Asking these questions is, I think, what kickstarts moral and ethical thinking. And, although not universally equal, the answers people give often share some common elements: many come to the conclusion that there is value in conscious experience, and consequently attribute a negative value to, for example, murder and premature death.
So you don’t think what kickstarts moral thinking is direct instruction from others, like “don’t do X, X is bad”?
Let’s move to statement 2. The fact that the values of intelligent agents are completely arbitrary is in conflict with the historical trend of moral progress observed so far on Earth, which is far from being a random walk — see [6] for an excellent defence of this point.
Again..you are assuming that a bunch of disconnected, non interacting agents all converge on the one true morality by individually re inventing to.
But humans are social, and learn morality from society....and given those facts, convergence could just be the spread of one culture.
So you don’t think what kickstarts moral thinking is direct instruction from others, like “don’t do X, X is bad”?
I guess you are saying that social interaction is important. I did not suggest that we exclude social interactions from the environment of a free agent; maybe we disagree about how I used the word kickstarts, but I can live with that.
I wrote:
Let’s move to statement 2. The fact that the values of intelligent agents are completely arbitrary is in conflict with the historical trend of moral progress observed so far on Earth, which is far from being a random walk — see [6] for an excellent defence of this point.
Maybe you are interpreting this as saying that it’s a direct contradiction. You could read it as: “Let’s take into account information we can gather from direct observation of humans, which are intelligent social agents: there’s a historical trend bla bla”
The point is that a historical trend isn’t strong evidence for realism, when the agents involved are capable of converging for other reasons. There’s convergence on Coca Cola, Taylor Swift and jeans, as well.
There’s a reason the legend of the Septuagint has seventy scholars working in mutual isolation.
It’s not that the OT implies that any de facto dry of agents has to be diverse, either.
So you don’t think what kickstarts moral thinking is direct instruction from others, like “don’t do X, X is bad”?
Again..you are assuming that a bunch of disconnected, non interacting agents all converge on the one true morality by individually re inventing to.
But humans are social, and learn morality from society....and given those facts, convergence could just be the spread of one culture.
I guess you are saying that social interaction is important. I did not suggest that we exclude social interactions from the environment of a free agent; maybe we disagree about how I used the word kickstarts, but I can live with that.
I wrote:
Maybe you are interpreting this as saying that it’s a direct contradiction. You could read it as: “Let’s take into account information we can gather from direct observation of humans, which are intelligent social agents: there’s a historical trend bla bla”
The point is that a historical trend isn’t strong evidence for realism, when the agents involved are capable of converging for other reasons. There’s convergence on Coca Cola, Taylor Swift and jeans, as well.
There’s a reason the legend of the Septuagint has seventy scholars working in mutual isolation.
It’s not that the OT implies that any de facto dry of agents has to be diverse, either.