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Vaniver comments on Deontological Decision Theory and The Solution to Morality - Less Wrong
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Huh? It struck me as pretty poor, actually.
It's not well-constructed overall, but I wish I had a nickel every time someone's huge ethical system turned out to be an unconscious example of rebelling within nature, or something that gets stuck on the pebblesorter example.
Right, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. I mean, he can only get away with the following because he's left his terms so fuzzy as to be meaningless:
That is, one would be upset if I said "there is a God, it's Maxwell's Equations!" because the concept of God and the concept of universal physical laws are generally distinct. Likewise, saying "well, morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others" makes a mockery of the word 'morality.'
I think your interpretation oversimplifies things. He's not saying "morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others"; he's rather making the claim (which he defers until later) that what we mean by morality cannot be divorced from contingent human psychology, choices and preferences, and that it's nonsense to claim "if moral sentiments and principles are contingent on the human brain rather than written into the nature of the universe, then human brains should therefore start acting like their caricatures of 'immoral' agents".
I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that the way Eliezer espouses thinking about ethics and morality in those sequences is a poor way of thinking about morality? Do you mean that Eliezer's explanations of that way are poor explanations? Both? Something else?
The methodology is mediocre, and the conclusions are questionable. At the moment I can't do much besides express distaste; my attempts to articulate alternatives have not gone well so far. But I am thinking about it, and actually just stumbled across something that might be useful.
I'm going to have to disagree with this. The methodology with which Eliezer approaches ethical and moral issues is definitely on par with or exceeding the philosophy of ethics that I've studied. I am still unsure whether you mean the methodology he espouses using, or the methods he applied to make the posts.