Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo. Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Research shows that, although people do respond with moral outrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce when secular violations of sacred values are rhetorically reframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The results reveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries on what is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid and forgivingly flexible.
Forgive me for being the party pooper, but this is an another example of research “finding out” information that is readily available to anyone paying attention to human behavior.
Yeah funny. I’ve written about a hundred articles defending utilitarianism and yet I find myself less willing to support those things than is typical. Weird.
Not that weird - these things all *sound* utilitarian, because the closest simple thought experiment is one in which a utilitarian would recommend them.
But all of us know the real world isn't a thought experiment, and things won't actually work out the way the speller of the thought experiment invites us to think it'll magically work.
Except when the real world involves just a steel switch moving steel rails that direct steel wheels - that's pretty certain, so the real world does support the simple utilitarian-sounding thought there.
>Except when the real world involves just a steel switch moving steel rails that direct steel wheels
Huh, when did you last encounter that situation? My biggest beef with emphasizing steel rail-based thought experiments is precisely that real world almost never presents cut-and-dried decisions with perfect information to you, so training your morality on them is pretty much the least optimal thing to do.
It seems to me that the usefulness of appreciating the correct choice in the classic Trolley thought experiment is to *train out* the pernicious active/passive distinction, which underlies mass complacency toward immense real-world harms.
Well, the old chestnuts of "first, do no harm" and "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" are evergreen for good reasons. Of course, the thing you refer to is real as well, the classic "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics" essay is a good elaboration, but even if you may not endorse it, others do, and will treat you accordingly, so taking it into account is prudent.
Because they evoke warm, fuzzy feelings in people who don't think about them for more than a second? Yeah, quite a few chestnuts are like that, now that you mention it. ;-)
No one whom we'd ever describe as a decent physician remotely follows "first, do no harm". You couldn't have chemo or radiation. You couldn't have surgery. You couldn't have opiates for extreme pain, because of the omnipresent risk of addiction.
> You couldn't have opiates for extreme pain, because of the omnipresent risk of addiction.
Ha! Doctors are way ahead of you there - since the Sackler thing, legal prescriptions for opiates are wayyyyy down, it's basically impossible to get pain relief no matter how well attested or legitimate now.
The only situation you can get them is when your specific doctor knows you individually and likes you more than other patients, and decides to allocate a part of their (presumably forever-dwindling) quota of "okay, you can prescribe *this much* without us calling you a quack and witch-hunting you into extinction" supply.
I draw a distinction between "First do no harm" and "Above all else do no harm". The *first* question a physician should ask is "will this harm the patient?" After that comes "will this heal the patient?". This is superior to "First heal the patient" where the physician considers the potential harm of surgery in the light of the benefits that they have already considered and become somewhat committed to, and superior to "Above all else do no harm" where the physician considers the potential harm of surgery and says "welp, my only responsibility is avoiding harm, no surgery for you."
Those old chestnuts exist because real-world outcome are subject to both limited information and probabilistic outcome. Contrived trolly-experiences are unrealistically clear. It is a classic map is not the territory, type issue. Sometimes a simplified example allows for a better examination of the primary principles involved, but in this case I think it shows how our intuitions are actually more tied to the practical uncertainties.
Right. That's my point. It's the only thought experiment where our intuitions are reliable, because it's the only thought experiment where reality behaves like a thought experiment.
Thought experiments aren't about training morality - they're about testing theories of morality to see if they agree with what we pre-theoretically believed. People claim utilitarianism is wrong because it gives the "wrong answer" in many thought experiments. But that's because those thought experiments (other than the trolley problem) aren't realistic.
As a utilitarian myself, I'd say there are plenty of very real situations where utilitarianism gives an answer that conflicts with normal Human-Moral-Intuition. For example if you have to lie, cheat or, betray someone. I think a good fraction of utilitarians will face at least one situation in their life where they have to do one of those in a non-trival way.
I'm not clear what you are suggesting here? There are mountains of cultural narratives where some form of deceit or betrayal is lauded for the overall good it enabled. Often those are portrayed as "necessary evils" - but isn't that fully aligned with utilitarianism?
I'm a little confused by your question. I just mean to say that the idea that utilitarianism has unintuitive implications is correct and that's ok; all theories do - it's just that they are usually too vague to have any implications at all. Of course, utilitarians should be mindful of hubris and selfish-rationalization etc., but there are still real cases where unpalatable "greater-good" reasoning is appropriate.
When presented with The Trolley Problem, it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to think of Sophie Zawistowska at Auschwitz giving up Eva to save her son.
Now see, I always thought the trolley experiment was a good example of the hazard of what you call out as magical thinking.
You say steel rails, certainty. I say, if you, laymen bystander, see a speeding train, PLEASE dont run over and flip a switch just in front of it. You are more likely to derail the train than save any lives.
I'm one of the critics who strongly rejects utilitarianism and consequentialism –– and I'm also pretty strongly against the list of things you list as things you're against. I think they're bad ideas for reasons mostly orthogonal to utilitarianism, so I don't think this list really gets at anything about utilitarianism.
Yes, and conversely it is possible to argue for those things from a non utilitarian perspective. He bizarrely writes as though he thought it was self evident that non utilitarians would be against those things (“These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good”).
I agree. The list had fairly simple what I consider to be utilitarian arguments in the other direction as well. It felt very unpersuasive if his point was that it seems odd for a utilitarian not to espouse those values.
It also gets to the heart of confusion around situational and rule-based utilitarian meta-games. It might be better to have social norm or laws that produce downside outcomes, or result in social nash-equilibria or whatnot. In fact you could make strong utilitarian cases for every position he cites.
Though I'm slightly partial to the belief that nearly all universalist moral systems are utilitarian in some higher-order sense. If the you believe "my entire belief system will make everyone better off" as surely most modern ones do, then how isn't it utilitarian? At that point aren't we just arguing about the granularity of rules and tradeoffs within the system as a whole, or empirical considerations up with which the specifics rest?
I think you're really referring to consequentialism, and when used in that context, where "all ethical forms are really a kind of consequentialism" -- well, yes.
But that's kind of a circular definition: the point of all moral / ethical system is to make the world a better place, ultimately -- it's just that what counts as a "better world" is hugely important, and keeping consequentialism or utilitarianism so broad makes them effectively meaningless.
Utilitarianism, to me, carries an implication of being able to actually in some way *calculate* what is the "greatest utility" (at least in the rationalist understanding of utilitarianism). That one can objectively determine the best outcome. Scott's formulation seems to be that it's a good tool for choosing between two (or even several) well-defined options; I think that makes a lot of sense. But when utilitarianism starts to stand on its own, and needs to account for a more full set of moral theory, well, it doesn't generalize well, and often leads to absurdity. That doesn't make it particularly different from most other rigid ethical systems; they all fail when they try to universalize.
I don't know how this could make sense. What is a non-consequential reason for being against the list of things you are against? I would be very surprised if that didn't cash out ultimately in some consequential reasoning about what sorts of actions lead to human flourishing. Even Aristotle is consequentialist about things like those found on the list, i.e. things concerning political order and prudence. (And Kant can't help but use just a bit of consequentialism to justify the Categorical Imperative.)
This is a common mistake made by naive consequentialists. "Consequentialism" is not the trivial claim that consequences matter. Everyone, including Aristotle, holds that consequences matter. Rather, "consequentialism" is the claim that, in some strong sense, *only* consequences matter. Aristotle is absolutely not a consequentialist, correctly understood, in regard to the political order, or anything else.
So, what could possibly matter besides consequences? Lots of things. Like virtues and norms.
Here, the consequentialist will try to play an obvious and familiar trick: reductionism. "Surely, virtues and norms and anything else can only possibly matter because of their consequences?" But this is only true in an equivocal and weak sense. Virtue and norms matter "because of their consequences" only by taking the "integral of the function" over long periods of time: not merely over one's own lifetime, but over very many generations. And this results in a very different analysis from looking at the identifiable consequences of particular actions, one that is simply incorrect to call "consequentialism."
I see what you’re getting at. Could we not simply differentiate first order consequences from second, third, etc? I think the issue in modern philosophy is that every reason for doing something hard probably eventually needs to cash out to some kind of tangible benefit, whether that’s avoiding moral hazard, setting fair precedents, or much more direct stuff like feeding people. We don’t have sacred virtues or religion to reach for like the ancients, and we need to answer that series of “but why”s or any moral choice we might make looks pretty arbitrary.
It's true that virtues and norms matter, in part, because of the second- and third-order consequences of actions. Consequentialists often protest that, when they say "consequences," they mean to include the latter. The problem is that, in practice, they don't, and the protest becomes a classic motte-and-bailey. Higher-order consequences are difficult to explicitly model in the way rationalists like, so in practice, they usually just get dropped.
I believe that it is cleaner and more honest to treat virtues and norms as first-class objects, rather than as "mere" heuristic summaries of higher-order consequences.
You are mostly like me, except I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth. The fact that the harm of not going to school is distant doesn’t factor.
Scott has written before about the downsides of public schooling, and it’s not exactly an unpopular view around here. So not so much a distant harm to avoiding public schools but an immediate benefit of alternative schooling. Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone in every environment, but if you’re unfamiliar with the arguments maybe check out Caplan’s The Case Against Education.
My younger brother and I each graduated from one of the nation's first and most successful public "alternative" high schools, attendance at which was entirely voluntary. (In the sense that nobody was assigned to it you had to decide to attend it.) Its curriculum was explicitly designed in reaction against traditional American school pedagogy and practices. That included, for more than half the teachers, being explicitly indifferent about whether students felt the need to show up in classrooms (we could instead do independent-study programs). It was a great experience for both my brother and I and we each thrived at that school.
Neither of us though opposes compulsory schooling including in places where the only version of it available is the traditional one. That's because as well as seeing the upsides of breaking out of that model we also saw the downsides, which were just as powerful for some kids as the upsides were for us personally. If not moreso actually.
Best is for families to have choices -- traditional schools both public and private, home schooling, religious schools if that's their thing, variations on the trad school model like STEM or arts focused magnet schools, etc. [Indeed in my case I ended up at that alternative school after having emphatically demonstrated that traditional high schools were not ever going to be my path and my mother was frankly grasping at straws.] Obviously such a range of options is not practical outside of significant population centers. As a parent I've consciously chosen to live in places where such a range of options is available but I'm relatively privileged so could do that.
There does though have to be a default general way of trying to get all children up to a certain basic level of functional education. Compulsory schools still seem like the most effective default setup all things considered. They don't need to be viewed as anything more than that.
Attendance-optional schooling sounds like an interesting concept and I’m sure it works well for some (probably a fairly small group I suppose). But when Scott opposes “mandatory public schooling” I’m guessing his issue is more with the “public” and less with the “mandatory”. I don’t see any issue with parents forcing their kids to go to school, but the government forcing parents to send their kids to a particular school is a problem, especially considering the state of the education system.
It's not the parents' rights that are being violated (under the view that school is a truly awful experience). It's the child. Parents forcing kids to go to school would absolutely be a problem.
The disconnect here is that you feel school is at most marginally unpleasant while being very beneficial long term. There are some people who felt that school was worse than many other things we'd consider to be child abuse and that the benefits are dubious. Under that framework, giving the parents the choice is akin to letting parents choose whether to sell their children to forced-labor camps instead of forcing parents to do so: it's better, but many kids would still be sold to labor camps against their will (assuming a hypothetical society that's okay with that sort of thing).
This wasn't my experience in school, and I'm not convinced school should be optional. But I'm not going to deny that some people had the terrible experience they say they did and under those assumptions (terrible experience for little benefit), being against forced schooling is reasonable.
My experiences from school were pretty worthless (from an educational standpoint) and negative (from a social standpoint) until I got to college. It felt like I had to waste 12 years doing pointless busywork, then go into debt before I was allowed to start learning anything interesting or properly challenging. I also see real value in apprenticeships starting from a young age, to the point where I’d support a system that detractors would call child labor. Thanks to OSHA I don’t think there are any working environments left that are truly dangerous enough to disallow children on that basis (the children yearn for the mines, let them mine!)
I’ll argue against sending your kids to public school til my face turns blue. That being said, allowing children to make those decisions for themselves doesn’t seem like a workable solution to me, for at least 99% of people.
I really agree with this, just with a little bit less certainty.
What I'm unsure about are the exact numbers of how many would benefit and how many would suffer if grade school were optional. Scott Alexander, in my opinion, is not your average writer and probably wasn't your average student. He's a really excellent writer with one of the best substacks in its category. He says he was miserable in school and I don't really doubt he would have been better off (happier) without mandatory grade school. There are many kids who are naturally bright and curious and would probably do just as well in life if they didn't have to sit through K-12, and could get an earlier start on doing things more interesting and useful to them.
But people (adults and children alike) will also act against their own best long-term interests if given the choice. Most overweight people continue to eat too much when they have access to delicious food even if they'd like to lose weight (a somewhat tautological statement as the ones who don't are no longer overweight). I'm sure most kids would rather play video games or watch TV than do their homework assignment if given the choice (as would most adults). Giving people the freedom to harm themselves isn't a problem unique to children because children are dumber or something. But it is a problem. Adults are incentivized to work because they need money. I'm not sure what would incentivize kids to attend school if it were their own choice.
My uncertainty stems from stems from the questions: What percentage of kids actually benefit from K-12? How much? How many kids are truly miserable at school? How much would they learn doing whatever they would do as an alternative to school (eg self-study, apprenticeship, etc)? How would we incentivize people to prioritize their long-term well-being over short-term gratification?
My suspicion is that school caters most to students in the middle and kids at either extreme (very smart or very dumb) see the least benefit from school. And on top of that, a lot of schools are just low-quality all around.
Traditional schools still steal a lot more time than necessary. If you want to teach the basics (Basic Arithmetic and Primary Language skills + civic/political education), something like a Sunday school for a few years would probably suffice. Even if you have to make it compulsory, you can shorten the duration of the compulsory part.
To quote Scott from "Book Review: The Cult of Smart"
"Did you know that when a superintendent experimented with teaching no math at all before Grade 7, by 8th grade those students knew exactly as much math as kids who had learned math their whole lives? Sure, cut out the provably-useless three hours a day of homework, but I don't think we've even begun to explore how short and efficient school can be."
Right, but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value. Which imo is a pretty big indictment against anyone making a “greater good” argument for mandatory public schooling. If the value is primarily in signaling, then doesn’t making it optional send an even stronger signal?
> Right, but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value
There's some truth to this for a Harvard BA, but I'm not convinced there's a lot of it for K-12. The average kid who doesn't go to school (and doesn't have parents who are interested in a strong well-designed home-schooling program) just winds up illiterate and innumerate.
My five-year-old is at school right now. I don't send her because I think it will help with signalling later in life, I send her so that she can darn well learn to read and write, and all the other stuff of which she's currently ignorant.
(Side note: I've been trying to teach her to read since she was three and she's shown no interest in the idea, but she's made more progress in the one month she's been in school than in the previous years. I'm not sure whether that's because the teachers are better at teaching basic literacy than I am, or whether she's just a lot more motivated to learn it when she sees other kids doing it too.)
Ok sure, if you’re not shooting for an elite university, signaling has dubious value at that level. But then again the people who attend elite universities have an outlandishly outsized impact on our country’s future, and signaling for them begins by preschool. Hell, there’s even signaling value in the zip code you grew up in...
Then from the opposite end, there’s also signaling in the determination of the curriculum. Signaling how important you think arts and crafts is for the proper development of our precious children, is so blue it hurts...
> but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value.
It's also primarily about tertiary education, which can act as a signal because not everyone has it. So it's still pretty irrelevant to compulsory secondary education.
This may very well be true for US rationalist/libertarian circles, but AFAIK in the wider world, the idea of equating schools to prisons for children is even more fringe than the “taxes are theft” slogan, so is very puzzling that Scott treats it like a moral axiom here.
Is it of any significance that the absolute majority of parents and other adults that attended schools when young consider schools as a net good for self interest reasons (of them and their children) and not necessarily for the public good, or should we assume everyone educated by "the system" is brainwashed to think in this way and all those people’s opinions on this topic should be dismissed? /s
This makes me wonder if your schools are actually better than ours. I also wonder if most people feel that school was a net benefit, or rather feel their life turned out better than they deserved and thus feel an obligation to attribute that to something...
Plus, public schooling actually gives children more liberty because then their lives are ruled by two separate estates rather than just one. If one of those is being abusive or negligent, there is still a chance that the other one will help. If your homeschooling mom is a fundamentalist, you're screwed.
If the focus of the issue here is the child's well-being and self-determination, I don't get why "separating children from their parents" is taboo (even when the kids still get to see their parents daily) while "forcing children to stay with their parents" isn't. Isn't it just a relic from the time when children were regarded as their parents' property?
Hard to believe that teachers beating kids in a US public school is a common thing in this day and age. "Being beaten" is much much more common at home, where most parents spank. If anything, school rescues them from "being beaten".
Fights between kids happen outside school too, believe it or not.
Unless you plan to keep your kids at home, never allowed to leave the house to meet other kids. And with no siblings either, because siblings fight a lot.
If they're outside of school, they're far more likely to be resolved in a proper manner instead of being swept under the rug, or "both sides" arbitrariness.
You changed getting beaten to "fighting", and you're including common sibling fighting. Those two things are not the same. You replaced something awful with something mild, two-sided, and normal.
Bullying can happen many places but the bullied person needs to be in a situation where they can't just avoid their bully. If some kid in a park is beating up another kid, the kid just won't go to that park. School forces you to go back to where you're getting bullied every weekday.
It does happen - usually they know better than to leave marks, so they do stuff like taking a book and making like they're going to wallop you in the face with it but deliberately miss, or hold you down and force you to breathe smelling salts. Early on they really liked putting me in a chokehold for some reason.
I did get just straight up pushed over and kicked in the ribs once though, and I got picked up and thrown when I was little. That last one was an administrator rather than a teacher.
Except you're arguing that the parents shouldn't get to apply those checks. They have to leave their kids in public school regardless of what the school does.
Hi, I was homeschooled by a fundamentalist mom for one year. Best year of school I've had. I did have to go back to public school for 6-12 grades though because she wasn't enough of an expert on all the different subjects.
Forgive my ignorance on the topic but homeschooling is definitely something I plan to look into if I have kids. Was this a self-imposed decision by your parents or were you forced back to public school? Is there some kind of competency certification for parent-teachers?
(I imagine it probably varies substantially by state but would appreciate any general info)
It was a self-imposed decision after we noticed I had gotten 2 years ahead in math but 1 year behind in English and history. I don't know much about certification other than it depends on the state. I remember still having to go to school a couple days to take the state tests. My mom did happen to be a certified English (as a second language) teacher working at a public school, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't necessary.
She pretty much just gave me a math textbook and told me to do a chapter every day. When it ran out, we got a new one. (We later found out the chapters were intended to take a week.) I was supposed to be self-studying science off wikipedia as well, but I wasn't satisfied with how that turned out. I didn't know what questions to ask, so I think a textbook would have been better. She'd also occasionally suggest I write an essay, but I never did.
My experience with regard to education via textbooks, is that if you actually want to understand the material, the textbook is usually a better teacher, but if you want to pass the tests, a teacher is infinitely more "efficient". If you're reasonably intelligent, you can do the homework and pass the tests based solely on in-class lectures without ever even opening the assigned textbook, but you're really doing yourself a disservice. If I had to choose exclusively textbook learning for my kid, or exclusively in-person lectures, I would expect the textbook to produce better results.
In California when we home unschooled our kids it was effectively unregulated. You signed some forms making your home a school, were supposed to keep some records that nobody ever asked you for. That was more than ten years ago; I don't know the situation at present.
Parents don't have to know everything covered in high school, both because you don't have to learn all those things — the HS curriculum is a mostly a random selection from a much larger set of things that are worth learning for some people, useless for others — and because you can learn things from books and online.
In strictly utilitarian term the assumption you are making is that the likelihood of the parents making good choices for their children is on the same order of magnitude as the state making good choices for the child and so the diversification here is good.
The heuristic of let families decide what is best for their children is based on the assumption that parents are far, far, more likely to make good decisions in the best interest of their child than is the state. I think reality supports that assumption. Whatever examples of bad parenting you can bring up, there will be 10+ times more of bad state-ing.
There is still the mechanism of the state overriding the parents though even in places that allow home schooling. Its called child services in the US. As an institution it is probably fine, but society should demand a huge burden of proof on the state anytime they propose such an intervention. It should not just be the default position.
The parents are forced to give up their kids to school. In my country (Germany). Admittedly, most parents are most of the time very happy for this "free day-care" + a chance the kid might learn sth.. Then again, if we want to fly to my wife's family, on the other side of the planet, for a month, but school-vacations are only 2 weeks ... you are in trouble deep and at the mercy of a system not eager to be merciful. (On the last two days before vacation, you need to come in person to school to excuse a sick kid - because else parents might just take their kid a day early for vacation. 'Inconceivable'. I assume, all are aware how much learning is happening last day of school.)
Well, Scott did not write "in the US". Home-schooling is not a crime in (most of?) the US, but school is compulsory in many countries - and even in the USofA the state-school system tends to strongly "nudge" parents to sent their kids into far-from-perfect (often miserable) state-schools (Scott knows that even many private schools are far from perfect - he taught English to kids in Japan). Still, in all those countries most people claim the suffering of kids is something to accept or even cherish for some "greater good". Utilitarianism in extremo.
I'm guessing you don't know much about homeschooling. Also, seems like you are not taking into consideration the harm school does. Is it unthinkable to you that it does harm? I am absolutely positive it harmed me. And I had an easier time of it than a lot of gifted people I've met.
I wouldn't say school harmed me. I went to what was probably the best private school in Illinois, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us spent most of our time in school being bored. We thought we could do better for our kids.
That isn't the choice. It ought not to be a choice whether or not to educate your children, but how they are educated ought to be a choice of the family. One option can be public schooling.
Isn't this the world we already live in? You can choose public school, homeschool, or private school. Help me out, I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
I honestly don't know about what one must do for educating one's children. I assumed if you didn't send your kids to public school then you had to actively opt-out somehow, indicating you were doing something different.
