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SoullessAutomaton comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
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Do you object when other people use manipulative or coercive techniques on you, to maximize their own utility function without regard for your autonomy?
My objection would be to making a decision that I wouldn't make if I had better information. It's not about the fact that their utility function doesn't have a token for my autonomy.
And if you spend a lot of time being influenced by intelligent people who don't have a token for your autonomy, you'll be making a lot of decisions you wouldn't have made with better information and objectivity.
"Not causing people to make choices they will regret" is a pretty simple ethical principle.
Actually, I originally just said that one term of my utility function can be represented without a token for women's autonomy. The utility function as a whole definitely includes terms for the concerns of every human being.
But I hope you understand why, in some conversations, it would be natural for me to objectify women.
I hope you understand that the issue is not what is natural, but what is ethical.
But in comment xxx, you said that an important attribute in distinguishing examples was that "it's more socially acceptable," which I read as pretty close to "natural." Not the same "natural" as above, but deriving ought from is.
Social acceptability means roughly "adhering to commonly accepted ethical norms". A statement of what is about people's opinions about oughts, in other words.
There are plenty of natural behaviors and impulses, in the sense of expected based on human psychology, that are nevertheless not socially acceptable in many contexts; casual violence in most civilized societies, for instance.
If you're saying that ethics is the conventional wisdom about true morality, then (1) it could be wrong and (2) even if it's right, we have the right to ask for more detail: an appeal to authority can answer "what?" but not "why?"
Alternatively, you might be distinguishing between "morality" meaning indivisible goodness and "ethics" meaning the accepted rules of society, which we hope promote morality.
If so, are you saying that all these examples are immoral, but some are ethical? and we shouldn't worry about the harm we do by objectifying the bus driver because he knows its coming and has accepted it? (that the means justify the ends)
As a quick aside, avoid relying on any distinction between the terms "morality" and "ethics". I don't think there is any coherent, universally agreed-upon difference and inventing one tends to lead to confusion.
Community norms are inherently an appeal to (diffuse) authority, yes, and have little explanatory power; hence my noting it as a non-answer in the comment you linked to. Nevertheless, the norms objectively exist even if their foundations may be arbitrary.
The "real" answer, from my perspective, is that it's still a (mildly) inethical way to interact with people, but some combination of your "its part of his job" and a more general argument for impersonal economic transactions providing social benefits in the big picture outweighs it in many cases. On this basis, I accept the status quo of the afforementioned social norms.
Thanks for that clarification!
morals/ethics: I probably read your definition of social acceptability in terms of ethics backwards.
I think that you're too trusting of society's verbalization of morality and that this is rather different from what people actually accept. This is similar to the discussion of lying. It also reminds me of Michael Vassar's comment about homosexuality. Even if generally accepted ethics deviate from generally verbalized ethics, it's not clear what to choose.
Actually, it's contradictory. If they actually have autonomy, then you can't truly "cause" them to make a particular choice. So choosing to "not cause" them to make a choice is actually admitting they're not autonomous.
Ergo, given the definition of "objectifying" in use here, you are objectifying someone merely by trying not to influence them.
Are you seriously assuming incompatibilist free will? If we've got (roughly speaking) a deterministic universe, and no Kantian nonsense about noumena, then everybody can be caused to do things, even though they're autonomous.
Unless you're assuming incompatibilism in absence of free will... in which case, it seems like you should have a more basic disagreement with the objection of not treating people as though they are autonomous.
False dichotomy. Autonomy isn't absolute, nor is "causing" someone to make choices.