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buybuydandavis comments on Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable - Less Wrong
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Is Action X moral?
That's an ill posed question. Moral, according to what/whose moral standard?
If Clippy successfully grinds up half of humanity, and churns them out as shiny new paper clips, he would likely consider himself mighty moral_clippy ( if he even has a concept of morality - does he?). But we wouldn't find him so moral_human, or moral_human_i.
The various twists and turns of the scenario merely obfuscate the more fundamental issue - what/whose moral standards are we talking about?
I am a moral realist, I believe there exists an objective moral standard which is part of the territory. This is the moral standard we are talking about.
Obviously, we are unable to know whether our ethical maps correspond to the ethical territory. We should therefore update our priors about the ethical territory in response to good arguments and thought experiments. Throughout this discussion, I have made several updates to my beliefs.
If we don't believe there is such a thing as an objective ethical standard, if the territory doesn't exist, then I fail to see the point in even discussing ethics.
Hold on. You're saying that there's objective morality but it's unknowable in principle? Then on what basis do you believe it exists and why would its existence even matter?
Even if you think that ethics are a semi-arbitrary social construct, they are very useful for human societies and so worth discussing.
Fair point - I should have phrased that differently. I think I intended that both in the weak sense "Our prior on moral statements should never be 0 or 1" and also in the slightly stronger sense "Ethics is difficult, so our priors should have high variance"
The problem isn't so much with priors, the problem is what are you willing to accept as evidence to be used for updating your beliefs.
Is discussing preferences in sports, climate, food, art, attractiveness, ... also pointless? There are a great many preferences that we have, but not identically, and not assuming there is an objective "right" preference, that we discuss nevertheless.
No more than "we" are all talking about the same thing when "we" say God.
Is Clippy talking about the same moral standard?
There is no such a thing as an objective ethical standard. However, each agent has her own ethical standard which is meaningful to discuss. For humans, this moral standard often includes a "preference utilitarian" component i.e. we want the preferences of other morally significant agents to be satisfied (where the definition of "morally significant" is probably quite complicated but seems to involve intelligence and possibly similarity to humans) - but not at all costs (i.e. there are other components in our utility functions as well).