drnickbone comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong

38 [deleted] 11 June 2009 12:31PM

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Comment author: dclayh 11 June 2009 08:10:10PM 21 points [-]

Minor point: I find Julie-and-Mark-like examples silly because they ask for a moral intuition about a case where the outcome is predefined. Our moral intuition makes arguments of the form "behavior X usually leads to a bad outcome, therefore X is wrong". So if the outcome is already specified, the intuition has nothing to say; nor would we expect it to, since the whole point of morality is to help you make decisions between live possibilities, so why should it have anything to say about a situation that has already happened/cannot be altered?

Or to put it another way, I'm surprised no one said something to the effect of "Julie and Mark shouldn't have had sex because at the time they did they had no way of knowing that it would turn out well, and in fact every reason to believe it would turn out very badly, based on the experiences of other incestuous siblings."

Comment author: drnickbone 10 March 2014 10:30:20PM 5 points [-]

For concreteness, imagine a different story where Julie and Mark decide to play Russian roulette in their cabin (again, just for fun). They both miss the bullet, no harm results, and they never tell anyone etc. etc. So what was wrong with their actions?

I think most people would be able to handle that one very quickly. So the really interesting question is why no-one comes up with such an explanation in the incest case.

Expecting evolved moral instincts to conform exactly to some simple unifying principle is like expecting the orbits of the planets to be in the same proportion as the first 9 prime numbers or something. That which is produced by a complex, messy, random process is unlikely to have some low complexity description.

An interesting analogy. I mean, who would predict something crazy like the square of the orbital period being proportional to the cube of the orbital radius?

Obviously there's no unifying principle in all that messy moral randomness. No hidden laws, just waiting to be discovered...

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