You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

jimrandomh comments on Ethical frameworks are isomorphic - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: lavalamp 13 August 2014 10:39PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (43)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: jimrandomh 15 August 2014 03:54:27PM 1 point [-]

Sort of! But not exactly. This is a topic I've been meaning to write a long post on for ages, and have given a few short impromptu presentations about.

Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are classifiers over world-histories, actions, and agents, respectively. They're mutually reducible, in that you can take a value system or a value-system fragment in any one of the three forms, and use it to generate a value system or value-system fragment in either of the other two forms. But value-system fragments are not equally naturally expressed in different forms; if you take a value from one and try to reframe it in the others, you sometimes get an explosion of complexity, particularly if you want to reduce value-system fragments which have weights and scaling properties, and have those weights and scaling properties carry through.