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smoofra comments on Morality and International Humanitarian Law - Less Wrong
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My thoughts, expressed in a sound bite:
If something isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over either.
(Note that this is logically equivalent to its contrapositive: anything worth killing soldiers over is also worth killing civilians over.)
Voted up for bullet-biting.
Is bullet-biting an inherently good thing? Is it even reliably correlated with good things?
I guess it depends on how you define bullet-biting. Let me be more specific: voted up for accepting an ugly truth instead of rationalizing or making excuses.
Yes. (But having good preferences to 'bite bullets' towards is rather important too.)
Which question are you answering "yes" to?
Also, evidence?
The first.
As an answer to the first question it is a normative claim. All else being equal I prefer a universe in which bullets are bit than where they are not bit. The evidence for this is that I say I do, have no particular motive to lie and consistently demonstrate sufficiently aversive reactions to non-bullet-biting for me to have reliably inferred whether or not I consider it an intrinsic good. Depending on your moral philosophy you may consider it appropriate to declare my answer false but this would not be because of evidence.
In response to the second question, biting bullets also increases the relationship between one's consequentialist values and one's belief about optimal actions to take. Unless other assumptions and reasoning are sufficiently poor there will be a correlation to other good things.
Bullet biting is a terminal value for you? That is one of the weirdest things I've read in a while. More power to you, I guess, it doesn't threaten my terminal values so long as you aren't sacrificing truth for it.
Weird? Sacrificing truth? Are we even talking about the same concept here?
Bullet biting means excepting a disturbing conclusion instead of using the conclusion to reject one of the premises in a modus tollens or reducio argument. Some arguments that bite the bullet are probably true. If you want to consider them extra good because they also take this form, fine but most people tend to value things like happiness, freedom, knowledge etc. Biting the bullet looks kind of weird next to that list but terminal values aren't things you can be argued out of. Problem is, some arguments that bite the bullet are false. Were you to value biting the bullet over truthfulness you'd basically be declaring your willingness to argue dishonestly in cases where you can make arguments that bite the bullet.
Or maybe we're talking about totally different things.
I tend to associate not-bullet-biting less with rejecting one of the premises and more with "just kind of ignoring the whole thing because actually believing what your premises would lead you to conclude is silly even though the premises are the Right thing to believe".