Comment on On Caring

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 20:21:53 GMT

But this recurses [...] so it's exactly equivalent to how much harm we expect [...]

For an idealized consequentialist, yes. However, most of us find that our moral intuitions are not those of an idealized consequentialist. (They might be some sort of evolution-computed approximation to something slightly resembling idealized consequentialism.)

So this doesn't change the analysis that the embargo was ten thousand times worse [...]

That depends on the opportunities the person in question has to engage in similar indirectly harmful behaviour. GHWB is no longer in a position to cause millions of deaths by putting embargoes in place, after all.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying any of this in order to deny (1) that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre, or (2) that the sort of consequentialism frequently advocated (or assumed) on LW leads to the conclusion that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre. (It isn't perfectly clear to me whether you think 1, or think 2-but-not-1 and are using this partly as an argument against full-on consequentialism.)

But if the question is who is more evil*, GHWB or the Columbine killers?", the answer depends on what you mean by "evil" and most people most of the time don't mean "causing harm"; they mean something they probably couldn't express in words but that probably ends up being close to "having personality traits that in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness correlate with being dangerous to be closely involved with" -- which would include, e.g., a tendency to respond to (real or imagined) slights with extreme violence, but probably wouldn't include a tendency to callousness when dealing with the lives of strangers thousands of miles away.

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