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SaidAchmiz comments on 2014 Survey of Effective Altruists - Less Wrong
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Comments (148)
One of the main objections to utilitarianism, it seems to me, is skepticism about the possibility (or even coherence of the notion) of aggregating utility across individuals. That's one of my main objections, at any rate.
Skepticism about the applicability of the VNM theorem to human preferences is another issue, though that one might be less widespread.
Edit: The SEP describes classic utilitarianism as actual, direct, evaluative, hedonistic, maximizing, aggregative (specifically, total), universal, equal-consideration, agent-neutral consequentialism. I have definite issues with the "actual", "direct", "hedonistic", "aggregative", "total", and "equal-consideration" parts of that. (Though I expect that my issues with "actual" will be shared by a significant portion of those who consider themselves utilitarians here, and my issues with "hedonistic" and "direct" may be as well. That leaves "aggregative"+"total", and "equal-consideration", as the two aspects most likely to be sources of philosophical conflict.)
Those sound like objections to preference utilitarianism but not hedonistic utilitarianism. Although it's not technically possible yet, measuring the intensity of the positive and negative components of an experience sounds something that ought to be at least possible in principle. And the applicability of the VNM theorem to human preferences becomes irrelevant if you're not interested in preferences in the first place.
I don't see how having a quantitative, empirical measure which is appropriate for one individual helps you with comparisons across individuals. Do we really want to make people utility monsters because their neural currents devoted to measuring happiness have a higher amperage?
I was assuming that the measure would be valid across individuals. I wouldn't expect the neural basis of suffering or pleasure to vary so much that you couldn't automatically adapt it to the brains in question.
Well yes, hedonistic utilitarianism does make it possible in principle that Felix ends up screwing us over, but that's an objection to hedonistic utilitarianism rather than the measure.
I mean, the measure is going to be something like an EEG or an MRI, where we determine the amount of activity in some brain region. But while measuring the electrical properties of that region is just an engineering problem, and the units are the same from person to person, and maybe even the range is the same from person to person, that doesn't establish the ethical principle that all people deserve equal consideration (or, in the case of range differences or variance differences, that neural activity determines how much consideration one deserves).
It's not obvious to me that all agents deserve the same level of moral consideration (i.e. I am open to the possibility of utility monsters), but it is obvious to me that some ways of determining who should be the utility monsters are bad (generally because they're easily hacked or provide unproductive incentives).
Well it's not like people would go around maximizing the amount of this particular pattern of neural activity in the world: they would go around maximizing pleasure in the-kinds-of-agents-they-care-about, where the pattern is just a way of measuring and establishing what kinds of interventions actually do increase pleasure. (We are talking about humans, not FAI design, right?) If there are ways of hacking the pattern or producing it in ways that don't actually correlate with pleasure (of the kind that we care about), then those can be identified and ignored.
Depending on your view of human psychology, this doesn't seem like that bad a description, so long as we're talking about people only maximizing their own circuitry. (Maximizing is probably wrong, rather than keeping it within some reference range.)
That's what I had that in mind, yeah.
My core objection, which I think lines up with SaidAchmiz's, is that even if there's the ability to measure people's satisfaction objectively (so that we can count the transparency problem as solved), that doesn't tell us how to make satisfaction tradeoffs between individuals.
I agree with this. I was originally only objecting to the argument that aggregating utility between individuals would be impossible or incoherent, but I do not have an objection to the argument that the mapping from subjective states to math is underspecified. (Though I don't see this as a serious problem for utilitarianism: it only means that different people will have different mappings rather than there being a single unique one.)
Er, hang on. If this is your objection, I'm not sure that you've actually said what's wrong with said argument. Or do you mean that you were objecting to the applicability of said argument to hedonistic utilitarianism, which is how I read your comments?
To add to my "yes": I agree with the claim that aggregating utility between individuals seems to be possibly incoherent in the context of preference utilitarianism. Indeed, if we define utility in terms of preferences, I'm even somewhat skeptical of the feasibility of optimizing the utility of a single individual over their lifetime: see this comment.
Yes.
Kaj, is there somewhere you lay out your ethical views in more detail?
Ditto for Vaniver and Said.
No big systematic overview, though several comments and posts of mine touch upon different parts of them. Is there anything in particular that you're interested in?
Yes, true enough[1]; I did not properly separate those objections in my comment. To elaborate:
I object to hedonistic utilitarianism on the grounds that it clearly and grossly fails to capture my moral intuitions or those of anyone else whom I consider not to be evading the question. A full takedown of the "hedonistic" part of "hedonistic utilitarianism" is basically (at least) all of Eliezer's posts about the complexity of value and so forth, and I won't rehash it here.
