Anders_H comments on Open thread, Jun. 13 - Jun. 19, 2016 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: MrMind 13 June 2016 06:57AM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 13 June 2016 11:46:44PM 9 points [-]

I see in the "Recent on Rationality Blogs" panel an article entitled "Why EA is new and obvious". I'll take that as a prompt to list my three philosophical complaints abouts EA:

  • I believe in causality as a basic moral concept. My ethical system absolutely requires me to avoid hurting people, but is much less adamant about helping people. While some people claim to be indifferent to this distinction, in practice people's revealed moral preferences suggest that they agree with me (certainly the legal system agrees with me).
  • I also believe in locality as an ontologically primitive moral issue. I am more morally obligated to my mother than to a random stranger in Africa. Finer gradations are harder to tease out, but I still feel more obligation to a fellow American than to a citizen of another country, ceteris paribus.
  • I do not believe a good ethical system should rely on moral exhortation, at least not to the extent that EA does. Such systems will never succeed in solving the free-rider problem. The best strategy to produce ethical behavior is simply to appeal to self-interest, by offering people membership in a community that confers certain benefits, if the person is willing to follow certain rules.
Comment author: Anders_H 14 June 2016 01:05:37AM 4 points [-]

There may be an ethically relevant distinction between a rule that tells you to avoid being the cause of bad things, and a rule that says you should cause good things to happen. However, I am not convinced that causality is relevant to this distinction. As far as I can tell, these two concepts are both about causality. We may be using words differently, do you think you could explain why you think this distinction is about causality?

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 14 June 2016 03:33:40PM *  2 points [-]

In my understanding, consequentialism doesn't accept a moral distinction between sins of omission and sins of action. If a person dies whom I could have saved through some course of action, I'm just as guilty as I would be if I murdered the person. In my view, there must be a distinction between murder (=causing a death) and failure to prevent a death.

If you want to be more formal, here's a good rule. Given a death, would the death still have a occurred in a counterfactual world where the potentially-guilty person did not exist? If the answer is yes, the person is innocent. Since lots of poor people would still be dying if I didn't exist, I'm thereby exonerated of their death (phew). I still feel bad about eating meat, though.

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