Fellow resident Conq argues that any attempt to define a moral outgroup is fascism:

It doesn’t matter what we are excluding:

Excellent, very good. We’re all adults here so I am not going to quibble with his odd use of the word ‘fascism’, or hit him with cheap shots like “oh so you are saying that discriminating against earthworms is fascism” Instead, I will attempt a rational reconstruction of what I call Conq-Fascism, or ‘C-Fascism.’ Here is my best shot:

I have reconstructed this way because I cannot believe Conq is arguing it is always c-fascist to exclude some objects from one's moral accounting. Would he suggest that it is c-fascist to regard the lives of plants (or inanimate matter) as morally inferior to humanity? Surely not: that seems like a reasonable position to take. Rather, I think he is arguing it is c-fascist to say under no circumstances will I ever accept that plants could have moral worth.

I agree this is so when it comes to one's belief formation. I think what one morally values should track physical reality (e.g., capacity for suffering) and new scientific discoveries should therefore alter one's moral positions. If it turned out that broccoli has consciousness and can suffer then I would agree eating broccoli is morally wrong.

Insisting, however, on endless openness to (1) is unreasonable. As an ethical non-realist with strong naturalistic convictions, I take the view that your terminal values follow from personal composition and circumstance rather than the turning of some moral-knowledge crank.

Here is a test for the reader. We might ask Conq if he would be willing to countenance the possibility that totally inert matter (e.g. a helium atoms) has moral standing (assuming everything we know about the current world is correct). What would it mean for him to say “yes?”

“Yes there is a world where, on closer inspection of our moral precepts, we were wrong about basic factors of moral worth?” Or “Yes, I can imagine a world where I am a completely different person.” I am in the latter camp, and I suspect Conq probably is as well.

If moral primitives work like this, it is strange to insist people must be open to debate on them. You might similarly suggest people should be open to endless debate on how a nematode will behave in the next 20 minutes. “It is c-fascist to adopt a fixed attitude to the nematode’s behaviour; we must always assume it might do otherwise.”

Conq has at least two possible responses to this criticism. First, he might suggest that very few of our moral differences are primitive. The majority, in fact, is shaped by descriptive knowledge. That may be so (the rationalist’s dream), but I am slightly more sceptical. I worry some people are constituted very differently from you or I, in ways which are not altered by evidence:

Second, he might suggest that this exceedingly deterministic, naturalistic view of morality is false. You mean to suggest that my morality is constrained in the same way a nematode’s behaviour is? Unfortunately, yes, and I may later write a post about what it means to actually think like this (title TBD: ‘Nietzschean Therapy?’). I am also open to this not being the case: Scott Aaronson, for example, has a galaxy-brained argument that quantum mechanics provide us with a spooky form of free will at critical moral junctures.

To summarise,

1. It is fine to criticise people who refuse to change their moral positions in response to new evidence. That is also my current working definition of moral prejudice.
2. It is unreasonable to call people c-fascists because they happen to have different terminal values. They are just different: the ethical road runs out and, if cooperation or mutual tolerance is impossible, (e.g., if they are ‘tragic-romantics), then it becomes a question of Us or Them.