seer comments on Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice" - Less Wrong
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How do you distinguish the part of your ethics that you ignore in practice, e.g., not giving all your money to charity, from the part you insist you and everybody follow, e.g., not killing Joe even though he's being really really annoying.
Giving all my money to charity isn't a part of my ethics.
Increasing net utility (or something of the kind) is one of the things I care about. So the fact that something increases net utility is a reason to do it, and the fact that something decreases net utility is a reason not to. But net utility isn't the only thing I care about, so a thing that increases net utility isn't necessarily a thing I think I should do.
What I insist on, though, is another matter again. That's a matter of Schelling points and traditions and the like, optimized (inter alia) for being easy to remember and intuitively plausible.
So:
The attentive reader will notice that not killing people just for being annoying clearly fits into the same category as the last of those.