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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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None of the people alive in Homer's times is alive today. Dunno about how “fundamentally” different we are -- I'd guess the difference between CEV<Homer> and CEV<Esar> is very small but not exactly zero.
Okay, I think I'm starting to get it. Is the idea that, both of us given all the correct moral arguments and all the information, an archaic Greek person and myself would still want different things?
Yes. For a more philosophical (and extreme) take on the issue, you can read Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Warning: Nietzsche is made of hyperbole, so it's often quite difficult to understand his substantive point.
In this case, the point is that the Greeks divided the world into good and bad, while we moderns divide the world into good and evil. What's the difference? It is possible to bad at a sport, but acting within the norms of the sport, it is impossible to be evil. Imagine how your moral perspective would be different if you only judged people based on whether they were "good at life" or "bad at life".
Indeed, I like Nietzsche's philosophy as I know it from second-hand accounts, but when I tried to read his own writings I had to force myself through the pages and gave up. (Maybe I used a bad translation or something.)
ISTM that many (most?) LWers also divide the world into good and bad, so, to the extent this is a fundamental disagreement between values rather than someone's confusion due to not knowing something/not thinking stuff through, CEV<LW> might be closer to CEV<Homer> than to CEV<Catholics in the late second millennium>!
BTW, I think I've also seen a two-dimensional model for that; I don't remember how the quadrant other than “good”, “bad” and “evil” (people who aren't terribly good at life, but at least try hard not to harm others as a result of their incompetence, even to a cost to themselves) was labelled -- wimps?
Sounds like two axes, one going from competent to incompetent, the other from well-intentioned to ill-intentioned.
Yes. (Not sure about the exact labels on the axes, but that was the spirit.) IIRC, “good” was the quadrant (competent, well-intentioned), “bad” was (incompetent, ill-intentioned), “evil” was (competent, ill-intentioned) and I don't remember the label on the remaining quadrant.
Yes. Apparently sam0345 (if that's what he means by “his moral ideal”) thinks the two of you would still want very different things; wedrifid and I think you would want slightly different things.
Okay, thanks for taking the time to explain. This has been very helpful.
a) The word "different" seems to be missing from the above.
b) I don't k now how CEV is defined or whatt it is suppsed to be. Old-fashioned metaethics from that "diseseased discipline", philosophy, seem much clearer to me.
C) I have only ever been saying that, as so far stated, such questions are imponderable.
It's in the question; it seemed redundant to me to put it in the answers too.