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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes November 2009 - Less Wrong
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That's not even empirically true. At best, morality is the (really complicated) function relating "is" and "ought" - which means errors in the "is" can make vast differences to the consequent "ought".
(For example, in the Americas a couple centuries ago, it was widely believed that black people were not capable of being successful and happy without supervision of white people, and it was consequently meet to own such people in the same way as livestock is owned.)
As much as I keep citing this as an example myself, I don't think we're literally talking about sole prior cause and posterior effect here.
A fair point, to be sure.
Edit: To be precise, to a major extent, the causality is probably in the opposite direction - because treating people the way slaves were treated is wrong, those with a stake in the matter had it widely argued that the chattel slaves were not people in the proper sense of the word.