Well, whenever I say i just don't care, or that it's not a priority, y'all's kind get all uppity about that, so, yeah.

I've never done that. I'm only annoyed by poor reasoning and faulty logic.

You guys ever visit a local butcher? You vegans ever even walk outside of a city? Ever eat meat that isn't slapped with the logo of a national brand?
Cattle and hogs are killed here with a .22lr, delivered with surgical accuracy right against the skull. They don't feel shit.

Come on, that's a spurious argument and you know it. If you think animal farming can be run on a large scale without making any compromises to animal welfare, you're kidding yourself. You're playing roulette with an animal's welfare so you can chow down on a burger.

Not to mention the catastrophic resource wastage and environmental impacts that aren't remedied by "humane farming". So please, let's drop the greed-masquerading-as-utilitarianism argument. It's simply not compelling at all.

...You must include these variables. Otherwise, it just looks like you're setting up the experiment in such a way that would conveniently help your argument.

I only chose not to include them because they weren't necessary to illustrate my point. You can of course tweak it any way you wish; all that matters is that the pleasure gained/pain minimized/overall sum of both sits in favour of you eating the slice of cake.

The point being that if ethics is based on any experiential data, your own experiences are no less important than anyone else's.

So, I already covered this, on the paragraph beginning with "because you are not worth..."

But why am I not worth others' welfare? We're already assuming that the net pleasure gained (or net pain minimized) would be in favour of choosing my welfare over that of someone else. That's the big problem: we have moral fundamentals, such as pleasure is good and pain is bad (to put it bluntly). There are then more or less moral ways to navigate them. It then logically follows that there are more or less moral ways to act toward yourself. And unless you want to invoke some non-empirical concept, that seems to me an absolute fact.

However, it's possible for the selfishness to be outweighed, so as to make the selfishness nearly invisible. Even though it's selfish to do good deeds because they make you feel good, you're still doing good deeds, and that's what matters.

I think there's a conflation of intent and consequences here.

On one hand, consequentially good acts, while done for selfish reasons, are still good (albeit psychologically flawed);

Yet on the other, selfish acts done for selfish reasons are bad.

The intent is essentially the same in both. Now we're back at evaluating an action based solely on its consequences, and other than making a distinction between altruism and "personal gratification", I don't think you've sufficiently explained how personal gratification cannot be ethical. Your reasoning has been rather circular so far -- selfishness is bad because it's personal gratification, which is bad because it's selfish, etc.

Now, if you instead worded the question like, "do consequences that affect an other matter more than the consequences that affect you?" that would've worked better to illustrate your point.

Well yes, of course I wasn't implying that my welfare is worth more just because it's mine. That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

If we're dealing with only one other person, then neither one matters more than the other, assuming they're both Joe Sixpack. Whether one has his leg broken, or the other has his leg broken, there's no distinction. These are not the types of scenarios that I'm referring to, however.

Nor am I -- a more relevant example would be you and Joe Sixpack, where you would suffer more from a broken leg than he would. But that's still a tortured example. I think my point is clear enough already.

However much money you think you need to get yourself by is the amount you would keep, quite obviously. That's the point.

Sure -- my point was that donating $100 when you could have spared more is unethical, or at least has unethical elements, or at least is not "ethical" in some objective purist sense.

How much more ethical is donating $101 to charity over donating $100?

$1.

Well, no, because the dollar isn't an evaluative metric for something's moral value. Saying something is "one dollar more ethical" doesn't get us anywhere because it's entirely contingent on circumstance; there's a big consequential difference between giving an extra dollar to a homeless person and giving an extra dollar to a university.

And besides, if you honestly don't think selfishness is unethical, then you're contradicting yourself here. Why didn't you donate more? Well, because you have to sustain yourself, so that you may be able to donate more in the future, or something.

That's assuming that $100 was your absolute limit and anything over would make sustaining yourself difficult. Which isn't what I meant.

It's there, but it's too complex for us to define. That's my argument. Fortunately, I feel like a lot of the ethical judgments we make on a day-to-day basis are intuitively obvious.

That's something I'm becoming less convinced of. And as for an objective line between ethical and unethical actually existing? Well no, that doesn't sound right at all. "Ethical" and "unethical" are abstract concepts that serve as blunt instruments to navigate a continuum where a sole "dividing point" cannot logically exist. (At least, not in any way that I can conceive.)

how you can say that some actions are more ethical than others, but then say that there's no objective line there
if we can define what's ethical and unethical, that to me sounds like some kind of line you're drawing

Because the former is merely acknowledging an objective value system; the latter is a man-made attempt to draw lines in it.

