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Nisan comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Comments (534)
It's okay to deceive people if they're not actually harmed and you're sure they'll never find out. In practice, it's often too risky.
1-3: This is all okay, but nevertheless, I wouldn't do these things. The reason is that for me, a necessary ingredient for being happily married is an alief that my spouse is honest with me. It would be impossible for me to maintain this alief if I lied.
4-5: The child's welfare is more important than my happiness, so even I would lie if it was likely to benefit the child.
6: Let's assume the least convenient possible world, where everyone is better off if they tell the truth. Then in this particular case, they would be better off as deontologists. But they have no way of knowing this. This is not problematic for consequentialism any more than a version of the Trolley Problem in which the fat man is secretly a skinny man in disguise and pushing him will lead to more people dying.
1-3: It seems you're using an irrational rule for updating your beliefs about your spouse. If we fixed this minor shortcoming, would you lie?
6: Why not problematic? Unlike your Trolley Problem example, in my example the lie is caused by consequentialism in the first place. It's more similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma, if you ask me.
1-3: It's an alief, not a belief, because I know that lying to my spouse doesn't really make my spouse more likely to lie to me. But yes, I suppose I would be a happier person if I were capable of maintaining that alief (and repressing my guilt) while having an affair. I wonder if I would want to take a pill that would do that. Interesting. Anyways, if I did take that pill, then yes, I would cheat and lie.
Thanks for the link. I think Alicorn would call it an "unofficial" or "non-endorsed" belief.
Let's put another twist on it. What would you recommend someone else to do in the situations presented in the questionnaire? Would you prod them away from aliefs and toward rationality? :-)
Alicorn seems to think the concepts are distinct, but I don't know what the distinction is, and I haven't read any philosophical paper that defines alief : )
All right: If my friend told me they'd had an affair, and they wanted to keep it a secret from their spouse forever, and they had the ability to do so, then I would give them a pill that would allow them to live a happy life without confiding in their spouse — provided the pill does not have extra negative consequences.
Caveats: In real life, there's always some chance that the spouse will find out. Also, it's not acceptable for my friend to change their mind and tell their spouse years after the fact; that would harm the spouse. Also, the pill does not exist in reality, and I don't know how difficult it is to talk someone out of their aliefs and guilt. And while I'm making peoples' emotions more rational, I might as well address the third horn, which is to instill in the couple an appreciation of polyamory and open relationships.
The third horn for cases 4-6 is to remove the husband's biological chauvanism. Whether the child is biologically related to him shouldn't matter.
Why on earth should this not matter? It's very important to most people. And in those scenarios, there are the additional issues that she lied to him about the relationship and the kid and cheated on him. It's not solely about parentage: for instance, many people are ok with adopting, but not as many are ok with raising a kid that was the result of cheating.
I believe that, given time, I could convince a rational father that whatever love or responsibility he owes his child should not depend on where that child actually came from. Feel free to be skeptical until I've tried it.
Nisan:
Trouble is, this is not just a philosophical matter, or a matter of personal preference, but also an important legal question. Rather than convincing cuckolded men that they should accept their humiliating lot meekly -- itself a dubious achievement, even if it were possible -- your arguments are likely to be more effective in convincing courts and legislators to force cuckolded men to support their deceitful wives and the offspring of their indiscretions, whether they want it or not. (Just google for the relevant keywords to find reports of numerous such rulings in various jurisdictions.)
Of course, this doesn't mean that your arguments shouldn't be stated clearly and discussed openly, but when you insultingly refer to opposing views as "chauvinism," you engage in aggressive, warlike language against men who end up completely screwed over in such cases. To say the least, this is not appropriate in a rational discussion.
Relevant article.
Be wary of confusing "rational" with "emotionless." Because so much of our energy as rationalists is devoted to silencing unhelpful emotions, it's easy to forget that some of our emotions correspond to the very states of the world that we are cultivating our rationality in order to bring about. These emotions should not be smushed. See, e.g., Feeling Rational.
Of course, you might have a theory of fatherhood that says you love your kid because the kid has been assigned to you, or because the kid is needy, or because you've made an unconditional commitment to care for the sucker -- but none of those theories seem to describe my reality particularly well.
*The kid has been assigned to me
Well, no, he hasn't, actually; that's sort of the point. There was an effort by society to assign me the kid, but the effort failed because the kid didn't actually have the traits that society used to assign her to me.
*The kid is needy
Well, sure, but so are billions of others. Why should I care extra about this one?
