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Grognor comments on Morality open thread - Less Wrong
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I've gotten to thinking that morality and rationality are very, very isomorphic. The former seems to require the latter, and in my experience the latter gives rise to the former. So they may not even be completely distinguishable. We've got lots of commonalities between the two, noting that both are very difficult for humans due to our haphazard makeup, and both have imaginary Ideal versions (respectively: God, and the agent who only has true beliefs and optimal decisions and infinite computing power, and they seem to be correlated (though it is hard to say for sure), and the folk versions of both are always wrong. By which I mean when someone has an axe to grind, he will say it is moral to X, or rational to X, where really X is just what he wants, whether he is in a position of power or not. Related to that I've got a pet theory that if you take the high values of each literally, they are entirely uncontroversial, and arguments and tribalism only begin when people start making claims of what each implies, but once again I can't be sure at this juncture.
What say ye, Less Wrong?
My sense is that this assertion can be empirically falsified for all levels of abstraction below "Do what is right."
But in a particular society or sub-culture, more specific assertions can be uncontroversial - in an unhelpful in solving any problems kind of way. That was what I took away from Applause lights.
Indeed, this is one of many reasons why I am starting to think "go meta" is really, really good advice.
Edit: Clarification, what I mean is that I think virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, and the less popular ethical theories agree way more than their proponents think they do. At this point this is still a guess.
I don't follow. Discussing theories of morality is already quite meta from the object level moral decisions we face in our daily lives. Going another level of meta is unlikely to illuminate - it certainly doesn't seem likely to be helpful in doing the impossible.