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RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong
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C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"
The application to Coherent Extrapolated Volition is left as an exercise.
An important part of the quote, it seems, is "may be" the most oppressive. Only if the goodness of these "omnipotent moral busybodies" is actually so different from our own that we suffer under it is there an issue; a goodness well-executed would perhaps never even be called a tyranny at all.
But, from the inside, how to you tell the difference between doing actual good for others or being an omnipotent moral busybody?
"She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression."
Having a good factual model of a person would be necessary, and perhaps sufficient, for making that judgment favourably. When moving beyond making people more equal and free in their means, the model should be significantly better than their self-model. After that, the analyst would probably value the thus observed people caring about self-determination in the territory (so no deceiving them to think they're self-determining), and act accordingly.
If people declare that analysing people well enough to know their moral values is itself being a busybody, it becomes harder. First I would note that using the internet without unusual data protection already means a (possibly begrudging) acceptance of such busybodies, up to a point. But in a more inconvenient world, consent or prevention of acute danger are as far as I would be willing to go in just a comment.
For a single person, yes, but it takes a significant investment of time to build an accurate, factual model of a single person. It becomes impractical to do so when making decisions that affect even a mere hundred people.
How would you recommend scaling this up for large groups?
Sociology and psychology. Determine patterns in human desires and behaviour, and determine universal rules. Either that, or scale up your resources and get yourself an fAI.
This is a difficult problem, which very few people (if any) have ever solved properly. It's (probably) not insoluble, but it's also not easy...
Good luck.
Willingness to be critiqued? Self-examination and scrupulous quantities of doubt? This seems kind of like the wrong question, actually. "Actual good" is a fuzzy concept, if it even exists at all; a benevolent tyrant cares whether or not they are fulfilling their values (which, presumably, includes "provide others with things I think are good"). The question I would ask is how you tell the difference between actually achieving the manifestation of your values and only making a big show of it; presumably it's the latter that causes the problem (or at least the problem that you care about).
Then again, this comes from a moral non-realist who doesn't see a contradiction in having a moral clause saying it's good to enforce your morality on others to some extent, so your framework's results may vary.
Both of these will help. A lot.
True. One could go with "that which causes the greatest happiness", but one shouldn't be putting mood-controlling chemicals in the water. One could go with "that which best protects human life", but one shouldn't put humanity into a (very safe) zoo where nothing dangerous or interesting can ever happen to them.
This is therefore a major problem for someone actually trying to be a benevolent leader - how to go about it?
I'd suggest having some metric by which your values can be measured, and measuring it on a regular basis. For example, if you think that a benevolent leader would do best by reducing crime, then you can measure that by tracking crime statistics.
If someone clearly wants you to stop bothering them, then stop bothering them.
"Quit bothering me, officer, I'm super busy here."
I think you entirely missed the point.
As best I understood it, the point was that one's belief in one's own goodness is a source of drive - and if that goodness is false, the drive is misaimed, and the greater drive makes for greater ill consequences.
I think we agree that belief in one's own goodness has the capability to go quite wrong, in such cases as the quote describes more wrong than an all-other-things-being-equal belief in one's own evil. Where we seem to disagree is on the inevitability of this failure mode - I acknowledge that the failure mode exists and we should be cautious about it (although that may not have come across), whereas you seem to be implying that the failure mode is so prevalent that it would be better not to try to be a good overlord at all.
Am I understanding your position correctly?
Partially. Yes, I would assert that the failure mode you're talking about is prevalent (and point to a LOT of history to support that assertion; no one is evil is his own story). However the main point in the quote we're talking about isn't quite that, I think. Instead, consider such concepts as "autonomy", "individuality", and "diversity".
I don't think that helps AndHisHorse figure out the point.
How does Lewis, a conservative Christian, defend God or himself against this charge?
God gave humans free will. Yes, He commands people to act morally, but He doesn't compel people to do so.
The threat of severe punishment if one goes against the commands seems pretty similar to compulsion to me. If I commanded you to do something on pain of being thrown in an eternal pit of snakes, you could reasonably say I was forcing you to do it.
I would also be interested to know how C.S. Lewis separated righteous divine intervention from omnipotent busybodiness if anyone has the knowledge and a few minutes to save me from the terrible trials of actually looking up this myself!
Not only is it "pretty similar to compulsion"; it's the exact sort of compulsion that we complain of in human tyrants. The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn't that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it's that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the "wrong" way.
The kind of tyranny God allegedly refrains from exercising is precisely the kind that no human tyrant has ever had the option of exercising.
(Though that might change, and plenty of people have worried about the possibility -- see e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. For that matter, IIRC the paragraph quoted above is in the context of Lewis worrying about human tyrannies with the ability to mess with their subjects' minds.)
