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Comment by Symmetry on What Would You Do Without Morality? · 2008-06-30T01:12:00.000Z · LW · GW

I very much look forward to posts from Eliezer regarding whether the responses seen in this thread are in line with what he was expecting.

Comment by Symmetry on What Would You Do Without Morality? · 2008-06-29T18:38:00.000Z · LW · GW

Another perspective on the meaning of morality:

On one had there is morality as "those things which I want." I would join a lot of people here in saying that I think that what I want is arbitrary in that it was caused by some combination of my nature and nurture, rather than being in any fundamental way a product of my rationality. At the same time I can't deny that my morality is real, or that it governs my behavior. This is why I would call myself a moral skeptic, along the lines of Hume, rather than a nihilist. I also couldn't become an egoist without giving up my moral skepticism.

So what would it mean, and what would I do if I was stripped of this sort of morality? I don't think I can properly imagine it since I don't believe I can even imagine person-hood without this kind of morality.

On the other hand there is the morality that is the set of rules I use to bring my various wants and desires into harmony with each other. I can imagine this being removed from me while I still remain me, and I think this would result in a lot of incoherent and possibly hedonistic behavior before I recreated something like it.