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Alicorn comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong
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I upvoted this post because it was clear, interesting, and relatively novel, but I'm concerned that it could tend to lead to what I'm going to call "narrative bias" even though I think that already means something.
Imagine someone who's living a fairly mediocre life. Then, they get attacked - mugged or something. This isn't fun for them, but they acquire a wicked keen scar, lots of support from their friends, and a Nemesis who gives them Purpose in Life. They spend a long time hunting their nemesis, acquiring skills to do so, etc. etc., and eventually there is a kickass showdown where the nemesis - fairly old by this point, wasn't going to last long even absent violence - is taken down.
Or, for a simpler case: the death of Batman's parents. Batman's parents' death was not particularly awesome, but Batman got really awesome as a result.
It is not moral to attack mediocre people or orphan impressionable rich children, regardless.
I dunno, maybe this is just me complaining about consequentialism-in-general again with a different vocabulary.
(nods) I think so. Supposing that Bruce Wayne being Batman is a good thing, and supposing that his parents being killed was indispensible to him becoming Batman, then a consequentialist should endorse his parents having been killed. (Of course, we might ask why on earth we're supposing those things, but that's a different question.)
Disagree. P(parents killed | becoming like Batman) being high doesn't imply that P(becoming like Batman | parents killed) is high.
I agree with your assertion, but I suspect we're talking past each other, probably because I was cryptic.
Let me unpack a little, and see if you still disagree.
There's 30-year-old Bruce over there, and we have established (somehow) that he is Batman, that this is a good thing, and that it would not have happened had his parents not been killed. (Further, we have established (somehow) that his parents' continued survival would not have been an even better thing.)
And the question arises, was it a good thing that his parents were killed? (Not, "could we have known at the time that it was a good thing", merely "was it, in retrospect, a good thing?")
I'm saying a consequentialist answers "yes."
If your disagreement still applies, then I haven't followed your reasoning, and would appreciate it if you unpacked it for me.
As a consequentialist, I think the only good reason to judge past actions is to help make future decisions, so to me the question "was it a good thing that his parents were killed?" cashes out to "should we adopt a general policy of killing people's parents?" and the answer is no. (I think Alicorn agrees with me.)
It seems to me like a bad idea to judge past actions on the basis of their observed results; this leaves you too susceptible to survivorship bias. Past actions should be judged on the basis of their expected results. If I adopt a bad investment strategy but end up making a lot of money anyway, that doesn't imply that my investment strategy was a good idea.
OK, that's clear; thanks.
I of course agree that adopting a general policy of killing people's parents without reference to their attributes is a bad idea. It would most likely have bad consequences, after all. (Also, it violates rules against killing, and it's something virtuous people don't do.)
I agree that for a consequentialist, the only good reason to judge past actions is to help make future decisions.
I disagree that the question "was it a good thing that his parents were killed?" cashes out to "should we adopt a general policy of killing people's parents?" I would say, rather, that it cashes out to "should we adopt a general policy of killing people who are similar to Bruce Wayne's parents at the moment of their death?" ("People's parents" is one such set, but not the only one, and I see no reason to privilege it.)
And I would say the consequentialist's answer is "yes, for some kinds of similarity; no, for others." (Which kinds of similarity? Well, we may not know yet. That requires further study.)
My answer's still no because of my first comment. The death of his parents is only one factor involved in Bruce Wayne's becoming Batman. In Batman Begins, for example, another important factor is his training with the League of Shadows. The latter is not a predictable consequence of the former.
Ah, I see your point. Sure, that's true.
If it reliably resulted in more superheros and nobel-proze winners and such, I think it would be awesome (and moral) to traumatize kids.
If it's not reliable, and only some crazy black swan, then not.
This does seem to be the substance of your example.
Agreed. Most people already agree that it is moral to force kids to go to school for years, which can be a traumatizing experience for some, and school is not even all that reliable at producing what it claims to want to produce, namely productive members of society.
Even if net awesomeness increases though, do awesome ends justify non-awesome means?
The point of having LW posts around is not to take their titles as axioms and work from there. My hardware, corrupted as it is, has no intrinsic interest in traumatizing children, so I don't suspect my brain of doing something wrong when it tells me "if it were reliably determined that traumatizing children led to awesome outcome X, then we should traumatize children, especially considering we are in some sense already doing this."
In other words, I think an argument against traumatizing children to make superheroes, if it were determined that this would actually work, is either also an argument against mandatory education or else has to explain why it isn't suffering from status quo bias (why are we currently traumatizing children exactly the right amount?).
Edit: I'm not sure I said quite what I meant to say above. Let me say something different: the post you linked to is about how, when humans say things like "doing superficially bad thing X has awesome consequence Y, therefore we should do X" you should be skeptical because humans run on corrupted hardware which incentivizes them to justify certain kinds of superficially bad things. But what you're being skeptical of is the premise "doing superficially bad thing X has awesome consequence Y," or at least the implicit premise that it doesn't have counterbalancing bad consequences. In this discussion nyan_sandwich and I are both taking this premise for granted.