FrankAdamek comments on A Normative Rule for Decision-Changing Metrics - Less Wrong

1 Post author: FrankAdamek 05 August 2009 05:07AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 05 August 2009 07:26:56PM *  0 points [-]

Ideally, an ethics should not contain the concept "person".

We already know the concept of "person" is bankrupt unless you allow degrees of personhood (unless you are content with an ethics that has no problem with torturing dogs, but forbids saving 2 people using the organs from one brain-dead death-row convict with a terminal disease that gives his vegetative torso one month to live).

But even figuring out how much personhood to give each "person" isn't the best solution. If you contemplate different worlds with different amounts and types of joys, pains, and experiences; your judgement of which worlds are preferable shouldn't change according to how someone rather arbitrarily draws the "person" boundaries within it.

Besides, it will all be irrelevant once you've been assimilated anyway.

Comment author: FrankAdamek 05 August 2009 09:10:00PM 0 points [-]

I was using person as the most conventional reference of "a thing woth caring about". I don't draw ethical distinctions of personhood, but work off the extent of pleasure and pain felt by anything that can do so. How you figure that out, or begin to compare it, is of course one hell of a problem.