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curioux comments on Stupid Questions April 2015 - Less Wrong
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Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult and married someone of the same religion with a traditional promise to be loyal to them until death. Divorce was unthinkable to your spouse and you had repeatedly reassured them that you fully meant to keep your promise to never leave them, no matter what changes the future brought. You are now no longer religious and remaining married to this person makes you miserable in ways you are sure you can't fix without betraying who you currently are. Is it moral to leave your partner? Why and why not? (Don't worry, this is a hypothetical situation.)
No, since "no matter what changes the future brought" includes changes of religion.
Does it? It literally does, but you probably weren't thinking that at the time.
Good. :D
Maybe a good method to evaluate the strenght of this objection would be to invent many other scenarios that people are not thinking about when they speak about "no matter what changes the future brings", and ask how they feel about the other scenarios. Then use them as an outside view for the change of religion.
Assuming they only married me because they knew I was never going to leave them, no it isn't.
ETHICAL INJUNCTION:
Any moral reasoning that results in "...and I will be miserable for the rest of my life" that is not extremely difficult to prevent and has few other tradeoffs is probably not correct, no matter how well-argued.
Identity may be continuous, but it is not unchanging. You are not the person you were back then and are not required to be bound by their precommitments. No more than by someone else's precommitments. To be quasi-formal, the vows made back then are only morally binding on the fraction of your current self which are left unchanged from your old self.Or something like that.
Would you not object to your neighbor's refusal to return the set of tools you lent him on account of his having had a religious conversion?
What religion would compel you to do that?
Then don't make it a set of tools but a money loan. He switches to Islam and now things that interests on loans is immoral.
Imagine you're elected leader of a country. The last leader defended against an invasion by putting the country into debt. If he hadn't done that, the country would now be under control of the other country's totalitarian regime. You can pay the debt, but if you don't nobody can force you. Should you repay the debt? Are you bound by the precommitments of your predecessor?
A country that is known to elect new leaders cannot credibly precommit to paying back a loan unless it is in a situation that is robust against new leaders refusing to pay back the loans. So you would in fact be bound by the precommitments of your predecessor whether you wanted to be or not, though the exact mechanism can vary depending on exactly what made the precommitment credible.
Suppose the mechanism is that they're electing people that care about the country. Would this mechanism work? Would you and the other leaders consistently pay back loans?
If the mechanism didn't work, then the precommitment wouldn't be credible, and the people making the loans would have known that there is no credible precommitment.
And thus the country will fall. Since the leaders care about the country, they'd rather pay back some loans than let it fall, so the mechanism will work, right?
That's highly misleading. Empirically, many countries have successfully raise debt, and paid it back, despite debt-holders having no defense against a new leader wanting to default.
I think one defence those debt-holders have is that those countries have traditions of repaying debts.
Another is that, regardless of whether you're formally committed to repaying loans, if you default on one then you or your successors are going to get much worse terms (if any) for future loans. So a national leader who doesn't want to screw the country over is going to be reluctant to default.
Derek Parfit, on identity, talks about psychological connectedness (examples: recalling memories, continuing to hold a belief or desire, acting on earlier intentions), and continuity, which is the ancestral of connectedness. It sounds like you are saying that commitments should be binding based primarily on connectedness, not on continuity. But this has certain disadvantages. If I take the suggested attitude, I will be a less attractive partner to make deals and commitments with.
(I didn't downvote your comment BTW. But I bet my worries are similar to those of whoever did.)
Ah, yes, connectedness is indeed what I meant. Thanks! My point was that, while legal commitments transcend connectedness, moral need not.
I don't consider it moral for two people to make each other suffer for years instead of admitting their mistake and moving on with their lives. That's the result of pride, not forbearance. Still worse if one party suffers while the other remains pleased.
If there are severe practical obstacles to divorce then that's one thing, but even then there are ways around that. It's nothing unusual for a couple to separate while remaining married. For example, Warren Buffett had such an arrangement for nearly 30 years--until his wife died.
