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Rain comments on Rationalists don't care about the future - Less Wrong
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My "straw-man" does appear to have defenders, though we seem to agree you aren't one of them. I've admitted great confusion regarding ethics, morality, and meta-ethics, and I agree that rationality is one of the most powerful tools we have to dissect and analyze it.
What other valid tools for dissecting and analyzing morality are there again?
I'm not facetiously nit-picking, just wondering about your answer if there is one.
Before rationality can be applied, there has to be something there to say 'pick rationality'. Some other options might include intuition, astrology, life wisdom, or random walk.
You required a very narrow subset of possibilities ("valid tools for analyzing and dissecting"), so I'm sure the above options aren't included in what you would expect; it seems to me that you've got an answer already and are looking for a superset.
Thanks for your reply. Reading the sentence "rationality is one of the most powerful tools we have to dissect and analyze [morality]" seemed to imply that you thought there were other "equally powerful" (powerful = reliably working) tools to arrive at true conclusions about morality.
As far as I'm concerned rationality is the whole superset, so I was curious about your take on it. And yes, your above options are surely not included in what I would consider to be "powerful tools to arrive at true conclusions". Ultimately I think we don't actually disagree about anything - just another "but does it really make a sound" pitfall.
To some extent I am one such defender in the sense that I probably expect there to be a lot more of something like rationality to our values than you do. I was just saying that it's not necessary for that to be the case. Either way the important thing is that values are in the territory where you can use rationality on them.
For reference, this point was discussed in this post:
The point at which I think rationality enters our values is when those values are self-modifying, at which point you must provide a function for updating. Perhaps we only differ on the percentage we believe to be self-modifying.