Tyrrell_McAllister2 comments on Ethical Inhibitions - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2008 08:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (62)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister2 20 October 2008 09:39:44AM 0 points [-]

No one else has brought this up, so maybe I'm just dense, but I'm having trouble distinguishing the "point" from the "counterpoint" at this part of the post:

Elezier makes a "point":

So I suggest (tentatively) that humans naturally underestimate the odds of getting caught. We don't foresee all the possible chains of causality, all the entangled facts that can bring evidence against us. Those ancestors who lacked a sense of ethical caution stole the silverware when they expected that no one would catch them or punish them; and were nonetheless caught or punished often enough, on average, to outweigh the value of the silverware.

He then appears to present a possible "counterpoint":

Admittedly, this may be an unnecessary assumption. . . .

So one could counter-argue: "Early humans didn't reliably forecast the punishment that follows from breaking social codes, so they didn't reliably think consequentially about it, so they developed an instinct to obey the codes." Maybe the modern sociopaths that evade being caught are smarter than average. Or modern sociopaths are better educated than hunter-gatherer sociopaths. Or modern sociopaths get more second chances to recover from initial stumbles - they can change their name and move. It's not so strange to find an emotion executing in some exceptional circumstance where it fails to provide a reproductive benefit.

But then he seems to say that this counterpoint doesn't suffice for him:

But I feel justified in bringing up the more complicated hypothesis, because ethical inhibitions are archetypallythat which stops us even when we think no one is looking. A humanly universal concept, so far as I know, though I am not an anthropologist.

I'm not seeing the difference between the point and the counterpoint. Am I just misinterpreting the logic of the argument in thinking that these are supposed to be opposing points? Or, if not, how are they different?