wedrifid comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 01 January 2012 10:04:13AM *  1 point [-]

Tiny kittens are also cute and haven't even done anything to death yet. But if you accidentally lock one in a car and it suffocates, that's merely unfortunate, and should probably not be a crime. The same is true for infants and all other non-person life. If you kill a kitten for some reason other than sadism, well, it's unfortunate that you felt that was necessary, but again, they're not people.

Yeah, I get it, you don't consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I'm forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers. If I somehow have the option to exclude all consideration of your preferences from the optimisation function of an FAI then I take it. Just a plain ol' conflict of terminal values.

Comment author: wedrifid 01 January 2012 10:17:53AM *  0 points [-]

Oh, and to clarify the extent of my disagreement: When I say "You vote for baby killing, I vote against it" that assumes I don't live in some backwards country without compulsory voting. If voting is optional then I'm staying home. Other people killing babies is not my problem - because I don't have the power to stop a mob of humans from killing babies and I'm not interested in making the token gesture.