From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 21:22:14 MST
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote
>
>>Going a step even further, I think there are a few basic
>>outcomes that we can reach near unanimous agreement on, and that
>>therefore would serve as a rational basis for certain moral
>>strictures. For example, universal destruction of all life is
>>an outcome that I think most people can agree is "bad", and that
>>actions which bring about that would therefore be wrong.
>
> Hear, hear! We can encode our near-unanimous agreements
> in laws. In fact, failure to do so for a well-known
> class of conduct is disastrous for societies.
>
> Question: does my avowal that "It is MORALLY WRONG that x!"
> means only "I and most people disapprove of x" make me a
> moral relativist?
I suspect that the weight you put on "only", in that sentence, is
asserting the nonexistence of *something*, but it's not quite clear what.
It's possible that the something you assert the nonexistence of makes
you a moral relativist.
For example, if I avowed that "It is UNTRUE that X!" means only "I and
most people disbelieve in X", I would be a relativist. If I innocently
noticed that disbelief and untruth have *something* to do with each other,
I would have uncovered a critical fact about the nature and referent of
this thing called "truth", but not the only critical fact.
Another critical fact about this thing called "truth" is that people
sometimes go from believing things are true to believing they are untrue.
What is it that causes you to go from approving of something to
disapproving of it?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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