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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Mere Messiahs - Less Wrong
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Why throughout all of your posts do you continue to speak of altruistic action as good or praiseworthy? Evolutionary psychology disproves ethical cognitivism... Just as there's no invisible dragon in my garage, there's also no such as thing as a value or a moral obligation.
Really? I know what a garage would behave like if it contained an invisible dragon - we'd be able to measure the exhaled carbon dioxide, see footprints appearing in the ground, outline it by throwing flour into the air, etc. I know what a garage would behave like if it contained a benevolent God; it would cure the cancer of people placed inside, etc. Can you tell me what a garage would look like if it contains a moral obligation?
It's not that we looked in the morality garage and found that it was empty, but that, rather, morality isn't the sort of thing you find in a garage in the first place.
Do you, though? What if that God was vastly more intelligent than us; would you understand all of His reasons and agree with all of His policy decisions? Is there not a risk that you would conclude, on balance, "There should be no 'banned products shops'", while a more knowledgeable entity might decide that they are worth keeping open?
If God is more intelligent than me and I don't understand his reasons, that proves too much. It could just as well be that God is evil, and the things that he does that seem good just seem good to me because they are evil on a level that I can't understand.