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PhilGoetz comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
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Comments (420)
I'm liking Luminosity! I'm even tempted to read Twilight to find out what's different.
Not a big criticism, but I have to say something regarding the passage where Bella hunts a wolf.
Some current animal populations in Washington State:
Far more ethical to hunt a human.
I'm assuming you're joking, but the idea of assigning ethical value based on scarcity still makes me cry.
Not only that, it makes me inclined to assert that I be designated part of the smallest conceivable category that is plausible while also lumping everyone else into groups as general as I can get away with.
I'm a special unique butterfly, leave me alone!
The fact that you can make a wrong conclusion from a position, by using bad reasoning, is not an argument against that position.
Which leads to the reductio ad absurdum "You're unique, just like everyone else."
"Ethical value"?
The ethics here are within Bella's mind, not within the wolf's. The ethical dilemma is that to realize the value of her continue life, she needs to destroy other things of value. The ethical problem is to minimize the value she destroys. And the fact that value depends on scarcity is a fundamental economic principle.
It's a value calculation. Don't confuse things by inventing a new category of "ethical value".
Yes.
No. You're claiming that Bella should place a higher value on members of scarce species than on members of more common species. But she could instead assign value to other entities based on their intelligence, or in inverse proportion to their tastiness, or by any other standard. Economics doesn't have anything normative to say about ethics.
But the descriptive part of economics definitely pairs up with ethic's normative statements. It seems like if wolves are more valued by others than deer, the statement "destroy as little of what other people value as you can" needs to have an answer of the economic question "how much do other people value my options?" to function properly.
I disagree with PhilGoetz that wolves are valuable due solely to their scarcity- I think that some things, like smallpox or mosquitoes, should be endangered or extinct - but I think it's pretty trivial to put together the argument that killing a wolf for pleasure is much, much more wrong than killing a deer for pleasure.
Excellent reply. Upvoted. But there several problems with the position you are staking out. One is your over-the-top claim that it is more ethical to hunt a human. Agreed, the wolf has more value as a carrier of biodiversity, but that is not the only kind of value to be considered.
A second is your acceptance of "scarcity" as the word for the characteristic making the wolf valuable. As if the value arises by the same process as does the value in a rare coin. Supply and demand. No, actually the wolf is valuable as a carrier of information. Killing one of only a handful of wolves probably extinguishes several dozen alleles from the species gene pool and greatly increases the risk that the entire species will be extinguished. At least in Washington State.
And therein lies your third mistake. If you had been quoting wildlife populations in the entire Pacific Northwest, including B.C., then they might mean something. But the last wolf in Washington state has almost no biodiversity value if there are still plenty of wolves in Idaho or in Canada. Conducting a wildlife census based on human political boundaries makes no sense at all.
I think you're confusing things by conflating ethical value and economic value.
Edit: Also, even assuming you want to equate ethical and economic value, a human still has more value since he can create things of value much better then a wolf.
I reversed my vote when I saw the edit. While the conflation point is undeniable the 'can create value' is not especially relevant to Phil's discussion of scarcity and changed my impression of the comment to 'just throw soldiers for the Rah Humans side'.
It is by no means assured that the eaten human from the margin would have created more value than is lost by damaging a hypothetical endangered animal. In fact, someone who particularly values biodiversity the net value that would have been created by the human is almost certainly negative.
Since we're equating ethical value and economic value here, there's a simple way to test this: how much could you get paid to save the human vs. the wolf. Given that this is Norway and not some third world country, the human presumably has a decent amount of money he'd be willing to pay to save his life, not to mention his family and friends and the potential to take out a loan against future earnings. As for the wolf, you might be able to get something out of an animal-lover but not nearly as much as from the human.
Except PhilGoetz is trying to use this argument to justify valuing biodiversity.
I'm not. That's why I said I agree with your pre-edit point.
(Indirectly relevant: I am equating ethical value with personal utility which is something not everyone does.)
My point was that even if we grant PhilGoetz's equation of ethical and economic value, it still doesn't imply what he wants it to.
I think you're confusing things by postulating the existence of two different kinds of values.
If you had two kinds of values, how would you ever make a decision?
I think you're supposing that when I say "value", I mean dollars. I didn't say that.
You use economic principals to justify assigning value to biodiversity when you said "the fact that value depends on scarcity is a fundamental economic principle."
I think the most reasonable interpretation of that sentence is: more me biodiversity/scarcity is an instrumental value and my terminal values are based on economic/market value.
If this is incorrect could you explain what you meant, since the only other explanation I can think of is that it was a flimsy attempt to rationalize your valuing biodiversity.
Value is value. You can't have two separate types of value if you're going to make a decision. You can't say, "I'm going to use economic value for economic decisions, and ethical value for ethical decisions", because decisions don't break down nicely for you into those categories.
Economic value and ethical value need to be merged. And the result will look more like economic value, because economic value is well-studied and quantified, while the main point of the category "ethical value" is to be vague and slippery, so that people can avoid actually getting answers about ethics.
Economic value, a.k.a., market value, is how much something would be worth on the market. Ethical value is my personal utility function.
Data point: I maintain both concepts and yet don't feel confused.
Bella hunts a wolf in Norway, not in Washington State.
I'm not as much concerned with Bella's ethics in a fictional world, as I am with correcting the impression many people in the real world have that predators are common. This wrong impression kills predators.
I met a hunter in New York State in the early 1990s, near Corning, who encountered the first wolf pack seen in the state in maybe 50 years, and immediately shot one of them, because "they kill too many deer". He wasn't making it up. He showed me a photo.
Which is still a problem.