= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Social ethics vs decision theory - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (33)
There are a lot of different sorts of utilitarianism, and I'm not sure that all of them would lead to choosing not to have children. What's your line of thought that utilitarianism would lead to sterility?
Also, it wouldn't surprise me if many people who call themselves utilitarians actually mean they're more utilitarian than most people rather than that they're absolutely utilitarian. People (especially non-geeks) are very good at resilience in the face of memes.
Signaling might be even cruder and stupider than you imagine. How about "it's better to sound as though one has a highly intellectual system of ethics"?
If you have a choice between feeding your kids and feeding someone elses, usually the other person's needs will be greater than your own. Even if you want to make more utilitarians, much the same applies.
More generally, the "memetic hijcking" model diverts resources from genes to memes - often leading to compromised fertility.
Something like that probably explains a lot of interest in morality in general. There are also things like: look how much time I have to spend on things not involving finding my next meal.