I can't objectively claim that donating $100 to charity is ethical because there's no objective threshold where an action crosses from one into the other. Why did I not donate more?

Admittedly a lot of actions are ethically indefensible, but that doesn't mean a divide exists objectively, because there are still unethical elements to nearly every action. Or, if one does exist, I'm interested in the metric for defining it.

Not quite, I'm saying that how we are facilitates good moral reasoning, which is good definitionally. I'm not using the nature of humans as a metric for what is good; simply realising the constraints we have which impede perfect moral efficiency.

Fair enough. I agree that there would be a point where boundless altruism would have diminishing returns; but not only are we nowhere close to that, I don't think moral philosophy is close to it either, when it should really be a high priority. 

I just don't buy the whole "proximity isn't important" argument.

Well I just realised that my argument could be used against me; if I have moral value myself, and the immediacy of a drowning baby affects me more than a child on another continent, then it might be more ethical overall to save the baby. But that raises a lot more questions and it's 11pm so

That said, I think we have a fairly solid understanding of what concepts like evil must mean if they are to make any moral sense and it can be quite clearly extrapolated that anything which unambiguously and actively contributes to net suffering is absolutely immoral. You raise an interesting point as to whether passive, or inactive, contributions to suffering are equal; but it boils down to the age-old question over whether sins of omission are as bad as sins of commission. And I don't have an answer for that.

Yep, the concept of evil troubles me as well. If we deem certain mindsets and behaviors as evil based on their consequences, then we're leaving a wide range of mindsets and behaviors out (like not donating to charity, assuming it can be done reliably). Or maybe it's the consequences coupled with a visceral disgust we have toward them, but that's pretty wobbly criterion for evil in its moral sense (if there's any other). So either certain mindsets of neglect and inaction are equally evil, or evil has no purpose in moral philosophy and can be consigned to everyday language and fantasy movies.

Humans have evolved to have this bias of immediacy towards themselves and people in the general vicinity, and that's good. It allows for generally efficient moral reasoning; everybody would be brought to an effectual stand-still if they had to make global considerations constantly, and that of course would be a negative on net.

I'm not sure about that. You're using the benefits of how things are as an argument for how they should continue to be; unless I'm missing something, that's essentially an appeal to nature.

Would we really be brought to a standstill? I'd argue that living truly ethically would be navigating the waters between altruism and self-interest. I guess a lot of people would say I'm being pedantic, but the point stands: we aren't living as ethically as we (easily) could be.

Singer's dilemma was only one example, it can be localized if you wish. (Although he does somewhat address the issue of untrustworthy charities; see link). The question I'm most interested in is how we make a distinction between ethical and unethical actions. Is there any reliable metric for this? There's all these branches of moral theory yet none of them seem particularly adept at defining one down to the finer details.

what's your opinion on the matter?

I'm on to you.

I expressed my opinions in the OP.

And how might one go about this?

I don't know, but I don't think that's a valid reason to dismiss it. And Singer has something to say about it in the link:

At this point the students raise various practical difficulties. Can we be sure that our donation will really get to the people who need it? Doesn’t most aid get swallowed up in administrative costs, or waste, or downright corruption? Isn’t the real problem the growing world population, and is there any point in saving lives until the problem has been solved? These questions can all be answered: but I also point out that even if a substantial proportion of our donations were wasted, the cost to us of making the donation is so small, compared to the benefits that it provides when it, or some of it, does get through to those who need our help, that we would still be saving lives at a small cost to ourselves – even if aid organizations were much less efficient than they actually are.

I'm sure he explains it in more detail elsewhere, but I haven't looked into it.

"Being unethical" may as well just be a bodily function of ours. An involuntary one, like breathing, but one nonetheless.

Not sure what you mean by involuntary; I think this relates to the "action vs inaction" I mentioned in the OP. Are we being involuntarily unethical if we can volunteer not to be?

If everyone in the world decided that they were gonna be purely charitable for the rest of their lives, those charitable people would all die. Because to nourish yourself would mean not nourishing somebody else.

Not really, because it wouldn't be a case of removing your own wellbeing from the equation, but rather calculating how to best act in ways that increase overall wellbeing.

