Thom_Blake comments on Hot Air Doesn't Disagree - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 August 2008 12:42AM

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Comment author: Thom_Blake 16 August 2008 03:44:27PM 0 points [-]

Aristotelians may not be teaching physics courses (though I know of no survey showing that) but they do increasingly teach ethics courses. It makes sense to think of what qualities are good for a fox or good for a rabbit, and so one can speak about them with respect to ethics.

However, there is no reason to think that they disagree about ethics, since disagreement is a social activity that is seldom shared between species, and ethics requires actually thinking about what one has most reason to do or want. While it makes sense to attribute the intentional stance to such animals to predict their behavior (a la Dennett), that still leaves us with little reason to regard them as things that reason about morality.

That said, there is good reason to think that dogs, for instance, have disagreements about ethics. Dogs have a good sense of what it takes to be a good dog, and will correct each other's behavior if it falls out of line (as mentioned w.r.t. wolves above).