To be honest, hedonistic utilitarianism seems to me to be so obviously wrong that I'm not even all that interested in having this sort of moral philosophy debate with an effective altruist (or anyone else) who holds such a view. I mean, to start with, my hypothetical interlocutor would have to rebut all the objections raised to hedonistic utilitarianism over the centuries since it's been articulated, including, but not limited to, the aforementioned Lesswrong material.
I object to preference utilitarianism because of the "aggregation of utility" and "possibility of constructing a utility function" issues[2]. I think this is the more interesting objection.
[1] I'm not sure "intensity of the positive and negative components of an experience" is a coherent notion. There may not be a single quantity like that to measure. And even if we can measure something which we think qualifies for the title, it may be measurable only in some more-or-less absolute terms, while leaving open the question of how this hypothetical measured quantity matches up with anything like "utility to this particular experiencer". But, for the sake of the argument, I'm willing to grant that such a quantity can indeed be usefully measured, because this is certainly not my true rejection.
[2] These are my objections to the "preference" component of preference utilitarianism; my objection to classical utilitarianism also includes objections to other components, which I have enumerated in the grandparent.
Two replies:
1) Even if hedonistic utilitarianism would ultimately be wrong as a full description of what a person values, "maximize pleasure while minimizing suffering" can still be a useful heuristic to follow. Yes, following that heuristic to its logical conclusion would mean forcibly rewiring everyone's brains, but that doesn't need to be a problem for as long as forcibly rewiring people's brains isn't a realistic option. HU may still be the best approximation of a person's values in the context of today's world, even if it wasn't the best description overall.
2) The arguments on complexity of value and so on establish that the average person's values aren't correctly described by HU. This still leaves open the possibility of someone only approving of those of their behaviors that serve to promote HU, so there may definitely be individual people who accept HU, due to not sharing the moral intuitions which motivate the objections to it.
On 1): I am skeptical of replies to the effect that "yes, well, X might not be quite right, but it's a useful heuristic, therefore I will go on acting as if X is right". For one thing, a person who makes such a reply usually goes right back to saying "X is right!" (sans qualifiers) as soon as the current conversation ends. Let's get clear on what we actually believe, I generally think; once we've firmly established that, we can look for maximally effective implementations.
For another thing, HU may be the best approximation etc. etc., but that's a claim that at least should be made explicitly, such that it can be examined and argued for; a claim of this importance shouldn't come up only in such tangential discussion branches.
For a third thing, what happens when forcibly rewiring people's brains becomes a realistic option?
On 2): I think there's two issues here. There could indeed be people who accept HU because that's what correctly describes their moral intuitions. (Though I should certainly hope they do not think it proper to impose that moral philosophy on me, or on anyone else who doesn't subscribe to HU!)
"Only approving of those behaviors that serve to promote HU" is, I think, a separate thing. Or at least, I'd need to see the concept expanded a bit more before I could judge. What does this hypothetical person believe? What moral intuitions do they have? What exactly does it mean to "promote" hedonistic utilitarianism?
Why would this be improper? Don't that it doesn't follow from any meta-ethical position.
If you say "all that matters is pain and pleasure", and I say "no! I care about other things!", and you're like "nope, not listening. PAIN AND PLEASURE ARE THE ONLY THINGS", and then proceed to enact policies which minimize pain and maximize pleasure, without regard for any of the other things that I care about, and all the while I'm telling you that no, I care about these other things! Stop ignoring them! Other things matter to me! but you're not listening because you've decided that only pain and pleasure can possibly matter to anyone, despite my protestations otherwise...
... well, I hope you can see how that would bother me.
It's not just a matter of us caring about different things. If it were only that, we could acknowledge the fact, and proceed to some sort of compromise. Hedonistic utilitiarians, however, do not acknowledge that it's possible, or that it's valid, to care about things that are not pain or pleasure. All these people who claim to care about all sorts of other things must be misguided! Clearly.
They may think it's incorrect if they're realists, or cognitivists of some other form. But this has nothing to do with their being HUs, only with their being cognitivists.
Here are 3 non-exhaustive ways in which the situation you described could be bothersome:
(i) If your first order ethical theory (as opposed to your meta-ethics), perhaps combined with very plausible facts about human nature, requires otherwise. For instance if it speaks in favour of toleration or liberty here.
