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Alicorn comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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What kind of scope of omission are you looking for here? If someone asks "what are you up to today?" or "what do you think of my painting?" I can pick any random thing that I really did do today or any thing I really do think of their painting and say that. "Wrote a section of a book" rather than a complete list, "I like the color palette on the background" rather than "...and I hate everything else about it".
Also, not speaking never counts as lying. (Stopping mid-utterance might, depending on the utterance, again with a caveat for sincere mistake of some kind. No tricks with "mental reservation".)
Ok, that makes sense. But still, from my perspective, it still sounds like you're lying; at least, in the second example.
I don't see the any difference between saying, "I think your painting is great !"; and saying something you honestly expect your interlocutor to interpret in the same way, whereas the literal meaning of the words is quite different. In fact, I'd argue that the second option involves twice the lies.
What, never ? Never is a long time, you know. What if your friend asks you, "let me know if any of these paintings suck", and you say nothing, knowing that all of them pretty much suck ?
I would understand it if your policy was something like, "white lies are ok as long as refusing to engage in the would cause more harm in the long run"; but, as far as I can tell, your policy is "white lies are always (plus or minus epsilon) bad", so I'm not sure how you can reconcile it with the above.
If your friend asks you to serve as a painting-reviewer and you say you will and then you don't, that's probably breach of promise. If your friend asks you to do them this service and you stare blankly at them and never do it, you're probably being kind of a jerk (it'd be nicer to say "I'm not gonna do that" or something) but you are not lying.
I understand your point, but I still do not understand the motivation behind it. Are you following some sort of a consequentialist morality, or a deontological one that states "overt lies are bad, lies of omission are fine", or something else ?
As I see it, if a friend asks you "do you like this painting ?" and you reply with "the background color is nice", the top most likely outcomes are:
Similarly, if your friend asks you to review his paintings and you refuse, you'd better have a good reason for refusal (i.e., the truth or some white lie); otherwise, anyone of average intelligence will interpret your response as saying "I hate your paintings but I won't tell you about it".
None of what I wrote above matters if you only care about following prescribed rules, as opposed to caring about the effects your actions have on people. Perhaps this is the case ? If so, what are the rules, and how did you come by them ?
I'm Less Wrong's token deontologist. I thought most people around here knew that. I wrote this article about it and my personal brand of deontology is detailed in this comment.
Sorry, I did not, in fact, know that; and most people here are consequentialists, so I assumed you were one as well. I'd skimmed your post on deontology that you linked to earlier, but I did not understand that it was meant to represent your actual position (as opposed to merely being educational).
As I said above, if your moral system simply has a rule that states "lying is bad except by omission", or something similar, then none of my points are valid, so you are right and I was wrong, my apologies.
That said, personally, I don't think that deontology makes any sense except possibly as a set of heuristics for some other moral system. That's a different line of debate however, and I won't push it on you (unless you are actually interested in pursuing it).
I'm willing to answer questions about it if you're curious, but since I dropped out of grad school I haven't devoted much time to refining either my ethical theory or my ability to explain it so the old article will probably be just about as good. I get enough debating in just from hanging out with consequentialists all the time :P
To expand on what blacktrance said:
As I understand it, deontological systems are, at the core, based on lists of immutable rules.
Where do the rules come from ? For example, one rule that comes up pretty often is something like, "people have inalienable rights, especially the right to A, B and C". How do you know that people have rights; what makes those rights inalienable; and what makes you so sure that A, B and C are on the list, whereas X, Y and Z are not ?
And consequentialist systems are, at the core, based on an immutable utility function.
Where does this function come from?
Well, no. Utilitarian systems are based on a utility function (although I'm not aware of any requirement that it be immutable... actually, what do you mean by "immutable", exactly?). Consequentialist systems don't have to be utilitarian.
Even so, the origin of a utility function is not that mysterious. If your preferences adhere to the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, then you can construct a utility function (up to positive affine transformation, as I understand it) from your preferences. In general, the idea is that we have some existing values or preferences, and we somehow assign utility values to things ("things": events? world states? outcomes? something) by deriving them from our existing preferences/values. It's not a trivial process, by any means, but ultimately the source here is the contents of our own brains.
