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Salemicus comments on Open thread, Sept. 1-7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have been considering writing a series of posts on the Just World Hypothesis, but before I do so, I'd like to gauge whether people would be interested. Tentative content summaries:
Post 1: Is the World Just? Short Answer: Yes
Key points:
Post 2: The Just-World Hypothesis in the wild
Key points:
Post 3: How the Just World Hypothesis makes the world more just
Key points:
Your comments would be appreciated.
I think you need to start with defining what do you mean by "just" -- that's a... controversial issue.
I agree - somewhat. But it's not my intention to develop a full theory of justice. My approach is a large part of the outline of the first post - talking about how any useful notion of justice has to be both reflexive, and applicable, and thus showing most ideas of an "unjust world" to be underdeveloped. People can then fill in their own ideas of justice, but the idea that the world is mostly just most of the time for most reasonable ideas about justice should then be centrally focused in the reader's mind.
Without you telling me what "just" means, I don't understand the sentence "the world is mostly just most of the time for most reasonable ideas about justice".
In particular, it's easy to come up with reasonable ideas about justice (see e.g. a large variety of egalitarians) under which the world is NOT mostly just most of the time.
I agree that the notion of justice is hard to pin down, but if you ignore this problem many arguments around your post will be just arguments about the implied understanding of justice. It's better to make such things explicit.
I thought I had addressed exactly this point, by stating that any relevant theory of justice had to be applicable, and talking about theories so broad they swallow fairness. The second basketball analogy is the example. To be clear, the just world hypothesis is essentially "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." "Sowing and reaping ought to be uncorrelated" is a popular theory of justice, but non-responsive to the claim being made. Relevant disputes regarding justice have to be about what it means to sow "good" and what it means to reap "good."
Any? I have a feeling that you have a particular framework in your head that seems so natural to you that you just assume that everyone else also operates on the basis of the same framework. To you it's perfectly clear what does "relevant" mean here and you can true-Scotsman the "irrelevant" theories of justice.
But I'm different from you and my mind reading skills are lacking.
Not quite. That's a theory of causality, not justice.
If I had to take a stab at defining justice, I'd say something like "the positive correlation between the moral worth of actions or behavior and the value (to the actor) of the outcomes". I'm using "correlation" here not in a technical sense, but in a loose meaning corresponding to what a statistician might call "lack of independence".
Note the important parts of this ten-second definition: "moral worth" and "value of outcomes". There must be some underlying theory of morality (usually virtue ethics), some value system to estimate that "moral worth", and there also must be some ways to figure out the benefits of outcomes.
Effectively, what people consider "just" flows naturally out of their system of values and the crucial point is that different people have different systems of values, often VERY different.
Is it? My impression is that very few people would consider the world in which what you do doesn't matter at all to be just -- but I'm willing to look at evidence if you have any. Randomness is not justice.
Right. And that's precisely the discussion of the underlying morality and systems of values.
If your point is that under all human systems of value the world is just, well, that claim would need a LOT of support...
Yes, any. If you have a theory of justice that can't be applied to the question at hand, it isn't relevant to the question at hand. That doesn't mean your theory isn't a good one, it just means it has reached its limits. For example, a Rawlsian theory of justice has nothing to say about whether bananas are delicious.
Well, that's what the just world hypothesis states. You are fully entitled to view it as a theory of causality rather than justice, but you aren't arguing against it by doing so. That is what I mean by "applicable" and "relevant." If you have a theory of justice that neither supports nor contradicts the just world hypothesis, that's all well and good, but it doesn't speak to the questions I'm dealing with, i.e.:
Can you state it in less Biblical and more conventional and well-defined terms?
I doubt that the just world hypothesis specifies what kind of grain I can harvest after planting rye seeds and in a more general interpretation it boils down to "your actions will cause consequences" which is true but banal.
As per Wikipedia:
If you accept this definition of the just-world hypothesis as a cognitive bias then your inquiry into whether it is true does not make any sense.
Third party here, but I'd consider the just-world hypothesis something like the converse of the golden rule: The world will do unto you as you do unto others.
So is that, essentially, the idea of karma?
Those people usually don't talk about it as "sowing" and "reaping". But it is not rare for people to think of justice as some distribution of stuff that you decide on behind a "veil of ignorance" where your actions are irrelevant because "you" aren't any specific person.
Edit: And I did not downvote you. I upvoted the parent of this comment.
Ah, I see. Yes, egalitarians (especially hard-core ones) will say that every human being should get the same "distribution of stuff" regardless of what he sows. That's a notable part of communism: "To each according to his needs...". Point taken.
And yet, this is only about economics and material stuff. Lack of connection between sowing and reaping means, for example, that there is no system of justice in the law-and-order sense: murder would go unpunished, etc.
There are incentives for defecting in prisoner dilemmas. A world where people get ahead by defecting instead of cooperating is unjust to those people who choose to cooperate.
When I try to think of examples of 'just world' culture in the world, the only one I can produce is Prosperity Theology, which is easily used by the rich and powerful as justification that they must be good and deserving people. You'd have to make clear why this wouldn't do that, because divorced from religion this still seems to be harmful.
Are you saying that rich people shouldn't feel deserving of their wealth? How is it better if they feel guilty?
"Deserve" has two meanings. Strong: It would be unjust for me not to have X. Weak: It would not be unjust for me to have X. Some people clearly strongly-deserve to be rich (e.g., Norman Borlaug). Some clearly don't even weakly-deserve to be rich (e.g., a very successful thief). It's plausible that many (most?) rich people fall in the middle.
