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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4 - Less Wrong
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To what extent can magic be used to make food that doesn't require killing?
This is one of the few cases where canon is very clear about how magic works: Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.
So it looks as though food can be created without additional killing, and if Harry is willing to eat duplicates of preserved food (I can't see any reason why not), then the proportion of killing to the amount of food can be driven very low.
Particularly given that magical healing would allows the collection of initial 'food prototypes' with no long term damage! (Although it would probably rule out things like hearts.)
Chapter 6 mentions a "bottle of food and water pills", which seems to have been forgotten about.
This is not necessarily food created by magic, though: maybe someone took ordinary food and magicked it into a pill.
Canonically, it can't beyond increasing the amount (a really bad idea in MoR) or summoning something that's already dead. Not sure if it can in MoR, given that it seems mostly to use the 3.5 D&D spell list (although, come to think of it, neither <i>create food and water</i> nor <i>heroes feast</i> is a Sor/Wiz spell). Although even if it turns out plants are sentient, <i>fruit</i> should still be mostly okay.
I suppose that milk and infertile eggs would still be problematic because the cows and chickens are killing plants.
On the other hand, what's morality for? I thought the original intent was to improve life, not to make it impossible.
Morality? Original intent? To assert political influence among the tribe in a way that benefits yourself while simultaneously preventing yourself from making faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to yourself in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is prohibitively expensive.
Always a pleasure to hear from the Slytherins.
OK, why do you think Harry is concerned with ethical behavior to all sentients?
I think there's some evolutionary pressure on morality, so that it's a mixture of requirements for behavior which improve the odds of survival for the group, maintain the status of high-status people, and/or are just people making things up because they sound cool/seemed like a good idea at the time/distinguish the group from other groups. People are encouraged to think of all three as the same sort of thing.
Ahh, but am I? Or am I a hufflepuff who does not base his value system on self-deception?
The original intent of the egg laid by hens was something to do with the reproduction of chickens. Yet as far as I'm concerned eggs are there to be separated white from yolk, whipped thoroughly and combined with the extract from artificially selected cane. Morals, ethics and values general are similar - what matters to me is not what the original intent was or causal factors but what my values happen to be right now. I get to choose which of my values I consider, well, part of 'me'.
I note that maintaining the belief "the original intent of morality was to improve life", or even "the intent of morality that can be inferred from human behavior is to improve life" is not necessarily a stable belief to hold. That is, exposure information from the world around them through either social observation or theoretical study will cause the belief to be discarded because it just isn't, well, true. To refer to a well known exhortation by a source held here in disrepute: don't build your house on sand!
It seems he took his intuitive value for 'other thing that I can empathise with' and applied it more generally than most. This is not a logical problem - there is a huge space of values that are internally coherent. Yet it does have implications that lead me to consider the values of Harry<as expressed at that particular time> are only slightly preferable to those of Clippy. Optimizing the universe by those criteria would create an outcome that I personally (and I suggest most people) would not like all that much.
My thinking is along similar lines... yet I divide the three modes from a slightly different perspective. I don't put much weight on the 'odds of survival for the group' for example, although there is definitely a sense in which moral claims are meant to be interpreted as declarations of pro-social norms. I had tended to leave off 'just making things up because they sound cool' because I was focusing on the explicit political influences but come to think of it "seemed like a good idea at the time" probably does explain a lot!
If by "assert political influence," you mean not accept garbage like the Pirate Game, and by "tribe" you mean any group of mammals. Obviously I'm using a broad definition of morality here.
No, I don't mean that and it isn't exactly the kind of game morality is set up to handle.
But it is an interesting link and the progression is far from intuitive.
...OK, I have little experience with the game Taboo, but people claim to have found 5 major instincts that together provide "mechanisms" for nearly all societal codes. I care more about the first two then the others.
Before, I linked to evidence that dogs care about Fairness in a way that seems to clearly increase their chance of surviving to reproduce in the wild. (Though I admit they'd likely never have to face the Pirate Game as such.) This study purports to show Empathy and its backward cousin Group Loyalty in mice.
