aleksiL 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: aleksiL 01 February 2010 04:43:14PM 2 points [-]

As I understand Eliezer's position, when babyeater-humans say "right", they actually mean babyeating. They'd need a word like "babysaving" to refer to what's right.

Morality is what we call the output of a particular algorithm instantiated in human brains. If we instantiated a different algorithm, we'd have a word for its output instead.

I think Eliezer sees translating babyeater word for babyeating as "right" as an error similar to translating their word for babyeaters as "human".

Comment author: Unknowns 01 February 2010 05:04:36PM 3 points [-]

Precisely. So it was luck that we instantiate this algorithm, instead of a different one.