Do I deserve points for consistency? I personally tend to respect bullet-biters more, but I am one. I’m not sure I have a very good reason for that. When I say that I think bullet-dodgers tend to be less sensible I could just be affirming something about myself. I don’t know your (or other non-biters) reasons for giving points, other than over-confidence being more respected than hedged mealy-mouth wishy-washing. One might say that by following ideas to their logical conclusion we are more likely to determine which ideas are false (perhaps making bullet-biters epistemological kamikazes), but by accepting repugnant/absurd reductios we may just all end up very wrong rather than some incoherent mix of somewhat wrong. In the case of morality though I can’t say what it really means to be wrong or what motivation there is to be right. Like fiction, I choose to evict these deadbeat mind-haunting geists and forestall risks to my epistemic hygiene.
I did read the morality stuff at Overcoming Bias (other than the stuff in Eliezer’s sci-fi series, I don’t read fiction), didn’t find it convincing and made similar arguments there.
You’re right that emotivism doesn’t imply indifference to the suffering of others, it’s really a meta-ethical theory which says that moral talk is “yay”, “boo”, “I approve and want you to as well” and so on rather than having objective (as in one-parameter-function) content. Going below the meta-level to my actual morals (if they can be called such), I am a Stirnerite egoist. I believe Vichy is as well, but I don’t know if other LWers are. Even that doesn’t preclude sympathy for others (though its hard to say what it does preclude). I think it meshes well with emotivism, and Bryan Caplan seems to as well since he deems Stirner an “emotivist anarchist”. Let’s ignore for now that he never called himself an anarchist and Sidney Parker said the egoist must be an archist!
At any rate, with no moral truth or God to punish me I have no reason to subject myself to any moral standard. To look out for ones’ self is what comes easiest and determines most of our behavior. That comes into tension with other impulses, but I am liberated from the tribal constraints which would force me to affirm the communal faith. I probably would not do that if I felt the conflicting emotions that others do (low in Agreeable, presumably like most atheists but even moreso). To the extent that I can determine how I feel, I choose to do so in a way that serves my purposes. Being an adaptation-executer, my purposes are linked to how I feel and so I’m quite open to Nozick’s experience machine (in some sense there’s a good chance I’m already in one) or wireheading. Hopefully Anonymous is also an egoist, but would seek perpetual subjective existence even if it means an eternity of torture.
One proto-emotivist book, though it doesn’t embrace egoism, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I haven’t actually read it in the original, but there’s a passage about a disaster in China compared to the loss of your own finger. I think it aptly describes how most of us would react. The occurrence in China is distant, like something in a work of fiction. If the universe is infinite there may well be an infinite number of Chinas, or Earths, disappearing right now. And the past, with its native americans and colonists or peasants and proletariat that died for modernity is similar. If we thought utilitarianism was true, it would be sheerest nonsense to care more about your own finger than all the Chinese, or even insects. But I do care more about my finger and am completely comfortable with that reflexive priority. If I was going to be in charge of making deals then the massive subjective harm from the perspective of the Chinese would be something to consider, and that leads us back to the ability to take part in a contract.
Aschwin de Wolf’s Against Politics site used to have a lot more material on contractarianism and minimal ethics, but the re-launched version has less and I was asked to take down my mirror site. There is still some there to check out, and cyonics enthusiasts may be interested in the related Depressed Metabolism site.
Do I deserve points for consistency? I personally tend to respect bullet-biters more, but I am one. I’m not sure I have a very good reason for that. When I say that I think bullet-dodgers tend to be less sensible I could just be affirming something about myself. I don’t know your (or other non-biters) reasons for giving points, other than over-confidence being more respected than hedged mealy-mouth wishy-washing. One might say that by following ideas to their logical conclusion we are more likely to determine which ideas are false (perhaps making bullet-biters epistemological kamikazes), but by accepting repugnant/absurd reductios we may just all end up very wrong rather than some incoherent mix of somewhat wrong. In the case of morality though I can’t say what it really means to be wrong or what motivation there is to be right. Like fiction, I choose to evict these deadbeat mind-haunting geists and forestall risks to my epistemic hygiene.
I did read the morality stuff at Overcoming Bias (other than the stuff in Eliezer’s sci-fi series, I don’t read fiction), didn’t find it convincing and made similar arguments there.
You’re right that emotivism doesn’t imply indifference to the suffering of others, it’s really a meta-ethical theory which says that moral talk is “yay”, “boo”, “I approve and want you to as well” and so on rather than having objective (as in one-parameter-function) content. Going below the meta-level to my actual morals (if they can be called such), I am a Stirnerite egoist. I believe Vichy is as well, but I don’t know if other LWers are. Even that doesn’t preclude sympathy for others (though its hard to say what it does preclude). I think it meshes well with emotivism, and Bryan Caplan seems to as well since he deems Stirner an “emotivist anarchist”. Let’s ignore for now that he never called himself an anarchist and Sidney Parker said the egoist must be an archist!
At any rate, with no moral truth or God to punish me I have no reason to subject myself to any moral standard. To look out for ones’ self is what comes easiest and determines most of our behavior. That comes into tension with other impulses, but I am liberated from the tribal constraints which would force me to affirm the communal faith. I probably would not do that if I felt the conflicting emotions that others do (low in Agreeable, presumably like most atheists but even moreso). To the extent that I can determine how I feel, I choose to do so in a way that serves my purposes. Being an adaptation-executer, my purposes are linked to how I feel and so I’m quite open to Nozick’s experience machine (in some sense there’s a good chance I’m already in one) or wireheading. Hopefully Anonymous is also an egoist, but would seek perpetual subjective existence even if it means an eternity of torture.
One proto-emotivist book, though it doesn’t embrace egoism, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I haven’t actually read it in the original, but there’s a passage about a disaster in China compared to the loss of your own finger. I think it aptly describes how most of us would react. The occurrence in China is distant, like something in a work of fiction. If the universe is infinite there may well be an infinite number of Chinas, or Earths, disappearing right now. And the past, with its native americans and colonists or peasants and proletariat that died for modernity is similar. If we thought utilitarianism was true, it would be sheerest nonsense to care more about your own finger than all the Chinese, or even insects. But I do care more about my finger and am completely comfortable with that reflexive priority. If I was going to be in charge of making deals then the massive subjective harm from the perspective of the Chinese would be something to consider, and that leads us back to the ability to take part in a contract.
Aschwin de Wolf’s Against Politics site used to have a lot more material on contractarianism and minimal ethics, but the re-launched version has less and I was asked to take down my mirror site. There is still some there to check out, and cyonics enthusiasts may be interested in the related Depressed Metabolism site.