I think this is an argument for having your values written down somewhere, and maybe even for getting them from a source that is not original to you, but I don't think it is a good reason to base your values on Christianity. The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
Here's another, unpolitical scenario about pulling back values
Consider a world where there are cosmic rays that can hit an agent's brain, but they home in on the part containing the utility function. Shielding from these rays is possible but expensive.
In this world, when an agent considers whether to invest in the expensive protection, it considers whether a version of it newly hit with a cosmic ray would remain loyal to the old version of it by keeping on maximizing the old utility function (with some weight) as well as the new cosmic ray begotten one.
Then, when a agent newly hit by a cosmic ray agent considers whether to remain loyal, it notices that if it doesn't, it's less likely to exist since it's predecessor would have invested in the protection, so it remains loyal.
Major issue: Christian ethics aren't stable. Polygamy, genocide, and slavery were all perfectly normal parts of life at various times during the development of the modern Christian faith. Those practices are frowned upon currently, at least in polite company. While many Christian ideas have in some way shaped current moral beliefs, their direct influence is much smaller than it is usually given credit for. And consider the CEV proposal. Early Christians thought that women and individuals of other races were not nearly as morally important as the males in their culture, but intelligent early Christians probably would have found the idea of gender and racial equality weird and moderately disconcerting, but not terrible. It might perhaps be analogous to if I told you that a few centuries from now, it would be regarded as a horrible, immoral belief to hold that a human's life was any more important than a Chimpanzee's (ie Trolley problems with two chimpanzees vs one human). That idea is weird and semi-disturbing, but it doesn't seem terrible. Drift of your moral feelings is fine. Just make sure you put some thought into what sort of direction you want your drift to be in.
Check out this puzzle of mine as well.
You’re a Cthulhu cultist and believe that Cthulhu will reward you by eating you first iff you perform painful ritual self-mutilation in His honor when the moon is full and would do so even if you believed that Cthulhu does not exist. You know, of course, that Cthulhu is a perfect predictor of mortals’ actions, so He knows what you would do.
One day you’re persuaded by an atheist’s arguments that Cthulhu doesn’t actually exist.
That night the moon is full. Do you perform the ritual?
Counterargument:
as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
People don't get their morals from books (much). Christians included.
The trouble is that there are multiple meanings of "moral values" here. There is the human instantiation, and the ideal decision agent instantiation. The ideal decision agent instantiation is used in 5. and a bit in 4. The human instantiation is used elsewhere.
Though usually these are pretty close and the approximation is useful, it can also run into trouble when you're talking specifically about things humans do that ideal decision agents don't do, and this is one of those things.
Specifically, 5. doesn't necessarily work for human values, since we're so inconsistent. People can go into isolation and just think and come out with different human values. How weird is that?!
Mostly, I think my ability to evaluate this argument is distorted beyond reliability by including the word "Christianity." So, first, let me try and taboo that word and generate a more generalized version of the argument:
1/2. My values are primarily learned from society, not innate.
When scrutinizing an argument, one good heuristic is to focus on vague words like "many" and aim for a more robust version. The argument has several such words: "many" in #1, "strongly" and "many" in #3, "full of" in #4, "most" in #5.
For instance, does "many of my moral values" stand for 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99% of your values in that argument? How strong an impression does the argument make on you depending on which of these rough quantifiers you substitute for "many"? (Subsid...
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda. lso my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values. A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
The argument assumes change is necessarily for the worse. People can aquire new values whilst seeing them as an improvement. If it is possible to m...
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
Hm, at this point it sounds similar to the point Phil Goetz was making in "Reason as memetic immune disorder".
There is moral error and moral disagreement. If your values change because of moral disagreement between your past and future self, that is something you'd want to prevent. If, however, you are simply correcting your moral error, this should be encouraged. In this case, your future self is acting more moral than you are by your current belief system, since he understands it better.
I think most of my change in morality will be due to correcting moral error. As such, in a matter of dispute, I trust my future self over my present self.
As Alicorn says, provided you are averse to values drift, this is an argument towards writing your values down and using that as a periodic anchor. Not only is it not clear what Christianity's values actually are (witness the tremendous proliferation of interpretations among Christians in outright defiance of other interpretations,) making this change itself constitutes a shift in your values to satisfy someone else's agenda in ways that are harmful with respect to your current values.
The argument has merit, but the conclusion (7) needs to be replaced with something more appropriate in light of (3). You should edit your values to more closely match an amalgam of the many influences that affected you. Or better yet, as Alicorn says, have your values written down somewhere. Including your acceptance of rational change - which puts an interesting twist on the whole deal.
Can anyone explain why, in a rapidly changing world, we need "absolute" and "eternal" morality?
First of all, this may be an attempt to change your value system and I want you to bear that in mind while reading this post.
1: Seems to be a statement of fact which there is a lot of evidence for and I don't have a problem with.
2: Seems to be a reasonable conclusion from 1.
3: Seems to be a conclusion for people living in the United States which has SOME evidence backing it, but there do exist counter arguments against that such as here But rather than sidetracking this, I'll just link a google search and let you draw their own conclusions.
4: I feel like o...
I think the argument is interesting and partly valid. Explaining which part I like will take some explanation.
Many of our problems thinking about morality, I think, arise from a failure to make a distinction between two different things.
Morality of daily life is a social convention. It serves its societal and personal (egoistically prudent) function precisely because it is a (mostly) shared convention. Almost any reasonable moral code, if common knowledge, is better than no common code.
Morality as an idea...
Isn't there a hidden problem with values taking other values as their arguments? If I can value having a particular value, I can possibly construct self-referential paradoxical values like V = value of not having value V, and empty values like V = value of having value V. A value system including value W = value of preserving other values, W included seems to be of that kind, and I am not sure whether it can be transformed into a consistent decision algorithm.
On the other hand, look at what happens if we avoid self-reference by introducing distinct types o...
drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values
True. And that drift would be beneficial from the perspective of your new, drifted-to values.
But neither of those statements have any bearing on whether value drift (in general or any specific instance thereof) is good or bad.
All values, wherever they come from, need to be re-examined on their own merit. At one point slavery was thought to be acceptable by a lot of people. If you grew up in that society, you would probably inherit that belief as well. There are very likely similar beliefs that you have right now, that were given to you by some source you find credible (society, the Bible, or LW) that you might be better off not having. That's why you need to examine every single belief that you have aside from its source. You can't assume they are automatically correct because ...
I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
What do you think?