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Multiheaded, you're taking the disutility of each torture caused by Pinochet and using their sum to declare his actions as a net evil. OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.
You, however, appear to be looking at his actions, declaring them evil, and citing Allende as evidence that Pinochet's ruthlessness was unnecessary. This could be the foundation of a good argument, perhaps, but it's not made clear and is instead obscured behind an appeal to emotions, declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.
He doesn't actually make that statement anywhere that I can see.
I disagree that he has done anything of the sort. What's he even comparing Pinochet to? The obvious candidate is a peacefully elected president after the end of Allende's term, which suggests someone from UP or the Christian Democrats, and it's hard to imagine such a government sponsoring systemic torture against dissidents.
In any case, I think claims of "rational" (which Multiheaded hasn't made anyway) needs to stay far, far away from this thread.
To head off an interpretation argument, that's a fair rephrasing of my position. I wouldn't use the word "utility," but the basic moral premise is the same: As bad as Pinochet was, I think he was one of the best options the country had at the time.
On the bright side, we now know how little the torture of over twenty-five thousand is worth to you.
Yes. It's worth at least the prevention of the torture of fifty thousand.
Guerrilla warfare against the new government began the same month as the coup - the very next day, in point of fact. At that point I think civil war was inevitable. (And yes, the coup itself was inevitable. Even the judiciary supported it. This might have something to do with the fact that their insistence on following the law resulted in Allende's administration effectively calling the justices of the nation capitalist lapdogs. Yes, I paraphrase.)
The population of Chile was 10 million. There were fewer than 30,000 political prisoners, and around 5,000 deaths (including military and guerrilla forces killed in combat). And yes, a lot of those political prisoners were tortured.
There were other major conflicts in the area in the same era.
Somewhere north of 10,000 died in Argentina in this time frame in the "Dirty War."
The civil war in El Salvador cost around 75,000 lives, out of a population of somewhere south of 5 million people.
The civil war in Guatemala cost somewhere north of 150,000 lives, out of a population of around 4 million people.
Nicaragua faced -two- civil wars, for a combined death toll of at least 40,000, out of a population of around 3 million people.
I could keep going.
Pinochet was an asshole. But if the other conflicts in the region in the era are any indication, his administration, as oppressive as it was, did save the country from a far more costly conflict. In general the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally - such as Argentina and Chile - suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn't or couldn't, such as Nicaragua. (Guatemala initially didn't, but turned far more brutal later.) More, his administration concluded itself peacefully, democratically, and without substantive corruption, which also ran against the norm (for comparison, see, for example, Bolivia). (Note that there -was- corruption -during- his administration. My point there is that he didn't try to corrupt the new government as it formed, and indeed appears to have done a very good job of passing the torch.)
Yes. I think the man did more good than evil. It's a well-considered position and not one I entered into lightly. This doesn't mean the torture of thousands of people doesn't matter; they do. Rather, it means that the lives of tens of thousands of people who -didn't- die matter also.
It's really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn't been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country's government more recently.
Cf. Twilight Struggle (which is an amazing game, btw).
More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up -- with the exception of Argentina -- are not in the same reference class. In the 1970's Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile's.
El Salvador's troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala's number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile's economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.
Argentina's policies were very similar to Chile's; they, like Pinochet's Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you're wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.
(Note that I'm not particularly a fan of Argentina's series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)
Nothing in my previous comment says this. Yawn.
And what about, um, you know, the logic of MY side in all this? The logic of the Left? Wherever third-world revolutionaries have turned to all the things they're accused of doing, their rationale has always been to prevent the deaths and misery that were going on without any overt civil war, through the "normal" functioning of divided societies. So how is this different from Maoists claiming that, as under Mao's rule life expectancy in China doubled, history has absolved him of everything?
Mark Twain wrote quite glowingly:
The question is, can we at all justify throwing away the moral injunctions of our civilization by arguing from some clever total-utilitarian counterfactuals, with the track records of such approaches being what it is? I think no, and I think that if you'd say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.
Something feels wrong about the comparison Mark Twain made. I'll try to explain by an example:
When my country was officially a socialist country, we didn't have mobile phones. Shortly after the regime changed, mobile phones were invented, and now everyone has them. -- Yet I don't consider this an evidence that somehow socialism and mobile phones are opposed. It simply happened. In a counterfactual universe, my country would be socialist today and have mobile phones, too. If I try to make an argument about how socialism relates to the mobile phones, it is not fair to compare past and present. It would be fair only to compare the present and the counterfactual present... assuming such comparison can be made. (For example, I could argue that in the counterfactual universe people in my country probably have less mobile phones, because central planning would probably decide that a smaller number of mobile phones is enough. But of course someone could argue they have more and better mobile phones, because of, uhm, something. Or that having less mobile phones, and perhaps more of something else, is better.)
Similarly, to morally evaluate a revolution, we should not compare it with the past, but with the counterfactual universe where the revolution did not happen. Yeah, it might be impossible. That does not make comparison with the past a correct one -- only as much as the past is reliable as a model of the counterfactual present.
Because, if we take comparing with past as our moral guide, here is my advice for all wannabe dictators: -- Make your revolution just after a significant invention in agriculture or medicine! Then, assuming you are competent enough, all the people you killed will be balanced by the people saved by the improved agriculture or medicine. And the history will consider you the benefactor of humankind. (And a promoter of modern technology.)
