I disagree that it is wrong for them to do that. And this is not just a disagreement about words: I disagree that Eliezer’s preferred outcome for the story is better than the other outcome.
“Right” is just another way of saying “good”, or anyway “reasonably judged to be good.” And good is the kind of thing which naturally results in desire. Note that I did not say it is “what is desired” any more than you want to say that someone values at a particular moment is necessarily right. I said it is what naturally results in desire. This definition is in fact very close to yours, except that I don’t make the whole universe revolve around human beings by saying that nothing is good except what is good for humans. And since different kinds of things naturally result in desire for different kinds of beings (e.g. humans and babyeaters), those different things are right for different kinds of beings.
That does not make “right” or “good” meaningless. It makes it relative to something. And this is an obvious fact about the meaning of the words; to speak of good is to speak of what is good for someone. This is not subjectivism, since it is an objective fact that some things are good for humans, and other things are good for other things.
Nor does this mean that right means “in harmony with any set of values.” It has to be in harmony with some real set of values, not an invented one, nor one that someone simply made up—for the same reasons that you do not allow human morals to be simply invented by a random individual.
Returning to the larger point, as I said, this is not just a disagreement about words, but about what is good. People maintaining your theory (like Eliezer) hope to optimize the universe for human values. I have no such hope, and I think it is a perverse idea in the first place.
“Right” is just another way of saying “good”, or anyway “reasonably judged to be good.”
No, morally rightness and wrongness have implications about rule following and rule breaking, reward and punishment that moral goodness and harness dont. Giving to charity is virus, but not giving to charity isn’t wrong and doesn’t deserve punishment.
Similarly, moral goodness and hedonic goodness are different.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. I would describe giving to charity as morally good without implying that not giving is morally evil.
I agree that moral goodness is different from hedonic goodness (which I assume means pleasure), but I would describe that by saying that pleasure is good in a certain way, but may or may not be good all things considered, while moral goodness means what is good all things considered.
You’re saying that “right” just means “in harmony with any set of values held by sentient beings?”
So, baby-eating is right for baby-eaters, wrong for humans, and all either of those statements means is that they are/aren’t consistent with the fundamental values of the two species?
That is most of it. But again, I insist that the disagreement is real. Because Eliezer would want to stomp out baby-eater values from the cosmos. I would not.
I do not support “letting a sentient being eat babies just because it wants to” in general. So for example if there is a human who wants to eat babies, I would prevent that. But that is because it is bad for humans to eat babies. In the case of the babyeaters, it is by stipulation good for them.
That stipulation itself, by the way, is not really a reasonable one. Some species do sometimes eat babies, and it is possible that such a species could develop reason. But it is likely that the very process of developing reason would impede the eating of babies, and eating babies would become unusual, much as cannibalism is unusual in human societies. And just as cannibalism is wrong for humans, eating babies would become wrong for that species. But Eliezer makes the stipulation because, as I said, he believes that human values are intrinsically arbitrary, from an absolute standpoint.
So there is a metaethical disagreement. You could put it this way: I think that reality is fundamentally good, and therefore actually existing species will have fundamentally good values. Eliezer thinks that reality is fundamentally indifferent, and therefore actually existing species will have fundamentally indifferent values.
But given the stipulation, yes I am serious. And no I would not accept those solutions, unless those solutions were acceptable to them anyway—which would prove my point that eating babies was not actually good for them, and not actually a true part of their values.
When you say reality is fundamentally “good,” doesn’t that translate (in your terms) to just a tautology?
Aren’t you just saying that the desires of sentient beings are fundamentally “the desires of sentient beings?”
It sounds like you’re saying that you personally value sentient beings fulfilling their fundamental desires. Do you also value a sentient being fulfilling its fundamental desire to eliminate sentient beings that value sentient beings that fulfill their fundamental desires?
That is, if it wants to kill you because you value that, are you cool with that?
What do you do, in general, when values clash? You have some members of a species who want to eat their innocent, thinking children, and you have some innocent, thinking children who don’t want to be eaten. On what grounds do you side with the eaters?
“When you say reality is fundamentally “good,” doesn’t that translate (in your terms) to just a tautology?” Sort of, but not quite.
“Aren’t you just saying that the desires of sentient beings are fundamentally “the desires of sentient beings?”″ No.
