247 sats \ 11 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug \ on: What qualities distinguish someone as a high-value person? ideasfromtheedge
They generate more value for other people than they consume. The larger that delta, the more valuable.
That's how I was going to define "valuable person" too. Are there any qualitative differences that separate a "high-value person" or is it just a quantitative difference?
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Not generically. In certain contexts we'd prefer certain kinds of value more than others, but even that could be abstracted into some subjective measure of production and consumption. It seems like any qualitative difference is a proxy for a quantitative one.
This sounds dangerously utilitarian so I'd have to make exceptions when they consume priceless things. I wouldn't call an axe murderer valuable even if they produced 10x the value of every person they murdered.
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The fix for that is either Rule Utilitarianism, where killing someone immediately puts you in the bad category, or just including the value of the murdered people to themselves, which is presumably priceless.
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I'm really interested in how murder is dealt with in ethical systems. Oftentimes, it isn't obvious how to treat it from the base principles, and yet it's one of the most obviously wrong things to our intuition.
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Along similar lines, I've been frustrated with the quality of recent interest in the abortion debate. Both sides use exceptions as examples of who their policy protects when they probably agree on the exceptions. I'm satisfied with some kind of mental iverson bracket for exceptions, and would prefer they talk about the average case. But maybe I've been thinking about it wrong and formalizing exceptions in all their intuitive weirdness would clarify the average case.
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I had no idea that function had a name.
I've always been conflicted about this. I remember reading some Ayn Rand book where she was arguing that you shouldn't get hung up on how a philosophy handles weird edge cases, but rather how it handles the bulk of plausible ones.
At the time, I had a visceral reaction against that position. If your philosophy doesn't handle the weird cases, doesn't that imply your principles are not correct? And, if your principles are not correct, then why do you think they account for anything well.
I've become more sympathetic to the idea of focusing on the center of the distribution, though. It's like getting the first order approximation established. From there you can develop the more complex second and third order approximations of moral truth.
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But how do we compare the value generated for others to the value they consume? Considering value is subjective and not always monetary.
If I grow an apple and trade it for an orange, the apple can make the other party happy, but how can we know the orange I got didn't make me even happier, making me less valuable?