The Charlotteville (?) riots (and by extension the Alt-Right/Nazi vs Antifa fights) are proof of this - there's loud, violent protestors on both sides, neither of which is engaging in a debate because they're both strongly opposed on a moral level.

Suppose you already have a solution in-hand for determining what the "best world" is, and everyone agrees on this definition of what is "right" and "good".

Now, can you calculate with any accuracy what actions each person should take in order for us all to arrive at that "best world"?

I think it's clear to most people who have taken an algorithms course that such a calculation -- even with perfect knowledge about the current and future state of the world -- is completely and totally intractable. (And besides, it doesn't take an algorithms course to notice we don't have that perfect knowledge; I don't even know if it will rain this afternoon.)

Value systems and moral codes -- e.g., "no stealing and no murdering except in X,Y,Z cases" -- provide us with a set of heuristics that while perhaps not optimal at least seem to keep us in decently good steady states for a while.

> The hypothetico-dialectical method of talking about morality, as if it was simultaneously mathematics and politics, has always confused me.

The point is to explore the theoretical limits of what's even possible. If we can show that something is impossible even in a highly idealized setting, then we can probably conclude that the same thing is impossible in more messy settings.

Of course, "all models are wrong" and all that.

But if pure consequentialism doesn't work well even in the most ideal of settings, that might be a good indicator that it also doesn't work well in far more messy settings.

> Plainly there ought to be some observable evidence that we've done the right thing

Why is that so "plain"? Besides, "what should I do?" is a far more... timely... question than "did I just do the right thing?"

> or the term "right" has no meaning at all other than "theorem within a politically fashionable consistent axiom schema."

Outside of religious and spiritual folks, I think most people agree that morality is socially constructed.

It doesn't matter whether people agree with it. It matters whether it's actually correct, and actually refers to real things.

>Outside of religious and spiritual folks, I think most people agree that morality is socially constructed.

Then stop talking about morality already. There's no point in spending massive sums of effort, money, and even military manpower on made-up constructions if you know damn well they're made up.

(Mind, I don't think morality is made up: I'm a moral realist. Of course, religious folks aren't moral realists, they're usually just plain confused about what counts as "real", as are you, since you appear to think "real morality" means "morality enforced by a giant authority figure in the sky".)

You're completely missing my point.

Replace the quoted sentence with "Suppose you already have an actually correct morality that refers to real things". The computational intractability argument remains a damning condemnation of consequentialism. Just because you can state the theorem doesn't mean you can find the witnessing construction.

> Then stop talking about morality already

Just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't valuable, and it also doesn't mean that they have no effect on our lives.

> There's no point in spending massive sums of effort, money, and even military manpower on made-up constructions if you know damn well they're made up.

Why not?

Why can't we just say some things are "self-evident" and worth fighting for?

And if this is true, then why are moral considerations such potent rhetorical devices? The only possible explanation I can think of is extraordinarily condescending.

> I'm a moral realist

Now I'm even more confused.

First, the realists play this game all the time; each branch of moral realism basically corresponds to a different -- usually embarrassingly pseudo-scientific -- way of justifying a priori ethical concerns.

From my perspective, moral realism isn't an escape from the problem; it's just a way of ignoring the actually hard problem and playing games that are completely parametric in the actually hard problems.

Second, the view of morality as a social construction isn't even inconsistent with moral realism as long as you're willing to go past whatever nice distinctions make for easy-to-grade multiple choice exams in PHIL 101. E.g., one plausible (and, per usual, embarrassingly pseudo-scientific) hypothesis bridging this divide is that morality is a social construction that necessarily arises from ethical intuitions that have a physiological basis.

Because nothing is actually self-evident in the real world. It's all still made out of meat, with no convenient teletypes up to Plato's Heaven where the Self-Evident Propositions, Ideal Forms, and A Prioris live. "Self-evident and worth fighting for" isn't a factual claim, it's an effort to persuade people to believe (what you label) a delusion.

>And if this is true, then why are moral considerations such potent rhetorical devices? The only possible explanation I can think of is extraordinarily condescending.

Well, there are three possibilities here:

* Typical antirealism. Moral appeals are in fact appeals to ontological delusion. This sounds condescending, but it's the corner you back yourself into by trying to have your moral appeals and your anti-realism at the same time. You're the one saying, "let's appeal to morality, but only ever to my morality, left completely unaccountable to external facts beyond my intuitions." If you tried that in math, physics, sociology, psychology -- you'd be thrown out of the room.

