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AspiringRationalist comments on Population Ethics Shouldn't Be About Maximizing Utility - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: Ghatanathoah 18 March 2013 02:35AM

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Comment author: AspiringRationalist 21 March 2013 03:20:23AM 1 point [-]

let me suggest a moral axiom with apparently very strong intuitive support, no matter what your concept of morality: morality should exist. That is, there should exist creatures who know what is moral, and who act on that. So if your moral theory implies that in ordinary circumstances moral creatures should exterminate themselves, leaving only immoral creatures, or no creatures at all, well that seems a sufficient reductio to solidly reject your moral theory.

-Robin Hanson

How close is close enough? If my moral system has 20 distinct components, should I value a being with 19 of those 20 as a moral being? 95% of a moral being? What if it has 5 of those 20 components?

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 21 March 2013 05:04:47AM *  -1 points [-]

Assuming that all components are equally valuable (which probably isn't true in real life), and that the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts (again, this is probably false in real life) then I think that being with "partial morality" may be "partially worth creating."

This sounds much less strange if you state it in more concrete terms. If you ask people to rank the following scenarios in preference order:

  1. All life on Earth goes extinct.

  2. Humanity, and all other life on Earth, survives perfectly fine.

  3. Humanity dies out, but the other great apes do not.

Most people would rank, in order from most to least desirable, 2, 3, 1. This is because the other great apes likely share at least some moral values in common with humanity, so their survival is better than nothing.

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