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Jiro comments on What level of compassion do you consider normal, expected, mandatory etc. ? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 [deleted] 10 April 2015 12:57PM

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Comment author: Jiro 12 April 2015 03:56:58AM *  0 points [-]

There's a combination of

  1. A defeasible presumption that if I project matter and/or energy into you, and that directly causes you to suffer, I'm in the moral wrong.
  2. Ideas about what counts as projecting matter and energy that do not follow the literal definition of projecting matter and energy.

People don't think of seeing a shirt as the shirt doing something to their retina. They think of it as them reacting to a shirt and the shirt just sitting there. The fact that you see the shirt by reflected light is an irrelevant technical detail. If the shirt was illuminated by a lamp on your front lawn instead of by the sun, the technical details would change (since the light is coming from you) but the answer to who is wrong would not change.

Comment author: torekp 12 April 2015 10:18:40AM *  0 points [-]

You're right. I explained it badly. Or to put it differently, my theory of the doing-to-you vs something-that-just-happens distinction, was badly simplistic.

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