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Kyrorh comments on Value ethics vs. agency ethics - Less Wrong Discussion

-1 [deleted] 26 July 2014 07:34AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 July 2014 03:07:55PM 0 points [-]

Although I've come to expect this result, it still baffles me.

I'm concerned that you are mixing two different things.

Those two things would be value ethics and agency ethics and I'm the one trying to hold them apart while you are conflating them.

I wouldn't call it "moral", I'd just call it "bargaining".

But we're not bargaining. This works even if we never meet. If agency is just another terminal value you can trade it for whatever else you value and by that you are failing to make the distinction that I'm trying to show. Only because agency is not just a terminal value can I make a game theoretic consideration outside the mere value comparison.

Agency thus becomes a set of guidelines that we use to judge right from wrong outside of mere value calculations. How is that not what we call 'morality'?

but the distinction between the two scenarios is principal.

And that would be exactly my point.

Comment author: Squark 29 July 2014 08:03:54PM 0 points [-]

But we're not bargaining. This works even if we never meet.

Yeah, which would make it acausal trade. It's still bargaining in the game theoretic sense. The agents have a "sufficiently advanced" decision theory to allow them to reach a Pareto optimal outcome (e.g. Nash bargaining solution) rather than e.g. Nash equilibrium even acausally. It has nothing to do with "respecting agency".