Kaj_Sotala comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2009 05:57AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 05 August 2009 01:13:24PM 0 points [-]

At the risk of getting into semantics: in that case, pain serves a useful purpose, but that doesn't make pain itself non-bad. Creating an alternative ("upgraded") alert system that served the wake-up function but wasn't painful would be better. If pain in that context wouldn't be bad, then "does the alert system cause pain" would be an irrelevant question and the upgraded alert system wouldn't be considered any better.

Comment author: anonym 06 August 2009 03:59:12AM 0 points [-]

in that case, pain serves a useful purpose

Right, which was exactly my point: not every instance of pain should be classified as bad, and so it doesn't make sense to say the general phenomenon is "unconditionally bad, in all cases, with no exceptions", which is exactly what Bongo implicitly asserted.