Eugine_Nier comments on Morality is not about willpower - Less Wrong
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Part of your description of the "ethics is willpower" position appears to be a strawman, as other parts of the same description are accurate, I assume it is because you do not fully understand it:
Firstly the position would more accurately be called "ethics is willpower plus wisdom", but even that doesn't fully capture it. Let's go through your points one by one:
No, it also includes delaying short-term gratification for long term benefits even to yourself.
This is more or less correct.
No, it's just that when they agree we don't spend much efforts talking about it. This is similar to the reason people on lw focus on the flaws in human reasoning and not the many times it's correct.
Well yes and no, there are positive imperatives as well as negative ones.
By "utility function" you seem to mean one's selfish desires and/or impulses.
No, in fact a large part of the "traditional education" was teaching people how to distinguish good from bad.
No problems with these two, except I'd potentially replace the "or" with an "and".
Except it's also possible to reason about what you should want so ethics and reason aren't opposed. Furthermore, once you've figured out what you should want you should also use reason to figure out how to go about it.
I don't entirely agree with these, but they are at least positions that a lot of people actually hold.
Uhm no, see my note above about it being possible to reason about ethics. Unethical smart people, however, have the potential to be worse then unethical dumb people since they can better rationalize their misbehavior and go about doing it more effectively.
That's like saying that reason is contrary to human nature because we have biases.
Even the people who hold this position believe it's still possible to reason about it.
This suggests you don't understand what people mean when they use the word "wisdom". As a first approximation think of wisdom as meaning real world experience.
I suspect this is true to a similar extend that intelligence is a single dimension.
I was parodying that view when I said it is "acquired automatically as a linear function of age." If you know of any studies that attempted to measure wisdom, or show correlations between different tests of wisdom, or between wisdom and outcomes, I'd be very interested in them.
I can't offhand think of any good uses of the word "wisdom" that would not be better replaced by some combination of "intelligent" and "knowledgeable". It is often used as a way to claim intelligence without having intelligence; or to criticize intelligent statements by saying they are not "wise", whatever that is.
It has been observed that people with high intelligence, nonetheless, frequently do stupid things, including stupid things that many people with less intelligence get right (I don't think this is controversial, but can provide examples as necessary). I am, therefore, using "wisdom" to mean whatever is necessary besides intelligence to avoid doing stupid things.
Luck?