Who Counts?

April 30th, 2012
ea, morality
Who should count in my moral system? Whose joy and suffering matter? All living things? Animals? Mammals? People? Relatives? Me?

Normally people go to their moral intution to answer these questions, but I'm dubious of mine because it tells me things that are unreasonable:

  • Someone physically close to me is more important than someone in another country.
  • Doctors should treat people first-come-first-served instead of treating inexpensive diseases first.
  • Charities should spend all their money on helping people instead of measuring how well what they're doing works.
  • The suffering of a person matters less if they're being emulated on a computer.
  • The suffering of cuter animals and more attractive people matters more.
  • One person with a problem is more important than many.

Cutting chunks off a tree for fun seems wrong. So does going around stomping on ants, raising chickens in massively overcrowded conditions, kicking puppies, and torturing people in video games. But I'm not sure which of these, if any, are actually wrong and not just my moral intutition being overly empathic in what to identify with.

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Mindful posting

It is important, for the preservation of American democracy and maybe the world, that the Democrats take the House and Senate in November.

via Thing of Things September 18, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)