Logicomorality. Discussion
I was really flattered to get some feedback on my last text about morality from Mindaugas G. His arguments were indeed insightful, so I decided to discuss them here to clarify some of the issues concerning logicomorality.
First of all the main sentence which attracted his attention was "If subject A understands all the consequences of his actions and knows all the necessary variables - he is acting good, otherwise - subject B can do better". His questions were (as I interpreted them): "What does a word "acting" mean in this sentence? Does a person act to avoid bad consequences? What about the other observers of a person's actions? Is morality connected only with actions or also thinking?". My answers to these would be: what is happening in your mind cannot fall under the categories of good or bad, only your actions can. This is because it takes time to accumulate information, your first ideas are never correct and they are just assumptions, you need to explore the world to decide your next action, the longer you explore the more better your actions will be. Simple as that. "Avoiding bad consequences" is not a question that should concern a person of this type of morality, there is no good or bad as a fact, everything is just a comparison, so the scale of "goodness" is from zero (bad) to infinity (good), zero means random actions, infinity means total determinism. So to act "good" all you have to do is to understand the world and the result of your actions as much as you can and "avoid bad consequences" means ground your actions on logic and facts. The other observers can evaluate your actions objectively if they at the same time have more information than you do. Of course, usually people judge others by saying "you could have done this and that", but the fact is that talking about past has nothing to do with "good" or "bad" it's just not connected this way.
Mindaugas next question was "what's the use of all this information? there is too much of it already!" He is right that there is an overwhelming amount of information available, but that's where intellect comes to play - by using it, person sorts information and separates the valuable one from the useless. This is the basic principle of logicomorality: information is of a great importance, because the more relevant information you have the better your actions are. But we can't forget that the consequences are as important as initial data, so information alone is not important if you can't (aren't able) use it to predict the outcome.
Mindaugas comments on my sentence "Feelings we feel are not important here, because they are not connected to the outside world, they are purely ours":
"It's quite obvious that the outside world is in some causal interaction with what we feel. Thus: feelings are subjective, but are not disconnected from outside world as 'causal act' does not allow (by contradiction) the result to be in no connection with the cause."
I would say that feelings are a nuisance to the real understanding. It is not important that you are either happy or sad while doing actions, they shouldn't be "a source of information" about the world, because they come from within you by looking to the World and this doesn't mean that the thing you are looking at is the source of your feelings, they differ from person to person. As precise information is of the great importance here, feelings don't provide it.
His question on "so acting based on our feelings is bad, because they carry no information from outside":
"Can you give some examples when one bases her acts on feelings? Besides: what carries information from outside then?"
An example when one bases his acts on feelings "I disagree with people 'torturing' animals, I better rise my voice against it". The information is provided to us not by feelings (although we should discuss the very same meaning of the word "feeling" in a separate text as this could be a source of misunderstanding) but by interaction with the world, i.e. "senses": sight, touch, etc. For example, I see a friendly dog and I enjoy the sight, the other one, who is afraid of dogs, feels fear, but the fact they see both is "it is a four legged, brown colored animal, waging a tail --- a dog".
