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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes November 2013 - Less Wrong
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I'd extend Eugene's reply and point out that both the original and modified version of the sentence are observations. As such, it doesn't matter that the two sentences are grammatically similar; it's entirely possible that one is observed and the other is not. History has plenty of examples of people who are willing to do harm for a good cause and end up just doing harm; history does not have plenty of examples of people who are willing to cut people open to remove cancer and end up just cutting people open.
Also, the phrasing "to end malaria" isn't analogous to "to remove cancer" because while the surgery only has a certain probability of working, the uncertainty in that probability is limited. We know the risks of surgery, we know how well surgery works to treat cancer, and so we can weigh those probabilities. When ending malaria (in this example), the claim that the experiment has so-and-so chance of ending malaria involves a lot more human judgment than the claim that surgery has so-and-so chance of removing cancer.
Yes, but keep in mind the danger of availability bias; when people are willing to do harm for a good cause, and end up doing more good than harm, we're not so likely to hear about it. Knut Haukelid and his partners caused the death of eighteen civilians, and may thereby have saved several orders of magnitude more. How many people have heard of him? But failed acts of pragmatism become scandals.
Also, some people (such as Hitler and Stalin) are conventionally held up as examples of the evils of believing that ends justify means, but in fact disavowed utilitarianism just as strongly as their critics. To quote Yvain on the subject, "If we're going to play the "pretend historical figures were utilitarian" game, it's unfair to only apply it to the historical figures whose policies ended in disaster."
We already have a situation where we can cause harm to innocent people for the general good. It's called taxes.
Since I got modded down for that before, here's a hopefully less controversial example: the penal system. If you decide that your society is going to have a penal system, you know (since the system isn't perfect) that your system will inevitably punish innocent people. You can try to take measures to reduce that, but there's no way you can eliminate it. Nobody would say we shouldn't put a penal system into effect because it is wrong to harm innocent people for the greater good--even though harming innocent people for the greater good is exactly what it will do.
I don't think anyone really objects to hurting innocent people for the greater good. The kind of scenarios that most people object to have other characteristics than just that and it may be worth figuring out what those are and why.
It seems to me that utilitarianism decides how to act based on what course of action benefits people the most; deciding who counts as people is not itself utilitarian or non-utilitarian.
And even ignoring that, Hitler and Stalin may be valuable as examples because they don't resemble strict utilitarianism, but they do resemble utilitarianism as done by fallible humans. Actual humans who claim that the ends justify the means also try to downplay exactly how bad the end is, and their methods of downplaying that do resemble ideas of Hitler and Stalin.
Can you provide examples of this? In my experience, while utilitarianism done by fallible humans may be less desirable than utilitarianism as performed by ideal rationalists, the worst failures of judgment on an "ends justify the means" basis tend not to come from people actually proposing policies on a utilitarian basis, but from people who were not utilitarians whose policies are later held up as examples of what utilitarians would do, or from people who are not utilitarians proposing hypotheticals of their own as what policies utilitarianism would lead to.
Non utilitarians in my experience generally point to dangers of a hypothetical "utilitarianism as implemented by someone much dumber or more discriminatory than I am," which is why for example in Yvain's Consequentialism FAQ, the objections he answered tended to be from people believing that utilitarians would engage in actions that those posing the objections could see would lead to bad consequences.
Utilitarianism as practiced by fallible humans would certainly have its failings, but there are also points of policy where it probably offers some very substantial benefits relative to our current norms, and it's disingenuous to focus only on the negative or pretend that humans are dumber than they actually are when it comes to making utilitarian judgments.
Any example I could give you of humans fallibly being utilitarian you could equally well describe as an example of humans not being utilitarian at all. After all, that's what "fallible" means--"doing X incorrectly" is a type of "not doing X".
If you want an example of humans doing something close to utilitarian (which is all you're going to get, given how the word "fallible" works), Stalin himself is an example. Just about everything he did was described as being for the greater good, because building the perfect Soviet society is for the greater good and the harm done to someone by giving him a show trial and executing him is necessary to build that society. Of course, you could explain how Stalin wasn't really utilitarian, but if he was really utilitarian, he wouldn't be fallibly utilitarian.