* Moral appeals are used as verbal shortcuts to ultimately nonmoral things. For example, the moral stricture "do not harm the innocent" may ground out in "I feel empathetic pain when I see children get hurt". In this case, the moral appeal has a little bit more actual force, since it grounds out in a real motivation to which we can actually, well, appeal. In fact, if we can manage to talk about the rational content of that empathetic pain (something which antirealists vehemently disavow but which basically the entire rest of humanity for all of history upheld), we can achieve...

* Moral realism: moral appeals work because they appeal to real things that have motivational power. The empathetic pain is a real moral motivation, pain is bad, especially when the damage it accompanies is too permanent for it to be a learning experience. This is the typical view among basically everyone who hasn't been carefully trained to pooh-pooh our innate emotions and motivations as having no normative force, and remains the majority opinion among both professional ethicists and laypeople.

>First, the realists play this game all the time; each branch of moral realism basically corresponds to a different -- usually embarrassingly pseudo-scientific -- way of justifying a priori ethical concerns.

Well, I usually don't see the pseudo-scientific ones. I usually see the pseudo-mathematical ones. But oh well, my ethical concerns are a posteriori, just like my epistemological, uh, knowledge.

Mind, if I want to be dickishly precise, I'm a realist about value and interests at the organismic level, and merely observe that moral norms and imperatives at the social level often have deep anthropological reasons that ground out in the genuine interests of the individuals involved. Where they don't, those norms and imperatives tend to get changed over time.

That might be a form of constructivism at the social level, but constructivism isn't really a form of realism or antirealism (it roughly says, "morality comes from running this algorithm on these data, but you might need some nonmoral interest to get someone running the algorithm at all), and it's actually different from naive social constructionism ("people make up morality, agree tentatively on things, and then use it to persuade each-other about stuff").

>From my perspective, moral realism isn't an escape from the problem; it's just a way of ignoring the actually hard problem and playing games that are completely parametric in the actually hard problems.

Would you care to pose the actual hard problem, then?

>E.g., one plausible (and, per usual, embarrassingly pseudo-scientific) hypothesis bridging this divide is that morality is a social construction that necessarily arises from ethical intuitions that have a physiological basis.

That would still be a typical antirealist view, since it says that morality arises in a way that has nothing to do with moral facts as such.

(The nasty tricky part is what you're willing to count as a moral or normative fact in the first place. Fix that and the questions get a lot clearer. Make that slippery and you get hundreds of years of philosophizing instead of knowing what to do.)

Isn't this exactly my point?

> Would you care to pose the actual hard problem, then?

Where the hell does your moral truth come from?

The way I see it, we actually operate in exactly the same way. The only difference is that I don't pretend that arbitrary things aren't arbitrary.

> I'm a realist about value and interests at the organismic level, and merely observe that moral norms and imperatives at the social level often have deep anthropological reasons that ground out in the genuine interests of the individuals involved.

This kind of inexact hand waving is exactly what I meant when I said "pseudo-scientific BS".

It's built into our everyday physical reality, or it is bullshit.

Moral realism has no epistemic superiority. It's just as "bullshit" as everything else; the rotten core of bullshit is just hidden under a bunch of layers of deduction.

I prefer to air the dirty laundry; realists are uncomfortable by stained underwear and would prefer to play logical games on top of an edifice without thinking too much about the sand underneath their feet.

But at the core all systems of morality have the same problem. Realism is no escape. In fact, IMO, it's worse than a mistake because it provides the illusion of solving an insurmountable problems.

I guess it comes down to this: "I choose to believe in God and I know that belief is arbitrary" is to me by far the most compelling apology. Things like Goedel's proof just make me yawn and squint.

This debate suggests that is not a safe assumption.

> There's no point

If it redirects money, there certainly is a point.

Or people could just admit moral realism every time they try to argue moral stuff. You know. Alternatives.

No he didn't [1]. I strongly dislike SJWs, but this guy is no ally. He's, at best, shockingly ignorant (what do I keep hearing about how google only gets the best?) at worst a fascist or fascist apologist.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

Enough time has passed that experts have had time to comprehend the original document, and it seems like James was only pretending to play openly. He misrepresented a lot of the science and put his own spin on it.

