Wei_Dai comments on A funny argument for traditional morality - Less Wrong

15 Post author: cousin_it 12 July 2011 09:25PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 13 July 2011 02:15:11AM 7 points [-]

Counterargument:

  1. At least some of your values arose from your biology.
  2. Probably, among those "biological" values is the value of allowing your other values to be edited by others around you. This is evidenced by the fact that all humans allow their values to be edited by others around them, unless they've already undergone extreme amounts of indoctrination (and probably even then).
  3. Since you have not (I guess) undergone extreme amounts of indoctrination, there's no reason to expect that you no longer have that value.
Comment author: Emile 13 July 2011 09:56:05AM 5 points [-]

I find calling "allowing your other values to be edited by others" a value is a bit forced - it's a feature of human brains, but if I were to model my mind as an agent with values, I'm not sure I'd list that among the values.

Also, there are cases where everybody here (probably) agrees we don't want our values to be changed by others (advertisers trying to get us to value the awesome image of driving a Mercedes Benz!), and cases where most people here would agree we want our values to be flexible and may adopt new ones (say, when thinking about how to deal with completely new and weird cases that aren't covered by our pre-existing values or by Christian tradition, like brain uploads or duplication machines or encountering weird aliens). I think most of the discussion is where exactly to draw the line.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 13 July 2011 05:07:06PM 0 points [-]

I find calling "allowing your other values to be edited by others" a value is a bit forced - it's a feature of human brains, but if I were to model my mind as an agent with values, I'm not sure I'd list that among the values.

But it's not simply a hardwired feature either, since if you gave most people the option of self-modifying away that feature, they wouldn't accept. Perhaps another way to think about it is that we value our humanity (humanness) and allowing our values to be changed (to some extent) by others around us is a part of that.

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