Toby_Ord comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Wei_Dai 30 January 2010 02:50AM

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Comment author: Toby_Ord 30 January 2010 10:15:09PM 1 point [-]

Roko, you make a good point that it can be quite murky just what realism and anti-realism mean (in ethics or in anything else). However, I don't agree with what you write after that. Your Strong Moral Realism is a claim that is outside the domain of philosophy, as it is an empirical claim in the domain of exo-biology or exo-sociology or something. No matter what the truth of a meta-ethical claim, smart entities might refuse to believe it (the same goes for other philosophical claims or mathematical claims).

Pick your favourite philosophical claim. I'm sure there are very smart possible entities that don't believe this and very smart ones that do. There are probably also very smart entities without the concepts needed to consider it.

I understand why you introduced Strong Moral Realism: you want to be able to see why the truth of realism would matter and so you came up with truth conditions. However, reducing a philosophical claim to an empirical one never quite captures it.

For what its worth, I think that the empirical claim Strong Moral Realism is false, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was considerable agreement among radically different entities on how to transform the world.