I think Lewis's actual response would not be the one VoiceOfRa gives; rather, I think he would say that God doesn't really send people to hell, he merely permits them to send themselves there, and that the awfulness of hell is not a matter of devils with pitchforks or lakes of molten sulphur but of the inhabitants of hell -- who have selected themselves by their refusal to align themselves with God who is the source of all goodness -- living out the freedom-from-God on which they have insisted.
I should add that I think that's also a pretty hopeless response, though less obviously hopeless (to me) than the one VoiceOfRa suggests. (But also that it's some time since I read much Lewis and my mental model of him may be less than perfectly accurate; perhaps he could give a better account of his position than I have sketched above.)
C.S. Lewis gives his actual response in "The Great Divorce", and it is much as you say. In fact, he asserts that people in hell do not ever want to leave it, so God is just giving them what they want.
As you say, this may ultimately not make a lot of sense, but at least he is not saying that God is being tyrannical.
I'm not sure that "The Great Divorce" is intended to tell us Lewis's actual opinions about hell and how one gets and/or stays there. Isn't he at pains, in his interchange with George MacDonald at the end, to insist that it's mere speculation and not intended to be any kind of statement of doctrine?
(It's years since I read it, so I may well be wrong; in particular, I'm not more than 80% confident that what he says there can't be interpreted as "I expect things actually are somewhat like this, but it's important for the reader to understand that I could well be wrong about that".)
Yes, I think that's right, although I think he would be much more certain that God is not a tyrant, and would be proposing this as one possible explanation.
Stalin didn't only punish people who choose the wrong way but also because he feared that they might be against him. Hitler did horrible things to jewish people and other groups because of their identity and not because an individual did something wrong.
Sure. And Hitler started a world war, and Stalin suppressed varieties of artistic expression that he didn't like, and both of them did plenty of other awful things. I wasn't purporting to give a complete account of all the awfulness of Hitler or Stalin or any other tyrant. I was commenting on one particular aspect of human tyranny, the one already being compared against divine tyranny in this discussion: their tendency to try to control subjects' behaviour by coercion.
I doubt Lewis would be in favor of pestering people to convert, and it is quite certain that God does not pester anyone.
Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert, and it is quite certain that nearly all of the pestering Lewis was familiar with was done in the name of his own God. I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England, they would allow gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy.
The name of the book is God in the Dock because it is about accusations against God--and this is most properly an accusation against the Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) God. It would be hilariously ironic if Lewis were not using it that way.
IIRC, "God in the Dock" is the title of just one of the essays in the book, and many (most? all?) of the others aren't particularly about "accusations against God". The quotation in this thread, I think, comes from one of the ones that isn't.
The quotation is from "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment", which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology", which is the first section of the longer, "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics", also published under the title "Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics".
The essay called "God in the Dock" actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
How does that constitute the tyranny which he described?
Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful. What would happen if an army of Phil Goetz clones were made rulers of the US?
ETA: One might also compare and contrast the writings of Lewis (who did not become a tyrant), with, say, Mein Kampf (written by someone who did).
Speculation about "an army of Lewis clones" is not (direct) speculation about Lewis becoming a tyrant, but about Lewis honestly implementing his principles. His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced (unless you actually do think Lewis would permit gay marriage and polygamy if he ran the country).
No country permited gay marrige until about 20 years ago and western countries haven't permitted polygammy for millenia. Are you saying they were all tyranical?
It's "tyranny" in the sense that Lewis describes: using force to be a moral busybody.
It may not be tyranny if by tyranny if your definition of tyranny requires a certain amount of being a moral busybody, and just a little bit isn't enough to count as tyranny. I suspect that this is the definition you're using, but Lewis's definition doesn't contain a quantity threshhold.
When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis' writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between "this is how people should live" and "people should be compelled to live so" then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
It's true that Lewis separated religious and secular law, but presumably Lewis would want laws against, for instance, murder. It's hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed idea of what constitutes "harmful things", and not want laws against them.
One possible response is that the harmful things only harm oneself, but Lewis believed that such things harm society, not just oneself. Another possible response is that as a practical matter, it would be a bad idea to ban such things, but that only lasts as long as it's practical--such principles would not lead to the conclusion "we should not ban gay marriage" but rather "we should only ban gay marriage if we can get away with it".
fnord
There it is again. You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about how he thought people should live, and why, yet did not lift a finger to compel them. In this, he follows the example of He who Lewis believed the Father of us all. You do not understand this. Well, I do not pretend to write better than Lewis.
BTW, to talk of "banning" gay marriage is tendentious, presupposing that it is and always has been a thing that can only fail of existence by being "banned". What has actually happened in recent years is that there was no such thing recognised by church, state, or anyone, that a demand for social recognition of same-sex unions has developed, and that in various places, secular marriage has been so extended.
