mikerpiker comments on Philosophical Landmines - Less Wrong

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: mikerpiker 08 February 2013 10:51:39PM *  5 points [-]

I used to occasionally remark that consequentialism is a slam-dunk as far as practical every-day rationality goes; if you care about what happens, you think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. Duh.

The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists ?and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, you invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.

I don't think I understand the problem. You say that "consequentialism is a slam-dunk as far as practical rationality goes," this comment is interpreted as the claim that "The moral theory called Consequentialism is true," and the person you're talking to asks you what you think about some common and relevant objections to that moral theory.

What's gone wrong? "Consequentialism" is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action. So I don't think you can blame your interlocutor for interpreting the term this way and raising relevant objections to this view. You seem to be using the term in an idiosyncratic way—as referring to the view that we should think about the consequences of our actions before performing them (or something like that).

The lesson of your story seems not to be that we should avoid using terms like "consequentialism," but that we should be careful to explain exactly what we mean by a term if we're going to be using it in an idiosyncratic way.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 09 February 2013 12:21:33AM 14 points [-]

What's gone wrong? "Consequentialism" is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action.

Worse, the idea of consequentialism (or "utilitarianism") is often taken by people with a little philosophy awareness to mean the view that "the ends justify the means" without regard for actual outcomes — that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.

What this really amounts to is not "the ends justify the means", of course, but the horrible view that "good intentions justify actions that turn out to be harmful."

Ambiguity on "ends" probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 11 February 2013 09:10:11AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for making this obvious. Yes, this is the typical consequentialism strawman, but I did not notice how exactly are the meanings of the words redefined.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 February 2013 05:52:01AM 1 point [-]

Ambiguity on "ends" probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.

It doesn't help that consequentialist care about expected utility, which can be a lot closer to intentions than results.

Comment author: Muhd 16 August 2013 10:37:02PM *  1 point [-]

I'm confused. Consequentialists do not have access to the actual outcomes when they are making their decisions, so using that as a guideline for making moral decisions is completely unhelpful.

It also seems that your statement that good intentions don't justify the means is false. Consider this counterexample:

I have 2 choices A and B. Option A produces 2 utilons with 50% probability and -1 utilon the rest of the time. Choice B is just 0 utilons with 100% probability.

My expected utility for option A is +0.5 utilons which is greater than the 0 utilons for option B so I choose option A.

Let's say I happen to get the -1 utilon in the coin flip.

At this point, it seems the following three things are true:

  1. I had good intentions
  2. I had a bad actual outcome, compared to what would have happened if I had chosen option (or "means") B
  3. I made the right choice, given the information I had at the time

Therefore, from this example it certainly seems like good intentions do justify the means. But perhaps you meant something else by "good intentions"?

that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.

Certainly it is bad to delude yourself, but it seems like that is just a case of having the wrong intentions... that is, you should have intended to prevent yourself from becoming deluded in the first place, proceeding carefully and realizing that as a human you are likely to make errors in judgement.

Comment author: ikrase 13 March 2013 03:48:36PM 0 points [-]

Plus people often are unaware of moral injunctions, or even consequentialist heuristics, and tend to think of highly disruptive ruthlessly optimizing Grindelwald style consequentialism, or else of a variety of failure modes that seem consequentialistic but not actually good such as wireheading, euthanasia, schemes involving extreme inequality or something, etc.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 February 2013 02:28:14AM 1 point [-]

I don't think I understand the problem.

I rewrote that section to clarify. Does it help?

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