dhasenan comments on Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 October 2008 09:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 March 2012 04:56:09PM *  1 point [-]

That works, or at any rate I can't think of plausible ways to get out of your scenario. My worry though is that people's attempts to come up with alternatives is actually evidence that hypothetical moral problems have some basic flaw.

I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of what I mean, but suppose someone were to describe a non-existant person in great detail and ask you if you loved them. It's not that you couldn't love someone who fit that description, but rather that the kind of reasoning you would have to engage in to answer the question 'do you love this person?' just doesn't work in the abstract.

So my thought was that maybe something similar is going on with these moral puzzles. This isn't to say moral theories aren't worthwhile, but rather that the conditions necessary for their rational application exclude hypotheticals.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 February 2014 05:03:54AM 0 points [-]

It's not a flaw in the hypotheticals. Rather, it's a healthy desire in humans to find better tradeoffs than the ones initially presented to them.