A great answer by an evolutionary biologist on how James was absolutely wrong on almost every point he made: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

Doesn't seem like that to me. The Suzanne Sadedin's answer (which I personally find kinda hard to understand, IMHO it avoids the core argument) was the only answer (of several I read) from an actual scientist that disagreed with what Damore has wrote. Other scientists' responses either agreed or declined to comment. In particular, here: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

I think we can say that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community. The memo painted a much different picture.

It's an informal reply on quora from someone we have no verification about that cites exactly one supporting scientific study - and that is about bird mating practices. The rest cites amazon bookstore pages, blogs, articles in general interest magazines, other quora responses, or wikipedia articles (which themselves actually undermine the point she was trying to make - eg skimming the stereotype threat article, consensus seems to be it isn't real). The rest is an attempt to justify calling the author a fascist racist sexist etc. etc. and thereby gloss over the actual question at hand (namely, was he right?).

My education is in physics and CS, so I am not qualified to judge what is accurate in something like evolutionary psychology. But when I see a paper that weasely, juking around the issue while engaging in personal attacks, it inclines me to believe the memo is scientifically valid and this sort of emotion based response is the only one available to its detractors.

I counted 10 supporting scientific studies, and a whole bunch of other articles that all included lots of references.

> thereby gloss over the actual question at hand (namely, was he right?)

I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. She quotes what he wrote, and then shows why he is wrong, over and over again. She doesn't juke around the issue at all.

An impressive feat. Mind sharing them?

And again, direct support - not "mating practices of birds" or "fetal hormone influence and autism" or other none sense.

And also not links to Business Insider articles, Wikipedia articles, blogs, Amazon, or anything of the sort.

You are aware you can't just make stuff up when I've read the article and examined its links right?

>I don't see how you can come to that conclusion.

You don't see how quoting a person, and then playing free association with their words to conclude they're some kind of crypto fascist fog Whistler is kind of ridiculous?

You've already admitted that you are not qualified to judge what is accurate in this context, so why do you think you can now decide that some of the studies are nonsense? All of these studies support arguments she was making.

In reverse order of appearance:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350266/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27460188

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01256568

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...

http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~bieman/Pubs/turleyBiemanCSC94.p...

https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797611416252

http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-...

But an article that sleazy and loaded with weasel words and underhanded rhetorical tactics, that dances that much around the points being discussed - no one who has the facts on their side argues like that. Reading that post from beginning to end actually did more to convince me Damore was right than any other piece of writing I've seen thus far on the subject.

As to your links:

Read what you're trying to cite before blinding citing it.

Here is some of the titles of the papers you just linked to:

No relationship between prenatal androgen exposure and autistic traits

The origins of agriculture: Population growth during a period of declining health

Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body

Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and Women

Cuckolded Fathers Rare in Human Populations

As I said, basically pure none sense. The quora post is trying to blindside people with number of sources, to hide the fact they have absolutely no quality in sources.

Indeed, even the most directly pertinent link didn't really talk about the core issues raised in the memo. It instead discussed github pull requests vs. gender, which while far more related to the subject at hand than autistic dentistry (it is about sexism and the tech community), does not actually address the specific points raised by Damore's letter or support the arguments she was trying to make.

Incidentally, that study is nicely debunked here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...

You've probably read http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

David P Schmitt, the only one whose work was used in the memo doesn't seem agree with the memo. His third and fourth paragraphs say that any differences between sexes is small and not relevant to work going on at google. This is a common theme with the memo. The science is correct. But James goes beyond what the science says and adds incorrect arguments and statements on top. This is the problem. And it is the kind of thing that can get you labeled as sexist or whatever.

As I go through the links, each is used to directly refute one of these incorrect additions to the science that James wrote. They don't refute the science, they refute James' added commentary.

In 'Early androgen exposure and human gender development' there is a section titled "Which human behaviors show average sex differences?" and it is very pertinent to this topic.

Lots of people have been bringing up the Androgen Exposure argument in this debate, and the second Androgen study linked was showing it is not a solved question yet. So that was also relevant.

The Human health and population growth studies were used to refute James's statements that were quoted. Etc.

I'll happily agree that the author shouldn't have used certain terms or phrases. That was unneeded and unprofessional.

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...

I think one of the important points is this: "The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability."

Damore argued based on this, and I hold a similar view, that gender quotas should not be used, because they don't correspond to personal preferences. This has nothing to do with abilities.

It confirms the criticisms of Damore cherry picking his sources. It appears that for almost everything he wrote there is both supporting and conflicting evidence. The fact the he only mentions the supporting evidence is a huge problem. I would expect better from a google engineer.