Matt_Simpson 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 31 January 2010 11:13:57PM 10 points [-]

But then morality does not have as its subject matter "Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one's own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc."

Instead, it has primarily as its subject matter a list of ways to transform the universe into paperclips, cheesecake, needles, orgasmium, and only finally, a long way down the list, into eudaimonium.

I think this is not the subject matter that most people are talking about when they talk about morality. We should have a different name for this new subject, like "decision theory".

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 01 February 2010 11:45:44PM *  2 points [-]

But then morality does not have as its subject matter....

I think you can keep that definition: define morality and morality-human. However, at least in the metaethics sequence, it would have done a lot of good to distinguish between morality-Joe and morality-Jane even if you were eventually going to argue that the two were equivalent. Once you're finished arguing that point, however, go on using the term "morality" the way you want to.

I only say this because of my own experience. I didn't really understand the metaethics sequence when I first read it. I was also struggling with Hume at the time, and it was actually that struggle that led me to make the connection between what an agent "should" do and decision theory. Only later I realized that was exactly what you were doing, and I chalk part of it up to confusing terminology. If you dig through some of the original posts, I was (one of many?) confusing your arguments for classical utilitarianism.

On the other hand, I may not be representative. I'm used to thinking of agent's utility functions through economics, so the leap to should-X/morality-X connected to X's utility function was a small one, relatively speaking.