Certainly Greene’s paper title “The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality” was enough to tell me that he probably didn’t have exactly the same metaethics and interpretation I did.
Have you read it? It takes about a day and a half to read, and I think that he points out an error with the position that you took in the “p-right” etc discussions on OB. Would it be off topic for me to do a post on this?
Other than that, he takes the same position you do. I recommend that you read his dissertation, and then email him to discuss the application of this set of ideas to transhumanism/singularity. He would probably be interested.
Roko exaggerates. It’s only 377 pages and written in an accessible style.
It summarizes the ethical literature on moral realism, and takes the irrealist view that XML tags on actions don’t exist, and that even if they did exist we wouldn’t care about them. It then goes into the psychology literature (Greene does experimental philosophy, e.g. finding that people misinterpret utility as having diminishing marginal utility in contravention to experimental instructions), e.g. Haidt’s work on social intuitionism, to explain why it is that we think there are these moral properties ‘out there’ when there aren’t any. Lastly, he argues that we can get on with pursuing our concerns (reasoning about conflicts between our concerns, implications, instrumental questions, etc), but suggests that awareness of the absence of XML tags can help us to better understand and deal with those with differing moral views.
There is no objective truth about which actions are the right ones, no valuation inherent in the actions themselves. And even if there was, even if you could build a right-a-meter and check which actions are good, you won’t care about what it says, since it’s still you that draws the judgment.
Have you read it? It takes about a day and a half to read, and I think that he points out an error with the position that you took in the “p-right” etc discussions on OB. Would it be off topic for me to do a post on this?
Other than that, he takes the same position you do. I recommend that you read his dissertation, and then email him to discuss the application of this set of ideas to transhumanism/singularity. He would probably be interested.
In this case, I’d actually say email me first with a quickie description.
Roko exaggerates. It’s only 377 pages and written in an accessible style.
It summarizes the ethical literature on moral realism, and takes the irrealist view that XML tags on actions don’t exist, and that even if they did exist we wouldn’t care about them. It then goes into the psychology literature (Greene does experimental philosophy, e.g. finding that people misinterpret utility as having diminishing marginal utility in contravention to experimental instructions), e.g. Haidt’s work on social intuitionism, to explain why it is that we think there are these moral properties ‘out there’ when there aren’t any. Lastly, he argues that we can get on with pursuing our concerns (reasoning about conflicts between our concerns, implications, instrumental questions, etc), but suggests that awareness of the absence of XML tags can help us to better understand and deal with those with differing moral views.
This explains a LOT.
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Baron-JBDM-01.pdf
Enjoy.
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There is no objective truth about which actions are the right ones, no valuation inherent in the actions themselves. And even if there was, even if you could build a right-a-meter and check which actions are good, you won’t care about what it says, since it’s still you that draws the judgment.