That's a valid question, and, admittedly, there's no good answer that I'm aware of. One might say that, ultimately, the function can be derived from some basic principle like "seek pleasure, avoid pain", but there's no objective reason why anyone should follow that principle, as opposed to, say, "seek paperclips, avoid non-paperclips".
I will grant you that both consequentialism and deontology are based on some a priori assumptions; however, I would argue that the fact that consequentialism is based on fewer such assumptions, as well as its flexibility in the face of new evidence, make consequentialism a more efficient moral system -- given that we humans are agents who are reasoning under uncertainty using a comparatively limited amount of data.
I think that rights drop naturally out of personhood. Being a person is to be the kind of thing that has rights (and the obligation to respect same). The rights are slightly alienable via forfeiture or waiver, though.
I don't quite understand what you mean. Even if we can agree on what "personhood" means (and I've argued extensively with people on the topic, so it's possible that we won't agree), what does it mean for a right to "drop out naturally" out personhood ? I don't understand this process at all, nor do I understand the epistemology -- how do you determine exactly which rights "drop out naturally", and which ones do not ?
To use a trivial example, most deontologists would probably agree that something like "the right to not be arbitrarily killed by another person" should be on the list of rights that each person has. Most deontologists would probably also agree that something like "the right to possess three violet-blue glass marbles, each exactly 1cm in diameter" should not be on the list. But why ?
EDIT: Sorry, turns out you already answered my question. Here are some replacement questions.
You've said that you will do nothing, rather than violate a right in order to prevent other rights being violated. Yet you also say that people attempting to violate rights waive their rights not to be stopped. Is this rule designed for the purpose of allowing you to violate people's rights in order to protect others? That seems unfair to people in situations where there's no clearly identifiable moustache-twirling villain.
You have also said that people can waive any of their rights - for example, people waive their right not to have sex in order to have sex, and people waive their right not to be murdered in order to commit suicide. Doesn't this deny the existence of rape within marriage? Isn't it, in fact, the exact argument that was used to oppose laws prohibiting rape within marriage? This seems worrying. (Obviously, there are other, similar cases that can be constructed, but this one is a major problem.)
Finally, you mention that some actions which do not violate rights are nonetheless "being a dick", and you will act to prevent and punish these acts in order to discourage them. Doesn't this imply that there are additional aspects to morality not contained by "rights"? Do you act as a Standard-LessWrong-Consequentialist-Utilitarian™ with regards to Not Being A Dick?
I wish everyone in this thread would be more careful about using the word "right". If you are trying to violate somebody's rights, you don't have "a right not to be stopped". You have your perfectly normal complement of rights, and some of them are getting in the way of protecting someone else's rights, so, since you're the active party, your (contextually relevant) rights are suspended. They remain in effect out of that context (if you are coming at me with a knife I may violently prevent you from being a threat to me; I may not then take your wallet and run off cackling; I may not, ten years later, visit you in prison and inform you that your mother is dead when she is not; etc.).
That's a good question, but the answer is no. A marriage does not constitute a promise to be permanently sexually available. You could opt to issue standing permission, and I gather this was customary and expected in historical marriages, but you can revoke it at any time; your rights are yours and you may assert them at will. I don't object to people granting each other standing permission to do things and sticking with it if that's how they prefer to conduct themselves, but morally speaking the option to refuse remains open.
No. There's morality, and then there's all the many things that are not morality. Consequentialists (theoretically, anyway) assign value to everything and add it all up according to the same arithmetic - with whatever epicycles they need not to rob banks and kidnap medical test subjects - but that's not what I'm doing. Morality limits behavior in certain basic ways. You can be a huge dick and technically not do anything morally wrong. (And people can get back at you all kinds of ways, and not technically do anything morally wrong! It's not a fun way to live and I don't really recommend it.)
No. Actually, you could probably call me sort of virtuist with respect to dickishness. I am sort of Standard-LessWrong-Consequentialist-Utilitarian™ with respect to prudence, which is a whole 'nother thing.
