The wrongness comes from wherever the wrongness of harm comes from.
Are you begging the question? I honestly can’t tell from that:
“Things that cause harm are wrong.”
“Theft can be wrong by virtue of being theft.”
“X = Harm.Wrongness.TraceSource”
“The ‘wrong’ in theft comes from X.”
Implicit: “Theft causes Harm.”
Therefore, Theft is wrong.
What am I missing? The above doesn’t seem to clearly follow.
This line of argument is frustrating me and I’m having unwarranted strong emotional responses, which is a sure warning bell that something is wrong somewhere here. It also makes me want to give up and leave, which (in my case) is usually also a good sign that there’s some unresolved issue or missing information that I really should solve/find right now, lest it bite me in the ass later. As such, I’d be much obliged if you can bear with me until I mange to sort this out.
I’m not trying to suggest that redefinitions would make new territory wrong. I’m trying to figure out how there exists a case in which X is wrong because it is Y, and Y is known to be wrong for Z, when X does not have Z.
My fictive, overblown example in the grandparent might be a good thought experiment for this. Where does the harm in the theft of the magical device come from, if is it explicitly stated in the problem statement that no harm shall be derived from said theft by the owner but that the owner does not consent to the device being taken from his “possession”? Assume zero external noise and complicating factors (such as encouraging future, more harmful forms of theft). If that assumption doesn’t work, assume there are zero laws against theft, and that laws against theft were never invented, and humans had never evolved to be angry towards having “their shiny claw” stolen.
Personally, in such a thought experiment, I see exactly zero harm from the theft, and large beneficial effects. I can’t conceive how a theft that causes no harm once reduced to its baser components of availability, usage, emotional value, instrumental value, etc. would still cause harm somehow, simply by virtue of it violating an agreement between animals not to do it. If I cede seeing harm on “violating social agreements”, then I fail to see the clear schelling point / distinction between that and causing harm by not submitting to any arbitrary social norm, regardless of other values (e.g. we would all be causing harm to a lot of people simply by not praying in X manner to Y god).
From there, I infer that the only way there could remain any wrongness is that some other source of wrongness, other than harm, would shine in from above into theft specifically (and possibly other specific things humans just happen to have opinions about) - which is where my strongly adversarial responses come from.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you; I’ve been travelling.
The wrongness of the theft doesn’t come from any harm it may or may not cause. Rather, it comes from where-ever the wrongness of harmful acts comes from. If harmful acts can be wrong simply because they are harmful, then theft can be wrong simply because it is theft. If harmful acts are wrong because they’re pareto inefficient, then I can say theft is wrong because its pareto inefficient. If Yvain said harmful acts are wrong because god says so, the person he’s talking to can explain that theft is wrong because god says so.
In the examples, Yvain accuses people of commiting the worst argument in the world because they use the theft (or equivalent) category when it doesn’t overlap with the harm category. But this only makes sense if we agreed that the only thing that ultimately matters is harm, which is not the case. (Even if it were the case that only harm mattered, this is a very contentious philosophical point, and its denial definitely does not constitute the worst argument in the world).
Ah! That explanation did the trick, now I finally understand what you were talking about.
This is something my mind had automatically skipped over, as in my model it’s “obvious” that harm is “wrong” merely because the human brain is hardcoded to reject/dislike some things by default, like pain and such. I had taken “harms” as being things that fit this definition, which would make the whole thing incompatible with your arguments unless theft were to also be preprogrammed in the brain.
Basically, I had assumed one specific example of this source of wrongness, and made it incompatible with “theft” or other complex behavior models, skipping over the rest. Assuming I now understand this correctly, that is.
Are you begging the question? I honestly can’t tell from that:
“Things that cause harm are wrong.”
“Theft can be wrong by virtue of being theft.”
“X = Harm.Wrongness.TraceSource”
“The ‘wrong’ in theft comes from X.”
Implicit: “Theft causes Harm.” Therefore, Theft is wrong.
What am I missing? The above doesn’t seem to clearly follow.
This line of argument is frustrating me and I’m having unwarranted strong emotional responses, which is a sure warning bell that something is wrong somewhere here. It also makes me want to give up and leave, which (in my case) is usually also a good sign that there’s some unresolved issue or missing information that I really should solve/find right now, lest it bite me in the ass later. As such, I’d be much obliged if you can bear with me until I mange to sort this out.
I’m not trying to suggest that redefinitions would make new territory wrong. I’m trying to figure out how there exists a case in which X is wrong because it is Y, and Y is known to be wrong for Z, when X does not have Z.
My fictive, overblown example in the grandparent might be a good thought experiment for this. Where does the harm in the theft of the magical device come from, if is it explicitly stated in the problem statement that no harm shall be derived from said theft by the owner but that the owner does not consent to the device being taken from his “possession”? Assume zero external noise and complicating factors (such as encouraging future, more harmful forms of theft). If that assumption doesn’t work, assume there are zero laws against theft, and that laws against theft were never invented, and humans had never evolved to be angry towards having “their shiny claw” stolen.
Personally, in such a thought experiment, I see exactly zero harm from the theft, and large beneficial effects. I can’t conceive how a theft that causes no harm once reduced to its baser components of availability, usage, emotional value, instrumental value, etc. would still cause harm somehow, simply by virtue of it violating an agreement between animals not to do it. If I cede seeing harm on “violating social agreements”, then I fail to see the clear schelling point / distinction between that and causing harm by not submitting to any arbitrary social norm, regardless of other values (e.g. we would all be causing harm to a lot of people simply by not praying in X manner to Y god).
From there, I infer that the only way there could remain any wrongness is that some other source of wrongness, other than harm, would shine in from above into theft specifically (and possibly other specific things humans just happen to have opinions about) - which is where my strongly adversarial responses come from.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you; I’ve been travelling.
The wrongness of the theft doesn’t come from any harm it may or may not cause. Rather, it comes from where-ever the wrongness of harmful acts comes from. If harmful acts can be wrong simply because they are harmful, then theft can be wrong simply because it is theft. If harmful acts are wrong because they’re pareto inefficient, then I can say theft is wrong because its pareto inefficient. If Yvain said harmful acts are wrong because god says so, the person he’s talking to can explain that theft is wrong because god says so.
In the examples, Yvain accuses people of commiting the worst argument in the world because they use the theft (or equivalent) category when it doesn’t overlap with the harm category. But this only makes sense if we agreed that the only thing that ultimately matters is harm, which is not the case. (Even if it were the case that only harm mattered, this is a very contentious philosophical point, and its denial definitely does not constitute the worst argument in the world).
Ah! That explanation did the trick, now I finally understand what you were talking about.
This is something my mind had automatically skipped over, as in my model it’s “obvious” that harm is “wrong” merely because the human brain is hardcoded to reject/dislike some things by default, like pain and such. I had taken “harms” as being things that fit this definition, which would make the whole thing incompatible with your arguments unless theft were to also be preprogrammed in the brain.
Basically, I had assumed one specific example of this source of wrongness, and made it incompatible with “theft” or other complex behavior models, skipping over the rest. Assuming I now understand this correctly, that is.