Lightwave comments on What is Eliezer Yudkowsky's meta-ethical theory? - Less Wrong

33 Post author: lukeprog 29 January 2011 07:58PM

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Comment author: Lightwave 01 February 2011 10:11:03AM *  1 point [-]

What if we use 'human' as a rigid designator for unmodified-human. Then in case aliens convert people into paperclip-maximizers, they're no longer human, hence human_right no longer applies to them, but itself remains unchanged.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 01 February 2011 09:48:53PM 0 points [-]

human_right still applies to them in the sense that they still should do what's human_right. That's the definition of should. (Remember, should refers to a specific set of terminal values, those that humans happen to have, called human_right) However, these modified humans, much like clippy, don't care about human_right and so won't be motivated to act based on human_right (except insofar as it helps make paperclips).

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you because it's a little ambiguous how you used the word "applies." If you mean that the modified humans don't care about human_right anymore, I agree. If you mean that the modified humans shouldn't care about human_right, then I disagree.

Comment author: Lightwave 01 February 2011 10:16:50PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure why it's necessary to use 'should' to mean morally_should, it could just be used to mean decision-theoretic_should. E.g. if you're asked what a chess playing computer program should do to win a particular game, you could give a list of moves it should make. And when a human asks what they should do related to a moral question, you can first use the human_right function to determine what is the desired state of the world that they want to achieve, and then ask what you should do (as in decision-theoretic_should, or as in what moves/steps you need to execute, in analogy to the chess program) to create this state. Thus morality is contained within the human_right function and there's no confusion over the meaning of 'should'.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 01 February 2011 10:43:07PM 0 points [-]

As long as you can keep the terms straight, sure. EY's argument was that using "should" in that sense makes it easier to make mistakes related to relativism.