I see this line of thinking coming directly out of Hume. Some of Hume’s main points, as I read him:
1. Morality flows straight from humanity’s values, and that’s it.
2. Morality is universalizable among humans because of the psychological commonality.
3. What we are really doing in ethics is trying to find general principles which explain the values we have, then we can use the general principle to make ethical decisions. This is another label for trying to define the big abstract computation in our heads so that we can better optimize it. Hume never really questions our ethical beliefs; he just takes them as given and tries to understand them.
I’m very interested in how Eliezer gets from his meta-ethics to utilitarianism. Many an experiment has been thought for the sole purpose of showing how utilitarianism is in direct conflict with our moral intuitions. On the other hand, the same can be said for deontological ethics.
I see this line of thinking coming directly out of Hume. Some of Hume’s main points, as I read him:
1. Morality flows straight from humanity’s values, and that’s it.
2. Morality is universalizable among humans because of the psychological commonality.
3. What we are really doing in ethics is trying to find general principles which explain the values we have, then we can use the general principle to make ethical decisions. This is another label for trying to define the big abstract computation in our heads so that we can better optimize it. Hume never really questions our ethical beliefs; he just takes them as given and tries to understand them.
I’m very interested in how Eliezer gets from his meta-ethics to utilitarianism. Many an experiment has been thought for the sole purpose of showing how utilitarianism is in direct conflict with our moral intuitions. On the other hand, the same can be said for deontological ethics.