morality is about letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.
Then morality would be about letting babies eat pieces of broken glass, and yet that’s not the moral calculation that our brain makes. Indeed our brain might calculate as more “moral” a parent who vaccinates his children against their will, than a parent who lets them eat broken glass as they will.
I wonder if you’re mistaking the economico-political injuctions of e.g. libertarianism as to be the same as moral evaluations. Even if you’re a libertarian, they’re really really not. What’s the optimal system for the government to do (or not do) has little to do with what is calculated as moral by our brains.
Babies are people and a lacerated oesophagus is a cost.
Kratoklastes spoke about morality being “letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.” The baby’s action imposes a cost on itself.
Again ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I’ma put it here...
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete
It was a comment—not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess—if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.
Here’s something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a “description of what morality entails”, it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)
Downvoted, as I will be downvoting every comment of yours that whines about downvotes from now on. Your downvotes have nothing to do with your positions, which are pretty common in their actual content around these parts, and everything to do with your horrid manner and utter incapacity of forming sentences that actually communicate meanings.
It was a comment
And as such it was judged and found wanting.
and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
Then it shouldn’t have started with the words “morality is about...”
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one’s views on a topic: you’re being dishonest (again).
Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone’s schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.
I note that you didn’t bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won’t do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.
And last but not least—given that you’ve already exhibited ‘bounded literacy’: what gives you the right to judge anybody?
I’m not going demand that we compare academic transcripts—you don’t have a hope on that metric—just some indication apart from “I feel strongly about this” will suffice. Preferably one that doesn’t confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb “to be”.
I suggest you don’t be so hasty to accuse people of dishonesty. Downvoted without comment from now on, since you seem incapable of doing anything other than insulting and accusing them of various crimes.
I also find it bitterly amusing that someone who admitted to taking delight out of trolling people presumes to even have an opinion about morality, let alone accuse others of dishonesty. And indeed you clearly don’t have an opinion about morality, you obviously only have opinions about politics and keep confusing the two concepts. All your babble about tyranny-tyranny-state-violence-whatever, would still not be useful in helping a five-year old learn why he should be nice to his sister or polite to his grandmother, or explain why our brain evaluates it morally better to make someone feel happy than to make them feel sad, all else being equal.
If you have a moral sense, instead of just political lectures, you’ve yet to display it at all.
Yeah, so I’ll just leave this here… (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of ‘correct line’ cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in… ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared “China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe” irrational fearmonger).
Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you’re also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.
If you can’t read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you’re just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn’t have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it (“I haven’t read Coase”… “I haven’t read Rand”… “I haven’t read anything on existentialism”… “Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?”).
You’re a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.
Wait—don’t tell me… you aren’t aware of their work. Google it.
Here’s the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your ‘net’ Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who’s not a retard thinks it’s worth doing.
And the big problem you face is that I don’t give a toss what number my ‘karma’ winds up at: this is the internet.
I’ve been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I’ve been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).
You do NOT want this war: you’re not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You’re a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.
You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai… and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.
You not only made a ludicrous attempt to supposedly shame me by googling previous stuff about me, but your attempt to do so is as much of a failure as everything else you’ve posted—it took me a min to figure out what the hell you were even referring to in regards to “transitive preferences”. You are referring to an Ornery forum discussion where someone else asked that question, and I answered them—not a question I asked others.
Your reading comprehension fails, your google-fu fails, etc, etc...
You also don’t seemingly see a discrepancy between your constant accusations of me supposedly being “dishonest” and yet how I openly admit my levels of ignorance whenever such ignorance may be relevant to a discussion?
Nor do you seemingly see a problem with so easily accusing me of such a serious moral crime as dishonesty, without the slightest shred of evidence. Is this what your moral sense entails, freely making slanderous accusations?
Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons—including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.
I’m not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.
Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm—it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).
Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let’s not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill—anybody familiar with the term ‘drapetomania’ will immediately see why).
Yes. Of course. It was the blatant flaw in your description of morality. Unless one addresses that one first, there’s hardly a need to discuss subtleties.
A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons
If you’re creating exceptions to your definition of morality for “sensible reasons”, you should hopefully also understand that these sensible reasons won’t be automatically understood by an AI unless they’re actually programmed in. Woe unto us if we think the AI will just automatically understand that when we say “letting individuals do what they will” we mean “individuals with the exception of babies and other people of mentally limited capacity, in whose case different rules apply, mostly having to do with preserving them from harm rather that letting them do whatever”.
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete, because it relies on those unspoken and undescribed “sensible reasons”. Once the insufficiency was shown to you you were forced to enhance your description of morality with ideas like “full agency” and the “capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm”.
And then you conceded of course that it’s not just babies, but other people with mentally limited mental capacity also fall in that category. Your description of morality seems more and more insufficient to explain what we actually mean by morality.
So, do you want to try to redescribe “morality” to include all these details explicitly, instead of just going “except in cases where common sense applies”?
