Honestly I do not understand how you can continue calling Eliezer a relativist when he has persistently claimed that what is right doesn’t depend on who’s asking and doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right.
Before I say anything else I want you to know that I am not a Communist.
Marx was right about everything he wrote about, but he didn’t know everything, I wouldn’t say that Marx had all the answers. When the time is ripe the proletariat will inevitably rise up and create a government that will organize the people, it will put everybody to work according to his abilities and give out the results according to the needs, and that will be the best thing that ever happened to anybody. But don’t call me a Communist, because I’m not one.
Oh well. Maybe Eliezer is saying something new and it’s hard to understand. So we keep mistaking what he’s saying for something old that we do understand.
To me he looks like a platonist. Our individual concepts of “right” are imperfect representations of the real true platonic “right” which exists independently of any or all of us.
I am more of a nominalist. I see our concepts as things that get continually re-created. We are born without any concept of “right” and we develop such concepts as we grow up, with the foundations in our families. The degree to which we develop similar concepts of “right” is a triumph for our societies. There’s nothing inevitable about it, but there’s a value to moral uniformity that goes beyond the particular beliefs.
So for example about “murder”. Americans mostly believe that killing is sometimes proper and necessary. Killing in self defense. Policemen must sometimes kill dangerous criminals. It’s vitally necessary to kill the enemy in wartime. Etc. We call it “murder” only when it is not justified, so of course we agree that murder is wrong.
We would be better off if we all agreed about when killing is “right”. Is it right to kill adulterous spouses? The people they have sex with? Is it right to kill IRS agents? Blasphemers? Four years ago a man I met in a public park threatened to kill me to keep me from voting for Kerry. Was he right? Whatever the rules are about killing, if we all agreed and we knew where we stood, we’d be better off than when we disagree and don’t know who to expect will try to kill us.
And that is why in the new society children will be taken from their parents and raised in common dormitories. Because individual families are too diverse, and they don’t all raise their children to understand that “from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs” is the most basic and important part of morality.
But don’t call me a Communist, I already explained that I wasn’t a Communist in my first sentence above.
Eliezer’s moral theory is Aristotelian, not Platonic. Plato believed that Forms and The Good existed in a separate realm and not in the real world; any triangle you drew was an approximation of The Triangle. Aristotle believed that Forms were generalizations of things that exist in the real world, and had no independent existence. The Triangle is that which is shared among all drawings of triangles; The Dog is that which is shared among all dogs.
Eliezer’s moral theory, it seems to me, is that there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has. People may deviate from The Right, and could take murderpills to make everyone believe something which is Wrong is right, but The Right doesn’t change; people would just go further out of correspondence with it.
there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has.
...right now. It is not generalized, on this account, from the internal sense of rightness that every human will have in the future (say, after taking murder pills). Neither is it generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human had in the past, supposing that was different.
Thing being, I don’t even see the necessity for a Concept of Right, which can be generalized from real humans. You can rather dissolve the question. What is Right? That which gets us what we value, insofar as we value it, to the greatest degree possible, with a rational reflection to eliminate values whose implementation shows them to be internally contradictory, accounting for the diversity of others around us.
Even if everyone takes “murderpills”, everyone wants to kill but nobody to be killed, so the implementation of the Value of Murder is internally contradictory to the degree that the anarchy, chaos and terror of a continuous murder spree would outweigh the value of the killings themselves for the killers—particularly given that you can never be assured you’re not next!
Honestly I do not understand how you can continue calling Eliezer a relativist when he has persistently claimed that what is right doesn’t depend on who’s asking and doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right.
Before I say anything else I want you to know that I am not a Communist.
Marx was right about everything he wrote about, but he didn’t know everything, I wouldn’t say that Marx had all the answers. When the time is ripe the proletariat will inevitably rise up and create a government that will organize the people, it will put everybody to work according to his abilities and give out the results according to the needs, and that will be the best thing that ever happened to anybody. But don’t call me a Communist, because I’m not one.
Oh well. Maybe Eliezer is saying something new and it’s hard to understand. So we keep mistaking what he’s saying for something old that we do understand.
To me he looks like a platonist. Our individual concepts of “right” are imperfect representations of the real true platonic “right” which exists independently of any or all of us.
I am more of a nominalist. I see our concepts as things that get continually re-created. We are born without any concept of “right” and we develop such concepts as we grow up, with the foundations in our families. The degree to which we develop similar concepts of “right” is a triumph for our societies. There’s nothing inevitable about it, but there’s a value to moral uniformity that goes beyond the particular beliefs.
So for example about “murder”. Americans mostly believe that killing is sometimes proper and necessary. Killing in self defense. Policemen must sometimes kill dangerous criminals. It’s vitally necessary to kill the enemy in wartime. Etc. We call it “murder” only when it is not justified, so of course we agree that murder is wrong.
We would be better off if we all agreed about when killing is “right”. Is it right to kill adulterous spouses? The people they have sex with? Is it right to kill IRS agents? Blasphemers? Four years ago a man I met in a public park threatened to kill me to keep me from voting for Kerry. Was he right? Whatever the rules are about killing, if we all agreed and we knew where we stood, we’d be better off than when we disagree and don’t know who to expect will try to kill us.
And that is why in the new society children will be taken from their parents and raised in common dormitories. Because individual families are too diverse, and they don’t all raise their children to understand that “from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs” is the most basic and important part of morality.
But don’t call me a Communist, I already explained that I wasn’t a Communist in my first sentence above.
Eliezer’s moral theory is Aristotelian, not Platonic. Plato believed that Forms and The Good existed in a separate realm and not in the real world; any triangle you drew was an approximation of The Triangle. Aristotle believed that Forms were generalizations of things that exist in the real world, and had no independent existence. The Triangle is that which is shared among all drawings of triangles; The Dog is that which is shared among all dogs.
Eliezer’s moral theory, it seems to me, is that there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has. People may deviate from The Right, and could take murderpills to make everyone believe something which is Wrong is right, but The Right doesn’t change; people would just go further out of correspondence with it.
...right now. It is not generalized, on this account, from the internal sense of rightness that every human will have in the future (say, after taking murder pills). Neither is it generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human had in the past, supposing that was different.
Thing being, I don’t even see the necessity for a Concept of Right, which can be generalized from real humans. You can rather dissolve the question. What is Right? That which gets us what we value, insofar as we value it, to the greatest degree possible, with a rational reflection to eliminate values whose implementation shows them to be internally contradictory, accounting for the diversity of others around us.
Even if everyone takes “murderpills”, everyone wants to kill but nobody to be killed, so the implementation of the Value of Murder is internally contradictory to the degree that the anarchy, chaos and terror of a continuous murder spree would outweigh the value of the killings themselves for the killers—particularly given that you can never be assured you’re not next!
Right arrives to a sustainable long-term balance.