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> To me, there is a clear indicator: human suffering. I like to divide morality into happiness ("utility") and rights. All else equal, increasing aggregate hap
by Jeff_Brown 7y ago
> To me, there is a clear indicator: human suffering.
I like to divide morality into happiness ("utility") and rights. All else equal, increasing aggregate happiness is better. However, if increasing (the authority's measure of) aggregate happiness tramples a lot peoples' rights, that sucks.
Rights (and their implications) are easier to codify legally than happiness maximization. This eigenmagic seems easier to compute (because it's easier to encode) for happiness than for rights.
(One can frame rights as an implication of happiness maximization. Some economists do this. A (properly bounded) right to private property, for instance, increases net happiness by avoiding tragedies of the commons. Thievery should be illegal because stolen goods are on average less valuable to the thief than the victim. I don't know whether such analyses imply all the rights we'd like, or how absolutely.)
- nine_k 7y agoIndeed, "rights" is a reasonably good proxy for not increasing suffering. If nobody is entitled to arbitrarily take your possessions or do bodily harm to you, a number of the worst sources of suffering are removed, at least most of the time. Since both happiness and utility are strictly subjective (e.g. not directly measurable or comparable), such proxies is our only hope to produce some formal, computable approaches to limiting of the suffering. But the intention to limit suffering for most of the outgroup seems a key indicator for me.