*I've made an unconditional commitment
Such commitments are sweet, but probably irrational. Because I don't want to spend 18 years raising a kid that isn't mine, I wouldn't precommit to raising a kid regardless of whether she's mine or someone else's. At the very least, the level of commitment of my parenting would vary depending on whether (a) the kid was the child of me and an honest lover, or (b) the kid was the child of my nonconsensual cuckolder and my dishonest lover.
You're welcome to write all the words you like and I'll read them, but if you mean "more time" literally, then you can't have it! If I spend enough time raising a kid, in some meaningful sense the kid will become properly mine. Because the kid will still not be mine in other, equally meaningful senses, I don't want that to happen, and so I won't give you the time to 'convince' me. What would really convince me in such a situation isn't your arguments, however persistently applied, but the way that the passage of time changed the situation which you were trying to justify to me.
Okay, here is where my theory of fatherhood is coming from:
You are not your genes. Your child is not your genes. Before people knew about genes, men knew that it was very important for them to get their semen into women, and that the resulting children were special. If a man's semen didn't work, or if his wife was impregnated by someone else's semen, the man would be humiliated. These are the values of an alien god, and we're allowed to reject them.
Consider a more humanistic conception of personal identity: Your child is an individual, not a possession, and not merely a product of the circumstances of their conception. If you find out they came from an adulterous affair, that doesn't change the fact that they are an individual who has a special personal relationship with you.
Consider a more transhumanistic conception of personal identity: Your child is a mind whose qualities are influenced by genetics in a way that is not well-understood, but whose informational content is much more than their genome. Creating this child involved semen at some point, because that's the only way of having children available to you right now. If it turns out that the mother covertly used someone else's semen, that revelation has no effect on the child's identity.
These are not moral arguments. I'm describing a worldview that will still make sense when parents start giving their children genes they themselves do not have, when mothers can elect to have children without the inconvenience of being pregnant, when children are not biological creatures at all. Filial love should flourish in this world.
Now for the moral arguments: It is not good to bring new life into this world if it is going to be miserable. Therefore one shouldn't have a child unless one is willing and able to care for it. This is a moral anti-realist account of what is commonly thought of as a (legitimate) father's "responsibility" for his child.
It is also not good to cause an existing person to become miserable. If a child recognizes you as their father, and you renounce the child, that child will become miserable. On the other hand, caring for the child might make you miserable. But in most cases, it seems to me that being disowned by the man you call "father" is worse than raising a child for 13 or 18 years. Therefore, if you have a child who recognizes you as their father, you should continue to play the role of father, even if you learn something surprising about where they came from.
Now if you fiddle with the parameters enough, you'll break the consequentialist argument: If the child is a week old when you learn they're not related to you, it's probably not too late to break the filial bond and disown them. If you decide that you're not capable of being an adequate father for whatever reason, it's probably in the child's best interest for you to give it away. And so on.
Yes, we are -- but we're not required to! Reversed Stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that an alien god cared a lot about transferring semen is neither evidence for nor evidence against the moral proposition that we should care about genetic inheritance. If, upon rational reflection, we freely decide that we would like children who share our genes -- not because of an instinct to rut and to punish adulterers, but because we know what genes are and we think it'd be pretty cool if our kids had some of ours -- then that makes genetic inheritance a human value, and not just a value of evolution. The fact that evolution valued genetic transfer doesn't mean humans aren't allowed to value genetic transfer.
I agree with you that in the future there will be more choices about gene-design, but the choice "create a child using a biologically-determined mix of my genes and my lover's genes" is just a special case of the choice "create a child using genes that conform to my preferences." Either way, there is still the issue of choice. If part of what bonds me to my child is that I feel I have had some say in what genes the child will have, and then I suddenly find out that my wishes about gene-design were not honored, it would be legitimate for me to feel correspondingly less attached to my kid.
I didn't, on this account. As I understand the dilemma, (1) I told my wife something like "I encourage you to become pregnant with our child, on the condition that it will have genetic material from both of us," and (2) I attempted to get my wife pregnant with our child but failed. Neither activity counts as "bringing new life into this world." The encouragement doesn't count as causing the creation of life, because the condition wasn't met. Likewise, the attempt doesn't count as causing the creation of life, because the attempt failed. In failing to achieve my preferences, I also fail to achieve responsibility for the child's creation. It's not just that I'm really annoyed at not getting what I want and so now I'm going to sulk -- I really, truly haven't committed any of the acts that would lead to moral responsibility for another's well-being.
Again, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because my "intuition" screams at me to say that I should want children who share my genes doesn't mean that I can't rationally decide that I value gene-sharing. Going a step further, just because people's intuitions may not point directly at some deeper moral truth doesn't mean that there is no moral truth, still less that the one and only moral truth is consequentialism.
