[extropy-chat] In defense of moral standards (Was: In defense of moral relativism)

[Jeff Medina]

On 5/4/05, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> It was a tad worse than that.  I believe Giulio also said that believing in an
> external, objective reality leads to mass-murder and atrocity.
> 
> But as that is only Giulio's mere personal opinion, bearing no relation to
> (smirk smirk) any actual "reality" (if indeed such a concept is even coherent)
> we may safely ignore it.
> 
> (Though that refutation does not actually follow.  Giulio did not assert that
> reality was not objective; he merely said that entertaining the notion leads
> to homicide.  This assertion has no evidential bearing on whether reality is
> objective.)

Could you point out where he said this? Because what I read was that
*morality* was not objective.

Aside: This does not imply that the moral beliefs of a particular
individual at a particular time could not be objectively determined;
quite the contrary, given the supervenience of mental states on
objective physical reality, including those mental states with moral
content.

He also didn't say that the notion of objective reality leads to
homicide. He said that the notion of objective, infallibilist moral
dogma leads to homicide, and he said this based on inductive inference
from the laundry list of horrible events in human history in which
groups convinced they had ascertained objective moral knowledge saw
fit to murder those who disagreed or were otherwise undesirable
according to the moral 'axioms' of each respective group.

Jeff