A license is a kind of credential that allows one the moral/ethical/legal right to perform a certain kind of action.
In this case, I believe he's saying that merely doing "the human thing to do" is not a credential that makes "doing the human thing" moral in and of itself.
Unfortunately his analogy is with some complicated mathematical logic.
Thank you. That's very helpful.
Today's post, No License To Be Human was originally published on 20 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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 You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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