Peterdjones comments on The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 December 2007 02:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (271)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Peterdjones 11 May 2011 03:34:24PM 1 point [-]

'Good' and 'bad' are always evaluated in terms of effects upon a particular thing; a good hammer is one which optimally pounds in nails, a good horse is fast and strong, and a good human experiences eudaimonia. Murder is the sort of thing that makes one a bad human; it makes one less virtuous and thus less able to experience eudaimonia.

What is eudaimonia for...or does the buck stop there?

As a side note, 'murder' is normative; it is tautologically wrong.

And tautologies and other apriori procedures can deliver epistemic objectivity without the need for the any appeal to quasi empiricsim.

Comment author: thomblake 11 May 2011 06:09:08PM 1 point [-]

What is eudaimonia for...or does the buck stop there?

It was originally defined as where the buck stops. To Aristotle, infinite chains of justification were obviously no good, so the ultimate good was simply that which all other goods were ultimately for.

Regardless of how well that notion stands up, there is a sense in which 'being a good hammer' is not for anything else, but the hammer itself is still for something and serves its purpose better when it's good. Those things are usually unpacked nowadays from the perspective of some particular agent.