= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jiro comments on Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice" - 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)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (110)
The fantasy isn't mainly that Robertson likes torturing atheists or thinks his audience does. The fantasy is that their own atheism is responsible for them being tortured and that the awfulness of that demonstrates that atheism is awful. Whether his audience likes hearing about atheists suffering is a side issue.
That's a bad comparison because Nazis did not believe that Jews could or should give up being Jews.
Hmmm, I think a better word than "fantasy" here is "dystopia." Robertson is painting a bleak picture of a world where without moral authority, like the (much longer) bleak depiction of say, Fahrenheit 451 of a world without intellectual freedoms. Again, the natural reaction to reading Fahrenheit 451 or hearing Robertson isn't gleeful cackling, but shocked horror. "Something ain't right."
Robertson is mistaken in believing that atheists all deny the existence of right and wrong. However, from a timeless decision point of view, someone who does in fact deny the existence of right and wrong is at least partly "responsible" for it if he is murdered by someone who does not believe that murder is wrong and who would not have done it if he did believe it was wrong.
Saying he has no responsibility at all in this sense, would be like saying that the person who takes two boxes in a Newcomb situation is not responsible for the fact that he didn't get the million.