Metaethics - Moral Deference

This video outlines the moral deference problem for moral realism, plus some potential realist responses.

0:00 - Introduction
1:30 - The puzzle of moral deference
7:13 - Explaining the deference datum
12:22 - Trivial facts
14:53 - Expertise
18:12 - Knowledge-how
27:45 - Trouble for antirealism?
32:42 - Rejecting the deference datum

[Altitudes]

I raised this question with the philosophers at HMRC and they insisted that their word is definitely good enough to defer to.

[aarantheartist]

Interesting topic Kane. I think that lots of us would feel weird deferring to moral philosophers even if moral realism were true and even if moral philosophers really were experts. Most philosophers would feel weird doing it because philosophers generally don’t like deferring to other philosophers about ANY philosophical topics - they would almost always examine the relevant literature themselves and have a think about it. And a lot of non-philosophers I know just don’t have any real idea what philosophy is, or they have very strange ideas about what it is, so that they just wouldn’t think of philosophers as the kinds of people who can be trusted to give moral advice.

I’m tempted to think of non-deference in morality as just reflecting what people think about moral philosophers.

[OBGynKenobi]

Moral Deference happens every day amongst the gullible.

Two examples. In politics, people allow themselves to be dictated morals to, or even morally manipulated, and they'll gladly go along without a thought.

In religion, adherents allow themselves to be told what their morals should be without questioning the person telling them.

[InventiveHarvest]

The costs of moral deviance is social rejection. People ask their friends and family for moral advice, not the experts. Experts that don't know me can't ostracize me.

[unstablepc]

For me, part of why I get red alerts around moral deference is that it is a sacrifice of autonomy. By allowing someone to dictate what is right/wrong, you are giving them great power over you. This may be a result of my culture that greatly values individuality. In medieval times for instance, deference to a priest might have been seen as virtuous. I also think the meat example can be twisted a little to show a bit of what I mean by the importance of autonomy:
"Sarah wants to know if eating meat is wrong/costly. She asks a specialist who tells her eating meat is wrong/costly. Because the specialist told her eating meat is wrong/costly, she decides that eating meat is wrong/costly."
For me, this is digs a wider difference between cost VS morality deference, because Sarah is a whole lot less autonomous in this example. In the moral case, her behaviour feels a lot more dubious.

[dumbledorelives]

What do you think about the example of ethics committees in hospitals? In that case, we do tend to defer to moral experts (not getting into differences between morality and ethics) when difficult medical decisions must be made. In that case, to me, it seems that moral principles have been agreed upon in advance (Informed consent, autonomy, beneficence/nonmaleficense) and the moral experts are imparting "knowledge how"

[silverharloe]

I suspect that members of some (not necessarily all) religions would reject the deference datum altogether, thinking that it's not merely acceptable to defer to moral authority for complex moral questions, but positively required, or at minimum praiseworthy, and yet many of them believe that they are moral realists of one stripe or another.

[whycantiremainanonymous]

I'm responding early in the process of watching the video (today's schedule is complicated for me; sorry), so it's very likely I'm breaking into an open door, and everything I write will be covered later, but still:
Is there really such a difference there? I generally defer to the expertise of, say, a tax specialist, but if I ever have doubts about that expert's level of expertise, or if the matter is sufficiently important, I'll ask that specialist to convince me with their knowledge and with reasoning, and then form my own opinion. So, for instance, when a relative had cancer a few years back, and had to decide whether to undergo a complicated operation, we had a family council with a doctor and a medical school student present, and discussed all the pros and cons in detail, until we became convinced by the doctors' arguments.
On the other side of the coin, large organisations and professional unions often outsource its ethical commitments to experts, who write ethical codes for them. And just like large corporations use accountants to evade tax payments they should have paid, such fundamentally morally corrupt organisations as armies sometimes use philosophy professors to write ethical codes for them, that would help present the attrocities they commit in deceptively positive light (I happen to live in a country, where the military, which is busy bombing children out of existence as we speak, hired such a philosophy professor to cover its behind with such a "moral code").
Finally, the realist might argue that some moral problems are very difficult to decide, and our knowledge is not advanced enough to trust even the best experts. Say, physicists still haven't settled the question of the nature of dark matter (or modifications to General Relativity instead), so you can't defer to their expertise, but the assumption is that there is a fact of the matter there. We just, collectively, don't know for sure what it is.

[Riskofdisconnect]

I'm sort of inclined to reject the idea of moral datum altogether. Every example of moral data I've seen seems rather more like taking something as post facto justification for already held beliefs than actual evidence for anything.

[italogiardina]

Moral realism as a form of inverse deference is where a political community persuades as organisational citizenship behaviour which entails all individuals are deviants by token of having private belief. Hence the justice system.

[markkuykendall]

So the takeaway is that civilization ought to defer to experts when experts have verifiable or testable data; when they're expertise can have a truth test applied to it that's a correspondence theory of truth? Moral/ethical judgements can't be evaluated in this way so society at least pretends to encourage us to not defer?

[neoepicurean]

Can't one see the advice and moral beliefs of others as second order evidence? This crosses into the realm of peer disagreement. Maybe we ought to defer to others to remain rational?

[understand]

Can I ask you a question even though it's stupid? I don't understand philosophy well but if you are moral anti realist doesn’t that make every action allowed?

[Shiv-kbmv]

Every time I try to join your serve w the link it says link is invalid or link is expired

[hharvey]

not sure I see the problem for the fictionalist. it seems that if I were to discover that, while I'd initially been in favour of capital punishment, it was empirically associated by relevant experts with a reduction in peace/social stability etc etc, I would probably change my view on the basis of this

[JM-usfr]

I have a response and an objection to this challenge.

Response: Perhaps moral deference seems weird because _foundational_ values are subjective, so no one can actually tell you what you should _foundationally_ value, despite instrumental values perhaps being a bit more accessible for a moral realist.

Objection: I'm not so sure moral deference is actually that weird. In virtue theory, one way they answer the critique of being non-prescriptive is that we ought to consider what a virtuous person would do in a given situation. That's sort of like moral deference.

[aaronchipp-miller]

Whats the argument for the ostenisble innappropriateness of moral deference. It just doesnt strike me as odd at all, and thus the puzzle doesnt get off the ground

[smdb]

I come from the shia sect of Islam. in the sect there literally are people who are considered moral experts. It's really common for a person to be wondering about the morality of something to just go and ask an imam.

[davidantinucci]

If religious dogma is as much an exercise in moral reference as it seems McGrath has a much weaker case ...just saying ..