All of Eisegetes's Comments + Replies

To the question "Which circuits are moral?", I kind of saw that one coming. If you allow me to mirror it: How do you know which decisions involve moral judgements?

Well, I would ask whether the decision in question is one that people (including me) normally refer to as a moral decision. "Moral" is a category of meaning whose content we determine through social negotiations, produced by some combination of each person's inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers, and the views and attitudes expressed more generally throughout their societ... (read more)

That's a confusion. I was explicitly talking of "moral" circuits.

Well, that presupposes that we have some ability to distinguish between moral circuits and other circuits. To do that, you need some other criteria for what morality consists in than evolutionary imperatives, b/c all brain connections are at least partially caused by evolution. Ask yourself: what decision procedure would I articulate to justify to Eisegetes that the circuits responsible for regulating blinking, for creating feelings of hunger, or giving rise to sexual desire are,... (read more)

Unknown, it seems like what you are doing is making a distinction between a particular action being obligatory -- you do not feel like you "ought" to torture someone -- and its outcome being preferable -- you feel like it would be better, all other things being equal, if you did torture the person.

Is that correct? If it isn't, I have trouble seeing why the g64 variant of the problem wouldn't overcome your hesitation to torture. Or are you simply stating a deontological side-constraint -- I will never torture, period, not even to save the lives ... (read more)

Still haven't heard from even one proponent of TORTURE who would be willing to pick up the blowtorch themselves. Kind of casts doubt on the degree to which you really believe what you are asserting.

I mean, perhaps it is the case that although picking up the blowtorch is ethically obligatory, you are too squeamish to do what is required. But that should be overrideable by a strong enough ethical imperative. (I don't know if I would pick up the blowtorch to save the life of one stranger, for instance, but I would feel compelled to do it to save the popu... (read more)

Your (a): I was not talking about a universal, but of a personal scalar ordering. Somewhere inside everybody's brain there must be a mechanism that decides which of the considered options wins the competition for "most moral option of the moment".

That's a common utilitarian assumption/axiom, but I'm not sure it's true. I think for most people, analysis stops at "this action is not wrong," and potential actions are not ranked much beyond that. Thus, most people would not say that one is behaving immorally by volunteering at a soup kitc... (read more)

Salutator: thanks for clarifying. I would tend to think that physical facts like neural firings can be quite easily multiplied. I think the problem has less to do with the multiplying, than with the assumption that the number of neural firings is constitutive of wrongness.

Frank, I think a utility function like that is a mathematical abstraction, and nothing more. People do not, in fact, have scalar-ordered ranked preferences across every possible hypothetical outcome. They are essentially indifferent between a wide range of choices. And anyway, I'm sure that there is sufficient agreement among moral agents to permit the useful aggregation of their varied, and sometimes conflicting, notions of what is preferable into a single useful metric. And even if we could do that, I'm not sure that such a function would correspond ... (read more)

Unknown: 10 years and I would leave the lever alone, no doubt. 1 day is a very hard call; probably I would pull the lever. Most of us could get over 1 day over torture in a way that is fundamentally different from years of torture, after all.

Perhaps you can defend one punch per human being, but there must be some number of human beings for whom one punch each would outweigh torture.

As I said, I don't have that intuition. A punch is a fairly trivial harm. I doubt I would ever feel worse about a lot of people (even 5^^^^^^5) getting punched than about a ... (read more)

Frank, re: #2: One can also believe option 4: that pleasure and pain have some moral significance, but do not perfectly determine moral outcomes. That is not necessarily irrational, it is not amoral, and it is not utilitarian. Indeed, I would posit that it represents the primary strand of all moral thinking and intuitions, so it is strange that it wasn't on your list.

Eisegates, is there no limit to the number of people you would subject to a punch in the face (very painful but temporary with no risk of death) in order to avoid the torture of one person? What if you personally had to do (at least some of) the punching? I agree that I might not be willing to personally commit the torture despite the terrible (aggregate) harm my refusal would bring, but I'm not proud of that fact - it seems selfish to me. And extrapolating your position seems to justify pretty terrible acts. It seems to me that the punch is equivalent to ... (read more)

I think you're letting the notation confuse you. It would imply that, if A,B,C,D where e.g. real numbers, and that is the context the "<"-sign is mostly used in. But Orders can exist on sets other then sets of numbers. You can for example sort (order) the telephone book alphabetically, so that Cooper < Smith and still there is no k so that k*Cooper>Smith.

This is fairly confusing...in the telephone book example, you haven't defined * as an operator. I frankly have no idea what you would mean by it. Using the notation kA > D implies a... (read more)

Ben, that's not about additivism, but indicates that you are a deontologist by nature, as everyone is. A better test: would you flip a lever which would stop the torture if everyone on earth would instantly be automatically punched in the face? I don't think I would.

I'm fairly certain I would pull the lever. And I'm certain that if I had to watch the person be tortured (or do it myself!) I would happily pull the lever.

It was this sort of intuition that motivated my earlier question to Eliezer (which he still hasn't responded to). I'd be interested to hea... (read more)

Eliezer: would you torture a person for fifty years, if you lived in a large enough universe to contain 3^^^3 people, and if the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of that universe informed you that if you did not do so, he would carry out the dust-speck operation?

Seriously, would you pick up the blow torch and use it for the rest of your life, for the sake of the dust-specks?