I was responding to "I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth." The kids don't have the choice, but the parents should.
Oh okay, I read it as advocating for the status quo (kids must go to school but it doesn't have to be public school) and against some unspecified change Scott was implying in the post.
Yeah I think OP was confused thinking Scott was suggesting leaving it up to the kids (which is laughably absurd imo) but I’m pretty sure his position is actually just not leaving it up to the state.
you are giving the parents the choice, not the kids the choice. The heuristic is parents know best, or can be relied on to consider their childs best interest far more than can the state.
I agree that if Scott’s standard is that compulsion of kids to do things they don’t want to do “for the greater good” is bad, a lot baby is going to get swept up with that bath water.
I am also fine with compulsory education, but I think you're treating the opposite of government enforced schooling with 'kids get to decide' instead of with 'parents get to decide' (which may be Scott's view?).
I could be wrong, maybe you think the government ought to make laws about dental care. Missing dental appointments or poor care revealed at them should result in fines or imprisonment, and government inspectors should routinely enter your house to check whether you've locked the sissors away from the kids?
The distinction between “moral rule” and “greater good” seems quite arbitrary here.
One could say that the “moral rule” is that lies are bad, and that free speech is merely a utilitarian justification for allowing lies.
I don’t know if there’s a “moral rule” against removing people from places for 7 hours a day. “Forcible separation” sounds like a bit of a stretch—the connotation of forced separation implies significantly longer separation.
One could have a moral rule that says “don’t knowingly incite mobs to kill Asians”—but view wipe spread dissemination of truth about COVID a necessary measure to advance society.
One could believe that there is a moral obligation to protest through the most visible means—irrespective of effectiveness—but decide not to annoy some people for fear of consequences.
I think you may be rather more charitable here than necessary or perhaps defensible. People largely like in-group causes and dislike out-group causes. Thinking seriously about the pros and cons weakens the sense of innate rightness on our side. Scott we're clearly facing inhuman barbarians here, we don't need any bean-counting to dtermine our rectitude in the face of such evil.
You tangentially reminded me of a really old (2009) Scott essay arguing that "the normal mental algorithms for resolving moral problems use emotivism... aka the yay/boo theory, the belief that moral statements, however official they may sound, are merely personal opinions of preference or dislike" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2LWXsJxKS626QNEA/the-trouble-with-good
It’s the natural consequence of utilitarian thinking and utility functions that that kind of logic prevails. Utilitarianism would logically argue that the homeless village drunk be killed, if he has a lower personal utility than the increase in utility to all the villagers who are not woken by drunken singing when he’s gone.
But a utilitarian who can see more than one move ahead also realizes that legitimizing violence against inconvenient people will not merely result in that one drunk being removed. I've little doubt we would have killed such drunks centuries, or millennia, or millions of years ago. And now we have cultural and biological guardrails preventing us from doing so. A utilitarian who fails to consider those and their meaning is not a very thorough one.
Seriously, how do people still bring this point up every time, when every utilitarian will always just say, that they are willing to consider second order effects and follow societal rules.
And even if something seems good and they can't think of any way the negative consequences could outweigh the positive ones almost every utilitarian still says, if I'm uncertain enough I won't do it in case I just missed some big negative consequence.
It's very hard to prove or disprove that the size of a second order effect is enough to reverse the gain from the first order effect, so "second order effect" amounts to an epicycle that utilitarians can add whenever they want to arbitrarily rule out uncomfortable conclusions.
>And even if something seems good and they can't think of any way the negative consequences could outweigh the positive ones almost every utilitarian still says, if I'm uncertain enough I won't do it in case I just missed some big negative consequence
And that's an even worse arbitrary decision. If you can ignore utilitarian conclusions when you're "uncertain", even though you admittedly see no negative consequence, your actual moral system isn't utilitarianism, it's wherever your uncertainty comes from.
I'd rephrase that to "naive armchair utilitarianism" -- seems straightforward to a more practical utilitarian that killing the homeless village drunk would be bad, cf https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ (ctrl+F "The problem with murder isn’t just that it creates a world in which one extra person is dead")
All moral systems have their own "repugnant conclusions" at the edges, in different ways. Utilitarians have to make sacrifices for avoiding dust specs, deontologists have to tell the truth to murderers, and virtue ethicists have to love Mao for wanting the best though ending up killing people. It's hopeless.
I don't think it's hopeless. Tradeoffs obviously exist, and had Y. used a different example of a hardship for n people to relieve a lesser hardship for N people, where N >> n, a nice debate could be had.
But he used torture. He used somebody - not himself - condemned to a lifetime of deliberately inflicted unimaginable suffering so that he - and others - avoid a dust spec in the eyes.
Of all examples he could pick, he picked THAT one.
Well he wanted to make the example as strong as possible, to reach the very edge of an edge case, right. This is what a philosopher would do. And the conclusion is decidedly repugnant. It gives us information, which is maybe something like: our model needs tweaking, e.g. (just the first thought that comes to my mind) let's ask all these people with dust specks whether they would prefer someone to go through torture for them to get rid of the specks; we'll get a majority "no" answer and that solves it. We shouldn't go through with a repugnant conclusion when it's very clearly repugnant for 99% of people reading it.
Exactly. The thought is not "well, now we know we need to torture someone in this case." It's "huh, how is my model so wrong?" (I'd suggest that if your model implies you can sum minor discomforts infinitely until they reach the level of a major suffering, to the point where they are in some sense comparable, then your model is seriously flawed and you need to update it -- badly.)
Ethical systems are simply tools to help us better understand and develop our own feelings of morality. Anyone who says "I'm a utilitarian" or "I'm a deontologist" is lying to themselves. We all use all of these systems as we feel it produces what we decide is the moral outcome (and often, which systems we choose to apply to which situations informs how our - changing! - moral beliefs develop).
Morality always ends (or starts?) in feelings. Well, unless you believe in a moral arbiter which exists entirely outside the universe (which is typically called "god"). Then morality is a matter of objective truth, and it's our job to discover that truth. Suffice it to say that is not my belief.
Can we say this: all the three main ethical systems reduce into consequentialism when you pick them apart. Ask someone why they think virtue ethics is the right one; they'll argue that even though good intentions can lead to bad outcomes sometimes, they usually don't, and therefore, just by holding up human virtues as the most important things, we'll make the society a better place to live. This is a consequentialist argument: make a better place. Likewise deontology: yes, in very specific circumstances it leads to doing bad things, but generally it gives a very strong and rigid scaffolding that keeps people from doing the worst things most of the time, therefore leading to a safer and happier society. Religious deontology: this is what God wants, we should do what He wants because He has absolute power over us (and/or we love him) so it's really best for our outcomes if we do so. Again the reasons are totally consequentialist: safer and happier society; best for our outcomes. I can't make up any justification for virtue ethics or deontology that are clearly not consequentialist. The latter seems like the... one ring to rule them all.
No, because there are people who value certain things beyond their material consequences. Some people believe that doing the right thing is its own reward. Some people believe that following the moral structure of their god / religion is a religiously "good" thing that they owe their creator. Unless you broaden consequentialism to include all things, such as, "it makes me feel better, and thus feeling better is a consequence of my action" or somesuch. At that point, I start to feel like consequentialism is "obviously correct / reflective of ethical systems but at that level, not a very useful tool."
Really I don't even need to go to that, there's no deontological principle that prevents me from just shutting the door on him without saying anything.
*Kantians* have to tell the truth to murderers. There are many kinds of deontology; you can fine-tune your system to get as closely in tune with common intuitions, which is its main advantage. And sure, *if you assume* that Mao was motivated entirely by good intentions, then if you're a viture ethicist you'd have to say he was in some sense a good person (though even then while you might credit him with the virtues of courage and justice, you'd definitely have to deny him wisdom and temperance). This doesn't seem like much of a bullet to bite.
I think you're making a false equivalence. Utilitarianism really is uniquely (and unapologetically) repugnant.
After ignorantly fumbling around this topic here for a while, and reading other peoples answers, including the host's old FAQ he linked below, I realized that pure deontology is insane and all non-pure "deontology" (and "virtue ethics"), which are defendable in polite society (meaning they don't imply that some things must be done just because a deity said so and that's good enough even if it leads to horrible outcomes), converge into consequentialism. We celebrate good virtues and allow/forbid certain acts because these have generally good/bad consequences and that's what we actually care about. Therefore, nice people are all consequentialists deep down, even if they express virtue ethics/deontological sentiments every now and then. Only a crazed fundamentalist celebrates clearly bad-consequence things because God said so, or you know, who was that guy who got himself killed because he couldn't escape through a legume field for it would have lowered his virtue (sorry, I can't remember and I don't know another example of a true virtue ethicist). The latter are pure deontologists and pure virtue ethicists who regard consequences as unimportant. Did I get something wrong?
However, if you start doing *math* to find the best consequences or calculate the utility, this must be hard, it's easy to forget to add important things to your model or give wrong weights to variables, etc. Of course it leads to repugnant conclusions, regularly. I'd trust such calculations in very simple cases, e.g. when calculating, which action saves more children from measles, but not so much in complicated cases where the utility reduction caused by dust specks is compared to that of torture.
Editing to add: but of course you have to calculate these things, for how else will the AGI know what we actually value. This is a horrifying problem, just thinking about how a machine would solve the dust specks vs torture problem if we haven't done it first makes me uneasy.
I think you're using "utilitarian" and "consequentialist" interchangably, for one thing (as are, it seems, most people). Consequentialism is broad with many forms (of which utilitarianism is just one), much like deontology has many forms (Kantianism, rights-based theories, divine-command theories, contractualist theories) as does virtue ethics (many choices of possible virtues to accept or reject). It's utilitarianism that is often regugnant because it literally ignores all values except base utility (pleasure or desire). Other forms of consequentialism can accept all kinds of values to maximise (e.g. rights, equality, justice, promise-keeping) and may not have any such regugnancy.
The other issue is implying that deontological theories ignore consequences. Some do, but many take account of consequences, just not *only* consequences. (I'm not sure, though, if it makes sense for virtue ethicists to weigh consequences). So yes, you could get a consequentialist form of, say, a rights-based theory that is very similar to the deontological form. But it would still have important differences: the consequentialist rights-theory would tell you to infringe rights if that would minimise rights-infringements overall. So, it would say it's right to torture soneone if that would stop several other people from being tortured. Or that the true pro-freedom-of-speech position is to outlaw political movements (nazism, communism) that would infringe speech if they took power. Which are similar problems to utilitarianism though not as horrifying. The deontologocal theory would say never do those things no matter what good may come of it, because it's the *act* that has the moral significance.
As for AGI, it seems to me we would be much better off trying to align it with strict deontological values (e.g. Asimov laws, or just criminal laws and constitutional rights in general). The potential for disaster seems vastly lower, unless I'm missing something.
I distinguish between a) are utilitarians more likely to say what Yudkowsky said about the torture v. dust specks case, as a matter of fact, and b) do only utilitarians have moral beliefs that taken together in fact imply dust specks is worse, whether or not they are prepared to recognize that. A is true, almost certainly, but B is probably false.
The assumptions needed to generate the offensive/paradoxical conclusion are *far* weaker than full-blown utilitarianism, and they don't rely on the idea that it is ever okay to cause, rather than fail to prevent, great harm.
Suppose you have an absolutely forced choice between 1) preventing 1 person from being tortured for 50 years or 2) preventing a million people being tortured for 50 years very, very slightly less painfully. Obviously, you should prevent 2: Your not doing evil to bring a good about (except the unavoidable evil of not preventing at least one person being tortured, since you can only do 1 OR 2.) And a very slight decrease in how bad the torture is for the number of victims is clearly much less important multiplying the number of victims by 1 million. But if you concede that you should prevent 2) over 1, you will also concede that you should 3) prevent trillions of people being tortured very slightly less intensely than the people in 2, over preventing 2. Keep on with this pattern of massively increasing the number of people hurt, while making an incredibly small reduction in the level of harm per person. It seems like each time, you should prevent the very slightly smaller harm to vastly more people, over the very slightly bigger harm to vastly less people. Since you can keep reducing harms by tiny fractions forever, eventually you will end up arriving at a trivial harm to an unimaginably large number of people from 50 years of torture to one person, by a series of steps where at every point, you agree that it is more important to prevent the next-in-series trivially smaller harm to vastly more people, than the previous-in-series trivially larger harm to vastly less people.
To reject this argument you have to reject either
-that some things are more worth preventing than others (in which case you are rejecting the "torture is worse than dust specks" conclusion just as much as Eliezer, you just don't think dust specks is better either)
-that it is always more important to prevent a trivially smaller* harm to a vastly larger number of people than to prevent a trivially larger harm to vastly less people.
-That if it's there's a chain where it's more important to prevent B than A, and more important to prevent C than B and more important....to prevent Z than Y, then it's also more important to prevent the Z than A. (In technical terms, this is something like "more important to prevent than is transitive").
Some hyper-consistent academic philosophers might indeed reject one of those 3 claims (I know of some who reject the 3rd). But even put together they are a vastly weaker claim than utilitarianism (they don't for example entail that it is sometimes ok to inflict harm in order to prevent a greater harm, since they are just about forced choices between two preventing acts that aren't harmings.) I'd guess most people who understand them implicitly accept them, except in cases like the current one where their weird consequences have been pointed out.
It may indeed reveal something bad/dangerous/discrediting about utilitarians as people, that they are disproportionately prepared to say 'although that conclusions seems horrendous, the argument for it is so strong that I accept it". But that's a separate matter from whether the case raises intellectual trouble for people who aren't utilitarians, or indeed, whether the failure of non-utilitarians to see that the case raises trouble for them reveals something bad about non-utilitarians.
*The difference can be arbitrarily small: say well under a second more/less of torture.
I reject this reasoning thusly: at some reduction point, "torture" becomes "discomfort", and at that point there's no number of people subjected to discomfort that outweigh one person being skinned alive.
If the gaps I'm suffering are tiny each time, it's implausible that there is any adjacent pair in the series where the harm to a much larger number fails to be worse. As you go through the series and make individual worse-than judgments, you are never comparing a really, really bad harm to one person to a trivial one to others. So you can't explain why any of the individual judgments that the harm to the larger number is worse is wrong by saying that no amount of minor suffering can outweigh super-heavy suffering; the suffering of the individuals in the two groups is nearly identical every single time. It's only when you put all the different individual judgments together that you get "discomfort for many outweighs torture for a few". But that's the conclusion of the argument, not a principle violates by any of the individual judgments about pairs in the series that the argument is using as premises.
Of course, you can just say that torture for 1 *is* worse than discomfort for many so the argument goes wrong somewhere. And that very well may be right. But then you have to deny either that some things are worse than others (non-starter) or deny one incredibly intuitive judgment about the pairs in such a series, none of which judgments involve comparing suffering of a torture level to mild discomfort (seems very implausible) or you have to deny the transitivity of "worse than" (which it's hard to even make sense of).
It's a really, really nasty problem, that arises from deep tensions in our moral beliefs. It's not just a result of people thinking utilitarianism sounds good when they first hear about it and then being stupidly dogmatic when confronted with an obvious counterexample.
I understand and agree in principle, but find it hard to apply to this specific case. It's really hard to think of a way to consistently increase discomfort by tiny amounts. Human perception of pain and suffering is highly nonlinear and unstable. Damage is obviously discontinuous: the bone holds, or cracks. Pain perception is also highly context-dependent. All of this makes it a terrible example to hang an incremental philosophical argument on.
The answer is the same as the heap paradox. If you slightly reduce the size of a heap, you'll still call it a heap, right? So you can reduce it to nothing. And clearly you can't transition from "is a heap" to "isn't a heap' just because it got smaller by a tiny amount.
My definition of a heap is fuzzy enough that there's a borderline size where if you ask me if it's a heap, I'll say "it's sort of heapish" and my estimation of how heapish it is will gradually go up or down as you vary from that size.. By the time you get down to one grain, I'll always say "no" even though there has been no sudden change where I went from "is a heap" to "isn't a heap".
The same applies to reducing the intensity and increasing the number. I'll gradually get less and less confident that it's a bad thing.
Actually, your argument is a version of the repugnant conclusion, and implies that you endorse the repugnant conclusion--do you?
Well the sorites (the heap thing) is also arguably an unsolved paradox. People get annoyed when you say that because actually worrying about the sorites seems silly. But amongst people who actually study it there is no single consensus solution. (Maybe supervaluationism is close.) And the "solutions" on offer tend to have unpleasant features like "entails that actually there is an exact nu
number no. of grains that make a heap" or "entails that All Fs are Gs can be false even when there are Fs and none of them are a counterexample."
So even if the argument is just a sorites that wouldn't tell us that it's easy to identify where it goes wrong. (Though it would tell us it goes wrong somewhere, since sorites arguments are bad, even though it's hard to say why.)
I don't think it *is* a sorites though. In a classic sorites, the reason you appear allowed to move a property-say being not a heap- from the n-1th member of the series to the nth is that a) the change is too small to plausibly make a difference as to whether the object has the property and b) (more persuasive in my view), of your not allowed to make the move each time, there has to be an exact cut-off point for when things change from having the property to not having it and that's implausible. But in the series I gave, one reason why it seems OK to keep saying the next thing is worse than the previous isn't that some change is too small to make a difference in whether something has a property. And it's not that if we chose some point to say "that's where the bigger numbers cease to count" that point would look arbitrary". It's that at each step, it seems crystal clear that the n-th event is worse than the previous.
In comparison, the following is probably bad-for-whatever reason the sorites is bad, I think: "So-and-so says they'd save many more people from a smaller harm rather than less people from a larger harm, when the gap in harms is small, but not when it is big, this must be wrong, because it implies there's an exact size of the gap in harms where things switch over". But that ISN'T the argument I made.
I admit I am not certain about it not being a sorites: this stuff is really hard to think through. But it's not a sorites just because it involves moving a property up a continua in small steps. That is true of some famous arguments, like ones for the Repugnant Conclusion that, whether they work or not, no one thinks are soritical.
As for whether I accept the Repugnant Conclusion itself: not sure. It is highly counterintuitive, but very strong arguments can be given for it. I don't know whether you should believe the conclusion of the argument I gave here either, it does seem pretty repellent. My point is just that the difficulties here don't stem from utilitarianism, and that you probably have to say *something* that seems wrong.
Seems strawmannish to me, a utilitarian can argue that the world would in some sense be a better place without the drunk, without advocating for his death (because among other things it weakens useful norms against killing and discarding our humanity that should not be done lightly)
And if the drunk is molesting kids then yeah maybe he should be killed, so in this case the "populist moral intuition" may well align with the utilitarian view
If a drunk ran around blaring a bullhorn at midnight, such that nobody could sleep, there was no government to arrest/try him, and he refused to stop even when threatened with guns; yes, shoot him.
I have a visceral reaction to casual propositions of torture and often forget this is not how others feel.
My argument is simple: don't. Don't torture people. Don't propose torturing people. Don't make torture a part of some philosophical discussion about tradeoffs.
But why not? There are actual, real world involves tradeoffs which approximate "torture" in various ways. The thought experiment is a device for understanding how our moral intuitions work in the extreme which (arguably) helps us contend with them better in reality. If you just taboo discussing things because you are triggered by them who is this helping? Do you think that the thought experiment somehow makes it more likely that torture is actually proposed in reality and carried out or...?
"Do you think that the thought experiment somehow makes it more likely that torture is actually proposed in reality and carried out"
Yes I actually believe that. One of the greatest crimes of W. Bushes' presidency was normalization of the torture discourse. For all his flaws, John McCain had an admirable moral clarity about this issue.
One can make philosophical points without proposing drilling holes into kneecaps.
But philosophical thought experiments including torture are not unique to utilitarians, all flavors of philosophers use them where necessary.
I understand you well, I also find it hard to endure such visuals (too many mirror neurons or whatnot). It even makes it more difficult to follow the reasoning of an argument if I spend my energy on trying not to imagine too well.
But Yudkowsky was trying to find a way to teach the AGI, an alien mind that has no feelings whatsoever about torture. You can't care about your own sensitivity in such a situation, it's way too bad if the machine gets some wrong idea.
If it really is a utilitarian argument, it's an odd one in that it doesn't actually need to mention torture. A feature, or bug. of utilitarianism is that intentions don't matter. So the pain of the torture could be the result of a chronic illness, instead. What's more, phrasing it as torture, as something intentional rather than something natural, encourages people to choose the wrong conclusion. Most people aren't utilitarians, and do care about intention, so if you ask them which is morally worse out of an intentional act, and an unintentional occurrence, they are likely to choose the intentional act.
Yep, it’s “insane” (sociopathic / ridiculous / wrong) not to consider intent. Spherical-cow-ish. Intent is key to everyday functioning, and criminal law, and etc. It matters a huge deal if I lose control of my vehicle and hit a pedestrian vs intentionally driving into one.
Well, that comment obviously wasn't kind. But I'd say it was both true and necessary: True, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of people really do find Yudkowsky's conclusion to be utterly disgusting. Necessary, because Rationalists need to understand that most people are disgusted by it, and even more important, to understand *why* most people are disgusted by it. (And no, condescendingly writing off the average person's disgust as irrational doesn't count as understanding it.)
I think to pass the bar of "true and necessary" you need to actually include some argument and justification. A one-sentence pot shot about a controversial topic doesn't make the conversation better even if in the end you're correct.
Yeah, that argument is what made me realize that I wasn't actually a utilitarian (except in the sense that I have a utility function, just like most non-insane people, even if they've too stupid to realize it).
Do you believe that consistently? There are real world parallels to that argument, for example building a road that lets everyone have a nicer commute, but 1 in 1000 people will die horribly at a car crash at a young age. Most people out there choose in favor of building the road.
I WOULD build roads despite increases in car crashes. I would NOT horribly torture someone to prevent dust specks in eyes. If utilitarianism decrees that consistency requires I do either both or neither, then a pox on utilitarianism.
