I think lots of people are misunderstanding the “1-place function” bit. It even took me a bit to understand, and I’m familiar with the functional programming roots of the analogy. The idea is that the “1-place morality” is a closure over (i.e. reference to) the 2-place function with arguments “person, situation” that implicitly includes the “person” argument. The 1-place function that you use references yourself. So the “1-place function” is one’s subjective morality, and not some objective version. I think that could have been a lot clearer in the post. Not everyone has studied Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell.
Overall I’m a bit disappointed. I thought I was going to learn something. Although you did resolve some confusion I had about the metacircular parts of the reasoning, my conclusions are all the same. Perhaps if I were programming an FAI the explicitness of the argument would be impressive.
As other commenters have brought up, your argument doesn’t address how your moral function interacts with others’ functions, or how we can go about creating a social, shared morality. Granted, it’s a topic for another post (or several) but you could at least acknowledge the issue.
I think lots of people are misunderstanding the “1-place function” bit. It even took me a bit to understand, and I’m familiar with the functional programming roots of the analogy. The idea is that the “1-place morality” is a closure over (i.e. reference to) the 2-place function with arguments “person, situation” that implicitly includes the “person” argument. The 1-place function that you use references yourself. So the “1-place function” is one’s subjective morality, and not some objective version. I think that could have been a lot clearer in the post. Not everyone has studied Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell.
Overall I’m a bit disappointed. I thought I was going to learn something. Although you did resolve some confusion I had about the metacircular parts of the reasoning, my conclusions are all the same. Perhaps if I were programming an FAI the explicitness of the argument would be impressive.
As other commenters have brought up, your argument doesn’t address how your moral function interacts with others’ functions, or how we can go about creating a social, shared morality. Granted, it’s a topic for another post (or several) but you could at least acknowledge the issue.