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MugaSofer comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong
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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.
I find your terms confusing, but yes, I agree that classifying acts is one thing and making decisions is something else, and that a consequentialist does the latter based on their expectations about the consequences, and these often get confused.
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?
We must indeed use rules as a matter of practical necessity, but it's just that: a matter of practical necessity. We can't model the entirety of our future lightcone in sufficient detail so we make generic rules like "do not lie" "do not murder" "don't violate the rights of others" which seem to be more likely to have good consequences than the opposite.
But the good consequences are still the thing we're striving for -- obeying rules is just a means to that end, and therefore can be replaced or overriden in particular contexts where the best consequences are known to be achievable differently...
A consequentialist is perhaps a bit scarier in the sense that you don't know if they'll stupidly break some significant rule by using bad judgment. But a deontologist that follows rules can likewise be scary in blindly obeying a rule which you were hoping them to break.
In the case of super-intelligent agents that shared my values, I'd hope them to be consequentialists. As intelligence of agent decreases, there's assurance in some limited type of deontology... "For the good of the tribe, do not murder even for the good of the tribe..."
That's the kind of Combination approach I was arguing for.
My understanding of pure Consequentialism is that this is exactly the approach it promotes.
Am I to understand that you're arguing for consequentialism by rejecting "consequentialism" and calling it a "combination approach"?
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?
It seems to me that judging people and sending them to jail is on the level of actions, like whether you should donate to charity. Whether someone ought to be jailed should be judged like other moral questions; does it produce good consequences or follow good rules or whatever.
I don't think a moral theory has to have special cases built in for judging other people's actions, and then prescribing rewards/punishments. It should describe constriants on what is right, and then let you derive individual cases like the righteusness of jail from what is right in general.
But, unless JGWeissman is a judge, the question of whether someone should go to jail is a moral question (as you seem to accept) that is not concerned with what JGWeissman ought to do.
Universalisability rides again.
The question of whether or not someone ought to go jail, independent of whether or not any agent ought to put them in jail, doesn't seem very meaningful. In general, I don't want people to go to jail because jail is unpleasant, it prevents people from doing many useful things, and its dehumanizing nature can lead to people becoming more criminal. I want specific people to go jail because it prevents them from repeating their bad actions, and having jail as a predictable consequence for a well defined set of bad behaviors is an incentive for people not to execute those bad behaviors. (And I want our criminal justice system to be more efficient about this.) I don't see why it has to be more complicated, or more fundamental, than that. Nyan is exactly right, judging other people's actions is just another sort of action you can choose, it is not fundamentally a special case.
If I'm parsing that right, you misunderstood my point. Sorry.
I am not trying to lose information by applying a universalizing instinct. It is fully OK, on the level of a particular moral theory, to make such judgements and prescriptions. I'm saying, though, that this is a matter of normative ethics, not metaethics.
As a matter of metaethics, I don't think moral theories are about judging the actions of other people, or even yourself. I think they are about what you ought to do, with double emphasis on "you". As a matter of normaitive ethics, I think it is terminally good to punish the evil and reward the just, (though it is also instrumentally a good idea for game thoery reasons), but this should not leak into metaethics.
Do you understand what I'm getting at better now?
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.
What for? It doesn't help me achieve good things to know whether you are morally good, except to the extent that "you are morally good" makes useful predictions about your behaviour that I can use to achieve more good. And that's a question for epistemology, not morality.
They would see it as a two-place concept instead of a one-place concept. Call them A and B. For A, A is morally responsible for everything that goes on in the world. Likewise for B. For A, the question "what is B morally responsible for" does not answer the question "what should A do", which is the only question A is interested in.
A would agree that for B, B is morally responsible for everything, but would comment that that's not very interesting (to A) as a moral question.
So another way of looking at it is that for this sort of consequentialist, morality is purely personal.
By extension, however, in case this corollary was lost in inferential distance:
For A, "What should A do?" may include making moral evaluations of B's possible actions within A's model of the world and attempting to influence them, such that A-actions that affect the actions of B can become very important.
Thus, by instrumental utility, A often should make a model of B in order to influence B's actions on the world as much as possible, since this influence is one possible action A can take that influences A's own moral responsibility towards the world.
Indeed. I would consider it a given that you should model the objects in your world if you want to predict and influence the world.
Because then you apportion reward and punishment where they are deserved. That is itself a Good, called "justice"
I don't see how that follows from consequentialism or anything else.
Then it is limited.
I get it now. I think I ought to hold myself to a higher standard than I hold other people, because it would be ridiculous to judge everyone in the world for failing to try as hard as they can to improve it, and ridiculous to let myself off with anything less than that full effort. And I take it you don't see things this way.
It follows from the practical concern that A only gets to control the actions of A, so any question not in some way useful for determining A's actions isn't interesting to A.
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.
double-posted
In before this is downvoted to the point where discussion is curtailed.
And yet here you are arguing for Evil Mutants.
I'm aware many people who believe this don't literally think of it in terms of the soul - if only because they don't think about it all - but I think it's a good shorthand for the ideas involved.
Observing simple incompetence in the environment.
I should probably note I'm not familiar with these individuals, although the names do ring a faint bell.
Seems like evidence for my previous statements. No?