I think regardless of moral system, consistency requires an attempt to describe the boundary between the space of acceptable tradeoffs and unacceptable. That is, what is (or what are the characteristics of) the most emotionally/intuitively repugnant tradeoff that you would still endorse, and similarly for the most appealing tradeoff that you still think we should reject? Having identified that point, is there anything that inherently distinguishes it from any other boundary you could have drawn, or is it an equilibrium point reached by influences pulling you in different directions over the course of life? Does every wrong thing have something in common with the dust-speck scenario that isn't shared with the road-crash scenario?
If we don't at least attempt to deal with those things, then we're in the realm of "I know it when I see it", which is a surrender or indifference to inconsistency, not a resolution of it.
I think this is just a fundamental personality difference here.
When I read something like that, I'm really fascinated by the idea that the reasoning I use in most cases seems to support something I wouldn't agree with. Either something is wrong with my usual reasoning, or I have to change my mind on a big issue, or there's some missing philosophical link I just can't grasp. It gives me the same kind of "that's funny" itch that I imagine scientists get when they find some anomalous data that quantum physics or relativity doesn't quite explain which might point the way to a deeper theory.
But other people seem to view it as "Ha ha, high-status person talked about a thing that makes him easy to dunk on!"
But it doesn’t make me want to “dunk on” a “high-status person” (the fact that this fool is somehow can be described like this is in itself a bizarre thing).
It makes my blood boil. This armchair pontificator proposes that someone else (not high-status, I guess), tortures some other low-status person for 50 years. And thinks this is so obviously good and rational that anyone who disagrees is a moron.
Note how he doesn’t volunteer.
Let me go one step further and make it really visceral.
He is proposing that you torture your child for 50 years so that he and everyone else avoids a spec of dust in their eyes.
Imagine that there is some medical treatment that can make it so you never get a dust speck in your eye again. If it was free, would you be willing to drive to the doctor's office to get it? If so, recall that there is a nonzero chance that you will be injured in a car accident on the way to the office, and a nonzero chance the injury will cause you severe chronic pain for the rest of your life.
Now imagine that the treatment is rolled out worldwide. Most people get the treatment. Most are fine, but one person does get into a freak accident and spends the rest of their life in pain.
You could make a number of arguments that the scenario I outlined is not analogous to torture vs dust specks. Maybe it's because everyone chose to drive freely or something like that. But I don't think you could argue that it would be a bad thing such a treatment was invented at all, since it tempted one person to a terrible fate. I'm not saying you should agree with Yudkowsky, I am saying that dismissing his argument as completely ridiculous doesn't make sense and doesn't reflect how humans think about risk in real life. Most people are willing to accept a tiny chance of death or something like torture to avoid a certainty of dust specks.
There's a moral and practical gulf between "chance injury in an accident" and "deliberately causing excruciating pain and disfigurement for 50 years with no hope of relief". On simple practical level, I challenge anyone to come up with an untreatable chronic pain that rises to the level of, just an example, slicing skin off and salting the area (or what do you think "torture" means?!).
His argument is not ridiculous, it's horrifying. I don't know any human in real life who considers being tortured for 50 years as any part of a risk they need to account for.
Vaccines. Full stop. Guillain-Barré syndrome is horrific and can kill you. Someone (say, a child) who is compelled to get vaccinated might well become unable to walk and experience chronic pain for the rest of their life. And yet...the tradeoff certainly seems worth it.
A more productive framing: Suppose a vaccine has a 1-in-1,000,000 chance of causing Guillain-Barré syndrome, has zero other side effects, and is 100% effective at preventing both the onset and spread of a disease. How banal of a disease would justify mandating this vaccine in children? Would your answer change if the world population was 100,000 people? One billion? Ten billion? One trillion?
This is an interesting real-world tradeoff. I'm glad I don't have to actually make this decision.
But I still find the deliberate torture to be different, on a visceral level. I don't suffer from chronic pain, but certainly had my share of excruciatingly painful things happen. In no way I would say that they were equivalent to being tied to a chair having a blowtorch boiling my eye out. An emotional abuse of someone having the power to inflict arbitrarily painful suffering on you for no reason, while laughing and sneering, is quite different from suffering from a health condition.
The diseases that vaccines prevent can typically cause suffering on a similar order of magnitude per individual as Guillain-Barre, so this is not an example in favor of torture in the thought experiment, and it explains why we do indeed vaccinate; what supports favoring dust specks for the many is that we wouldn't vaccinate the whole hypothetically colonized universe against a one-time one-second ocular discomfort if it was presumed to cause decades-long persistent intense pain in a single individual.
There have historically been maniacs who kidnap and torture people for years before they are caught. That means there is a tiny chance that it might happen to someone. However, we generally do not plan our lives around the remote possibility that a maniac might kidnap and torture us. If I need to go to the corner store to pick up some ice, I am probably slightly increasing the odds that a passing maniac might kidnap me. But the odds are so unlikely I consider it worth the risk to deal with a trivial inconvenience like being out of ice.
That being said, if you want to argue that dust specks are so small as to be incomparable to torture, I think Yudkowsky addresses that. He suggests the same argument, but replace dust specks with some pain the is larger than dust specks, but smaller than torture, that you do consider comparable.
That's the usual reaction when detecting an anomaly within a paradigm until they pile up so much that it causes a crisis. After reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it's hard to not see things that way
Ok, but have you identified something wrong with your reasoning, or changed your mind on a big issue, or found a missing philosophical link? It feels like you're just shrugging and saying "Huh, looks like I support moral horrors. Oh well." If that doesn't actually make you *change your mind*, it sure looks like you're starting with your conclusion of utilitarianism and just refusing to consider evidence against it. The point is not dunking on a high-status individual, it's a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism.
"Either something is wrong with my usual reasoning, or I have to change my mind on a big issue, or there's some missing philosophical link I just can't grasp."
But are you (or Rationalists in general) actually doing one of those three things? I think people would be a lot less antagonistic if Rationalists used the thought experiment to say "hmm, this obviously can't be right, I should try to figure out exactly where this line of reasoning went wrong." But instead, a lot of Rationalists seem to be unironically agreeing with the conclusion, however begrudgingly. That's the part people are getting upset about.
Also, it's not that novel of an idea. It's basically just an inverted version of Nozick's utility monster, which was intended as an argument against utilitarianism. It's also the premise of a famous sci-fi novel, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." And an even more famous novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," had a similar thought experiment all the way back in 1880, when the nihilist Ivan asked his pious brother Alyosha if he would accept a world of perfect peace and harmony at the cost of torturing one child to death.
I think the problem with that reasoning is that utilitarians assume that the equation that best represents morality is something as simple as 'Value = x - y", take some arbitrary numbers, get results that contradict common sense, and claim that 'people are just repulsed by math' instead of reconsidering the model they began with. If your goal is to formalize moral intuition, you should test various frameworks for your calculations and find out which one aligns the most with intuitive morality. What if the best equation is 'Value = (x + y + z^1.5 + exp(w))/ log(a + b)' or something even more complicated? Is 'Value' a real number at all or is it an n-dimensional vector? What if torture is 3↑↑↑↑↑3 times worse than a dust speck and therefore 3↑↑↑3 people getting dust specks is a better alternative to torture of a single person? If you stick with the first model you came up with, you will likely end up with 'garbage in, garbage out' situation.
Yes, thank you for that point. It's actually such a naive way of thinking, that a large X can be somehow made equivalent to an N of small x, that I don't even know where to start... Nothing in real life works like this, I can lift 10 kg hundreds of times, 100 kg maybe once, and 1000 kg never. 10^10 linear-range strains cause no damage to a spring at all, but one instant of a strain beyond the breaking point obviously breaks it.
I agree. But its' even worse than that. What if the outputs of "utility for person A" and "utility for person B" are incomparable values (e.g. "blue" and "justice")? There may not be *any* mathematical way to compose or compare utility values *even if we could even theoretically derive such things in the first place* (which is a disputed concept).
Utilitarianism presumes that
1. Utility exists as a measurable, quantifiable, *calculable* value that can be straightforwardly and unambiguously calculated from a situation/event/action.
2. Utility calculated for different situations can be compared
3. Utility calculated for different situations can be *combined* to produce another utility value that makes sense.
-3- (actually 4, numbering is hard). That comparison is *simple* in the sense that it follows a straightforward, no-context-needed (only inputs are utilities), constant (in time and situation-space), and most of all *linear* fashion.
All of those are, as far as I can tell, deeply disputed ideas. But without *any* of them, the entire concept of a tractable moral calculus vanishes.
Note that even some scientific values (such as temperature) fail these conditions--while you can compare (absolute) temperatures and calculate them from situations (or more precisely measure them for non-trivial systems), you cannot combine them in any sane or linear way with the sole exception of taking a difference between absolute temperatures. You can't add temperatures and get a meaningful value that represents anything physical, for example. And the ways that do allow you to do that (ensemble thermodynamics) are neither simple nor linear, and require lots of context and other assumptions.
Exactly. You get the correct version of utilitarianism (without any 3^^3 nonsense) if you relax one of the VNM assumptions, the one that utility can be modeled by real numbers.
The real number version of utilitarianism is still a useful theory in its newtonian envelope for writing reinforcement learning papers, I guess.
So, overall agreed. But, hypothetical-infinitely-sophisticated-utilitarian response, the "linear" assumption for 4 (or 3 part 2) probably does hold well enough for everyday moral concerns, much like Newtonian physics hold for everyday individual walking around, sports, driving, etc.
It's only when you get to massive scales and/or GPS that you have to break out the in-depth probability calculations or General Relativity.
And in the meantime, linearity allows for making the moral calculations we were already doing anyway (see, e.g., sentencing guidelines) explicit.
An assumption about linearity is *usually* appropriate. But we need to be very clear that we're making simplifying assumptions and that we're throwing away lots of complexity.
And the thing that scares me is that we *don't know* when the assumption of linearity holds and when it doesn't, because we don't even have the beginnings of an idea of what the real underlying calculation is...or even if it exists! In physics, we can actually fairly rigorously show and test the limits of these assumptions, because we have access to the underlying reality outside the models. In morality...we can't. Because toy problems don't actually illuminate anything other than the preconceptions of the people making the toy problems.
And sentencing guidelines, in particular, are kinda a bad example of anything but politics. There's no moral calculus going on there, explicit or implicit. Just horse trading and moral posturing.
I disagree; the moral calculations going into sentencing guidelines may be *wrong*, but that's not the same as them being *nonexistent*. Just because we're still mostly eyeballing it doesn't mean there's nothing to see once the microscopes come out.
Punishment in general is a fairly central example of where moral calculations occur: people believe it has moral weight, but they disagree about what that weight is.
Part of the issue, I think, is that any shared morality simple enough to be predictable can, by the same token, be faked - and in a large enough population, *will* be faked by someone who does not have your best interests at heart. The human alignment problem, as it were.
You can analyze them with "moral calculus", but *that's entirely post hoc*, and as such reflects only the post-hoc assumptions and inputs. There wasn't any actual calculations done in deriving them. There was only moral posturing and politics. For example, crack cocaine and powder cocaine were treated very differently for a long time, like *orders of magnitude* differently. Despite being fairly similar in overall effects. Why? Politics.
Oregon, for example, has a 2-dimensional grid. Seriousness vs history. But the breakpoints are completely arbitrary and is non numerical. For example, attempts are classified as 2 categories below the full crime on Seriousness. Why? Because that's what the legislature defined. That makes an attempted seriousness 11 (the worst other than non-ranked ones like murder 1) offense reduce from (for equal histories in category A, the worst category) 225-269 months to 66-72 months (3.41x reduction), but for history category I (the least-bad), it reduces the same offense from 120-121 months down to 34-36 months, a 3.52x reduction. So you get a (relative) discount on attempt vs actual for a worse history. Basically, they chose nice-seeming numbers and loosely threw things into bins, with political horsetrading to make the numbers come out looking "normal." That's not moral calculus worth calling such--it's just politics.
Nobody qua nobody does actual moral calculus (like with actual numbers) on anything but toy problems (and yes, all of AI risk is toy problems) where all the values are pulled ex nihilo. Because it's not actually possible to derive any of the values involved *even relatively* from first or even second principles. There is no objective, commonly-accepted way to quantify any of the situations involved.
So people may *rank order* moral things (X is worse than Y but better than Z), but that's not moral calculus. That's just, well, *rank ordering things by whatever criteria, mathematical or not, they feel like*.
> What if torture is 3↑↑↑↑↑3 times worse than a dust speck and therefore 3↑↑↑3 people getting dust specks is a better alternative to torture of a single person? If you stick with the first model you came up with, you will likely end up with 'garbage in, garbage out' situation.
As the dust specks post says, the argument allows you to have very different cutoffs, but it is making the fundamental point that there's a tradeoff *somewhere*. Even for something as minor as stopping dust specks in people's eyes.
Seeing people, even in the ACX comments, display reasoning that starts and effectively ends at 'Can't rationalists SEE that TORTURE is HORRIFICALLY BAD???' (when they can, almost everyone does, and recognising that is in fact key to the thought experiment being interesting) makes me incredibly depressed about humanity's reasoning capabilities.
On a slightly more constructive note, people around here often wax about the importance of IQ for making society more effectively intelligent, but I think that's wrongheaded because in practice IQ is almost never the limiting factor on people's ability to be basically rational, and this thread is an excellent case study in that; anyone with an IQ >75 is capable of grasping the simple logic of the issue, but even an arbitrarily high IQ is no defense against the erroneous *ways of thinking* which cause vast swathes of the population to stop thinking logically the moment they encounter an emotive concept.
FWIW, as someone else has already pointed out, the answer to the question isn't actually obvious because the ratio of real-terms suffering could be comparably vast to the number of people suffering mild inconvenience, but most objecting reasoning clearly breaks down before that point.
The answer is obvious. Don't torture people. Don't casually equate minor inconveniences to having your toes smashed with a hammer. Don't pretend that 100 rabbits somehow make up an elephant.
No, I don't care what IQ anyone has, and I don't care about thinking logically about torture, we had President Bush and Attorney Yoo do this for us, they were really good at it. What was it, "if not severe organ damage, then not torture", really, who needs anesthetics for a root canal, Yoo said it was ok.
I don't need to be "basically rational" about torture, I have my engineering job that takes a lot of rationality to do. I can make a simple moral judgement, and I do: Don't. Torture. People. Don't invent clever arguments for when sometimes it's a preferred action. And if you can't not do this, volunteer yourself for the privilege.
What don't you get? In Michael Malice's phrasing (which I endorse wholeheartedly), they're "literal prisons for children and the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives."
"...the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives."
Until they have children. Not defending institutions here, but the nature of the target population probably plays some role.
Then again, concentrating large numbers of low social skill individuals might be expected to go poorly, which might be an argument for not doing that thing if you can avoid it.
I would still strongly choose homeschooling / unschooling, and just enroll them in martial arts from a young age.
I'd bet pretty heavily they're going to get much more effective tools for defusing and/or dealing with violence competently from the martial arts training than from public school, too.
Few events. The violence itself is instructive, and as long as it doesn't cause permanent damage, one or two incidents are good for kids. More experience is good.
If more experience with violence is good, and if it's justified to force children to attend school so that they can get this valuable experience, then surely it's also good for adults. I propose we do a national survey to find all adults who never experienced violence in school (and thus missed out an important lesson), and send the police to beat them up. Not hard enough to cause permanent damage but hard enough to be instructive.
As I see it, there is a small minority of aspies who do not have the social skills necessary to handle school, while also being academically gifted enough (and having dedicated enough parents) to succeed in many aspects of life without school. These individuals might be better off without school, but then they project what might be good for them onto everyone else.
I expect libertarians would have a nice answer to that: sure, feel free to send *your* kids to school if you think it's good for them, and let me decide what I want for mine.
I don't believe they do, but why would the general laissez-faire attitude be limited to property? Anyway, I'm not a libertarian myself (a sympathizer, maybe) so I'll let them speak for themselves.
I classify myself as conservative, rather than libertarian, but I believe they would think their kids are their *responsibility*, rather than their property. If I feel I can fulfill my responsibilities better without public school, then I should have the freedom to do that.
Ah, but if the school feels they can fulfill their responsibility better than the parents?
Don't get me wrong, I think parents should generally have control over their kids' decisions to a much greater extent than outsiders such as the government. But this is not a deep philosophical principle, it's a presumption based on factors such as the typical strength of emotional ties between parents and children, but as a presumption it can be overridden when circumstances require it. And it seems to me that (say) requiring education, but letting parents decide whether that education is public or private or homeschooling, is a reasonable compromise between parental control and society's interest in educating people.
One can't hide behind a general principle of laissez-faire libertarianism so long as one accepts there are at least some things society shouldn't allow people to do to their kids. We do generally accept this, because kids are also people and deserve at least the same help and protection society extends to any other people. Once we do accept that, however, the conversation is no longer about the general principle, but about whether this thing in particular belongs in that set.
It's not a "principle" so much as a heuristic and a preference. In this particular case, I think it is mine, too (in case you were going to accuse me of hiding behind hypothetical libertarians). Without thinking on it too hard, I am fine with the society setting some reasonable standards for homeschooling or whatever else people might prefer to public schools. Regarding both the current well-being of the kids and the knowledge they are expected to acquire.
I had the skills necessary to handle school, but I still hated it throughout. I suppose it was useful to learn what peer interactions can often be like, but a couple of years would have sufficed.
This is about *much* more than social skills - if your kid is at all gifted or talented, public school is an *agonizingly* slow crawl over broken glass to learn anything. And that's risky, because A) they're never going to learn good study habits or how to apply themselves, because the subject matter and talent level is so much lower than where they are, and B) they will likely be extremely bored, and can either get disruptive, check out of academics entirely, or do other things that put them on a bad path.
This is just my individual opinion, but if your kid is smart, you should literally aim to have them completely through HS and entering undergrad by 15-16, because that's about the appropriate learning level for a smart 15-16 year old. Even *undergrad* is a huge waste of time with basically zero learning for at least half of it when you consider how many gen-eds they force you to take!
There are things like tracking and acceleration which help a lot with that. For the vast majority of kids who are "at all gifted or talented", that's sufficient to challenge them.
The same "tracking" that's the bugbear of educators everywhere, and that's being systematically eliminated in just about every public school system across the country due to "disparate impact?"
I wish Tracing Woodgrains were in here, they're a SME in this, but it's my understanding tracking has been under a decades-long sustained assault bent on eliminating it everywhere. Even the handful of magnet schools left in NYC are at risk.
"The same "tracking" that's the bugbear of educators everywhere, and that's being systematically eliminated in just about every public school system across the country "
"Everywhere", or "the country"? Tracking is taken for granted in many non US countries.
Oh yeah, sorry for using "everywhere" instead of "across the USA" or something like that - sometimes I forget that Scott has a decent international audience.
Well, it depends on the country and the city you are living it, so I can't talk for everyone. But to give a personal example: there is a school for gifted kids in the city where I live, so I checked the conditions and my daughter easily passes all of them. So we applied to the school. However, it turned out that there were 200 kids who applied to the school and passed the conditions that year, but the school only has the capacity to admit 40 of them each year. Too bad, my daughter didn't get to the selected 40.
So we decided to try another school. That one was not for gifted children in general, but for mathematically talented. Okay, my daughter can do that, too, so we applied. Again, the same story, about 200 kids passed the test, they could only take 40, my daughter didn't get to the selection.
So now she attends a school for normal kids. We live in one of the better parts of the city, so the school is way above average in quality of education; all her classmates are generally smart. But despite that, she is bored at many subjects; for example in math she essentially hasn't learned anything new during the first 2 1/2 years, because she already knew all of that when she was 5.
Thus my experience is that on one hand, the opportunities for gifted kids *exist*, but on the other hand, realistically maybe 1 in 10 gifted kids gets the opportunity to *actually use* them; there is simply not enough capacity.
And that's me, living in the better part of the city where the opportunities are concentrated. My sister lives in a worse part of the city, her son is super talented at math and all technical things, but there are no opportunities for that nearby, and even the average education is hard to get. (This year they got a new teacher; it is some crazy old lady who basically doesn't teach at all. There are simply not enough people willing to teach, so the schools accept almost anyone.)
Speaking as somebody who was so bored in public school that I literally became a delinquent, and then was further reinforced because the "bad kids' school" actually gave you all your work for the week on Monday at 8am, so you could literally finish the whole week of pablum and nonsense in a couple of hours and then flirt and make trouble with the other delinquent kids for all the rest of the week, I would recommend home-schooling or unschooling where your kids can set their own pace.
School is CRUSHINGLY boring if you're actually smart. There's no better way to bitterly extinguish the love of learning and academics than forcing somebody smart into public school, they're literally prison-factories built to grind that joy out of you. I mean, I'm sure you've heard us all bitch about public schools in this comment section multiple times.
Online home school curriculums are cheap. Grad students are cheap. There has to be a better way.
I think that you vastly overestimate the degree of "academic giftedness", or whatever, that is required of either child or parent for homeschooling to work. Normal people can pull it off, usually without too much effort. I've seen it happen.
From what I have seen, it usually requires a stay-at-home mom, so "not too much effort" is actually one person working full-time.
But if that's what you wanted to do anyway, then yes... you simply buy the textbooks, read them with your kids (1 hour of learning at home is about as efficient as an entire day at school), and network with other homeschooling families so you can share advice about textbooks, buy and sell used textbooks, and maybe organize some group learning and field trips.
Really only one person working half time at the margin, I think - they were going to be working half time as a homemaker/caregiver even if they did send the kids to school and even if they were also working a full-time job outside the home.
But yes, it's mostly contingent on one parent being willing to stay home with the kids.
"As I see it, there is a small minority of aspies who do not have the social skills necessary to handle school, while also being academically gifted enough (and having dedicated enough parents) to succeed in many aspects of life without school. These individuals might be better off without school, but then they project what might be good for them onto everyone else."
Yes, exactly, with the "and having dedicated enough parents" being by far the most important part.
