Originally this blog was a place for me to write down some abstract thoughts about a (then) confusing and seemingly insurmountable set of related problems I was facing - namely my dissertation in Meta-Ethics, specifically about questioning the nature and reality of Moral Principles. I have moved away from this now, but what I do is still influenced by this work.
In the end I managed to submit a lengthy academic work which gained me a decent qualification, and all was well; but I do not feel I truly finished. For a few reasons.
Firstly I had not satisfied myself as to the correctness of my answer, or even my question. Secondly I had an urge to rewrite, rewrite-some-more, edit and then bind my finished thesis. I have not yet done this (but I will!!)
My worry about the question has not gone away, and I have been secretly planning a way of answering my question, or perhaps thinking of a better question. In the end I chose this:
What is the best conception of the relation between natural properties and moral properties?
I looked at many alternatives, and drew heavily on Shaffer-Landu's work, especially Moral Reasons (1997) in forming a taxonomy of what I still see as a kind of scale of views. My answer really came down to a response to Jonathan Dancy's arguments: he points out (Ethics without Principles, 2004 and may other places) that absolute rules are doomed, because they are destroyed by exceptions. There are always so many exceptions to a "Moral Law", that the very concept is ultimately impossible do defend.
We say "Do not kill", and think this is a law, but we have exceptions like "Unless in self defence, unless for survival, unless to serve justice, unless to prevent killing, unless to ease suffering, unless unknowingly, unless through meaning to do well, unless forced to choose between killing or causing death through not killing, and so on and so on forever. His point was this; add these additions, and the original rule is no longer itself.
I think this is sensible. I think replies to this are also sensible: moral rules (not laws, "laws" is... problematic)are not simple things, we instead use the words "Do Not Kill" as a kind of signpost for something more.
But what more?
I thought long and hard, and sweated into may nights, and strained and formatted, and redrafted and took notes. Eventually I had a breakthrough. The solution seemed clear, and still does, the rules must be algorithms.
As the reader will know, an algorithm is just a set of operations one performs upon an input. It seems plain that a "Moral Law" is like this: the input is the situation, the right thing to do is the output of a set of interpretations, predictions, summations of histories, calculations, extrapolations, and speculations about this situation. It may be useful to think of moral theories in this vein; as a set of algorithms.
The funny thing about this is that I feel this is wrong. Intuition is hugely important in moral theory, and ultimately this is how we judge rightness of course (indeed, any deeply unintuitive theory would be deemed wrong anyway!). Still, I don't think these intuitions drop from the sky.
Perhaps intuitions are indeed these very algorithms? That would be one way of looking at it for sure.
I will complete my work, and finish my book, and I will hopefully find time to do justice to the many other things that I want to in this life. I have been working on a career in IT and network design for some years, and it is not unrelated: algorithms are everywhere in the world of Cisco, Linux, C++, SQL, PHP and their kind. I hope to keep going until I get back to the thinking, the writing, and the necessary growing which is why I studied philosophy in the first place, and why I still think that everyone should have done so.
