Thanks for this! Definitely some themes that are in the zeitgeist right now for whatever reason.
One thing I’ll have to think about more is the idea of natural limits (e.g. the human stomach’s capacity for tasty food) as a critical part of “human values,” that keeps them from exhibiting abstractly bad properties like monomania. At first glance one might think of this as an argument for taking abstract properties (meta-values) seriously, or taking actual human behavior (which automatically includes physical constraints) seriously, but it might also be regarded as an example of where human values are indeterminate when we go outside the everyday regime. If someone wants to get surgery to make their stomach 1000x bigger (or whatever), and this changes the abstract properties of their behavior, maybe we shouldn’t forbid this a priori.
Thanks for this! Definitely some themes that are in the zeitgeist right now for whatever reason.
One thing I’ll have to think about more is the idea of natural limits (e.g. the human stomach’s capacity for tasty food) as a critical part of “human values,” that keeps them from exhibiting abstractly bad properties like monomania. At first glance one might think of this as an argument for taking abstract properties (meta-values) seriously, or taking actual human behavior (which automatically includes physical constraints) seriously, but it might also be regarded as an example of where human values are indeterminate when we go outside the everyday regime. If someone wants to get surgery to make their stomach 1000x bigger (or whatever), and this changes the abstract properties of their behavior, maybe we shouldn’t forbid this a priori.