I think it's inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it anyway, given that
1) you don't consider personal freedom good in itself or you don't think the gain to personal freedom balances out the harm, and 2) it's practical to ban it
I wouldn't ban alcohol, because of points 1 and 2. Note that if by "harmful" you mean "harmful, in the net" #1 is equivalent to saying that alcohol isn't harmful.
I am skeptical that Lewis believed #1. I find it hard to think that Lewis believed that divorce is harmful by itself but has enough good effects to more than balance out the harm.
And refusing to ban things based solely on #2 would mean only conditionally refusing to ban them. If you don't want to ban divorce based on #2 and society changed so that you could ban divorces without nasty side effects, you should then ban it.
Lewis actually said he didn't want to ban divorce, but his rationale could equally apply to banning murder--it's incoherent.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis' time, have behaved. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
(Yes, religious freedom includes the right to polygamy and prostitution.)
In fact I have several times explicitly stated the same thing you wrote here, as a critique of Eliezer's outline of CEV, which assume (without even noticing it) that a moral belief implies an imperative to propagate itself.
I prefer to determine what Lewis almost certainly believed by looking at what he certainly wrote. The very quote that started this discussion is explicitly saying the opposite.
Besides, it's nearly five hundred years since the Thirty Years War knocked the stuffing out of Christian proselytisation by the sword, and the imperative to force people into belief, or at least practice, has been declining ever since. Further history here.
The fact that they no longer tell people to convert or die does not mean they grant freedom of religion. I'm not aware of any society with a Christian majority that has ever refrained from enforcing its moral rules on the rest of its society. I am aware of probably hundreds, if I added them up, throughout history, that have done so. Find me a dozen counterexamples and I'll listen.
I believe, at this point, that it might be helpful to quote from "Dignitatis Humanae", an official Vatican document on the subject of religious freedom:
To elaborate slightly:
Now, I'm not saying that all denominations of Christianity have an equally strong stance in favour of religious freedom (I've heard about some extremely militant modern Protestant groups, particularly in America). But this is strong evidence that there is a rather large group of Catholics who do believe in the idea of religious freedom; and if Lewis had done so as well, then he would hardly be alone in this stance.
(Dignitatis Humanae was published about two years after Lewis' death)
And yet the Catholic Church and its members still work to ban birth-control in countries where it thinks that's possible.
I don't care what they say they do. I care what they do.
The book is a collection. Lewis did not choose the title.
(The title is taken from the title of one of the essays. It was published well after Lewis died, so I assume he didn't intend them to be a book at all.)
It would still be hilariously ironic if Lewis made such an observation, and didn't explain how he and his God are not such moral busybodies. It would be another example to add to my list of examples of people whose criticism of others is accidentally truer criticism of themselves.
I think this depends almost entirely on how often you expect the busybodies to be wrong when they override people's judgement.
I don't think classifying adult humans in the same category as infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals is always an unreasonable decision. I refer to myself with this sentiment as well.
"Always" is a good place to start.
Could you expand on this?
Only by repeating the same thought in more words, but the original quote from Lewis does that.
See, my problem with the Lewis quote is that it consists largely of a set of bare, unsupported assertions. Now, being unsupported doesn't mean they aren't true, but it does mean that they're not very convincing. Speaking as someone who really is neutral/undecided on this topic, the quote doesn't sway me one way or the other. So if, as you say, the only possible way you could expand on this claim is by "repeating [it] in more words", I don't find your position very well-supported.
Well, here's some more from Lewis, as interpreted by me. But any piece of writing can be read as "a set of bare, unsupported assertions", as the tortoise said to Achilles. The reader always has to work out for himself how the things fit together to make a machine that goes, especially with an isolated quote.
The quote is from an essay called "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment". (You can google up the full text.) The eponymous theory, which he opposes, is that the sole functions of punishment are deterrence and reform. This implies (he says) that the sole standard by which to judge the laws prescribing punishments for crimes is the matter of fact: whether those aims are achieved. Are potential criminals deterred, and are actual criminals reformed. Justice is irrelevant. There is no such thing as justice, only welfare, collectively assessed. This implies the view of people expressed in the quote: to treat them no better than children, animals, or imbeciles. No individual matters to the advocate of this view, any more than a single cow matters to a farmer, who will slaughter it at once if it has picked up an infectious disease. The good of society as a whole is all that matters to this sort of humanitarian; which means, as Lewis is not the only one to observe, the good of the people on top, the would-be tyrants for whom, as I remark in another comment on this thread, a view of how people should live is necessarily a view about how people should be made to live.
I think Lewis's contention in that essay is wrong, because he confuses two claims.
