You’re welcome! The refutation of universally compelling arguments I was referring to is this one. I see you responded that you’re interested in a different definition of “compelling”. On the word “compelling”, you say
On the one hand, we could mean ‘persuasive’ where this means something like ‘If I sat down with someone, and presented the moral argument to them, they would end up accepting it regardless of their starting view’. This seems to be a bad option, because the claim that ‘there are no universally persuasive moral arguments’ is trivial.
This is indeed the meaning of “compelling” that Eliezer uses, and Eliezer’s original argument is indeed trivial, which perhaps explains why he spent so few words on it.
If you wanted to defend a different claim, that there are arguments that all minds are “rationally committed” to accepting or whatever, then you’d have to begin by operationalizing “committed”, “reasons”, etc. I believe there’s no nontrivial way to do this. In any case the burden is on others to operationalize these concepts in an interesting way.
You’re welcome! The refutation of universally compelling arguments I was referring to is this one. I see you responded that you’re interested in a different definition of “compelling”. On the word “compelling”, you say
This is indeed the meaning of “compelling” that Eliezer uses, and Eliezer’s original argument is indeed trivial, which perhaps explains why he spent so few words on it.
If you wanted to defend a different claim, that there are arguments that all minds are “rationally committed” to accepting or whatever, then you’d have to begin by operationalizing “committed”, “reasons”, etc. I believe there’s no nontrivial way to do this. In any case the burden is on others to operationalize these concepts in an interesting way.
Okay, thanks for pointing that out.