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nshepperd comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
What principle determines what actions are unacceptable apart from "they lead to a bottom line I don't like"? That's the problem. Without any prescription for that, the CI fails to constrain your actions, and you're reduced to simply doing whatever you want anyway.
It's not like the issue has never been noticed or addressed:
"Hypothetical imperatives apply to someone dependent on them having certain ends to the meaning:
if I wish to quench my thirst, I must drink something; if I wish to acquire knowledge, I must learn.
A categorical imperative, on the other hand, denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances, both required and justified as an end in itself. It is best known in its first formulation:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.[1] "--WP
This asserts a meta-meta-ethical proposition that you must have explicit principles to prescribe all your actions, without which you are lost in a moral void. Yet observably there are good and decent people in the world who do not reflect on such things much, or at all.
If to begin to think about ethics immediately casts you into a moral void where for lack of yet worked out principles you can no longer discern good from evil, you're doing it wrong.
Look, I have no problem with basing ethics on moral intuitions, and what we actually want. References to right and wrong are after all stored only in our heads.
But in the specific context of a discussion of the Categorical Imperative—which is supposed to be a principle forbidding "categorically" certain decisions—there needs to be some rule explaining what "universalizable" actions are not permitted, for the CI to make meaningful prescriptions. If you simply decide what actions are permitted based on whether you (intuitively) approve of the outcome, then the Imperative is doing no real work whatsoever.
If, like most people, you don't want to be murdered, the CI will tell you not to murder. If you don't want to be robbed, it will tell you not to rob. Etc. It does work for the normal majority, and the abnornmal minority are probably going to be a problem under any system.
Please read the above thread and understand the problem before replying.
But for your benefit, I'll repeat it: explain to me, in step-by-step reasoning, how the categorical imperative forbids me from taking the action "if (I am nshepperd) then rob else do nothing". It certainly seems like it would be very favourable to me if everyone did "if (I am nshepperd) then rob else do nothing".
That's a blatant cheat. How can you have a universal law that includes a specific exception for a named individual?
The way nshepperd just described. It is, after all, a universal law, applied in every situation. It just returns different results for a specific individual. We can call a situation-sensitive law like this a piecewise law.
Most people would probably not want to live in a society with a universal law not to steal unless you are a particular person, if they didn't know in advance whether or not the person would be them, so it's a law one is unlikely to support from behind a veil of ignorance.
However, some piecewise laws do better behind veils of ignorance than non-piecewise universal laws. For instance, laws which distinguish our treatment of introverts from extroverts stand to outperform ones which treat both according to the same standard.
You can rescue non piecewise categorical imperatives by raising them to a higher level of abstraction, but in order to keep them from being outperformed by piecewise imperatives, you need levels of abstraction higher than, for example "Don't steal." At a sufficient level of abstraction, categorical imperatives stop being actionable guides, and become something more like descriptions of our fundamental values.
I'm all in favour of going to higher levels of abstraction. Its much better appreach than coding in kittens-are-nice and slugs-are-nasty.
Is there anything that makes it qualitatively different from
if (subject == A) { return X }
elsif (subject==B) { return Y }
elsif (subject==C) { return Z } ... etc. etc.?
No, there isn't any real difference from that, which is why the example demonstrates a flaw in the Categorical Imperative. Any non-universal law can be expressed as a universal law. "The law is 'you can rob', but the law should only be applied to Jiro" is a non-universal law, but "The law is 'if (I am Jiro) then rob else do nothing' and this law is applied to everyone" is a universal law that has the same effect. Because of this ability to express one in terms of the other, saying "you should only do things if you would like for them to be universally applied" fails to provide any constraints at all, and is useless.
Of course, most people don't consider such universal laws to be universal laws, but on the other hand I'm not convinced that they are consistent when they say so--for instance "if (I am convicted of robbery) then put me in jail else nothing" is a law that is of similar form but which most people would consider a legitimate universalizable law.
If the law gives different results for different people doing the same thing, it isn't universal jn the intended sense, which is pretty much the .same as fairness.
I don't think there is, but then, I don't think that classifying things as universal law or not is usually very useful in terms of moral guidelines anyway. I consider the Categorical Imperative to be a failed model.
Why is it failed? A counterexample was put forward that isn't a universal law. That doesn't prove the .CI to be wrong. So what does?
We already adjust rules by reference classes, since we have different rules for minors and the insane. Maybe we just need rules that are apt to the reference class and impartial within it.
A qualitative difference is a quantitative difference that is large enough.
Sometimes. Not always.