This is one of the things I don’t understand: If you think everything is just a provincial human value, then why do you care? Why not play video games or watch YouTube videos instead of arguing about CEV? Is it just more fun?
(There’s a longish section trying to answer this question in the CEV document, but I can’t make sense of it.)
There’s a distinction that hasn’t been made on LW yet, between personal values and evangelical values. Western thought traditionally blurs the distinction between them, and assumes that, if you have personal values, you value other people having your values, and must go on a crusade to get everybody else to adopt your personal values.
The CEVer position is, as far as I can tell, that they follow their values because that’s what they are programmed to do. It’s a weird sort of double-think that can only arise when you act on the supposition that you have no free will with which to act. They’re talking themselves into being evangelists for values that they don’t really believe in. It’s like taking the ability to follow a moral code that you know has no outside justification from Nietzsche’s “master morality”, and combining it with the prohibition against value-creation from his “slave morality”.
There’s a distinction that hasn’t been made on LW yet, between personal values and evangelical values. Western thought traditionally blurs the distinction between them, and assumes that, if you have personal values, you value other people having your values, and must go on a crusade to get everybody else to adopt your personal values.
That’s how most values work. In general, I value human life. If someone does not share this value, and they decide to commit murder, then I would stop them if possible. If someone does not share this value, but is merely apathetic about murder rather than a potential murderer themselves, then I would cause them to share this value if possible, so there will be more people to help me stop actual murderers. So yes, at least in this case, I would act to get other people to adopt my values, or inhibit them from acting on their own values. Is this overly evangelical? What is bad about it?
In any case, history seems to indicate that “evangelizing your values” is a “universal human value”.
Groups that didn’t/don’t value evangelizing their values:
The Romans. They don’t care what you think; they just want you to pay your taxes.
The Jews. Because God didn’t choose you.
Nietzschians. Those are their values, dammit! Create your own!
Goths. (Angst-goths, not Visi-goths.) Because if everyone were a goth, they’d be just like everyone else.
We get into one sort of confusion by using particular values as examples. You talk about valuing human life. How about valuing the taste of avocados? Do you want to evangelize that? That’s kind of evangelism-neutral. How about the preferences you have that make one particular private place, or one particular person, or other limited resource, special to you? You don’t want to evangelize those preferences, or you’d have more competition. Is the first sort of value the only one CEV works with? How does it make that distinction?
We get into another sort of confusion by not distinguishing between the values we hold as individuals, the values we encourage our society to hold, and the values we want God to hold. The kind of values you want your God to hold are very different from the kind of values you want people to hold, in the same way that you want the referee to have different desires than the players. CEV mushes these two very different things together.
Good points. I haven’t thoroughly read the CEV document yet, so I don’t know if there is any discussion of this, but it does seem that it should make a distinction between those different types of values and preferences.
This is one of the things I don’t understand: If you think everything is just a provincial human value, then why do you care? Why not play video games or watch YouTube videos instead of arguing about CEV? Is it just more fun?
(There’s a longish section trying to answer this question in the CEV document, but I can’t make sense of it.)
There’s a distinction that hasn’t been made on LW yet, between personal values and evangelical values. Western thought traditionally blurs the distinction between them, and assumes that, if you have personal values, you value other people having your values, and must go on a crusade to get everybody else to adopt your personal values.
The CEVer position is, as far as I can tell, that they follow their values because that’s what they are programmed to do. It’s a weird sort of double-think that can only arise when you act on the supposition that you have no free will with which to act. They’re talking themselves into being evangelists for values that they don’t really believe in. It’s like taking the ability to follow a moral code that you know has no outside justification from Nietzsche’s “master morality”, and combining it with the prohibition against value-creation from his “slave morality”.
That’s how most values work. In general, I value human life. If someone does not share this value, and they decide to commit murder, then I would stop them if possible. If someone does not share this value, but is merely apathetic about murder rather than a potential murderer themselves, then I would cause them to share this value if possible, so there will be more people to help me stop actual murderers. So yes, at least in this case, I would act to get other people to adopt my values, or inhibit them from acting on their own values. Is this overly evangelical? What is bad about it?
In any case, history seems to indicate that “evangelizing your values” is a “universal human value”.
Groups that didn’t/don’t value evangelizing their values:
The Romans. They don’t care what you think; they just want you to pay your taxes.
The Jews. Because God didn’t choose you.
Nietzschians. Those are their values, dammit! Create your own!
Goths. (Angst-goths, not Visi-goths.) Because if everyone were a goth, they’d be just like everyone else.
We get into one sort of confusion by using particular values as examples. You talk about valuing human life. How about valuing the taste of avocados? Do you want to evangelize that? That’s kind of evangelism-neutral. How about the preferences you have that make one particular private place, or one particular person, or other limited resource, special to you? You don’t want to evangelize those preferences, or you’d have more competition. Is the first sort of value the only one CEV works with? How does it make that distinction?
We get into another sort of confusion by not distinguishing between the values we hold as individuals, the values we encourage our society to hold, and the values we want God to hold. The kind of values you want your God to hold are very different from the kind of values you want people to hold, in the same way that you want the referee to have different desires than the players. CEV mushes these two very different things together.
Good points. I haven’t thoroughly read the CEV document yet, so I don’t know if there is any discussion of this, but it does seem that it should make a distinction between those different types of values and preferences.