Vaniver comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 March 2007 06:53PM

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Comment author: Chrysophylax 30 January 2013 05:41:31PM *  1 point [-]

A bad person is someone who does bad things.

If doing "bad" things (choose your own definition) makes you a Bad Person, then everyone who has ever acted immorally is a Bad Person. Personally, I have done quite a lot of immoral things (by my own standards), as has everyone else ever. Does this make me a Bad Person? I hope not.

You are making precisely the mistake that the Politics is the Mind-Killer sequence warns against - you are seeing actions you disagree with and deciding that the actors are inherently wicked. This is a combination of correspondence bias, or the fundamental attribution error, (explaining actions in terms of enduring traits, rather than situations) and assuming that any reasonable person would agree to whatever moral standard you pick. A person is moral if they desire to follow a moral standard, irrespective of whether anyone else agrees with that standard.

Comment author: Vaniver 30 January 2013 05:55:35PM 6 points [-]

If a broken machine is a machine that doesn't work, does that mean that all machines are broken, because there was a time for each machine when it did not work?

More clearly: reading "someone who does bad things" as "someone who has ever done a bad thing" requires additional assumptions.