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Strilanc comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Sam Harris recently responded to the winning essay of the "moral landscape challenge".
I thought it was a bit odd that the essay wasn't focused on the claimed definition of morality being vacuous. "Increasing the well-being of conscious creatures" is the sort of answer you get when you cheat at rationalist taboo. The problem has been moved into the word "well-being", not solved in any useful way. In practical terms it's equivalent to saying non-conscious things don't count and then stopping.
It's a bit hard to explain this to people. Condensing the various inferential leaps into a single post might make a useful post. On the other hand it's just repackaging what's already here. Thoughts?
"Well-being" is a know-it-when-we-see-it sort of thing. Sure it's vague, but I don't begrudge its use.
Let's break down the phrase you just objected to (I have not read SH's book, if that matters): "Increasing the well-being" - roughly correlates with increase utility, diminishing suffering, increasing freedom, increasing mindfulness, etc. Good things! And if defining it further gets into hairsplitting over competing utilitarianisms, then you might as well avoid that route. "Of all conscious creatures" - well, you obviously can't do anything immoral to a rock. Maybe you kick a rock and upset the nest of another creature, but you haven't hurt the rock. But you can do immoral things to conscious creatures, which can be argued to be pretty broad; certainly broader than just humans.
So I think this is as concrete as many one-sentence summaries of morality.
But just how much value does "increase the <good things we know it when we see it> for conscious creatures" provide over just "do the <good actions we know them when we see them>"?