I hope it isn’t a joke. I can see great use for a deconstruction of the many philosophical questions, failed philosophies, and most importantly, some kind of status report of more modern thought.
We’ve all heard Hume, Kant and Descartes, to name a few. But their ideas were formed long before the Scientific Revolution, which I arbitrarily deem to be the publishing of the Origin of the Species. It would be nice to point people arguing old school deontology, for example, to Wei Dei’s chapter: True Answers About Why Good Will Alone Is Insufficient.
In some ways I like this idea, but in some ways I don’t think it would work. Suppose, for example, that I produce a post entitled “The real reason why philosophical realism sucks”. The post consists of 20 lines or so of aphorisms, each a link to a more complete philosophical argument. Cool, potentially informative, and very likely useful as a reference. But how would you discuss a posting like that in the comments?
Suppose acting out of concern for the morality of my future selves was moral.
For a reductio, assume moral motive was sufficient for moral action. Suppose you self-modified yourself into a paperclipper, who believed it was moral to make paperclips. Now, post-modification you could be moral by making paperclips. Recognising this, your motive in self-modifying is to help your future self to act morally. Hence, by our Kantian assumption, the self-modification was moral. Hence it is moral to become a paperclipper!
I hope it isn’t a joke. I can see great use for a deconstruction of the many philosophical questions, failed philosophies, and most importantly, some kind of status report of more modern thought.
We’ve all heard Hume, Kant and Descartes, to name a few. But their ideas were formed long before the Scientific Revolution, which I arbitrarily deem to be the publishing of the Origin of the Species. It would be nice to point people arguing old school deontology, for example, to Wei Dei’s chapter: True Answers About Why Good Will Alone Is Insufficient.
In some ways I like this idea, but in some ways I don’t think it would work. Suppose, for example, that I produce a post entitled “The real reason why philosophical realism sucks”. The post consists of 20 lines or so of aphorisms, each a link to a more complete philosophical argument. Cool, potentially informative, and very likely useful as a reference. But how would you discuss a posting like that in the comments?
Suppose acting out of concern for the morality of my future selves was moral.
For a reductio, assume moral motive was sufficient for moral action. Suppose you self-modified yourself into a paperclipper, who believed it was moral to make paperclips. Now, post-modification you could be moral by making paperclips. Recognising this, your motive in self-modifying is to help your future self to act morally. Hence, by our Kantian assumption, the self-modification was moral. Hence it is moral to become a paperclipper!