yes I think perfectly rational agents can plausibly all want and choose different things. This need not be arbitrary, it might be instead related to what those agents want.

To say that there is nothing they "should" choose is different. They should choose what is morally right. Not because that is what rationality dictates but because that is what it means for something to be morally right. Morality is the categorical imperative, the thing we should do regardless of our desires. Why should we do what's right? Because that is what "should" means.

Typo in previous post. "Could have not done it" should read I could have not done it

I meant morally relevant in the sense that it is restricting the person's freedom. If I had a habit of murdering someone, that would be morally relevant in the sense that I'd be murdering people and murdering is morally bad. I meant that acting out of habit is not, in itself, restricting freedom.

To your second point, and using the same example, murdering someone as a habit would violate my victim's freedom, but it wouldn't violate mine. In this hypothetical, could have not done that and should have not done that.

Claiming that I am merely deceiving myself about my own mental states, or their order, if it conflicts with your claim that I can't observe cause and effect relationships in my mind seems like the classic, unfalsifiable refrain of the psychological egoistic when faced with altruism. It seems like if a specific memory (or for that matter a specific experience) reliably and repeatably evokes specific emotional states in me, then it would be reasonable to say one caused the other.

A mutual feedback relation appears to be a cause and effect relation, at least regarding the persistence of the thing, if not it's initial inception.

Also, regarding not knowing the likely consequences of an action, are you assuming expected value consequentialism? Because it seems that actual value consequentialism doesn't need to know the "likely" consequences of an action to evaluate it, only the actual consequences that followed from an action. That's not really relevant to the main point though, and either one would have issues if you really couldn't evaluate the consequences of actions if they involve mental states. Luckily, that appears to not be the case.

With the bar set low for "understanding" then most adults, most of the time, should be able to understand their choices.

Yes, I agree that people in those circumstances may not be able to understand the nature of their choices. People are capable of putting themselves in situations where they aren't really functioning in their full capacity as moral agents for a time and that isn't a problem. As for head injuries and significant cognitive decline (simply having a poorer memory than one used to isn't likely to affect one's freedom in a morally relevant way very often), yeah, those things seem to reduce a person's ability to understand their choices. I submit to you that this is a bad thing. Depending on what you mean, then this could be something of a binary distinction.

That being said, people can be more less free in the sense that more or less of their freedom is being reduced/violated/etc. For example, an alligator biting my toe off reduces my freedom somewhat, but not as much as if it bit my head off. The whole point of this exercise is to figure out how to determine which action violates the least freedom (or perhaps the least important freedom) or, conversely, protects the most.

As for cults, that depends on what the cult has taught them. If, for example, they think that they are going to be punished be an omnipotent being if they do the wrong thing, then that ignorance is reducing/violating their freedom in a morally relevant way as they are essentially always under threat.

That is actually a really good illustration of why I resist the term "promote". Whether someone has a bad habit is not morally relevant. This does not (in most circumstances anyway) reduce their freedom in a morally relevant way according to FC. This is also the case when engaging in an activity. If I choose to go read a book, I don't become less free in a morally relevant way than before I decided to do so, because I am still able to understand and make those choices that belong to me to the same degree as before. It is not freedom of all kinds that is being protected here, it is specifically the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices.

You don't need to know the likely consequences of actions in order to evaluate actions by their consequences. It is certainly a good idea to discover the likely consequences of actions if those consequences determine the morality of those actions. Consequentialism is not itself empirical, but if accepted, it allows us to determine the morality of actions empirically(ish, the kinds of measures of value that consequentialist theories use range from very difficult to measure empirically to very, very difficult to measure empircally).

This last seems a bit dubious. First, it seems like I can observe cause and effect relationships within my mind at least as easily as I can in the world, probably more so. To use an example that would be morally relevant to any kind of hedonistic utilitarianism: If I remember something funny, I experience happiness. In fact, given that almost all consequentialist measures of value appear to evaluate effects that occur within the mind of people. And that's putting aside all of the psychological models that are specifically about the cause and effect relationships between emotions, thoughts, and actions. Second, it is you who is claiming that contemplation increases freedom, not me, which suggests to me that you have at least some basis for thinking that there is a cause and effect relationship between the one and the other, which you now appear to be claiming is impossible to know.

I'm not really sure tangible proof is the right form of proof for moral absolutism, but I take your point. But I think the only viable options are moral realism (and objectivism, and a few other isms, but you get what I mean), or moral error theory. So it's possible moral truths don't exist, but assuming that they do, I want to know what they are... though I'd settle for a step closer than we were before.

no, I am concerned with solving ethics entirely. But having a system that works for ASIs would be a significant benefit of that for sure.

