Toggle comments on Compartmentalizing: Effective Altruism and Abortion - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Dias 04 January 2015 11:48PM

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Comment author: Toggle 06 January 2015 01:47:51AM 1 point [-]

There's a lot of heavy lifting going on behind the scenes in Will MacAskill's thesis, which I'm glad you linked to.

In particular, it's far from obvious that you can rationally construct an uncertainty table about moral 'facts' in the same way that you could for an empirical uncertainty. Can the objective worth of an action be surprising, independent of its form and consequences? The physical state of the fetus is not in question; the 'surprising discovery' here would be that an abortion has some quality of badness, one which is not implied by a subjective observer's desires or a full and complete understanding of the physical system.

If there is such a quality of objective badness or goodness, what properties does it have, and how would you discover those properties? Why should we expect it to operate within standard mathematical axioms in the first place?

Comment author: Dias 08 January 2015 01:50:03AM 2 points [-]

The physical state of the fetus is not in question; the 'surprising discovery' here would be that an abortion has some quality of badness, one which is not implied by a subjective observer's desires or a full and complete understanding of the physical system.

I think I have two responses:

  • Firstly, I sometimes am convinced to change my mind on moral issues as a result of purely moral arguments. Something like moral uncertainty seems to be at play.
  • I think there's some danger of equivocation with "full and complete understanding of the physical system." Maybe if I knew the position of each atom, and had all the systems-level understanding that would imply, then there would be no moral uncertainty. But it seems possible that I could have a 'full understanding' in the conventional, more banal sense, and also have moral uncertainty, even if some strong version of physicalism is true.
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