cata comments on Strategies for dealing with emotional nihilism - Less Wrong

28 [deleted] 10 October 2010 01:31PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 11 October 2010 12:49:24PM 2 points [-]

There are two salient senses of something being non-arbitrary: something you prefer for a clear moral reason, and something understood as resulting from a clear physical cause. You are elaborating the sense irrelevant in this context: that happiness as a phenomenon appeared because of evolutionary factors (although explanatory power of this argument is debatable). But this is not at all a moral argument for preferring happiness, which is the context of Rain's confusion.

Comment author: cata 11 October 2010 02:03:41PM 1 point [-]

I agree that there's a semantic distinction between those two senses, but I'd point out that when you're talking about humans, there's not much practical distinction. It's not as if someone comes up to us at the age of 18 and says "OK, you're an adult, so if you don't find happiness to be moral, you may now modify your preferences at will to match your morality." That's really hard to do! So I don't think it's irrelevant.