Perplexed comments on If reductionism is the hammer, what nails are out there? - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
That depends a lot on what you mean by "moral relativism". Certainly rationality and reductionism need not imply taking morality less seriously. I liked what Eliezer's Harry Potter had to say on the subject:
If you haven't looked at it already, you might like Eliezer's sequence on metaethics, which talks about how one can notice that our concerns are generated by our brains, and that one could design brains with different concerns, while still taking morality seriously.
It sounds a lot as if you are suggesting that there is some essence to morality which transcends "concerns are generated by our brains".
"still taking morality seriously" modifies "one [who can...]", not "brains with different concerns".
I'm not sure why you came to think there was some confusion on this point, so I will not presume to suggest where you went wrong in your reading.
One attractor in the space of moral systems that doesn't have much to do with what could be engineered into brains is the class of moral systems that are favoured by natural selection.