prase comments on Pluralistic Moral Reductionism - Less Wrong

33 Post author: lukeprog 01 June 2011 12:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (316)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: prase 01 June 2011 03:50:09PM *  0 points [-]

I believe that (almost) everybody things "ought" means the same thing, and that people disagree about the concept that "ought" usually refers to.

What is the difference between what "ought" means and what it refers to?

Edit:

This concept is special because it has a reverse definition. Normally a word is defined by the situations in which you can infer that a statement about that word is true. However, "ought" is defined the other way - by what you can do when you infer that a statement about "ought" is true.

In the above, do you say that "You ought to do X." is exactly equivalent to the command"Do X!", and "I ought to do X." means "I will do X on the first opportunity and not by accident." ?

Is it the case that Katy ought to buy a car? Well, I don't know. But I know that if Katy is rational, and she becomes convinced that she ought to buy a car, then she will buy a car.

Ought we base the definition of "ought" on a pretty complicated notion of rationality?

Comment author: Will_Sawin 01 June 2011 03:55:06PM 1 point [-]

(yay, I finally caused a confusion that should be really easy to clear up!)

Alice and Bob agree that "Earth" means "that giant thing under us". Alice and Bob disagree about the Earth, though. They disagree about that giant thing under them. Alice thinks it's round, and Bob thinks it's flat.

Comment author: prase 01 June 2011 04:02:19PM 0 points [-]

I have difficulty to apply the analogy to ought.