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Lumifer comments on My Kind of Moral Responsibility - Less Wrong Discussion
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That starts to remind me of medieval Christianity. The only question is whether you can save souls from eternal torment, anything that happens in this world is utterly irrelevant in comparison, and guilt, yes, guilt is a very useful tool.
Thank you, I'll pass.
I don't even really get what you're passing on. I really would like to understand what your criticism is, but this is way too little information for me to infer that.
I'm passing on hard-core utilitarianism, basically. Specifically, I'm passing on on simple functions to be maxmised with everything else considered an acceptable sacrifice if it leads to an uptick in the One True Goal. Even more specifically, I'm passing on using guilt to manipulate people into doing things you want them to do, all in the service of One True Goal.
The parallel should be obvious: if you believe in eternal (!) salvation and torment, absolutely anything on Earth can be sacrificed for a minute increase in the chance of salvation.
... yes? What's wrong with that? Are you saying that, if you came across strong evidence that the Christian Heaven and Hell are real, you wouldn't do absolutely anything necessary to get yourself and the people you care about to Heaven?
The medieval Christians you describe didn't fail morally because they were hard-core utilitarians, they failed because they believed Christianity was true!
Yes, I'm saying that.
I'm not sure you're realizing all the consequences of taking that position VERY seriously. For example, you would want to kidnap children to baptize them. That's just as an intermediate step, of course -- you would want to convert or kill all non-Christians, as soon as possible, because even if their souls are already lost, they are leading their children astray, children whose souls could possibly be saved if they are removed from their heathen/Muslim/Jewish/etc. parents.
Yes, I acknowledge all of that. Do you understand the consequence of not doing those things, if Christianity is true?
Eternal torment, for everyone you failed to convert.
Eternal. Torment.
Yes, I do. Well, since I'm not actually religious, my understanding is hypothetical. But yes, this is precisely the point I'm making.
Well, my point is that stating all the horrible things that Christians should do to (hypothetically) save people from eternal torment is not a good argument against 'hard-core' utilitarianism. These acts are only horrible because Christianity isn't true. Therefore the antidote for these horrors is not, "don't swallow the bullet", it's "don't believe stuff without good evidence".
Is that so?
Would real-life Christians who sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that Christianity is true agree that such acts are not horrible at all and, in fact, desirable and highly moral?
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror. "Better they burn in this life than in the next."
Various arguments have been made that it's impossible to be sure to the degree required. I don't accept them, but I don't think you're advancing one of them either.
Yes? Of course? With the caveats that the concept of 'Christianity' is the medieval one you mentioned above, that these Christians really have no doubts about their beliefs, and that they swallow the bullet.
Are you trolling? Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?
The real danger, of course, is being utterly convinced Christianity is true when it is not.
The actions described by Lumifer are horrific precisely because they are balanced against a hypothetical benefit, not a certain one. If there is only an epsilon chance of Christianity being true, but the utility loss of eternal torment is infinite, should you take radical steps anyway?
In a nutshell, Lumifer's position is just hedging against Pascal's mugging, and IMHO any moral system that doesn't do so is not appropriate for use out here in the real world.
You're hand-waving a lot of problems. Or you added too many negatives to that last sentence.
You're describing a situation where some people hold factually incorrect beliefs (i.e. objectively wrong religions). And there's an infinitely powerful entity - a simulator, an Omega, a God - who will torture them for an unbounded time unless they change their minds and belive before they die. The only way to help them is by making them believe the truth; you completely believe this fact.
Do you think that not overriding other people's will, or not intervening forcefully in their lives, is a more important principle than saving them from eternal torture? What exactly is the rule according to which you (would) act?
Given your certainty, it seems that it would be easy for you to demonstrate and even to prove that these beliefs are "factually incorrect". Would you mind doing that? It would settle a lot of issues that humanity struggled with for many centuries:-/
I think you are misunderstanding what DanArmak wrote. The "situation" in question -- which it would be more accurate to say you were describing other people's belief in -- was that Christianity is right and unbelievers are going to hell; neither you nor Dan were endorsing that situation as an accurate account of the world, only as what some people have believed the world to be like.
(Right, Dan?)
That's right.
Like gjm says, you seem to have missed that I was describing a counterfactual. I don't personally hold such a (religious) belief, so I can't do what you ask.
But more relevantly, people have failed for many centuries to convince most others of many true facts I do believe in - such as atheism, or (more relevantly) the falsehood of all existing religions.
This isn't because the beliefs aren't true or the proofs are hard to verify; it's because people are hard to convince of anything contrary to something they already believe which is of great personal or social importance to them. People, in short, are not truth seekers, and also lack by default a good epistemological framework to seek truth with.
You're very... cavalier about putting an equals sign between things you believe in and things which are true. Yes, of course you believe they are true, but there is Cromwell's beseechment to keep in mind. Especially in a situation where you hold a certain belief and other people hold clearly different beliefs.
Oh really? You can prove that all religions are false? Let me go back to my comment, then, where it seems I wasn't quite clear. If you can provide proofs of atheism being true, please do so.
Of course, proving a negative is notoriously hard to do.
I try to keep in mind a probabilistic degree of belief for different beliefs. But I do endorse my previous statement for some beliefs, which I hold strongly enough to simply refer to them as true, even after taking all the meta-arguments against certainty into account.
Those are two different things. It's hard to prove that atheism is true in the sense that all possible religions are false. But it's quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I'm talking to have ever heard of) is false.
(*) (Excluding some philosophies which are called 'religions' but don't make any concrete claims, either natural or supernatural, limiting themselves to moral rules and so on; obviously those can't be true or false, proven or disproven.)
The two parts of your last paragraph oppose one another -- given the difficulty people have in seeking the truth, all proofs of that kind are hard to verify. You cannot say "the proofs are easy to verify, but most people do not have the ability to do so." Saying that something is easy just means that it does not take much ability.
You can say that it is easy for you, perhaps, but not that it is just easy.
It's true that the difficulty of understanding a proof is relative to the one doing the understanding. But what I meant was different.
People don't (merely) "have difficulty in seeking the truth", or find the proofs "hard to verify". Rather, people are generally not interested in seeking truth on certain subjects, and not willing to accept truth that is contrary to their dearly held beliefs, regardless of the nature or difficulty of the proof that is presented to them. When I said that "people are not truth seekers", I didn't mean that they are bad at discovering the truth, but that on certain subjects they usually (act as if they) don't want to discover it at all.
What does this mean in this context?
Means "pay special attention to, this is a key expression".
This isn't exclusively medieval. Lots of modern Evangelicals view the world in rather stark heaven/hell terms.
I believe that is still the official Catholic position.
Pascal's wager applied.
Some quote from some "official source" went like "better that we all die an agonizing death than that one soul is lost to damnation".
Kinda-sorta. On the one hand, yes, on other hand nowadays Vatican likes to talk about ecumenism and how everyone (notably including non-Christians) should live in peace and harmony.
As usual, what it means is "better that you die an agonizing death than that one soul is lost to damnation"