(ii) If you're a cognitivist of the sort who thinks she could be wrong, it could increase your credence that you're wrong.
(iii) If you'd at least on reflection give weight to the evident distress SaidAchmiz feels in this scenario, as most HUs would.
No, I don't think this is right. I think you (and Kaj_Sotala) are confusing these two questions:
#1 is a meta-ethical question; moral realism or cognitivism may lead you to answer "no", if you're a hedonistic utilitarian. #2 is an ethical question; it's about the content of hedonistic utilitarianism.
If I intrinsically care about, say, freedom, that's not an ethical claim. It's just a preference. "Humans may have preferences about things other than pain/pleasure, and those preferences are morally important" is an ethical claim which I might formulate, about that preference that I have.
Hedonistic utilitarianism tells me that my aforementioned preference is incoherent or mistaken, and that in fact I do not have any preferences (or any preferences that are morally important or worth caring about) other than preferences about pleasure/pain.
Moral realism (which, as blacktrance correctly notes, is implied by any utilitarianism) may lead a hedonistic utilitarian to say that my aforementioned ethical claim is incorrect.
As for your scenarios, I'm not sure what you meant by listing them. My point was that my scenario, which describes a situation involving a hypothetical me, Said Achmiz, would be bothersome to me, Said Achmiz. Is it really not clear why it would be?
Ethical subjectivism (which I subscribe to) would say that "ethical claims" are just a specific subset of our preferences; indeed, I'm rather skeptical of the notion of there being a distinction between ethical claims and preferences in the first place. But HU wouldn't necessarily say that someone's preference for something else than pleasure or pain would be mistaken - if it's interpreted within a subjectivist framework, HU is just a description of preferences that are different. See my response to blacktrance.
I don't think that hedonistic utilitarianism necessarily implies moral realism. Some HUs will certainly tell you that the people who morally disagree with them are misguided, but I don't see why the proportion of HUs who think so (vs. the proportion of HUs who think that you are simply caring about different things) would need to be any different than it would be among the adherents of any other ethical position.
Maybe you meant your comment to refer specifically to the kinds of HUs who would impose their position on you, but even then the moral realism doesn't follow. You can want to impose your values on others despite thinking that values are just questions of opinion. For instance, there are things that I consider basic human rights and I want to impose the requirement to respect them on every member of every society, even though there are people who would disagree with that requirement. I don't think that the people who disagree are misguided in any sense, I just think that they value different things.
I agree with blacktrance's reply to you, and also see my reply to tog in a different subthread for some commentary. However, I'm sufficiently unsure of what you're saying to be certain that your comment is fully answered by either of those things. For example:
If you [the hypothetical you] think that it's possible to care (intrinsically, i.e. terminally) about things other than pain and pleasure, then I'm not quite sure how you can remain a hedonistic utilitarian. You'd have to say something like: "Yes, many people intrinsically value all sorts of things, but those preferences are morally irrelevant, and it is ok to frustrate those preferences as much as necessary, in order to minimize pain and maximize pleasure." You would, in other words, have to endorse a world where all the things that people value are mercilessly destroyed, and the things they most abhor and despise come to pass, if only this world had the most pleasure and least pain.
Now, granted, people sometimes endorse the strangest things, and I wouldn't even be surprised to find someone on Lesswrong who held such a view, but then again I never claimed otherwise. What I said was that I should hope those people do not impose such a worldview on me.
If I've misinterpreted your comment and thereby failed to address your points, apologies; please clarify.
Well, if you're really curious about how one could be a hedonistic utilitarian while also thinking that it's possible to care intrinsically about things other than pain and pleasure, one could think something like:
"So there's this confusing concept called 'preferences' that seems to be a general term for all kinds of things that affect our behavior, or mental states, or both. Probably not all the things that affect our behavior are morally important: for instance, a reflex action is a thing in a person's nervous system that causes them to act in a certain way in certain situations, so you could kind of call that a preference to act in such a way in such a situation, but it still doesn't seem like a morally important one.
"So what does make a preference morally important? If we define a preference as 'an internal disposition that affects the choices that you make', it seems like there would exist two kinds of preferences. First there are the ones that just cause a person to do things, but which don't necessarily cause any feelings of pleasure or pain. Reflexes and automated habits, for instance. These don't feel like they'd be worth moral consideration any more than the automatic decisions made by a computer program would.