First of all, the word “tautology” is vague. I know it is a tautology to say that red is red. But is it a tautology to say that two is an even number? That’s not clear. But if a tautology means that the subject and predicate mean the same thing, then saying that two is even is definitely not a tautology, because they don’t mean the same thing. And in that way, “reality is fundamentally good” is not a tautology, because “reality” does not have the same meaning as “good.”
Still, if you say that reality is fundamentally something, and you are right, there must be something similar to a tautology there. Because if there is nothing even like a tautology, you will be saying something false, as if you were to say that reality is fundamentally blue. That’s not a tautology at all, but it’s also false. But if what you say is true, then “being real” and “being that way” must be very deeply intertwined, and most likely even the meaning will be very close. Otherwise how would it turn out that reality is fundamentally that way?
I have remarked before that we get the idea of desire from certain feelings, but what makes us call it desire instead of a different feeling is not the subjective quality of the feeling, but the objective fact that when we feel that way, we tend to do a particular thing. E.g. when we are hungry, we tend to go and find food and eat it. So because we notice that we do that, we call that feeling a desire for food. Now this implies that the most important thing about the word “desire” is that it is a tendency to do something, not the fact that it is also a feeling.
So if we said, “everyone does what they desire to do,” it would mean something like “everyone does what they tend to do.” That is not a tautology, because you can occasionally do something that you do not generally tend to do, but it is very close to a tautology.
We get the idea of “good” from the fact that we are tending to do various things, and we assume that those various things must have something in common that explains why we are tending to do all of them. We call that common thing “good.”
Now you could say, “the common thing is that you desire all of those things.” But that is not the way the human mind is working here, whether it is right or wrong. We already know that we desire them all. We want to know “why” we desire them all. And we explain that by saying that they all have something that we call “goodness.” We know it explains our desires, but that does not mean we know anything else about it.
This is really the exact point where I disagree with Eliezer. I think he believes that the common thing is the desire, and there is no other explanation except for random facts in the world that are responsible for our individual desires and for desires generally common in the human species. I think that the natural intuition that there is another explanation is correct. Now you might want to ask, “then what is good, apart from ‘what explains our desires’”?
And I have already started to explain this in other comments, although I did not go into detail. I noted above that the most important thing about “desire” is that it is a tendency to do something. So likewise the most important thing about the word “good” is that it explains the tendency to do something. Now consider this fact about things: things tend to exist. And existing things tend to continue to exist. Why do they tend to do those things? In the first place, it is obvious why things tend to exist. Because they are real, and reality involves existence. And tending to continue to exist might be less obvious, but we can see that at least the particular reality of the thing is responsible for that tendency: why do rocks tend to continue to exist? Part of the reality of the rock (in this case its structure) is responsible for that tendency. It tends to continue to exist because of the reality it has.
In other words, the thing that explains why things tend to do things is reality itself. So reality is fundamentally good, that is, the explanation for why things tend to do the things they do is fundamentally their reality. Note that this last sentence is not a tautology, in that it has a distinct subject and predicate.
Richard Dawkins says that reality looks just as we would expect if it is fundamentally indifferent. And I am pretty sure Eliezer agrees with him about this. But in fact it does not look the way I would expect if it were fundamentally indifferent: I would expect in that situation that things would not have any tendencies at all, so all things would be random.
I will answer the things about my values in another comment.
“It sounds like you’re saying that you personally value sentient beings fulfilling their fundamental desires.” Yes.
“Do you also value a sentient being fulfilling its fundamental desire to eliminate sentient beings that value sentient beings that fulfill their fundamental desires?”
No sentient being has, or can have (at least in a normal way) that desire as a “fundamental desire.” It should be obvious why such a value cannot evolve, if you consider the matter physically. Considered from my point of view, it cannot evolve precisely because it is an evil desire.
Also, it is important here that we are speaking of “fundamental” desires, in that a particular sentient being sometimes has a particular desire for something bad, due to some kind of mistake or bad situation. (E.g. a murderer has the desire to kill someone, but that desire is not fundamental.)
“You have some members of a species who want to eat their innocent, thinking children, and you have some innocent, thinking children who don’t want to be eaten. On what grounds do you side with the eaters?”
