blacktrance comments on Be comfortable with hypocrisy - Less Wrong

32 Post author: The_Duck 08 April 2014 10:03AM

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Comment author: blacktrance 08 April 2014 07:58:34PM 1 point [-]

What would be for you an example of inconsistent behavior, then?

If you say that eating meat is wrong, but then eat it.

If you climb the abstraction tree high enough, you can always get to consistency, if only in the form of "Do what your morals tell you to do".

That's true, but "do what your morals tell you to do" is vacuous and not action-guiding. Morality must be action-guiding, and "In [situation], do X" and "In [situation], do what RNG tells you" are both action-guiding.

In particular, "X is wrong" is a different claim from "X is inconsistent" or "X is not logically coherent".

If I say "Eating meat is wrong, one should never do something wrong, it is sometimes permissible to eat meat", there is a contradiction, and that requires at least one of the three statements to be false.