knb comments on Fascists and Rakes - Less Wrong

39 Post author: philh 05 January 2014 12:41AM

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Comment author: knb 05 January 2014 01:24:34PM *  10 points [-]

It feels like most people have a moral intuition along the lines of "you should let people do what they want, unless they're hurting other people".

If it feels like that, you probably have a very provincial understanding of human moral intuitions. Haidt identified 6 moral foundations, only one of which is harm-based.

  1. Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
  2. Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions (He has also referred to this dimension as proportionality.)
  3. Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
  4. Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
  5. Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
  6. Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Comment author: scrafty 06 January 2014 12:33:47AM 5 points [-]

I don't see how the fact that the permissiveness principle is only based on one (two, actually, including the third one) of the six foundations would imply that it's not a widely-held intuition.

Comment author: knb 06 January 2014 05:33:44PM 3 points [-]

You're falsely conflating the permissiveness principle with those moral foundations. The permissiveness principle is a much stronger position, which states that things are only immoral if they cause harm.

Comment author: philh 07 January 2014 12:26:39AM 0 points [-]

I was thinking of the PP as more of a rule of thumb.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 05 January 2014 09:54:34PM 2 points [-]

What specifically does "foundation" mean in this context? Are those things evaluated by different parts of the brain, do they create different emotions, or...?

Without this information, they are basically just six different applause lights. Or course different people may have different applause lights. But what exactly is the difference between a person who values loyalty and hates betrayal intrinsically, and a person for whom loyalty means fairness + care, and betrayal means cheating and harm? (Loyalty could be modelled as an informal mutual aid pact.)

Comment author: Vulture 07 January 2014 03:21:15AM *  2 points [-]

Without this information, they are basically just six different applause lights.

It's possible to determine that certain features as (virtually) universal across cultures, without also identifying why exactly they are or how they work.

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