= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SilentCal comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (99)
This makes sense... and the idea of 'praiseworthy/benevolent' shows that Moralos do have the concept of a full ranking.
So we could look at this as Moralos having a ranking plus an 'obligation rule' that tells you how good an outcome you're obligated to achieve in a given situation, while Moralps don't accept such a rule and instead just play it by ear.
Justifying an obligation rule seems philosophically tough... unless you justify it as a heuristic, in which case you get to think like a Moralp and act like a Moralo, and abandon your heuristic if it seems like it's breaking down. Taking Giving What We Can's 10% pledge is a good example of adopting such a heuristic.
Maybe, but it's a very common moral intuition, so anything that purports to be a theory of human morality ought to explain it, or at least explain why we would misperceive that the distinction between obligatory and praiseworthy-but-non-obligatory actions exists.
Is heuristic value not a sufficient explanation of the intuition?
I don't see the heuristic value. We don't perceive people as being binarily e.g. either attractive or unattractive, friendly or unfriendly, reliable or unreliable; even though we often had to make snap judgements about these attributes, on matters of life and death, we still perceive them as being on a sliding scale. Why would moral vs. immoral be different?
It'd be fairer to compare to other properties of actions rather than properties of people; I think moral vs. immoral is also a sliding scale when applied to people.
That said, we do seem more attached to the binary of moral vs. immoral actions than, say, wise vs. unwise. My first guess is that this stems from a desire to orchestrate social responses to immoral action. From this hypothesis I predict that binary views of moral/immoral will be correlated with coordinated social responses to same.
Interesting; that may be a real difference in our intuitions. My sense is that unless I'm deliberately paying attention I tend to think of people quite binarily as either decent people or bad people.
Significantly more than you think of them binarily regarding those other categories? Then it is a real difference.
My view of people is that there are a few saints and a few cancers, and a big decent majority in between who sometimes fall short of obligations and sometimes exceed them depending on the situation. The 'saint' and 'cancer' categories are very small.
What do your 'good' and 'bad' categories look like, and what are their relative sizes?
I think of a large population of "decent", who generically never do anything outright bad (I realise this is probably inaccurate, I'm talking about intuitions). There's some variation within that category in terms of how much outright good they do, but that's a lot less important. And then a smaller but substantial chunk, say 10%, of "bad" people, people who do outright bad things on occasion (and some variation in how frequently they do them, but again that's much less important).