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

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

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 02 January 2012 08:27:26PM 1 point [-]

Hm. So what seems to follow from this is that most people don't actually consider killing people to be a particularly big deal, what they're averse to is killing people who contribute something useful to society... or, more generally, that most people are primarily motivated by maximizing social value.

Yes? (I don't mean to be pedantic here, I just want to make sure I'm not putting words in your mouth.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 January 2012 08:47:13PM 1 point [-]

Blast me! I meant to say that our culture is an exception, not an "inclusion". So this statement is largely true about non-western cultures, but western ones mostly view the relatively recent concept of "individuality and personhood are sacred" as their main reason against murder.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 02 January 2012 09:16:59PM 1 point [-]

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

So is your position that we inherited an aversion to murder from earlier non-western cultures, and then when we sanctified personhood we made that our main reason for our pre-existing aversion?
Or that earlier cultures weren't averse to murder, and our sanctification caused us to develop such an aversion?
Or something else?

Comment author: Multiheaded 02 January 2012 09:53:42PM 0 points [-]

Both, probably. We inherited all of their aversion (being a modest amount), and then we developed the sacredness, which, all on its own, added several times more aversion on top of that.