thomblake 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.

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