That’s not how this works. Rats feel pain without a doubt, but we destroy them quite freely. Whether you will damage the robot is decided by many factors.
That’s not how it works either. You can’t infer zero moral relevance of some factor by noting that other factors acan countervail.
The robot’s subjective experience of pain only matters if you decide that it matters
I’m not morally omniscient. The robots experience of pain matters if it features in some scheme of ideal moral reasoning. To put i another way, you just proved that nothing is morally relevant, if you proved anything at all.
Are you asking about the “at best” part? Because the rest of that sentence seems quite mundane. Here “at best” is about the limits of my own imagination.
Well, you do seem to have a subjective intuition that robots will never feel pain. Others intuit differently. What happened to all the science stuff?
The robots experience of pain matters if it features in some scheme of ideal moral reasoning.
Gosh, I really don’t want to start talking about morality now. But I have to point out that the “bitterness of purple” can also matter, if it features in some scheme of ideal moral reasoning. At least if you accept that this moral reasoning could require arbitrary concepts and not just ones grounded in reality.
Well, you do seem to have a subjective intuition that robots will never feel pain.
No, I ran a deterministic procedure in my brain, called “is X well defined”, on “robot pain”, and it returned “no”. It’s only subjective in the sense that mine is different from yours, if you have such a procedure at all. The procedure, by the way, works by searching for alternative definitions of things, such that the given concept is neither trivial nor stupid. Unfortunately, failure to find such definitions does not produce a proof of non-existence, so I’m quite open to the idea that I missed something, it’s just that you inspire little confidence.
I did not mean to imply that ideal moral reasoning is weird and unguessable....only that you should not take imperfect moral reasoning (whose?) to be the last word. The idea that deliberately causing pain is wrong is not contentious, and you don’t actually have an argument against it.
It’s only subjective in the sense that mine is different from yours
That’s not a very interesting sense. Is height also subjective, since we are not equally tall? This sense is also very far from the magical “subjective experience” you’ve used. I guess the problematic word in that phrase is “experience”, not “subjective”?
Height is not a subjective judgement because it is not a judgement. If judgements are going to vary, that matters, because then who knows what the truth is?
That’s not how it works either. You can’t infer zero moral relevance of some factor by noting that other factors acan countervail.
I’m not morally omniscient. The robots experience of pain matters if it features in some scheme of ideal moral reasoning. To put i another way, you just proved that nothing is morally relevant, if you proved anything at all.
Well, you do seem to have a subjective intuition that robots will never feel pain. Others intuit differently. What happened to all the science stuff?
Gosh, I really don’t want to start talking about morality now. But I have to point out that the “bitterness of purple” can also matter, if it features in some scheme of ideal moral reasoning. At least if you accept that this moral reasoning could require arbitrary concepts and not just ones grounded in reality.
No, I ran a deterministic procedure in my brain, called “is X well defined”, on “robot pain”, and it returned “no”. It’s only subjective in the sense that mine is different from yours, if you have such a procedure at all. The procedure, by the way, works by searching for alternative definitions of things, such that the given concept is neither trivial nor stupid. Unfortunately, failure to find such definitions does not produce a proof of non-existence, so I’m quite open to the idea that I missed something, it’s just that you inspire little confidence.
I did not mean to imply that ideal moral reasoning is weird and unguessable....only that you should not take imperfect moral reasoning (whose?) to be the last word. The idea that deliberately causing pain is wrong is not contentious, and you don’t actually have an argument against it.
That’s the sense that matters.
That’s not a very interesting sense. Is height also subjective, since we are not equally tall? This sense is also very far from the magical “subjective experience” you’ve used. I guess the problematic word in that phrase is “experience”, not “subjective”?
Height is not a subjective judgement because it is not a judgement. If judgements are going to vary, that matters, because then who knows what the truth is?