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Jayson_Virissimo comments on New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics - Less Wrong
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Yeah, but they are losing compassion for other things (unborn babies, gods, etc...). What reason is there to believe there is a net gain in compassion, rather than simply a shift in the things to be compassionate towards?
EDIT: This should have been directed towards Vaniver rather than shminux.
an expanding circle of empathetic concern needn't reflect a net gain in compassion. Naively, one might imagine that e.g. vegans are more compassionate than vegetarians. But I know of no evidence this is the case. Tellingly, female vegetarians outnumber male vegetarians by around 2:1, but the ratio of male to female vegans is roughly equal. So an expanding circle may reflect our reduced tolerance of inconsistency / cognitive dissonance. Men are more likely to be utilitarian hyper-systematisers.
Does your source distinguish between motivations for vegetarianism? It's plausible that the male:female vegetarianism rates are instead motivated by (e.g.) culture-linked diet concerns -- women adopt restricted diets of all types significantly more than men -- and that ethically motivated vegetarianism occurs at similar rates, or that self-justifying ethics tend to evolve after the fact.
Nornagest, fair point. See too "The Brain Functional Networks Associated to Human and Animal Suffering Differ among Omnivores, Vegetarians and Vegans" : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010847
Right. What I should have said was:
The growth of science has led to a decline in animism. So in one sense, our sphere of concern has narrowed. But within the sphere of sentience, I think Singer and Pinker are broadly correct. Also, utopian technology makes even the weakest forms of benevolence vastly more effective. Consider, say, vaccination. Even if, pessimistically, one doesn't foresee any net growth in empathetic concern, technology increasingly makes the costs of benevolence trivial.
[Once again, I'm not addressing here the prospect of hypothetical paperclippers - just mind-reading humans with a pain-pleasure (dis)value axis.]
Would this be the same Singer who argues that there's nothing wrong with infanticide?
On (indirect) utilitarian grounds, we may make a strong case that enshrining the sanctity of life in law will lead to better consequences than legalising infanticide. So I disagree with Singer here. But I'm not sure Singer's willingness to defend infanticide as (sometimes) the lesser evil is a counterexample to the broad sweep of the generalisation of the expanding circle. We're not talking about some Iron Law of Moral Progress.
If I recall correctly Singer's defense is that it's better to kill infants than have them grow up with disabilities. The logic here relies on excluding infants and to a certain extent people with disabilities from our circle of compassion.
You may want to look at gwern's essay on the subject. By the time you finish taking into account all the counterexamples your generalization looks more like a case of cherry-picking examples.
Eugine, are you doing Peter Singer justice? What motivates Singer's position isn't a range of empathetic concern that's stunted in comparsion to people who favour the universal sanctity of human life. Rather it's a different conception of the threshold below which a life is not worth living. We find similar debates over the so-called "Logic of the Larder" for factory-farmed non-human animals: http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/salt02.htm. Actually, one may agree with Singer - both his utilitarian ethics and bleak diagnosis of some human and nonhuman lives - and still argue against his policy prescriptions on indirect utilitarian grounds. But this would take us far afield.
By this logic most of the people from the past who Singer and Pinker cite as examples of less empathic individuals aren't less empathic either. But seriously, has Singer made any effort to take into account, or even look at, the preferences of any of the people who he claims have lives that aren't worth living?
I disagree with Peter Singer here. So I'm not best placed to argue his position. But Singer is acutely sensitive to the potential risks of any notion of lives not worth living. Recall Singer lost three of his grandparents in the Holocaust. Let's just say it's not obvious that an incurable victim of, say, infantile Tay–Sachs disease, who is going do die around four years old after a chronic pain-ridden existence, is better off alive. We can't ask this question to the victim: the nature of the disorder means s/he is not cognitively competent to understand the question.
Either way, the case for the expanding circle doesn't depend on an alleged growth in empathy per se. If, as I think quite likely, we eventually enlarge our sphere of concern to the well-being of all sentience, this outcome may owe as much to the trait of high-AQ hyper-systematising as any widening or deepening compassion. By way of example, consider the work of Bill Gates in cost-effective investments in global health (vaccinations etc) and indeed in: http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Features/Future-of-Food ("the future of meat is vegan"). Not even his greatest admirers would describe Gates as unusually empathetic. But he is unusually rational - and the growth in secular scientific rationalism looks set to continue.
As I understand the common arguments for legalizing infanticide, it involves weighting the preferences of the parents and society more - not a complete discounting of the infant's preferences.
Try replacing "infanticide" (and "infant's") in that sentence with "killing Jews" or "enslaving Blacks". Would you also argue that it's not excluding Jews or Blacks from the circle of compassion?
It seems like a silly question. Practically everyone discounts the preferences of the very young. They can't vote, and below some age, are widely agreed to have practically no human rights, and are generally eligible for death on parental whim.
I find it really weird that I don't recall having seen that piece of rhetoric before. (ETA: Argh, dangerously close to politics here. Retracting this comment.)
I wish I could upvote your retraction.
The closest thing I have seen to this sort of idea is this:
http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle
Wow, an excellent essay!
If I remember correctly, I started thinking along these lines after hearing Robert Garland lecture on ancient Egyptian religion. As a side-note to a discussion about how they had little sympathy for the plight of slaves and those in the lower classes of society (since this was all part of the eternal cosmic order and as it should be), he mentioned that they would likely think that we are the cruel ones, since we don't even bother to feed and cloth the gods, let alone worship them (and the gods, of course, are even more important than mere humans, making our lack of concern all the more horrible).
Any idea where Garland might've written that up? All the books listed in your link sound like they'd be on Greece, not Egypt.
It was definitely a lecture, not a book. Maybe I'll track it down when I get around to Ankifying my Ancient Egypt notes.