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Alicorn comments on The Value of Nature and Old Books - Less Wrong
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You're either ignoring "absent human action" or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind. Buying a slave is a human action. I used the word "status quo" because we were talking about "nature" - a thing that usually includes in its definition that humans haven't messed with it all that much. I'd have chosen a different term (or more likely, made one up - I don't think there is a good one already for the general case) if the topic had not been nature.
If I moved into an apartment only to discover that the only bathtub was home to koi, I think much of my irkedness would stem from having been subject to misleading advertising. Misleading advertising is certainly a human action.
I took it to mean "absent further human action", which I thought was the only coherent way to interpret your post. (If that's not what you meant, then please forgive the rant.)
If what you really meant was "absent human action at all" (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the "natural" status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.
So the only way I could make sense of your example was to assume that you were assigning special status to "no further action" such that it was more relevant to the question of what to do with the bathtub than comparing the utilities of "being able to shower" and "having pet koi" in order to optimize for fairness.
I'm not saying that I think your position is that the status quo is always better. That would be a silly straw man. I'm just saying that privileging the status quo is a form of anchoring that can make people resist change even when they'd consider the new state of affairs to be "more fair" than the old state of affairs, had they not been anchored.
In my example about discovering the bathtub home to koi, "no further action" would have left the koi in place. The misleading advertising had already happened. It would take further action to find the koi a new home.
In my example about the slaveowner being confronted by abolitionists, "no further action" would have kept the slave enslaved. The slave had already been bought "fair and square" according to the rules at the time. The status quo was legal slavery. Abolition is what needed further action.
Am I completely missing your point? If so, by what interpretation of "status quo" was your original koi example relevant?
Of course. However, since I think that nature probably belongs to all humans now and in the future, I couldn't use a nature example without begging the question and having it be giant and cumbersome. The bathtub was supposed to illustrate the collective property notion, not the status-quo notion.
You're inserting the word "further". I never included or meant to include the word or notion of "further". Among other things, that would lead to the conclusion that once a factory is already set up to dump waste into a river (for instance), since it'd take further human action to undo that setup, it should be left in place unless everyone agrees to change it. But that's not the answer I want - I think it matters that it took human action to set it up that way to begin with.
Well that clears things up then. I realize you never included the word "further", but I had to insert it in order to use your bathtub example to interpret the status quo notion in any meaningful way.
Assuming that had been your intent, the implied reductio was very much part of my point. I didn't think you would want the factory to continue dumping waste, which is why I thought your argument about "status quo" was flawed.
But since you've clarified your position, I lift that particular objection.
Having reread your comments with the context of that clarification, I now understand what you meant and I sort of agree, with caveats.
If there is no clear winner among the possible states of affairs in consideration, then it makes sense to default to the state of affairs that requires no action. And I agree that future humans have rights insofar as it isn't fair to "use up" nature in the present, leaving future generations with polluted wastelands.
However, I don't think that uncertainty about the preferences of future humans should leave us unable to make changes to the current state of nature.
This may be true, but if we collectively think in the present that some change is a generally good idea overall, we shouldn't maintain the status quo just because we're worried that people in the future might disagree and want nature left alone. We should guess at what their preferences will be and take that into account so that we can move forward.
Otherwise, we'd never be able to change anything about nature that we don't like.
For all practical purposes, I agree completely.
Get rid of the roommate. Shower with the koi.
'A wizard has turned your bathtub into a koi pond. Is this awesome Y/N?'
(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.)
'An evil sorcerer has turned your home into a human's bathtub. Is this a horrible eco-disaster Y/N?'
(In keeping with the theme of preservation of nature. Although koi aren't very natural.)