To me, that sounds like a mockery of ethics, and we shouldn't really play with it like that.

The big problem for me is that a lot of these arbitrary ethical lines only serve to make people comfortable with what they're doing (or not doing) when they could easily be doing more. And the current attitude is geared more toward inaction: "as long as you're not doing such and such bad things, you're not a bad person" instead of "as long as you are doing such and such good things, you're not a bad person".

That seems pretty dangerous to me.

Before addressing the question:

- This isn't an argument for moral nihlism.

- This accepts the existence of an objective system of value (which I think any reasonable person has to accept)

So the problem here is not whether some actions are more moral than others, but whether there is any empirically quanitifiable distinction between actions that are moral/ethical and immoral/unethical. Take this moral dilemma from Peter Singer:

You are walking down the street when you notice a baby drowning in a puddle. You can easily step in and save the baby, but it would mean ruining your new pair of $100 shoes. Are you morally obligated to save the baby?

Now the point of this is to demonstrate that since all of us would (hopefully) save the baby at the expense of our shoes, we are equally obligated to donate a similar amount of money to charity for a child in need somewhere else -- their proximity to us is irrelevant.

But this brings up another, more unsettling problem: if choosing not to save the drowning baby is indisputably unethical, then would choosing not to donate to charity be equally so? I don't think many people would be comfortable with this, but I really can't see any logic to get around it.

And then, if you do choose to donate $100 to charity, the question would arise of "why only $100? Why not $150? $200?" Assuming you could be more ethical than you are being, are you not essentially being unethical? Where do we draw the line?

If the line is drawn merely for pragmatic purposes, then the only truth to be derived from it is that nothing is truly ethical; some things are simply more or less ethical than others. Yet at the same time, everything we do has unethical components.

Some quick arguments against this would be:

"There's a difference between action and inaction"; that's to say, there's a difference between choosing to actively harm someone than to sit back and let them suffer. That's obviously flawed reasoning, because you are choosing to let them suffer either way; choosing not to act is no less morally repugnant, consequentially speaking

"There's a sliding scale; just as some things are more unethical than others, some things are more ethical than others, but they are still more ethical than not"; that's to say, murder is worse than stealing a candy bar, just as donating $150 is more ethical than donating 100. Okay, but the problem is where an action crosses the line from unethical into ethical territory -- judging by the drowning baby example, this seems based on nothing more than intuition.

"This doesn't invalidate ethics, though. There's still a continuum of more or less ethical actions, and we should still strive to be more ethical people." Absolutely. This doesn't discredit objective morality at all, but it does call into question whether the colloquial definitions of ethical/unethical can in fact be logically defended.

At any rate it looks like the colloquial definitions need a serious overhaul.

He's been on Forbes for ages now. Why is this news?

can peanut butter be objectively proven to be tastier than caramel (or vice-versa)?

If by objective you mean able to be measured, then maybe

Both peanut butter and caramel can be measured on how many people like/dislike them, it would then be a case of calculating which is the more productive. But that's assuming there's a metric for doing that, which I doubt.

If by objective you mean universal, then no.

Quote from: Pendulate on July 07, 2015, 09:46:05 PM

If machines were to become capable of recursive self programming, their motives would likely be even less familiar to us than organic extraterrestrials who likely underwent a similar evolutionary process. I doubt concepts like narcissism could even be applied to them.

If anything, that's even riskier than creating a hyper-intelligent narcissist.

Although, I have to say, I really don't find the whole "non-Euclidean, blue-and-orange value systems" argument very compelling.

We're in agreement that sentient AI would likely arise by accident, aren't we?

Unless we start trying to create narcissistic, semi-organic computers, I don't think we'll have much of a say in what interests they'll end up developing.

I can't grasp different value systems either, but I find it equally difficult to grasp a computer developing values similar to ours when its mode of information processing is so incommensurable.

Far less likely than machine intelligence we've created doing the same thing and if IIRC you're down for that.

How could an AI develop an interest in something like that, exactly?

Possessiveness is something that carbon-based life forms developed for specific biological and environmental purposes, and it's almost entirely irrational. How and why would an intelligent machine running on different hardware develop this trait?

I really can't imagine hyper-intelligent beings would be concerned with such a juvenile goal as intergalactic domination.

I mean it makes for shitty hollywood movies, but realistically I think ideas like that are fairly rudimentary in the evolutionary process.