byrnema comments on Attention Less Wrong: We need an FAQ - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Kevin 27 April 2010 10:06AM

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Comment author: byrnema 29 April 2010 08:09:49PM *  3 points [-]

That is more clear, but still describes what I thought I understood of your position. It's rather unconventional, so it took me a while to be certain what you meant.

I think that 'subjective' means that a mind is assessing the morality. The key idea is that different minds could assign different moral judgements, so the judgement is mind-dependent.

In contrast, any morality that considers the state of an agent's mind in the computation of that agent's morality can be either objective or subjective.

For example, suppose it was written on a tablet, "the action of every agent is moral unless it is done with the purpose of harming another agent". The tablet-law is still objective, but the computation of the morality of an action depends on the agent's intention (and mind).

I just experienced a flicker of a different understanding, that helps me to relate to your concept of subjective. Suppose there were two tablets:

Tablet A: The action of every agent is moral unless it harms another agent.

Tablet B: The action of every agent is moral unless it is done with the purpose of harming another agent.

Tablet A measures morality based on the absolute, objective result of an action, whereas Tablet B considers the intention of an action.

Whereas this is an important distinction between the tablets, we don't say that Tablet A is an objective morality and Tablet B is a subjective morality. There must be other terms for this distinction. I know that Tablet A is like consequentialism, and Tablet B includes, for example, virtue ethics.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 30 April 2010 02:04:35AM 0 points [-]

It's rather unconventional, so it took me a while to be certain what you meant.

I was just giving my interpretation of the article's definitions. Do you think my interpretation is unconventional?

I don't think I disagree with you about how to parse mind-dependent, I've just been sloppy in putting it into a definition. I would call both tablet A and tablet B objective/mind independent

So how about this for a definition of mind-dependent:

The "source" of what is moral for an agent depends on the mind of the agent.