Eliezer, I think you come closer to sharing my understanding of morality than anyone else I’ve ever met. Places where I disagree with you:
First, as a purely communicative matter, I think you’d be clearer if you replaced all instances of “right” and “good” with “E-right” and “E-good.”
Second, as I commented a couple threads back, I think you grossly overestimate the psychological unity of humankind. Thus I think that, say, E-right is not at all the same as J-right (although they’re much more similar than either is to p-right). The fact that our optimization processes are close enough in many cases that we can share conclusions and even arguments doesn’t mean that they’re the same optimization process, or that we won’t disagree wildly in some cases.
Simple example: I don’t care about the well-being of animals. There’s no comparison in there, and there’s no factual claim. I just don’t care. When I read the famous ethics paper about “would it be okay to torture puppies to death to get a rare flavor compound,” my response was something along the lines of, “dude, they’re puppies. Who cares if they’re tortured?” I think anyone who enjoys torturing for the sake of torturing is probably mentally unbalanced and extremely unvirtuous. But I don’t care about the pain in the puppy at all. And the only way you could make me care is if you showed that causing puppies pain came back to affect human well-being somehow.
Third, I think you are a moral relativist, at least as that claim is generally understood. Moral absolutists typically claim that there is some morality demonstrably binding upon all conscious agents. You call this an “attempt to persuade an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness” and claim that it’s a hopeless and fundamentally stupid task. Thus you don’t believe what moral absolutists believe; instead, you believe different beings embody different optimization processes (which is the name you give to what most people refer to as morality, at least in conscious beings). You’re a moral relativist. Which is good, because it means you’re right.
Eliezer, I think you come closer to sharing my understanding of morality than anyone else I’ve ever met. Places where I disagree with you:
First, as a purely communicative matter, I think you’d be clearer if you replaced all instances of “right” and “good” with “E-right” and “E-good.”
Second, as I commented a couple threads back, I think you grossly overestimate the psychological unity of humankind. Thus I think that, say, E-right is not at all the same as J-right (although they’re much more similar than either is to p-right). The fact that our optimization processes are close enough in many cases that we can share conclusions and even arguments doesn’t mean that they’re the same optimization process, or that we won’t disagree wildly in some cases.
Simple example: I don’t care about the well-being of animals. There’s no comparison in there, and there’s no factual claim. I just don’t care. When I read the famous ethics paper about “would it be okay to torture puppies to death to get a rare flavor compound,” my response was something along the lines of, “dude, they’re puppies. Who cares if they’re tortured?” I think anyone who enjoys torturing for the sake of torturing is probably mentally unbalanced and extremely unvirtuous. But I don’t care about the pain in the puppy at all. And the only way you could make me care is if you showed that causing puppies pain came back to affect human well-being somehow.
Third, I think you are a moral relativist, at least as that claim is generally understood. Moral absolutists typically claim that there is some morality demonstrably binding upon all conscious agents. You call this an “attempt to persuade an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness” and claim that it’s a hopeless and fundamentally stupid task. Thus you don’t believe what moral absolutists believe; instead, you believe different beings embody different optimization processes (which is the name you give to what most people refer to as morality, at least in conscious beings). You’re a moral relativist. Which is good, because it means you’re right.
Excuse me. It means you’re J-right.