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SaidAchmiz comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - LessWrong
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I think that this assumption is warranted because I don't know what it would even mean for Christian values to be "true". If by morality being true you mean that those who disobey will be punished, then yes, but that doesn't mean that disobeying is wrong according to your personal utility function. And as far as moral realism goes, I don't see how a world where it holds would be different from a world where it doesn't. Even if there is some moral law written into the fabric of the universe, it would still be a further question whether you decide to care about it. So I agree with your original comment, if the heaven-and-hell version of Christianity was true, killing babies would be a very altruistic thing to do.
Thank you for saying this! I thought something along those lines but I couldn't think of how to put it.
That's pretty simple. If God -- specifically the Christian God -- truly exists and the general teachings of Christianity adequately represent Him, then Christian morality is basically like physics: it's the natural law because that's how the world has been constructed and that's how it works. Your personal utility function is irrelevant in the same sense in which maybe you really want to fly, yet if you jump off a cliff gravity will still do its job.
That's quite standard theology -- since LW frequently discusses religious matters (without usually recognizing them as such :-D) I recommend at least some familiarity with it...
My claim is that this idea of morality being "like natural law" is conceptual nonsense. Does it mean that I'd be incapable of violating it? No. Does it mean that I'm being irrational if I don't follow it? Well, one could define rationality that way, but what is the point; I don't care if I'm losing according to the "law of the universe" just like I don't care that I'm losing in terms of reproductive success.
I don't think so. "Like natural law" here means "will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so".
If Christianity were true (we'll ignore a bunch of issues and self-contradictions here) then, for example, dying after committing a mortal sin and without proper repentance will lead you to Hell. Doesn't matter whether you think it wasn't a big deal -- you still end up in Hell. Having free will means you can violate the Christian morality but it's similar to jumping off a cliff -- you just will make a messy splat. Whether you care or not is irrelevant.
That's not what I was disputing. Of course you'd end up in hell if Christianity is true, but if your personal utility function is utilitarianism, you'd sacrifice yourself for the greater good.
No, because if Christianity were true then God defines what is the "greater good", not you. Your belief that what you're going for is "greater good" would be mistaken. Because of free will you can choose between good and evil but you can't define what is good and what is evil.
Speakers use their actual language.
To elaborate: Even if counterfactually God were to legislate that all must use the holy dictionary that defines the symbol "greater good" as divine punishment, or face smiting, this would not make the sacrifice mentioned by ice9 not for the greater good. Because what we are talking about when we say "greater good" here, in the real world, is not divine punishment. Specifically, when ice9 says "you'd sacrifice yourself for the greater good" they mean you'd sacrifice yourself to save people from a god's evil vendetta.
Below you mentioned that you can't define gravity to repulse things instead of attract. This is a good analogy what you are supposing God to be doing. In fact God is free to define "gravity" (a symbol, a string of 7 letters) in a new language of His own. But claiming that God can define gravity itself is logical nonsense (gravity not being a symbol of any language).
The same way, it is logical nonsense to suppose that God can define the greater good to be something bad. He can invent a new language where "the greater good" (a string) refers to something bad, but that would simply be a useless language that no-one here speaks, and irrelevant to any matter of actual morality.
(I won't dispute that "god can redefine the greater good" might well be standard theology, but as theology it is logical nonsense.)
You're quite mistaken about that. In the Christian world God not only can define gravity itself -- He did define gravity itself. Remember that whole Creator bit..?
Do not attempt to confuse yourself with wordplay.
If I build a house with a triangular roof, does the fact that I could have built one with a square roof instead mean I can define triangles as squares if I want to?
The fact remains that gravity is a force, not a word or a symbol. "Gravity" can be defined as something; gravity cannot, because defining things is intrinsically a linguistic activity.
Do not attempt to confuse yourself with wordplay.
Let's replace the word "define" with the word "create". God created gravity, the force itself. In the process of creating it he defined it to be what it is. This is all before language -- the same way by building a house with a triangular roof I defined that roof as triangular regardless of what you'll call it later.
Again, the major difference between the Christian world and the atheist world is not in what someone calls things -- it's in what things are and are not.
Specific morality is a built-in feature of reality in the Christian world, similar to how gravity is a built-in feature of reality in the physical world. The names that your mind assigns do not change this.
Taboo moral terms like good/bad/evil; can you still explain to me how a world where a God given morality exists is different from a world where it doesn't? My belief that I'm doing it for the greater good would not be mistaken because I'd define "the greater good" as the amount of suffering prevented (assuming that this is my terminal value), and I literally don't care whether that definition corresponds with whatever semantic tricks God wants to play.
See a couple of steps above: "Like natural law" here means "will lead to certain consequences regardless of whether you believe so".
You can't. Under Christianity you do not have the power to define "the greater good". In physical parallels this would be similar to "I define gravity to repulse objects instead of attract and I literally don't care whether that definition corresponds with whatever tricks nature wants to play".
Why can't you define "the greater good"?
If Christianity is true, then you can't define away things like "this action puts me in Hell", but I wouldn't call that being unable to define the greater good; I'd say that in that situation I am still defining the greater good but Hell is now decoupled from it.
It would be like saying "I define gravity to repulse objects" and then adding "Of course, this means that I am now using some name other than 'gravity' for the force that makes things fall". It's not at all clear that this is wrong. At most, it's just not very useful, because if I look around for things that satisfy my new definition of gravity, I can't find them. But that objection doesn't seem to apply to the "greater good" case--if I define :"greater good" to mean something other than "doesn't get me sent to Hell", I can in fact find things that meet my definition, and I have a reason to want to talk about them as a category.
To give a concrete example: Imagine that forcibly converting Jews gets you sent to heaven and refusing to do so gets you sent to Hell. Why can I not say that someone who refuses to forcibly convert Jews is acting for the greater good, but some people who act for the greater good get sent to Hell? That seems like an equally sensible way of describing it, rather than "forcibly converting Jews is for the greater good".
Because of the difference between the map and the territory.
We're talking about a counterfactual universe where Christianity is true. This is a different universe from the one we live in, different in many subtle and profound ways. It's not just the same old world that happens to have an angry old guy sitting up there in the clouds, chucking souls alternatively into a fire pit and into a line for harps.
One of the differences is that in the Christian world morality exists not in your mind, but in the world. It is objective, not subjective. It is built in into the fabric of reality. It is part of the territory.
You can redefine the greater good no more than you can redefine the value of pi or the Planck length.
Now maps, sure. You can draw whatever maps you like and tag things with whatever labels you want. You can make a map of the desert, call it a mountain, and start constructing a ship in the middle of it. That's all fine -- but all you're doing is scribbling on a map and the territory is not changed by that.
That's, by the way, is why occasionally Christians classify atheism as a mental disorder. From their point of view claiming to define the greater good yourself is tantamount to claiming to define the gravitational constant yourself -- clearly a crazy thing to do. You're constructing false maps.
Your ability to name things does not change what things are.