Larry_D'Anna comments on Morality as Fixed Computation - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 August 2008 01:00AM

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Comment author: Larry_D'Anna 08 August 2008 03:34:09AM 1 point [-]

Tom McCabe: speaking as someone who morally disapproves of murder, I'd like to see the AI reprogram everyone back, or cryosuspend them all indefinitely, or upload them into a sub-matrix where they can think they're happily murdering each other without all the actual murder. Of course your hypothetical murder-lovers would call this imoral, but I'm not about to start taking the moral arguments of murder-lovers seriously. You just have to come to grips with the fact that the thing we call Morality isn't anything special from a global, physical perspective. It isn't written in the stars, it doesn't follow from pure logic, it isn't simple or easy to describe. It's a big messy, complicated aspect of *our* specific nature as a species.

Coming to grips with this fact doesn't mean you have to turn into a moral relativist, or claim that morality is made of nothing but arbitrary individual preference. Those conclusions just don't follow.