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.
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.
Fantastic! My thoughts exactly, thank you for writing this.
“If I have to choose between having the Frankenworm exist or having Alice exist, what does ethics require me to choose?”
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.
Sorites paradoxes are everywhere, heaps, baldness, colour boundaries. We live with them just fine.
This is that, the worm is not a life, Alice is. Middle is muddled. Type difference.
Aha! A crux! Beautiful. Thank you for the discussion :).
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.
“Wouldn’t you still get weird conclusions if you replaced happiness in the argument by “the messier thing that happiness is trying to get at”?”
Sure, I agree, though I would argue that less reductive the measurement the less weird the outcome. So the closer you get to accuracy in your measurement of “the messier thing that happiness is trying to get at” the better the outcomes of the weird edge cases.
“arithmetic is just writing down how we compare things”
err, a minor point, you can totally compare things without math. Compare the pleasure of holding a baby with the pleasure of solving a hard problem, people will have consistent, different views on the matter without anyone reaching for a calculator.
A more major point you are making is that ethics / morality must produce a total ordering over all possible world states. I disagree with that point. It’s totally fine that Ethics can rank A>B and C>D without ranking A vs C. Some questions just don’t have determinate answers. In the example with the happy people, perhaps there is an acceptable range, say anywhere from one very happy person to 20 sort of happy people. I’m not claiming this range precisely or even that the range is the answer to this one, I don’t know the answer here. I am simply claiming that answers in ethics can be fuzzy or ranges or not an answerable question.
If there is an acceptable range, then there is no repugnant conclusion. The interval breaks the iteration needed to reach the extremes.
Sorry for the flippant silly rules comment, i don’t think i quite engaged with what you were trying to do. My excuse is it was well past midnight and I was tired, but frankly i shouldn’t have posted then.
That said I do think you’re barking up the wrong tree. The FrankenWorm isn’t a problem your ethics needs to solve, its evidence that hedonic utilitarianism is flawed. If you take a moral intuition (happiness is good, encourage it), promote it to a unit (utils), then optimize, you get weird conclusions. But happiness was never a unit, it’s a lossy compression of a much messier thing, engagement, meaning, integration with your chosen family, absence of suffering. This is sort of a Goodhart / alignment sort of issue. Garbage in garbage out.
Any aggregation rule produces these edge case absurdities, and ethics isn’t the kind of thing that aggregates cleanly. The ease of finding these paradoxes across frameworks is a feature of trying to make ethics arithmetic, not a deep fact about morality.
Idk man seems like your asking to much from a social technology that encourages / discourages behavior by labeling it good or bad (morality). Through such a lens how is it possible to answer such questions in a universal sense.
What do you think? Own your judgment. Dont get trapped by silly rules.
Its good advice for a hike. A hike is a much simpler proposition; the problems have been solved and will remain solved. In this case reductive advice can cut to the heart of things and provide value without losing much from neglecting the nuance.
The problem in applying it to children is that they are very complex to start with and are anti inductive (and only get more so as they grow older). losing the nuance bites.
If you’re going to give advice and want it to be helpful, it has be lower level. For example,
“Water sterile enough to mix up into baby formula can be made by boiling a jug and letting it cool. The water will be good for a few hours, but once mixed with formula, use within about half an hour or discard.”
Or a lens / mental model / way of looking at things
“Tantrum: kid using bad behaviour to get what they want. Hold the line.
Meltdown: kid overwhelmed (tired, hungry, sick, overstimulated). Reduce the load.
Hard to tell apart in the moment, tantrums can transition to meltdowns but not the other way. Try the gentle response first, if they escalate or you can see them working you, switch to holding the line.”
Honestly taken as a lens your advice is fine, “Enjoy your children, they can be fun” is all g. Its just problematic when you try to enthrone it as your main guiding principle or give it as a glib response to genuine issues.
How specificly? Well a few different factors, your original comment contained none of the softning context you have now added. Another of your comments “skill issue” set a rather hostile tone, flavoring this other comment of yours.
On a personal note, I also feel that although your point is true insofar as to “children can be fun at times”, following your advice as stated will lead to great pain for all involved. Children are fundamentally not your peers (yet), and so cannot be treated as friends. There are indeed many aspects of raising an adult that require problem solving. So, your “advice” is highly reductive.
So, bad advice in a hostile tone framed in a way that implys your superiority in this field of study. That’s toxic. Or possibly trolling.
Three kids 5 and under are a bunch of work. Your comment here is toxic.
Hey fair enough, no argument if you find it useful. I dont really see much of a distinction
Morality usually refers to what i would call a particular moral system, a set of first order normative commitments, what you actually believe is right / wrong or good / bad. It’s the object level rules “killing is bad,” “honesty is good.”
Ethics is in common parlance the “study” or “science” of figuring out the deeper reason something is right or wrong. Unfortunately in my model that boils down to “large groups of people think it is good or bad, right or wrong”. Hey all of the wrong models have to live somewhere!
Im still thankful to the philosophers who study ethics, it’s a wonderful thing to try to get to the roots of things and I wouldn’t have been able to understand without reading their work.
“It would be a good idea to invite those with ideas deviant from the lesswrong orthodoxy to out themselves by posting their heretical thoughts in public so we may excise them later” 😈
For those unable to recognise jokes in text form (a lot of us), this is a joke.
I like this, well written sir. it feels very similar to my position. I’ve made no claims of convergence like you have but I could certainly see myself agreeing. I need to think on it.
Thats funny, I would not consider them similar, what lead you to that feeling? Am I missing an interpretation?
Mine is a definition of what morality is plus a way of determining the merits of a moral system if you accept my definition.
Horosphere is making the claim that morality is objective, by which I assume he means that there are things that are universally good vs universally bad in such a way that a mind is uneeded to judge goodness or badness.
I’m interested in what you mean by reasonable definitions.
Also, you’ve basically said “Morality is objective” but with hedging, do you agree? Your position is reasonable and held by many.
I’m however separating what morality is, from what a particular moral system classifies as good or bad. Distinguishing the classifier from the output. I would say our statements are fundamentally incompatible rather than strictly opposite.
Made me laugh :D. I do agree with “a belief in positive communal response to earnestness is important for any truth-seeking group”, sadly I don’t believe that standard is achieved even here in the lofty heights of less wrong, where at least we try.
but “This state of affairs is non-problematic” is an issue, if this post got no comments, that means that less wrong is a total monolith where everyone thinks the same, that’s not good for truth seeking.
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.