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Yeah, as kid I thought "moral calculus" was literal advanced math, and was disappointed to learn that attempts to quantify morality had been abandoned. That tur

• GuB-42 3y ago
  Game theory and bayesian statistics are somewhat related to it. They don't quantify morality but they may explain the logic behind some moral judgment, and allow for extrapolation.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Game theory and bayesian statistics are somewhat related to it. > They don't quantify morality but they may explain the logic behind some moral judgment, and allow for extrapolation. Kind of, but this is a bit fuzzy langauge. Game theory can, if one assumes rational choice theory as a given [0], re-explain what purport to be moral judgements on other bases as utility-maximizing decisions and infer actual premises from them, and Bayesian statistics can be used as part of that, or to reason from probabilistic factual premises to probabilistic factual conclusions as part of combined fact-value judgements. Maybe Bayesian statistics can even be applied to get from probabilistic value premises to probabilistiv valie conclusions in some moral frameworks (but only ones that explicitly incorporate Bayesian logic as a moral premise to start with.) [0] which may be a bad idea, because while it is sometimes a useful approximation, and is extremely convenient and tidy, rational choice theory is clearly false in the general sense.