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Test for Consequentialism:
Suppose you are a judge in deciding whether person X or Y commited a murder. Let's also assume your society has the death penalty. A supermajority of society (say, encouraged by the popular media) has come to think that X committed the crime, which would decrease their confidence in the justice system if he is set free, but you know (e.g. because you know Bayes) that Y was responsible. We also assume you know that Y won't reoffend if set free because (say) they have been too spooked by this episode. Will you condemn X or Y? (Before you quibble your way out of this, read The Least Convenient Possible World)
If you said X, you pass.
Just a response to "Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve so much as a stubbed toe."
N.B. This does not mean I'm against consequentialism.
By condemning X, I uphold the people's trust in the justice system, while making it unworthy of that trust. By condemning Y, I reduce the people's trust in the justice system, while making the system worthy of their trust. But what is their trust worth, without the reality that they trust in?
If I intend the justice system to be worthy of confidence, I desire to act to make it worthy of confidence. If I intend it to be unworthy of confidence, I desire to act to make it unworthy of confidence. Let me not become unattached to my desires, nor attached to what I do not desire.
Also, there is no Least Convenient Possible World. The Least Convenient Possible World for your interlocutors is the Most Convenient Possible World for yourself, the one where you get to just say "Suppose that such and such, which you think is Bad, were actually Good. Then it would be Good, wouldn't it?"
You're kind of missing the point here. I probably should have clarified my position more The reason I want people to trust the justice system is so that people wil not be inclined to commit crimes, because it would then more likely (from their point of view) that, if they did, they would get caught. I suppose there is the issue of precedent to worry about, but the ultimate purpose of the justice system, from the consequentialist viewpoint, is to deter crimes (by either the offender it is dealing with or potential others), not to punish criminals. As the offender is, by assumption, unlikely to reoffend, the everyone else's criminal behaviors are the main factor here, and these are minimised through the justice system's reputation. (I also should have added the assumption that attempts to convince people of the truth have failed). By prosecuting X you are acheiving this purpose. The Least Convenient Possible World is the one where there's not a third way, or additional factor (I hadn't thought of) that lets you get out of this.
Rationality is not about maximising the accuracy of your beliefs, nor the accuracy of others. It is about winning!
EDIT: Grammer EDIT: The point is, if you would punish a guilty person for a stabler society, you ought to to the same to an innocent person, for the some benefit.
I don't think you understand what "rationality is about winning" means. It is explained here, here, and here.
Possibly I used it out of context, What I mean is that utility (less crime)> utility(society has inaccurate view of justice system) when the latter has few other consequences, and rationaliy is about maximising utility. Also, in the Least Convenient World, overall this trial will not affect any others, hence negating the point about the accuracy of the justice system. Here knowledge is not an end, it is a means to an end.
See my reply to Roxolan.
This ignores the causal relationships. How is punishing the innocent supposed to create a stabler society? Because, in your scenario, it's just this once and no-one will ever know. But it's never just this once, and people (the judge, X, and Y at least) will know. As one might observe from a glance at the news from time to time. All you're doing is saying, "But what if it really was just this once and no-one would ever know?" To which the answer is, "How will you know?" To which the LCPW replies "But what if you did know?", engulfing the objection and Borgifying it into an extra hypothesis of your own.
You might as well jump straight to your desired conclusion and say "But what if it really was Good, not Bad?" and you are no longer talking about anything in reality. Reality itself is the Least Convenient Possible World.
In the least convenient possible world, condemning an innocent in this one case will not make the system generally less worthy of confidence. Maybe you know it will never happen again.
Maybe everyone would have a pony.
ETA: It is not for the proponent of an argument to fabricate a Least Convenient Possible World -- that is, a Most Convenient Possible World for themselves -- and insist that their interlocutors address it, brushing aside every argument they make by inventing more and more Conveniences. The more you add to the scenario, the smaller the sliver of potential reality you are talking about. The endpoint of this is the world in which the desired conclusion has been made true by definition, at which point the claim no longer refers to anything at all.
The discipline of the Least Convenient Possible World is a discipline for oneself, not a weapon to point at others.
If I, this hypothetical judge, am willing to have the innocent punished and the guilty set free, to preserve confidence that the guilty are punished and the innocent are set free, I must be willing that I and my fellow judges do the same in every such case. Call this the Categorical Imperative, call it TDT, that is where it leads, at the speed of thought, not the speed of time: to take one step is to have travelled the whole way. I would have decided to blow with the mob and call it justice. It cannot be done.
If that's what makes the world least convenient, sure. You're trying for a reductio ad absurdum, but the LCPW is allowed to be pretty absurd. It exists only to push philosophies to their extremes and to prevent evasions.
