Re: Singularity: Individual, Borg, Death?

From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 11 1998 - 15:12:14 MST


Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Nick Bostrom wrote:
> > I don't want to advocate any specific interpretation of moral
> > statements here. But however we choose to interpret such statements,
> > it does seem to be a fact that almost all reasonable people agree
> > that it is wrong (whatever that means) to torture innocent people
> > for a little fun. *If* there are "objective" truths in ethics (which
> > I am not claiming) then I think we can be fairly confident that that
> > is one of them.
>
> Why are you so confident? Is it the extreme wrongness (in your eyes) of
> the act, or the popularity of the event being seen as wrong by a large
> proportion of the population?

A bit of both, I suppose. It seems that the way the word "wrong" is
used in English is to denote that kind of acts.

Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics



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