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Peterdjones comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong
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Comments (179)
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"?
That would be why he specified "simpler versions", yes?
Yes
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.
So when you said morailty was about what you ought to do, you mean it was about was people in general ought to do. ETA: And what if agent A would jail them, and agent B would free them? They're either in jail or they are not.
But morality is not about deciding what to do next, because many actions are morally neutral, and many actions that are morally wrong are justfiable in other ways. Morailty is not just decision theory. Moraility is about what people ought to do. What people ought to do the good. When something is judged good, praise and reward are given, when something is judged wrong, blame and punishment are given.
No. It's about what JGWeissman in general ought to do, including "JGWeissman encourages and/or forces everyone else to do X, and convinces everyone to be consequentialist and follow the same principles and JGWeissman".
Does that make it clearer? Prescription is just an action to take like any other. Take another step back into meta and higher-order. These discussions we're having, convincing people, thinking in certain ways that promote certain general behaviors, are all things we individually are doing, actions that one individual consequentialist agent will evaluate in the same manner as they would evaluate "Give fish or not?"
This is technically unknown, unverifiable, and seems very dubious and unlikely and irrelevant to me. Unless you completely exclude transitivity and instrumentality from your entire model of the world.
Basically, most actions I can think of will either increase or decrease the probability of a ton of possible-futures at the same time, so one would want to take actions which increase the odds of the more desirable possible futures at the expense of less desirable ones. Even if the action doesn't directly impact or impacts it in a non-obvious way.
For example, a policy of not lying, even if in this case it would save some pain, could be much more useful for increasing the odds of possible futures where yourself and people you care about lie to each other a lot less, and since lying is much more likely to be hurtful than beneficial and economies of scale apply, you might be consequentially better to prescribe yourself the no-lying policy even in this particular instance where it will be immediately negative.
Also note that "judging something good" and "giving praise and rewards", as well as "judging something bad" and "attributing blame and giving punishment", are also actions to decide upon. So deciding whether to blame or to praise is a set of actions where, yes, morality is about deciding which one to do.
Your mental judgments are actions, in the useful sense when discussing metaethics.
Is it? That isn't relevant to me. It isn't relevant to interaction between people, it isn't relevant to society as a whole, and it isn't relevant to criminal justice. I don't see why I should call anything so jejune "morality".
Standard consequentialists can and do judge the actions of others to be right or wrong according to their consequences. I don't know what you think is blocking that off.
Discussions of metaethics are typically pinned to sets of common-sense intuitions. It is a common sense intutiion that choosing vanilla instead of chocolate is morally neutral. It is common sense that I should not steal someone's wallet although the money is morally neutral.
That is not an fact about morality that is a implication of the naive consequentualist theory of morality -- and one that is often used as an objection against it.
Or I might be able to prudently predate. Although you are using the language of consequentialsim, your theory is actually egoism: you are saying that there is no sense in which I should care about people unknown to me, but instead I should just maximise the values I happen to have (thereby collapsing ethics into instrumental rationality).
Morality is a particular kind of deciding and acting. You cannot eliminate the difference between ethics and instrumental decision theory, by noting that they are both to do with acts and decisions. There is still the distinction between instrumental and moral acts, instrumental and moral decisions
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?
What I oought to do is the kind of actions that attract praise. The kind of actions that attract praise are the kind that ought to be done. Those are surley different ways of saying the same thing.
Why would you differ? Maybe it's the "double emphasis on you", The situations in which I morally ought not do something to my advantage are where it would affect someone else. Maybe you are an ethical egoist.
Soooo...
Suppose I hypnotize all humans. All of them! And I give them all the inviolable command to always praise murder and genocide. I'm so good at hypnosis that it overrides everything else and this Law becomes a tightly-entangled part of their entire consciousnesses. However, they still hate murder and genocide, are still unhappy about their effects, etc. They just praise it, both vocally and internally and mentally. Somewhat like how many used to praise Zeus, despite most of his interactions with the world being "Rape people" and "Kill people".