I would accept any figure as "fallibly utilitarian" if they endorsed utilitarian ethics and claimed to be attempting to follow it, but Stalin did not do so, and while his actions might be interpreted as a fallible attempt at utilitarianism, his own pronouncements don't particularly invite such interpretation.
That doesn't actually contain any of his own pronouncements.
I managed to Google this for Hitler: "It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man."
This may not be technically utilitarian,. but it is an example of Hitler endorsing the idea that some people should be harmed to benefit others (in this case to benefit society), and is an example of how that doesn't go well.
People have been proposing that some people should be harmed to benefit others long before anyone proposed the idea of utilitarianism; usually it was justified because the people being harmed are outgroup members, or simply Less Important compared to the people being helped, or to subordinate individual identity to the group identity.
Sometimes, this doesn't go well. In some cases, such as, by your own example, in the case of taxes or a justic system, it goes much better than a refusal to harm some people to help others. Utilitarianism is a construction for formalizing under what conditions it is or is not a good idea to attempt such tradeoffs. Calling the purges of Hitler or Stalin failings of Utilitarianism is about as fair as calling every successful government intervention or institution ever, which after all all involve sacrificing resources of the public for a common good, successes of Utilitarianism.
Another way that a penal system is extremely likely to harm innocents is that the imprisoned person may have been supplying a net benefit to their associates in non-criminal ways, and they can't continue to supply those benefits while in prison. This is especially likely for some of the children of prisoners, even if the prisoners were guilty..
That's indirect harm. Non-utilitarians don't have to care about it (and certainly not care about it as much as utilitarians).
I am unsure how to map decisions under uncertainty to evidence about values as you do here.
A still-less-controversial illustration: I am shown two envelopes, and I have very high confidence that there's a $100 bill in exactly one of those envelopes. I am offered the chance to pay $10 for one of those envelopes, chosen at random; I estimate the EV of that chance at $50, so I buy it. I am then (before "my" envelope is chosen) offered the chance to pay another $10 for the other envelope, this chance to be revoked once the first envelope is selected. For similar reasons I buy that too.
I am now extremely confident that I've spent $10 for an empty envelope... and I endorse that choice even under reflection. But it seems ridiculous to conclude from this that I endorse spending $10 for an empty envelope. Something like that is true, yes, but whatever it is needs to be stated much more precisely to avoid being actively deceptive.
It seems to me that if I punish a hundred people who have been convicted of a crime, even though I'm confident that at least some of those people are innocent, I'm in a somewhat analogous situation to paying $10 for an empty envelope... and concluding that I endorse punishing innocent people seems equally ridiculous. Something like that is true, yes, but whatever it is needs to be stated much more precisely to avoid being actively deceptive.
In your example, you are presenting "I think you should spend $10 for an empty envelope" as a separate activity, and you are being misleading because you are not putting it into context and saying "I think you should spend $10 for an empty envelope, if this means you can get a full one".
With the justice system example, I am presenting the example in context--that is, I am not just saying "I think you should harm innocent people", I am saying "I think you should harm innocent people, if other people are helped more". It's the in-context version of the statement that I am presenting, not the out-of-context version.
(nods) Yes, that makes sense.
Thanks.
I (and James Donald) agree. Remember that the traditional ethical laws this is based on also have traditional exceptions, e.g., for punishment and war, and additional laws governing when and how those exceptions apply. The thing to remember is that you are not allowed to add to the list of exceptions as you see fit, nor are you allowed to play semantic games to expand them. In particular, no "war on poverty", or "war on cancer", even "war on terror" is pushing it.
I think you're misunderstanding me. We all know that most ethical systems think it's okay to punish criminals. I'm not referring to the fact that criminals are punished, but the fact that when we try to punish criminals we will, since no system is perfect, inevitably end up punishing some innocent people as well. Those people did nothing wrong, yet we are hurting them, and for the greater good.
This is no different from the fact that it's okay to fly planes even though some of them will inevitably crash.
Note that if a judge punishes someone who turns out to be innocent, we believe he should feel guilty about this rather then simply shrugging and saying "mistakes will happen". Similarly, if an engeneer makes a mistake than causes a plane to crash.
Just like not all people punished are guilty, not all innocent people punished are discovered; there's always going to be a certain residue of innocent people who are punished, but not discovered, with no guilty judges or anything else to make up for it. Hurting such innocent people is nevertheless an accepted part of having a penal system.