As I said in another comment, the babyeater situation is contrived, and most likely it is impossible for those values to evolve in reality. But stipulating that they do, then the desires of the babies are not fundamental, because if the baby grows up and learns more about reality, it will say, “it would have been right to eat me.”
I am pretty sure that people even in the original context brought attention to the fact that there are a great many ways that we treat children in which they do not want to be treated, to which no one at all objects (e.g. no one objects if you prevent a child from running out into the street, even if it wants to. And that is because the desires are not fundamental.)
Your objection is really something like, “but that desire must be fundamental because everything has the fundamental desire not to be eaten.” Perhaps. But as I said, that simply means that the situation is contrived and false.
The situation can happen with an intelligent species and a non-intelligent species, and has happened on earth—e.g. people kill and eat other animals. And although I do not object to people doing this, and I think it is morally right, I do not take “sides,” because I would change the values neither of the people nor of the animals. Both desires are good, and the behavior on both sides is right (although technically we should not be speaking of right and wrong in respect to non-rational creatures.)
It probably could not happen with two intelligent species, if only for economic reasons.
I don’t know. I wonder if some extra visualization would help.
Would you help catch the children so that their parents could eat them? If they pleaded with you, would you really think “if you were to live, you would one day agree this was good, therefore it is good, even though you don’t currently believe it to be?”
Why say the important desire is the one the child will one day have, instead of the one that the adult used to have?
I would certainly be less interested in aliens obtaining what is good for them, than in humans obtaining what is good for them. However, that said, the basic response (given Eliezer’s stipulations), is yes, I would, and yes I would really think that.
The adult has not only changed his desire, he has changed his mind as well, and he has done that through a normal process of growing up. So (again given Eliezer’s stipulations), it is just as reasonable to believe the adults here as it is to believe human adults. It is not a question of talking about whose desire is important, but whose opinion is correct.
We get the idea of “good” from the fact that we are tending to do various things, and we assume that those various things must have something in common that explains why we are tending to do all of them. We call that common thing “good.”
....a word which means a number of things, which are capable of conflicting with each other. Moral good refers to things that are beneficial at the group level, but which individuals tend not to do without encouragement.
I disagree that it is wrong for them to do that. And this is not just a disagreement about words: I disagree that Eliezer’s preferred outcome for the story is better than the other outcome.
“Right” is just another way of saying “good”, or anyway “reasonably judged to be good.” And good is the kind of thing which naturally results in desire. Note that I did not say it is “what is desired” any more than you want to say that someone values at a particular moment is necessarily right. I said it is what naturally results in desire. This definition is in fact very close to yours, except that I don’t make the whole universe revolve around human beings by saying that nothing is good except what is good for humans. And since different kinds of things naturally result in desire for different kinds of beings (e.g. humans and babyeaters), those different things are right for different kinds of beings.
That does not make “right” or “good” meaningless. It makes it relative to something. And this is an obvious fact about the meaning of the words; to speak of good is to speak of what is good for someone. This is not subjectivism, since it is an objective fact that some things are good for humans, and other things are good for other things.
Nor does this mean that right means “in harmony with any set of values.” It has to be in harmony with some real set of values, not an invented one, nor one that someone simply made up—for the same reasons that you do not allow human morals to be simply invented by a random individual.
Returning to the larger point, as I said, this is not just a disagreement about words, but about what is good. People maintaining your theory (like Eliezer) hope to optimize the universe for human values. I have no such hope, and I think it is a perverse idea in the first place.
No, morally rightness and wrongness have implications about rule following and rule breaking, reward and punishment that moral goodness and harness dont. Giving to charity is virus, but not giving to charity isn’t wrong and doesn’t deserve punishment.
Similarly, moral goodness and hedonic goodness are different.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. I would describe giving to charity as morally good without implying that not giving is morally evil.
I agree that moral goodness is different from hedonic goodness (which I assume means pleasure), but I would describe that by saying that pleasure is good in a certain way, but may or may not be good all things considered, while moral goodness means what is good all things considered.
I’m saying its a bad idea to collapse together the ideas of moral obligation, moral advisability and pleasure.
I agree.
I think I get it.
You’re saying that “right” just means “in harmony with any set of values held by sentient beings?”
So, baby-eating is right for baby-eaters, wrong for humans, and all either of those statements means is that they are/aren’t consistent with the fundamental values of the two species?