The literal religious "prosperity gospel", and its various secular parallels, tell rich people they strongly-deserve to be rich: God has made them so and God's judgement is impeccable, or The Market has made them so and is the only meaningful way to answer the question of where the money should go, or whatever. One can feel queasy about this while also saying that most rich people weakly-deserve their wealth and needn't feel guilty about it.
That's not how it works in Calvinism.
Essentially, Calvin believed in predestination (at birth each human is predestined to go to Heaven or Hell and he can't change that) and believed in signs of predestination -- while you can never be certain, you can make, in LW terms, high credence estimates whether a particular person is going to Hell or Heaven. These signs revolved around pious behavior and the interesting thing is that working hard was a virtue, but spending money on unnecessary consumption was a sin. Basically, being a scrooge and accumulating money was a sign of piousness -- evidence used to update the estimate of that person going to Heaven.
I don't think contemporary prosperity-gospel preachers are thinking (or speaking or writing) in those terms.
A just-world-based culture where you show off your success is treating the fact of your success as evidence that you are virtuous and deserve that success. This doesn't follow, and in practice has bad results.
Also, it is better if they feel guilty, because they might do something useful with their money to assuage their consciences.
Are you saying that being successful isn't in any way evidence that you deserve it? For example, does winning all those competitions provide no evidence at all that Usain Bolt is a great sprinter?
I asked this before and got no answer: what exactly are the bad results? Seems to me that if Usain Bolt feels guilty about winning the Olympics, that's worse for him. If everyone expects Usain Bolt to feel guilty for winning, people who would otherwise enjoy athletics won't try and compete in the first place. That's worse for the world generally.
What exactly do you expect Usain Bolt to do with his money?
Usain Bolt is a great sprinter, and has succeeded. He probably deserves that success. Lance Armstrong was probably a great cyclist, and succeeded. He probably did not deserve that success. <Long list of professional baseball players in the 90s and 00s> have succeeded, and probably did not deserve that success. Professional athletics is specifically constructed to be an environment where the deserving succeed, and still frequently rewards players who don't deserve success with success.
And to my knowledge Usain Bolt, despite being high profile and more financially successful than most Olympic athletes, is not particularly rich. Most peak-of-their-skill Olympians aren't. (As a specific example, a large fraction of the US Olympic rowing team has worked as movers (at a specific moving company, which is not lucrative).
As I explained earlier (presumably before you asked the first time, but I'm not clear where you asked that since it isn't anywhere in this thread), in social groups where financial success is treated as being evidence of virtue, manipulative people who acquired that success unethically are treated as being necessarily virtuous, because the world is just and they would not have received these rewards if it was unjust. This heavily rewards unethical behavior that benefits you financially, and tells people who are not financially successful that it is their own personal fault for not acting virtuously enough, not a structural problem that they'll have to work around. It tells people false, counterproductive things.
It may be that the idea you're intending to outline is substantially different so that it doesn't have these effects, possibly by having a strongly-domain-specific concept of "success" and/or "deserve". But if you're measuring it with a naive concept of publically-displayable success and deserving, it's going to have perverse, undesirable effects.
As a side example, consider financial markets, where exceptional success is weakly indicative of unethical behavior, since the extreme difficulty of beating the market honestly implies that those who beat the market are probably not honest. This can range from Ponzi schemes (Bernie Madoff) to engineering derivatives that will collapse in such a way that you will benefit massively while the economy will suffer. (This happened with the subprime mortgage market.) The more successful someone is, there, the less likely it is that they deserve it.
In practice the best case scenario is that they give it to inefficient charities. The worst scenario is that they support nice-sounding but very destructive political causes.
It is true that I implicitly assumed that people feeling guilty about possession of wealth and attempting to do good in order to assuage their guilt will do more good than harm in so attempting. I think this is a fair assumption, however.
That's a fully generalizable argument more or less lifted from Christianity's playbook X-/
I think I'm OK with that, on balance. Most people have a natural tendency to feel they deserve nicer things, regardless of how nice their things are. Having a societal rule that says the opposite will tend to correct for that.
And hey, it's been effective. Why throw away a tool that works because the people who invented it disagree with us? We can even use it more effectively.
I think I'm not OK with that, at all.
It seems our value systems are sufficiently different here. You go ahead and feel as much guilt as you want. I'll pass.
What is the problem with an overall societal rule which compensates for a known widespread bias? I don't agree that there is difference in values here.
Really? You're telling me my values aren't different from yours? And how do you know, pray tell?
Nothing in what you've said previously articulates any kind of difference in the structure of what you value from mine, and you seem to be using "difference in values" as a stopsign.
If you want to tap out, say so and I will drop the point entirely, but I think the reason you have given is disingenuous and want to find out what your real objection is. I'm not wedded to this position; it was a throwaway remark that I am defending because I don't see any reason to reject it. If you have principled reasons to reject this social rule, which would cause discomfort with the status quo and as far as I can tell therefore push society further toward a Pareto optimum, please tell them to me.
Well, all of Christianity is certainly committed to the just-world idea "in the long term" -- see the Last Judgement.
Yes, but the section I was responding to was this:
And in ordinary Christianity, there isn't much 'competing to show off your success', since it will show up later. In Prosperity Theology there is much more emphasis on miraculous financial rewards in the present day.
Ah, I see. By the way, didn't Prosperity Theology have a predecessor somewhere around Reformation? I have a vague memory that some offshoot of Calvinism was explicitly treating wealth and worldly success as signs of God's favor and so were an indicator of being predestined to be saved...
I'm not familiar with it, nor is it mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but it's a plausible story.
Also orthodox economics.
? Please explain what you mean here.