from the north, long ago, before the rise of Aldmeri civilization. I am a very old man.”

“I am T'Brith the hunter-gatherer. I am the son of a slave. I only know myself. The name of one of the many forces of the night, which can break your dreams and drag you down into them, I know nothing of.”

The last man of the forest sat down cross-legged on a trunk.

“I am Haemovu the priest. I only know my own power, and the things I can and cannot do.”

The last man of the forest sat down cross-legged on a trunk.

“I am Skorda the trader. I only know the flow of my own bladder, and how full it gets.”

“I am Kynesuke the red-robed witch. Only the day I was born, and the day I can know no more.”

Speaking of things I experienced a long time ago that I’m revisiting with Esther: Homestuck.

I’m really glad that Homestuck holds up after all these years.  It’s not perfect, of course, but the things I enjoyed about it in 2011 are still, almost one-for-one, things I have enjoyed while re-reading it in 2019.

This was a pleasant surprise, since the later stretches of the story were so reliably disappointing that it was hard to imagine the earlier parts had been much better.  It felt rational to think I was falling prey to grumpy-old-man syndrome, complaining about the exact same thing I used to like because I wasn’t the easily impressed youth who used to like it.  And maybe it was a plausible hypothesis.  Just not an accurate one.

If there’s a pattern in the cases where some work hasn’t stood the test of time for me, it’s that I liked the concept of the thing more than the thing itself, and could go on liking the concept in principle without ever revisiting its disposable concrete implementation.  Adventure Time was like this for “bizarre and unpredictable but not ‘edgy’ children’s shows”; Pacific Rim was like this for “the grandiose emotions and giant robots of anime transposed into Hollywood vernacular”; even Infinite Jest was like this, for “bizarre disquieting artifacts/experiences about bizarre disquieting artifacts/experiences.”

I enjoyed these things because they proved the existence of the categories they belonged to, by existing while belonging to those categories.  But I didn’t like anything else about them enough to revisit them once they’d served as proofs of concept.

Homestuck was not like this.  It’s not merely appealing as a concrete instance of an appealing category, because it’s hard to even describe what that category would be using only external referents.  It’s just itself, and you can’t throw away the concrete thing and still carry the essence around in your pocket.  And you wouldn’t want to, because the concrete thing is simply good as a concrete thing, too.  The jokes are still funny, the characters still lovable, even in a world where their very existence is no longer surprising.

Esther and I have been watching Star Trek: TNG recently.  We’re watching in chronological order and are still in the 1st season.  It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the show, and some of the episodes I’m seeing for the first time.  Some things that have struck me about it:

- I don’t find the first season nearly as bad as everyone says?  (Admittedly we did skip the 3rd episode, reportedly the worst of the entire series.)

Sure, every episode has some elements – whether in the writing, the acting, or the set and makeup design – that are poorly executed by ordinary standards.  But IMO that’s always true, even in the best of Star Trek.  It’s one of the reasons the Trekkie is such a frequently mocked stereotype.  The show itself is never fully defensible, never not doing something wrong.  It’s why the appeal of Star Trek is so mystifying to a lot of people.

And yet, even as it motivates the question “why do people like Star Trek?”, it is also part of the answer.  That the creators’ reach extends beyond their grasp, that they hold onto their grand dreams of social progress and space exploration even when they can only depict them with thrift-store props and stilted acting, is actually poignantly appropriate for the central themes: humanity is transparently and obviously imperfect, its dreams and ideals are far from being realized, but it holds on to them and keeps going, undaunted.  Towards new life and new civilizations, where no man one has gone before.

Like a stage play, the show runs on willful, not forced, suspension of disbelief: it offers you potential that you can take or leave as you choose, not the illusion of something already made fully real.  Given Star Trek’s goals, this kind of conceptual sketching is more effective than verisimilitude.  Of course this doesn’t feel like we’re really seeing the 24th century.  We can’t see the 24th century; we’re not there.  But we can dream of what’s out there, aware of our current limitations, but refusing to let them bound the breadth of our imaginings.

- On a lighter but related note, there’s usually an element of deliberate comedy in Star Trek, and I think critics often miss this or are uncomfortable with it?  The first season is frequently silly, but it’s not like the creators aren’t aware of the silliness.  I think there tends to be an assumption that, because Star Trek involves such lofty idea(l)s, if you’re laughing it must be a failure of the show.  But these things aren’t actually incompatible.  Among other things it’s a funny show, and it’s intended to be!

- Long ago, back when Voyager was still airing and people were comparing it to TNG and DS9, I remember frequently hearing the charge that TNG was “too metaphysical.”  At the time I didn’t understand this, but now it really stands out to me.  It seems like every other episode involves some godlike being, something far more advanced than 24th-century humanity or its funny-eared siblings, something not even bound by ordinary space or time.

