preferredanonymous comments on The curse of identity - LessWrong

121 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 17 November 2011 07:28PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 November 2011 06:02:08AM 2 points [-]

What's built in, plausibly, are specific drives (to comfort a crying baby, to take a clear example) whose gratification overlaps what we're inclined to call good. But these specific drives don't congeal into a drive to do ethical good: "good" isn't a natural property.

Now, you could say that "doing good" is just a "far" view of gratifying these specific drives. But I don't think that's the way it's used when someone sets out to "do good," that is, when they're making "near" choices.