That is most of it. But again, I insist that the disagreement is real. Because Eliezer would want to stomp out baby-eater values from the cosmos. I would not.
Metaethically, I don’t see a disagreement between you and Eliezer. Ethically, I do.
Eliezer says he values babies not being eaten more than he values letting a sentient being eat babies just because it wants to.
You say you don’t, that’s all. Different values.
Are you serious, though? What if you had enough power to stop them from eating babies without having to kill them? Can we just give them fake babies?
I do not support “letting a sentient being eat babies just because it wants to” in general. So for example if there is a human who wants to eat babies, I would prevent that. But that is because it is bad for humans to eat babies. In the case of the babyeaters, it is by stipulation good for them.
That stipulation itself, by the way, is not really a reasonable one. Some species do sometimes eat babies, and it is possible that such a species could develop reason. But it is likely that the very process of developing reason would impede the eating of babies, and eating babies would become unusual, much as cannibalism is unusual in human societies. And just as cannibalism is wrong for humans, eating babies would become wrong for that species. But Eliezer makes the stipulation because, as I said, he believes that human values are intrinsically arbitrary, from an absolute standpoint.
So there is a metaethical disagreement. You could put it this way: I think that reality is fundamentally good, and therefore actually existing species will have fundamentally good values. Eliezer thinks that reality is fundamentally indifferent, and therefore actually existing species will have fundamentally indifferent values.
But given the stipulation, yes I am serious. And no I would not accept those solutions, unless those solutions were acceptable to them anyway—which would prove my point that eating babies was not actually good for them, and not actually a true part of their values.
When you say reality is fundamentally “good,” doesn’t that translate (in your terms) to just a tautology?
Aren’t you just saying that the desires of sentient beings are fundamentally “the desires of sentient beings?”
It sounds like you’re saying that you personally value sentient beings fulfilling their fundamental desires. Do you also value a sentient being fulfilling its fundamental desire to eliminate sentient beings that value sentient beings that fulfill their fundamental desires?
That is, if it wants to kill you because you value that, are you cool with that?
What do you do, in general, when values clash? You have some members of a species who want to eat their innocent, thinking children, and you have some innocent, thinking children who don’t want to be eaten. On what grounds do you side with the eaters?
“When you say reality is fundamentally “good,” doesn’t that translate (in your terms) to just a tautology?” Sort of, but not quite.
“Aren’t you just saying that the desires of sentient beings are fundamentally “the desires of sentient beings?”″ No.
First of all, the word “tautology” is vague. I know it is a tautology to say that red is red. But is it a tautology to say that two is an even number? That’s not clear. But if a tautology means that the subject and predicate mean the same thing, then saying that two is even is definitely not a tautology, because they don’t mean the same thing. And in that way, “reality is fundamentally good” is not a tautology, because “reality” does not have the same meaning as “good.”
Still, if you say that reality is fundamentally something, and you are right, there must be something similar to a tautology there. Because if there is nothing even like a tautology, you will be saying something false, as if you were to say that reality is fundamentally blue. That’s not a tautology at all, but it’s also false. But if what you say is true, then “being real” and “being that way” must be very deeply intertwined, and most likely even the meaning will be very close. Otherwise how would it turn out that reality is fundamentally that way?
I have remarked before that we get the idea of desire from certain feelings, but what makes us call it desire instead of a different feeling is not the subjective quality of the feeling, but the objective fact that when we feel that way, we tend to do a particular thing. E.g. when we are hungry, we tend to go and find food and eat it. So because we notice that we do that, we call that feeling a desire for food. Now this implies that the most important thing about the word “desire” is that it is a tendency to do something, not the fact that it is also a feeling.
So if we said, “everyone does what they desire to do,” it would mean something like “everyone does what they tend to do.” That is not a tautology, because you can occasionally do something that you do not generally tend to do, but it is very close to a tautology.
We get the idea of “good” from the fact that we are tending to do various things, and we assume that those various things must have something in common that explains why we are tending to do all of them. We call that common thing “good.”
Now you could say, “the common thing is that you desire all of those things.” But that is not the way the human mind is working here, whether it is right or wrong. We already know that we desire them all. We want to know “why” we desire them all. And we explain that by saying that they all have something that we call “goodness.” We know it explains our desires, but that does not mean we know anything else about it.
