4 ms·

How could one possess "exceptional clarity and agility of intellect" and then not apply it to moral questions?

• TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Moral questions require empathy. If you have no empathy, moral questions only interest you to the extent that they imply potential benefits for you.
  • lagadu 7y ago
    Plus morality is highly subjective and beliefs on what is moral varies by individual.
    • PavlovsCat 7y ago
      Lacking empathy is a defect of the mind I would say, and clarity refers to the whole of it, just like health refers to all of it. A person who has healthy fingernails but has cancer isn't healthy, and a person that excels at specific technial problems, but isn't even bad, but completely absent, when it comes to other very basic ones, isn't brilliant. > morality is highly subjective And the word "brilliant" is not? "Highly" is just padding: Morality is subjective, and so is everything else, ultimately. It's not a magically different kind of thing to think about, it's just one of the more basic ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_reasoning
• pmichaud 7y ago
  The Orthogonality Thesis[1][2] states that the ethics of a given mind is orthogonal to its intelligence. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis [2] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_Analysis_and_Metaethics-1.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_An...
  • PavlovsCat 7y ago
    It's part of the mind either way, and a "brilliant person" isn't referring to just their intelligence. E.g. nobody with empathy would call even a highly intelligent doctor torturing and experimenting on prisoners "brilliant", without any qualifiers or caveats.