= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChrisHallquist comments on Why didn't people (apparently?) understand the metaethics sequence? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (229)
Okay... I need to write a post about that.
Are you really imagining a coherent possibility, though? I mean, you could also say, "If someone tells me, 'imagine that p & ~p,' it seems that in that case, p & ~p."
I am. It's so easy to do I can't begin to guess what the inferential distance is.
Wouldn't it be inherently right to kill babies if they were going to suffer? Wouldn't it be inherently right to kill babies if they had negative moral value to me, such as baby mosquitoes carrying malaria?
I think it's fair, principle of charity and all, to assume "babies" means "baby humans" specifically. A lot of things people say about babies becomes at best false, at worst profoundly incoherent, without this assumption.
But you're right of course, that there are many scenarios in which killing human babies leads to better solutions than not killing them. Every time I consider pointing this out when this question comes up, I decide that the phrase "inherently right" is trying to do some extra work here that somehow or other excludes these cases, though I can't really figure out how it is supposed to do that work, and it never seems likely that raising the question will get satisfying answers.
This seems like it might get back to the "terminal"/"instrumental" gulf, which is where I often part company with LW's thinking about values.
Yeah, these were just a couple examples. (I can also imagine feeling about babies the way I feel about mosquitos with malaria. Do I have an exceptionally good imagination? As the imagined feelings become more removed from reality, the examples must get more bizarre, but that is the way with counter-factuals.) But there being ready examples isn't the point. I am asked to consider that I have this value, and I can, there is no inherent contradiction.
Perhaps as you suggest, there is no p&-p contradiction because preserving the lives of babies is not a terminal value. And I should replace this example with an actual terminal value.
But herein lies a problem. Without objective morality, I'm pretty sure I don't have any terminal values -- everything depends on context. (I'm also not very certain what a terminal value would like if there was an objective morality.)