Close your eyes, take as long as necessary to answer: What would you do, if nothing were right?
This is the life I lead now. I live as though there were no natural rights [1] and as though there were no God, in a determined universe that existed long before me and which will exist long after me, me being a non-vitalist sort of me at that.
Law, economics, convention and biology keep me from doing some of what I'd like to do in this world. Fortunately they keep others from doing what they'd like to do in this world, too, as some of it wouldn't be very nice for me at all.
My motives are likely my preference for things, sometimes gussied up as what is right or wrong but that, too, is a preference for my self-perception. I think of myself as a failed egoist.
Morality not being real is similar to the soul not being real. No captain in the boat doesn't mean there's no boat and no ocean and no storm.
Today's post, What Would You Do Without Morality? was originally published on 29 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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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 The Opposite Sex, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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