Re: MORALITY: right & wrong (was: A Bioethical Foundation for Human Rights)

From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu Nov 08 2001 - 11:49:10 MST


> From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
> > What should the extropian definition of freedom be?
>
> Same as the dictionary definition, because supplying yet another definition
> would dilute the meaning, thereby causing linguistic entropy rather than
> extropy.

We don't want "another" definition; we want to _narrow_ the defintion,
Every dictionary I've seen has 8 or 9 definitions, many of which are
incompatible. If we want to describe something as a goal, we at least
better define precisely what it is that we want, rather than just
giving it an ambiguous name and hope people can guess what we mean.

_My_ goal, at any rate, is to increase the number of actions that
I can take that don't interfere with the options of others. People
generally call that "freedom" or "liberty", but many people also
use those words for totally different things: "freedom from fear",
for example, which is something totally different.

Dictionaries contain almost no useful information about the world.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC



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