Eliezer: “But this would be an extreme position to take with respect to your fellow humans, and I recommend against doing so. Even a psychopath would still be in a common moral reference frame with you, if, fully informed, they would decide to take a pill that would make them non-psychopaths. If you told me that my ability to care about other people was neurologically damaged, and you offered me a pill to fix it, I would take it.”
How sure are you that most human moral disagreements are attributable to
lack of veridical information, or
lack of ability/tools to work through that information, or
defects?
You talk freely about psychopaths and non-psychopaths as though these were distinct categories of non-defective and defective humans. I know you know this is not so. The arguments about psychological unity of humankind only extend so far. e.g., would you be prepared to tell a homosexual that, if they were fully informed, they would decide to take a pill to change their orientation? There are demonstrable differences where our fellow humans really are “different optimization processes”. Why should we ignore the spread of differences in moral computations?
I’ve been enjoying your OB posts and your thought experiments are powerful, but I’m curious as to the empirical data that have led you to update your beliefs so strongly in favour of psychological unity and so strongly against differences in computation. Your arguments that mention psychopaths smack a little of a “no true Scotsman” definition of human morality.
Eliezer: “But this would be an extreme position to take with respect to your fellow humans, and I recommend against doing so. Even a psychopath would still be in a common moral reference frame with you, if, fully informed, they would decide to take a pill that would make them non-psychopaths. If you told me that my ability to care about other people was neurologically damaged, and you offered me a pill to fix it, I would take it.”
How sure are you that most human moral disagreements are attributable to
lack of veridical information, or
lack of ability/tools to work through that information, or
defects? You talk freely about psychopaths and non-psychopaths as though these were distinct categories of non-defective and defective humans. I know you know this is not so. The arguments about psychological unity of humankind only extend so far. e.g., would you be prepared to tell a homosexual that, if they were fully informed, they would decide to take a pill to change their orientation? There are demonstrable differences where our fellow humans really are “different optimization processes”. Why should we ignore the spread of differences in moral computations?
I’ve been enjoying your OB posts and your thought experiments are powerful, but I’m curious as to the empirical data that have led you to update your beliefs so strongly in favour of psychological unity and so strongly against differences in computation. Your arguments that mention psychopaths smack a little of a “no true Scotsman” definition of human morality.