Today's post, Fake Utility Functions was originally published on 06 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Describes the seeming fascination that many have with trying to compress morality down to a single principle. The sequence leading up to this post tries to explain the cognitive twists whereby people smuggle all of their complicated other preferences into their choice of exactly which acts they try to justify using their single principle; but if they were really following only that single principle, they would choose other acts to justify.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Uncritical Supercriticality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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