Delete comment from: The Splintered Mind
Thanks for the comments, folks!
Unknown: I'm have a little trouble understanding yours. Maybe you could expand a bit on the main thought?
chinaphil: Lots there, but I suspect that we start from pretty fundamentally different places here, in terms of our understanding of ethical diversity. My perspective is that there's more diversity in the words that come out of people's mouths than in the reactions in their hearts, once you account for the different interests and group allegiences people have. Taking "criminals should be punished" as an example: Some people are fine with no punishment for certain classes of criminal conduct, others fine with no punishment for other classes of criminal conduct, and people differ in who they regard as legitimate authorities, but it's going to be an extreme outlier who does not feel that there are important classes of misconduct that warrant the punishment by some legitimate type of authority. In fact, I think there's going to be a lot of overlap here among people not too far from the mainstream, even between hugely separated cultures like 21st century US and ancient China, which is why the mainstream moral systems of those cultures are so readily comprehensible to us, though they also do have a tinge of foreignness. So... huge issue! Obviously, we're not going to resolve it here. But I do agree that it would be interesting to see Singer, Rawls, etc., applied to weird-mind cases to see where that takes us -- could be illuminating both because of the potential future of AI but also just in terms of evaluating those views now for current purposes (as Nozick was doing with the utility monster).
Aug 14, 2015, 10:49:36 AM