Bay 12 Games Forum

Consider if you made a robot that had sensors that if you started dismantling the robot, or damaged the robot, it made the robot try to run away and/or make a loud noise.

Would it be immoral for you (as the creator) to destroy that robot?

What if the robots were self-replicating and could self-modify their code. Under what circumstances would it be moral for a robot to destroy another robot, if any? Under what circumstances would it be immoral for you, the creator, to destroy some of the robots? Under what circumstances, if any, would it be immoral to not destroy some of the robots?

Yes. All those are immoral. Why make it difficult?

You can justify killing in self defense, but that doesn't make it moral.

The only subtle one is probably the leisure time one. There's a point where if you over-stress yourself, you reduce your ability to server others, so that can be immoral.

I mean of course I used reductio-ad-absurdum to show that for most things the argument is silly and is probably just trying to self-justify behavior or internal monologue or justify criticizing other peoples' thoughts and/or behaviors.

Some things are... blurry perhaps, but in that case, just err on the non-blurry definition.

You mean things are only "evil" if they result in a physical change to the universe, or other people? That's sort of a... functional definition, not an existential definition.

It also means you shouldn't really call things good or evil - only harmful or benign, and to go further, as "personally harmful/benign" vs "publicly harmful/benign."

That's a difference between atheistic and theistic morality though... one is that there is an existential, fundamental "good/evil", the other is that everything is just pragmatic.

What? No that's not at all the conclusion I'd draw.

If you're too dense to plan ahead and have no impulse control? You don't get to go consequence free for being a brute.  But if you really have no impulse control (e.g., say you had a brain tumor) then you are morally exonerated, not free from social consequences.

Maybe that's the key - don't confuse moral impact with social impact!  Consider the quote (which I'm paraphrasing) "giving to the needy doesn't require love, but loving the needy requires giving." Giving to the needy in both cases likely has the same social impact, but they have quite different moral implications.

Regarding the "if you repress your bad thoughts... you are considered an angel." I suppose maybe you are considered one by society, but you aren't one. You're a struggling, internally miserable human.

I mean, what if you are a closet dog-hater but never act on it, never attend an event, but in your heart of hearts you want to destroy all dogs in the most gruesome way possible.  I'd say you are not a "moral" person, even though society would not notice.

Eh, that’s a flawed question anyway: actions don’t have morality, it’s the intent behind them that matters.

Integral calculus and the lack of elementary expressions for many antiderivatives.  Especially in geometry and physics, resulting in inverse trig functions and their piecewise domains, or things like polylogarithms or bessel functions or the error function or elliptical integrals... which are just defined as the integral of some other expression or if you're lucky an infinite series, rather than a nice closed form...

Because I was beat by another post:

Not true! That's only the intrinsic value of a good or service.

There is also the "market value" of a good or service, which is what someone else is willing to give up in exchange for that good or service.  Consider that the intrinsic value is essentially static - how many calories a food has, or the mechanical properties of a machine.  But the market value can change dramatically depending on sentiment. If I want a new TV, am I willing to sacrifice one vacation a year for it, or two?

My original long post:

The hyperbole is that selling something higher than the labor value to make it is somehow under-paying for labor.

Also if you always pay every cent you have to labor, and don't register it as "profit", then you can never perform "true investment", which is using profits to improve productivity.

By true investment I mean: say you need to farm all year to make enough food for yourself to eat. But you can go with reduced food (income) for a time, so you can use that effort to make a plow, so that next year you can make the amount of food you want with less effort.

So if you just give everyone "all the value of their labor", it makes it very difficult to improve productivity.  So we let "employers" have some profit, so they can more effectively use aggregate profit - way more than a single individual can sacrifice themselves - to increase overall society productivity.  Sure there's a risk that companies can use that profit poorly.

But it's almost impossible to make a law that would prevent abuse of profit but still allow "good" use of profit.  So you either slow down dramatically the pace of innovation, as it can only be accomplished by individuals sacrificing use of present income to develop new stuff, or you allow companies to potentially misuse profit.

If you do have laws about use of profit, though, it should be on the particular use of it - it can't be on something as naive as "10% profit margin is fine, but 11% is too much!"

So the debate really is - should we strive for faster productivity gains, with the risk of abusers? Or should we have slower productivity gains, also with the risk of abusers (because there will be many, many individuals who are happy to just consume every bit of their own produce, never save for famine, and never have any "spare" labor to innovate)?

(Of course, this doesn't even account for other political nonsense like who gets to own what, or taxes, or in-group out-group tribalism...)

Well, in order to make a profit off someone else’s labour, you need to pay them less than their labour is worth. It’s varying degrees of horrible depending on how bad you want to be in that regard.

That's... an interesting and questionable philosophy.

Consider a situation where the baseline is 1 year worth of food for 1 year worth of labor.  Now say that someone other than the farmer creates a plow and now the laborer can get 2 years of food for 1 year worth of labor. Who gets the "profit" here? How do you attribute the value of the labor to the plow-maker versus the the plow-user?  That is - what percentage of that extra years worth of food, goes to the plow maker versus the plow user?  Do you split it 50/50? Do you give it all to the plow-maker, since the plow enabled all the marginal increase in output?  Do you give it all to the plow-user, since it was that labor that actually generated the food?  Is it something in between?

What if it wasn't a plow-maker, but a merchant who took some of the food and carried it around the countryside? What if the merchant had to buy the food with 1 cart of lumber?  When they distribute and the food, for lumber, they end up with 2 carts of wood. The merchant had a net gain of one cart of wood... was that "stealing" from the original farmer, paying them less than their labor was worth? Or was that just getting paid for the added value associated with distributing the produce?

Does the merchant have any obligation to the farmer to give them more lumber? Should the merchant have such an obligation?