These are Nazis, yes? I wouldn't be that surprised if some of them were "gleeful" even if they had literally no psychopaths among their ranks - unlikely from a purely statistical standpoint.
While my contrarian tendencies are screaming at me to argue this was, in fact, completely unjust ... I can see some neat arguments for that ...
We punished Nazis who were "just obeying orders" - and now nobody can use that excuse. Seems like a pretty classic example of punishment setting an example for others. No "they're monsters and must suffer" required.
I'm probably more practiced at empathising with racists, and specifically Nazis - just based on your being drawn from our culture - but surely racist beliefs is a more sympathetic motivation than greed?
(At least, if we ignore the idea of bias possibly leading to racist beliefs that justify benefiting ourselves at their expense, which you are, right?)
There are a lot of people who really don't understand the structure of reality, or how prevalent and how destructive sociopaths (and the conformists that they influence) are.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people's realities that's filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths. This makes them easy prey for sociopaths, especially intelligent, extreme sociopaths (total sociopathy, lack of mirror neurons, total lack of empathy, as described by Robert Hare in "without conscience") with modern technology and a support network of other sociopaths.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn't read Stanley Milgram's book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category. I'm not suggesting that you or anyone else in this conversation is "bad" or "ignorant," but just that you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
The world still doesn't have much of a problem with the "initiation of force" or "aggression." (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) ...Especially not when it's labeled as "majoritarian government." ie: "Legitimized by a vote." However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
Stangl could have recognized that the murder of women and children was "too wrong to tolerate." In fact, he did recognize this, by his comment that he felt "weak in the knees" while pushing women and children into the gas chamber. That he chose to follow "the path of compliance" "the path of obedience" and "the path of nonresistance" (all those prior paths are different ways of saying the same thing, with different emphasis on personal onus, and on the extent to which fear plays a defensible part in his decision-making).
The reason I still judge the Nazis (and their modern equivalents) harshly is because they faced significant opposition, but it was almost as wrong as they were. The levellers innovated proper jury trials in the 1600s, and restored them by the 1670, in the trial of William Penn. It wasn't as if Austria was without its "Golden Bull" either. Instead, they chose a mindless interpretation of "the will to power."
The rest of the world viewed Hitler as a raving madman. There were plenty of criticisms of Nazism in existence at the time of Hitler's rise to power. Adam Smith had written "The Wealth of Nations" over a century earlier. The Federalist and Anti-Federalists were right in incredible detail again, over a century earlier.
Talk about the prison industrial complex with anyone, and talk with someone who has family members imprisoned for a victimless crime offense. Talk with someone who knows Schaeffer Cox, (one of the many political prisoners in the USA). Most people will choose not to talk to these people (to remain ignorant) because knowledge imparts onus to act morally, and stop supporting immoral systems. To meet the Jews is to activate your mirror neurons, is to empathize with them, ...a dangerous thing to do when you're meeting them standing outside of a cattle car. Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
I'm on a mobile device right now - I'll go over your arguments, links, and videos in more detail later, so here are my immediate responses, nothing more.
Wait, why would evolution make us vulnerable to sociopaths? Wouldn't patching such a weakness be an evolutionary advantage?
Wouldn't a total lack of mirror neurons make people much harder to predict, crippling social skills?
"Ignorant" is not, and should not be, a synonym for "bad". If you have valuable information for me, I'll own up to it.
Those strike me as near-meaningless terms, with connotations chosen specifically so people will have a problem with them despite their vagueness.
Did you accidentally a word there? I don't follow your point.
And clearly, they all deliberately chose the suboptimal choice, in full knowledge of their mistake.
You're joking, right?
Statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
i.e. not my statistical likelihood, i.e. nice try, but no-one is going going to have a visceral fear reaction and skip past their well-practiced justification (or much reaction at all, unless you can do better than that skeevy-looking graph.)
The non aggression principle is horribly broken
Concern about sociopaths applies to both business and government:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/01/09/3140081/bridge-sociopathy/
So, is this trolling? You cite the Milgram experiment, in which the authorities did not pretend to represent the government. The prevalence and importance of non-governmental authority in real life is one of the main objections to libertarianism, especially the version you seem to promote here (right-wing libertarianism as moral principle).
Having reviewed your links:
Your first link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgGyvxqYSbE) both appears to be, and is, a farly typical YouTube conspiracy theory documentary that merely happens to focus on psychopaths. It was so bad I seriously considered giving up on reviewing your stuff. I strongly recommend that, whatever you do, you cease using this as your introductory point.
"The Psychology of Evil" was mildly interesting; although it didn't contain much in the way of new data for me, it contained much that is relatively obscure. I did notice, however, that he appears to be not only anthropomorphizing but demonizing formless things. Not only are most bad things accomplished by large social forces, most things period are. It is easier for a "freethinker" to do damage than good, although obviously, considering we are on LW, I consider this a relatively minor point.
I find the identification of "people who see reality accurately" with "small-l libertarians" extremely dubious, especially when it goes completely unsupported, as if this were a background feature of reality barely worth remarking on.
Prison industrial complex link is meh; this, on the other hand, is excellent, and I may use it myself.
Schaeffer Cox is a fraud, although I can't blame him for trying and I remain concerned about the general problem even if he is not an instance of it.
The chart remains utterly unrelated to anything you mentioned or seem particularly concerned about here.