This is a special post for quick takes by James Camacho. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Religious freedoms are a subsidy to keep the temperature low. There's the myth that societies will slowly but surely get better, kind of like a gradient descent. If we increase the temperature too high, an entropic force would push us out of a narrow valley, so society could become much worse (e.g. nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition). It's entirely possible that the stable equilibrium we're being attracted to will still have religion.
I want to love this metaphor but don't get it at all. Religious freedom isn't a narrow valley; it's an enormous Shelling hyperplane. 85% of people are religious, but no majority is Christian or Hindu or Kuvah'magh or Kraẞël or Ŧ̈ř̈ȧ̈ӎ͛ṽ̥ŧ̊ħ or Sisters of the Screaming Nightshroud of Ɀ̈ӊ͢Ṩ͎̈Ⱦ̸Ḥ̛͑.. These religions don't agree on many things, but they all pull for freedom of religion over the crazy *#%! the other religions want.
Graph Utilitarianism:
People care about others, so their utility function naturally takes into account utilities of those around them. They may weight others' utilities by familiarity, geographical distance, DNA distance, trust, etc. If every weight is nonnegative, there is a unique global utility function (Perron-Frobenius).
Some issues it solves:
Big issue:
This is a very imprecise use of “utility”. Caring about others does not generally take their utility into account.
It takes one’s model of the utility that one thinks the others should have into account.
And, as you note, even this isn’t consistent across people or time.
Risk is a great study into why selfish egoism fails.
I took an ethics class at university, and mostly came to the opinion that morality was utilitarianism with an added deontological rule to not impose negative externalities on others. I.e. "Help others, but if you don't, at least don't hurt them." Both of these are tricky, because anytime you try to "sum over everyone" or have any sort of "universal rule" logic breaks down (due to Descartes' evil demon and Russell's vicious circle). Really, selfish egoism seemed to make more logical sense, but it doesn't have a pro-social bias, so it makes less sense to adopt when considering how to interact with or create a society.
The great thing about societies is we're almost always playing positive-sum games. After all, those that aren't don't last very long. Even if my ethics wasn't well-defined, the actions proscribed will usually be pretty good ones, so it's usually not useful to try to refine that definition. Plus, societies come with cultures that have evolved for thousands of years to bias people to act decently, often without needing to think how this relates to "ethics". For example, many religious rules seem mildly ridiculous nowadays, but thousands of years ago they didn't need to know why cooking a goatchild in its mother's milk was wrong, just to not do it.
Well, all of this breaks down when you're playing Risk. The scarcity of resources is very apparent to all the players, which limits the possibility for positive-sum games. Sure, you can help each other manoeuvre your stacks at the beginning of the game, or one-two slam the third and fourth players, but every time you cooperate with someone else, you're defecting against everyone else. This is probably why everyone hates turtles so much: they only cooperate with themselves, which means they're defecting against every other player.
I used to be more forgiving of mistakes or idiocracy. After all, everyone makes mistakes, and you can't expect people to take the correct actions if they don't know what they are! Shouldn't the intentions matter more? Now, I disagree. If you can't work with me, for whatever reason, I have to take you down.
One game in particular comes to mind. I had the North American position and signalled two or three times to the European and Africa+SA players to help me slam the Australian player. The Africa player had to go first, due to turn order and having 30 more troops; instead, they just sat and passed. The Australian player was obviously displeased about my intentions, and positioned their troops to take me out, so I broke SA and repositioned my troops there. What followed was a huge reshuffle (that the Africa player made take wayy longer due to their noobery), and eventually the European player died off. Then, again, I signal to the former Africa player to kill the Australian player, and again, they just sit and take a card. I couldn't work with them, because they were being stupid and selfish. 'And', because that kind of selfishness is rather stupid. Since I couldn't go first + second with them, I was forced to slam into them to guarantee second place. If they were smart about being selfish, they would have cooperated with me.
As that last sentence alludes to, selfish egoism seems to make a lot of sense for a moral understanding of Risk. Something I've noticed is almost all the Grandmasters that comment on the subreddit, or record on YouTube seem to have similar ideas:
This makes the stupidity issue almost more of a crime than intentionally harming someone. If someone plays well and punishes my greed, I can respect that. They want winning chances, so if I give them winning chances, they'll work with me. But if I'm stupid, I might suicide my troops into them, ruining both of our games. Or, if someone gets their Asia position knocked out by Europe, I can understand them going through my NA/Africa bonus to get a new stack out. But, they're ruining both of our games if they just sit on Central America or North Africa. And, since I'm smart enough, I would break the Europe bonus in retaliation. If everyone were smart and knew everyone else was smart, the Europe player wouldn't knock out the SA player's Asia stack. People wouldn't greed for both Americas while I'm sitting in Africa. So on and so forth. Really, most of the "moral wrongs" we feel when playing Risk only occur because one of us isn't smart enough!
My view on ethics has shifted; maybe smart selfish egoism really is a decent ethics to live by. However, also evidenced by Risk, most people aren't smart enough to work with, and most that are took awhile to get there. I think utilitaranism/deontology works better because people don't need to think as hard to take good actions. Even if they aren't necessarily the best, they're far better than most people would come up with!
Why are conservatives for punitive correction while progressives do not think it works? I think this can be explained by the difference between stable equilibria and saddle points.
If you have a system where people make random "mistakes" an amount of the time, the stable points are known as trembling-hand equilibria. Or, similarly, if they transition to different policies some H of the time, you get some thermodynamic distribution. In both models, your system is exponentially more likely to end up in states it is hard to transition out of (Ellison's lemma & the Boltzmann distribution respectively). Societies will usually spend a lot of time at a stable equilibrium, and then rapidly transition to a new one when the temperature increaes, in a way akin to simulated annealing. Note that we're currently in one of those transition periods, so if you want to shape the next couple decades of policy, now is the time to get into politics.
In stable equilibria, punishment works. It essentially decreases so it's less likely for too many people to make a mistake at the same time, conserving the equilibrium. But progressives are climbing a narrow mountain pass, not sitting at the top of a local maximum. It's much easier for disaffected members to shove society off the pass, so a policy of punishing defectors is not stable—the defectors can just defect more and win. This is why punishment doesn't work; the only way forward is if everyone goes along with the plan.