From The Sci Phi Show.

MP3 link (6 minutes 59 seconds)

One of the iconic images from science fiction television is the 3D chess set from the set of the original Star Trek. The worldbuilding of science fiction and fantasy can explore variations on the languages, games, currencies, and other traditions of our world. By breaking out of provincialistic molds, it can introduce us in our formative years to the suggestion that the familiar things we grow up with and take for granted are really not the only way.

Many works of speculation attempt to leave intact the things we can’t change, and consider differences only in the things we can change. It’s revealing to notice which things we consider to be reality’s rules, which is the objective reality, and which things are elements of our own construction, the subjective reality. The premise of today’s minicast is the concept that there exists a third category, known to philosophers as the intersubjective, that games, economies, languages, and other transaction rulesets exist in this category, and the effect of this on whether morality is real or unreal.

In one sense, morality exists; in another sense, it doesn’t. Morality exists in the same form that economics, linguistics, and chess exist. It is as real as they are, and also sort of unreal by the same standards by which money and language are partially unreal. These are all systems of rules that people invent, within which they can conduct transactions.

Rule sets are as real and unreal as any other software. Processors juggle electricity from circuit to circuit according to software rules, in a set of transactions. We can observe and measure them, so they’re real, but when the electrons stop moving in the circuits, where did the calculation go? It was never “there.” It was never any place in particular.

The English language was not floating out there in some metaphysical form, waiting to be discovered by the first English speaker. Neither was the rule set of chess. We can even invent alternatives to them. Neither does morality have independent existence. There are nihilists who suggest that this means there is no way to distinguish between moral and immoral acts. And yet I hardly think a nihilist will carry the argument through, and say we have no ability to tell, within broad limits, whether someone is measurably practicing “correct” English and “correct” F.I.D.E. chess.

Saying “I can just carry on hurting people as much as I want” is like saying “I will speak my own language to myself that no one else knows, and play my own chess-like game against myself.” Rule sets are not objectively real, and subjectively they can be whatever you want if you never make any interpersonal transactions with them; but intersubjectively they are as real as bedrock. You can carve bedrock, but you can’t wish it away. Believe me, I have some experience with artificial languages, chess variants, and artificially-designed religions. You still have to know English, and you won’t get many people to play any chess-like game other than Chess.

You can even say “I don’t particularly like morality and I don’t want to participate in that system”, and yet still meaningfully tell more or less whether someone is doing it.

We have chess pieces, dollar bills, writing and sound waves as physical representations of rule sets. But that’s all they do– represent information systems. They serve as cognitive ergonomics. For instance, there is a new notation system devised to represent formal logic, called the Logic Alphabet, at www.logic-alphabet.net. It can be constructed as a physical model to serve as cognitive ergonomics for formal logic. All these things are just prosthetic devices to help us measure, the way an abacus is a mental prosthetic to help our primate brains perform arithmetic. I’m not sure there is any such equivalent physical device for moral reasoning, which could be where some of the confusion is coming from.

Looking up moral rules in a book is not moral reasoning in the same way that using a calculator is a substitute for skill in arithmetic. If your calculator is broken, you’ll tend to be wrong a lot. If you take the authoritarian tack that arithmetic is defined as “whatever your broken calculator tells you”, you’re even worse off. If one reasons that there is no observational foundation for moral reasoning, it does not follow that irrationalism and authoritarianism solves this problem. That would be a solution that exacerbates the problem it was intended to solve.