Comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:40:32 GMT

But claims about transfinities don't correspond directly to any object. Maths is "spun off" from other facts, on your view. So, by analogy, moral realism could be "spun off" without needing any Form of the Good to correspond to goodness.

Spun off from what, and how?

You seem to be assumig that morality is about individual behaviour. A moral realist system like utiitarianism operates at the group level, and woud take paperclipper values into account along with all others. Utilitarianism doens't care what values are, it just sums or averages them.

Speaking as a utilitarian, yes, utilitarianism does care about what values are. If I value paperclips, I assign utility to paperclips, if I don't, I don't.

Or perhaps you are making the objection that an entity woud need moral values to care about the preferences of others in the first place. That is addressed by, another kind of realism, the rationality-based kind, which starts from noting that rational agents have to have some value in common, because they are all rational.

Why does their being rational demand that they have values in common? Being rational means that they necessarily share a common process, namely rationality, but that process can be used to optimize many different, mutually contradictory things. Why should their values converge?

I was talking about rational minds converging on the moral claims, not on values.. Rational minds can converge on "maximise group utility" whilst what is utilitous varies considerably.

So what if a paperclipper arrives at "maximize group utility," and the only relevant member of the group which shares its conception of utility is itself, and its only basis for measuring utility is paperclips? The fact that it shares the principle of maximizing utility doesn't demand any overlap of end-goal with other utility maximizers.

Axioms are formal statements, intuitions are gut feelings tha are often used to justify axioms.

But, as I've pointed out previously, intuitions are often unhelpful, or even actively misleading, with respect to locating the truth.

If our axioms are grounded in our intuitions, then entities which don't share our intuitions will not share our axioms.

So do they call for them to be fired?

No, but neither do I, so I don't see why that's relevant.

Discuss