I'm not really sure what it means for a choice to be freer without reference to some restriction of freedom. I agree that it is all freedom, so when determing what is "more important" it seems like we either want to say that the some choices either involve more freedom, or that the freedom to make some choices is more important than the freedom to make others for some reason (eg, more central to is as persons) or that they by reference to which freedom one would choose over the other (as in the POM)

as I did mention though, it is better to consider this freedom being protected rather than promoted. So long as the person is able to understand and make their own choices, then there is nothing that, as it were, "needs doing". Whether the person has constrained their own choices in some fashion is (in most cases) morally irrelevant.

Also, consequentialism refers to a broad range of theories (or, if you prefer, the feature common to a broad range of theories) that share the common feature that they evaluate actions by reference to their consequences. That doesn't necessarily require observation, certainly not external observation. Also, it does seem as though you could, at least in some cases, observe contemplation

I think that is an appropriate, useful, and accurate distinction to draw. Good for me vs morally good. Categorical imperative vs hypothetical imperative.

I am asking for a specific answer and willing to pay for it. I think I've been entirely clear about exactly what I'm asking for. If you feel that deal is not beneficial, you are very welcome not to take it.

I'm not sure what you mean by these criteria that are independent of the freedom derived as a consequence. Could you elaborate on that?

I don't think you are using "freedom" in quite the same way. Also FC doesn't seek to produce the "most freedom" in the way you describe. Also, consequentialism does not require the perspective of an observer, nor is it really connected with such a perspective.

"Better" in the context of a scenario being better or worse than another can be taken to mean less freedom is violated/more is protected. "Worse" in that context can be taken to mean more freedom is violated/less is protected.

Yes, freedom itself is the measure of value, though by "freedom" I mean specifically the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make those choices that belong to them.

There's a difference between being praiseworthy and being good though. A consequentialist might consistently say that an action is morally bad but we should praise the person who performed it, and that an action is an action was morally good, but we should condemn, even punish, the person who performed it. The reaction to the initial action is also an action, and also ought to aim at the best consequences.

It seems to me someone might care about something more than what is morally good, or perhaps not care about it at all. That seems imaginable.

I mean, it is consequentialism, so people's motivations for their actions don't really come into it, just the consequences.

I'm afraid I haven't read it, so I can't comment with certainty.

Yes, manipulation, so long as no one is deceived about about morally relevant choices they are making or threatened with having their morally relevant choices taken away, would probably be permissible. Feature not a bug.

Putting weakness of will to one side, do you think it's possible for people to choose evil over good intentionally? It seems at least possible to me.

that's more an example of not knowing that not caring though, don't you think?

the saving and the raping are two separate actions though. One is good, the other bad.

Those examples don't coerce with a threat to reduce one's morally relevant freedom though, so don't put the agent in the position to choose between doing the thing or having their freedom reduced, so don't pose a problem.

You don't think that someone can understand what's good or right and choose against it? That someone can intentionally do what they know is wrong?

I object to "for free". Ditto with "bait". I would say instead that I'm incentizing.

I mean, I have been making a sincere effort to reply to people, I'm simply pointing out that things are likely to slip through the cracks and that checking back here, and several other places, isn't practical in the long term.

I work there doing a combination of tutoring, marking, and some lecturing. If anyone is interested in taking some distance courses, I can say that environmental ethics and ethics today are both just great. Heh.

I agree that it needs more clarifying than that, which is why I provided a document doing just that. That document also had deeper thought put into word choice. If you've already checked that out, then could you elaborate on what needs clarifying?

as well as saying again that questions are best addressed to the email address provided as I won't be able to stay on top of every avenue they come through otherwise, I would suggest you may be making some moral assumptions unknowingly. For example, when you say that those who are free are unconstrained by ignorance or circumstance (which appears to be a much more demanding type of freedom than the kind I have detailed) that they would choose what is good or what makes them flourish (which I don't think is necessarily true), this appears to assume some connection between morality and flourishing.

But, to answer your question, a rational agent may not care about others freedom. There's a longer discussion to be had there, but suffice to say that I wouldn't assume that moral facts are motivating to others, and if people fail to care about what is moral, then so much the worse for them.

While I disagree that one is not free to tutor kids in calculus if one doesn't know any calculus, I take your point. However, as I pointed out, it is not all freedom that is to be protected, only the protection of those choices that belong to you. That kind of freedom is not violated by jet engines not having been invented yet.

And again, it is likely that questions on this forum will not recieve prompt replies and may go unreplied to entirely. It is not the best place to ask them.

