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Nornagest comments on Really Extreme Altruism - Less Wrong
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Comments (87)
Nah, that's just standard deontological vs. consequential thinking. If dishonesty is approached in consequential terms then it becomes just another act of (fully generalized) aggression -- something you don't want to do to someone except in self-defense or unless you'd also slash their tires, to borrow an Eliezer phrase, but not something that's forbidden in all cases. It only becomes problematic in general if there's a deontological prohibition against it.
Looking at it that way doesn't clarify the distinction between lying by commission vs. lying by omission, though. There's something else going on there.
I don't know what you just said. For example you wrote: "that's just standard deontological vs. consequential thinking." What does that mean? Does that mean that I have in a single comment articulated both deontological and consequentialist thinking and set them at odds, simultaneously arguing both sides? Or are you saying I articulated one of these? If so, which one?
For my part, I don't think my comment takes either side. Whether your view is deontological or consequentialist, you should agree on the basics, which includes that you have a right to self-defense. That is the context I am talking about in deciding whether the deception is moral. So I am not saying anything consequentialist here, if that's your point. A deontologisr should agree on the right to self defense, unless his moral axioms are badly chosen.
I think your comment describes a consequentialist take on the subject of dishonesty and implicitly argues that the deontological version is incorrect. I agree with that conclusion, but I don't think it says anything unusual on the subject of dishonesty in particular.
You think the right to self defense is consequentialist? That's the first I've heard about that.
In this context, and as a heuristic rather than a defining feature. Most systems of deontological ethics I've ever heard of don't allow for lying in self-defense; it's possible in principle to come up with one that does, but I've never seen a well-defined one in the wild.
I was really looking more at the structure of your comment than at the specific example of self-defense, though: you described some examples of dishonesty aimed at minimizing harm and contrasted them with unambiguously negative-sum examples, which is a style of argument I associate (pretty strongly) with a pragmatic/consequential approach to ethics. My mistake if that's a bad assumption.
It's no different in principle from killing in self defense. If these systems don't allow lying in self defense, then they must not allow self defense at all, because lying in self defense is a trivial application of the general right to self defense.
Anyway, the fact that my point triggered a memory in you of a consequentialist versus deontological dispute does not change my point. If we delete everything you said about deontologists versus consequentialists, have you actually said something to deflect my point?
I don't think that follows. These are deontologists we are talking about. They are in the business of making up a set of arbitrary rules and saying that's what people should do. Remembering to include a rule about being allowed to defend yourself physically doesn't mean they will remember to also allow people to lie in self defense.
We can't assume deontologists are sane or reasonable. They are humans talking about morality!
Well, that' wasn't a caricature...!
That is actually how deontologists work, though. It's not a caricature when the people you're talking about say this is okay because it's Right and this isn't because it's Wrong and when you ask them why some things are Right and other things are Wrong, they try to conjure up the inherent Rightness and Wrongness of actions from nowhere. Seriously!
No.
I don't think it was. Just a fairly simple and non-technical description. A similar simplified description of consequentialist moralizing would not read all that much differently.
The key sentence in the comment in terms of conveying perspective was "They are humans talking about morality!" I actually suggest the description errs on the side of a positive idealized spin. Morality just isn't that nice.
'Rights' are most usefully thought of in political contexts; ethically, the question is not so much "Do I have a right to self-defense?" as "Should I defend myself?".
For Kant (the principal deontologist), lying is inherently self-defeating. The point of lying is to make someone believe what you say; but, if everyone would lie in that circumstance, then no one would believe what you say. And so lying cannot be universalized for any circumstance, and so is disallowed by the criterion of universalizability.
This is only true if the other party is aware of the circumstance. If they are not - if they are already deceived about the circumstance - then if everyone lied in the circumstance, the other party would still be deceived. Therefore lying is not self-defeating.
I was just pointing out how Kant might justify self-defense but not lying in self-defense, in summary. If you'd like to disagree with Kant, I suggest doing so against more than an off-the-cuff summary.
Though I don't recommend bothering with it, as his ethics is based on his metaphysics and his metaphysics is false.
Understood.
I don't disagree with your point. I just don't see it as relevant to mine.
There are any number of ways we can slice up a moral question: initiation of harm's one, protected categories like the "not any of your business" you mentioned are another, and my omission/commission distinction is a third. Bringing up one doesn't invalidate another.
But I think lying by omission can indeed be very bad, if you are using the lie of omission to defraud the other party, and that seems to be what is occurring in the scenario in question.
Generally speaking, we are not obligated to inform random people walking down the street of the facts. That would be active assistance, which we do not owe to random strangers. In contrast, telling random strangers active lies puts them at risk, because if they act on those lies they may be harmed. So there you have a moral distinction between failing to inform people of the truth, and informing them of lies. But if you are already interacting with someone, for example if you are buying life insurance from them with the intention of killing yourself, then they are no longer random strangers, and your obligations to them increase.
I am not arguing that lying by omission cannot be bad. Neither am I arguing for a specific policy toward lies of omission. I am arguing that folk ethics sees them as consistently less bad than lies of commission with the same consequences, and that a general discussion of the ethics of honesty ought to reflect this either by including reasons to do the same or by accounting for non-ethical reasons for the folk distinction. Otherwise you've got a theory that doesn't match the empirical data.