pdf23ds comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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Yudkowsky briefly addressed moral luck:
Lately I've actually been thinking that maybe we should split up morality into two concepts, and deal with them separately: one referring to moral sentiments, and another referring to what we actually do. It seems like a lot of discussions of utilitarianism versus deontology treat them as two arbitrary viewpoints or positions, but insofar as my thinking has trended utilitarian lately, it hasn't been because I'm attracted to a utilitarian position, but because Cox's theorem [edit: sic] forces it. Even if I draw up a set of rights that I think must not be violated, I'm still going to have to make decisions under uncertainty, which I would guess means acting to minimize the expected number of rights-violations.
I don't think that's quite the same usage of "moral luck". According to the technical term, it's when you, for example, judge someone who was driving drunk and hit a person more harshly than someone who was driving drunk and didn't hit anyone, all else being equal. In other words, things entirely outside of your control that make the same action more or less blameworthy. Another example, from the link:
I don't see the difference between this usage and Zack's/Eliezer's: the definition given in the SEP link is:
A situation where all of an agent's options are blameworthy seems quite clearly to fall within this category.
OK, I suppose it counts as an instance, though I'm not convinced Eliezer intended the phrase in that sense. But it's certainly one of the instances I'm less interested in.
Agreed.