Will_Sawin comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Will_Sawin 09 June 2011 05:46PM

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Comment author: Will_Sawin 27 June 2011 02:54:08PM 0 points [-]

I don't love all your terminology, but obviously my preferred terminology's ability to communicate my ideas on this matter has been shown to be poor.

I would emphasize less relationships between similar moral beliefs:

A thing can't be both permissible and forbidden.

and more the assembly-line process converting general to specific

This ought function doesn't contain physical beliefs, but rather processes primitive normative/moral beliefs (from outside the ought function) and outputs particular normative/moral judgments, which contribute to the production of human behavior (including spoken moral judgments)

I'm pretty sure the first statement here only makes sense as a consequence of the second:

The ought function doesn't reduce to physics because it's a set of purely logical statements. The 'meaning' of ought in this sense is determined by the role that the ought function plays in producing intentional behavior by the robots.