I've written only one paper that really bears the marks of the Trump Administration -- "One-person Moral Twin Earth Cases", which came out in Thought two years ago. It has two thought experiments. In one, you're a crash-landed astronaut hearing trolley problems from an alien nurse. The other one is heavier.
To explain what the paper is about, I'm criticizing theories of moral language popular among people who think that objective moral facts can be empirically discovered. This is in fact my team, as I think we can empirically discover that pleasure is moral value (long story there). But I think we're getting the linguistic stuff wrong by anchoring moral facts too tightly to things in our social environment, as the causal theory of reference does. The example tries to show that:
"You are an educated person on a planet like ours. While studying philosophy, you learned about consequentialist and deontological theories, each of which seemed to get at part of the moral truth. While studying history, you learned that properties at the level of gender, class, and race had significantly influenced moral judgment over millennia. Other societies within the broad linguistic community of your planet had accepted hierarchical class and gender norms, and valorized conquest, enslavement, and genocide of other races. Remnants of these anti-egalitarian norms still lingered in your society’s folk moral beliefs. You were optimistic that they would eventually be revised away. Future folk morality would then coincide with the philosophers’ values: happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agents.
Your optimism was shaken by disturbing events. Politicians gained approval in your society and won election to its highest offices by proudly expressing sexist, classist, and racist values. Many of their influential supporters wanted to revise folk morality in favor of these values. They worked to entrench the old anti-egalitarian influences, even against values of happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agents. If their favored revisions succeeded, folk morality would favor the subjection of women, deference to the wealthy, and the glory of a master race.
You were forced to consider a grim future possibility. What if the long-run causal-regulatory influences on moral concepts were as your enemies hoped? What if the popularity of moral theories concerned with happiness for all creatures and respect for rational agency in recent centuries was merely a contingent historical aberration? What if gender, class, and racial properties were the strongest causal regulators of moral concepts across all of time? Would sexism, classism, and racism then be right?
I hope you’ll agree that the answer is no. The causal theory says yes. It entails that “water is XYZ*” is true if XYZ causally regulates the concept of water, and that “sexism, classism, and racism are right” is true if sexism, classism, and racism causally regulate the concept of rightness in our linguistic community. I do not believe that either concept is causally regulated in such a way. If proven wrong on both counts, I will start believing that water is XYZ. I will not start believing that sexism, classism, and racism are right...
[*XYZ is some non-H2O chemical structure.]
...Early causal theorists were optimistic about the causal influence of moral properties and the arc of the moral universe. They wrote in times of progress, when the fall of apartheid and communism made grim possibilities for the long-run causal regulation of moral concepts less salient. The time has come to consider these grim possibilities. Doing so reveals that the causal theory, the stabilizing function account, and the connectedness model allow a dystopian future to shape the moral truth in its own image. Moral concepts must let us convey the horror of such a future, rather than falling under its control."