I'm not rejecting the anti-school argument at all (I happen to think the entire education system should be burned to the ground) but it's annoying that no one seems to be engaging with the central argument for mandatory schooling: equality of opportunity. Everything that people are condemning in schools (bullying, lack of support for gifted kids) would be, and has been historically, the norm without schools. The smart kids with smart parents would be better off (though even now they still have that at-home advantage and ability to learn on their own time, the issue being the waste of time spent at school, not deprivation of learning as such) while the smart kids with stupid, disengaged parents (no interest or value for education, no books in the house or knowledge of where to find learning material) would be immeasurably worse off. This is often being put as weighing the interests of smart kids against those of dumb kids, when it really should be (far more importantly) smart kids with smart parents vs smart kids with dumb parents.
And the same is true for bullying. For kids with good parents, school increases the risk of bullying. For kids with bad parents, who without school would probably send their kids off to the park or street corner every day with innumerable opportunities to be beaten up with no adults around at all, even the worst school outcome (of taking no action at all on bullying, which is obviously not the case at every school) is still no worse than the norm without school (and probably still slightly better due to the mere presence of adults, however incompetent).
I don't imagine this constitutes much of a defence of schools, which are on the whole so bad it's almost a feat to have managed to create a system that works *this* badly. But the same people who create and run these horrible schools would, absent schools, be (along with many others like them and even worse) be "running" their own children's "education" in the same way, just with no oversight or attempted standards at all. The basic argument for schools would be every child getting a somewhat similar method of education and daytime supervision instead of it varying enormously by parental quality. I'd just like to see this argument more clearly addressed.
> Everything that people are condemning in schools (bullying, lack of support for gifted kids) would be, and has been historically, the norm without schools.
School segregates kids by age, and separates them from their relatives and older friends.
If a child is bullied on the street, there are a few options -- avoid that specific street (maybe the bully is less interested in bullying specifically you, and more interested in dominating a specific territory), ask a stronger/older friend or relative for protection, or stay at places where the adults can see you and can intervene. This limits your freedom, of course, but many kids who are bullied at school would gladly pay the price.
Instead, the school demands that the child leave everyone who could protect them, and spend half of the day in the presence of the bully, five days a week. In my opinion, that makes things more intense.
Gifted kids naturally try to discuss complicated topics with older kids or adults. Or they read books when they are older. The school, again, removes this option -- the only adult in the room is the teacher, and the teacher is talking to the average kids, and cannot have a parallel conversation with you. And no, you are not allowed to read a book, just because you already understand the current lesson; you still have to keep paying attention (to what exactly?).
Wherever two or three Rationalists are gathered together, they will moan about the education system. But not in a very rational way. It's a topic that rationalists are predictably irrational about. They note that they personally had a bad time at school, and conclude that education is bad. They note that they could educate themselves , and conclude that everyone could. Both arguments commit the rationalist sin of typical-minding.
I also don't get it when I reflect on my own experience. I suspect a big ingredient is the high variance in school quality. I suspect many of the vocal anti-school people went to not-great schools.
Agreed. I disliked school quite a bit, but I don't see most people (possibly even myself despite teaching myself programming) learning much without a decently structured setup.
For the same reason that you need some disincentive for crime (whether that be jail or rehabilitation) even if you try to make so things don't get there in the first place, I think you do need some way of going "you do need to learn kiddo". Saying that you spend X hours in a classroom that you're not supposed to leave is that method. We could infact setup society so that if the kid wants to drop out and learn nothing on their own, then they can, but I value a mix of their long-term capabilities & happiness rather than immediate short-term happiness.
The problems with schools is of course that they use up too much time and aren't customizable enough. AI will help with that, but you still want the kids to learn rather than, well, not learning much and watching funny videos all the time.
Homeschooling can work if the parent is competent enough, but imo most parents aren't and this would only grow worse because there'd be more baseline variance. (but of course also AI completely flips this on its head, have to be careful of forecasting while ignoring that major change)
What about killing everyone who wants to do the things you consider bad? How utilitarian can one really be if one is not willing to drown this world in blood to create a better one?
Using inductive reasoning to support utilitarianism is kind of wild. It seems like one of the hallmarks of consequentialists (not the ideologies themselves, but the people who espouse them) is arguing that some idea that violates a cultural taboo (the way we've done things in the past, traditions, moral rules, etc.) is actually better in the long run for some amount of "good" (hedonistic, utilitarianism, etc.) The way something has turned out in the past usually wouldn't have much bearing on if it was done correctly if the math works out that way.
This is not wild at all, everybody is using inductive reasoning all the time.
And yes violating some taboo can be better in the long run and we have a lot of examples of that. It isn’t, inductive reasoning vs something else, nor utilitarianism vs something else, it is just different positions about the likely outcome of X or Y.
> The way something has turned out in the past usually wouldn't have much bearing on if it was done correctly if the math works out that way.
Ok but inductive reasoning, higher order effects, etc… could absolutely be included in the math.
If the expected consequences is far off of what we can have deduced with the information we have, then the math is just not done correctly (and indeed it is never completely possible to do it correctly except in thought experiments, it is an ideal).
You consistently seem to accord states/governments a privileged moral position; you said something similar in "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck." I do not share this view.
Flip the causality: less that states have a privileged position, and more that the things that have that privileged position are states. The response that nothing should hold the privileged position is a standard libertarian/anarchic argument, and disagreeing is common.
Libertarians might say that nothing SHOULD hold such a privileged position. Anarchists would say nothing DOES.
Also, you can't simply flip the causality: what characterizes states is POWER, and the ability to label its threats "laws" and its violent enforcement thereof "justice" is downstream of that.
Nah. The usefulness of violence is baked into the universe, the human condition - dissolve all governments, and armed robbery still functions just fine. "All violence is equally illegitimate" is a meaningless bit of linguistic nihilism; we can do better.
If you ever want to establish 'illegitimate violence' as a meaningful category you need a legitimate alternative. Draw up the system that results in that high ground and bam, there's your government.
(It's totally possible for the legitimate user of violence to be powerless, but then they're irrelevant and the same mechanism operates one epicycle down.)
I prefer to categorize violence by color. Mine is a richer system than yours (and so LESS linguistically nihilistic), because while you can only sort into "legitimate" and "illegitimate," I have a much broader spectrum to choose from.
Also, I wouldn't actually say all violence is equally illegitimate: I am not a strawman pacifist. Violence that helps me and my family/friends, or that hurts my enemies, or amuses me despite not otherwise being helpful, is righteous, moral, divinely mandated, legitimate, etc.
This seems like a fully general argument against justice. For instance, replace "killing" with "imprisoning" and "blood" with "inmates' suffering" in your sentence and you have a pretty accurate (if emotionally charged) description of criminal law, as practised in many countries around the world.
(I'm also eliding the distinction between "wants to do <bad thing>" and "already did <bad thing>", but the first of those is at the very least a notable component of our present notions of justice, considering we see premeditated murder as more serious than manslaughter.)
I understand the overwhelming majority of people recognize no distinction between criminal law and justice. But among the few who do, the realization that they are essentially orthogonal is not rare.
I'm not sure what you mean. Literally nothing? Zero, zip, zilch, nada? Bugger all? Surely it isn't just that you're confused by terms like "justice system"? Plenty of individuals and entities protect their interests by issuing threats backed up with violence, of which the state is one (possibly the most powerful, but I don't consider that germane).
Sorry I’m being so vague. You asked what criminal law had to do with justice. That indicated to me that you thought one had nothing (zero) to do with the other—that you thought the two things, criminal law and justice, were unrelated. I can see how the two things could be related, but not how they couldn’t be, so I was hoping you might explain it to me.
Okay, let's see: can you imagine an unjust law? Is that a coherent concept to you, or does that sound oxymoronic?
It's precisely that idea, but realizing that it's not merely a few isolated (perhaps even exclusively historical) examples, but a widespread (I'd argue universal) feature of how states pass and enforce laws.
"These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good, but for some reason the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
What? People who worry about utilitarianism do talk about those exact things, all the time. They're all incredibly common libertarian/classical liberal talking points, and often espoused by deontological libertarians and classical liberals whose opposition to the state is rooted in an opposition to utilitarianism in general.
Non-consequentialists don't see "utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good". That's a utilitarian framing of the issue. The very concept of a "greater" good, as if you could measure or compare or do math with goodness, is the problem to begin with.
When the people you don't like want to censor speech or cancel people or whatever, they don't frame that mentally as performing a lesser evil in service of a greater good, unless they have consequentialist leanings to begin with. The censoring or cancelling are acts that are good in themselves. Or they evince certain personal virtues that are good in themselves. There is no justification in terms of future good that might result from present evil, as if we could predict future consequences or that they are even relevant to moral choices! The act in itself, or the personal qualities that lead to the act in themselves, should be judged by itself.
So when you look at people that accuse utilitarians of thinking as if you can perform lesser evils in service of greater good, and then respond by thinking of the lesser evils they do in service of greater goods, you're not refuting them. You're doing exactly what they are accusing you of, what they find problematic.
Yeah, it reminds me of the "Mistake theorists think conflict theorists are making a mistake, conflict theorists think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict" post.
And in case we get to the utilitarian talking point of "OK, you have certain rules and principles for how to act, or what virtues to embody, but if those rules and principles conflict you must have some method to deconflict them? Isn't that then choosing a lesser evil over a greater evil, breaking one rule to keep another?" Again, that's not the mindset. Sometimes the rules have a specific hierarchy -- cannibalism is bad, but there is an exception for when life must be saved -- in which case the totality of the hierarchy of rules is being kept when a starving man has to eat a corpse, no lesser or greater evil tradeoff. Sometimes there is simply no way to compare, in which case we can be indifferent in the choice between two conflicting rules. They are not a lesser or greater evil, just a choice that is not meaningful either way as long as the rules as a whole are respected. There is no calculation the way that a consequentialist would assume or expect.
But there are other sources of meta-ethics. Tradition. Heuristics. Descriptive ethics. The explicit comparison of the utility of outcomes is not the only way to reason about which rules
I'd guess most people in the world would accept cannibalism under certain circumstances even though only a tiny proportion must know and care about whatever passage in scripture you're referencing, so it sounds like scripture is only restating the common man's utilitarian reasoning.
Citing "tradition" doesn't really describe where tradition comes from or why it persists. Is it an appeal to popularity? Did someone make the utilitarian or consequentialist calculation or virtue ethics based proclamation and others just trusted in their correctness. Heuristics are rules of thumb that approximate some other kind of reasoning. I don't really know anything about descriptive ethics.
Meta-ethical theories didn't develop in a vacuum. They are based on epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. It's not about an appeal to popularity or utilitarian math, it's about which meta-ethical theory is derived from a which metaphysical or epistemological theory and the truth value of those underlying claims.
This is actually the biggest flaw in virtue ethics, because in order to convince someone of the correct set of virtues and moral exemplars, you have to convince them of the truth value of your other claims, which is more difficult than relying on a shared paradigm of empirical knowledge and weights of resulting effects of actions.
There is no deep difference between some things are more good/bad than each other and sometimes you should choose one thing over another. They are just different ways of saying the same thing. When consequentialists make claims with numbers in them representing "utilities", those are just short-hand for way longer and more complicated claims about preferability rankings.
Side question. I'm curious as to whether your opposition to mandatory public schooling is entirely because it's mandatory or in part due to you thinking it's actively bad for kids or a waste of time at best?
My opposition is entirely consequentialist: competitive markets tend to work very well, and the governmental near-monopoly has produced predictable calcified inefficiencies. If it were not mandatory but rather enforced by strong social feedback (as university education is for middle castes), I would have the same objection to its wastefulness.
My boring liberal compromise solution is that I would like states to allow vouchers and home schooling. After that I don't really care or have strong opinions.
Why are so many otherwise intelligent people so hung up about ideological consistency? Why do they put themselves in a box, stressing over whether there is something wrong if they or someone else believes that some policy or action or thought doesn't conform to a construct of belief that results in the best outcome for the most people or results in a bad outcome for some people or doesn't lead to equality or helps some at the expense of others or reflects conservative values (whatever they are this day, "am I supposed to for free trade or protectionism) or progressive ones (are Jews the oppressors or the oppressed). It seems to me that this preoccupation with ideology, is just a way to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to struggle with the reality that in the end the world is messy, there is no one compass you can rely upon, you just have to fight your way through conflicting values and make the best judgment you can, understanding that actions have consequences, that someone comes out ahead and someone does not and that no matter what we decide now, we may never know or only know in hindsight whether it was the right thing to do.
You criticize people for crystallizing reusable principles instead of deciding what's best on a case-by-case basis. But what algorithm do you use to decide what's best on a case-by-case basis, without relying on principles? Whatever algorithm you actually use, how is that different/better compared to principles?
Making your algorithm more transparent (simpler, easier to model, etc.) has some strategic advantages in organizing cooperation (makes it safer for people to cooperate with you because they can better predict your stances) and also in combating your own biases.
Making your decisions more consistent also has strategic advantages in that you will spend less time undoing your own efforts (see: the whole class of "money pump" arguments).
I think it’s the crystallizing aspect of it that might concern some people. All ideologies are flawed to varying degrees. Some seem to be better for more people than others. I think it’s important to “define the process” as Ryan W. put it below, in the service of improving it, but it’s worth considering the value of maintaining some degree of freedom outside of one’s convictions.
I think that it's a good idea to keep some humility and doubt about your conclusions, so that you can change them if you encounter evidence that you made a mistake.
But you seem to be suggesting that this is opposed to having principles or to striving for consistency, and I don't think I agree with that framing. I think the amount of clarity in your decision process and the amount of certainty in your decision process are different.
I worry that some people fall into a trap that goes something like:
1. They try adding some clarity
2. They can now see a bunch of problems
3. They conclude that the clarity created the problems (when actually it just revealed them)
4. Therefore they remove the clarity
5. And, perversely, they become MORE confident in their unclear decision process, now that they have "successfully" rejected a thing that was making it bad
6. Now you have a person who is bad at moral reasoning, yet confident in their moral conclusions, and inoculated against any attempt to fix this
>a person who is bad at moral reasoning, yet confident in their moral conclusions, and inoculated against any attempt to fix this.
Yes. I probably said it poorly but this is precisely the kind of person I was trying to discourage against being by emphasizing the importance of maintaining some degree of freedom outside of one’s convictions.
In this particular case, parts of the community here descend from the "rationalist" project, which on some level was an attempt to come up with ethical systems that would work for a superintelligent AI. That is, the assumption was that humanity would build a superintelligent AI, and the goal is to make sure that it a) didn't eliminate or invert all value in the universe, and b) would, if possible, make the universe better.
But what ethical systems would work? How can we be sure that the superintelligent AI will muddle through to something good? How comfortable would you feel if you handed the future of humanity over to whatever Google or OpenAI come up with?
Well, and also, we're in position where AI is plausible due to scientific progress, which is based on ever refining consistent models of the world. In particular, we have good reasons to believe that certain conservation laws haven't been broken once in the entire history of the universe. So, the logic goes, if the physical world is consistent and predictable for the wise, why shouldn't the world of ideology and morality be?
When you think about usual situations, you do not need much of a theory. Do what you did the last time, or do what people around you are doing. Intelligent people are more likely to consider new situations, or new possible reactions to existing situations. Then they need some language to communicate and defend their conclusions.
Is it okay to exterminate the mosquitoes because it could save lives of millions of people? Or is it wrong because it is playing God?
Is science always good because "science!" and "progress!"? Or should we abstain from certain kinds of research, such as gain-of-function research of deadly viruses?
Suppose that someone is extremely pro-life, pickets abortion clinics and screams at the people trying to go in, etc. Then when they're pregnant and it's inconvenient for them, they immediately have an abortion and don't feel guilty. Then they go back to picketing abortion clinics, and they don't see anything wrong or inconsistent with their behavior. Is anything bad about this?
EDIT: I think my answer here is that consistency is the only real source of insight into morality that we have. If some psychopath says "I love killing people, no problem there", then there isn't really a solution - you just have to kill him before he kills you. But if someone is a basically moral person but disagrees with you about one thing, then you get a chance to appeal to their own principles and show that actually they should support you (which sometimes works). This is basically the project that civilization is built upon - getting everyone to sign Platonic contracts which sort of require their value function to have an elegant profile in conceptspace or else they don't work. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/
I don't think restricting free speech is actually a "bad thing" in the relevant sense. If you punish a mob boss for ordering his subordinates to commit a robbery, is that "doing a bad thing for the greater good"? What's innately evil is violently suppressing the truth. (Actually, even this is probably insufficiently nuanced -- I think it's fine to punish someone for leaking classified information to a wartime enemy, for example -- but trying to develop a fully-worked-out model of the moral principle that free speech proxies would probably take too long to fit in a blog comment.) So, in theory, enforcing laws against misinformation doesn't require doing any evil. In practice, we shouldn't do this because the risks of trusting the state to judge what is misinformation are too high to be worth it, but that's not a deontological argument.
I don't see why I should need to reconcile a conflict between my views and yours. It would only be a problem for me if my views were in conflict with themselves.
Well, if you accept that we should act according to deontological principles in at least some cases, then there has to be some way of deciding whether a principle is actually deontological or not.
Restricting free speech is a bad thing because free expression is an important component of being human. A free society is a beautiful and possible thing.
Exactly. Being able to form and express opinions and beliefs is what separates humans from animals, so when you suppress someone's speech, you are depriving them of part of their humanity.
A forum where people are genuinely free to express themselves in literally whatever way they want doesn't look like this comments section. It looks like 4chan's /b/.
I can say many things about /b/, and I am glad a place like that exists. I would not, however, call /b/ beautiful, nor would I want every place to be like that.
This is flatly untrue, unless (perhaps; I'm more of an /a/ guy) said users only post on /b/ and never check the rest of the site.
Every other board, including /pol/, has rules. Bans for violating them are often global, and 4chan janitors are infamously arbitrary in how they apply them; I doubt I'm alone in having served a variety of temp bans over the years. Sometimes I deserved them, other times it was for things like "replying to an off-topic thread" (and one that was dubiously off-topic) or for getting caught in an automated filter.
I call out /b/ specifically precisely because those other places have rules and bans; there are things people cannot say there and ways people cannot express themselves, and because of these restrictions on speech it is possible for more civil discussion to happen.
This is, in fact, my entire thesis.
(Even /b/ is not absolutely free: speech in the US is not entirely free, and you cannot post content that is illegal under US law; people do regularly try, but those posts get promptly deleted. Still, it is about as free as any US-hosted social media site can be while staying legal, and I find it hard to believe that permitting illegal content would improve the quality of discourse.)
Just tried to find 4chan /b/, but couldn't. I assume it's a place where there is no limit to how lewd, weird and politically incorrect people are willing to be. But is it really a place where you can say absolutely anything without being censured by other posters? Can you say really woke things, and insist that any decent person would think the same? Can you talk about how lame people of 4chan are? Can you say you're a pedophile and it's a free country and you should be able to impose sex on any child you can corner?
I actually laughed aloud at this, because they scarcely talk about anything else. It's a phantasmagorical panoply of deeply held, very specific hatreds of basically any group you could name, but I really don't think anything is more unifying than how much the median /b/ user seems to despise (a) himself, and (b) every other motherfucker on the website.
Actually to your broader question, I think part of the wild west vibe is because the baseline level of hostility is so incredibly high that it's hard to differentiate which abuse is meant to be censure for misconduct, and that saps its effectiveness.
There are posts saying each of the things you mention, and worse, on a daily basis. Other users absolutely do respond with censure and hostility, as they do to every post no matter how innocuous. All of this free speech is permitted - none is removed, blocked or otherwise silenced. Everyone is genuinely free to express themselves however they wish. It is, in its own way, beautiful.
...at some point here the goalposts seem to have shifted from being free to say what you want to silencing other users' responses to what you've said.
What about /their/ freedom of speech?
People being angry at you for saying something, while that post stays up for everyone to read, is not censorship. Deleting your post against your will would be censorship; as would deleting your detractors' against theirs. So long as the responses are limited to speech, it's all speech. You are not prevented from saying what you want; neither are they. A free speech absolutist ought to support it all. Otherwise we're just censors haggling over the price.
I don't think that's a good argument for free speech. There are a lot of important components of being human -- everything from taking a shit to falling in love to knowing you will die to liking music. Unless you can name some way that freedom of speech is a more essential component than the many others, what you said doesn't make sense. And besides, nobody has anything like real freedom of speech even in a country where free speech is protected by law. In virtually all settings there are many things you can't say without suffering a consequence so bad that for all practical purposes you simply are not allowed to say them. I'm sure that has been true since the hunter gatherer days. Groups can't cohere if people vocalize all their opinions and passing thoughts. And in most people's lives unspoken rules suppress far more speech than laws against hate speech or whatever do.
There's another aspect to consider: "restricting free speech" might not be about suppressing truth so much as about allowing an exchange of ideas to actually take place without being drowned out by noise.
If I wade into the comments section to put forward the thesis that <person> is a <pejorative>, I would expect to be moderated, and rightly so. From my POV, however, I am stating the truth as I perceive it, and being silenced for it.
If I wade into every single conversation in the comments section to politely put forward my green-ink cosmology/flat earth/whatever theory, I would be told to give it a rest. But I am simply stating truths! The world clearly needs to hear them; the place is full of people who have not yet seen the light. The problem must be that I am not shouting loudly or ubiquitously enough!
Often, the debate is actually not so much about the principles involved as about /the category/ of whatever thing it is I want to shout from the soapbox that most of the people I'm shouting at don't want me polluting their environment with. It is in their interest to paint my ranting as noise to be moderated. It is in my interest to paint it as ideas to be exchanged in the spirit of free speech.
Well, I assumed Scott was talking about people who wanted *the government* to suppress misinformation or hate speech, since arguing from the premise of "it's a sacred, fundamental moral principle that Internet forums shouldn't be moderated" would be obviously ridiculous.
Government censorship is certainly the motte, but IME ~99% of all internet conversation about censorship and the principles of free speech - including on this substack - involves some person or group being "silenced" following decisions made by some private entity to drop content from a platform owned or managed by that entity.
Still, I guess it's possible Scott could have meant that. I'll stand down.
Most of those private entities are owned by billionaires, often the same billionaires, and some even get pressured by the state to censor as an end-run around the first amendment.
