SilasBarta comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: Matt_Simpson 02 August 2010 05:02:37PM *  8 points [-]

Was Kant implicitly using UDT?

Consider Kant's categorical imperative. It says, roughly, that you should act such that you could will your action as a universal law without undermining the intent of the action. For example, suppose you want to obtain a loan for a new car and never pay it back - you want to break a promise. In a world where everyone broke promises, the social practice of promise keeping wouldn't exist and thus neither would the practice of giving out loans. So you would undermine your own ends and thus, according to the categorical imperative, you shouldn't get a loan without the intent to pay it back.

Another way to put Kant's position would be that you should choose such that you are choosing for all other rational agents. What does UDT tell you to do? It says (among other things) that you should choose such that you are choosing for every agent running the same decision algorithm as yourself. It wouldn't be a stretch to call UDT agents rational. So Kant thinks we should be using UDT! Of course, Kant can't draw the conclusions he wants to draw because no human is actually using UDT. But that doesn't change the decision algorithm Kant is endorsing.

Except... Kant isn't a consequentialist. If the categorical imperative demands something, it demands it no matter the circumstances. Kant famously argued that lying is wrong, period. Even if the fate of the world depends on it.

So Kant isn't really endorsing UDT, but I thought the surface similarity was pretty funny.

Comment author: SilasBarta 02 August 2010 05:26:23PM *  2 points [-]

Drescher has some important things to say about this distinction in Good and Real. What I got out of it, is that the CI is justifiable on consequentialist or self-serving grounds, so long as you relax the constraint that you can only consider the causal consequences (or "means-end links") of your decisions, i.e., things that happen "futureward" of your decision.

Drescher argues that specifically ethical behavior is distinguished by its recognition of these "acausal means-end links", in which you act for the sake of what would be the case if-counterfactually you would make that decision, even though you may already know the result. (Though I may be butchering it -- it's tough to get my head around the arguments.)

And I saw a parallel between Drescher's reasoning and UDT, as the former argues that your decisions set the output of all similar processes to the extent that they are similar.