Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.

And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.

> Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.

We can label these actions in many ways, such as analog or discrete.

To revisit my earlier question: Does it matter to your philosophy how we label them? Why?

I guess it doesn’t matter, but it is the simplest way to look at the situation and so most useful. I would say it’s the most accurate for your consequentialist approach: certain binary actions lead to certain binary consequences.

In this case the binary action is getting in the sub or not. The outcome is dying or not. There is no analogue aspect of either. You can’t half enter a submarine or half die.

Decomposing things down to a binary is fundamentally how things work. We can analyse things to death and add our own mental/idealistic layers of continuity (like probabilities of outcomes or degrees of truthiness of statements), but the decisions that come from the analysis are always binary.

> And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.

Which kind of moral relativism? There is quite a big difference between the various flavors...

> Descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this.

> Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong.

> Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist.

> Said concepts of the different intellectual movements involve considerable nuance and aren't absolute descriptions.

Quotes from Wikipedia [1], even though I prefer the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2] for more detailed explanations.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/#ForArg

I don’t see much practical difference between the different flavours. I think you can judge morals only from the perspective of within a moral system. Thus tolerating other moral systems or not is arbitrarily determined by the moral system you choose.

It sounds like you are the ‘deepest’ kind of moral relativist. You are technically correct that to apply a set of morals you have to use a set of morals. This tautological reasoning of course is obvious, but this reasoning does not get at the key parts of these different kinds of moral relativism.

There are practical differences such as: I prefer not to travel to geographic regions where a sizable number of people think it’s OK to harm me or treat me less than their in-group. I think you would agree. (?)

I’m not simply speaking of general chaos that you might find in a war zone; I’m speaking of cultural and ethical norms that are predictably harmful or constrain my ethical set of freedoms.

For such a preference, we can ask: How we assess this preference we have to avoid particular moral systems? To what degree does the following apply: We are acting rationally to protect ourselves? does our preference also reveal our actual morality here?

What about when such a choice cannot be made in a vacuum? It is one thing say that you’re a (particular kind of) moral relativist, but if you had to make a choice between supporting one moral system and another, what would you do?

Philosophers such a Robert Kane use logic along the lines of ”you have to choose” to argue against the deeper senses of moral relativism.

Thanks for discussing. I think they were probably better forums for us to unpack these ideas. I think we disagreed enough to make it interesting and are clear enough to make discussion possible. LMW if the subject area or another, would be something that you would like to unpack further. I’m prototyping some discussion tooling.

So I agree we should tolerate other systems where possible (since none are right or wrong). But our moral system might require us to NOT tolerate aspects of other systems. Therefore we can tolerate them up to a point. We don’t not tolerate them because they are objectively wrong, but because they are wrong from the POV of our own arbitrary moral system.

I’m interested in the discussion UI. For a while I’ve been thinking about how to turn discussions like this into knowledge graphs to make it easy for others to follow and contribute. If you’d like we could set up accounts on one of the philosophy forums to discuss this?