rationalnoodles comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - LessWrong

48 Post author: peter_hurford 23 July 2013 09:30PM

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Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 24 July 2013 03:31:08PM *  2 points [-]

The morality you suggest is what Derek Parfit calls collectively self-defeating. This means that if everyone were to follow it perfectly, there could be empirical situations where your actual goals, namely the well-being of those closest to you, are achieved less well than they would be if everyone followed a different moral view. So there could be situations in which people have more influence on the well-being of the family of strangers, and if they'd all favor their own relatives, everyone would end up worse off, despite everyone acting perfectly moral. Personally I want a world where everyone acts perfectly moral to be as close to Paradise as is empirically possible, but whether this is something you are concerned about is a different question (that depends on what question your seeking to answer by coming up with a coherent moral view).

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 July 2013 04:05:40AM 2 points [-]

That's a game theory/decision theory problem, not a problem with the utility function.

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 25 July 2013 04:14:21AM *  -1 points [-]

If all the agents in the situation acted according to utilitarianism, everyone would be better off. To the extent that everyone acting according to common sense morality predictably fails to bring about the best of all possible worlds in this situation, and to the extent that one cares about this fact, this constitutes an argument against common sense morality.

Of course, if decision theory or game theory could make those agents cooperate successfully (so they don't do predictably worse than other moralities anymore) in all logically possible situations, then the objection disappears. I see no reason to assume this, though.