= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NihilCredo comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (696)
Is it the author's opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed? It would seem that to think that after their creation, they would want to do what they have been designed to do and so would be no more evil than creating an intelligence which would want to bowl and fish all day. Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don't enjoy such work to do it. Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?
ETA: While this argument works in the abstract and is useful for countering human biases against "slavery" and applies in the particular for the creation of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, house elves have addition features I wasn't considering which makes their creation morally evil.
Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don't enjoy such work to do it.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy - you don't have to force anyone to do it. Offer a sufficiently high salary to scrub Hogwarts' toilet (or just to cast Cleaning Charms on them), and voila, you have free-willed, willing, unmodified house workers.
The meaningful question (at least, to the degree that any moral question can be meaningful) is whether there is any value in that "unmodified" qualifier.
It matters precisely to the extent that the premodified entity desires to not be modified and that the premodified entity's values matter.
That the premodified entity's values matter seems to have been generally assumed all round in this thread. That the premodified entity desires to not be modified seems an extremely reasonable assumption.
Sorry, I should have used "non-artificial" or something else; I intended to also include the quoted case of house elves having been created ad hoc.
I maintain that house-elves created from scratch are completely different from identical house-elves created by modifying free elves against their will. Lumping the two together will produce non-well-defined moral judgments.
They still don't enjoy the work, even if they find doing it instrumentally rational. They are forced to do it by circumstances, and in a better world they wouldn't be.
But in a world with house elves, they are even worse off - they are just unemployed, rather than having the option of taking the job. I doubt more than a trifling amount of the money saved by Hogwarts trickles down to them.
I realise that considering the effect of house elves on the job market goes far outside the scope of this problem in the philosophy of consciousness, and much far outside the scope of the Potterverse; but once you start taking into account the welfare of the hypothetical replacements for house elves, there's no real way to dodge the question.
For philosophical debates, it's probably better to stick with the pig that wants to be eaten.
I pointed out that your argument doesn't contradict Locas's statement that those who don't enjoy the work will be forced to do it, and specifically disclaimed that choosing to do the work regardless might well be rational of them (and hence making them better off). Yet in reply you elaborate in what manner this decision can be rational, as if objecting to what I said. I don't see what you disagree with (besides usage of the word "forced").
Also:
They are not unemployed, they choose the next best option available.
That.
You're right. It's still a strictly worse situation for them, though, since they lose one option and gain nothing.