Richard: It seems to me that asking how is it that the word ‘right’ came to refer to rightness is like asking why ‘green’ means green, instead of meaning zebra.
The fact is that there is some concept that we’ve been calling “right”, and though we don’t exactly know what we mean by it, we’re pretty certain it means something, and in some cases we know it when we see it.
It strikes me as unfair to accuse Eliezer of having his own private meaning of “right” that isn’t in accordance with the common one, because hasn’t endorsed a criterion or decision procedure for ‘right’, he hasn’t tried to define it, he hasn’t made clearly-wrong claims about it like “murder is right”, he really hasn’t said much of anything about the object-level practical meaning of ‘right’. He has mostly just discussed certain meta-level features of the concept, such as the fact that isn’t all-possible-minds-universal, and the idea that one who explicitly thinks “If i think X is right, then X is right” can think that anything is right.
Richard: It seems to me that asking how is it that the word ‘right’ came to refer to rightness is like asking why ‘green’ means green, instead of meaning zebra.
The fact is that there is some concept that we’ve been calling “right”, and though we don’t exactly know what we mean by it, we’re pretty certain it means something, and in some cases we know it when we see it.
It strikes me as unfair to accuse Eliezer of having his own private meaning of “right” that isn’t in accordance with the common one, because hasn’t endorsed a criterion or decision procedure for ‘right’, he hasn’t tried to define it, he hasn’t made clearly-wrong claims about it like “murder is right”, he really hasn’t said much of anything about the object-level practical meaning of ‘right’. He has mostly just discussed certain meta-level features of the concept, such as the fact that isn’t all-possible-minds-universal, and the idea that one who explicitly thinks “If i think X is right, then X is right” can think that anything is right.