In the age when forums dominated the internet, and most topics had multiple competing forums, this argument was at least a bit sympathetic. Today, as applied to the Facebooks and Reddits of the world, it's considerably less so. (For everyone except for those "at least it's not the government" libertarians, I suppose.)
Further discussion at this point necessarily focuses on specifics - is a particular thing someone wants to say mere noise that it's right to moderate to enable sacred exchange of valuable ideas, or is it sacred free speech that should never be silenced?
The person wanting to say whatever it is will, of course, inevitably pursue the discussion to the best of their ability, aiming to show the latter.
It's one of those irregular verbs - I am exchanging valuable truths; you are expressing your feelings; he/she/it is a troll heading for a ban.
IMO we must accept some level of restriction on speech in most places, lest everything becomes 4chan's /b/ and no productive discussion can take place. But the thing is, once you accept any restrictions on anyone at all, the ship has sailed; as the joke goes, we have already established what we are, and are now just haggling over the price.
I'd suggest it's because the small scale individualist utilitarianism you describe invariably ends up eroding the laws and regulations put in place to protect "ordinary people" from the invasive governmental strong-arm do-as-your-told form of utilitarianism.
I think people are ok with doing bad things to achieve greater good, as long as it is done as part of a rule they know to be a predictable part of social contract. Conversely, people oppose to the meta-rule which would let individuals make on the spot, subjective, utilitarian judgements, because that's unpredictable and might lead to constant fear. I'd be afraid to get into a taxi in a society in which it would be ok for the driver to make a decision to sacrifice me for a greater good based on their view of values.
I think normative and consequential approach converge once you start taking second (third, nth) orders into account. An action is only achieving a greater good, if a society which adopted it as a rule would be nicer.
But this is difficult, as it requires careful consideration of all pros and cons by various members of society, some precomitment, enforcement, and becomes undistinguishable from democratic process of establishing norms.
This is my view as well. One major people have against utilitarians is that they are calculating the incalculable. If you start adding second and higher order effects, then it really is incalculable, and some level of epistemic humility is required. That's why I'm generally against causing first-order harms in order to bring about higher-order benefits.
On the other hand I'm generally anti-utilitarianism but it's hard to find actual real-world scenarios in which I'd actively _disagree_ with utilitarianism. My disagreements with utilitarianism are either pretty abstract (utility can't be computed in practice and therefore can't be maximised in practice) or only occur in hypothetical philosophical situations, not real ones.
I think most anti-utilitarians have this in common; you won't often find someone who explicitly says "it's right to do X, even though doing Y would make the world a better place". Non-utilitarians will usually have an argument why the thing that they propose doing for un-utilitarian reasons also just happens to be the utilitarianally optimal thing anyway.
Well, utilitarianism says that you have to donate all your possessions to those poorer that you. I assume that you haven't in fact been doing that, which seems to me to count as a real-world scenario. Of course, this applies to pretty much all the so-called utilitarians as well. Some of them do feel guilt about this, to their credit.
*Maximizing* consequentialism says that. The scalar consequentialism I espouse only says that ceteris paribus you'd be a more morally good person if you donated more possessions to those for whom they did more good. Of course we realize that none of us prioritize *only* moral goodness in our decision-making, or ever will, nor do we imagine that forcing others is a reliable way to increase first-order good behaviors by more than the badness of the higher-order consequences.
I think that one area where utilitarianism in practice often breaks down is that it tends to focus people on short term effects. It also potentially leads to a kind of tunnel vision where only a very limited set of goals or surrogate endpoints are considered. This isn't a requirement of utilitarianism. But it's a very common rookie mistake, so it's worth acknowledging.
My guess? This is less about you (Scott) than your comments section, but in the space here, the general vibe often seems to be "ethics as sport," ie "let's play out any argument no matter how many common taboos we are contemplating violating because we understand this is all part of a game we are playing to arrive at some kind of deeper consensus or understanding of principals or common notions or whatever." Which yes, gives people the vibe that this is a space where people think anything is at least theoretically permittable. To most people, ethics is more like war, you don't suggest arguments unless you are laying the groundwork for an attack. So the sentence "the most cogent argument I can think of for eating babies" will make most people think you are trying to legitimately justify the eating of babies, not that you are conducting rationality katas or whatever the fuck people think they are doing around here.
This, btw, is why in most spaces if people discuss morality at all, they spend half the time virtue signaling, when everybody knows what tribe you belong to, it allows you to make hypothetical arguments without anyone thinking you are trying to secretly incept outcomes that run counter to the groups common moral code. But with utilitarians (or at least, internet rationalist-utilitarians), the highest common goal of the tribe is "let's discuss anything and everything in the most rational light possible, no matter how uncomfortable," and thus the only virtue signaling you get is people racing to show how adept they are at justifying absolute horror that they don't even really believe in, just to prove they are capable of the exercise.
You betcha. Why just the other day we were discussing whether, if you cannibalize you mother, it made the deed more reprehensible to cook her with bacon for flavoring , since adding the bacon gave you partial responsibility for the death of a second sentient being. Some brought recipes.
I think the anti-utilitarians come in various flavors.
1. The Nate Silver flavor: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1742636333624107121 of doing-bad-things-has-good-result-and-don't-worry-about-indirect-consequences. This is, by far, the most common. This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way.
2. The I-need-a-philosophy-job flavor. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor; I don't want to degrade the entire profession. But the absolutely awful critiques I've been reading for decades persist. (Some critiques require work and there are hard problems. But man, so many are just bad. In college, I read a textbook that explained that utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism. I made up the names of the cereals, but not the argument.)
3. As you observe, the math-is-bad flavor. These folks seem to be wrong, and uninterestingly so.
I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well. I do think in practice given our human limitations, rule-following is a good default heuristic. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this.
> This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way
I don't know what you mean by a serious way. If you mean that philosophy professors don't believe it then maybe you're right, but "very naive utilitarianism" is the version that you're most likely to encounter in the wild.
Very naive utilitarianism is worth attacking not because philosophy professors believe it but because actual jerks in the real world use it to make (or at least to justify) the very real harms they want to inflict on the world.
"It's okay to block the highway to protest because...", "It's okay to lie to the public, because...", "It's okay to kill all the kulaks, because..." -- these are things that get said by jerks who genuinely believe in very naive utilitarianism.
Perhaps we need a term that helps us differentiate between "deep utilitarianism" and "shallow utilitarianism"?
Deep utilitarianism is really hard, because you have to deal with time horizons (where probabilities decrease as distance in time gets bigger), nth order effects (with decreasing probabilities as `n` gets bigger), and uncertainty in all things.
Shallow utilitarianism is really easy, because you just look one step into the future and decide if a thing is good or bad and then stop. It also is *very* easy to do a bad thing this way.
I think many long-held social norms are a sort of emergent form of deep utilitarianism. Things like "don't murder all of the x in your society" exists for the reasons a deep utilitarian would argue, but no one sat down and calculated them out 1000 years ago. Instead, societies tried different things and the ones that didn't murder all x in their society seemed to do better over the last 10,000 years than the ones that did.
My thoughts too. But if I think about that more, how much of a society's outcomes are determined by it having the right values and how much by them having lots and lots of oil? Or: maybe you are unlikely to stumble upon the industrial revolution unless you have certain values, but you don't need them to industrialize if you already know what to do, and your outcomes might even be better afterwards. Or: maybe some values we think are important for good outcomes are actually dependent on the *true* reasons of those outcomes (e.g. a lot of European's success since the Enlightenment was the result of tolerance to Jews but the real "lesson" might not have been "be tolerant to minorities", but rather "breed a highly intelligent population by unintentional unethical eugenics and use them to solve hard problems").
Yes, there is a huge number of confounding variables when you look at history, and one can make arguments for many possible explanations for an outcome. We do our best to try to reason about which one is most likely, but IMO a good utilitarian will recognize that their confidence is not certain for any of this. Historically, more liberal societies tended to advance faster, but there are enough confounders to make it so we can't say for sure that a more liberal society today will advance more/faster than a less liberal society today.
Thinking about historical examples, the ideological landscape of a society seems to matter quite a lot, but perhaps not in the kind of ways they themselves might have thought about it. The Romans for instance would have attributed their success to virtus, disciplina, pietas, fides, etc, but we would be inclined to think that it wasn't their martial bravery (which they'd be ready to admit barbarians also possessed in spades) or even bravery tempered by discipline (that barbarians supposedly lacked), never mind dutiful worship of Jupiter in accordance with the tradition of their ancestors, but e.g. a large freeholding middle-class wealthy enough to equip themselves as heavy infantries, a political career path (cursus honorum) that ensured a large supply of broadly competent military leaders, and their way of treating conquered peoples not as subjucated subjects but allies - an uneven relationship mirroring patron-client relationship already present in those societies and thus making the arrangement more palatable - but allies nevertheless, all of these factors among others allowing them to mobilize their available military resources entire order of magnitude more efficiently than many of their contemporary rivals. These sort of factors, more so than pure happenstance of geography or a series of great men, seem to account for their success, and you can cast these factors in terms of values: republicanism, equality, enfranchisement, etc.
Can't help but notice that the Romans attributed their success to what they valued and you (tentatively) attribute their success to what our society values. I expect we are better at sociology than the Romans but are we really good at it?
Is there a short summary? Most of the article is about alleged torture instruments; I said nothing about that.
Yes, there are people who believe that Inquisition did nothing wrong, and they sound about as impartial as people who believe that Hitler did nothing wrong.
So you prefer to remain in your ignorance, rather than correct your misconceptions?
The article is not about "the Inquisition did nothing wrong", it's about "all the things you think you know about the Inquisition are wrong".
This isn't "Hitler did nothing wrong", it's "I know Hitler was a giant radioactive dinosaur who flattened Tokyo and you can't tell me otherwise, you Tokyo-destruction apologist!"
Sorry, I've researched this subject myself, and your myth is a myth. See my thoroughly-documented work-in-progress, "Christianity was Totalitarian" ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F1ZhOKn3VT6biu_SzbCV2RcSP0Qn4xbkDO8BajSZSlE/edit ), under "The Bloody Cross", for a VERY LONG chronological list of atrocities committed in the name of Christ.
Making war on heretics was popular in the 6th-9th centuries, and caused the Dark Age. It wasn't the barbarians who destroyed Rome; it was the 20-year war between the Eastern and Western empires instigated by Emperor Justinian in the name of killing Arian Christians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(535%E2%80%93554)). Charlemagne's wars, also in the name of killing Arians, devastated what is now France and Germany.
Crusades to kill heretics were big in the 13th century. The Catholic church's biggest and most-lethal crusades weren't against Muslims, but against other Christians. Witch-burning was a Big Deal in the 14th - 16th century. War between Protestants and Catholics was the game in the 16th+17th centuries.
The Puritans exterminated most of the Native Americans in Massachusetts, tho I don't think I have that on my list yet. The Catholic church committed what amounted to partial genocides all around the world throughout the colonial period, all in one way or another designed to convert people to Christianity. (For instance, in the Belgian Congo, hundreds of Catholic clergy, including the Pope, covered up the massacre of at least 5 million Congolese for decades, because they had a deal with the Belgian King that Catholic missions would get to raise all the resulting orphans as Christians.) During WW2, Catholic clergy helped execute about 800,000 people, mostly Orthodox Christians. The total number of people whose deaths Christians either committed directly, or participated in, in the name of Christ, is about 20 million, if we don't count the role of Catholic priests in instigating the Rwandan genocide (because that was, unlike the previous genocides, not authorized by the Vatican). That's just the ones documented. The real number could easily be twice as large. And most of those were killed in a world with much smaller populations than in the 20th century.
Number of witches killed can only be estimated by sampling areas where records were kept and survived to this day. The numbers in that web page are a gross under-estimate, by 1-2 orders of magnitude, because so few records remain.
You know what /is/ a myth? The idea that the Roman empire persistently persecuted Christians. There were something like 10 years in its history that it persecuted Christians seriously, and the total number killed is unknown, but might only be in the hundreds.
You really should read the long list of well-documented Christian mass atrocities. But that would challenge your beliefs, so I suppose you won't.
Gibbon claimed something quite different: that Christianity weakened the Roman spirit, allowing it to be conquered by barbarians. But saying Rome was "conquered by the barbarians" in the 5th century because Germanic peoples were in charge is a little like saying that New Mexico was conquered by Mexico in 1917 because it elected a Mexican-American governor. They were Romanized barbarians.
(Most of these people were actually burning innocent people falsely accused of being witches, which was bad, but the problem there was an error of epistemology, not moral philosophy.)
"There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there."
I used to believe that moral mistakes are a separate category from epistemic mistakes, but then I realized that most people actively reject information that would challenge the morality of their behavior.
So by that calculus, the most moral person in the world would be some arrogant asshole who never listens to others and never reflects on his own behavior, because then all of his mistakes would be epistemic ones.
I don't know how many people are out there making consciously utilitarian arguments for highway-blocking protests. Other than, e.g., delaying an ambulance with a critical patient (which they would imply is rare), I think most would just deny that there is any harm to weigh against. Rather, the motorists are being given an opportunity to realize that <protest issue> is actually more important than wherever they thought they needed to be, which will make them better people. Any irritation or discomfort is actually just embarrassment at being confronted with something they were ignoring.
"utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism."
What? I can't make any sense of that. Is it that you would like the Wheat Chex better, knew you would like them better, but ate the Corn Chex for some other reason? And thus you were not being utilitarian because you weren't making the choice that gave you the greatest happiness? And that's immoral? No, that can't be right.
You thought the Corn Chex would give you the greatest happiness/utility, which is why the utilitarian choice was to eat them. But this was wrong, so utilitarianism is wrong. But that doesn't make it immoral, just mistaken.
One issue discussed by W. D. Ross and some later utilitarian philosophers is the question of whether or not it is permissible to miss an opportunity for "innocent pleasure." So yes, on one utilitarian view, it is indeed immoral to choose the Corn Chex if you would have enjoyed the Wheat Chex more. (I think the anti-utilitarian argument here is to suppose that this controversial position within utilitarianism is representative of utiltarianism as a whole, that it is obviously wrong, and that therefore utilitarianism as a whole is obviously wrong. But I don't know what book John R. Mayne was talking about, so I can't say for sure.)
But you might think you would like the Corn Chex more, so it wasn't until you tried them that you decided "No, I prefer the Wheat Chex". Or you might know that you prefer Wheat Chex, but you prefer them *too* much and eat way too many of them, so you pick the Corn Chex in order not to overeat. Or you might make a choice to mortify your appetites in order to gain self-control. I can't see those cases as immoral, but I suppose I'm forgetting this is a philosophical conundrum and the abstract thought experiments go to crazy places (like our infamous Trolley problem: "ordinary people are squeamish about the notion of deliberately killing someone, isn't that weird?")
>I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well.
There's this study about whether ethics professors act more ethically than non-ethics professors, the result of which (basically no difference) gestures towards a conclusion that might be more illuminating: humans in general are ethics-satisficers rather than ethics-maximizers, and this leads to people to act about as decently as their peers, which permits a whole lot of wrongdoing (like eating meat if you believe eating meat is unethical) since ethical theories only really tend to disagree at edge cases.
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism are not the same things. You can be a non-Utilitarian and a Consequentialist, and you can be a Utilitarian without being a Consequentialist, despite what professional moron and evil person, Peter Singer, might say in a cited paper.
You are a Utilitarian because you're a Utilitarian. You've self described this way, you've wrote about how you think this is the only theory of ethics that even tries to "solve the problem", you've strenuously defended the position in the past, and you frequently talk about other moral theories in such ways as to suggest you are incapable of understanding alternate positions in the first place. This isn't an insult, you've admitted this in previous blogs, including ones specifically about things missing from one's awareness.
This post is itself is an example, since I have no idea who these people are who are pro the first list, but against the second. Don't worry, I'm against both lists, because the first list is obviously bad, and for the second list, I'm forced to fill in the blanks of what you actually mean by your own personal actions, to which I am against.
"So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I think utilitarians are uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and also utilitarians are very likely to accept everything in that first list. To be sure, it's completely possible to be a utilitarian and reject the first list, but I notice most self described utilitarians have no understanding of anything, whether they be blog authors or Peter Singer, so I would be really surprised to see an example that I believed. We might point to Peter Singer especially as the most obviously willing-to-do-evil Utilitarian, somebody who clearly doesn't understand anything, and, due to prominence, a large chunk of why Utilitarianism gets a bad rap from normal people who are just into politics and not philosophy.
But ignoring the reason from mere prominent individual, I think your confusion is based on, once again, an inability to understand the alternatives.
In itself, "calculating lives" is not utilitarianism, nor consequentialist. Nobody cares about that. What is utilitarianism is the part where you say that the calculation is the crux of the "science" of ethics, and the consequentilist part is where you say the nature of the outcome-as-outcome is the most important and/or primary factor in determining what to do.
Somebody like great hero Achilles might take both the calculation of lives, and the consequences of the action as important in a moral judgement, for example "we must kill as many of the enemy as possible." But great hero Achilles is a virtue ethicist, and so the consequences-in-themselves are not the marker, but rather how they conform to the virtues necessary for heroism, such as bravery, piety, martial prowess, leadership, and so on, is the marker. The calculation of lives or their maximisation is not the primary motive, but rather, these are the extension of what it means to create victory, which in this case is heroic.
But IF Achilles was a utilitarian consequentialist in the mould of most internet utilitarians, or Peter Singer, we might decide to maximise the deaths of our enemies and lives of our friends. But we need to realise that all animals are equal and infanticide is fine, also we need to be long thinkers and consider future enemies and friends. In conclusion, utilitarianism is a mathematical attractor for the annihilation of all life in the universe. Absolutely perfect for people obsessed with AI, people who think everything can and should be put under the label of "science", and other such Moloch worshippers.
Off the top of my head, you could generalise hypothetical modern Rule Utilitarianism that define "good" in ways that veer into Deontology or Virtue.
We can say that are three different kinds of moral reasoning. Consequences, obligation, and character. One might consider Utilitarianism as primarily a method, rather than a judgement about which moral reasoning is best. This method would be deciding numerical or numerical-like values to be weighed against other such values, to calculate and maximise some and/or minimise others.
You see this happen a lot in the self-help world. Mentions of how to build up a habit, for example, usually will set a number of days, weeks, or months, in order to get the character benefit you want. You would be using a utilitarian method to reach a character goal.
Another common case would be the aforementioned Rule Utilitarians. It is quite common, for example, for self described Utilitarians to promote veganism, or vegetarianism, and then extend this to a broadly progressive environmentalist position generally. Dig down, and in at least some cases it would because they believe there's some deontological obligation to care about the planet as a broad concept. Some might even be honest about this.
Now I didn't say this was particularly prominent or coherent, or even something people would self-credit. Probably, people who fall into this weird notion would see the label as an insult. Or, they'd be really confused about what it is they're doing or caring about. But I accuse Utilitarians in general of being "really confused".
Hmm, as I understand it, utilitarianism is primarily about "the greatest good for the greatest number", and since you have to operationalize this somehow that's where numerical-like values come in.
The self-help thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with this, it's more like a typical case of the inverse, consequentialism without utilitarianism.
Rule utilitarianism is just utilitarians acknowledging that they can't actually calculate all of the important stuff and essentially replacing it with deontology, except without the usual religious carrot-and-stick connotations.
As a non-utilitarian, I too am against the things you are against in your first list.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good” - even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I get your point. But my problem with utilitarianism isn’t about mixing human lives with math, but rather that utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people. These third parties do not know how their calculations or policies are going to affect people they meant to affect, they can never calculate it with the perfect information, information only individuals themselves possess. Me knowing what I know about myself, can use math all I want to calculate what’s good for me and test them out in the real world, but I would not think I can/should do it for other people. There are two problems with “Doing an evil thing for the greater good”: 1) the “evil things” sometimes violates individual’s natural rights. 2) there is no such thing as the greater good. What’s good for me might not be good for you. Everyone’s so different in terms of believes, personality, individual circumstances at any given time. The best one to decide what’s good for a person is a person himself. Not an outside calculation with imperfect information and the goal to maximize group interest.
> utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people.
I think only *bad* utilitarians do this. If you think 1 step into the future then "government should control X" seems like a good idea. If you think a few more steps into the future you realize "giving the power to do X to a small group of people historically always ends poorly, so even though we may get short term gains, long term we'll see a lot more suffering."
Human society has come up with these "natural rights" through exploration and we have found that things like freedom and liberty result in societies with a lot less pain and suffering than societies that don't have those things. A utilitarian who is good at their job will recognize this and put a whole lot of weight on the benefits of these fundamental rights and be incredibly unlikely to override them.
Scott gets to this sort of when he talks about things like compulsory education. It sounds good if you don't consider that creating an institution that has the ability to force you to raise your children a certain way leads to a society that is unable to explore the child-rearing landscape and come up with new, better, ways of child rearing. It also puts power of indoctrination into the hands of a small number of people which history has shown can be abused to great effect (see Chinese cultural revolution as an example). The "basic human right" to raise your children how you see fit is sacred for a good reason, and a utilitarian should not ignore that without an *incredibly* good reason.
If natural rights (without quote) are fully recognized and respected by utilitarians who’s good at their job, then what is left worthy for them to calculate? When you are faced with the decision of whether mandatory schooling is good for society or not, and you think in terms of Maximizing group interest, you can argue a good utilitarian concludes “mandatory schooling is bad” and a bad utilitarian concludes the opposite. But a non-utilitarian who does not want to maximize group interest - because they know they don’t know other people as well as those people know themselves - naturally do not agree with anything compulsory. There is no need for the good utilitarian here even though he might conclude the same as non-utilitarian. But can a good utilitarian stay “good” consistently throughout all issues all the time? I think that would be incredibly hard, not to mention unnecessary due to the fact that people can and should and are better off to decide for themselves.
I agree with your premise and general argument. However, I would like to posit that the person who is blindly following some heuristic that seems to work broadly will also get things wrong sometimes. The important question is how much effort both have to put into decision making to achieve similar success rates, and can they both achieve the same high success rate or will one always be strictly better.
