thomblake comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 April 2009 07:07PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (183)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: thomblake 24 April 2009 05:36:15PM 1 point [-]

Yes, 'pure altruism' is a pretty weak position, and you won't find many proponents of it. Altruism as an ethical position doesn't make any sense; you keep pushing all of your utils on other people, but if you consider a 2-person system doing this, nobody actually gets to keep any of the utils.

Comment author: steven0461 24 April 2009 07:00:39PM 2 points [-]

Agreed, but under certain conditions relating to how much causal influence one has on others vs. oneself, utilitarianism and pure altruism lead to the same prescriptions. (I would argue these conditions are usually satisfied in practice.)