TheAncientGeek comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (304)
I see morality as fundamentally a way of dealing with conflicts between values/goals, so I cant answer questions posed in terms of "our values", because I don't know whether that means a set of identical values, a set of non-identical but non conflicting values, or a set of conflicting values. One of the implications of that view is that some values/goals are automatically morally irrelevant , since they can be satisfied without potential conflict. Another implication is that my view approximates to "morality is society's rules", but without the dismissive implication..if a society as gone through a process of formulating rules that are effective at reducing conflict, then there is a non-vacuous sense in which that society's morality is its rules. Also AI and alien morality are perfectly feasible, and possibly even necessary.
Some people think that any value, if it is the only value, naturally tries to consume all available resources. Even if you explicitly make a satisficing, non-maximizing value (e.g. "make 1000 paperclips", not just "make paperclips"), a rational agent pursuing that value may consume infinite resources making more paperclips just in case it's somehow wrong about already having made 1000 of them, or in case some of the ones it has made are destroyed.
On this view, all values need to be able to trade off one another (which implies a common quantitative utility measurement). Even if it seems obvious that the chance you're wrong about having made 1000 paperclips is very small, and you shouldn't invest more resources in that instead of working on your next value, this needs to be explicit and quantified.
In this case, since all values inherently conflict with one another, all decisions (between actions that would serve different values) are moral decisions in your terms. I think this is a good intuition pump for why some people think all actions and all decisions are necessarily moral.
Were the Babyeaters immoral before meeting humans?
If not, what would you like to call the thing we actually care about?
If I don't use "moral" as a rubber stamp for all and any human value, you don't run into CCCs problem of labeling theft and murder as moral because some people value them. That's the upside. Whats the downside?
What they did was clearly wrong... but, at the same time, they did not know it, and that has relevance.
Consider; you are given a device with a single button. You push the button and a hamburger appears. This is repeatable; every time you push the button, a hamburger appears. To the best of your knowledge, this is the only effect of pushing the button. Pushing the button therefore does not make you an immoral person; pushing the button several times to produce enough hamburgers to feed the hungry would, in fact, be the action of a moral person.
The above paragraph holds even if the device also causes lightning to strike a different person in China every time you press the button. (Although, in this case, creating the device was presumably an immoral act).
So, back to the babyeaters; some of their actions were immoral, but they themselves were not immoral, due to their ignorance.
Clearly I should have asked about actions rather than people. But the Babyeaters were not ignorant that they were causing great pain and emotional distress. They may not have known how long it continued, but none of the human characters IIRC suggested this information might change their minds. Because those aliens had a genetic tendency towards non-human preferences, and the (working) society they built strongly reinforced this.