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MugaSofer comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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Again, I suspect this is a terminological confusion - a confusion over what "consequentialism" actually means caring about.
To you - and me - a "consequence" includes the means, the end, and any inadvertent side-effects. Any result of an action.
To Eugine, and some others, it includes the end, and any inadvertent side-effects; but apparently the path taken to them, the means, is not included. I can see how someone might pick up this definition from context, based on some of the standard examples. I've done similar things myself with other words.
(As a side note, I have also seen it assumed to include only the end - the intended result, not any unintended ones. This is likely due to using consequentialism to judge people, which is not the standard usage but common practice in other systems.)
Perhaps not coincidentally, I have only observed the latter two interpretations in people arguing against consequentialism, and/or the idea that "the ends justify the means". If you're interested, I think tabooing the terms involve might dissolve some of their objections, and you both may find you now disagree less than you think. But probably still a bit.
Well, most of the well known consequentialist dilemmas rely on forbidding considering the path, in fact not caring about is one of the premises of the VNM theorem.
As I said, "I can see how someone might pick up this definition from context, based on some of the standard examples."
I don't think it's the intention of those examples, however - at least, not the ones that I'm thinking of. Could you describe the ones you have in mind, so we can compare interpretations?
I ... think this is a misinterpretation, but I'm most definitely not a domain expert, so could you elaborate?
Well, caring about the path renders the independence axiom meaningless.
Really? Again, I'm not an expert, but ...
How does saying that something positive-utility remains good independant of other factors, and something negative-utility remains bad, preclude caring about those other factors too? If it did, why would that only include "the path", and not other things we care about, because other subsets of reality are good or bad independant of them too?
Don't get me wrong; I understand that in various deontological and virtue ethics systems we wouldn't care about the "end" at all if it were reached through incorrect "means". Consequentialists reject this*; but by comparing the end and the means, not ignoring the means altogether! At least, in my limited experience, anyway.
Again, could you please describe some of the thought experiments you were thinking of?
*(although they don't all care for independence as an axiom, because it doesn't apply to instrumental goals, only terminal ones)
To take an extreme example, in the classic cannibal lifeboat scenario, the moral solution is generally considered to draw straws. That is, this is considered preferable to just eating Bill, or Tom for that matter, even though according to the independence axiom there should be a particular person among the participants sacrificing whom would maximize utility.
I don't think that's a consequentialist thought experiment, though? Could you give examples of how it's illustrated in trolley problems, ticking time bomb scenarios, even forced-organ-donation-style "for the greater good" arguments? If it's not too much trouble - I realize you're probably not anticipating huge amounts of expected value here.
(I think most LW-style utilitarian consequentialists would agree there is probably an optimal one, but unilaterally deciding that yourself might lead to additional consequences - better to avoid selfish infighting and, most importantly, perceived unfairness, especially when you may be too uncertain about the outcomes anyway. So that's a data point for you.)
What do you mean by "consequentialist thought experiment"?
Yes, you can always argue that any behavior is instrumental, replacing it with the reason it came to be thought of as moral, but if you go down that route, you'll end up concluding the purpose of life is to maximize inclusive genetic fitness.
One of the standard thought experiments used to demonstrate and/or explain consequentialism. I'm really just trying to see what your model of consequentialism is based on.
Well, we're adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers - the environment has changed. But yeah, there's a very real danger in coming up with grandiose rationalizations for how all your moral intuitions are really consequences of your beautifully simple unified theory.
And there's a very real danger of this being a fully general counterargument against any sufficiently simple moral theory.
My understanding of consequentialism is similar to yours and TheOtherDave's. In a chain of events, I consider all events in the chain to be a consequence of whatever began the chain, not just the final state.
As I understand Eugine, he'd say that in my example above there's no consequentialist grounds for choosing B over A, since in two years the state of the world is identical and being alive an extra year in the interim isn't a consequence that motivates choosing B over A.
If I've understood properly, this isn't a terminological confusion, it's a conflict of values. If I understood him correctly, he thinks it's absurd to choose B over A in my example based on that extra year, regardless of whether we call that year a "consequence" or something else.
That's why I started out by requesting some clarification of a key term. Given the nature of the answer I got, I decided that further efforts along these lines would likely be counterproductive, so I dropped it.
Right, as a reductio of choosing based on "consequentialist grounds". His understanding of "consequentialist grounds".
Sorry, I'm not following.
A reductio argument, as I understand it, adopts the premise to be disproved and shows how that premise leads to a falsehood. What premise is being adopted here, and what contradiction does it lead to?
Um, the premise is that only "consequences" or final outcomes matter, and the falsehood derived is that "creating a person and then killing him is morally equivalent to not creating him in the first place because the consequences are the same".
But it looks like there may be an inferential distance between us? Regardless, tapping out.
That's your privilege, of course. Thanks for your time.
I can't, to be honest. Pretty much all the standard examples that I can think of relating to consequentialism fall into one of two categories: first, thought experiments aimed at forcing counterintuitive behavior out of some specific dialect of utilitarianism (example: the Repugnant Conclusion); and second, thought experiments contrasting some noxious means with a desirable end (example: the trolley problem).
Biting the bullet on the latter is a totally acceptable response and is in fact one I endorse; but I can't see how you can look at e.g. the trolley problem and conclude that people biting that bullet are ignoring the fat man's life; its loss is precisely what makes the dilemma a dilemma. Unless I totally misunderstand what you mean by "means".
Now, if you're arguing for some non-consequential ethic and you need some straw to stuff your opponent with... that's a different story.
They're not ignoring his life, they're counting it as 1 VP (Victory Point) and contrasting with the larger number of VP's they can get by saving the people on the track. The fact that you kill him directly is something your not allowed to consider.
Well, nothing in the definition of consequential ethics requires us to be looking exclusively at expected life years or pleasure or pain. It's possible to imagine one where you're summing over feelings of violated boundaries or something, in which case the fact that you've killed the guy directly becomes overwhelmingly important and the trolley problem would straightforwardly favor "do not push". It's just that most consequential ethics don't, so it isn't; in other words this feature emerges from the utility function, not the metaethical scheme.
(As an aside, it seems to me that preference utilitarianism -- which I don't entirely endorse, but which seems to be the least wrong of the common utilitarianisms -- would in many cases weight the fat man's life more heavily than that of a random bystander; many people, given the choice, would rather die by accident than through violence. It wouldn't likely be enough to change the outcome in the standard 1:5 case, but it would be enough to make us prefer doing nothing in a hypothetical 1:1 case, rather than being indifferent as per total utilitarianism. Which matches my intuition.)
So you're willing to allow summing over feelings of violated boundaries, but not summing over actual violated boundaries, interesting.
That was one example in a very large space of possibilities; you can differentiate the consequences of actions in any way you please, as long as you're doing so in a well-behaved way. You don't even need to be using a sum -- average utilitarianism doesn't.
This does carry a couple of caveats, of course. Some methods give much less pathological results than others, and some are much less well studied.
Summing over actual violated boundaries is also a possible consequentialism, but it does not seem to capture the intuitions of those deontological theories which disallow you to push the fat guy. Suppose the driver of the trolley is a mustache-twirling villain who has tied the other five people to the tracks deliberately to run the trolley over them (thus violating their boundaries). Deontologists would say this makes little difference for your choice in the dilemma, you are still not permitted to throw the fat man on the tracks to save them. This deontological rule cannot be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to boundary-violations regardless of agent. It can, perhaps, (I am not entirely sure) be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to the subjective feeling of violating a boundary yourself.