Given infinite time to contemplate all decisions, I think a particularly smart/clever utilitarian will come out ahead. Given finite time to contemplate all decisions, I believe that the natural rights believer (for some set of natural rights I agree with) will probably come out ahead.
However, a utilitarian can always fallback to natural rights when they need to make decisions quickly, and only switch over to calculations when they have the time necessary to really think deeply. For me personally, I have some heuristics that seem to get things right 99% of the time that I used, and I occasionally do deep utilitarian calculations. Every time my utilitarian calculations align with my general purpose heuristics, it reinforces my belief that my heuristics are good, and when the calculations don't align, it helps give me feedback on where I may need better heuristics.
I think most greater good arguments are slippery slopes. And yet I am comfortable with the caveat you have, even though I am a deontologist. Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal, which is what scares me about the whole consequentialist attitude.
I have a pet theory that humans evolved a distrust of anyone relying heavily on system 2 for their decisions because system 2 is better at deception than system 1. (Not everyone using system 2 is an evil mastermind, but every evil mastermind is using system 2.)
The other part of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which doesn't get as much discussion, is about the theory that our system 2 was evolved to coordinate group action. To persuade ourselves and others to join together. It's purely an accident that it can be used for rational thinking. What it's really for is rationalization and politics.
Thinking that a mother's love is virtuous and sacred? Sure, that's deep inside our system 1. Following the dude who's saying "burn the witch?" Heck yes, we want to be part of the burners, not the burnees. But we're not really evolved to follow someone who's talking to themselves and claims they've figured out something new. That's weird and dangerous. Better to stay away until they have a track record, or at least until a lot of other people sign on first.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're a utilitarian or a consequentialist. You don't seem to have any coherent moral philosophy at all. Which is fine, because no one does. Everyone just does what makes them feel good. It's not any more complicated than that.
Utilitarianism isn't any more objective than emotivism because any value it optimizes for is ultimately still arbitrary. There is no objective value to human life or death, happiness or suffering, order or chaos. You're still just operating on your own preferences. Thus, utilitarianism is just a way of practicing emotivism, not a separate moral system.
None of Scott's posts have shown that he has any truly consistent values. Utilitarianism requires that you have utility values that you optimize for. Scott allegedly optimizes for decreasing suffering and fulfilling preferences, yet most of his objections in the first part revolve around freedom, something completely orthogonal to well-being. Also he's against wireheading, which is the obvious optimal outcome of optimizing for those things. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-thrones/
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with any of this. He's just human. Even utilitarianism doesn't make the values you optimize for any less arbitrary. But at least it's actually honest about what you want (in theory). But what does anyone actually want? Happiness? But then why do so many make so much effort to avoid it? None of this makes any sense...
'Freedom' is a preference that many humans value being fulfilled, and thus he values it being fulfilled for them. He probably also has some personal preference directly for people being free to choose what they want.
I can believe he's not a hedonistic utilitarian (or a suffering - somehow weighted preferences_fulfilled utilitarian), but that doesn't lead to "not consequentialist".
I don't think I agree that Scott's posts haven't shown consistent values. I think he chooses different parts to focus on at times for the topic of a post, and I think he's confused in some manners (of course because I believe I got the right answer), but I still don't see them as inconsistent as you are saying they are.
(of course they're not a fully formed tightly written utility function, but whatever)
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It is easy to be against wireheading if you value some form of fulfilling preferences, because ~most people have preferences about the real world and want their happiness to be linked to something real. Wireheading is the optimum for a hedonistic utilitarian who only values happiness where happiness is defined as certain chemicals, but it isn't the optimum for fulfilling preferences.
(I think the Fun Theory sequence on LW is the response I'd throw at his Wirehead gods post)
I think most people are deontologists, even if they don't realize it, even if they're atheists. They have specific commandments that demand specific actions, and also a (sometimes quite crude) framework for dealing with conflicts between commandments. Sometimes the framework involves utilitarianism, but other times it involves a hierarchy. And they view it as a hostile and profane act for someone else to come in and start homogenizing their sacred commandments with math.
Just as people don't like putting prices on sacred things (such as a mother's love, or clean air), because that transforms them into secular things which can be traded in the market. Money is market is economics is math, and once you start denominating your virtue in numbers, you've lost touch with the Source.
Now anyone more clever than you can throw some numbers at you and make you do whatever they want.
Most people are consequentialists when the tradeoff is the status quo. Not-absurdly-slow speed limits trade some probability of death and serious injury to the few against increased convenience to the many. It's okay that the side effects of chemotherapy kill many people, because avoiding chemo would kill a larger number of people, some of whom are not the same people. Consequentialism is an essential pillar of any complex society, and only appears as a demon when the particular tradeoff is new and feels weird.
"I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality" -- Yes, this.
Utilitarians, and people who are against utilitarianism, may both say "the ends justify the means," but they mean it differently. A utilitarian would mean that the action has expected positive net utility. An anti-utilitarian would typically mean that the ends are /permanent/, while the means are /temporary/.
I'm only slightly over-generalizing when I say that there are two types of people: people who think of reality as a state, and change as discrete transitions between states; and people who think of reality as a continuous dynamic system. People who model change in the world with state transitions don't count the cost of the path from here to there, because there is no path. The in-between part literally doesn't exist for them; it doesn't count in their (subconscious) utility function. And people who model the world with state transitions, believe that states are stable, and actions are initiated only by agents; so if you achieve a new state, you'll remain in that state until someone instigates some other revolutionary state transition. The new, more-perfect state will be permanent, unless you failed to eliminate all the evil people who would try to change it. So it's the only thing that counts.
The state-based model of reality is part of a larger system of metaphysics and ethics, that found in Plato, Christianity, Marxism, and the Social Justice Movement, which believes that the morality of actions can be certain, and forbids the use of numeric calculations in ethics in order to guarantee certainty. Where there are measurements, there are errors; where values of different goods are compared, there are disagreements. So for instance Marx didn't adopt the labor theory of value because it makes sense--it doesn't--but because it provides an objective measure of value that everyone can agree on. Modeling reality as a continuous dynamic system would require measuring all sorts of things, including how long an incentive must be applied before society reaches its new, more-perfect state. This kind of ethical system refuses to measure, so it just ignores that part of the calculation.
Ethical systems of this type usually avoid using numeric values at all by making ethical valuations ordinal (position in a sequence), not cardinal (an independent numeric measure). An ethical rule of lower ordinality (coming earlier in the sequence) always takes precedence over a rule of higher ordinality (later in the sequence). This is why SJWs think it makes sense to say "first we will eliminate all racism; next we will eliminate global warming; next we will eliminate homelessness." It is immoral under these systems to give anyone a tax break while one person is still homeless. In fact, these systems simply provide no way to think ethically about taxation--taxation is numeric, and can't be integrated with or connected to their system of ethics.
These systems still come into irreconcilable conflicts when they must rank a high-priority rule applied to a low-priority object (eg "do not hurt chickens") against a low-priority rule applied to a high-priority objects (eg "feed humans enough protein").
I would summarise my anti-utilitarian argument as "the downside of the means is certain, the upside of the ends is unpredictable". People who say that the ends justify the means are usually acting with an unjustifiable certainty about what the ends will actually be.
Agree. I also agree with Melvin that people who say that the ends justify the means are usually acting with an unjustifiable certainty about what the ends will actually be. Utilitarianism doesn't work when combined with unjustifiable certainty. That may be another major reason some people hate it--they imagine a utilitarian acting with the same certainty they have in their actions.
I had a long argument with my brother once, who's still a fundamentalist Christian, about moral certainty. He insisted that you can't act morally without absolute certainty--but it turned out he didn't mean certainty about the outcome, but absolute certainty about the morality of the action, /regardless/ of the outcome. I probably told him he was using the word "morality" wrong. Neither of us understood each other at all.
Well, sure. I do wish people who are arguing against some self-described utilitarians making mistakes that are straightforwardly described in utilitarian terms, would say so, rather than say they're arguing against utilitarianism.
Regarding your brother: I think quite a bit these days about the relations between fixed moral personality psychology and normative theories. As a scalar consequentialist, I have very little trouble doing many kinds of good without the concept of moral obligation, but I increasingly feel like I'm running into a brick wall trying to explain it to some people, as if their motivational and self-assessment systems just can't work if they don't feel like there's a clear line between "good person" and "bad person" that they're on the right side of.
That's true; I think all moral systems are ultimately aimed at the same goal -- good things happen and bad things don't.
Utilitarianism is about attempting to get there via an overly naive optimisation, like trying to get to the South Pole by walking directly south. You won't get there and you'll probably just wind up trampling on your neighbours' garden before eventually hitting a wall.
I disagree strongly with your first sentence. Deontology seems to be aimed at preserving the agent's ability to claim moral purity, regardless of how many bad things are happening outside the walls of self.
Scott, I'm curious how you as a utilitarian make up your mind on issues like the above.
When faced with a particular disruptive protest, do you sit down and calculate all possible outcomes, their relative probability, assign a utility value to each, and make up your mind based on that?
Or do you fall back on some general sorts of principles like "it's wrong to inconvenience people even if you think it's for a good cause" and "this sort of thing is generally counterproductive anyway"?
I suspect it's closer to the latter than to the former, in which case are you _really_ being a utilitarian, or are you just following the same sort of heuristic-based morality that a non-utilitarian would?
I agree I'm following the heuristic based morality, I just think utilitarianism is the thing it's a heuristic for. That is, usually it's fine to rely on "don't kill people", but if someone else proposes that we *should* kill people in some situation (eg capital punishment), and we need to examine the heuristic and figure out whether it applies, then utilitarianism is the level we retreat to when we're trying to do that.
(often this is impossible, and so we instead retreat to even deeper heuristics, and maybe try to justify *those* by utilitarianism. Maybe utilitarianism never gets invoked at all; I just find it reassuring to know that there's an actual point to all the heuristics hiding somewhere in the background).
I would suggest that within the space of possible values, there's no preferred basis for selecting preference-satisfaction over preference-dissatisfaction, pleasure over pain, or any of that over paperclips. We care about these, not because they are fundamental, but because they are part of our innate evolved sense of morality and values. So it strikes me that utilitarianism isn't the final level to retreat to.
Instead, what if we take evolved human morality as fundamental, and call an agent behaving in accordance with this set of values "virtuous"? I find that wisdom and prudence would characterize that agent among others traits, and thus allow derivation of consequentialist reasoning for the sort of edge cases where it's appropriate.
Well that's fair enough, but I'm not sure how your moral system is practically different to anyone else's. The most ardent deontologist will, if asked, say that his heuristics, if followed consistently, would lead to a morally optimal world.
If there's any difference at all between real-world practical utilitarianism and real-world practical deontology it's that utilitarianism gives you more flexibility and encourages you to bend your heuristics when it seems like a good idea. This allows you to do things like murdering your landlady with an axe because you think you'll be the next Napoleon. If men were angels then this sort of flexibility would probably be a good idea, but since we're not I'm inclined towards a "no really, obey the heuristics" meta-rule.
"trying to play down concerns about COVID because that might incite mobs to attack Chinese people. This violates the usual moral rule against deception to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the panic."
Not quite a fair description-- individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly.
What he said doesn't actually preclude that. They were playing down covid BEFORE many, if not any of these supposed attacks took place, so what he said makes perfect sense.
And saying "individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly" is vague to the point of meaningless. How many? How often? Probably less often that black people randomly attack white people, but anyway...
A different angle (black attacks on Chinese people not being taken as seriously as white attacks), but there were enough attacks that there were two mailing lists about them.
I tend to agree with your positions here, but I think what people are getting at when they describe your positions as more utilitarian is that they exhibit certain tendencies common in utilitarianism, namely focusing on legible, quantifiable, localized, easy-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits over illegible, unquantifiable, diffuse, difficult-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits. Now, I'm not entirely against that tendency, but I think it is a genuine hurdle to deal with when trying to reason consequentially, and I think the list of issues you posted on each side very clearly falls into this dichotomy, with the first list generally involving a localized harm for a diffuse benefit, and the latter list involving a localized benefit for (perhaps) a diffuse harm
this is such a well put and useful point, and i think the reason i’m so taken with it is that it doesn’t pretend to glibly or simplistically resolve the question at a fully general level: one can’t just declare the diffuse and incalculable side should win, any more than the localized and calculable side. i don’t think it will resolve most specific problems. i think it’s a very good way to check that one’s mental model of the problem isn’t catastrophically incomplete. i’m always troubled by the loss of context that imo adds meaningful implicit risk in ‘decoupling’ approaches to problem-solving.
I’m confused by what statements like “forcably separating children from their families” are meant to imply. It seems like some real concerns about schooling have been turned into abstract principles that don’t make a lot of sense once I think about them more.
For one thing, it sounds like something done without parents’ consent. That seems rare? It seems like parents, at least, have choices, since private and home-schooling exist? In practice, this “family separation” is typically parents making their children go to school.
If parents decide that, all things considered, their local public school is pretty good, characterizing it as an unusual form of coercion seems wrong. It doesn’t seem different from parents making many other decisions they make for their kids. Is sending the kids off to summer camp wrong too?
It seems like the answer is always going to be “it depends,” but typically parents are given pretty wide latitude when deciding what’s best for their kids.
Also, most parents work and need someone else to take care of the kids while they work, because many jobs are incompatible with babysitting. So isn’t this “forceable separation” really due to the necessity of working to make a living?
And as to “confining them in a space that they’re not allowed to leave” - isn’t that the state of all children? At young ages there are physical limits (playpen, barriers). Later, parents will watch over their kids or make rules that they need to follow. It’s not like they can live where they wish and go where they please.
Maybe there’s some better way of describing what’s wrong and what needs to change.
My understanding of the school system in the US is that it is no longer as voluntary as it used to be. If you want to home school your child, in many cases you have to convince the state that you are doing it in a "correct" and approved way. You cannot just say "I'm homeschooling my child" and then proceed to leave them to play unsupervised in the back yard and call it a "Montessori educational program".
That's because the actual requirement is to educate your children, not send them to school, lest the children suffer the fate of these kids. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1fsat6o3
Note: My first comment below is slightly sarcastic, other two are more serious.
Given how notoriously successful in life Jewish people allegedly are (I don't have first hand knowledge of the truth to this), it seems silly to tell Jewish people that they are educating their children wrong.
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The problem with compulsory education, is that the people who define what education is are not infallible. Do you trust both an extreme left wing government, and an extreme right wing government to define what education looks like more than individual parents? Are you OK if they force teaching creationism? If they force teaching of evolution? If they force teaching of a whitewashed history? If they force teaching of critical race theory?
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Centralized definitions of what an education removes people's ability to explore the landscape of possible educational systems. Montessori schools are an example of a novel educational strategy that people are trying out. Maybe it works great, maybe not, but we won't know unless some people try it. Maybe the school referenced in your article churns out the best and the brightest, for reasons we don't yet understand but will become apparent to us later.
At the school in question "teaching in done only in Yiddish, and no lessons in English, reading, spelling, writing, math, geography, history, civics, or science were carried out." So I rather doubt that they "churn out the best and the brightest." And, in fact, there is lots of evidence that they don't. Nor do I think it is ethical to essentially gamble with kids' futures on the off chance that "for reasons we don't understand" things will turn out for the best.
More importantly, you are not addressing the issue I raised. You are assuming that the state tells private schools how to teach and dictates specific curriculum. It is my understanding that that is not the case; schools are required to teach subjects like math and science, but there is very little in the way of mandates re the specifics thereof. For example in California, "Students attending private schools are exempt from California's compulsory attendance law if the schools offer instruction in the several branches of study required in the state's public schools. Private schools are not required to follow the state's adopted Content Standards." https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/non-public-education/regulation-map/california.html
> schools are required to teach subjects like math and science
This exemplifies the crux of our disagreement. IIUC, you are of the belief that teaching these core subjects should be mandated and all parents should be forced to ensure their children receive education in those subjects.
While I personally agree that these are good subjects to teach and I would encourage parents to ensure their children receive an education in these areas, I do not believe that I should have the right to override parent choices for their children's education.
Long ago teaching religion was considered critical, and reading/writing/arithmetic/science was not. Society at the time felt this was the best way to create a society of good/productive citizens. Today, we believe that reading/writing/arithmetic are the best way to create a society of good/productive citizens. We are probably more right today than we used to be, but perhaps in the future we'll realize that we were wrong. The best way to find out is to allow parents to educate their children how they wish and see which ones turn out the best. Some children *will* receive poor educations, but some will receive superior educations and so we make the trade in hope of a better future.
As an example, while I do believe reading/writing/arithmetic are quite useful, I actually think that teaching children how to learn, how to be curious, the scientific method, how to find truth, philosophy of knowledge, etc. are more useful and more important to teach at a young age. If a parent wanted to experiment with focusing on these things I would be quite interested to see the outcome, but this would be illegal in California based on the rules you linked.
>I do not believe that I should have the right to override parent choices for their children's education.
Yes, you do, because you are protecting the rights of children, which you completely ignore. A child who goes through the school mentioned in the article will have very few opportunities in contemporary society and will be deprived of the ability to make all sorts of choices as an adult. It is immoral to do that to a child, and to sacrifice them to some vague notion that, if we sacrifice enough of them, we might hit upon a a successful path.
> but this would be illegal in California based on the rules you linked.
> In Meyer v. Nebraska and Farrington v. Tokushige, U.S. Supreme Court cases of the 1920s, the fundamental right of parents to direct the education of their children was established. These decisions are still heavily cited today by those claiming the right to home school in federal and state courts.
> The United States Department of Education estimates that 1.5 million K–12 students were homeschooled in the United States in 2007 (with a confidence interval of 1.3 million to 1.7 million), constituting nearly three percent of students.
When I say "mandatory public schooling", I mean "schooling which is mandatory whether or not parents consent".
Although most parents don't make a giant fuss about it, I feel like this is similar to how most people don't make a fuss about paying their taxes, even if they wish the tax rate was lower - it's not really worth making a fuss when you'll definitely lose.
But why would they lose? Home schooling is a thing. What sort of dispute are you imagining that parents would lose?
It seems like home schooling makes public school optional in practice, except that someone does still need to take care of the kids, so it’s often difficult to implement.
My understanding is that in many places in the US (I'm not sure if it is a state or federal thing), if you homes chool your children you must do so in a way approved by the state. You cannot simply let your children help you at work, or play in the back yard all day. You must prove to the state that you are "educating them" in a way that the state approves of.
Yes, that matches my understanding of how it works. But it’s not a “forcable separation” and it’s not “public schooling.” I don’t know how rigorous those standards are. Do homeschoolers complain about them?
Presumably the parents who sent their kids to this private school are unhappy: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1fsat6o3. I have also heard anecdotal reports from home schooling parents complaining about the bureaucratic burden, as well as disagreements with what is required. Montessori schools for example may not have a curriculum that meets requirements in all states. And of course, there is the general discomfort (which I think is reasonable) of having a social worker come to your house and grade you on whether you are raising your children properly. There are also odd cases of corruption here and there where these procedures are weaponized, though these are outliers.
You can see requirements by state at https://hslda.org/legal, and in particular check out the red colored states which have incredibly strict requirements which includes number of hours, annual assessments, and credential requirements for the "teacher" (even if it is parent).
Adults who recevied no education under the guise of home schooling complain. The worst case scenario of home schooling is at least as.bad.as the worst case.scenario.of.public education.
Yeah, on Reddit you can find a place where adults talk about how their homeschooling was awesome, and also a place where adults talk about how their homeschooling was horrible. It seems like school gives you mostly an average experience, and homeschooling will send you to an extreme... but both extremes are possible.
The positive experience is typically: had more fun, more free time, learned more. We all know that, because that is how we would probably do it.
The negative experience, I remember two frequent patterns. One pattern is crazy parents, either religious fanatics or some other kind that... opposes the civilization in general and all its knowledge. These people are keeping their kids uneducated on purpose. It doesn't necessarily feel like "not learning" for the kids, because they sometimes have to read lots of religious texts or do some other kind of bullshit work. But ultimately they learn nothing useful, despite all the work.
Another pattern, which was a news for me, are basically parents who originally wanted to do it the right way, and then they... burned out, or suffered depression, or otherwise became unable to do homeschooling the right way... and they refuse to *admit it and give up*. So the kids are at home, but no one actually takes care of them; maybe they learn on their own, maybe they don't learn at all; but the parents are definitely not explaining things to them or buying textbooks or hiring tutors. The parents are presumably also not happy about the outcome, but they keep doing it anyway.
Granted. And yet, without fail, every time I have the first conversation with a fellow self-described consequentialist libertarian, your name comes up quickly. And as consequentialists, we don't tend to truck in the "You're not a *real* x!" sorts of argument anyway.
I think this footnote is a bit disingenuous to the pro-gun side:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms.
I think a more correct description of their position would be:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives today to protect against tyranny in the future.
This is definitely a utilitarian argument (lives today for lives in the future), but it isn't just sacrificing lives for the sake of being able to own a gun.
Good luck facing down the military, and extremely militarised police force(s) with a few pea shooters and shot guns. If gun rights supporters were serious about fighting for liberty then they should be arguing for mass ownership of tanks.
My point here was not to argue whether the anti-gun-control people are right or wrong, but rather to suggest that the article steel man their argument rather than straw man it.
The steel man is that the purpose of gun ownership is to fend off tyranny. If we agree that tyranny is bad, then the actual debate isn't about whether gun control works, nor whether gun control reduces short term deaths. It instead becomes an interesting debate about whether gun ownership prevents tyranny or not.
I probably won't engage much on the specific gun control debate in this thread, but the gist of the steel man for why gun ownership prevents tyranny is that it is extremely rare for a government trying to oppress a population to engage in a scorched earth strategy (e.g., nuking cities). Instead they tend to go door to door and try to surgically remove combatants while leaving the pliable people (useful labor) untouched. If everyone owns a gun, this strategy becomes *extremely* hard/costly to execute.
