This little accident of the Gift doesn’t seem like a good reason to throw away the Gift
We’ve been “gifted” with impulses to replicate our genes, but many of us elect not to. I’m not as old as Steven Pinker is when he seemingly bragged of it, but I’ve made no progress toward reproducing and don’t have any plans for it in the immediate future, though I could easily donate to a sperm bank. I could engage in all sorts of fitness lowering activities like attending grad-school, becoming a Jainist monk, engaging in amputative body-modification or committing suicide. People created by evolution do that every day, just as they kill, rob and rape.
Now let’s say we want to make a little machine, one that will save the lives of children
Does it take into account the length, quantity or quality of lives when making tradeoffs between saving lives? If it seeks to avoid death will it commit to the apocalyptic imperative as anti-natalism would seem to me to suggest? Does it seek to save fetuses or ensure that a minimum of sperm and eggs die childless? Some of these questions a machine will have to decide and there is no decision simply coming from the axiom you gave. That’s because there is no correct answer, no fact of the matter.
And then this value zero, in turn, equating to a moral imperative to wear black, feel awful, write gloomy poetry, betray friends, and commit suicide.
None of the moral skeptics here embrace such a position. I and many others deny ANY MORAL IMPERATIVE WHATSOEVER. That I don’t wear all black, write any poetry, push my reputation among my friends below “no more reliable than average”, or intentionally harm myself is simply what I’ve elected to do so far and I reserve the option of pursuing all those “nihilist” behaviors in the future for any reason as unjustified as a coin flip.
it certainly isn’t a inescapable logical justification for wearing black.
There’s none necessary. If you wear black you won’t violate anyones rights. There are none to violate.
the ideal morality that we would have if we heard all the arguments, to whatever extent such an extrapolation is coherent.
You’ve questionably asserted the existence of “moral error”. You also know that people have cognitive biases that cause them go off in crazy divergent directions when exposed to more and more of the same arguments. I would hypothesize that the asymptotic direction the human brain would go in about an unresolved positivist question in the absence of empirical evidence is way off, if simply because the brain isn’t designed with singularities in mind. I wouldn’t hold up as ideal behavior the output of a program given an asymtote of input. It’s liable to crash. You might respond that the ideal computer the program would run on would have an infinite memory or disk, but that would be a different computer. Should I defer to another human being similar to me but with a seemingly infinite memory (you hear about these savants every once in a while)? I can’t say. I do know that if the computer could genuinely prove that if I heard all the arguments I’d devote my life to cleaning outhouses, I’d say so much the worse for the version of me that’s heard all the arguments. He’s not in charge, I am.
Also, how many people can you name who engaged in seriously reprehensible actions and changed their ways because of a really good ethical argument? I know that the anti-slavery movement didn’t count Aristotle among its converts, nor did Amnesty International convince Hitler or Stalin. We may like to imagine our beliefs are so superior that they would convince those old baddies, but I doubt we could. If Carlyle were brought to the present I bet he’d dismay at what a bleeding-heart he’d been and widen his circle of those fit for the whip.
you just mentioned intuitions, rather than using them
The intuition led to the belief. What is the distinction. “It is my intuition that removing the child from the tracks is repugnant”—“You just mentioned rather than used intuitions”.
Tom McCabe:
humanity’s Coherent Extrapolated Volition
I think Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem would argue against that being meaningful when applied to “humanity”.
This little accident of the Gift doesn’t seem like a good reason to throw away the Gift We’ve been “gifted” with impulses to replicate our genes, but many of us elect not to. I’m not as old as Steven Pinker is when he seemingly bragged of it, but I’ve made no progress toward reproducing and don’t have any plans for it in the immediate future, though I could easily donate to a sperm bank. I could engage in all sorts of fitness lowering activities like attending grad-school, becoming a Jainist monk, engaging in amputative body-modification or committing suicide. People created by evolution do that every day, just as they kill, rob and rape.
Now let’s say we want to make a little machine, one that will save the lives of children Does it take into account the length, quantity or quality of lives when making tradeoffs between saving lives? If it seeks to avoid death will it commit to the apocalyptic imperative as anti-natalism would seem to me to suggest? Does it seek to save fetuses or ensure that a minimum of sperm and eggs die childless? Some of these questions a machine will have to decide and there is no decision simply coming from the axiom you gave. That’s because there is no correct answer, no fact of the matter.
And then this value zero, in turn, equating to a moral imperative to wear black, feel awful, write gloomy poetry, betray friends, and commit suicide. None of the moral skeptics here embrace such a position. I and many others deny ANY MORAL IMPERATIVE WHATSOEVER. That I don’t wear all black, write any poetry, push my reputation among my friends below “no more reliable than average”, or intentionally harm myself is simply what I’ve elected to do so far and I reserve the option of pursuing all those “nihilist” behaviors in the future for any reason as unjustified as a coin flip.
it certainly isn’t a inescapable logical justification for wearing black. There’s none necessary. If you wear black you won’t violate anyones rights. There are none to violate.
the ideal morality that we would have if we heard all the arguments, to whatever extent such an extrapolation is coherent. You’ve questionably asserted the existence of “moral error”. You also know that people have cognitive biases that cause them go off in crazy divergent directions when exposed to more and more of the same arguments. I would hypothesize that the asymptotic direction the human brain would go in about an unresolved positivist question in the absence of empirical evidence is way off, if simply because the brain isn’t designed with singularities in mind. I wouldn’t hold up as ideal behavior the output of a program given an asymtote of input. It’s liable to crash. You might respond that the ideal computer the program would run on would have an infinite memory or disk, but that would be a different computer. Should I defer to another human being similar to me but with a seemingly infinite memory (you hear about these savants every once in a while)? I can’t say. I do know that if the computer could genuinely prove that if I heard all the arguments I’d devote my life to cleaning outhouses, I’d say so much the worse for the version of me that’s heard all the arguments. He’s not in charge, I am.
Also, how many people can you name who engaged in seriously reprehensible actions and changed their ways because of a really good ethical argument? I know that the anti-slavery movement didn’t count Aristotle among its converts, nor did Amnesty International convince Hitler or Stalin. We may like to imagine our beliefs are so superior that they would convince those old baddies, but I doubt we could. If Carlyle were brought to the present I bet he’d dismay at what a bleeding-heart he’d been and widen his circle of those fit for the whip.
you just mentioned intuitions, rather than using them The intuition led to the belief. What is the distinction. “It is my intuition that removing the child from the tracks is repugnant”—“You just mentioned rather than used intuitions”.
Tom McCabe: humanity’s Coherent Extrapolated Volition I think Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem would argue against that being meaningful when applied to “humanity”.