I have skimmed the first two links, and based only on these, I think this theory is ridiculously simplistic to be useful for us here at LW.
How do you compare the strength of two desires? How do you aggregate desires? Maybe Fyfe has answers, but I haven’t seen them. In the two links, I couldn’t even find any attempt to deal with popular corner cases such as animal rights and patient rights. And in a transhuman world, corner cases are the typical cases: constantly reprogrammed desires, splitting and merging minds, the ability to spawn millions of minds with specific desires and so on.
I don’t know, maybe this is a common problem with all current theories of ethics, and I only singled out this theory because I’m totally unversed in the literature of ethics. The result is all the same: this seems to be useless as a foundation for anything formalized and long-lasting (FAI).
I have skimmed the first two links, and based only on these, I think this theory is ridiculously simplistic to be useful for us here at LW.
How do you compare the strength of two desires? How do you aggregate desires? Maybe Fyfe has answers, but I haven’t seen them. In the two links, I couldn’t even find any attempt to deal with popular corner cases such as animal rights and patient rights. And in a transhuman world, corner cases are the typical cases: constantly reprogrammed desires, splitting and merging minds, the ability to spawn millions of minds with specific desires and so on.
I don’t know, maybe this is a common problem with all current theories of ethics, and I only singled out this theory because I’m totally unversed in the literature of ethics. The result is all the same: this seems to be useless as a foundation for anything formalized and long-lasting (FAI).
Indeed, I keep bugging him about this. :(
As for animal rights, this is what he says whenever anyone brings up the topic.