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shminux comments on Magical Healing Powers - Less Wrong
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Why? My should is different from your should. Who is to say that your should is better for me than mine?
And no, I don't accept your "idea that we have some obligation to try to help other people". I hate obligations. They piss me off. Whatever I do, I do because I want to, not because I owe it to others.
This seems like a bad general heuristic that should be more restricted in its application. Who is to say that following your understanding of your goals is better for you than following someone else's? You have to consider specific arguments, not just origins of statements or beliefs. Think it possible that you may be mistaken, etc.
No disagreement there, specific arguments ought to be considered. However, in my experience, if someone tells you that you have an obligation to do something (pray to $god, donate to $cause, enlist in $military, vote for $candidate, ...), they are not to be trusted with putting forth arguments, or even estimating prior[itie]s. So, ignore people like that entirely and do your own research from scratch.
So the heuristic is to only consider arguments that don't claim to be leading to any (novel/actionable) conclusions? This rule decides at the bottom line, stopping consideration of arguments that don't conclude with uncertainty or close match to intuitively natural desires, which would be bad if conclusions not of that form turn out to be knowably correct.
If you remain specific, you may get rid of "pray to $god", but not other similar things, "donate to $cause that's known to be worthless", but not other similar things, etc. That should lift most of the load without as many false negatives.
Wait, so you're saying that your right to freedom is more important than making this world as good as possible? By all moral systems I know of, that's morally wrong (though I'll admit I don't know many). Do you have a well-defined moral system you could point me to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_egoism
Even an ethical egoist would cooperate with a copy of herself in the prisoner's dilemma, if she's using the ‘right’ decision theory.
I am saying nothing of the sort. My point is that I distrust anyone who tells me that I am obligated to do stuff that they think is "right".