jet_lagg wrote:
What's the net benefit/harm of pot smoking, spanking children, infanticide for dire economic reasons, killing one person to save some number of anothers, abortion for non-life threatening reasons, stealing to feed yourself, investing in yourself some amount vs your children, invading a country to overthrow a brutal regime, etc. Any number you come up with will reflect the biases/ethics/morality of the person assigning the number as they envision the situation. So while it might help you find what *you* personally should do given some scenario, the answer would remain personal to you.
I don't think it would be especially hard to quantify what people want. We have a lot of the methods already in place within psychology. But yes, it would naturally vary from person to person, which is where the strength of Game Theory shows itself, demonstrating the most rational solution to a scenario with different, sometimes competing interests. It would be complex, sure, but so is medicine (to use the analogy Harris is fond of). The point is that I believe there are answers, and we could find them using scientific methods.
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Hm.
What's the "rational" solution to a game? For a given player, it is the one that maximizes their own payoff. Hardly ethical, unless you include ethical considerations in the payoff matrix.
Are you talking about Nash equilibria? But an iron-fist dictatorship is a Nash equilibrium (if the dictator steals less money/food/power from the people, he would be worse off, and if the people rebel they get whacked).
If you're defining "rational" as the one that maximizes some kind of aggregate payoff median payoff for all players, then you've already introduced a definition of morality in your "rationality". You also run into the difficulty of choosing the "right" aggregate function. Median payoff? Total sum? Minimum across all players? Note: that's social-democracy, capitalism and communism respectively.