At least as I understand his point about rationality being objective, I assume he means that “given a set of goals and possible decisions, the most effective decision is determined.”
I don’t really understand why this doesn’t apply to morality as such, unless they aren’t similar in the way he implies.
Wei Dai distinguishes between objective rationality and subjectively obective morality:
in ethics we find it hard to do better than to identify “morality” with a huge blob of computation which is particular to human minds, but it appears that in decision theory “rationality” isn’t similarly dependent on complex details unique to humanity.
Morality does seem to be more complex than decision theory. But aren’t they both subjectively objective? Just as we can define the class of moral agents as those which respond to moral arguments, we can define the (larger) class of rational agents as those which respond to arguments about rationality.
At least as I understand his point about rationality being objective, I assume he means that “given a set of goals and possible decisions, the most effective decision is determined.”
I don’t really understand why this doesn’t apply to morality as such, unless they aren’t similar in the way he implies.
Wei Dai distinguishes between objective rationality and subjectively obective morality:
Morality does seem to be more complex than decision theory. But aren’t they both subjectively objective? Just as we can define the class of moral agents as those which respond to moral arguments, we can define the (larger) class of rational agents as those which respond to arguments about rationality.