buybuydandavis comments on My Kind of Moral Responsibility - Less Wrong Discussion
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Wow, okay, so I am not talking about a situation where you can do whatever the hell you want, and I'm not proposing any sort of position that makes you start coercing and threatening people, or taking away people's rights. You are lumping a lot more stuff in. I'm really only talking about how people make causal inferences, and how these result in different feelings like sadness, anger, and guilt. The reason it's good to feel guilty is because it gives you a signal that you are the causal origin of a negative outcome. But then people try to reconcile their scope insensitivity with their causal inference mechanism, and if they discredit their intuitions about scope and locality, then that causal inference mechanism gives you a huge dose of 'you are the causal origin of a negative outcome' signal. That's the 'repugnant conclusion'. The other decision is to discredit your intuition about the causal inference mechanism: say that anyone who focuses on outcomes is obviously missing some larger point about morality, because there's no way that we're all bad people. I'm saying, when you know what guilt actually is, and what it's for, you can stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we're doing successfully half of the time. You don't need to care about the guilt because the system that delivers it was never designed to make inferences of that scope. If anything, the level of guilt people feel when they believe that they should be utilitarians is an underestimate, because of the scope insensitivity! Recognizing your feelings as sources of information about what you actually want, instead of constantly, implicitly using them as value judgments about 'you' due to a lack of understanding, is totally different from saying that you can do anything you want, and that guilt is an illusion.
And I'm still noting that you seem to lack cognizance of the responsibility modality. Causality is a part of responsibility, but does not determine it. Getting out of bed in the morning may causally lead to you getting hit by a bus, or someone else getting hit by a bus, but that doesn't make you morally responsible for the accident.
Again, I wonder if you don't get it at all, and simply lack a moral modality I have.
People clearly get this idea to varying degrees. People often still feel guilty when they are part of a causal chain, even when they "know" they were not responsible. Seeing how that tendency distributes across Haidt's distributions of moral foundations would be really interesting.
As for our emotions and moral intuitions, I agree that one should realize one's essential freedom in how we respond to them. They are all data. We can choose.
For the rest of your post, I'm not a utilitarian and wasn't really interested in commenting on your apparent attempt to ameliorate guilt in utilitarians.
You can do anything you can do.
As I read it, you interpreted guilt as the emotional reaction to being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome. That's not an illusion. It's a mistake to think I held it you were saying it was.