By the argument you're giving, this would effectively hack and reprogram morality itself (gasp!) such that you should always do murder and genocide as much as possible (since they "always" praise it, without diminishing returns or habituation effects or desensitization).
Clearly this is not the same as what you ought to do.
(In this case, my first guess would be that you should revert my hypnosis and prevent me and anyone else from ever doing that again.)
For more exploration into this, suppose I'm always optimally good. Always. A perfectly optimally-morally-good human. What praise do I get? Well, some for that, some once in a while when I do something particularly heroic. Otherwise, various effects make the praise rather rare.
On the other hand, if I'm a super-sucky bad human that kills people by accident all the time (say, ten every hour on average), then each time I manage to prevent one such accident I get praise. I could optimize this and generate a much larger amount of praise with this strategy. Clearly this set of action attracts more praise. Should I ought to do this and seek to do it more than the previous one?
No. Good acts are acts that should be praised, not acts that happen to be. I said the relationship between ought.good/praise was analytical, ie semantic. You don't change that kind of relationship by re-arranging atoms..
How can you hate something yet praise it internally? I'm having trouble coming up with an example.
I don't see what you're getting at. I'll lay out my full position to see if that helps.
First of all, there are seperate concepts for metaethics and normative ethics. They are a meta-level apart, and mixing them up is like telling me that 2+2=4 when I'm asking about whether 4 is an integer.
So, given those rigidly seperated mental buckets, I claim as a matter of metaethics, that moral theories solve the problem of what ought to be done. Then, as a practical concern, the only question interesting to me, is "what should I do?", because it's the only one I can act on. I don't think this makes me an egoist, or in fact is any evidence at all about what I think ought to be done, because what ought to be done is a question for moral theories, not metaethics.
Then, on the level of normative ethics, i.e. looking from within a moral theory, (which I've decided answers the question "what ought to be done"), I claim that I ought to act in such a way as achieves the "best" outcome, and if outcomes are morally identical, then the oughtness of them is identitcal, and I don't care which is done. You can call this "consequentialism" if you like. Then, unpacking "best" a bit, we find all the good things like fun, happiness, freedom, life, etc.
Among the good things, we may or may not find punishing the unjust and rewarding the just. i suspect we do find it. I claim that this punishableness is not the same as the rightness that the actions of moral agents have, because it includes things like "he didn't know any better" and "can we really expect people to...", which I claim are not included in what makes an action right or wrong. This terminal punishableness thing is also mixed up with the instrumental concerns of incentives and game theory, which I claim are a seperate problem to be solved once you've worked out what is terminally valueable.
So, anyways, this is all a long widned way of saying that when deciding what to do, I hold myself to a much more demanding standard than I use when judging the actions of others.
What's wrong with sticking with "what ought to be done" as formulation?
Meaning others shouldn't? Your use of the "I" formulation is making your theory unclear.
They seem different to you because you are a consequentialist. Consequentialist good and bad outcomes can;t be directly transalted in praiseworthiness and blamewoorthiness because they are too hard to predict.
I don't see why. Do you think you are much better at making predictions?
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.
It doesn't follow from that that you have no interest in praise and blame.
Isn't A interested in the actions of B and C that impinge on A?
Yes, and it doesn't follow that because I am interested in praise and blame, I must hold other people to the same standard I hold myself. I said right there in the passage you quoted that I do in fact hold other people to some standard, it's just not the same as I use for myself.
Yes as a matter of epistemology and normative ethics, but not as a matter of metaethics.
Your metaethics treats everyone as acting but not acted on?
A is interested in:
1) The state of the world. This is important information for deciding anything.
2) A's possible actions, and their consequences. "Their consequences" == expected future state of the world for each action.
"actions of B and C that impinge on A" is a subset of 1) and "giving praise and blame" is a subset of 2). "Influencing the actions of B and C" is also a subset of 2).
1) The state of the world. This is important information for deciding anything. 2) A's possible actions, and their consequences. "Their consequences" == expected future state of the world for each action.
Or, briefly "The Union of A and not-A"
or, more briefly still:
"Everything".