![]() ![]() ![]() Killing enemy soldiers is allowable torturing them is not. Killing enemy soldiers is allowable killing enemy civilians is not. Killing people is not allowable locking them up forever is. We use real values in deciding what to do on Saturday, but we discretize them on Sunday. People want a simple moral system that classifies things as good or bad, allowable or not allowable, valuable or not valuable. I think this comes from believing in the soul, and binary thought in general. That shows that most Americans place a huge value on life itself, and almost no value on what happens to that life. We have a few hundred thousand people serving sentences of 20 years and up, but no debate about it. We have a death-penalty debate in the US, which has consequences for less than 100 people per year. That's why it's controversial to execute criminals, but not controversial to lock them up in a bare room for 20 years. But society teaches the opposite: that mere life has a tremendous value, and anything you do with your life has negligible additional value. How do you weigh rationality, and your other qualities and activities, relative to life itself? I would say that life itself has zero value the value of a life is the sum of the values of things done and experienced during that life. Value is value, regardless of which equation it's in at the moment. If all lives have equal value, we shouldn't criticize someone who decides to become a drug addict on welfare. Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable. Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable. You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning. If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation. If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally. If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access. Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong. There is little chance that any of the people you save in Africa will get a good post-graduate education and then follow that up by rejecting religion, embracing rationality, and writing Less Wrong posts. What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality? Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives. ![]() You value knowledge and rationality and truth a lot. You've put a lot of effort into education, and learning the truth about the world. (where 2 is probably a subset of 1 for atheists, and probably nearly disjoint from 1 for Presbyterians). values that are admissible for moral reasoning.values they use to decide what they want.The responses to So you say you're an altruist indicate that people have split their values into two categories: Follow-up to: So you say you're an altruist ![]()
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