this desire is still irrational

It is objectively pointless. To rationally order desires by objective outcomes is what I document in the linked article.

Everyone else is insane.

So, if you or I encounter someone irrationally bent on mass murder, we morally ought to kill them.

Then there are no such people left to fret about.

Thanks for the reply, sir. However, I don’t think it really addresses what I was asking. My hypothetical was about any sufficiently powerful agent, regardless of their psychological makeup, who wants humanity to end. Whether such an agent would, in practice, be a psychopath isn’t the point, so the parts of your reply about why psychopaths usually comply with moral norms don’t really engage with the question I was asking.

The conditions I set out weren’t just additional details. They were the entire point of the thought experiment. I wasn’t asking whether a real-world agent could ever actually be free from all risk. I agree that, in reality, they couldn’t. My question is different. If we simply assume, for the sake of argument, that the powerful agent faces no risk whatsoever (even if he does, he gets pleasure by dealing with it), achieves complete and lasting satisfaction, and never experiences any form of punishment or retaliation, does your view still say that their action is wrong? If so, why, given that the usual considerations about risk, consequences, and self-interest have been explicitly set aside?

As I understand it, your view is that moral facts ultimately depend on what a fully rational person would want if they had complete understanding of their situation. So my question is this: could wanting the extinction of humanity, thereby eliminating every future moment of happiness, wellbeing, or flourishing that could ever exist, still count as something a fully rational person might want? Or does being fully rational rule out that desire altogether, in much the same way that it rules out holding contradictory or incoherent beliefs?

I don’t think this question can be dismissed easily. If rationality consists only in being internally consistent, well informed, and effective at achieving one’s goals, then it doesn’t seem to exclude any particular goal in principle. Wanting humanity to end could be just as rational as wanting a pleasant dinner, provided the agent isn’t mistaken about the facts and isn’t reasoning inconsistently. Satisfaction is still satisfaction. On a purely instrumental conception of rationality, there doesn’t appear to be any basis for saying that one source of lasting satisfaction is more rational than another.

If, however, your theory wants to say that this desire is still irrational, or that acting on it is still objectively wrong, even after we’ve assumed away all risk and guaranteed complete satisfaction, then it seems to require a stronger conception of rationality. It has to build something substantive into what it means to be fully rational. A common response is that someone who genuinely and completely understood what it is like to be every person whose future would be erased could no longer stably maintain such a desire. The desire would dissolve simply through that deeper understanding. That may well be true, but notice that this is no longer an argument about risk, consequences, or instrumental reasoning. It is instead the claim that a sufficiently complete understanding of other conscious minds necessarily transforms what one can rationally want. At that point, it begins to look as though a moral commitment has been built into the very concept of rationality, rather than being something that follows from rationality alone.

suppose a powerful agent wants the human race to end

Why would it want that?

Facing any threat, the first question is cause. You attack the cause first. So in any such hypothetical, step one is talking to this “powerful agent” and working out why it’s doing something so stupid and whether its needs could be met by some other compromise. Objectively rational agents will oblige. Even psychopaths (that’s why most psychopaths are compliant; they aren’t all rapists and serial killers for a reason). And that’s even despite psychopaths being cognitively disabled (they are insane).

So you are describing a massively irrational agent—essentially a lunatic. To whom no truth or logic would matter anyway so what they would do cannot inform what we should do. The last thing we should behave like is an irrational lunatic. So describing why an irrational lunatic would do an unstoppably irrational and crazy thing is of no relevance to what a rational, sane agent should do.

For more on this point see The Objective Value Cascade.

I’ve a quick hypothetical, sir: suppose a powerful agent wants the human race to end, and he has the means to bring this about. He has calculated everything perfectly, and it is stipulated as fact, not just his belief, that he faces zero risk of failure, punishment, or retaliation at any point in the process. He gets full, lasting satisfaction from this goal. Since no other rational agents would remain afterward, there is no total war scenario to deter him either. Given your view that moral facts are relative to an agent’s real wants and situation, would ending the human race then be objectively moral for him?

many thanks – highly apposite.

I am not sure. But not because anything you say is incorrect, but because it’s not engaging with what they are trying to do, so they’d just twist it back into their rhetoric. This happened with my recent debates with Christian nationalists on exactly that question (see comment thread there which was in response to this comment there).

So, rhetorically, I think when the God-grounder asks, ‘What is your standard of morality?’ the best answer is to start somewhere they can’t escape from: “that which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.” Then they will try to wriggle out of that by arguing that standards can’t be derived that way. Which will be an ironic own goal, because that amounts to admitting moral facts are not rational. Which is the actual significance of denying the Euthyphro dilemma that they usually avoid by deploying rhetoric against it that avoids that revelation. So don’t let them avoid that revelation. Make it the center-point.

I answer this way because I realize now that we should not be assuming they are merely confused and actually have a coherent point for us to take seriously. When they ask, ‘What is your standard of morality?’, to them that is just the opening move in a rhetorical chess game, and not a sincere concern for your answer. They are waiting for that line to trigger some common response that they have practiced a gameplay around, so they can out-wordgame you.

The only way to win that game is not to play. Force them right onto the horns of the dilemma but without any way for them to try jumping from one horn or the other mid-argument. Start right at square one: that which is moral is and can only ever be that which is concluded without fallacy from true premises about people and the world. And keep defending that proposition; don’t let them change the subject (and they will try, so keep sharp and be ready to catch when they do).

