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mwengler comments on The Argument From Marginal Cases - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: jkaufman 26 July 2013 01:30PM

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Comment author: mwengler 27 July 2013 03:42:02PM 1 point [-]

Thoughts?

Ultimately, it seems as hard to come up with a ratio of X:Y:Z as it would be to come up with a personal valuation ratio of Apples:Oranges:Education:747s:Laptops.

You are taking morality, which is some inborn urges you have when confronted with certain types of information, urges which started evolving in you long before your ancestors had anything approaching a modern neocortex, and which absolutely evolved in you without any kind of reference to the moral problem you are looking at in this comment. And you are trying to come up with a fixed-in-time, transitive, quantitative description of it.

In the case of Apples:Oranges, the COST of these to you in a store may be close to constant, but their VALUE to you are all over the map: sometimes the Apple wins, sometimes the Orange wins, often the Laptop wins, and when the 747 wins it wins big time.

It seems likely enough that your moral urges would be all over the map, variable in time. And that your effort to summarize them completely with fixed static numbers makes less sense than describing nature using the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.