= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (420)
I think you're confusing things by conflating ethical value and economic value.
Edit: Also, even assuming you want to equate ethical and economic value, a human still has more value since he can create things of value much better then a wolf.
I reversed my vote when I saw the edit. While the conflation point is undeniable the 'can create value' is not especially relevant to Phil's discussion of scarcity and changed my impression of the comment to 'just throw soldiers for the Rah Humans side'.
It is by no means assured that the eaten human from the margin would have created more value than is lost by damaging a hypothetical endangered animal. In fact, someone who particularly values biodiversity the net value that would have been created by the human is almost certainly negative.
Since we're equating ethical value and economic value here, there's a simple way to test this: how much could you get paid to save the human vs. the wolf. Given that this is Norway and not some third world country, the human presumably has a decent amount of money he'd be willing to pay to save his life, not to mention his family and friends and the potential to take out a loan against future earnings. As for the wolf, you might be able to get something out of an animal-lover but not nearly as much as from the human.
Except PhilGoetz is trying to use this argument to justify valuing biodiversity.
I'm not. That's why I said I agree with your pre-edit point.
(Indirectly relevant: I am equating ethical value with personal utility which is something not everyone does.)
My point was that even if we grant PhilGoetz's equation of ethical and economic value, it still doesn't imply what he wants it to.
I think you're confusing things by postulating the existence of two different kinds of values.
If you had two kinds of values, how would you ever make a decision?
I think you're supposing that when I say "value", I mean dollars. I didn't say that.
You use economic principals to justify assigning value to biodiversity when you said "the fact that value depends on scarcity is a fundamental economic principle."
I think the most reasonable interpretation of that sentence is: more me biodiversity/scarcity is an instrumental value and my terminal values are based on economic/market value.
If this is incorrect could you explain what you meant, since the only other explanation I can think of is that it was a flimsy attempt to rationalize your valuing biodiversity.
Value is value. You can't have two separate types of value if you're going to make a decision. You can't say, "I'm going to use economic value for economic decisions, and ethical value for ethical decisions", because decisions don't break down nicely for you into those categories.
Economic value and ethical value need to be merged. And the result will look more like economic value, because economic value is well-studied and quantified, while the main point of the category "ethical value" is to be vague and slippery, so that people can avoid actually getting answers about ethics.
Economic value, a.k.a., market value, is how much something would be worth on the market. Ethical value is my personal utility function.
Data point: I maintain both concepts and yet don't feel confused.