“ Our moral values concern other people’s conduct (often everyone), while our taste preferences are typically limited in scope to our own conduct.
Our moral values matter a whole lot to us, while our taste preferences matter comparatively less.”
It might could be framed slightly differently though, where our moral values are in regard to what people ought or ought not do because it impacts our own goals and desires.
Coupling this with it being a goal or desire that supersedes the value we place on others autonomy and we get a preference that “feels” different from our other preferences.
You wrote that the two characteristics which distinguish your moral from nonmoral preferences are the following:
"Scope: My moral preferences are preferences about how other people (often all or most people) act, not just myself.
Intensity: I care more about my moral preferences than my taste preferences. I might not eat nasty food if you serve it to me, but I would be far more opposed to someone setting me on fire or stealing my car."
I wonder if you think that you ever make errors in your moral judgements or if sometimes act in ways that are not aligned with your moral values. For me, I sometimes come to the conclusion that I've made a mistake about what I thought was wrong. Sometimes, this stems from a failure to fully emphasize or understand the situation or what was important to the people in it. By contrast, I don't think I'm really wrong about my food preferences. I might be mistaken if I like a food or not if I have never tried it, but if I've eaten the food before then, I don't think I'm really ever mistaken. I'm not sure if something similar is true of my moral judgements or not. It could be that understanding the situation, whats at stake and the people involved is analogous to being in a position of tasting the food and if I really understand that stuff, then I won't be wrong. But sometimes I think I tend to be biased towards what is more familiar to me or similar to my own experience. I might initially side with someone more bookish or against someone that I don't like and then later realize that I only thought they were in the right because I liked them more or did not like the person on the other side. To me this observations seem to show that there is more room for error in moral judgement than in judgements of preference. Moreover, sometimes I fail to do what I think the right thing is and later regret it. Its not that I didn't think it was the right thing when I did something else instead, its that I did something else even though I knew it was not the right thing to do. When this happens, sometimes I try to rationalize my actions and explain to myself why what I did was not really wrong. Usually, I end up regretting what I did. I don't really see any analog with this in the case of preferences. I never order vanilla ice cream when I really wanted chocolate and then fabricate false explanations for why I did this in order to avoid feeling a sense of regret or responsibility.
"Preferences" is a gross oversimplification, or at least lacks clarity. I pretty much agree with your entire second paragraph. I think people are predisposed to pick up and respond to local and cultural norms, and that guilt, shame, and social reinforcement all serve to motivate people to comply with the status quo and not simply act exclusively on whatever idiosyncratic personal preferences they happen to have. We are cultural organisms and this is reflected in our psychology.
I don't typically get into much detail about this because the battles over the nature of morality in metaethics are typically so shallow on the psychological front that there's little opportunity to do so, but to assuage your concerns: No I don't have a naive and psychologically misguided view about moral psychology that ignores culture.
I also agree moral rules are (usually? almost always) not arbitrary, but I think they can be arbitrary and there wouldn't be any error if so. Also, "arbitrary" is one of these funky terms philosophers throw around, often as a sneer, without it being all that clear what they have in mind.
Combine these two-
“ Our moral values concern other people’s conduct (often everyone), while our taste preferences are typically limited in scope to our own conduct.
Our moral values matter a whole lot to us, while our taste preferences matter comparatively less.”
It might could be framed slightly differently though, where our moral values are in regard to what people ought or ought not do because it impacts our own goals and desires.
Coupling this with it being a goal or desire that supersedes the value we place on others autonomy and we get a preference that “feels” different from our other preferences.
Hello,
You wrote that the two characteristics which distinguish your moral from nonmoral preferences are the following:
"Scope: My moral preferences are preferences about how other people (often all or most people) act, not just myself.
Intensity: I care more about my moral preferences than my taste preferences. I might not eat nasty food if you serve it to me, but I would be far more opposed to someone setting me on fire or stealing my car."
I wonder if you think that you ever make errors in your moral judgements or if sometimes act in ways that are not aligned with your moral values. For me, I sometimes come to the conclusion that I've made a mistake about what I thought was wrong. Sometimes, this stems from a failure to fully emphasize or understand the situation or what was important to the people in it. By contrast, I don't think I'm really wrong about my food preferences. I might be mistaken if I like a food or not if I have never tried it, but if I've eaten the food before then, I don't think I'm really ever mistaken. I'm not sure if something similar is true of my moral judgements or not. It could be that understanding the situation, whats at stake and the people involved is analogous to being in a position of tasting the food and if I really understand that stuff, then I won't be wrong. But sometimes I think I tend to be biased towards what is more familiar to me or similar to my own experience. I might initially side with someone more bookish or against someone that I don't like and then later realize that I only thought they were in the right because I liked them more or did not like the person on the other side. To me this observations seem to show that there is more room for error in moral judgement than in judgements of preference. Moreover, sometimes I fail to do what I think the right thing is and later regret it. Its not that I didn't think it was the right thing when I did something else instead, its that I did something else even though I knew it was not the right thing to do. When this happens, sometimes I try to rationalize my actions and explain to myself why what I did was not really wrong. Usually, I end up regretting what I did. I don't really see any analog with this in the case of preferences. I never order vanilla ice cream when I really wanted chocolate and then fabricate false explanations for why I did this in order to avoid feeling a sense of regret or responsibility.
What do you make of this argument? https://substack.com/@williamjoy/note/c-153935285?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2b1728
Excellent, per usual. Thanks!
"Preferences" is a gross oversimplification, or at least lacks clarity. I pretty much agree with your entire second paragraph. I think people are predisposed to pick up and respond to local and cultural norms, and that guilt, shame, and social reinforcement all serve to motivate people to comply with the status quo and not simply act exclusively on whatever idiosyncratic personal preferences they happen to have. We are cultural organisms and this is reflected in our psychology.
I don't typically get into much detail about this because the battles over the nature of morality in metaethics are typically so shallow on the psychological front that there's little opportunity to do so, but to assuage your concerns: No I don't have a naive and psychologically misguided view about moral psychology that ignores culture.
I also agree moral rules are (usually? almost always) not arbitrary, but I think they can be arbitrary and there wouldn't be any error if so. Also, "arbitrary" is one of these funky terms philosophers throw around, often as a sneer, without it being all that clear what they have in mind.