= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on The 5-Second Level - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (310)
Why must my personal understanding of right and wrong also apply to other people? What if I think something's wrong for me to do, but I don't care if other people do it (e.g. procrastination)?
If it's purely personal, why call it moral?
I'm confused. With Sidgwick, I define 'ethics' as 'the study of what one has most reason to do or to want', and take 'moral' to in most cases be equivalent to 'ethical'.
Then, 'morality' is indeed purely personal, but being very similar creatures we can build off each others' moral successes.
I tend to think of 'the things I have to do to be me' as moral, and 'the things I have to do to fit into society' to be ethics. In a lot of cases when someone is calling someone else immoral, it seems to me that they're saying that that person has done something that they couldn't do and remain who they are.
Edit - please disregard this post
Why not? (A somewhat quirky twist that seems to crop up is that of having a powerful moral intuition that people's morals should be personal. It can sometimes get contradictory but morals are like that.)
Usual reasons...for one things, there are other ways of describing it, such as "personal code". For another, it renders morality pretty meaningless if someone can say "murders' OK for me".
I think it makes sense in the negative sense, as things that aren't OK. What's wrong with holding oneself to a higher standard? What's wrong with saying "It'd be immoral for ME to murder?"
And yet if the same neurological hardware is being engaged in order to make social moves of a similar form 'morality' still seems appropriate. Especially since morals like "people should not force their view of right and wrong on others" legitimate instances of moralizing even when the moralizer tends to take other actions which aren't consistent with the ideal. Because, as I tend to say, morals are like that.
What about "war is OK for me"?
It really gets to me that when a bunch of people gather together under some banner then it suddenly becomes moral for them to do lots of things that would never be allowed if they were acting independently: the difference between war and murder...
The only morality I want is the kind where people stop doing terrible things and then saying "they were following orders". Personal responsibility is the ONLY kind of responsibility.
Because you care about other people, and other people are relevantly similar to yourself. This applies to both instrumentally relevant details, like the character of a person you're going to hire, and more personal concern, like whether your brother is living a good life.
Principles derivable from game theory, maybe.