I think the question feels off. “Is the FrankenWorm better than Alice” with no “better for what” attached. “What’s better, a duck sized horse or a horse sized duck?” Unanswerable until you specify what for. You could say “for me to ride” or “for me to be safer” and that works.
Hedonic utilitarianism’s move is to say that better is “more total happy experience moments in the universe.” In that case the math works and the FrankenWorm wins.
My background view is that morality is a mix of genetic and culturally evolved tech for coordinating groups of humans living roughly human lives. The “for what” baked into our moral intuitions is roughly “for groups of humans flourishing together”. The FrankenWorm isn’t in the domain the tool was selected for. You’re asking your immune system about cryptocurrency.
This is why your pairwise intuitions chain into a conclusion you reject. The early steps “small sacrifice to save a life” match templates the moral machinery actually has, rescue, sacrifice, kin care. The late steps don’t match anything, morality never met a FrankenWorm. The transitivity argument assumes every step is the same kind of operation. I don’t think it is. Early steps are tractable moral judgments, the late steps have changed the “for what” sneakily in the background, a FrankenWorm is not a human living roughly human lives.
“If ethics doesn’t aggregate cleanly, then I want to know the messy way that it does aggregate.”
I think the answer is that it doesn’t aggregate. Aggregation is what utilitarianism does. Real ethics / morality as experienced by people is a library of pattern matched responses to recognized situations and produces nonsense or uncertainty or fuzziness on unrecognized ones. The repugnant conclusion is one of those unrecognised scenarios.
I think the question feels off. “Is the FrankenWorm better than Alice” with no “better for what” attached.
“If I have to choose between having the Frankenworm exist or having Alice exist, what does ethics require me to choose?”
The transitivity argument assumes every step is the same kind of operation.
If you give up the idea that every step is the same kind of thing, then there must be a step which counts, and a successive and very similar step, which doesn’t count. And that itself will lead to bad conclusions.
The repugnant conclusion is one of those unrecognised scenarios.
The problem here is that you can get the repugnant conclusion by stringing together only recognized scenarios that you individually do think you know how to handle.
Doing A results in a world where Alice exists. Doing B results in a world that is identical except the Frankenworm exists. You must do either A or B (perhaps one of them is to wait without doing the other one.) Does ethics tell you to do A or B here? (Or does it say nothing about what you should do?)
My model of ethics says nothing on choosing between the two states.
I personally dont see the value in a frankinworm. I would choose for it not to exist, if you forced me to choose and that option was otherwise costless to me, but my understanding of morality dosnt inform that choice.
whatever it is that motivates that choice is what I am asking about, with the motivations that prioritize yourself or people especially close to you ‘factored out’. That is what I mean when I talk about ‘morality’, here.
Okay, i think i see where you are coming from, hmmm
Residual preference after direct self interest is factored out could include evolved revulsion, fear of the strange, a strong preference for not summoning eldritch beings beyond my ken and still not be a unified moral function. None of these need cohere into a system that aggregates cleanly.
I think we disagree on the need to order all world states with coherent rules. I think saying idk is sometimes right.
I think that the argument here against “strongly incomplete” preferences is convincing. A strong incompleteness means there’s there states A,B,C such that B is preferable to A, but C is incomparable to both A and B. The post shows that such an agent could randomly self modify in a way that tends to steer the world in a strictly preferable way.
Without a strong incompleteness, any incomparable pair can be treated as if you were indifferent. This, then, is just as much a judgement as saying that one is better or worse.
Unless you reject transitivity? To me, I’m not sure how my preferences could be ‘truly’ intransitive, as opposed to reasoning errors or lossy information about my desires causing me to violate transitivity.
The Wentworth argument runs on agents with stable preferences over well defined states. Strong incompleteness is unstable on those terms.
However my claim is that the comparison itself is malformed as previously described. You can’t money pump someone over a question that doesn’t have an answer of that shape.
Indifference and incomparability aren’t the same thing. My idk is more Incomparability, meaning the question doesn’t have an answer that makes sense. Its like asking which is hotter, the number 7 or the colour blue.
