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CoffeeStain comments on Normativity and Meta-Philosophy - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Wei_Dai 23 April 2013 08:35PM

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Comment author: CoffeeStain 24 April 2013 05:15:22AM 0 points [-]

How about, "You should X, and you should accept a standard that would recommend it?" Thereby appealing to a third (shared) standard, possibly one having to do with rationality of moral beliefs. Applying an analogous moral version of Aumann's Agreeement Theorem could lead us to a theory which suggests that you can never say this quoted sentence unless you're willing to believe that you should accept the standard you recommend.

I do hope to avoid discussion about the common usage of "should" in favor of a theory that would allow us (if no one else) to use it consistently to refer to some shared standard, and I believe this can be done without paradox. So long as a community shares a sufficiently basic belief, it will be possible to extract shared consequences of that belief. In the same sense that a group of rationalists cannot convince non-Baysians that they should apply Aumann's Agreement Theorem, we cannot convince an analogous group that our word "should" refers to our internally normative values. In neither case should we worry.