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shminux comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong
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I've considered using neutral terms, but then it is just too easy to say "well, it just sucks to be you, Neptunian, my rational anti-dust-specker approach requires you to suffer!"
This is a bit of a fair point. I guess I'd have written the hypothetical in a few stages to address the underlying issue, which is presumably is either:
1) what happens if it turns out humans don't have compatible values?
2) How does our morality handle aliens or transhumans with unique moralities? What if they are almost identical to our own?
I don't think the babyeater story provided an answer (and I don't have one now) but I felt like it addressed the issue in an emotionally salient way that wasn't deceptive.
It's a bad sign if you feel your argument requires violating Godwin's Law in order to be effective, no?
Not strictly. It's still explicitly genocide with Venusians and Neptunians -- it's just easier to ignore that fact in the abstract. Connecting it to an actual genocide causes people to reference their existing thinking on the subject. Whether or not that existing thinking is applicable is open for debate, but the tactic's not invalid out of hand.
The supposed positive (making the genocide easier to imagine) is however outweighed by a big negative of the connotations brought by the choice of terminology. It was certainly not true about the Nazis that their hatred towards the Jews was an immutable terminal value and the "known to be in general quite rational" part is also problematic. Of course we shouldn't fight the hippo, but it is hard to separate the label "Nazi" from its real meaning.
As a result, the replies to this post are going to be affected by three considerations: 1) the commenters' stance towards the speck/torture problem, 2) their ability to accept the terms of a hypothetical while ignoring most connotations of used terminology, and 3) their courage to say something which may be interpreted as support for Nazism by casual readers. Which makes the post pretty bad as a thought experiment supposed to inquire only the first question.
I suppose that's fair. I do think that trying to abstract away the horror of genocide is probably not conducive to a good analysis, either, but there may be an approach better suited to this that does not invoke as much baggage.
It's a bad sign if you feel your ethics don't work (or shouldn't be talked about) in an important, and real, case like the Nazis vs. Jews.
I'm not saying genocide is bad because Hitler did it. I'm saying it's bad for other reasons, regardless of who does it, and Hitler should not be a special case either way.
n your previous comment you seemed to be saying that a good argument should be able to work without invoking Hitler. I'm saying that a good argument should also be able to apply to Hitler just as well as to anyone else. Using Hitler as an example has downsides, but if someone claims the argument actually doesn't work for Hitler as well as for other cases, then by all means we should discuss Hitler.
It is also a bad sign if you invoke TWAITW. If you check the law, as stated on Wikipedia, it does not cover my post:
You can sort of make your case that it is covered by one of the Corollaries:
except for the proposed amendment:
Which is exactly what I was doing (well, one out of three, so not exactly).
As discussed there, pointing out that it has this feature isn't always the worst argument in the world. If you have a coherent reason why this argument is different from other moral arguments that require Godwin's Law violations for their persuasiveness, then the conversation can go forward.
EDIT: (Parent was edited while I was replying.) If "using Jews and Nazis as your example because replacing them with Venusians and Neptunians would fail to be persuasive" isn't technically "Godwin's Law", then fine, but it's still a feature that correlates with really bad moral arguments, unless there's a relevant difference here.