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Bugmaster comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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Thank you for stating your perspective and opinion so clearly and honestly. It is valuable. Now allow me to do the same, and follow by a question (driven by sincere curiosity):
I think you are.
You are heartless.
Here's my question, and I hope you take the time to answer as honestly as you wrote your comment:
Why?
After all you've rejected to care about, why in the world would you care about something as abstract as "humanity surviving and thriving"? It's just an ape species, and there have already been billions of them. In addition, you clearly don't care about numbers of individuals or quality of life. And you know the heat death of the universe will kill them all off anyway, if they survive the next few centuries.
I don't mean to convince you otherwise, but it seems arbitrary - and surprisingly common - that someone who doesn't care about the suffering or lives of strangers would care about that one thing out of the blue.
You are saying that shminux is "a worse person than you" and also "heartless", but I am not sure what these words mean. How do you measure which person is better as compared to another person ? If the answer is, "whoever cares about more people is better", then all you're saying is, "shminux cares about fewer people because he cares about fewer people". This is true, but tautologically so.
All morals are axioms, not theorems, and thus all moral claims are tautological.
Whatever morals we choose, we are driven to choose them by the morals we already have – the ones we were born with and raised to have. We did not get our morals from an objective external source. So no matter what your morals, if you condemn someone else by them, your condemnation will be tautoligcal.
I don't agree.
Yes, at some level there are basic moral claims that behave like axioms, but many moral claims are much more like theorems than axioms.
Derived moral claims also depend upon factual information about the real world, and thus they can be false if they are based on incorrect beliefs about reality.