Look, I already conceded that given enough time, I would become attached even to a kid that didn't share my genes. My point is just that that would be unpleasant, and I prefer to avoid that outcome. I'm not trying to choose a convenient example, I'm trying to explain why I think genetic inheritance matters. I'm not claiming that genetic inheritance is the only thing that matters. You, by contrast, do seem to be claiming that genetic inheritance can never matter, and so you really need to deal with the counter-arguments at your argument's weakest point -- a time very near birth.
Ah, so that's how your theory works!
Nisan, if you don't give me $10000 right now, I will be miserable. Also I'm Russian while you presumably live in a Western country, dollars carry more weight here, so by giving the money to me you will be increasing total utility.
Nisan:
The same can be said about all values held by humans. So, who gets to decide which "values of an alien god" are to be rejected, and which are to be enforced as social and legal norms?
I am highly skeptical. I'm not a father, but I doubt I could be convinced of this proposition. Rationality serves human values, and caring about genetic offspring is a human value. How would you attempt to convince someone of this?
Would that work symmetrically? Imagine the father swaps the kid in the hospital while the mother is asleep, tired from giving birth. Then the mother takes the kid home and starts raising it without knowing it isn't hers. A week passes. Now you approach the mother and offer her your rational arguments! Explain to her why she should stay with the father for the sake of the child that isn't hers, instead of (say) stabbing the father in his sleep and going off to search "chauvinistically" for her baby.
This is not an honest mirror-image of the original problem. You have introduced a new child into the situation, and also specified that the mother has been raising the "wrong child" for one week, whereas in the original problem the age of the child was left unspecified.
There do exist valuable critiques of this idea. I wasn't expecting it to be controversial, but in the spirit of this site I welcome a critical discussion.
Really? Why?
I would have expected it to be uncontroversial that being biologically related should matter a great deal. You're responsible for someone you brought in to the world; you're not responsible for a random person.
So what? If the mother isn't a "biological chauvinist" in your sense, she will be completely indifferent between raising her child and someone else's. And she has no particular reason to go look for her own child. Or am I misunderstanding your concept of "biological chauvinism"?
If it was one week in the original problem, would that change your answers? I'm honestly curious.
Ouch, big red flag here. Instill appreciation? Remove chauvinism?
IMO, editing people's beliefs to better serve their preferences is miles better than editing their preferences to better match your own. And what other reason can you have for editing other people's preferences? If you're looking out for their good, why not just wirehead them and be done with it?
I'm not talking about editing people at all. Perhaps you got the wrong idea when I said I would give my friend a mind-altering pill; I would not force them to swallow it. What I'm talking about is using moral and rational arguments, which is the way we change people's preferences in real life. There is nothing wrong with unleashing a (good) argument on someone.
6: In the trolley problem, a deontologist wouldn't push decide to push the man, so the pseudo-fat man's life is saved, whereas he would have been killed if it had been a consequentialist behind him; the reason for his death is consequentialism.
Maybe you missed the point of my comment. (Maybe I'm missing my own point; can't tell right now, too sleepy) Anyway, here's what I meant:
Both in my example and in the pseudo-trolley problem, people behave suboptimally because they're lied to. This suboptimal behavior arises from consequentialist reasoning in both cases. But in my example, the lie is also caused by consequentialism, whereas in the pseudo-trolley problem the lie is just part of the problem statement.
Fair point, I didn't see that. Not sure how relevant the distinction is though; in either world, deontologists will come out ahead of consequentialists.
But we can just as well construct situations where the deontologist would not come out ahead. Once you include lies in the situation, pretty much anything goes. It isn't clear to me if one can meaningfully compare the systems based on situations involving incorrect data unless you have some idea what sort of incorrect data would occur more often and in what contexts.
Right, and furthermore, a rational consequentialist makes those moral decisions which lead to the best outcomes, averaged over all possible worlds where the agent has the same epistemic state. Consequentialists and deontologists will occasionally screw things up, and this is unavoidable; but consequentialists are better on average at making the world a better place.
That's an argument that only appeals to the consequentalist.
Of course. I am only arguing that consequentialists want to be consequentialists, despite cousin_it's scenario #6.
I'm not sure that's true. Forms of deontology will usually have some sort of theory of value that allows for a 'better world', though it's usually tied up with weird metaphysical views that don't jive well with consequentialism.
You're right, it's pretty easy to construct situations where deontologism locks people into a suboptimal equilibrium. You don't even need lies for that: three stranded people are dying of hunger, removing the taboo on cannibalism can help two of them survive.
The purpose of my questionnaire wasn't to attack consequentialism in general, only to show how it applies to interpersonal relationships, which are a huge minefield anyway. Maybe I should have posted my own answers as well. On second thought, that can wait.