Your examples seem to work by Authority, which I feel pretty confident exists in other animals (especially for children). It makes a certain amount of sense to describe rules of this nature as ways to assert political influence, provided we include unconscious political behavior and allow a wide range of motives for wanting to influence others.
"Purity" seems like a mindless animal's version of germ theory.
(Edited once for clarity in the first paragraph.)
Morality? Original intent? To assert parental influence upon your unruly children in a way that gives you a moment's peace while simultaneously preventing your children from making future faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to the little darlings, in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is just too complicated for those immature brains.
Elaine Morgan's ideas about mankind's physical origins may have been all wet, but I think she was right on when talking about where human society and language came from. Hint: it wasn't created to satisfy the needs of adult male hunting bands.
Morality tends to become less necessary as one matures. It is also, as you allude, plays a less significant role in all-male social competition than in mixed group or all female competition. Yet to limiting it as you do to just children is a mistake. The role of morality is clearly visible outside of the family unit and used by and directed at adults.
Are you using "morality" in some narrow technical sense, here? I ask because this statement seems so bizarrely false to me that it seems like you may have been saying something entirely different than my understanding of what you said.
I'm using a perfectly standard definition of morality. I can only assume you are using a different meaning of necessary.
Take, for example, 'crossing the road'. Look both ways, hold hands, etc. That is all presented using the mechanism for morality. This is necessary for most young children because their ability to reason out natural consequences and actually make responsible judgements is undeveloped. As an adult you don't need to to have a feeling when you cross the road that you may be transgressing on an absolute moral law. You take care because you know about the dangers of cars.
Then, on the social side of things, consider 'please and thankyou'. It is presented as a moral obligation to children. Part of being a 'good boy and girl'. Because children don't have decades of experience and a theoretical grasp of the intricacies of deference to status and supplication. As people mature they learn when it is best to supplicate and when supplication would actually be detrimental. Heck, in the worst case following that moral literally get you killed.
I make no suggestion that abandoning ones ethics entirely is either a good thing or practical. I can only assume that is the 'bizarrely false' thing that you are talking about. Because the fact that morality is more useful for children than for adults seems blatantly obvious. Perplexed (although not myself) went as far as to say it is the sole reason for morality's existence!
Okay, so you're not using morality in the sense of a deep understanding of motivations and consequences which guide a person not to do things which may eventually harm them, but in the sense of rules for people to follow when they haven't thought it through, or can't think it through. I think that sufficiently explains our difference on this.
Sounds about right to me.
Mine is still too young for us to let her cross the road unshepherded, but I'm certainly not presenting that sort of thing to her "using the mechanism for morality"; at least, I'm trying not to and so far as I can tell I'm succeeding. (I think my wife is doing likewise, but I don't know for sure; we haven't discussed the matter in depth.) When there's something she mustn't do for reasons of safety, we tell her "don't do X, it's dangerous and here's why". Seems to be working well so far.
Now, maybe however I present things my daughter interprets them using "the mechanism for morality" (e.g., if that's automatically triggered by any sense of parental disapproval); it's hard to tell. And maybe I, or my daughter, or both, are unusual. But a blanket statement that "That is all presented using the mechanism for morality" seems to me to need some actual justification which isn't in evidence; it looks clearly false to me.
There is no other example you can think of where morality is useful for keeping young people from being hurt by environmental or social dangers that they are later able to handle in a more sophisticated, practical way, without the morals of children protecting them?
This may be an inferential distance that is too large to cross. Morality is something that many find hard to reduce.
Agreed. But the context was "original intent". Morality originated as a way to align children's behavior with mother's wishes. It then was discovered that it could be extended to align adult behaviors with tribal wishes.
That is my story and I'm sticking to it.
Mutilating, yes, but not necessarily killing. Grass can regrow after being cropped.
Chickens are also at least partly insectivorous, but if insects turn out to be sapient (and Rita Skeeter certainly demonstrates that it's possible to hide human-level intelligence in an insect) it might be time to rethink the existential triage priorities.
Er, really?
Use an asterix on either side of the word or phrase to make italics.