It’s almost like the show wants to mock or question the entire space exploration premise: the characters journey through physical space, to find “what’s out there,” only to be told again and again that the real action is not even happening anywhere in physical space at all, but in some other dimension or higher realm far beyond their powers of conception.  It destabilizes the show’s world and complicates/confuses its themes: it feels like humanity is more at the whim of the elements (or the gods) than ever before, less the master of its own destiny, all their ambitious exploration just a bunch of ants reporting on the scents in the vicinity of their anthill while an unseen city bustles around them.

IIUC, the New Age movement was at a relative peak of mainstream popularity around the time the show was coming out – the Harmonic Convergence was in 1987, The Celestine Prophecy came out in 1993.  I suspect this cultural context is responsible for TNG’s “metaphysical” bent, although TNG (thankfully) never sets up an actual conflict between mysticism and science per se, only a gap between what the characters see and what their current theories can explain.

uploadedyudkowsky:

Notes:

1. The January 1973 issue of Scientific American, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

2. Richard Briffa, “Holographic Transistors”, Science, Vol. 273, June 6, 1967, pp.1348-33, doi:10.1126/science.2468171.

3. “A Theory of Communication”, interview with Charles Tart, The MIT Alumni Magazine, No. 26, Fall 1967.

4. As above.

5. Jonathan I. Kalish, “Learning from Physically Protected Places: The Architecture of Reality”, Review of History of Intelligence, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1991).

6. Brian Greene, “After Telepathy: Communication in the Era of Technology”, Science, Vol. 246, September 26, 1970, pp.829-32, doi:10.1126/science.2621585.

7. Jesse Berrand and David Chalmers, “Communication without Communication: The Paralleling Project and Its Prospects”, Science, Vol. 238, January 12, 1981, pp.1679-84, doi:10.1126/science.2362407.

8. Ibid.

9. Marcello Bombelli, “Silicon Information and the Formation of Technologies: The Case of Computer Programmer Fiction”, Journal of Computer & Unilateral Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 1987).

10. Chris Roberts, “Information as Transputer: Inside the Computer Display Unit”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 1988).

11. Ross Anderson, “A Concept of ‘Information’ That Can Stand Up To Cognition”, Perspectives on Intelligence, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Spring 1991).

12. E. O. Wilson, Information and Culture in Primitive Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

13. Ibid.

14. See “Brief History of Prediction Markets: Lessons for Governance”, Winning at Free-to-Play (January 1991).

15. For a remarkable exposition of the free-to-play phenomenon, see “No Free Ranges!”, in The Essential Rand, Vol. 1, p. 322.

16. See “Pervading Authority: Decentralizing the Development Process”, New Individualism, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1991).

17. For an informative discussion of free software, see “Software for Free Men”, The Transhumanist FAQ, February 2, 1991.

18. For a list of initial sources for the English term “anarchy”, see “Anarchy: An Immaterial State”, in Free to Build (March/April 1991).

19. For more on this topic, see “Freedoms of Speech and of the Press”, in Winning at Free-to-Play (January/February 1991).

20. For a first step toward a solution, see Y. Michael Wilmers, “Natural Order in Anarchy”, in R. A. Torpy and K. Zukav (Eds.), Anarchy: Rights and Obligations in Evolutionary Contexts (Berkeley and Los Gatos, CA: ABC-Clio, 1991).

21. See e.g. the final draft of “Rationality and the Internet”, in Winning at Free-to-Play (January/February 1991).

22. See “The Design Space of Morality”, in R. H. Jacobson, B. Howard, and M. Bly (Eds.), Hostile Paradigm Stereotypes: The Case Against Moral Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

23. See “Changing Your Metaethics”, in R. A. Torpy and K. Zukav (Eds.), Hostile Paradigm Stereotypes: The Case Against Moral Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

24. See Mike Bithell, “I’ll Choose Fun”, in Winning at Free-to-Play, February/March 1991.

25. Colin Wilson, “You could also say that the real justification is that almost no one would try this approach even if everyone was doing it…”, “Cognitive Computing and the Moral Void”, and “John Searle’s Dilemma”, in Winning at Free-to-Play, March/April 1991.

26. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I agree with David Chalmers in “Free Will is Sloppy Work” that you can’t make a computer program that refuses to compute the NO-TRANSLATION predicate. In the computer language of the gophers, the NO-TRANSLATION predicate is defined as:

(NO_TRANSLATION

street-peddler:

nostalgebraist:

Verbal brain noise: “Principles of Dumbassery, 2nd edition”

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Verbal brain noise: “Principles of Dumbassery, 2nd edition”