The second of these may well lead to the conclusions he deplores (e.g., that there's no such thing as too harsh a punishment, if it has the effect of deterring and/or reforming). The first doesn't, because there can be other constraints on punishment. (E.g., it seems to me perfectly consistent to hold that what punishment is for is deterrence and reform, but that it is wrong to inflict any punishment more severe than some limit derived from the severity of the offence being punished.)
I think (some) people believe that the sole functions of punishment are deterrence and reform in the same way as they believe that the sole function of cancer surgery is to remove tumours; that doesn't commit them to accepting limitlessly harsh punishment in the pursuit of reform, any more than it commits them to having cancer surgeons remove so much non-cancerous tissue that they kill their patients.
There can be, but but the theory he is opposing knows only these two, constrained only by their production of collective welfare, just as the cancer surgeon cuts out tumours as required for the patient's health. A metaphor that excellently conveys Lewis' horror at what he calls the humanitarian theory. The committers of bad deeds are a cancer to be cut out. Their status as people does not weigh in the scales. The collective is all.
Lewis is arguing that while these two things matter, they are not the only thing, and that when desert (i.e. what one deserves) is missing, one ends up with the moral consequences he describes.
Lewis is less than perfectly clear about what theory it is he is opposing, but whatever it is he claims it is "almost universal among my fellow-countrymen". I do not find it plausible that almost all Englishmen[1] in 1949 believed that there should be no constraints on how criminals are treated other than the overall interests of "the collective"; do you, really?
[1] "Englishmen" should here be interpreted with exactly whatever degree of assumed maleness Lewis employed when he wrote "countrymen".
The nearest thing Lewis gets to a clear statement of "the Humanitarian theory" (as he calls what he's arguing against) is, I think, this:
Now, as it happens, I believe (at least as a first approximation) that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. I don't quite think that "crime is more or less pathological", and nor for that matter do I believe that even a majority of 1949 Englishmen thought so, but I don't think this makes an essential difference here. But I do not hold that there are, or should be, no other constraints on punishment, nor do I hold that the only appropriate constraint is the welfare of the collective[2]. I am pretty sure that these are not in any useful sense implied by the belief that the only legitimate motives for punishing are, etc.; nor do I see any other reason to think that someone who thinks the only legitimate motives for punishing are, etc., should think there are no other constraints on punishment.
[2] I might endorse a sufficiently careful claim that the only appropriate constraint is some sort of global utility, but note that "sufficiently careful" includes, e.g., taking into account the fact that treating some individuals very badly "for the general good" is likely to have all kinds of second-order side effects, mostly very bad ones.
Lewis does not (at least, not as I read him) regard the claim that there are no other constraints on punishment as part of the Humanitarian Theory; he suggests that it follows from that theory, but he is wrong. Specifically, his argument goes like this: (1) The HT, unlike the older "Retributive Theory", is not concerned with desert. (2) The question "is it just?" is specifically a question about desert; it doesn't make sense to ask "is this a just deterrent?", only "will it in fact deter?", and similarly for curing. (3) Therefore, "when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether".
But note what he's done in step 3. "When we cease to consider what the criminal deserves". He is conflating two notions of desert. (a) What punishment does the criminal deserve, on account of the wickedness of his conduct or the harm it has caused? (b) What treatment does the criminal deserve, according to whatever general principles govern how we treat people? The "Humanitarian" theory of punishment indeed declines to make question (a) central, but that doesn't mean it forbids you to ask question (b). And if you refuse to ask question (b) then you are on the road to totalitarianism quite independently of any questions about punishment.
Lewis goes on to say (purporting to describe the opinions of adherents of the "Humanitarian theory") that " the only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures". But, again, this does not follow from the HT, nor is there any other reason why an adherent of the HT should endorse it.
If you prefer to read Lewis not as saying that this follows from the HT, but as saying that it is part of the HT, then my objection is different: so far as I know, scarcely anyone has ever endorsed this "extended Humanitarian theory", and his arguments are not relevant to anyone who endorses merely the "unextended HT" that simply says that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter and the desire to mend.
* * * *
Now, Lewis does write this:
Of course we don't have the original letter; we don't even know that Lewis didn't make it up, or misunderstand it. (Though I would guess that, being generally both honest and intelligent, he did neither.) So it's hard to tell very much about what its author actually thought. But maybe Lewis did in fact encounter an adherent of what I've called the "extended Humanitarian theory". If so, fair enough; let us agree that the EHT is unpleasant and conducive to totalitarianism. But let us not pretend, as unfortunately Lewis does, that the EHT is either the same thing as, or a necessary consequence of, the idea that punishment should be for deterrence and reform rather than for retribution.
Would you object to behavioral nudges a la Thaler?
Would that count as "behavioral nudges a la Thaler"?
On the scale of evil, it does not rank with marching dissidents off to reeducation camps to be purified of their delusions through daily toil for the greater collective utility of the people. Does that answer your question?