A sincere person who asked that question would welcome a more substantive answer because they actually want the answer, and are not just taking a “kata stance” to “fight” whatever you say. But you will almost never hear that question from someone sincerely asking it. So never act like that’s what’s happening.

If by rare chance it turns out your interlocutor is sincere, their questioning will get there smoothly from your starting point, because they actually want to know how it gets there, rather than wanting instead to deny whatever you say. And you will quickly see the difference in the direction of their discourse. And since it ends in the same place anyway, the better move is always to take the rhetorical move I recommend.

But just FYI, that “sincere” line of inquiry will go something like this:

Q: What is your standard of morality?
A: That which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.

Q: What does follow without fallacy from true premises about people and the world?
A: That cultivating empathy, honesty, and reasonableness makes everything statistically go better for you.

Q: By what standard of better?
A: That which will bring optimal satisfaction to you, with yourself and your life.

Q: What if being evil satisfies you most?
A: It can’t. Science shows that that is always self-defeating and leads to perpetual dissatisfaction with both yourself (Bergman) and your life (Axelrod), which you will deny but admit when being honest. And true facts only follow from true premises, so the “being honest” part is what is actually true about you and thus entails what would actually be better for you even when you are committed to denying it.

Q: What if you just want to be irrational and believe false things?
A: It would still be objectively true that you will honestly be more satisfied with yourself and your life if you weren’t irrational and didn’t believe false things.

Q: What if you don’t want to be satisfied with yourself and your life?
A: That is a self-contradiction. If you genuinely want to be dissatisfied, then being dissatisfied is what satisfies you. And that’s again another goal, and goals are always statistically best served by being rational. And being rational leads to the conclusion that that you don’t genuinely want to be dissatisfied, that in fact that is self-defeating and exactly what no rational person actually prefers when aware of the alternative.

That last point brings us all the way to The Objective Value Cascade.

The rest is just science.

But every step is grounded the same way: it always comes back to “It’s better for everyone, in all possible preference cases, to be rational and informed” and that always ends in the same place, with “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world,” which is therefore always the standard of morality in all possible worlds, whether a God exists or not.

Indeed, even if God exists, that has to be his standard of morality, and thus when God doesn’t exist, it remains our standard. God cannot make “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world” different than it is. That’s literally logically impossible. And therefore that has to be the same standard God uses to determine the standard of morality. But that standard exists even when God does not. And so we do not need God to determine what is moral.

When the God-grounder asks, ‘What is your standard of morality?’

Is that same as asking, say, what my standard is for ‘car’ or ‘tree’ ?

ie identifying wrongness or rightness is tantamount to declaring I’ve got access to an objective standard that allows me to do so.

Simlarly, being able to identify a car would also mean I’ve got an objective standard of car-ness and non-car-ness.

But since I haven’t got access to any objective ruler, I can still identify wrongness, carness, treeness etc.

Is that the correct way of responding to one who asks me about standards?

I actually have a whole line on “why” any agent ought to care about rationality. That’s in the peer reviewed paper, along with citations to further discussion.

So, this is another example of armchair apologetics: they don’t even know what I argued, but lie to you and claim I “didn’t” argue something that in fact I did, and even made a point of.

That tells you these are not reliable critics. They are defending the wall, not engaging with the peer reviewed literature.

That is also shown by their obviously not even having thought this through themselves, as I am sure if faced with someone arguing they should be irrational or that true conclusions (such as about morality) can be reached irrationally, they would readily refute them (with exactly the same arguments I did).

Moral facts are, as I argue, the properties of rational agents. That is a true fact. It cannot work to say “but irrational agents won’t know what is true of rational behavior” because that simply points out that irrational agents don’t know the truth that rational agents do. Which is ironically exactly how Christians themselves always argue: that people committed to irrationality just don’t know the truth because they need to be rational to ascertain it.

Hence my paper says “This is also why it is imperative to be rational: because irrationality is always inevitably counter to self-interest (Carrier 2011, pp. 426–27, n. 36). It therefore can never be imperative in any possible world.”

If anyone checks the cited source (as a competent person actually interested in engaging the argument would), they get:

Someone may object that perhaps we ought to be irrational and uninformed, but still the conclusion would follow that when we are rational and informed we would want x. Only if x were then “to be irrational and/or uninformed in circumstance z” would it then be true that we ought to be irrational and uninformed, and yet even that conclusion can only follow if we are rational and informed when we arrive at it. Because for an imperative to pursue x to be true, whatever we want most must in fact be best achieved by obeying x, yet it’s unlikely that we will arrive at that conclusion by being irrational and uninformed. Such an approach is very unlikely to light upon the truth of what best achieves our desires (as if it could do so by accident). Therefore, any conclusion arrived at regarding what x is must be either rational and informed or probably false. Ergo, to achieve anything we desire, we ought to endeavor to be rational and informed.

Carrier commits a classic begging-the-question fallacy by assuming without justification that rationality has overriding force. He never explains why any agent ought to care about rationality, or why its imperatives are binding beyond mere tautology

Is that a comment that misses the mark, Dr Carrier?

That’s a defect of academic (ivory tower) philosophy now, yes. Its purpose has become corrupted by incentives unrelated to real progress in the field. This is one of many reasons philosophy peer-review has high rates of false positives and false negatives (even more than science, and science is experiencing a crisis in this same area). It’s better than nothing. But it’s not 100% reliable and it could do better.