I'm really glad people are interested, but I will remind you that there is an email address set up for questions and potential solutions because I sent this to a couple of forums and fifty philosophy departments, so trying to keep up with communication in every avenue is going to be difficult

Yes, there is very much an underlying assumption of moral objectivism, among several others which I have helpfully detailed in the primer provided.

I think you may have read me a lot more paternalistic than I intended. No, so long as the person is not giving up their freedom unwittingly (such as in the example of jumping off a building because they think they can fly), then choosing to destroy things over which you ought to have freedom such that you have fewer choices in future, or simply avoid making choices, is that person's "right" (by which I mean it is a choice that belongs to them and one that they ought to be able to make)

The prize money will be reassessed yearly, so you currently have 364 days until this is reassessed. Or until someone else solves it first.

I'm happy to shout it from the rooftops or keep it all to myself depending on what the hypothetical winner wants. It makes no odds to me at all.

Yeah, a team of experts would be great, but I haven't got one, so I'm afraid you're stuck with me.

That would be a shame, but it would be a sort of solution. Depending on how thoroughly it was proved and what assumptions the proof relied on, it could potentially be eligible for all or part of the prize.

Thanks

Well I'm glad your computer didn't blow up. I could boil the problem down to "how do we resolve conflicts between the freedom of different persons over things choices that belong to them?" but it that question very helpful without the context, hence the non-computer-exploding document.

Terrapin: Yes it would be fair to say that I am addressing the philosophical tradition of libertarianism rather than any political party in the U.S. Yes libertarians, even quite hard-line ones, tend to accept that some small amount of government is okay in order to protect freedom (such as through having a police force and an army), my point is that protecting freedom covers rather a lot more than this and that same principle can justify rather big states under the right circumstances.

Mongrel: I would classify freedom as the ability of a person to understand and make decisions and the morally relevant kind of freedom as that over one's own choices, so if you would call that a negative freedom (in the sense of Berlin's negative and positive freedoms) then yes, it is a negative concept.

Yes I agree it is similar to a lot of rights based theories but in a consequentialist way. A consequentialism of rights if you will.

The sentence before it. If what is morally valuable is the protection of person's freedom then what is wrong with both of those acts is that they violate a person's freedom but to different extents. Given that it is all the same value (freedom), we should be able to weigh the freedom violated by one act against the freedom violated by another.

Unenlightened: You have offered a false dichotomy in saying that property exists either by agreement or in a simple you own what you can defend kind of way. I reject this dichotomy entirely and say that property ownership, if it exists at all, is a relation between a person and an object (or objects) which endows the person with the moral right to make decisions regarding that object. So if I own something, I own it regardless of whether anyone else agrees that I do. If, for example, I own a house and the state decides that people with my particular genetic background are no longer allowed to own houses and take it from me, then this is theft. The property is mine, not by agreement or by my ability to defend it, but by moral right.

Mongrel: I disagree that the value of a life, or in this case the value of protecting a person's freedom to continue living, is not calculable. In the most simple terms we can just weigh the lives that are lost as a result of having a state against those that would be likely lost if we were to not have a state and decide whether we should overthrow the government and become anarchists (though I suspect that such a calculation would not favor anarchism). Further, if what is valuable is freedom, then it seems we should be able to weigh the freedom lost when a person is killed against their will against other types of freedom violations. There should be an answer to the question: how many rapes are as bad as a murder? I have a chapter where I discuss this problem if you would like to read it.

Wow, looks like lots of people are joining in on the feedback. Thanks.

Bitter crank: The problem with the social contract is that it doesn't exist. We don't give our consent to the state first and then receive benefits later. Rather we receive benefits and then our consent is assumed. My point is that the removal of one's property through threat of force, such as threat of prison, is a form of theft. My larger point is that, if we are consequentialists, theft is justified when it has sufficiently good consequences that could not come about without that theft. So I am conceding the point that taxation is theft to the libertarian but arguing that this alone is not enough to condemn it in many circumstances.

Unenlightened: Yes I am assuming one can own property in a sense that produces a moral right to it. I do indeed discuss earlier in the thesis that a good justification for how this works has yet to be shown and that it's possible that property, thus understood, cannot exist and, if so, we can disregard everything I say regarding property. While making that assumption there isn't much to be said in regards to those who think that all property is theft except "no it isn't" which isn't very interesting. But if you can think of an interesting way to engage with that flavor of anarchist, please let me know.

Barry: Yes I noticed that too, but don't worry about it too much. He provided a lot of feedback which is what I was asking for.

Bitter Crank: Thanks for your feedback, I will have a proper read through of it tomorrow and respond then as I just got home and it is getting late here.

