Yvain comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong

236 Post author: Yvain 30 May 2010 09:16PM

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Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 31 May 2010 02:30:48AM *  8 points [-]

Sort-of nitpick:

The consequentialist model of blame is very different from the deontological model. Because all actions are biologically determined, none are more or less metaphysically blameworthy than others, and none can mark anyone with the metaphysical status of "bad person" and make them "deserve" bad treatment. Consequentialists don't on a primary level want anyone to be treated badly, full stop; thus is it written: "Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve so much as a stubbed toe." But if consequentialists don't believe in punishment for its own sake, they do believe in punishment for the sake of, well, consequences.

I would say "utilitarians" rather than "consequentialists" here; while both terms are vague, consequentialism is generally more about the structure of your values, and there's no structural reason a consequentialist (/ determinist) couldn't consider it desirable for blameworthy people to be punished. (Or, with regard to preventative imprisonment of innocents, undesirable for innocents to be punished, over and above the undesirability of the harm that the punishment constitutes.)

Comment author: Yvain 31 May 2010 09:42:51PM 7 points [-]

I installed a mental filter that does a find and replace from "utilitarian" to "consequentialist" every time I use it outside very technical discussion, simply because the sort of people who don't read Less Wrong already have weird and negative associations with "utilitarian" that I can completely avoid by saying "consequentialist" and usually keep the meaning of whatever I'm saying intact.

Less Wrong does deserve better than me mindlessly applying that filter. But you'd need a pretty convoluted consequentialist system to promote blame (and if you were willing to go that far, you could call a deontologist someone who wants to promote states of the world in which rules are followed and bad people are punished, and therefore a consequentialist at heart). Likewise, you could imagine a preference utilitarian who wants people to be punished just because e or a sufficient number of other people prefer it. I'm not sufficiently convinced enough to edit the article, though I'll try to be more careful about those terms in the future.

Comment author: thomblake 01 June 2010 08:48:05PM 5 points [-]

I installed a mental filter that does a find and replace from "utilitarian" to "consequentialist" every time I use it outside very technical discussion,

I, for what it's worth, think this is a good heuristic.

Comment author: utilitymonster 01 June 2010 02:02:39AM 3 points [-]

you'd need a pretty convoluted consequentialist system to promote blame (and if you were willing to go that far, you could call a deontologist someone who wants to promote states of the world in which rules are followed and bad people are punished, and therefore a consequentialist at heart). Likewise, you could imagine a preference utilitarian who wants people to be punished just because e or a sufficient number of other people prefer it.

I'm not sure how complicated it would have to be. You might have some standard of benevolence (how disposed you are to do things that make people happy) and hold that other things being equal, it is better for benevolent people to be happy. True, you'd have to specify a number of parameters here, but it isn't clear that you'd need enough to make it egregiously complex. (Or, on a variant, you could say how malevolent various past actions are and hold that outcomes are better when malevolent actions are punished to a certain extent.)

Also, I don't think you can do a great job representing deontological views as trying to minimize the extent to which rules are broken by people in general. The reason has to do with the fact that deontological duties are usually thought to be agent-relative (and time-relative, probably). Deontologists think that I have a special duty to see to it that I don't break promises in a way that I don't have a duty to see to it that you don't break promises. They wouldn't be happy, for instance, if I broke a promise to see to it that you kept two promises of roughly equal importance. Now, if you think of the deontologists as trying to satisfy some agent-relative and time-relative goal, you might be able to think of them as just trying to maximize the satisfaction of that goal. (I think this is right.) If you find this issue interesting (I don't think it is all that interesting personally), googling "Consequentializing Moral Theories" should get you in touch with some of the relevant philosophy.