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BlueAjah comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong
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Nobody chooses their genes or their early environment. The choices they make are determined by those things (and some quantum coin flips). Given what we know of neuroscience how can anyone deserve anything?
"Nobody chooses their genes or their early environment. The choices they make are determined by those things (and some quantum coin flips)."
All true so far... but here comes the huge logical leap...
"Given what we know of neuroscience how can anyone deserve anything?"
What does neuroscience showing the cause of why bad people choose to do bad things, have to do with whether or not bad people deserve bad things to happen to them?
The idea that bad people who choose to do bad things to others deserve bad things to happen to them has never been based on an incorrect view of neuroscience, and neuroscience doesn't change that even slightly.
The point TGGP3 is making is that they didn't choose to do bad things, and so are not bad people - they're exactly like you would be if you had lived their lives. Always remember that you are not special - nobody is perfectly rational, and nobody is the main character in a story. To quote Eliezer, "You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where 'I vas only followink orders' is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would've called it honourable fealty." Remember that some Nazis committed atrocities, but some Nazis were ten years old in 1945. It is very difficult to be a "good person" (by your standards) when you have a completely different idea of what being good is. You are displaying a version of the fundamental attribution error - that is, you don't think of other people as being just like you and doing things for reasons you don't know about, so you can use the words "bad person" comfortably. The idea "bad people deserve bad things to happen to them" is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that there is such a thing as a bad person, which is unproven at best - even the existence of free will is debatable.
There are people who consider themselves to be bad people, but they tend to be either mentally ill or people who have not yet resolved the conflict between "I have done X" and "I think that it is wrong to do X" - that is, they have not adjusted to having become new people with different morals since they did X (which is what criminal-justice systems are meant to achieve).
I can only interpret a statement like this as "they are exactly like you would be if you were exactly like them", which is of course a tautology.
If you first accept a definition of what is good and what is bad, then certainly there are bad people. A bad person is someone who does bad things. This is still relative to some morality, presumably that of the speaker.
No. If they were, say, psycopaths, or babyeater aliens in human skins, then living their life - holding the same beliefs, experienceing the same problems - would not make you act the same way. It's a question of terminal value differences and instrumental value differences. The former must be fought, (or at most bargained with,) but the latter can be persuaded.
So anyone who's actions have negative consequences "deserves" Bad Things to happen to them?
I am not saying that. I was only replying to the part "... is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that there is such a thing as a bad person".
My point is that the distinction between "Bad Person" and "Good Person" seems ... well, arbitrary. Anyone's actions can have Bad Consequences. I guess that didn't come across so well, huh?
This is a flaw with (ETA: simpler versions of) consequentialism: no one can accurately predict the long range consequences of their actions. But it is unreasonable to hold someone culpable, to blame them, for what they cannot predict. So the consequentialist notion of good and bad actions doesn't translate directly into what we want from a pratical moral theory, guidance as to apportion blame and praise. This line of thinking can lead to a kind of fusion of deontology and consequentialism: we praise someone for following the rules ("as a rule, try to save a life where you can") even if the consequences were unwelcome ("The person you saved was a mass murderer");
I agree that if what I want is a framework for assigning blame in a socially useful fashion, consequentialism violates many of our intuitions about reasonableness of such a framework.
So, sure, if the purpose of morality is to guide the apportionment of praise and blame, and we endorse those intuitions, then it follows that consequentialism is flawed relative to other models.
It's not clear to me that either of those premises is necessary.
There's a confusion here between consequentialistically good acts (ones that have good consequences) and consequentialistically good behaviour (acting according to your beliefs of what acts have good consequences).
People can only act according to their model of the consequences, not accoriding to the consequences themselves.
A consequentialist considers the moral action to be the one that has good consequences.
But that means moral behaviour is to perform the acts that we anticipate to have good consequences.
And moral blame or praise on people is likewise assigned on the consequences of their actions as they anticipated them...
So the consequentialist assigns moral blame if it was anticipated that the person saved was a mass murderer and was likely to kill multiple times again....
And how do we anticipate or project, save on the basis of relatively tractable rules?
What I want out of a moral theory is to know what I ought to do.
As far as blame and praise go, consequentialism with game theory tells you how to use a system of blame and praise provide good incentives for desired behavior.
So you don't want to be able to understand how punishments and rewards are morally justified--why someone ought, or not, be sent to jail?
Knowledge without motivation may lend itself to akrasia. It would also be useful for a moral theory to motivate us to do what we ought to do.
That's not a flaw in consequentialism. It's a flaw in judging other people's morality.
Consequentialists (should) generally reject the idea that anyone but themselves has moral responsibility.
judging the moral worth of others actions is something a moral theory should enable one to do. It's not something you can just give up on.
So two consequentialists would decide that each of them has moral responsibility and the other doesn't? Does that make sense? It is intended as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, or as a bullet to be bitten.
But some people take more actions that have Bad Consequences than others, don't they?
Yes, but even that is subject to counter-arguments and further debate, so I think the point is in trying to find something that more appropriately describes exactly what we're looking for.
After all, proportionality and other factors have to be taken into account. If Einstein takes more actions with Good Consequences and less actions with Bad Consequences than John Q. Eggfart, I don't anticipate this to be solely because John Q. Eggfart is a Bad Person with a broken morality system. I suspect Mr. Eggfart's IQ of 75 to have something to do with it.
If you mean that some people choose poorly or are simply unlucky, yes.
If you mean that some people are Evil and so take Evil actions, then ... well, yes, I suppose, psychopaths. But most Bad Consequences do not reflect some inherent deformity of the soul, which is all I'm saying.
Classifying people as Bad is not helpful. Classifying people as Dangerous ... is. My only objection is turning people into Evil Mutants - which the comment I originally replied to was doing. ("Bad Things are done by Bad People who deserve to be punished.")
I'd prefer to leave "the soul" out of this.
How do you know that most bad consequences don't involve sociopaths or their influence? It seems unlikely that that's not the case, to me.
Also, don't forget conformists who obey sociopaths. Franz Stangl said he felt "weak in the knees" when he was pushing gas chamber doors shut on a group of women and kids. ...But he did it anyway.
Wagner gleefully killed women and kids.
Yet, we also rightfully call Stangl an evil person, and rightfully punish him, even though he was "Just following orders." In hindsight, even his claims that the democide of over 6 million Jews and 10 million German dissidents and dissenters was solely for theft and without racist motivations, doesn't make me want to punish him less.
If doing "bad" things (choose your own definition) makes you a Bad Person, then everyone who has ever acted immorally is a Bad Person. Personally, I have done quite a lot of immoral things (by my own standards), as has everyone else ever. Does this make me a Bad Person? I hope not.
You are making precisely the mistake that the Politics is the Mind-Killer sequence warns against - you are seeing actions you disagree with and deciding that the actors are inherently wicked. This is a combination of correspondence bias, or the fundamental attribution error, (explaining actions in terms of enduring traits, rather than situations) and assuming that any reasonable person would agree to whatever moral standard you pick. A person is moral if they desire to follow a moral standard, irrespective of whether anyone else agrees with that standard.
If a broken machine is a machine that doesn't work, does that mean that all machines are broken, because there was a time for each machine when it did not work?
More clearly: reading "someone who does bad things" as "someone who has ever done a bad thing" requires additional assumptions.