= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
thomblake comments on Rationality Quotes October 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (298)
To put on my utilitarian hat for a moment, I would suggest that blaming someone for a genuine mistake is right inasmuch as it leads to better outcomes.
To wit, sometimes punishing genuine mistakes will correct behavior.
Also,
What is this supposed to mean? Was there an implied syllogism that I didn't spot? Why did logic even enter the conversation?
It means that if certain assumptions are made, including about what basic words mean (I make no comment on whether these assumptions are correct) then reaching the conclusions that someone is to be blamed relies on making a logic error. So yes, you did miss an implied syllogism---perhaps because you don't accept the implied premises so don't consider the syllogism important.
Asking this question is a dubious move. Commenting on whether things make any sense at all is reasonably relevant to most conversations and this conversation seems to be about evaluating whether a line of reasoning (in a quote) is to be accepted. That line of reasoning being illogical would be pretty darn relevant if happened to be true (and again, I'm not commenting on the validity of the required premises).
Yeah, I was just confused. I see "illogical" being used in situations that don't seem to be about logic, and looking at a dictionary to see if I was assuming a wrong meaning didn't seem to help.
So based on your explanation, it seems like if Alice says "illogical" to Betty like that, I should 1) assume Alice thinks Betty is making a logical argument, 2) figure out what logical argument Alice thinks Betty is supposed to be making, and 3) figure out what Alice thinks is wrong with that argument.
Of course, that sounds like a lot of work, so I'll probably just start skipping over that word.
That seems practical. Usually a similar thing can be done with 'immoral' too, and 'right', and 'should'.
We should distinguish between the notion of blame insofar as it's useful as opposed to blame insofar as it suggests that there is something wrong with the person for making the initial decision. Don't confuse different issues, there's a difference between desirable metaethics and desirable societal norms.
It seems illogical to have a moral system which requires people to do something impossible.
My desirable metaethics contains a complete lack of the notion referred to as "blame". The closest it gets is rewards for things that encourage prevention of things that would be "blamed" under other metaethics, such as the one which I currently hold (there are lots of hard problems to solve before that desired metaethics can be made fully reflectively coherent).
That seems to be begging the question. You posit that these things are objectively impossible, but assert that there is no way to obtain objective truth, and no way to verify the impossibility of something.
Also, a moral system which requires for maximal morality that all minds be infinitely kind requires all minds to do something impossible, yet seems like an extremely logical moral system (if kindness is the only thing valued). You can have unbounded variables in moral systems. I see no error there.
Not illogical, just annoying and pointless.