I think the question feels off. “Is the FrankenWorm better than Alice” with no “better for what” attached. “What’s better, a duck sized horse or a horse sized duck?” Unanswerable until you specify what for. You could say “for me to ride” or “for me to be safer” and that works.
Hedonic utilitarianism’s move is to say that better is “more total happy experience moments in the universe.” In that case the math works and the FrankenWorm wins.
My background view is that morality is a mix of genetic and culturally evolved tech for coordinating groups of humans living roughly human lives. The “for what” baked into our moral intuitions is roughly “for groups of humans flourishing together”. The FrankenWorm isn’t in the domain the tool was selected for. You’re asking your immune system about cryptocurrency.
This is why your pairwise intuitions chain into a conclusion you reject. The early steps “small sacrifice to save a life” match templates the moral machinery actually has, rescue, sacrifice, kin care. The late steps don’t match anything, morality never met a FrankenWorm. The transitivity argument assumes every step is the same kind of operation. I don’t think it is. Early steps are tractable moral judgments, the late steps have changed the “for what” sneakily in the background, a FrankenWorm is not a human living roughly human lives.
I think the answer is that it doesn’t aggregate. Aggregation is what utilitarianism does. Real ethics / morality as experienced by people is a library of pattern matched responses to recognized situations and produces nonsense or uncertainty or fuzziness on unrecognized ones. The repugnant conclusion is one of those unrecognised scenarios.
“If I have to choose between having the Frankenworm exist or having Alice exist, what does ethics require me to choose?”
If you give up the idea that every step is the same kind of thing, then there must be a step which counts, and a successive and very similar step, which doesn’t count. And that itself will lead to bad conclusions.
The problem here is that you can get the repugnant conclusion by stringing together only recognized scenarios that you individually do think you know how to handle.
You haven’t identified the “for what” here. Please explain your point further.
Sorites paradoxes again.
Yeah, problem being that you are handling each comparison with a flawed model.
Doing A results in a world where Alice exists. Doing B results in a world that is identical except the Frankenworm exists. You must do either A or B (perhaps one of them is to wait without doing the other one.) Does ethics tell you to do A or B here? (Or does it say nothing about what you should do?)
My model of ethics says nothing on choosing between the two states.
I personally dont see the value in a frankinworm. I would choose for it not to exist, if you forced me to choose and that option was otherwise costless to me, but my understanding of morality dosnt inform that choice.
whatever it is that motivates that choice is what I am asking about, with the motivations that prioritize yourself or people especially close to you ‘factored out’. That is what I mean when I talk about ‘morality’, here.
Okay, i think i see where you are coming from, hmmm
Residual preference after direct self interest is factored out could include evolved revulsion, fear of the strange, a strong preference for not summoning eldritch beings beyond my ken and still not be a unified moral function. None of these need cohere into a system that aggregates cleanly.
I think we disagree on the need to order all world states with coherent rules. I think saying idk is sometimes right.
Inaction is still a choice.
I think that the argument here against “strongly incomplete” preferences is convincing. A strong incompleteness means there’s there states A,B,C such that B is preferable to A, but C is incomparable to both A and B. The post shows that such an agent could randomly self modify in a way that tends to steer the world in a strictly preferable way.
Without a strong incompleteness, any incomparable pair can be treated as if you were indifferent. This, then, is just as much a judgement as saying that one is better or worse.
Unless you reject transitivity? To me, I’m not sure how my preferences could be ‘truly’ intransitive, as opposed to reasoning errors or lossy information about my desires causing me to violate transitivity.
The Wentworth argument runs on agents with stable preferences over well defined states. Strong incompleteness is unstable on those terms.
However my claim is that the comparison itself is malformed as previously described. You can’t money pump someone over a question that doesn’t have an answer of that shape.
Indifference and incomparability aren’t the same thing. My idk is more Incomparability, meaning the question doesn’t have an answer that makes sense. Its like asking which is hotter, the number 7 or the colour blue.