That’s not sufficient—there can be wildly different, incompatible universalizable morality systems based on different premises and axioms; and each could reasonably claim to be that they are a true morality and the other is a tribal shibboleth.
As an example (but there are others), many of the major religious traditions would definitely claim to be universalizable systems of morality; and they are contradicting each other on some points.
What is the difference between “self-serving ideas” as you describe, “tribal shibboleths” and “true morality” ?
What if “Peterdjones-true-morality” is “PeterisP-tribal-shibboleth”, and “Peterdjones-tribal-shibboleth” is “PeterisP-true-morality” ?
I’m afraid that any nontrivial metaethics cannot result in concrete universal ethics—that the context would still be individual and the resulting “how RichardKennaway should live” ethics wouldn’t exactly equal “how PeterisP should live”.
The difference would hopefully be much smaller than the difference between “how RichardKennaway should live RichardKennaway-justly” and “How Clippy should maximize paperclips”, but still.
Another situation that has some parallels and may be relevant to the discussion.
Helping starving kids is Good—that’s well understood. However, my upbringing and current gut feeling says that this is not unconditional. In particular, feeding starving kids is Good if you can afford it; but feeding other starving kids if that causes your own kids to starve is not good, and would be considered evil and socially unacceptable. i.e., that goodness of resource redistribution should depend on resource scarcity; and that hurting your in-group is forbidden even with good intentions.
It may be caused by the fact that I’m partially brought up by people that actually experienced starvation and have had their relatives starve to death (WW2 aftermath and all that), but I’d guess that their opinion is more fact-based than mine and that they definitely had put more thought into it than I have, so until/if I analyze it more, I probably should accept that prior.
That is so—though it depends on the actual chances; “much higher chance of survival” is different than “higher chance of survival”.
But my point is that:
a) I might [currently thinking] rationally desire that all of my in-group would adopt such a belief mode—I would have higher chances of survival if those close to me prefer me to a random stranger. And “belief-sets that we want our neighbors to have” are correlated with what we define as “good”.
b) As far as I understand, homo sapiens do generally actually have such an attitude—evolutionary psychology research and actual observations when mothers/caretakers have had to choose kids in fires/etc.
c) Duty may be a relevant factor/emotion. Even if the values were perfectly identical (say, the kids involved would be twins of a third party), if one was entrusted to me or I had casually accepted to watch him, I’d be strongly compelled to save that one first, even if the chances of survival would (to an extent) suggest otherwise. And for my own kids, naturally, I have a duty to take care of them unlike 99.999% other kids—even if I wouldn’t love them, I’d still have that duty.
OK, then I feel confused.
Regarding ” if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater”—I was under impression that this would be a common trait shared by [nearly] all homo sapiens. Is it not so and is generally considered sociopathic/evil ?
No, I’m not arguing that this is a bias to overcome—if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater.
I’m arguing that this is a strong counterexample to the assumption that all entities may be treated as equals in calculating “value of entity_X’s suffering to me”. They are clearly not equal, they differ by order(s) of magnitude.
“general value of entity_X’s suffering” is a different, not identical measurement—but when making my decisions (such as the original discussion on what charities would be the most rational [for me] to support) I don’t want to use the general values, but the values as they apply to me.
What should be objective grounds for such a multiplier? Not all suffering is valued equally. Excluding self-suffering (which is so much subjectively different) from the discussion, I would value the suffering of my child as more important than the suffering of your child. And vice versa.
So, for any valuation that would make sense to me (so that I would actually use that method to make decisions), there should be some difference between multipliers for various beings—if the average homo sapiens would be evaluated with a coefficient of 1, then some people (like your close relatives or friends) would be >1, and some would be <1. Animals (to me) would clearly be <1 as illustrated by a simple dilemma—if I had to choose to kill a cow to save a random man, or to kill a random man to save a cow, I’d favor the man in all cases without much hesitation.
So an important question is, what should be a reasonable basis to quantitatively compare a human life versus (as an example) cow lifes—one-to-ten? one-to-thousand? one-to-all-the-cows-in-the-world? Frankly, I’ve got no idea. I’ve given it some thought but I can’t imagine a way how to get to an order of magnitude estimate that would feel reasonable to me.
The examples of corvids designing and making specialized tools after observing what they would need to solve specific problems (placement of an otherwise unaccessible treat) seem to demonstrate such chains of thought.
Why not?
