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grouchymusicologist comments on Levels of Action - Less Wrong
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Interesting post, and a useful distinction.
Here is a suggestion for how this essay could be slightly clarified. For me, one way in which the concept was not immediately intuitive was the notion that a Level 1 action "directly moves the world from a less desirable state into a more desirable state." Given how pervasive discussions of morality have been on Less Wrong lately, I found myself wondering, "Why is it intrinsically more desirable that you have $100 than that some employer offering a task via Mechanical Turk has the $100?" The idea of world-state-desirability immediately called to mind matters of ethics (in the guise of a claim that some world-states are intrinsically more desirable than others).
But really, you are just making a distinction between object-level changes and meta-level changes regardless of desirability-sign. The distinction would be equally valid if I were an Evil Typist, who could either commit evil through typing (Level 1: additive) or take typing classes in order to multiply the evil I were able to commit through typing (Level 2: multiplicative).
This isn't in any way to denigrate the basic claim of the post, which I think is a helpful one. Desirability, in the sense you're using it, is subjective and not in any sense moral. Insofar as it caused me some confusion with other (i.e., ethical) notions of desirability, a bit of rephrasing might clarify the argument.
If two people conduct a mutually-agreeable exchange, then both of them think the world has improved according to their own preferences. The employee has more money, and the employer has less money, but the work they wanted done is done. Often enough, everyone else in the world is fairly indifferent, and so pairwise mutually-agreeable exchanges often improve the world for everyone.
This is one of the ways that microeconomics is awesome. Pareto-optimality isn't everything; we do have preferences regarding things like fairness, and there are positional goods and externalities, but fairly often, working toward the Pareto frontier is a good thing to do.
Being subjective is not a disqualifier for being moral.
In the common sense of 'moral' ("What one has most reason to do or to want"), desirability is inextricably linked with morality, in its relationship with both 'reason' and 'want'.
Indeed not, but my point was that the main distinction the post makes is just as valid when applied to ways to bring about changes that are immoral or morally neutral.