= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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 (199)
Moral intuitions (i.e, 'kneejerk reactions') are what fuels many people's opinions. Can we do better on LW? Meta-ethical systems (consequentialism, deontology) are often used as post-hoc rationalizations for said moral intuitions, but can we do better?
For these kind of problems I especially like Kant's approach -- can we come up with a rule that underlies our opinion on something, and would we be willing to follow that rule, even if it goes against our immediate intuitions in some other case? And the more specific a rule gets (ie., 'this only applies to green people', the clearer is the sign that we're doing some special pleading.
How is coming up with a rule based on our moral intuitions and then following that rule even when it means violating our intuitions any better than just following intuitions in the first place? How is it better to replace following intuitions with following an imperfect simplification derived from an intuition?
I have been thinking these past months that I could somehow be immune from or outside of the necessity of having my intuitions dictate my values. Someone pointed out to me that it was essentially an intuition of mine that separating from this source of morality would be a good idea, and since then I have been trying to figure out how to live with being just an evolutionarily determined set of arbitrary (to anyone outside the system) values.
You can't get away from your intuitions.
We contemplate our moral intuitions and intuitively abstract rules from them, and have the intuition that such rules should be followed. Yet the rules may turn out to violate other intuitions. The problem is not rules against intuitions, but intuitions against intuitions.