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.
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.