I understood what you meant in the case of the ghost. Even if the ghost cannot be perceived in principle, it may still exist. This is not incoherent.

I would say that saying someone is obligated to do something and saying they ought to (if we are using "ought" in an objective, universal way, rather than an "if, then" way) amount to saying the same thing.

I absolutely can imagine aliens of that sort. They are not like square circles at all. Evolution certainly occurs, but it is not the only possible way persons could come about. They could be artificially constructed persons, or persons which are the result of a bizarre accident of physics bringing particles together to cohere into an entire person. It seems totally conceivable that one of these convoluted examples could bring about a person without a survival instinct, even if they are only a short-lived person. I can coherently conceive of such a thing. If you find that you cannot imagine such entities, I would suggest that you may not be trying very hard.

If this is your assumption then you are contradicting yourself. The way persons ought to be or act is different than the way they do (or choose) to act - hence it's different than mere freedom. Your proposed morality is just terribly incomplete, otherwise there is nothing wrong with it. — Agustino

I am not sure what you mean by this. I completely agree that the way persons ought to act is different from the way they do act. However, one can only be morally obliged to act in some way if that person can actually act in that way (ought implies can) so it seems to follow that whatever is of moral value must be shared by all possible persons.

I don't remotely agree in the case of the ghost. It may well be the case that the ghost exists. It doesn't make sense for me to believe in it, but that doesn't affect whether it exists or not. As for how we form the idea of the external world, that is either a very hard question or a very silly one. I am going to assume you mean this in the difficult way, in which case I think my answer is probably "I don't know, but I certainly do have an idea of an external world" it seems completely coherent to talk about an external world, even if we have no direct access to it.

If non-human person makes no sense to you then we are likely talking past one another. When I say that morality is the way persons ought to be or act, I mean all persons, not just ones we know about. If this is the case, then either their are lots of different moral values or what is of moral value is something shared by all possible free, rational agents. We can imagine all sorts of aliens that don't share out desires to, for example, grow, or expand their agency or even survive (though that one looks like it might require a bit more mental gymnastics) so these cannot be shared by all possible free, rational agents. So yes, I really am talking about all possible persons, including any imaginable alien.

It is not only humans that are morally relevant. Any kind of person, be they human or not, surely matters just as much. It is not our humanity that makes us matter, it is our personhood.

What do you mean "reach beyond"? If you mean find out if our perceptions are actually reliable and actually represent the external world, then they can't. We are doomed to forever experience only our perceptions, and never the reality beyond them. But whether such a reality exists and, if so, what that world is like is a matter of objective fact. The answer to those questions are true regardless of whether people can ever know them. I suppose what I am getting at here is that there is a difference between something objectively existing and/or being true, and whether we can know it to be true and, further, whether we can know it to be true in a way you would consider "objective". Or, to put it another way, there is a difference between epistemology and ontology.

I do not fail to realize what subjective means but, using your definition, I do not remotely except that what we perceive dictates what is true. There may be things that we, or someone, cannot perceive in any way but the way we, or they, do, but that may not be objectively true.

It should have priority because if morality is the way in which persons ought to be or act, then it must be able to apply to all potential persons, not just humans. And I suspect these other human potentialities (assuming you mean any of the things virtue ethicists generally care about) you are talking about are not necessarily shared by other possible persons.

I would not say you "ought to do whatever you want". I would say you ought to be free to make your own choices. If a person decides to do something they don't particularly want to do, there is nothing wrong with that. The wrong comes in the violation of their ability to make and understand choices. As for how I establish this is the case, it goes back to freedom (by which I mean the ability to make and understand one's choices) being the best candidate for moral value. Which goes back to my assumption that morality is the way in which persons ought to be or act.

Are you sure you aren't considering human nature, rather than the nature of personhood?

No, the fact that we cannot directly perceive something does not mean it does not make sense to say that it exists. When we discuss whether we should believe our perceptions of the external world resemble the actual outside world even though we only have direct experience of the veil of perception, this is a sensible discussion.

Further, the cogito is not subjective truth. It is an objective truth, albeit one discovered through personal experience. When we work out that we exist, this is not true relative to us or true from only our perspective. It is true definitely and objectively, although no one else can know it.

I am not claiming a necessary link. I am saying that the freedom over persons to make their own choices seems the best candidate for moral value we have.

I would not say that if you own yourself you CAN do whatever you want. For example it might be the case you are bound and gagged and locked in a small room. Then you cannot exercise your freedom, though you still own yourself. I would say that you are morally permitted to harm yourself.

Also I should make it clear that I am not defending the freedom to do anything you want. I am defending the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. To put it another way, the freedom over those things that already belong to the person: their mind, body and property.