Rationality Quotes November 2013

MalcolmOcean

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

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.

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.

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.

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..

9Desrtopa12y

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.

0Eugine_Nier12y

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.

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