So what are you supposed to say if you want to hold rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts?

Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves.

Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn't irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I'll have to pay compensation to the landlord.

Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don't understand the state of law, at least in the UK.

This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes... (e.g. you can't contract to be a slave)...

No it isn't, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say "damages in the case of breach" and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It's so strange.

I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.

Look at the following graph of divorce over time.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons

Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).

Now look at the marriage rate:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png

Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn't enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.

There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth

Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44549000/gif/_44549854_uk_pop_226.gif

I would think for the story you want to tell, you'd want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn't hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.

No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.

Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves.

Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn't irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I'll have to pay compensation to the landlord.

Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don't understand the state of law, at least in the UK.

This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes... (e.g. you can't contract to be a slave)...

No it isn't, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say "damages in the case of breach" and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It's so strange.

I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.

Look at the following graph of divorce over time.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons

Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).

Now look at the marriage rate:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png

Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn't enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.

But cheating on spouses in general undermines the trust that spouses should have in each other, and the cumulative impact of even 1% of spouses cheating on the institution of marriage as a whole could be quite negative.

In the comments on Scott's blog, I've recently seen the claim that this is the opposite of how traditional marriage actually worked; there used to be a lot more adultery in old times, and it acted as a pressure valve for people who would've divorced nowdays, but naturally it was all swept under the rug.

I think the major issue House Elves create has to do not with (1) first order reasoning over ethical behavior with other people, nor (2) second order character development aimed at other people (binding pre-commitments to do momentarily irrational things to create certain game theoretic incentive systems with pleasing global properties) but something like (3) "third order moral reasoning" over political processes that include people pre-committed to various irrational character regimes being subject to political speech exhorting people to make similar pre-commitments based on shared traits.

Suppose humans meet "radically different aliens". First contact stories are a staple of science fiction and they can play out in various ways. Some of the pleasant outcomes involve humans and aliens changing their mind about some stuff so as to recognize each other as "people" and get along.

Now imagine that humans create house elves to be capable of speech and eye contact and geometric verbal reasoning and laughter and so on. Only then does this two-species composite meet "radically different aliens".

From the alien's perspective, humans and house elves are nearly identical except for a small fudge, right? Since the humans were OK creating the house elves they must endorse that state as "theoretically acceptable". Therefore it wouldn't seem like that large of an imposition to ask the humans to modify themselves that way, right? Maybe the house elves are actually happier? And they're certainly cheaper to feed!

Suppose the aliens earnestly and naively explained that they would be horrified to have created "house aliens" but they don't want to judge us, and would like to participate in our culture to some degree. Since "alien shaped slaves" make them queasy, and house elves are too small to do useful jobs on their space ships they want some humans to explain how to modify full human brains to make them good servants. And could be maybe show them how this technology works and give them some prototype volunteer slave humans? Pretty please? What could possibly go wrong? And they pinky-to-tentacle promise not to abuse the technology... not that humans can yet read the way their mandibles and multi-facted eyes squirm around to distinguish between delight at the opportunity to make new friends or gleeful appreciation of having found a new already-half-tamed slave species to upgrade a little and then sell on the galactic market...

And then the people who have been complaining about house elves all this time freak out about the creation of more "intrinsically oppressed" sentient beings. And the people who insisted that house elves weren't problematic at all don't want to give those dumb liberals "I told you so" credits so they agree with the aliens that maybe some weird humans can be found somewhere to volunteer so that humans can get some pretty glass beads from the aliens.

And six different philosophers/priests/politicians come up with subtly different takes on the issue and argue amongst each other to make a name for themselves, creating bickering factions of supporters... which makes the jobs of the people currently negotiating with the aliens that much harder, because it obviously gives the aliens a BATNA to try waiting for a regime change and seeing if they can get cooperation from one of the currently-out-of-power factions who are squabbling in favor of full cooperation so that humans can get some of those pretty beads the aliens wear!

Maybe there will never be such aliens? Maybe the general sanity waterline is high enough that no one should worry about this stuff? But if you're unsure of the answers to those issues, do you really want to fudge the brightline definition of "human" that we got for free from evolution? If you've going to fudge it, do you really want to fudge it down instead of up? Maybe keeping the universe of "moral atoms" simple enough for 12 year old kids to understand is helpful to making sure everyone acts morally in the long run?

I think that when bioconservatives talk about disgust and purity in the context of transhumanism, these are some of the pragmatic political issues that are lurking behind their moral sentiments. I don't generally "side" with the bioconservatives, but this is a reasonably good zombie argument that I've been able to reconstruct from their position.

How is lying like this ethical under it?

Consequentialism has no problems with lying at all.

Evil Stupid Thing Alert!

"The Duty to Lie to Stupid Voters" - yes, really

I decided to post it here because it's just so incredibly stupid and naively evil, but also because it's using LW-ish language in a piece on how to - in essence - thoroughly corrupt the libertarian cause. Thought y'all would enjoy it.

Standard rejoinders. Furthermore: even if Brennan is ignorant of the classical liberal value of republicanism, why can't he use his own libertarian philosophy to unfuck himself? How is lying like this ethical under it? Why does he discuss the benefits of such crude, object-level deception openly, on a moderately well read blog, with potential for blowback? By VALIS, this is a perfect example of how much some apparently intelligent people could, indeed, benefit from reading LW!

Let me just bring up one historical parallel to put complaints like this ("if we ease up on controlling and punishing some particular group, this will greatly decrease society's productivity") in context. Such rhetoric was very common in the 18th and early 19th century, and its object was the proletariat and poverty. Here's a paper and an article about old-time Malthusian/anti-worker beliefs held by elites.

"The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness."

"Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."

In my opinion, this justification for class warfare from the top is analogous to such justifications for anti-feminism as seen today.

Tl;dr, from the outside view, the author is not in a good reference class.

EDIT: Downvotes, really? :tips fedora: