Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Depends on what you mean by “undecidable”. There may be situations in which it's hard in practice to decide whether it's better to do A or to do B, sure, but in principle either A is better, B is better, or the choice doesn't matter.

Depends on what you mean by “undecidable”.

So, for example, suppose a situation where a (true) moral system demands both A and B, yet in this situation A and B are incomposssible. Or it forbids both A and B, yet in this situation doing neither is impossible. Those examples have a pretty deontological air to them...could we come up with examples of such dilemmas within consequentialism?