Caledonian2 comments on Is Morality Given? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 July 2008 08:12AM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 07 July 2008 08:39:00PM 0 points [-]

As I said: you can start with an ostensive definition by listing examples of evil acts. Then you can find common elements.

There aren't necessarily any common elements, besides utterly trivial ones. If you look at examples of misspelled words in various languages and examine their individual properties, you won't find what unites them in a category. You have to understand their relationship to the spelling rules in the various languages - rules which themselves are likely to be incompatible and mutually incoherent - to understand what properties make them examples of 'misspelled words'.

We need the concept of morality itself, the rules that define the incompatible and mutually incoherent rule systems that are examples of 'morality'. Looking at examples of 'evil acts' isn't going to cut it.