If the government starts doing indiscriminate killing of their rebelling citizens (e.g., nuking cities) they very rapidly lose support of their own military and rapidly radicalize the entire population against them. Nukes, fighter jets, and tanks don't work super well when your 10,000 man defense force around your seat of power is having its supply lines of food interrupted by by 10,000,000 people with rifles spread out over your entire country.
Exactly how many million americans do you imagine the military are going to be able to stop? You think they're just going to blow up entire city blocks?
The left really, really don't want conservatives owning guns and it has nothing to do with school shootings.
Look at how well do the drone-delivered grenades work in Ukraine and think how ideologically polarised the US is, then add 2+2. You're delusional if you think guerillas will be fighting boots-on-the-ground military in a hypothetical civil war.
Darn it, I don't like guns but now you have me perking up and wagging my tail.
A local orchestra version of the 1812 Overture with *real* artillery accompaniment? Don't tempt me! 😀
Sounds like an idea for a video game: spread culture *and* obliterate the enemy at the same time! Real cannon, real shells, real targets, ring them bells!
You know I had to look it up, seems like it's been done by several militaries:
Thank you for that link. Both entertaining *and* informative (I didn't know about Sir Joseph Whitworth previously).
There is definitely something in humans which likes "fire! boom! 'splodey!" and though future societies may decide to polygenically screen that out for the sake of harmony and such, I think we'll miss it. No more fireworks? No more "boom! fire! 'splodey!", we'll miss something.
Bingo. Although I'm not 100% on the pro-gun side, it's an argument that I take very seriously as an ethical consequentialist.
Another thing that a consequentialist ought to mention about guns is crime deterrence, which (as with silently prevented harms in general) tends to be ignored by deontologists.
Pffft. I like guns, I've shot a bunch of them, my family has a ton of them, and although I'm apolitical, I hate the Left *at least* as much as the Right, and even with those factors in favor, I'm gonna say "to defend against tyranny" is a blatantly ridiculous, toothless reason.
10 years ago, we literally found out that our own government spies on literally everything you ever do, say, or send in any electronic medium whatsoever, and keeps all of it for all time on NSA servers to be correlated and machine-learninged and used against you whenever anyone feels like it in the future.
And what did the gun people do? These folks who had been *promising* us they were purely about preventing tyranny for decades, and boy, if ever any tyrant steps out behind the rosebush is HE going to be sorry! They did nothing. Not a peep. Not a protest, not a petition, not an "insurgency," not one gun fired in anger at all. With scarcely a whimper, they tucked their tail and scurried inside so they could eat fattening food in front of the TV for the next decade, all while continuing to use their electronic devices and allowing the government to spy on them however they wanted, literally 24/7/365.
You had your tyranny, and did literally nothing about it. People who think they'd defend against tyranny don't deserve guns, because they didn't and aren't.
A variant of this is to observe that people who cannot protect themselves will be more willing to tolerate oppressive government in exchange for police protection than people who can protect themselves. No knock raids, civil forfeiture, mass surveillance don't look so bad if you believe the alternative is being murdered in your bed, having your things stolen, being raped, ... . So it is sacrificing some lives to reduce tyranny in the present, with the conflict happening through ordinary political mechanisms, not civil war.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
...That is not a "usual" moral rule. As far as I can see, very few people have any issue with telling others that their opinions are bad and that they should feel bad. This is just a case of your values being non-standard.
"Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad" is about as close to the definition of "shaming" as I can see, and insulting is a normal rhetorical part of lots of discourse that, again, very few people have issue with. Doxxing is the one of these that's not like the others.
My intuition is that people are perfectly fine with bullying as long as the target "deserves" it. Now, obviously people draw the line at very different places, but even the staunchest anti-bullying advocates aren't going to be against telling a literal, honest to god Nazi to jump off a cliff. In their eyes, it would be immoral for them *not* to stand against blatant evil.
You are the only person I've seen that's even close to a rhetorical pacifist. It's not that others are compromising their values, it's just that you have very different values than most. Most people are willing to fight bad ideas at their source, not content to let the "marketplace of ideas" sort it out.
All the things you list as reasons people call you utilitarian just seem like very normal political views lots of people have. I guess I find it unlikely this is really why people consider you a utilitarian? Isn't it more likely you get called a utilitarian for beliefs you have that are rare among non-utilitarian, like (just to take a random example I remember) that the math shows eating beef is morally better than eating chicken?
Organ markets and genetic engineering are common subjects of mainstream political debate with plenty of people on both sides. I found a 2012 poll with 72% support for compensation for organ donors (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/05/16/152498553/poll-americans-show-support-for-compensation-of-organ-donors#). The main concern in medicine with genetic engineering seems to be the safety of the current technologies and I think this is sincere. Embryo selection already exists and the most significant objections come from pro-lifers.
"Earning-to-give" is obscure as a concept that exists only within a single small movement, but the way you expressed it in the post ("Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity") is obviously really popular in the US. If you stated it as "the best thing a smart person who wants to do good should do is go into finance and make as much money as possible" it would be less popular but also perhaps suggest some more insight into why people object to utilitarianism.
That NPR article reads very differently to me. First of all, 72% seems to be the proportion *of people who approve of compensating donations* who also approve of having insurers deliver the compensation (with the non-exclusive alternatives of charities and the gov't). Second, the only form of compensation that finds majority approval (60%) is credit toward future health care, with direct cash transfer the least-approved at 41%. Third, by pooling two exclusive responses, I see 64% saying compensation should be less than about $33,900 in 2024 dollars (frustratingly the article doesn't clarify whether they asked about specific higher brackets, and the link to the full poll results is dead). Fourth, and I think most damning to the idea that this hints at a nascent pro-organ-market constituency, 60% say there is a meaningful distinction between "compensation" (as the survey consistently described the policy in approval questions) and "purchase".
Overall that speaks more to me of a public that admires or appreciates organ donation and wants to reward the people who do it for their nobility of spirit, but (speculative) is probably instinctively uncomfortable with the idea of anyone with zero innate moral urge to donate deciding to do so for compensation, and (much more speculative) might even be less concerned with the possibility of exploitation than the sense that that person doesn't deserve the reward in the same way as the determined altruist.
Somehow I just know selling organs is going to lead to the same outcome as we currently have with home mortgages. Where older people already own all the land you need to exist, and many young people will be pressured into selling their health to let an elderly citizen live a bit longer, just so that they can get a rung into the property ladder to have a stable roof over their head. Then the ones that make it to old age, will repeat the cycle, harvesting young peoples' organs to live another few years.
Might be interesting to look into the demographics of the people currently selling their full blood / blood plasma for monetary compensation, and compare to places where receiving compensation for blood donation is banned. Those are the same people who will feel obliged to donate their organs, for example to put food on the table for the next few years, or to get out of debt.
I'd not be so opposed to a system where the government donates some amount of money to the charity of your choice when you make an organ donation, but any system based around direct monetary compensation will lead to 5000 - 40000 poor people donating a kidney because it will get them 100.000 dollars over 10 years. Then maybe after those 10 years they'll donate a lung, a cornea, or some other organ which it's nominally perfectly fine to live without but in sum will lead to lower QALY's for the donator only because they were made poor by the economic system.
>only because they were made poor by the economic system.
Is a person with an IQ of 70 *made* poor by the "economic system"? The only way that makes sense if you believe that an aggressive wealth redistribution not existing is "making" them poor, which is not really how the word would normally be used.
Hi, Scott. Congrats on your (relatively recent) paternity.
Myself, I have a deep-seated dislike for Utilitarianism, and I'd attribute it to a pendulum swing - I was a committed Marxist when young, and I've grown to loathe any discourse of ends-justify-means EVER. That, indeed, is my greatest gripe.
I don't think I have an aversion to 'calculating things', but I frame things like paid organ-donation as the starting/facilitating step to a Greater Evil that will plausibly follow, meaning I would fight from getting started in the first place. I also have a Kantian dislike for lying that makes me extremely prone to a similar unwillingness to any trade-offs in this regard.
Another thing that irks me about Utilitarianism (just one more, as I could go on forever) is its disregard for individuals as such. Natural and inviolable rights might be a social construction, but building them as axioms that should never be broken is less prone to the typical bad tampering of "Benevolent" others.
Interesting. I consider Marx profoundly anti-utilitarian, since his theory of political change involves groups binding together and pursuing power to achieve their own self-interest, as opposed to the classical liberal enlightenment theory underlying utilitarianism, that reason and empathy can lead us toward objective universalist concern for well-being.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Peter Singer is a founder of the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
I'd say Marxism (especially as Marxism-Leninism) is strongly naively utilitarian in the sense of 'the end justifies the means' - attaining a classless egalitarian society is such an absolute good that practically no price is too much to pay to obtain it. It is also a good framed with 'a universalist concern for well-being', or at least for the vast majority of humans. In another way, Marxism is implicitly anti-moral (morality is just the superstructural propaganda by which a ruling class justifies its position), although this still leaves the issue of how intellectuals can 'betray their class' by adopting Marxist thought, and why it is so lucky and convenient that the working class, in fighting against its predecessor, will necessarily put an end to all class structures and domination.
comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the majical “sacred rule” nonsense try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
1) People with more deontological intuitions and preferences are seen as more trustworthy and preferable than consequentialists (even by people who report having consequentialist intuitions!), and this seems attributable to their being perceived to be more reliable and thus predictable - the preference swaps when you frame the consequentialists as more behaviourally consistent. Though consequentialists reliably do whatever produces the best consequences, since what counts as best varies with context, this makes them seem unreliable (Everett et al., 2016; Turpin et al., 2021). Is this just an evolutionary hang up, or something that's still relevant? I think the latter, because...
2) It seems conspicuous that the first group of things Scott endorses are 'norms that are already largely operative in society' (don't ban speech, don't harass, don't lie, don't shame) while the second are proposed changes to the current status quo with mostly untested consequences (New drugs, new gene editing, sell your organs. Note the main exception to the first category, getting rid of traditonal schooling, seems like more of a break from what's come before). Although utilitarians care about 'the greater good' they also really care about stable cooperation and coordination, which relies on people internalising norms and upholding them mostly unquestioningly. I'm nowhere near the first to say this, but there's a very plausible case to be made that once we're at the level of deciding which norms we want people to internalise for the long haul, the first category are the ones utilitarians would want people to land on (rather than 'attempt to maximise utility'), and this is going to require being disposed towards not breaking them even when it really seems like doing so would produce better consequences.
If the issue with weird new consequentialist proposals is risk aversion, it ought to be discussed as such, rather than mischaracterized as evidence against consequentialism. Status quo consequentialist tradeoffs are the backbone of any complex society.
Let me try this again. I have a better approach that doesn’t pretend to know best as to how others should live, nor fails to mention other arguments for positions than those you’ve mentioned. Try thinking about morality in terms of not using force to have others comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the magical “sacred rule” nonsense, try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
I don't think this works. Agreeing that everyone has the right to defend themselves -
1. Do you have the right to own nukes?
2. Do you have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like they're going to start trouble?
3. Do you have the right to shoot someone *really* suspicious if you estimate 99.9% chance they're going to start trouble?
4. If a kid pokes you in the supermarket, what levels of self-defense are permissible? What if they keep doing it and their parent won't stop them? What if it's an adult? What if they plan to fight back?
I think no clear-and-fast moral law, including ones about personal choice or right to self-defense, answer these questions. I think "personal choice" and "right to self-defense" are good rights that should be protected, but that we need a deeper basis for our moral reasoning before we even know what we're talking about when we talk about them.
To answer your questions: I don't have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like he's going to start trouble. I do have the right to shoot someone who in fact has started trouble. If a kid or an adult pokes me in a supermarket, does he persist in doing so or was it an accident? At what point is my life or health threatened? At that point I do have the right to defend myself. As for clear and fast moral laws, when actions are questionable, that's what courts are for. But, to violate my right to defend myself categorically is an authoritarian outrage of the foundational moral justification for the existence of civil authority in the first place.
Where I live I can legally defend myself (or others) against an illegal attack as long as my defensive measures does not go further than necessary to stop the attack, and is in proportion to the attack. This includes self defense against government agents if the attack and use of force is illegal.
That sounds pretty reasonable as a principle for when you have the right to self defense to me.
*edit so:
>1. Do you have the right to own nukes?
No
>2. Do you have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like they're going to start trouble?
No
>3. Do you have the right to shoot someone *really* suspicious if you estimate 99.9% chance they're going to start trouble?
No
>4. If a kid pokes you in the supermarket, what levels of self-defense are permissible? What if they keep doing it and their parent won't stop them? What if it's an adult? What if they plan to fight back?
You are allowed to talk to the kid or hold the kids wrist or similar to stop them, but no more use of force than necessary. Similar with an adult, but use of more force is reasonable. If they start fighting you, you can probably use enough force to stop them as necessary. Killing or seriously harming them would only be permittable if there were a real and imminent threat to you of serious injury or death.
I believe this is correct. On the whole, blue States seem to regulate homeschooling more tightly (not a surprise), but no State makes it flatly illegal.
I don't really follow the argument here. You agree that you are utilitarian (or at least that that is a "fair descriptor"). I'm confident that you believe the utilitarian calculus supports your favoured policy in each of the examples you give (and I mostly agree with you). Therefore somebody who supported the opposed policies on utilitarian grounds would simply be empirically mistaken. But since you've given them as examples of "things many non-utilitarians believe are okay", they presumably support them on non-utilitarian grounds.
Supporting, on non-utilitarian grounds, policies which offend against the utilitarian calculus doesn't make someone a stealth utilitarian.
The simplest explanation for why people do not see the items you listed as true exceptions to the usual morals, is that they do not really believe in rules like (I will use the verbiage they might adopt) freedom of platform use for Nazi recruitment drives, letting weirdos make their children as crazy as they are, telling people the truth when you think they'll do something stupid as a response to it, never interrupting the complacency of the public even when they are ignoring something awful, or setting aside a practice that has defined who is "in" and who is "out" for most of their childhood, right when it looks like the wrong people have managed to get "in."
In fact, I think it's been rather broadly advertised that, among a certain milieu, freedom of speech in particular is no longer a sacred principle. The question on their minds: would you violate their ("the") principles for the greater good? Conversationally, "your" principles are a stand-in for their principles.
When people here are talking about utilitarianism or ethics in general, I am never sure if they are talking about utilitarianism just being true or false, or about it being the nicest system for our civilization to use.
If you are a serious moral realist, you just think a certain morality is true. This could mean a moral rule really exists somewhere in the universe, or, as I find more plausible, people in different states of the world are somehow comparable. So one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B.
If one believes utilitarianism is true in this sense, it really just doesn't matter what our intuitions are or whether people often abuse utilitarianism for governmental overreach that causes greater harm. Utilitarianism would just literally be the correct framework in which one can decide whether a person, or a group of people, is better or worse off in World A or B. A moral system would just be true, like the laws of nature.
The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
I remember one Less Wrong comment about which open philosophical questions one has strong opinions on that went something like this:
"1. Clearly, moral realism is false and antirealism is correct.
2. Clearly, utilitarianism is the best moral system."
To me, this sounds like saying, "Clearly, physics isn't actually real and an illusion; also, clearly, Einstein was right about everything."
I think there are only 2 options:
1. either we live in a universe that somehow contains moral rules (probably utilitarian ones), or
2. there are no rules, and the world is just nihilistic.
Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way.
I suspect people find option 1. to be too woo and unscientific, but option 2. is too cruel and unhuman, so they pretend we can do ethics even in an only-atoms, no-rules world.
If anything, people should make it clear if they are talking about realist or antirealist ethics. If you are talking about realist ethics, saying something leads to bad decision-making, government overreach, people can't think about second-order consequences—all just aren't arguments. It would be like saying chemistry isn't real because it would allow people to make bombs.
However, if we are talking about anti-realist ethics, those might all be good arguments.
I don't think that there is a contradiction between thinking that 1. "ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation" and thinking that 2. "one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B".
So, what I mean is that I can believe 1. that human moral intuitions stem from evolution, and are not somehow inherent in the universe, and 2. Due to my evolved moral intuitions, I want my fellow human beings to be happy - and to achieve that I should follow the moral system that has the highest chance of giving that outcome.
In fact, I think that 1. is trivially true, unless you believe that morals are infused by some metaphysical entity (e.g. god). If our moral intuitions come from our brain, then our brain was developed through evolution, and as such also our morals.
That's why I used the word "objective." Two identical stones have more mass than one times this stone. This is true even if no one knows it or if everyone thinks it is false. Clearly, you can think some person is better off in one of two worlds. But some people might disagree. The question is whether there is an objectively correct answer. Like there is in the example with the stones.
In the moral-realism-world, I also wouldn't equate our intuitions with the correct morality. This clearly can't be the case by just considering that people have very different intuitions, and only one of them could be correct.
If we live in antirealism-evolution-just-gave-us-intuitions-world, why should we care about our intuitions? Evolution also gave me lots of intuitions, like being scared of the dark, that I don't care about a lot. Why, if evolution made us prefer atoms in certain complicated structures, should we care about that now? Now that we know, evolution just gave us these beliefs.
I mostly don't want to just argue for moral realism because I am also not very convinced of it (although I think I find it more plausible than the average ACX reader). But I think there is a way ethics could be more than just intuition.
A priori, I would expect this universe, made of atoms, to be devoid of life and consciousness. Even if I learned about life, I think I would still expect it not to have consciousness. But, apparently, it does have consciousness. We don't know what it is, but somehow, atoms can create consciousness. And conditional on consciousness existing, conscious beings experiencing less suffering; being objectively the only thing that matters in the universe doesn't seem totally crazy to me.
But I notice mostly that I should read some more books on this topic.
> That's why I used the word "objective." Two identical stones have more mass than one times this stone. This is true even if no one knows it or if everyone thinks it is false. Clearly, you can think some person is better off in one of two worlds. But some people might disagree. The question is whether there is an objectively correct answer. Like there is in the example with the stones.
The only way there can be an objective "right" answer to this is if we have an objective and measurable definition of what is good. I don't believe that such a definition can exist outside our minds (or outside a mind, i.e. not necessarily a human mind), and that good and bad have no objective meaning in nature or in the universe. However, as with many abstract concepts, while the concept of what is good and what is moral is fussy in the edge cases, we can often more or less agree with some common core - and that is good enough. So in practice I believe it makes sense to say that world A is better than world B, and we should prefer world A. Someone might disagree - but so what? In that case we could try to discuss and come to a common understanding. Everybody would not be able to agree, but that doesn't mean we should not try to optimize for what we think is good.
>If we live in antirealism-evolution-just-gave-us-intuitions-world, why should we care about our intuitions? Evolution also gave me lots of intuitions, like being scared of the dark, that I don't care about a lot. Why, if evolution made us prefer atoms in certain complicated structures, should we care about that now? Now that we know, evolution just gave us these beliefs.
As I stated in the previous post, I think that we live in the evolution-gave-us-moral-intuitions world is trivially true, given that there are no metaphysical entity imposing such rules. So to me, this sounds a bit like arguing that we should believe in something because it gives a better outcome - which I reject. We should believe (and in fact have no choice than to believe) in what we believe to be the truth. Why should we care about morals, if there are no objective good? Well we don't have much choice do we? Why should we not care? After all this affects our felt well-being in a very real way. I certainly care about my well-being, and that of my fellow human beings, even if I can't define it precisely and know that others might disagree about what is good.
>A priori, I would expect this universe, made of atoms, to be devoid of life and consciousness. Even if I learned about life, I think I would still expect it not to have consciousness. But, apparently, it does have consciousness. We don't know what it is, but somehow, atoms can create consciousness. And conditional on consciousness existing, conscious beings experiencing less suffering; being objectively the only thing that matters in the universe doesn't seem totally crazy to me.
This is an argument for empiricism, and a good point. The world, in fact, often turns out to be more complicated and wonderous than what we would expect from pure logic and thought - this is an important insight, and one I agree with full-heartedly as an engineer. Therefore, we should always try to verify our theories with observed data and ground our thoughts.
> The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
because different strategies contain different trade-offs along a pareto frontier.
So, if I'm understanding you, your argument is something like:
1. Realist morality is either a "moral rule" existing out in the universe, which doesn't make sense, or;
2. An objective fact about what makes people better off, which is utilitarianism.
3. Antirealist "morality" is meaningless, leaving just a practical quasi-utilitarian day-to-day thinking (I'm not sure if you're saying this), but which either way certainly rules out any non-utilitarian morality.
4. Therefore, non-utilitarian morality is incoherent.
If that's the essence of your argument, the fault is in 2, which just assumes utilitarian ("better off") value is the only value, and is thus circular. One could just well argue "morality can only be either a rule floating out in the universe, or a description of the rules and principles by which people act, which is just deontology". Or replace "morality is either a rule floating out there, or a judgement about people's character, which is just virtue ethics", as an argument for either of those being the only coherent morality. It's a circular argument that just amounts to "I can't see any value in anything but x, therefore x is the only form of value" and ignoring the arguments made for other moral systems.
Nobody grounds morality in anything like "a rule floating out there in the universe". It's either grounded in reason (Kant) or emotion (Hume). Some would purport to ground it in God, which is antecedent to the universe (like reason) on any normal definition, but most of them don't *really* do so if they think about it, and if you point out the Euthyphro Dilemna: they'd usually ground it more or less ultimately in reason. And there arguments for many different moral theories following from reason, from the nature of human will or facts about reality. You've presented one of them (for utilitarianism) but it's far from the only one.
As for this
"Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way."
You can be a moral nihilist (it doesn't matter, there is no "matter"), or a relativist (it doesn't *objectively* matter, but it can to you), if not a realist. A relativist has to explain the existence of moral disagreement. A nihilist has to declare that all our moral feelings and moral language are an illusion that refers to nothing at all, and to explain where these illusions come from. And any appeal to "our evolved intuitions give us the illusion of this thing called morality which doesn't really exist" is going to look a lot less parsimonious than "morality exists and *just is* our evolved intuitions". And if some of those intuitions are near universal across humans, then that's close enough practically to realism, at least until we encounter an AGI or alien.
Tl: dr -- moral realism is the prima facie position. The correct form of it remains an open question.
That's pretty similar to what I meant, but I wasn't trying to make an argument for utilitarianism, mostly.
