RE: Singularity: Individual, Borg, Death?

Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Wed, 9 Dec 1998 09:20:38 -0600

Nick Bostrom wrote:
>it does seem to be a fact that almost all reasonable people agree
>that it is wrong (whatever that means) to torture innocent people
>for a little fun. *If* there are "objective" truths in ethics (which
>I am not claiming) then I think we can be fairly confident that that
>is one of them..

You can find lots of moral statements that 90% of all humans would agree to, and a few statements that 95% would agree with, but that's about as wide a consensus as you can get. Besides, objective truth isn't determined by a vote. If you took a poll on cosmology 1,000 years ago, virtually everyone would have agreed that the sun goes around the Earth. That doesn't mean that it does.

To reach an approximation of an objective truth, you need to have some way to conduct experiments to test your claims. If you can't prove (not argue, but *prove*, in an objective sense), that a moral proposition is false, you're just trading opinions.

Billy Brown
bbrown@conemsco.com