--Meatloaf
This sounds like a place where Kantian ethics would give the right answer. I think, there is some point at which it would be stupid to not seek divorce, and some point at which the promise you made is indeed more important, and the thing that differentiates those two states is not whether you want divorce now, but whether which procedure would it be better for people to follow - the one that has you stay married here, or the one that has you divorce here.
Kantian ethics would almost definitely say to never divorce. Kantianism is not the same as Rule Utilitarianism!
Even if we ignore for a moment the fact that Kantian ethics doesn't say anything because it's not well-defined, it's not at all clear to me that this is true. As it stands, your statement sounds like it's based more on popular impressions of what Kantian ethics is supposedly like than an actual attempt at Kantian reasoning.
Okay, thanks :)
The issue is with the decision, so asking "Is it moral?" is a potentially misleading framing because of the connotations of "moral" that aren't directly concerned with comparing effects of alternative actions. So the choice is between the scenario where a person made promises etc. and later stuck with them while miserable, and the scenario where they did something else.
I'm asking what would make you justify leaving or staying.
"Justify" has a similar problem. Justifications may be mistaken, even intentionally so. Calling something a justification emphasizes persuasion over accuracy.
This assumes that different kinds of religiosity tend to converge on similar ethics about marital commitments and fidelity. You could become "deeply religious" in a way which allows for divorce or outside relationships.
This also assumes that your religion's doctrine on these matters remains stable over many generations. If your religious community accepts 22nd+ Century medicine and permits its members to seek treatment for engineered negligible senescence and superlongevity, then you could live long enough to see your religion undergo a Reformation-like event which allows for a more flexible view of marriage and sexual relationships.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I find Ridley Scott's portrayal of Future Christians in the film Prometheus interesting. The space ship's archaeologist character, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), wears a cross and professes christian beliefs at a time when christianity has apparently gone into decline and christians have become relatively uncommon. Yet as a single christian woman she has a sexual relationship with a man on the ship, which suggests that christian sexual morality during that religion's long twilight will tend to converge with secular moral views.
First two paragraphs seem reasonable. To the third though:
Many, many self-identified Christians from pretty much all denominations have premarital sex. See e.g. here. And this isn't a new thing, even among the Puritans this was not uncommon (in there care we can tell based on extremely short times between many marriages and when children had their births recorded).
File this under "things that could probably be said better, but which might be better said than not said given I won't action it for later".
Whenever I see a post or question of the type "is X moral", I have an instinctual aversive reaction because such questions seem to leave so much that still needs to be asked, and the important questions are not even addressed, so even taking a potshot at the question requires wheeling some rather heavy equipment up to do some rather heavy digging as to the values, priorities, risk tolerance, etc of the person asking the question.
Re "the important questions are not even addressed": Fundamentally, are you trying to satisfice or maximize here? Are you trying to figure out the "optimal" action per those values that you group in the "morality" category, or are you trying to figure out which actions have an acceptable impact in terms of those values (such that you're then going to choose between the acceptable possibilities with a different set of values?) Once the meta's taken care of, what are the actual things that you value? Inferential distance is often pretty humongous in this regard, so more explicit often is better.
Maybe a more concrete example will be useful. If I ask you "what computer should I buy?", I should not take an immediate answer seriously with no further info, because I know you have no way of knowing what my decision criteria are (and its kinda hard for your recommendation to align with them by chance.) As such, I would probably want to give you a decent amount of information regarding my relevant preferences if I ask for such a recommendation...am I going to play games? Office work? Might even be useful to specify the type of games I'm playing and whether graphics are a biggie for me, etc.
When I don't see this type of info flow occurring, it feels like a charade, because if I were the one asking the question I would have to discard any answers that I got in the absence of such info about preferences, etc.
Again, apologies for going meta + possibly abrasive tone at the same time. Just trying to help discussions like this get started off on the right foot, as it feels like I see them more and more lately. Probably tapping out.
ETA punctuation.