Well, sure. I did read your explanation(s). I was assuming the worst-case scenario for the hypothetical, where you have to violate someone's rights in order to protect others. For example, the classic lying-to-the-nazis-about-the-jews scenario.
Not anymore, no. Because we changed the rules. Because of all the rapes.
I ... see, that seems consistent. I assume you can waive the right to abolish an agreement at will, too? That's the foundation of contract law, but I don't want to assume.
Indeed, and that's what I'm asking about. What is this "don't be a dick" function, and what place does it hold?
Huh. Shame.
... what's "prudence" in your nomenclature? I haven't seen the term as you use it.
Utilitarians do this. Consequentialists don't necessarily.
"No. There's morality, and then there's all the many things that are not morality."
Is this only a linguistic argument about what to call morality? With ,e.g. , virtue ethics claiming that all areas of life are part of morality, since ethics is about human excellence, and your claim that ethics only has to do with obligations and rights? Is there a reason you prefer to limit the domain of morality? Is there a concept you think gets lost when all of life is included in ethics (in virtue ethics or utilitarianism)?
Also, could you clarify the idea of obligations, are then any obligations which don't emanate from the rights of another person? Are there any obligations which emerge inherently from a person's humanity and are therefore not waivable?
You wrote that you believe that persons have rights. How do you determine what rights they have?
IANAlicorn, but, since I have the same belief, I'll give it a shot. My imperfect introspection tells me that, since the world where people don't have rights would quickly become unfair and full of suffering (and this has been repeatedly experimentally tested), I want to live in a world where I, my family or someone I can identify with would have less of a chance of being treated unfairly and made to suffer needlessly. Pretending that people have "unalienable rights" goes a long way toward that goal, so I want to believe it and I want everyone else to believe it, too. To dig deeper, I am forced to examine the sources for my desire for fairness and the origins of my empathy (imperfect though it is), and the available literature points to the mix of genetics and upbringing.
That sounds like rule utilitarianism, or a rule utilitarianism-like consequentialism, not like a deontological justification for human rights.
I agree, but that's all basically consequentialist.
A decent justification, but not very deontological. What I was curious about is how Alicorn determines what rights exist purely deontologically, without reference to consequences.
Since I'm no longer maybe going to write a thesis on it, mostly I don't work on this a lot. Not lying, not stealing, and not attacking people does pretty good for everyday. There's sort of an informal checklist when I think something might be a right - the rights have to be reasonably consistent with each other, they're overwhelmingly negative rights and not positive ones, simpler ones are better, etc. This would be easier with a sample maybe-a-right but I haven't examined any of those recently.
If I may offer one —
Suppose that I am photographed on the street outside a place that has a bad reputation (with some people). The photographer might publish the photo, which could lead viewers to believe bad things of me.
One acquaintance of mine, M, claims that I have a right to forbid the photographer from publishing this photo; I have the right to control publicity about me or the use of my image, even though the picture was taken in public.
Another acquaintance, B, claims that the photographer has a freedom-of-speech right to publish it, so long as they do not explicitly say anything false about me. B believes that it would be nice of the photographer to ask my permission, but that I do not have a right to this niceness.
Still another acquaintance, R, says that it depends on who I am: if I am the mayor of Toronto, I have no right to control photos of me, since my actions are of public interest; but if I am a privately employed engineer of no public reputation, then I do have that right.
Why these rights, and not others? For example, why a right to not be murdered, instead of a right to murder one person per year? A once-a-year right to murder can be formulated as a negative right, i.e. non-interference as you murder one person.
(I agree with the listed criteria for rights, BTW.)
Consequentialist reasoning which seems to align fairly well with Alicorn's conclusions (at least the one about it being in some situations correct to hide the truth by being selective even when this in some sense deceives the listener, and at the same time being less correct to directly lie) are touched on here if that's useful to you.
Essentially: You don't know for sure if a person wants general encouragement/niceties or a genuine critique. One way to deal with this is to say something nice+encouraging+true which leaves room for you to switch to "okay but here is what you could do better" mode without contradicting your previous nicety if and only if they communicate clearly they want your full opinion after hearing your careful wording.