Then morality would be about letting babies eat pieces of broken glass, and yet that’s not the moral calculation that our brain makes. Indeed our brain might calculate as more “moral” a parent who vaccinates his children against their will, than a parent who lets them eat broken glass as they will.
I wonder if you’re mistaking the economico-political injuctions of e.g. libertarianism as to be the same as moral evaluations. Even if you’re a libertarian, they’re really really not. What’s the optimal system for the government to do (or not do) has little to do with what is calculated as moral by our brains.
Babies are people and a lacerated oesophagus is a cost. You need a better example.
Kratoklastes spoke about morality being “letting individuals do as they like, so long as their doing so does not impose costs on others.” The baby’s action imposes a cost on itself.
Again ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I’ma put it here...
It was a comment—not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.
To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess—if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.
Here’s something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a “description of what morality entails”, it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)
Downvoted, as I will be downvoting every comment of yours that whines about downvotes from now on. Your downvotes have nothing to do with your positions, which are pretty common in their actual content around these parts, and everything to do with your horrid manner and utter incapacity of forming sentences that actually communicate meanings.
And as such it was judged and found wanting.
Then it shouldn’t have started with the words “morality is about...”
It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.
A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one’s views on a topic: you’re being dishonest (again).
Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone’s schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.
I note that you didn’t bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won’t do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.
And last but not least—given that you’ve already exhibited ‘bounded literacy’: what gives you the right to judge anybody?
I’m not going demand that we compare academic transcripts—you don’t have a hope on that metric—just some indication apart from “I feel strongly about this” will suffice. Preferably one that doesn’t confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb “to be”.
I suggest you don’t be so hasty to accuse people of dishonesty. Downvoted without comment from now on, since you seem incapable of doing anything other than insulting and accusing them of various crimes.
I also find it bitterly amusing that someone who admitted to taking delight out of trolling people presumes to even have an opinion about morality, let alone accuse others of dishonesty. And indeed you clearly don’t have an opinion about morality, you obviously only have opinions about politics and keep confusing the two concepts. All your babble about tyranny-tyranny-state-violence-whatever, would still not be useful in helping a five-year old learn why he should be nice to his sister or polite to his grandmother, or explain why our brain evaluates it morally better to make someone feel happy than to make them feel sad, all else being equal.
If you have a moral sense, instead of just political lectures, you’ve yet to display it at all.
Yeah, so I’ll just leave this here… (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of ‘correct line’ cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in… ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared “China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe” irrational fearmonger).
Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you’re also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.
If you can’t read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you’re just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn’t have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it (“I haven’t read Coase”… “I haven’t read Rand”… “I haven’t read anything on existentialism”… “Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?”).
You’re a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.
Wait—don’t tell me… you aren’t aware of their work. Google it.
Here’s the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your ‘net’ Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who’s not a retard thinks it’s worth doing.
And the big problem you face is that I don’t give a toss what number my ‘karma’ winds up at: this is the internet.
I’ve been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I’ve been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).
You do NOT want this war: you’re not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You’re a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.
You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai… and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.
Ga Muti. (or Ka muti if you prefer a hard gamma).
You not only made a ludicrous attempt to supposedly shame me by googling previous stuff about me, but your attempt to do so is as much of a failure as everything else you’ve posted—it took me a min to figure out what the hell you were even referring to in regards to “transitive preferences”. You are referring to an Ornery forum discussion where someone else asked that question, and I answered them—not a question I asked others.
Your reading comprehension fails, your google-fu fails, etc, etc...
You also don’t seemingly see a discrepancy between your constant accusations of me supposedly being “dishonest” and yet how I openly admit my levels of ignorance whenever such ignorance may be relevant to a discussion?
Nor do you seemingly see a problem with so easily accusing me of such a serious moral crime as dishonesty, without the slightest shred of evidence. Is this what your moral sense entails, freely making slanderous accusations?
Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons—including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.
I’m not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.
Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm—it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).
Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let’s not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill—anybody familiar with the term ‘drapetomania’ will immediately see why).
Yes. Of course. It was the blatant flaw in your description of morality. Unless one addresses that one first, there’s hardly a need to discuss subtleties.
If you’re creating exceptions to your definition of morality for “sensible reasons”, you should hopefully also understand that these sensible reasons won’t be automatically understood by an AI unless they’re actually programmed in. Woe unto us if we think the AI will just automatically understand that when we say “letting individuals do what they will” we mean “individuals with the exception of babies and other people of mentally limited capacity, in whose case different rules apply, mostly having to do with preserving them from harm rather that letting them do whatever”.
In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete, because it relies on those unspoken and undescribed “sensible reasons”. Once the insufficiency was shown to you you were forced to enhance your description of morality with ideas like “full agency” and the “capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm”.
And then you conceded of course that it’s not just babies, but other people with mentally limited mental capacity also fall in that category. Your description of morality seems more and more insufficient to explain what we actually mean by morality.
So, do you want to try to redescribe “morality” to include all these details explicitly, instead of just going “except in cases where common sense applies”?