Comment on Morality is Awesome

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 04:05:52 GMT

I meant that we should be looking at the awesomeness of outcomes and not actions, and that "awesome" is more effective at prompting this behavior than "good". It looks like you get it, if I understand you correctly.

Oh! That does make sense. I can see your point with that.

I find that somewhat implausible. If they are a hardcore explicit deontologist who,against the spirit of this article, has attempted to import their previous moral beliefs/confusions into their interpretation of "awesomism", then yeah. For random folks who intuitively lean towards deontology for "good", I think "awesome" is still going to be substantially more consequentialist.

Possibly. I'm honestly not sure which hypothesis would be more correct, at the moment. Testing it would probably be a good idea, if we had the resources to do it. (Do we have the resources for that? I wouldn't expect it, but weirder things have happened.)

Maybe next year's survey could have some scenarios that ask for an awesomeness ranking, and some other scenarios that ask for a goodness raking, and some more with a rightness ranking. Then we could see how people's intuitions vary with whether they claim to be deontologist or consequentialist, and with prompting wording. This could put the claims in the OP here on a more solid footing than "this works for me".

I don't think that would work. People here tend to be more consequentialist than I've seen from people not from here, so we'd probably not be able to see as much of a difference. Plus, the people here are hardly what I'd call normal and are more homogeneous than a more standard set of people. To effectively test that, we'd have to conduct that survey with a more random group of people. I mean, that survey would work, but the sample should be different than the contributors of LessWrong.

Discuss