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RobbBB comments on Privileging the Question - Less Wrong
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Man, reality is so much less interesting than my magical kingdom of loyal steelmen.
I would push the fat man in front of the trolley too in the thought experiment, and so would many rights based libertarians. They just don't do it in real life. I don't think they think rights are any more real than utilities are. They think it is a better form of government, to hold that people have inviolable rights even when there are compelling arguments in favor of violating those rights.
But more importantly, why are you being smug about this? Some people value being able to own firearms even at a steep cost to others. Some people, like communists, value economic equality across the population. It is not privileging the question if they value something more than you do. In fact, if that is the case, we should frown upon customized news feeds in general.
Brainoil, I'm pleased to hear your argument is more nuanced than MugaSofer suggested. It helps redeem the practice of steelmanning, which is not just about making discussions more civil and nuanced but also about becoming more accurate at predicting others' views. Utilitarians can accept 'rights' views, if they either reify rights and assign high value to consequences in which they are satisfied, or treat 'rights' as a heuristic that usefully approximates the true moral theory. So perhaps instead of talking about which abstract moral theory is the Right One, we should focus on more object-level questions like 'Which human preferences are more satisfied by debating gay marriage than by ignoring it, and how strong are those preferences relative to their competitor-values?'
Sure. (Though many values people have are probably a causal product of which questions they privilege.)
One way to think of rights is as ethical injunctions for governments, and depending on the right others, against violating them.