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army1987 comments on Population Ethics Shouldn't Be About Maximizing Utility - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (46)
The speaker.
I'd unpack that sentence as “according to <insert the speaker's set of values here>, a world with creatures who know what is <insert the speaker's set of values here> is better than one without such creatures, all other things being equal”. AFAICT, that is correct when spoken by a non-psychopathic human (as human::morality does terminally value the existence of human::moral creatures), but not by a Pebblesorter (as, AFAICT, Pebblesorter::morality doesn't care how many Pebblesorter::moral beings there are, except insofar as such beings will create more prime-numbered heaps).
Morality is an algorithm, so it exists the way infinitely many prime numbers exist, not the way I exist. So such a statement doesn't even make sense -- unless you take “morality” to be used synecdochally to refer to concrete implementations of the algorithm rather than to the abstract algorithm itself, in which case it reduces to the previous one.
The simpler and more accurate ways of expressing that are "Joe prefers A over B", or to more clearly indicate the preference as a moral preference, "A is preferable to B according to Joe's moral values".
Should goes beyond a statement of preference or higher rank according to a set of values, and implies that someone has the moral obligation to make it happen, or more precisely, to take a certain action. According to my values, I'd prefer that I had magical powers, but there's no person I can identify who has the moral obligation to give them to me, not even myself.