Of course that's an example why comparing with past can be misleading. Talking about dictators who kill people and forcefully introduce agricultural or medical improvements which wouldn't have otherwise happened, that would be a different topic. (But only if you make sure the improvements did not happen in the counterfactual universe.)
Regardless of whether or not I agree with his position here, I think this is an unfair standard to set.
If you chose a 90% chance of saving 500 people over a 100% chance of saving 400, got unlucky, and those 500 died, how forgiving do you think their families would be? Do you think it would be easy to face them?
I don't think this sort of moral lever is very useful for separating good choices from bad ones.
No. But I still would. And I'd let them take it all out on me. I'd hate to live in a world where anything less could be expected of me. Some things ought not to be easy to live with.
"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword."
That rule literally makes sense only because of scope insensitivity or similar bias. There's no reason to expect a rationalist to adopt it within a community of rationality.
In other words, maybe instrumentally useful, not terminal value.
Presumably when we're talking about killing and torturing people, the context cannot be a "community of rationality".
VALIS help me, this whole... conversation just feels so surreal to me somehow.
If we make the right choice as or more difficult to live with than wrong ones, we're not doing a very good job incentivizing people to take it.
Given the way real-world humans behave, incentives work as a blunt instrument. You can't incentivize only rational decisions without incentivizing irrational decisions that are somewhat similar in form. Incentivizing the 90% chance of saving 500 over the 100% chance of saving 400 would make the right choice more likely in that specific situation, but would also incentivize wrong choices (for instance, taking a 10% chance of 500 people dying in order to implement something that you are really certain would have good effects, when that certainty is unwarranted). You can't change human psychology to make the incentive work only on rational choices, so we're overall better off without the incentive.
Moreover, if we insist that good, moral* people think about making decisions in this way, this leads to more of the decisions being made by evil, immoral people.
*for all values of "good" and "moral".
From the outside view, a randomly picked choice to kill or hurt a large number of people, when made by actual humans, will turn out all wrong and unjustifiable in retrospect, say, 90% of the time. If we're talking about torture as opposed to just killing enemies, it's literally only there to create a lasting climate of terror and alienation (in the society being "reshaped" and "reformed") while giving an outlet to the kind of psychopaths who end up running the repressive machine. So it would make sense to have a very very strong prior against this kind of thing, AKA moral injunction.
Again, if we're considering counterfactuals along great timespans, we ARE considering counterfactuals along great timespans. Equally. If the counterfactual to a world where Pinochet didn't take power is a long and bloody civil war, the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible... is a lot more Pinochets. (Whom we also just served with a much more widely accepted excuse for their horrific acts.)
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements. Would you rather have "Thou shalt not kill", or "Thou shalt not kill unless thou sees a really good reason to and it's totally for the greater good"?
The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn't have been tortured if Pinochet hadn't been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.
Why don't you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn't been dictator? (Note: I don't seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you're capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)
The irony has completely gone off the charts.
Then how the fuck does it not nullify your counterfactual that they would've been tortured?
I can back up my claims with historical evidence about the lawful and peaceful character of Allende's government - as well as the enormous support and protection given to Pinochet and his ilk by the US, without which he would've been way less likely to succeed.
You just assert the opposite, that the US-backed dictators and their pet psychopaths were: 1) the only solution to violence and strife in the region, and 2) not at all a major contributing factor to said strife and violence. I say it's bullshit and shameless propaganda.
I'm really quite confident that many of the survivors brought that up over and over again - in interviews and when testifying after Pinochet's belated arrest and trial.
What, do you think that me, hypothetically, telling a victim/their family: "I looked you up, and I'm so sorry for what happened to you, I wish Pinochet never got his hands on anyone"... is somehow as fucked up as what you could possibly tell them, if Omega forced us both to explain ourselves to them?
Hey, any Chileans on LW?
Get off the trolley track or be consequentialized.
Get off the guill- ...no, I'd rather not go there. But LW has definitely been tempting me as of late.
I love paralepsis!
It's sill odd to be a "huge fan" of someone you can only defend as the lesser of two evils.
Yep, I admit there's two arguments. My secondary line of attack is that there was nothing "necessary" about the things Pinochet did, and that in regards to the rule of law and sustainable democracy he wrecked what Allende was trying to create.
But my primary line is that some "rational" arguments should be simply censored when their advocates don't even bother with hypotheticals but point to the unspeakable experiences of real victims and then dismiss them as a fair price for some dubious greater good. This is a behavior and an attitude that our society needs to suppress, I believe, because it's predictive of other self-centered, remorseless, power-blind attitudes - and we're better off with fully general ethical injunctions against such. Not tolerating even the beginning steps of some potentially devastating paths is important enough to outweigh perfect epistemic detachment and pretensions to impartiality.
Christian moralism in its 19th century form - once a popular source for such injunctions - is rightly considered obsolete/bankrupt, but, like Orwell, I think our civilization needs a replacement for it. Or else our descendants might be the ones screaming "Why did it have to be rats?!" one day.
ZERO compromise. Not for the sake of politeness, not for the sake of pure reason, not a single more step to hell.
I completely agree with you.