Eliezer’s moral theory is Aristotelian, not Platonic. Plato believed that Forms and The Good existed in a separate realm and not in the real world; any triangle you drew was an approximation of The Triangle. Aristotle believed that Forms were generalizations of things that exist in the real world, and had no independent existence. The Triangle is that which is shared among all drawings of triangles; The Dog is that which is shared among all dogs.
Eliezer’s moral theory, it seems to me, is that there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has. People may deviate from The Right, and could take murderpills to make everyone believe something which is Wrong is right, but The Right doesn’t change; people would just go further out of correspondence with it.
there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has.
...right now. It is not generalized, on this account, from the internal sense of rightness that every human will have in the future (say, after taking murder pills). Neither is it generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human had in the past, supposing that was different.
Thing being, I don’t even see the necessity for a Concept of Right, which can be generalized from real humans. You can rather dissolve the question. What is Right? That which gets us what we value, insofar as we value it, to the greatest degree possible, with a rational reflection to eliminate values whose implementation shows them to be internally contradictory, accounting for the diversity of others around us.
Even if everyone takes “murderpills”, everyone wants to kill but nobody to be killed, so the implementation of the Value of Murder is internally contradictory to the degree that the anarchy, chaos and terror of a continuous murder spree would outweigh the value of the killings themselves for the killers—particularly given that you can never be assured you’re not next!
Eliezer’s moral theory is Aristotelian, not Platonic. Plato believed that Forms and The Good existed in a separate realm and not in the real world; any triangle you drew was an approximation of The Triangle. Aristotle believed that Forms were generalizations of things that exist in the real world, and had no independent existence. The Triangle is that which is shared among all drawings of triangles; The Dog is that which is shared among all dogs.
Eliezer’s moral theory, it seems to me, is that there is Rightness, but it is generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human has. People may deviate from The Right, and could take murderpills to make everyone believe something which is Wrong is right, but The Right doesn’t change; people would just go further out of correspondence with it.
...right now. It is not generalized, on this account, from the internal sense of rightness that every human will have in the future (say, after taking murder pills). Neither is it generalized from the internal sense of rightness that every human had in the past, supposing that was different.
Thing being, I don’t even see the necessity for a Concept of Right, which can be generalized from real humans. You can rather dissolve the question. What is Right? That which gets us what we value, insofar as we value it, to the greatest degree possible, with a rational reflection to eliminate values whose implementation shows them to be internally contradictory, accounting for the diversity of others around us.
Even if everyone takes “murderpills”, everyone wants to kill but nobody to be killed, so the implementation of the Value of Murder is internally contradictory to the degree that the anarchy, chaos and terror of a continuous murder spree would outweigh the value of the killings themselves for the killers—particularly given that you can never be assured you’re not next!
Right arrives to a sustainable long-term balance.