This is really the exact point where I disagree with Eliezer. I think he believes that the common thing is the desire, and there is no other explanation except for random facts in the world that are responsible for our individual desires and for desires generally common in the human species. I think that the natural intuition that there is another explanation is correct. Now you might want to ask, “then what is good, apart from ‘what explains our desires’”?
And I have already started to explain this in other comments, although I did not go into detail. I noted above that the most important thing about “desire” is that it is a tendency to do something. So likewise the most important thing about the word “good” is that it explains the tendency to do something. Now consider this fact about things: things tend to exist. And existing things tend to continue to exist. Why do they tend to do those things? In the first place, it is obvious why things tend to exist. Because they are real, and reality involves existence. And tending to continue to exist might be less obvious, but we can see that at least the particular reality of the thing is responsible for that tendency: why do rocks tend to continue to exist? Part of the reality of the rock (in this case its structure) is responsible for that tendency. It tends to continue to exist because of the reality it has.
In other words, the thing that explains why things tend to do things is reality itself. So reality is fundamentally good, that is, the explanation for why things tend to do the things they do is fundamentally their reality. Note that this last sentence is not a tautology, in that it has a distinct subject and predicate.
Richard Dawkins says that reality looks just as we would expect if it is fundamentally indifferent. And I am pretty sure Eliezer agrees with him about this. But in fact it does not look the way I would expect if it were fundamentally indifferent: I would expect in that situation that things would not have any tendencies at all, so all things would be random.
I will answer the things about my values in another comment.
“It sounds like you’re saying that you personally value sentient beings fulfilling their fundamental desires.” Yes.
“Do you also value a sentient being fulfilling its fundamental desire to eliminate sentient beings that value sentient beings that fulfill their fundamental desires?”
No sentient being has, or can have (at least in a normal way) that desire as a “fundamental desire.” It should be obvious why such a value cannot evolve, if you consider the matter physically. Considered from my point of view, it cannot evolve precisely because it is an evil desire.
Also, it is important here that we are speaking of “fundamental” desires, in that a particular sentient being sometimes has a particular desire for something bad, due to some kind of mistake or bad situation. (E.g. a murderer has the desire to kill someone, but that desire is not fundamental.)
“You have some members of a species who want to eat their innocent, thinking children, and you have some innocent, thinking children who don’t want to be eaten. On what grounds do you side with the eaters?”
As I said in another comment, the babyeater situation is contrived, and most likely it is impossible for those values to evolve in reality. But stipulating that they do, then the desires of the babies are not fundamental, because if the baby grows up and learns more about reality, it will say, “it would have been right to eat me.”
I am pretty sure that people even in the original context brought attention to the fact that there are a great many ways that we treat children in which they do not want to be treated, to which no one at all objects (e.g. no one objects if you prevent a child from running out into the street, even if it wants to. And that is because the desires are not fundamental.)
Your objection is really something like, “but that desire must be fundamental because everything has the fundamental desire not to be eaten.” Perhaps. But as I said, that simply means that the situation is contrived and false.
The situation can happen with an intelligent species and a non-intelligent species, and has happened on earth—e.g. people kill and eat other animals. And although I do not object to people doing this, and I think it is morally right, I do not take “sides,” because I would change the values neither of the people nor of the animals. Both desires are good, and the behavior on both sides is right (although technically we should not be speaking of right and wrong in respect to non-rational creatures.)
It probably could not happen with two intelligent species, if only for economic reasons.
I don’t know. I wonder if some extra visualization would help.
Would you help catch the children so that their parents could eat them? If they pleaded with you, would you really think “if you were to live, you would one day agree this was good, therefore it is good, even though you don’t currently believe it to be?”
Why say the important desire is the one the child will one day have, instead of the one that the adult used to have?
I would certainly be less interested in aliens obtaining what is good for them, than in humans obtaining what is good for them. However, that said, the basic response (given Eliezer’s stipulations), is yes, I would, and yes I would really think that.
The adult has not only changed his desire, he has changed his mind as well, and he has done that through a normal process of growing up. So (again given Eliezer’s stipulations), it is just as reasonable to believe the adults here as it is to believe human adults. It is not a question of talking about whose desire is important, but whose opinion is correct.
....a word which means a number of things, which are capable of conflicting with each other. Moral good refers to things that are beneficial at the group level, but which individuals tend not to do without encouragement.