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Will_Sawin comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong
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Comments (316)
So if you tell me I should go do something, and I agree with you, and I never go do that, you would see nothing inconsistent?
I'm totally comfortable with claims of the form "If you believe XYZ normative statements, then you should do W." It should work just as well as conditionals about physical statements.
No, that is not something that is implied by my statements.
It is an example of someone not acting according to their own professed ideals and is inconsistent in the same way that all such things are.
So you're saying that I am only allowed to use "should" to mean "WillSawin_should". I can't use it to mean "wedrifid_should".
This seems like an odd way to run a conversation to me.
No, that is another rather bizarre thing which I definitely did not say. Perhaps it will be best for me to just leave it with my initial affirmation of Luke's post:
In my observation Luke's system for reducing moral claims provides more potential for enabling effective communication between agents and a more comprehensive way to form a useful epistemic model of such conversations.
So suppose I say:
"I wedrifid_should do X" and then don't do X. Clearly, I am not being inconsistent.
but if I say:
"I should do X" and then don't do X then I am being inconsistent.
Something must therefore prevent me from using "should" to mean "wedrifid_should".
I'd agree that you can (and probably do) use plain old "should" to mean multiple things. The trouble is that this isn't very useful for communication. So when communicating, us humans use heuristics to figure out what "should" is meant.
In the example of the conversation, if I say "you should X" and you say "I agree," then I generally use a shortcut to think you meant Will-should. The obvious reason for this is that if you meant Manfred-should, you would have just repeated my own statement back to me, which would be not communicating anything, and it's a decent shortcut to assume that when people say something they want to communicate. The only other obvious "should" in the conversation is Will-should, so it's a good guess that you meant Will-should.
"I agree" generally means the same thing as repeating someone's statement back at them. We can expand:
"You wedrifd_should do X"
"I agree, I will_should do X"
I seem to be making an error of interpretation here if I say things the way you normally say them! Why, in this instance, is it considered normal and acceptable to interpret professed agreement as expressing a different belief than the one being agreed to?
It all seems fishy to me.
Huh, yeah that is weird. But on thinking about it, I can only think of two situations I've heard or used "I agree." One is if there's a problem with an unsure solution, where it means "My solution-finding algorithm also returned that," and if someone offers a suggestion about what should be done, where I seem to be claiming it usually means "My should-finding algorithm also returned that."
In the first case, would you say that the \Manfred_solution is something or other? You and I mean something different by "solution"?
Of course not.
So why would you do something different for "should"?
Because there's no objective standard against which "should algorithms" can be tested, like there is for the standard for "solution-finding algorithms" If there was no objective standard for solutions, I would absolutely stop talking about "the solution" and start talking about the Manfred_solution.