Solvent comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong

51 Post author: ChrisHallquist 01 March 2014 08:52AM

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Comment author: Solvent 03 March 2014 01:32:07AM 2 points [-]

I don't know for sure Alicorn and I would continue to disagree about the ethics of white lies if we talked it out thoroughly, but it wouldn't remotely surprise me.

That's a moral disagreement, not a factual disagreement. Alicorn is a deontologist, and you guys probably wouldn't be able to reach consensus on that no matter how hard you tried.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 03 March 2014 01:53:30AM *  7 points [-]

Three somewhat disconnected responses —

For a moral realist, moral disagreements are factual disagreements.

I'm not sure that humans can actually have radically different terminal values from one another; but then, I'm also not sure that humans have terminal values.

It seems to me that "deontologist" and "consequentialist" refer to humans who happen to have noticed different sorts of patterns in their own moral responses — not groups of humans that have fundamentally different values written down in their source code somewhere. ("Moral responses" are things like approving, disapproving, praising, punishing, feeling pride or guilt, and so on. They are adaptations being executed, not optimized reflections of fundamental values.)