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 05 June 2012 04:09:08AM 0 points [-]

The emotional investment a parent makes in their child must be huge, and the damages similarly so. It seems perfectly reasonable for a parent to say, "There's nothing available that I value more than I valued my child, consequently no sum of money will suffice to cover my damages. Whatever you give me it's still going to work out as a loss."

This is reasoning we may use now. But it does not apply in the spirit of the weirdtopia where we evaluate children only as property without moral value beyond that.

Comment author: Estarlio 05 June 2012 04:36:08AM -1 points [-]

Where did we start talking about weirdtopia?

Sewing-Machine says: Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?

Konkvistador says: Because its illegal to kill other people's pets or destroy their property? Duh.

Jayson_Virissimo says: So, premeditated killing of someone else's child should be criminal damage rather than murder?

And then we're back to the bit I was responding to. But we all seem to be talking about what should be the case, where we want to end up. The reasoning we can apply at the moment seems the relevant thing to that. If weirdtopia doesn't look like a place our reasoning would work, if we wouldn't want to live there.... Well, so much the worse for weirdtopia.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 June 2012 04:42:18AM *  0 points [-]

Where did we start talking about weirdtopia?

A weirdtopia. The premises that lead to the reasoning and conclusions here are only premises I could consider reasoning from from the perspective of a weird alternate reality. I certainly don't endorse anything we're talking about here myself but do suggest that they are incompatible with the nice sounding "Whatever you give me it's still going to work out as a loss" kind of moral expressions you mention - at least to the extent that they are embedded in the law.

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