Your tone is getting unpleasant.
EDIT: yes, this was before the ETA.
I think you replied before my ETA. The LCPW is, in fact, not allowed to be pretty absurd. When pushed on one's interlocutors, it does not prevent evasions, it is an evasion.
The categorical imperative ignores the possibility of mixed strategies--it may be that doing X all the time is bad, doing Y all the time is bad, but doing a mixture of X and Y is not. For instance, if everyone only had sex with someone of the same sex, that would destroy society by lack of children. (And if everyone only had sex with someone of the opposite sex, gays would be unsatisfied, of course.) The appropriate thing to do, is to allow everyone to have sex with the type of partner that fits their preferences. Or to put it another way, "doing the same thing" and "in the same kind of case" depend on exactly what you count as the same--is the "same" thing "having only gay sex" or "having either type of sex depending on one's preference"?
In the punishment case, it may be that we're better off with a mixed strategy of sometimes killing innocent people and sometimes not; if you always kill innocent people, the justice system is worthless, but if you never kill innocent people, people have no confidence in the justice system and it also ends up being worthless. The optimal thing to do may be to kill innocent people a certain percentage of the time, or only in high profile public cases, or whatever. Asking "would you be willing to kill innocent people all the time" would be as inappropriate as asking "would you be willing to be in a society where people (when having sex) have gay sex all the time". You might be willing to do the "same thing" all the time where the "same thing" means "follow the public's preference, which sometimes leads to killing the innocent" (not "always kill the innocent ") just like in the gay sex example it means "follow someone's sexual preference, which sometimes leads to gay sex" (not "always have gay sex").
Yes, the categorical imperative has the problem of deciding on the reference class, as do TDT, the outside view, and every attempt to decide what precedent will be set by some action, or what precedent the past has set for some decision. Eliezer coined the phrase "reference class tennis" to refer to the broken sort of argumentation that consists of choosing competing reference classes in order to reach desired conclusions.
So how do you decide on the right reference class, rather than the one that lets you conclude what you already wanted to for other reasons? TDT, being more formalised (or intended to be, if MIRI and others ever work out exactly what it is) suggests a computational answer to this question. The class that your decision sets a precedent for is the class that shares the attributes that you actually used in making your decision -- the class that you would, in fact, make the same decision for.
This is not a solution to the reference class problem, or even an outline of a solution; it is only a pointer in a direction where a solution might be found. And even if TDT is formalised and gives a mathematical solution to the reference class problem, we may be in the same situation as we are with Bayesian reasoning: we can, and statisticians do, actually apply Bayes theorem in cases where the actual numbers are available to us, but "deep" Bayesianism can only be practiced by heuristic approximation.
"Would you like it if everyone did X" is just a bad idea, because there are some things whose prevalences I would prefer to be neither 0% nor 100%, but somewhere inbetween. That's really an objection to the categorical imperative, period. I can always say that I'm not really objecting to the categorical imperative in such a situation by rephrasing it in terms of a reference class "would you like it if everyone performed some algorithm that produced X some of the time", but that gets far away from what most people mean when they use the categorical imperative, even if technically it still fits.
An average person not from this site would not even comprehend "would you like it if everyone performed some algorithm with varying results" as a case of the golden rule, categorical imperative, or whatever, and certainly wouldn't think of it as an example of everyone doing the "same thing". In most people's minds, doing the same thing means to perform a simple action, not an algorithm.
In that case, the appropriate X is to perform the action with whatever probability you would wish to be the case. It still fits the CI.
Or more briefly, it still fits. But you have to actually make the die roll. What "an average person not from this site" would or would not comprehend by a thing is not relevant to discussions of the thing itself.
In that case, you can fit anything whatsoever into the categorical imperative by defining an appropriate reference class and action. For instance, I could justify robbery with "How would I like it, if everyone were to execute 'if (person is Jiro) then rob else do nothing'". The categorical imperative ceases to have meaning unless some actions and some reference classes are unacceptable.
That's too brief. Because :"what do most people mean when they say this" actually matters. They clearly don't mean for it to include "if (person is Jiro) then rob else do nothing" as a single action that can be universalized by the rule.
The reason that doesn't work is that people who are not Jiro would not like it if everyone were to execute 'if (person is Jiro) then rob else do nothing', so they couldn't justify you robbing that way. The fact that the rule contains a gerrymandered reference class isn't by itself a problem.
Doing which is reference class tennis, as I said. The solution is to not do that, to not write the bottom line of your argument and then invent whatever dishonest string of reasoning will end there.
No kidding. And indeed some are not, as you clearly understand, from your ability to make up an example of one. So what's the problem?