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ozziegooen comments on Reference Frames for Expected Value - LessWrong
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You come to what is more or less the right consequentialist answer in the end, but it seems to me that your path is needlessly convoluted. Why are we judging past actions? Generally, the reason is to give us insight into and perhaps influence future decisions. So we don't judge the lottery purchase to have been good, because it wouldn't be a good idea to imitate it (we have no way to successfully imitate "buy a winning lottery ticket" behavior, and imitating "buy a lottery ticket" behavior has poor expected utility, and similarly for many broader or narrower classes of similar actions), and so we want to discourage people from imitating it, not encourage them. If we're being good consequentialists, what other means could it possibly be appropriate to use in deciding how to judge other than basing it on the consequences of judging in that way?
Agreed. This really wasn't my best piece. I figured it would be better to publish it than not though. Was hoping it would turn out better. If the response is good I may rewrite it. However, I do feel like it is a complicated issue, so could require quite a bit of text to explain no matter how good the writing style.
The first reason that comes to my mind is to say things like "X is a bad person", or "Y cheated on this test, which was bad", etc. If we are to evaluate them consequentially, I'm making the argument that seeing things from their point of view is exceedingly difficult. It's thus very difficult to ask if another person is acting in a 'utilitarian' way, especially if that person claims to be.
In regard to the lottery purchase, the question is what does 'good' mean in the first place. I'm saying it is strongly coupled to a specific reference frame, and it's hard to make it an 'objective good' of any kind. However, it can be used to more clearly talk about specific kinds of 'good'. For instance, perhaps in this case if we used the 'reference frame' of our audience, we could explain the situation to them well, discouraging them (assuming a realistic audience).
I guess here the question is what it means to 'judge'. If 'judging' just means saying what happened (there was a person, he did this, this happened), then yes. If it is attempting to understand the decision making of the person in order to understand how 'morally good' that person is, or can be expected to be, those are different questions.