gregconen comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1329)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gregconen 18 March 2010 08:03:39PM 3 points [-]

But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn't we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?

Yes.

I have a strong preferences for simple set of moral preferences, with minimal inconsistency.

I admit that the idea of holding "killing babies is wrong" as a separate principle from "killing humans is wrong", or holding that "babies are human" as a moral (rather than empirical) principle simply did not occur to me. The dangers of generalizing from one example, I guess.