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Vladimir_Nesov comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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That's not the point. You must use your heuristics even if you don't know how they work, and avoid demanding to know how they work or how they should work as a prerequisite to being allowed to use them. Before developing technical ideas about what it means for something to be true, or what it means for something to be right, you need to allow yourself to recognize when something is true, or is right.
I'm sorry, but if we had no knowledge of brains, cognition, and the nature of preference, then sure, I'd use my feelings of right or wrong as much as the next guy, but that doesn't make them objectively true.
Likewise, just because I intuitively feel like I have a time-continuous self, that doesn't make consciousness fundamental.
As an agent, having knowledge of what I am, and what causes my experiences, changes my simple reliance on heuristics to a more accurate scientific exploration of the truth.
Just make sure that the particular piece of knowledge you demand is indeed available, and not, say, just the thing you are trying to figure out.
(Nod)
I still think it's a pretty simple case here. Is there a set of preferences which all intelligent agents are compelled by some force to adopt? Not as far as I can tell.
Morality doesn't work like physical law either. Nobody is compelled to be rational, but people who do reason can agree about certain things. That includes moral reasoning.
I think we should move this conversation back out of the other post, where it really doesn't belong.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
For what X are you saying "All agents that satisfy X must follow morality."?
If you're moving it anyway, I would recommend moving it here instead.
I'm saying that in "to be moral you must to follow whatever rules constitute morality" the "must" is a matter of logical necessity, as opposed to the two interpretations of compulsion considered by NMJ: physical necessity, and edict.
You still haven't explained in this framework why one can talk about how one gets that people "should" be moral anymore than people "should play chess". If morality is just another game, then it loses all the force you associate with it, and it seems clear that you are distinguishing between chess and morality.
Hmm... This is reminiscent of Eliezer's (and my) metaethics¹. In particular, I would say that "the rules that constitute morality" are, by the definition embedded in my brain, some set which I'm not exactly sure of the contents of but which definitely includes {kindness, not murdering, not stealing, allowing freedom, ...}. (Well, it may actually be a utility function, but sets are easier to convey in text.)
In that case, "should", "moral", "right" and the rest are all just different words for "the object is in the above set (which we call morality)". And then "being moral" means "following those rules" as a matter of logical necessity, as you've said. But this depends on what you mean by "the rules constituting morality", on which you haven't said whether you agree.
What do you think?
What determines the contents of the set / details of the utility function?
The short answer is: my/our preferences (suitably extrapolated).
The long answer is: it exists as a mathematical object regardless of anyone's preference, and one can judge things by it even in an empty universe. The reason we happen to care about this particular object is because it embodies our preferences, and we can find out exactly what object we are talking about by examining our preferences. It really adds up to the same thing, but if one only heard the short answer they might think it was about preferences, rather than described by them.
But anyway, I think I'm mostly trying to summarise the metaethics sequence by this point :/ (probably wrongly :p)