LauraABJ comments on Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions. - Less Wrong

18 [deleted] 31 January 2010 08:20PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 February 2010 01:26:08AM *  1 point [-]

...sounds mostly good so far. Except that there's plenty of justification for thinking about morality besides "it's something we happen to think about". They're just... well... there's no other way to put this... perfectly valid, moving, compelling, heartwarming, moral justifications. They're actually better justifications than being compelled by some sort of ineffable transcendent compellingness stuff - if I've got to respond to something, those are just the sort of (logical) facts I'd want to respond to! (I think this may be the part Roko still doesn't get.) Also, the "lucky causal history" isn't luck at all, of course.

It's also quite possible that human beings, from time to time, are talking about different subject matters when they have what looks like a moral disagreement; but this is a rather drastic assumption to make in our current state of ignorance, and I feel that a sort of courtesy should be extended, to the extent of hearing out each other's arguments and proceeding on the assumption that we actually are disagreeing about something.

Comment author: LauraABJ 01 February 2010 03:32:52AM 6 points [-]

Ah, so moral justifications are better justifications because they feel good to think about. Ah, happy children playing... Ah, lovers reuniting... Ah, the Magababga's chief warrior being roasted as dinner by our chief warrior who slew him nobly in combat...

I really don't see why we should expect 'morality' to extrapolate to the same mathematical axioms if we applied CEV to different subsets of the population. Sure, you can just define the word morality to include the sum total of all human brains/minds/wills/opinions, but that wouldn't change the fact that these people, given their druthers and their own algorithms would morally disagree. Evolutionary psychology is a very fine just-so story for many things that people do, but people's, dare I say, aesthetic sense of right and wrong is largely driven by culture and circumstance. What would you say if omega looked at the people of earth and said, "Yes, there is enough agreement on what 'morality' is that we need only define 80,000 separate logically consistent moral algorithms to cover everybody!"