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Will_Sawin comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (456)
The definition of "right action" is the kind of action you should do.
You don't need to know what "should" means, you just need to do what you should do and not do what you shouldn't do.
One should be able to cash out arguments about the "definition" of "right" as arguments about the actual nature of shouldness.
Defining 'right' in terms of 'should' gets us nowhere; it just punts to another symbol. Thus, I don't yet know what you're trying to say in this comment. Could you taboo 'should' for me?
Only through the use of koans. Consider the dialog in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles
Could you explain what "If A, then B" means, tabooing "if/then","therefore",etc.?
Here is another way:
If a rational agent becomes aware that the statement "I should do X" is true, then it will either proceed to do X or proceed to realize that it cannot do X (at least for now).
ETA: Here is a simple Python function (I think I coded it correctly):
def square (x): y=x*x return y
"return" is not just another symbol. It is not a gensym. It is functional. The act of returning and producing an output is completely separate from and non-reducible-to everything else that a subroutine can do.
Rational agents use "should" the same way this subroutine uses "return". It controls their output.
But better understanding of what "should" means helps, although it's true that you should do what you should even if you have no idea what "should" means.
How do I go about interpreting that statement if I have no idea what "should" means?
Use your shouldness-detector, even if it has no user-serviceable parts within. Shouldness-detector is that white sparkly sphere over there.
I think it means something analogous to "you can staple even if you have no idea what "kramdrukker" means". (I don't speak Afrikaans, but that's what a translator program just said is "stapler" in Africaans.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I think "should" is a special case of where a "can" sentence gets infected by the sentence's object (because the object is "should") to become a "should" sentence.
"You can hammer the nail." But should I? It's unclear. "You can eat the fish." But should I? It's unclear. "You can do what you should do." But should I? Yes - I definitely should, just because I can. So, "You can do what you should do" is equivalent to"You should do what you should do".
In other words, I interpret the statement by Vladmir to be an instance of what we can generally say about "can" statements, of which "should" happens to be a special case in which there is infection from "should" to "can" such that it is more natural in English to not write "can" at all.
This allows us to go from uncontroversial "can" statements to "should" statements, all without learning Africaans!
This feel like novel reasoning by my part (i.e. the whole "can" being infected bit) as to how Vladmir's statement is true, and I'd appreciate comments or a similarly reasoned source I might be partially remembering and repeating.
If these are equivalent, then the truth of the second statement should entail the truth of the first. But "You should do what you should do" is ostensibly a tautology, while "You can do what you should do" is not, and could be false.
One out you might want to take is to declare "S should X" only meaningful when ability and circumstance allow S to do X; when "S can X." But then you just have two clear tautologies, and declaring them equivalent is not suggestive of much at all.
Decisive points.
As you have shown them to not be equivalent, I would have done better to say:
But if the latter statement is truly a tautology, that obviously doesn't help. If I then add your second edit, that by "should" I mean "provided one is able to", I am at least less wrong...but can my argument avoid being wrong only by being vacuous?
I think so.
If you don't know what "should" means, how do you decide what to do?
This is another instance in which you can't argue morality into a rock.
If knowing what "should" means helped something, then knowledge of a definition could lead to real actionable information. This seems, on the face of it, absurd.
I think either:
"XYZ things are things that maximize utility"
or:
"XYZ things are things that you should do"
can count as a definition of XYZ, but not both, just as:
"ABC things are red things"
pr
"ABC things are round things"
can count as a definition of ABC things, but not both. (Since if you knew both, then you would learn that red things are round and round things are red.)