Deontological bars should reference the actor's beliefs

TFD
Sun, 03 May 2026 15:09:30 GMT

Scott Alexander has a recent piece about "deontological bars" in the context of AI safety. He describes the state of the discourse like this:

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an internal debate in the AI safety movement. Some people want to work with the least irresponsible AI labs, helping them “win” the “race” and hopefully do a better job creating superintelligence than their competitors. Others want to pause or ban AI research - the exact details vary from plan to plan, but assume they’ve already thought of and written hundred-page papers addressing your obvious objections. Different people have different opinions about which strategy is more likely to help, and it’s possible to coexist and pursue both at once. But in fact, both sides are a little nervous that the other is breaking a deontological bar.

Some of the people working on pause-AI regulations think there might be a deontologic bar against supporting AI companies. These companies are racing each other to create a potentially world-ending technology. If one company’s product has a 90% chance of ending the world, and another’s has an 80% chance of taking over the world, giving your money/support/encouragement to the 80%-ers seems kind of like endorsing evil. I don’t know if it was encouraged by this question exactly, but someone held a Twitter poll about whether you would become a concentration camp guard if you predicted you could get away with being only 90% as brutal as your average coworker. Taking the job would have good consequences, but is there a deontological bar in the way?

Some of the people working with the companies think there might be a deontologic bar against certain types of mass activism. The sorts of arguments that do well on LessWrong.com won’t give us landslide wins in national elections. That’s going to require things like working with Steve Bannon, working with Bernie Sanders, working with NIMBYs who hate data centers because they’re a thing that might be built in someone’s backyard (or by non-union labor), training TikTok influencers create short-form videos about the dangers of AI, and holding protests where we chant vapid slogans outside AI company headquarters. There are better and worse ways to do all these things, but once you lay out the welcome mat, you have limited control over who shows up - and every time someone tries to create the Peaceful Nonviolent Pause AI Movement Based On Peaceful Nonviolence For Peaceful Nonviolent People, it spends an inordinate amount of resources keeping out violent crazies who want to tag along.

My initial reaction upon reading this was that I don't see how there can be a general bar against either of these things. To the extent that there is some kind of bar, I feel like their needs to be additional details that are being assumed. The case that there is a deontological bar on supporting AI companies is in the context where you believe said companies have a reasonable chance of causing extreme harm, like human extinction. If the AI company in question was some random company that was using AI to help cute puppies rather than a frontier AI company I don't think many people would claim there is a deontological bar on supporting the company. Similarly, the bar on activism presumably assumes that the activism in question is or is likely to become dishonest or extreme in some way. In both cases there is an underlying belief about the nature of the action that is required for the existence of the deontological bar.

In my view, in order for an action of this type to be deontologically barred, the person taking the action (supporting the AI company, engaging in the aciivism) must have the beliefs that make the action barred. Unlike consequentialism, deontology often cars about the intent of the actor when they take an action, and I think that would apply to the types of deontological constraints that Alexander is discussing above. I can see how working for a company that is likely to cause great harm could be deontologically barred, but I think the person who is actually working with or supporting the company must believe that it is likely to cause that harm. Similarly, I can see how dishonest or extreme activism could be barred, but the activist must intend the dishonest or extreme acts. Note that this is different then saying that the activist believes that their actions are dishonest or extreme. In both cases, the actor need not believe their actions are barred for them to actually be barred, but they need to have beliefs such that there is the necessary intent. The AI lab support might need to believe that the lab they support has a relatively high chance of causing great harm, it isn't enough for it to be true that the lab has a high chance of causing great harm. By the same token, the activist might need to believe that their activism has a relatively high chance of leading to violence, it isn't enough for it to be true that their activism has a high chance of leading to violence. If this kind of intent is not required, it seems to me like these alleged deontological bars are simply consequentialism in disguise.

For consequentialism it mostly matters what is true (given that the statements here are statements about the probabilities of various consequences), but deontology cares about intent. As a result, when we evaluate deontological bars, I think these bars need to make references to the beliefs of the person taking the action in question. This distinction is particularly important if you want to accuse someone of violating a bar. It can be tempting to use your own beliefs about the situation, but in my view that is a mistake. If your real problem with someone is that they have incorrect beliefs about the nature or consequences of their actions, it's probably better to the just say that explicitly rather than accusing them of violating a deontological bar that only exists for those that have your beliefs.

Discuss