Of course, the best proportion would be 100% of people telling me that p(the_warming)=85%; but if we limit the outside opinions to simple yes/no statements, then having 85% telling ‘yes’ and 15% telling ‘no’ seems to be far more informative than 100% of people telling ‘yes’ - as that would lead me to very wrongly assume that p(the_warming) is the same as p(2+2=4).
The participants don’t know the rules, and have been given a hint that they don’t know the rules—as the host said that the choices will be independent/hidden, but then is telling you the other contestant’s choice. So they can easily assume a chance that the host is lying, or might then give the first contestant a chance to switch his choice, etc.
Actually, how should one measure own IQ ? I wouldn’t know a reasonable place where to start looking for it, as the internet is full of advertising for IQ measurements, i.e., lots of intentional misinformation. Especially avoiding anything restricted to a single location like USA—this makes SAT’s useless, well, at least for me.
Your interlucotur clearly wouldn’t be behaving nicely and would clearly be pushing for some confrontation—but does it mean that it is wrong or not allowed? This feels the same as if (s)he simply and directly called you a jackass in your face—it is an insult and potentially hostile, but it’s clearly legal and ‘allowed’; there are often quite understandable valid reasons to (re)act in such a way against someone, and it wouldn’t really be an excuse in a murder trial (and the original problem does involve murders as reaction to perceived insults).
All of the above days seem quite fun and fine to me.
As for the original article point—I agree that there isn’t any significant difference between the hypothetical British salmon case and Mohammad’s case, but it this fact doesn’t change anything. There isn’t a right to never be offended. There is no duty to abstain from offending others. It’s nice if others are nice, but you can’t demand everybody to be nice—most of them will be indifferent, and some will be not nice, and you just have to live with it and deal with it without using violence—and if you don’t know how to handle it without violence, then you are still a ‘child’ in that sense and have to learn proper reaction, so everybody can (and probably should) provoke you until you learn to deal with it.
If I understand your ‘problem’ correctly—estimating potential ally capabilities and being right/wrong about that (say, when considering teammates/guildmates/raid members/whatever), then it’s not nearly a game-specific concept—it applies to any partner-selection without perfect information, like mating or in job interviews. As long as there is a large enough pool of potential parners, and you don’t need all of the ‘good’ ones, then false negatives don’t really matter as much as the speed or ease of the selection process and the cost of false positives, where you trust someone and he turns out to be poor after all.
There’s no major penalty for being picky and denigrating a potential mate (or hundreds of them), especially for females, as long as you get a decent one in the end; In such situations the optimal evaluation criteria seem to be ‘better punish a hundred innocents than let one bad guy/loser past the filter’, the exact opposite of what most justice systems try to achieve.
There’s no major penalty for, say, throwing out a random half of CV’s you get for a job vacancy if you get too many responses—if you get a 98% ‘fit’ candidate up to final in-person interviews, then it doesn’t matter that much if you lose a 99% candidate that you didn’t consider at all—the cost of interviewing an extra dozen of losers would be greater than the benefit.
The same situation happens also in MMOG’s, and unsurprisingly people tend to find the same reasonable solutions as in real life.
As the saying goes, you can ignore politics but it doesn’t mean that politics will ignore you.
It is instrumentally rational to be aware of political methodologies both in the sense that they will interact with many issues in your daily life and also in the sense on how you may improve the success chances of any goals needing interaction or cooperation with others.
It goes on from the reasons of systems thinking through the theoretical foundation, the maths used, and the practical applications and pretty much all common types of issues seen in real world.
It’s about 5 times larger volume (~1000 A4 pages) than the Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems”, so not exactly textbook format, but covers the same stuff quite well and more. Though, it does spend much of the second half of the book focusing almost exclusively on practical development of system dynamics models.
The saying actually goes ‘jack of all trades and a master of none, though oft better than a master of one’.
There are quite a few insights and improvements that are obvious with cross-domain expertise, and much of the new developments nowadays pretty much are merging of two or more knowledge domains—bioinformatics as a single, but not nearly only example. Computational linguistics, for example—there are quite a few treatises on semantics written by linguists that would be insightful and new for computer science guys handling also non-linguistic knowledge/semantics projects.
I haven’t read the books you mention, but it seems that Sterman’s ‘Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world’ covers mostly the same topics, and it felt really well written, I’d recommend that one as an option as well.
OK, for a slightly clearer example, in the USA abortion debate, the pro-life “camp” definitely considers pro-life to be moral and wants to apply to everyone; and pro-choice “camp” definitely considers pro-choice to be moral and to apply to everyone.
This is not a symbolic point, it is a moral question that defines literally life-and-death decisions.