"But then there's the second category of preferences, ones that cause pleasure when they are satisfied, suffering when they are frustrated, or both. It feel like pleasure is a good thing and suffering is a bad thing, so that makes it good to satisfy the kinds of preferences that are produce pleasure when satisfied, as well as bad to frustrate the kinds of preferences that cause suffering when frustrated. Aha! Now I seem to have found a reasonable guideline for the kinds of preferences that I should care about. And of course this goes for higher-order preferences as well: if someone cares about X, then trying to change that preference would be a bad thing if they had a preference to continue caring about X, such that they would feel bad if someone tried to change their caring about X.
"And of course people can have various intrinsic preferences for things, which can mean that they do things even though that doesn't produce them any suffering or pleasure. Or it can mean that doing something gives them pleasure or lets them avoid suffering by itself, even when doing that something doesn't lead to any other consequence. The first kind of intrinsic preference I already concluded was morally irrelevant; the second kind is worth respecting, again because violating it would cause suffering, or reduce pleasure, or both. And I get tired of saying something clumsy like 'increasing pleasure and decreasing suffering' all the time, so let's just call that 'increasing well-being' for short.
"Now unfortunately people have lots of different intrinsic preferences, and they often conflict. We can't satisfy them all, as nice as it would be, so I have to choose my side. Since I chose my favored preferences on the basis that pleasure is good and suffering is bad, it would make sense to side with the preferences that, in the long term, produce the greatest amount of well-being in the world. For instance, some people may want the freedom to lie and cheat and murder, whereas other people want to have a peaceful and well-organized society. I think the preferences for living in peace will lead to greater well-being in the long term, so I will side with them, even if that means that the preferences of the sociopaths and murderers will be frustrated.
"Now there's also this kind of inconvenient issue that if we rewire people's brains so that they'll always experience the maximal amount of pleasure, then that will produce more well-being in the long run, even if those people don't currently want to have their brains rewired. I previously concluded that I should side with kinds of preferences that produce the greatest amount of well-being in the world, and the preference of 'let's rewire everyone's brains' does seem to produce by far the greatest amount of well-being in the world. So I should side with that preference, even though it goes against the intrinsic preferences of a lot of other people, but so did the decision to impose a lawful and peaceful society on the sociopaths and murderers, so that's okay by me.
"Of course, other people may disagree, since they care about different things than pain and pleasure. And they're not any more or less right - they just have different criteria for what counts as a moral action. But if it's either them imposing their worldview on me, or me imposing my worldview on them, well, I'd rather have it be me imposing mine on them."
Right, I wasn't objecting to your statement of not wanting to have such a worldview imposed on you. I was only objecting to the statement that hedonistic utilitarians would necessarily have to think that others were misguided in some sense.
Any form of utilitarianism implies moral realism, as utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory and normative ethical theories presuppose moral realism.
I feel that this discussion is rapidly descending into a debate over definitions, but as a counter-example, take ethical subjectivism, which is a form of moral non-realism and which Wikipedia defines as claiming that:
Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and say that utilitarianism is the theory that best describes their particular attitudes, or at least that subset of their attitudes that they endorse.
I agree that it would often be good to be clearer about these points.
At that point the people who consider themselves hedonistic utilitarians might come up with a theory that says that forcible wireheading is wrong and switch to calling themselves supporters of that theory. Or they could go on calling themselves HUs despite not forcibly wireheading anyone, in the same way that many people call themselves utilitarians today despite not actually giving most of their income away. Or some of them could decide to start working towards efforts to forcibly wirehead everyone, in which case they'd become the kinds of people described by my reply 2).
By this, I meant to say "only approve of whatever course of action HU says is the best one".
Yeah, I meant that as a normative "what then", not an empirical one. I agree that what you describe are plausible scenarios.
In that case, I'm unsure of what kind of an answer you were expecting (unless the "what then" was meant as a rhetorical question, but even then I'm slightly unsure of what point it was making).
Yes, the "what then" was rhetorical. If I had to express my point non-rhetorically, it'd be something like this:
If you take a position which gives ethically correct results only until such time as some (reasonably plausible) scenario comes to pass, then maybe your position isn't ethical in the first place. "This ethical framework gives nonsensical or monstrous results in edge cases [of varying degrees of edge-ness]" is, after all, a common and quite justified criticism of ethical frameworks.
It is a point against the framework, certainly. But so far nobody has developed an ethical framework that would have no problems at all, so at the moment we can only choose the framework that's the least bad.
(Assuming that we wish to choose one in the first place, of course - I do think that there is merit in just accepting that they're all flawed and then not choosing to endorse any single one.)