It’s always good news when someone else develops an idea independently from you. It's a sign you might be onto something. Which is why I was excited to discover that Alan Carter, Professor Emeritus of the University of Glasgow’s Department of Philosophy, has developed the concept of Complexity of Value independent of Less Wrong.

As far as I can tell Less Wrong does not know of Carter, the only references to his existence I could find on LW and OB were written by me. Whether Carter knows of LW or OB is harder to tell, but the only possible link I could find online was that he has criticized the views of Michael Huemer, who knows Bryan Caplan, who knows Robin Hanson. This makes it all the more interesting that Carter has developed views on value and morality very similar to ones commonly espoused on Less Wrong.

The Complexity of Value is one of the more important concepts in Less Wrong. It has been elaborated on its wiki page, as well as some classic posts by Eliezer. Carter has developed the same concept in numerous papers, although he usually refers to it as “a plurality of values” or “multidimensional axiology of value.” I will focus the discussion on working papers Carter has on the University of Glasgow’s website, as they can be linked to directly without having to deal with a pay wall. In particular I will focus on his paper "A Plurality of Values."

Carter begins the paper by arguing:

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were to discover that the physical universe was reducible to only one kind of fundamental entity? ... Wouldn’t it be nice, too, if we were to discover that the moral universe was reducible to only one kind of valuable entity—or one core value, for short? And wouldn’t it be nice if we discovered that all moral injunctions could be derived from one simple principle concerning the one core

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