On Relativism and Grounding
If you’re down with my definition of reality tunnels and you understand that faith is a choice then it’s possible you’ve come to a crossroads. “This all makes a sort of sense,” you may be saying. “But it leads to moral relativism. And I can’t go down that road, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
I hear you, and I understand why you feel that way. I got stuck there for a while as well. But I’ve managed to find a way out, and I’m hopeful that if your brain works like mine does then maybe I can draw you a map to join me here.
So let’s talk about this.
Why do we all dunk on relativism? Because, at the end of the day, relativism suggests that all positions are equally valid and all judgments are equally inconsequential. Functionally, we can define this problem by saying that relativism makes it impossible to answer the question “Why should I accept your perspective and not this competing one?” with anything other than an hapless shrug.
So, how can we provide a better answer to that question using the reality tunnel model? How do we avoid the infinite regress of deferred evaluation until we finally terminate in a vague mumble about aesthetic preferences? Why should we choose to accept some reality tunnels and reject others?
When someone disagrees with me and wants to engage in a debate I have one requirement: they must be able to restate my position to me, in my own terms, to my own satisfaction. Alignment must precede disagreement, else how do we even know where we disagree?
So here’s the thing:
- Communication is impossible in the absence of a shared understanding of some set of axioms. (We have to know we’re referring to the same thing to be capable of discussing it.)
- The more axioms a concept requires, the harder that concept is to discuss in a meaningful way because more time has to be spent aligning axioms. (Tautological, but this is why complex ideas are so much harder to model than simple ones.)
- The scale of the problems a person can solve is directly constrained by the scale of complexity that person can model. (You can’t fix what you don’t understand.)
- The models a person is capable of developing are constrained by the reality tunnels in which that person lives. (If you believe thunder is literally the sound of Thor’s hammer smashing around then you can’t have a complex understanding of climate change.)
There. Now we’re not being relativists, we’re grounding our morals in an ultimately utilitarian frame. But we can push this even further by recognizing that we live in a society. The sorts of problems that a society has to solve tend to be much more complex than the ones an individual has to solve, right?
That means that in order to live in a healthy, functioning society we must be willing to perform the complex labor required to build models that can get us better outcomes.
It’s fine if not everyone studies climate science, right? Generally it would be good enough if we as a society chose to delegate problems of that magnitude to specialist who devote many years to refining their shared reality tunnels specifically to be able to model and discuss problems of this complexity.
But it turns out that there are some reality tunnels that lack the capacity to even agree to these terms. There are people today who feel that we as a society should not tolerate the tyranny of ‘experts’, right?
I chose that word carefully, “tolerate”. Because as Yonatan Zunger argues so eloquently here, tolerance is not a moral precept. It’s a peace treaty, and it only applies to those who keep up their end. Both sides have to live by the terms.
Why should you choose this tunnel over that one? Because this tunnel is fully capable of modeling and understanding exactly how and why the two tunnels disagree, but that one isn’t. Because this tunnel upholds its end of the tolerance treaty, but that one doesn’t.
Because if you choose that one then you’re never going to be able to understand what this one has to tell you — but if you choose this one you’ll be able to understand what that one has to tell you.
