Will_Lugar

You, the human, might say we really should pursue beauty and laughter and love (which is clearly very important), and that we p-should sort pebbles (but that doesn't really matter). And that our way of life is really better than the Pebblesorters, although their way of life has the utterly irrelevant property of being p-better.

But the Pebblesorters would say we h-should pursue beauty and laughter and love (boring!), and that we really should sort pebbles (which is the self-evident meaning of life). Further, they will say their way of life is really better than ours, even though ours has some stupid old h-betterness.

I side with you the human, of course, but perhaps... (read more)

I agree with the concerns of AndyWood and others who have made similar comments, and I'll be paying attention to see whether the later installments of the metaethics sequence have answered them. Before I read them, here is my own summarized set of concerns. (I apologize if responding to a given part of a sequence before reading the later parts is bad form; please let me know if this is the case.)

Eliezer seems to assume that any two neurologically normal humans would agree on the right function if they were fully rational and sufficiently informed, citing the psychological unity of humankind as support. But even with the present degree of psychological unity,... (read 404 more words →)

It is sometimes argued that happiness is good and suffering is bad. (This is tentatively my own view, but explaining the meaning of "good" and "bad," defending its truth, and expanding the view to account for the additional categories of "right" and "wrong" is beyond the scope of this comment.)

If this is true, then depending on what kind of truth it is, it may also be true in all possible worlds--and a fortiori, on all possible planets in this universe. Furthermore, if it is true on all possible planets that happiness is good and suffering is bad, this does not preclude the possibility that on some planets, murder and theft might be... (read more)

A great post. It captured a lot of intriguing questions I currently have about ethics. One question I have, which I am curious to see addressed in further posts in this sequence, is: Once we dissolve the question of "fairness" (or "morality" or any other such term) and taboo the term, is there a common referent that all parties are really discussing, or do the parties have fundamentally different and irreconcilable ideas of what fairness (or morality, etc.) is? Is Xannon's "fairness" merely a homonym for Yancy's "fairness" rather than something they could figure out and agree on?

If the different views of "fairness" are irreconcilable, then I am inclined to wonder if... (read more)