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RichardKennaway comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong
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Having settled the meta-ethics, will you have anything to say about the ethics? Concrete theorems, with proofs, about how we should live?
I'm afraid that any nontrivial metaethics cannot result in concrete universal ethics - that the context would still be individual and the resulting "how RichardKennaway should live" ethics wouldn't exactly equal "how PeterisP should live".
The difference would hopefully be much smaller than the difference between "how RichardKennaway should live RichardKennaway-justly" and "How Clippy should maximize paperclips", but still.
Ok, I'll settle for concrete theorems, with proofs, about how some particular individual should live. Or ways of discovering facts about how they should live.
And presumably the concept of Coherent Extrapolated Volition requires some way of combining such facts about multiple individuals.
To derive an ethic from a metaethic, I think you need to plug in a parameter that describes the entire context of human existence. Metaethic(Context) -> Ethic
So I don't know what you expect such a "theorem" and such "proofs" to look like, without containing several volumes descriptive in symbolic form of the human context.
I have no such expectation either. But I do expect something, for what use is meta-ethics if no ethics results, or at least, practical procedures for discovering ethics?
What do you have in mind by "a description in symbolic form of the human context"? The Cyc database? What would you do with it?
We have the processing unit called "brain" which does contain our understanding of the human context and therefore can plug a context parameter into a metaethical philosophy and thus derive an ethic. But we can't currently express the functioning of the brain as theorems and proofs -- our understanding of its working is far fuzzier than that.
I expect that the use of metaethic in AI development would similarly be so that the AI has something to plug its understanding of the human context into.
It hasn't been established that we can't have them, just that we can't by some formal, computational method.I'm afraid we're back to hand-wavy socio-politico-philosphical discussion.