Peter3 comments on Dark Side Epistemology - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 October 2008 11:55PM

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Comment author: Peter3 18 October 2008 04:52:43AM 0 points [-]

Normative beliefs (beliefs about what should be) don't [require evidence], IMHO. What would count as evidence for or against a normative belief?

That's correct if you don't consider pure reason to be evidence - but I consider it to be so. So morality and ethics and all these normative things are, in fact, based on evidence - although it is a mix of abstract evidence (reason) with concrete evidence (empirical data). If you base your morality, or any normative theory (how the world should be) on anything other than how things actually are (including mathematics), you necessarily have to invoke ascribe some supernatural property onto it