So, if the government is forcing you to pay taxes it is infringing on your agency and is therefore evil?
The way it is mostly done today, probably yes. However, taxing use of natural resources or land ownership / stewardship could still be done morally. This is not an argument for anarchy.
So what? You make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Use Bayesian expected utility.
It's just something that bothers me about utilitarianism, not something I consider indefensible.
The pushing the fat man to death is the second part of the trolley problem where you need to do it to save the five.
So, is being neutral better, worse or incomparable with being good & bad?
That's an open question. I just wanted to point out that in this case there would be a cognitive dissonance between one part of the brain telling us to defect while the other tells us to cooperate, and my argument is that we should be aware of this cognitive dissonance to make a grounded moral decision.
OK, so you value your own innocence more than you value the lives of other people. But to what extent? What if it's 50 instead of 5? 5000? 5 million?
Your trying to push my concept of ethics back into the utilitarian frame while I was trying to free it from that. Of course there is a point where I value life more than my innocence and my brain would just act and rationalize it with the 'At least I feel guilty' self delusion. But that is exactly my point, even then it would still be morally wrong to kill one person. My more realistic version of the interaction game does not account for that kind of asymmetric payout and it might turn out that defecting against the defector in this situation is no longer the best strategy. I personally would not defect even against someone killing the one to safe the five other than pointing out the possible immorality and refusing to cooperate, staying neutral.
...taxing use of natural resources or land ownership / stewardship could still be done morally.
Why? How is that not a violation of agency?
Also, what about children? Is forbidding them from eating too much candy evil because it violates their agency?
Your trying to push my concept of ethics back into the utilitarian frame while I was trying to free it from that.
Well, either your ethics can be formulated as maximizing a utility function, in which I case I want to understand that utility function, or your ethics conflicts with the VNM axioms in which ca...
Preface
I have trouble expressing myself in such a way that my ideas come out even remotely like they sound in my head. So please apply the principle of charity and try to read how you think I thought of it.
Tit for Tat
Tit for Tat is usually presented in a game between two players where each chooses to either cooperate or defect. The real world game however differs in two important ways.
First, it's not a two player game. We make choices not only on our single instance of interaction but also on observed interactions between other players. Thus the Advanced Tit For Tat not only defects if the other player defected against itself but also if it could observe the other player defecting against any other player that employs a similar enough algorithm.
Second, there is a middle ground between cooperating and defecting, you could stay neutral. Thus you can harm your opponent, help him or do neither. The question of the best strategy in this real life prisoners dilemma is probably still unanswered. If I see my opponent defecting against some of my peers and cooperating with others, what do I choose?
Agency
The reason why there even is a game is because we can deliberate on our action and can take abstract thoughts into account that do not directly pertain to the current situation, which I think is the distinguishing factor of higher animals from lower. This ability is called agency. In order to be an agent a subject must be able to perceive the situation, have a set of possible actions, model the outcomes of these actions, value the outcomes, and then act accordingly.
We could act in such a way that infringes on these abilities in others. If we limit their ability to perceive or model the situation we call this fraud, if we limit their set of possible actions or their ability to choose between them, we call it coercion, if we infringe on their ability to value an outcome, we call it advertising.
Ethics
I propose that the purpose of our moral or ethical intuitions (I use the two words interchangeably, if there is a distinction please let me know) is to tell us whether some player defected, cooperated or stayed neutral, and to tell us who we should consider as having a close enough decision algorithm to ourselves to 'punish' third players for defecting against them. And I further propose that infringing on someones agency is what we consider as defecting.
Value Ethics
Utilitarians tend to see defecting or cooperating as pertaining to creation or destruction of values. (Edit:) Three things bother me about value ethics:
1. Valuations between different people can't really be compared. If we shut up and multiply, we value the lives of everybody exactly the same no matter how they themselves value their own life. If there are chores to be done and one person claims to "not mind too much" while the other claims to "hate it with a passion" we can't tell if the emotional effect on them is really any different or maybe even the other way round.
2. It makes you torture someone to avoid an insanely huge number of dust specs.
3. It makes you push a fat man to his death.
Agency ethics
Instead I propose that defecting in the real world game is all about infringing on someone's agency. Thus we intuit bankers who destroy an insane amount of wealth while not as good people still as neutral because they do not infringe on agency. At least that is my moral intuition.
So infringing on agency would make you a bad person, while not infringing on agency doesn't make you a good person. What makes you a good person is increasing value. Maybe agency is more fundamental and you cannot be a good person if you are a bad person, but maybe you can be both. That would create cognitive dissonance in people who consider ethics to be a singular thing and don't see the distinction, and that might be at the root of some ethics discussions.
Evil
In my version of ethics it counts as evil to push the fat man or to switch the tracks, as that would mean deliberately causing a death of someone who doesn't want to die. I would let the five die and not feel guilty about it, because I am not the cause of their deaths. I make a fundamental distinction between acting and not acting. If I hadn't been there the five would still die, so how could I be responsible for their deaths? I am aware that this view makes me evil in the eye of utilitarians. But I see less people acting consistent with utilitarianism than I see people arguing that way. Then again, this perception is probably heavily biased.
Conclusion
I don't really have a conclusion except of noticing that there exists a disagreement in fundamental morality and to inform you that there exists at least one person who considers infringing on someone's agency as defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.