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polymathwannabe comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have not yet read the sequences in full, let met ask, is there maybe an answer to what is bothering me about ethics: why is basically all ethics in the last 300 years or so universalistic? I.e. prescribing to treat everybody without exception according to the same principles? I don't understand it because I think altruism is based on reciprocity. If my cousin is starving and a complete stranger is halfway accross the world is starving even more, and I have money for food, most ethics would figure out I should help the stranger. But from my angle, I am obviously getting less reciprocity, less personal utility out of that than out of helping my cousin. I am not even considering the chance of a direct payback, simply the utility of having people I like and associate with not suffer is a utility to me, obviously. Basically you see altruism as an investment, you get a lot back from investing into people close to you, and then with the distance the return on investment is less and less to you, although never completely zero because making humankind as such better off is always better for you. This explains things like that kind of economic nationalism that if free trade makes Chinese workers better off with 100 units and American or European workers worse off with 50, a lot of people still don't want it, this is actually rational, 100 units to people far away make you better off with 1 unit, 50 units lost to basically your neighbors makes you worse off with 5.
And this is why I don't understand why most ethics are universalistic?
Of course one could argue this is not ethics when you talk about what is the best investment for yourself. After all with that sort of logic you would get the most return if you never give anything to anyone else, so why even help your cousin?
Anyway, was this sort of reciprocal and thus non-universalistic ethics ever discussed here?
Maybe that's what it feels like for you. My altruistic side feeds on my Buddhist ethics: I am just like any other human, so their suffering is not incomprehensible to me, because I have suffered too. I can identify with their aversion to suffering because that's exactly the same aversion to suffering that I feel. It has nothing to do with exchange or expected gain.
That is interesting that you mention that, because I spent years going to Buddhist meditation centers (of the Lama Ole type) and at some level still identify with it. However I never understood it as a sense of ethical duties or maxims I must exert my will to follow, but rather a set of practices that will put me in a state of bliss and natural compassion where I won't need to exert wil in this regard, goodness will just naturally flow from me. In this sense I am not even sure Buddhist ethics even exists if we define ethics as something you must force yourself to follow even if you really not feel like doing so. And I have always seen compassion in the B. sense as a form of gain to yourself - reducing the ego by focusing on other people's problems, thus our own problems will look smaller because we see our own self as something less important. (I don't practice it much anymore, because I realized if a "religion" is based on reincarnation there is no pressing need to work on it right now, it is not like I can ever be too late for that bus, so you should only work on it if you really feel like doing so. And frankly, these years I feel like being way more "evil" than Ole :) )