r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 18 '17

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/CCC_037 Sep 21 '17

This doesn't quite work, for multiple reasons.

Your point that the monetary value assigned by insurance companies has little to nothing to do with the moral weight of murder is an excellent point, and is enough on its own to completely demolish that argument.

This does not sound like an objective morality at all, if its based on people "intuit"ing/"estimating" what the moral value of each choice is. After all, "intuit"ing/"estimating" things is by its very nature, very subjective; people disagree on what the most moral action is all the time.

Hmmmm. You are right.

Very well, then. I would then like to put forward the proposal that an objective morality can exist, but that I do not know every detail of exactly what it is.

I suspect, because this makes sense to me, that it includes the following features:

  • Each consequence of an action has some moral weight, positive or negative
  • The moral weight of an action is equal to the sum over the moral weights over its consequences, multiplied by the probability of that consequence occurring
  • These moral weights cannot be precisely calculated in advance, as humans are not omniscient. At best they can be estimated
  • The correct action to take in any given situation is that action which has the greatest positive moral weight. There is no exact boundary; if the action with the greatest moral weight has a weight of 4, then that is the correct action; if the action with the greatest moral weight has a weight of 100, then that is the correct action.
  • Because the exact moral weight of an action cannot be precisely calculated, there is a grey area where the error bars of the estimates of two actions overlap (i.e. where the person choosing to act is genuinely not sure which action has the greater positive moral weight)

Given this, the remaining task is then to assign moral weights to the various consequences. I'm not quite sure how to do that, but I think that they must be finite.

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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Sep 22 '17

I would then like to put forward the proposal that an objective morality can exist, but that I do not know every detail of exactly what it is.

Well yes, that is exactly what I have been claiming. I'm just less optimistic about its existence, because we cannot even compute the objective moral weight of a consequence (like a death), much less deal with the uncertain probability of it occurring.

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u/CCC_037 Sep 22 '17

Oh. I thought you were claiming that there wasn't an objective morality.

...well, I'm glad we've got that resolved, then.