I think it's easiest to imagine a 2x2 matrix with realism or no realism and ethics important or unimportant.
The four combinations would be:
1. Nihilism (antirealism and ethics are fake)
2. Standard realism (ethics are real and important)
3. What everyone here seems to believe (antirealism and ethics are important)
4. I've never heard someone argue for this (realism and ethics are unimportant).
We can ignore 4., which I have never heard someone argue for. But the other three all seem about equally plausible to me. Some I find more convincing than others, but importantly, I would assign each one at least a 10% chance of being true.
But in this post, and generally on LW and ACX, people seem to always assume 3. This is especially important for this post because most of Scott's arguments only work in antirealism, but ethics is still an important world (as I argued in a different comment).
Also, if realism is true, I don't expect the true morality to be as simple as utilitarianism. I would expect it would be to utilitarianism as quantum physics is to Newtonian physics. But I agree with you that just saying that I find something consequentialist more convincing than something deontological isn't a sufficient argument here. But again, I mostly didn't want to argue for a specific point, but just say that to me, it seems like there are multiple positions that seem plausible, and this discussion seems to assume 3. being true.
>being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms
Citation needed. So far as I know, there's no established causation of more guns among the populace -> more deaths. America is of course an obvious outlier in its death-by-gunshot rate, but it's not the only country where people have plenty of legal guns, and those others don't seem to have the same problem.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Well I read a whole lot of supposedly scientific papers that try to calculate the impact of "misinformation" and other ideological content using statistical models, so I'm not sure about that. COVID response was a disaster partly because it consisted of imposing authoritarian decisions using justifications based in pseudo-scientific calculations.
Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful. But it looked like utilitarianism and that seemed to reassure people. So I don't know.
>Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful.
I keep seeing people on here saying that any proper cost/benifit analysis shows that covid measures were awful, but have yet to see any convincing analysis showing this. Do you have a link for this proper cost-benefit analysis?
Consider the Cochrane report that showed masks had no impact. The costs of making and buying all those masks was certainly >0, so, it therefore had a negative tradeoff.
Lockdowns also had no impact. There are studies showing no correlation between lockdown severity and outcomes. This is expected given what was known about the way the virus spread as early as April 2020 (or arguably earlier given that coronaviruses always spread in the same way). But obviously lockdowns were catastrophically expensive and the inflation we have now mostly traces to the cost of that.
That the masks had little impact sounds plausible to me, and this was also debated a lot at the time, but the cost of mask would be pretty negligible - I doubt i spent more than the equivalent of $100 on masks in total.
That lockdowns had no impact at all is a pretty extraordinary claim. That there is little correlation between the severity of lockdowns and outcomes proves very little, even if true. For example it would make sense if stronger lockdowns were correlated with harder hit places. In my country the lockdowns were pretty light, but people here generally were able and willing to lock down voluntarily to a larger degree than many other places due to good infrastructure (and culture) for allowing from home work for example. I find the cost-benefit and effect of covid measures and counterfactuals to be a very complicated question, and I find it very unlikely that the best course of action (for a government) was do nothing. And still I have not seen one thorough cost-benefit analysis that shows what you claim...
$100 per person multiplied by the entire population is a massive cost, and of course the cost of masks was not primarily monetary but social (children who found it harder to learn to speak, the constant stress and fear they created etc).
> That lockdowns had no impact at all is a pretty extraordinary
Heh. It's pretty anodyne and well accepted by people who followed COVID science closely. I mean if you go into spaces where people don't just blindly eat the words of public health officials, expressing this belief this would be considered a "How do you do fellow kids" kind of opening.
> That there is little correlation between the severity of lockdowns and outcomes proves very little, even if true.
It proves there can be no effect, because whilst correlation may not imply causation, causation always implies correlation.
Bear in mind that again, this is totally unsurprising. Lockdown was first trialled in ~Feb 2020 when there was an outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It was caught very fast and everyone, not only the index patients, were immediately restricted to their cabins. A cruise ship is the perfect place to implement lockdowns because people don't even have to leave their cabins to go to the supermarket, food and everything else can be brought to their door and left outside. Enforcement is likewise trivial. Yet the lockdown had no effect, instead COVID cases appeared randomly throughout the ship. By the time the outbreak was over however only about a quarter of people on board had become sick. Implications:
1. It was able to spread long distances via the air ducts, not only via droplets. Obvious, because SARS-1 could spread in the same way (and colds/flus must also be able to from lots of prior evidence). Lockdown and social distancing policy assumed exclusively close-distance droplet transmission.
2. Everyone was exposed but most people had pre-existing immunity. Therefore, COVID epidemics would stop before 100% of the population had become sick. Academic and public health models all assumed 100% susceptibility.
From these two facts you could immediate understand that none of the proposed policies would slow COVID down, and also that none of the doomsday scenarios would happen.
The Diamond Princess is strong evidence both that lockdowns did not work (a controlled experiment, in effect), and also explains why they had no effect.
> And still I have not seen one thorough cost-benefit analysis that shows what you claim...
I was going to dig up paper links until I read your comment, but if you can't even get past "no correlation = no causation" then why bother? To do a cost/benefit analysis you must first establish the benefit. Outside of controlled environments like cruise ships the best you can do is a regression of policy severity vs outcomes using public health data.
I can still dig up some of the papers that do this regression analysis, but you seem to incorrectly be rejecting the chain of reasoning up front so it presumably wouldn't convince you?
>$100 per person multiplied by the entire population is a massive cost, and of course the cost of masks was not primarily monetary but social (children who found it harder to learn to speak, the constant stress and fear they created etc).
The per capita measure is really the relevant measure here, any cost will become huge when multiplied by the entire population. Your assessment of social cost seem grossly hyperbolic to me - how a simple mask are supposed to cause this amount of stress I can't understand. Anecdotally masks caused ~0 stress to me or anyone I know.
> It proves there can be no effect, because whilst correlation may not imply causation, causation always implies correlation.
It proves no such thing, for the reason I stated before (more severe COVID is likely to cause more severe lockdowns). To show this, consider an island where there is no COVID and therefore no COVID deaths and no lockdowns, compared to an island infected with COVID where there are lockdowns and COVID deaths. The relevant comparison are instead two islands, equally affected by COVID, where one has lockdowns and the other not. Even then, the government imposed lockdowns, and the actual actions people take are not the same thing. People may lock-down and engage in avoidance voluntarily.
>1. It was able to spread long distances via the air ducts, not only via droplets. Obvious, because SARS-1 could spread in the same way (and colds/flus must also be able to from lots of prior evidence). Lockdown and social distancing policy assumed exclusively close-distance droplet transmission.
2. Everyone was exposed but most people had pre-existing immunity. Therefore, COVID epidemics would stop before 100% of the population had become sick. Academic and public health models all assumed 100% susceptibility
According to official sources this is not true. While COVID may also spread over long distances (through air ducts) the likelihood of infection increases with proximity - which makes perfect sense to me. Googling pre-existing immunity to COVID shows some recent papers and discussion on this - suggesting it might have had an effect, but I see nothing that justifies your take that "most people" had pre-existing immunity, and that this was the sole reason only a quarter of the population on the diamond princess got infected.
Are you suggesting I should disregard official sources and academics, and instead take your word for it, without any evidence?
> I can still dig up some of the papers that do this regression analysis, but you seem to incorrectly be rejecting the chain of reasoning up front so it presumably wouldn't convince you?
If you can dig up scientific evidence from good sources on this then it would change my point of view, yes. Of course one or two papers showing a regression analysis would not fully convince me, no. So far you have shown me no convincing evidence at all.
> any cost will become huge when multiplied by the entire population.
... which is why people pointed out that whole-population policies were terrible ideas.
> how a simple mask are supposed to cause this amount of stress I can't understand
You may not understand it for the same reasons you don't understand the other points here, even though they are obvious to other people. But they do cause stress. Perhaps a study will help:
> It proves no such thing, for the reason I stated before (more severe COVID is likely to cause more severe lockdowns)
But there was no correlation between severity of lockdowns and severity of COVID, so that cannot be the case.
A simple example of this is to look at Europe. Sweden had some of the lightest touch policies and ended up near the bottom of the COVID death charts. The justification for lockdowns explicitly stated that outcome was impossible.
At any rate, the causes of lockdown policies are well understood. They were driven by models and what neighboring countries were doing, not severity metrics.
> People may lock-down and engage in avoidance voluntarily.
That was also taken into account by looking at phone data.
> According to official sources this is not true
Official sources are wrong.
> the likelihood of infection increases with proximity
Try and figure out how they might be measuring that!
> I see nothing that justifies your take that "most people" had pre-existing immunity
You were already given the evidence, which is definitive: an outbreak on a floating island (cruise ship) with 100% enforcement in which most people did not get sick despite there being no effect of proximity on who did get sick. The only way to get that is with 100% exposure and large amounts of pre-existing immunity.
> Are you suggesting I should disregard official sources and academics, and instead take your word for it, without any evidence?
You've been given lots of evidence. I keep repeating the evidence that you don't seem to be integrating even though it's definitive. I mean you literally quoted a section where I said what happened - and you can easily check that historical record for yourself, it even has a Wikipedia page about it - by answering "according to official sources this is not true", without even citing what those sources are.
If you want to have a discussion about evidence then you have to be open to the possibility that the sources you trusted previously aren't honest or reliable. That's why you can't think of any evidence you would accept, which makes debate pointless. You haven't even described what "good sources" or "official sources" you think you're using.
The covid measures came more quickly than the health based rationales for them. There were no doubt multiple motives for what went on, few having to do with the health outcome of any individual. The greater good(s) indeed! How about the wonderful opportunity for digital health passports. And there was a certain election coming up that was heavily influenced by changes in the law due to the plague, er, relatively mild respiratory virus. Where’s there’s no effort to measure assumptions about what truly constitutes the greater good, it’s merely a rationale. It’s just hand waving.
Here's my indefensible take: Dostoyevsky said that if torturing a single child to death would give the entire world eternal health and happiness, it would still be wrong to do. I think he was saying that caring about the wellbeing of others only happens if your thinking is sort of the opposite of utilitarian reasoning -- when it is done out of that feeling of compassion and indignation that arises when you are deeply moved by someone's suffering.
Most of the time I am not paying much attention to people I do not know. I am a car and they are traffic. Go do your thing, other people. Whatever. I am not thinking about whether they are suffering, and if it the possibility does happen to cross my mind, I am not distressed and soon move on to thinking about other things. ( I doubt that I am terribly unusual in all this.). But now and then it's like a spark jumps from some stranger's situation into my imagination, and suddenly I care a lot about what's happening to them, and will put a lot of effort into helping. So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided, and that makes sense if you want people to give the most help where it will do the most good, rather than in the situation that happens to give them a great feeling of emotional involvement. I totally get it that it will not work to just broadcast information about people in trouble, and hope some random person is moved by the situation of the random person in trouble and coughs up some help. It's stupid as fuck. But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers. I think the root objection is that it's hard to get enthusiastic about utilitarian-generated projects..
On the other hand, I found out recently that a high-rise apartment building with some rent-subsidized units may be put up in the pretty little neighborhood where my office is, and displace some pricey little boutiques and charming little coffee shops. Also it will reduce the property value of the lovely home of a colleague of mine who lives right next to the street of charming little thingies. She asked me to join in the effort to keep the high-rise out of "our" neighborhood, and plunk it in the one tiny ratty area in our upper middle class town, and I declined. Said I didn't know enough about the situation to judge whether it was fairer to trash our area than the other one, and I didn't want to protest out of simple self-interest.. So I guess I'm not impervious to considerations of fairness and maximizing benefit.
TLDR: most of us are selfish and find a way to justify what we want or don’t, without reference to any philosophy. The greater good is just an excuse. Because it’s the impossible to know what the greater good really is. I hate to bring up a certain German dictator, but he was acting on behalf of the greater good. Moreover, we don’t really care. We can’t really care about humanity. It’s an abstraction, a rationalization. But if we choose to save that one tortured child, we have saved humanity. The humanity that lives inside each one of us. A certain religious philosopher said “whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, so you do to me.” Same idea.
> So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided...
Just quickly here, but given the median profile of a Rationalist or Utilitatrian, don't you think it's plausible they don't *have* those sparks? Certainly not to the extent that you, or otherwise notably empathic people have? Like, maybe they'd have one in a lifetime, and a regularly empathic person has 6 a year, and a really empathic person has 24 a year?
If that's the case, them coming up with rational frameworks for doing more good is a net good, because they wouldn't have had or acted on those sparks to begin with due to their different neural and emotional architecture.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Maybe the utilitarians need to find ways to weave in things that would appeal to people whose desire to help runs on sparks. Say some little documentary segments about individuals who suffering greatly with one of those cheap-to-fix problems. For instance I've read that lots of babies in the 3rd world die of some minor illness that causes diarrhea. If you just give them bottles with a mixture of water, sugar and a bit of salt (or something like that) they get through the illness fine). So some segments showing the babies turning the corner once they get the electrolyte mixture -- their mothers' relief, etc.
Yes, yes, that's the stuff - you "feelers" put together the best heartstring-puller reel, and us nerds in the lab will A/B test it seventy six ways and place it to maximize the impact in the overall pitch!
Which I think basically happens at large non-profits - they have nerds and creatives, and mix them judiciously to drive better outcomes, right?
Is your desire more in these hypotheticals and thought scenarios for Rationalists to try to include the sparks / heartstring tuggers?
Or is it that quintessential Rat-causes like Against Malaria are too data focused on their impacts, and should include more personalized stories on their homepage?
I think of the lack of a spark as it relates to food drives. If you've come to the conclusion that you wish to support a food bank, then I have heard many convincing arguments that the best you can do is to make an automatic monthly cash donation. But if you do this thing which is probably the most effective thing, it is rather uninspiring.
Meanwhile, I live in a community where hundreds of people make a concerted effort to collect paltry amounts of old canned goods from neighborhoods, expending a lot of resources - time, gas, social capital, etc... - to give the food bank a large quantity of fairly random canned goods, which now must be carefully sorted, and checked for safety, and so on. But such events can bring a community together in a way that an automated monthly donation never will.
Is it better to be effective and uninspiring? Or ineffective, but inspiring? Even through a utilitarian lens, I'm not sure that the former is the better long-term approach.
> But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers.
One can also object to to mathematical approach on dry, unemotional grounds, the incommeasurability of utility.
I find this post a bit baffling. Partly this is because I don't recognize the discourse it's criticizing. It's not ordinary back and forth about politics, because that discussion isn't at a level of moral generality where people are throwing accusations around "utilitarianism". It's not more academic or philosophical discussion about utilitarianism, because in those discussions skepticism about deception, restrictions on free speech, and so on are more closely associated with nonconsequentialist views than consequentialist ones, and it's just false that "the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
So regarding the core question:
"why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I'm not sure "people" (which people? The hoi polloi? The people who argue about moral theories?) really do think that.
But suppose for the sake of argument I was such a person - someone who really is mad at utilitarians for doing evil for a greater good but accepted the reasoning in favor of the "normal" politics Scott mentions. Am I being inconsistent? No, because I think it can in most cases be plausibly denied either that the given policy genuinely violates the "usual moral rule" or that the "usual moral rule" provides strong genuine nonconsequentialist reasons. For example, if you independently think that shaming people for X is wrong, then of course it's going to look a lot like "bullying" and you're going to think it violates the "usual rule against bullying". But if you think people deserve to be shamed for X, then there's a relevant difference between shaming people for X and paradigmatic examples of bullying. And so people who support shaming people for X won't say that this is a case where bullying is justified by the consequences - they'll say it's not bullying. And if you force them to say that it's bullying, they'll say that the real moral rule is "no undeserved bullying" not "no bullying".
So there's nothing inconsistent about thinking that shaming people for X is justified by the consequences, but that other sorts of things the utilitarian is committed to sanctioning are genuine evils.
None of this is to say that the way actual people reason about this is rational. I think people will tend to latch on to basically whatever kind of reasoning available to them to justify their preexisting beliefs. So the people who antecedently like policy X will think it has good consequences and also, conveniently, that those policies won't interfere with any genuine nonconsequentialist constraints. And the people who antecedently don't like policy X will think that it is objectionably doing evil for a greater good and also, conveniently, that it's not really a greater good if you think about it. And libertarianish rationalist utilitarians who are predisposed to be against restrictions on free speech but can't appeal to nonconsequentialist constraints will of course find the math conveniently works out against those restrictions (or do some rule-y backflips).
You sound kind of like a libertarian, particularly back in the 90s and 2000s when they were more emphatically pro-gay rights. (Not that they're against them per se these days, just that it seems to be more of a peripheral 'red tribe' affiliation when it used to be more of a 'neither left not right' thing.) Which isn't really a bad thing IMHO, just pointing out your politics may be more about tribal affiliation (Gray Tribe?) and gravitating to the most comfortable laundry list of positions than you'd like to think. Like everyone else in the world, really. ;)
I'm not immune--I just never found a tribe I liked.
I don't agree, it seems the 'blue tribe' wokery that annoys gray tribers is practiced more heavily by the upper classes (where the remaining cishet white men can easily throw a poorer one under the bus) than the middle or lower.
We ethical consequentialists are deeply aware of the large role played by status quo bias in many common objections. We're alleged to be monsters for believing that one electrocuted repairman is an acceptable tradeoff for the dispersed pleasure of a televised World Cup final, whilst our critics would accept increased rate of death and injury from traffic accidents, alcohol consumption, fights, coal burning for electricity, ad nauseam, as tradeoffs for holding that same event. The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
>The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
I'm glad somebody hasn't forgotten that, despite their moral grandstanding over covid, the American left were full blown covid deniers until reality forced them to tell the truth. And that this is an example of "anti-racist" ideology doing very obvious and undeniable harm.
Ummm no. The lefties put on their black masks and asked the authorities to govern them harder, locked up their children at home, and tried to force everyone take an experimental gene therapy.
Hammond may be referring to the first ~2 months of covid being widely known (January and February 2020) when they seemed very concerned that China and Chinese people were going to get blamed and would be harassed about it. Nancy Pelosi even encouraged people to go to Chinatown shortly before SF was locked down.
I think Hammond is wrong in how strongly he presents this, but the left generally were grandstanding against Trump even to the point of downplaying covid up until it started spreading a lot in the US. There was a big blowup between Trump and the Democrats with him leaning on calling it things like "the China virus" and them trying to call him racist and doing whatever they could to not blame China (which I think plays into the lab versus market question, with the Democrats trying to claim there's no way it could have been a lab as an overreaction to Trump blaming the Chinese).
Fair point. But let me say it was, well, stupid to care about some theoretical deplorable blaming China. Maybe it’s my prejudice, but isn’t it important to find out what really happened? And as it turns out we, the USSA, are the likely baddies with our vast array of biolabs around the world. We had our mits deep in Wuhan. Would it be for the greater good that we suppress that information, if true? My bias is that I want to know the truth as nearly as possible. And yes I do believe truth serves the greatest good better than lies.
I think you're pulling a bit of a fast one by lumping all 'non utilitarians' together. I've publicly opposed purely consequentialist ethics and agree with you on all your examples, for the very reasons you give (except for the point about state schools, but my disagreement there is not rooted in a consequentialist argument).
In truth, most people don't have an 'ethical theory', and if you quiz them (anecdata, UK) you will generally find them to be quasi-utilitarians. Here's why. What's often lost in these discussions is that Utilitarianism was originally intended to be a descriptive model of reality, NOT a decision making framework. The pitch by Bentham was that a 'hedonistic calculus' is a very simple model with a great deal of explanatory power for people's instinctive morals and traditional moral codes that arise from them - what *is* as much as what *ought* to be.
If it gives you the 'wrong' answer you aren't supposed to blindly say 'hedonistic calculus go brrrr' and change your mind! You're supposed to question how you've attempted to quantify 'good' and refer back to whichever moral principles you usually accept to figure out whether and where you've gone wrong.
Not to lump the opposition needlessly together, but it has, indeed, occurred to one that many a passionate derider of utilitarianism does seem to resort to intellectually dishonest or otherwise bullyish rhetoric.
One must only assume that these people think this sort of thing is, if not actually good, at least _just fine_ in general, because if they thought said dishonesty/bullying to be somehow _bad_, they'd have to somehow _justify_ it with some greater cause. Hmh.
I think another key distinction to be drawn is between:
(1) the abstract normative question of whether you ought to do what maximises utility (utilitarianism) vs other normative positions (deontology, justice etc.)
(2) ~ descriptive beliefs about whether breaking established norms in the service of other ends tends to work well
Beliefs about these two can diverge. You can be a utilitarian who believes, descriptively, that lying, cheating, stealing, suppressing/oppressing others in the service of the greater good tends to go badly and rarely serve the greater good. Or you can be non-utilitarian, pro-justice activist, who readily believes that all this and more should be readily employed in the service of greater pro-justice ends.
The first and last examples in the list are interesting to me, because the two sacred rules involved conflict with each other.
You can either have a rule of free speech, or a rule against bullying (etc). You can't have both.
I think this kind of explains a lot - the USA makes a big deal of free speech, and harassment is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Europe... isn't all going to the other extreme, and varies much more - but perhaps different countries are trying to strike different balances between the two. Perhaps even because it's more culturally diverse.
Free speech and harassment are definitely in tension. I don't think you've got the direction of change correct, but I think it's a minor point compared to recognizing that tension. Society cannot fully realize either goal (lots of free speech, low harassment).
I think very few people (maybe hardcore libertarians) argue that rights to free speech should extend to harassment or bullying, so there are in practice always limits to free speech. The question is more what counts as harassment, and there are differing opinions on that.
Well, sure, but it was only back in "Links For January 2024" that Scott proclaimed America as a beacon of freedom for not banning a phrase many people claim to be hate speech; a call to genocide - while Germany would consider it (and decide against) - so you can include him among those very few.
My point was just that almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech - there is always some trade off. I think most people would agree that some level of harassment is not ok and should be illegal, even if that technically infringes on a right to free speech. A central example of such harassment would be frequent (such as daily) written or vocal attacks, f.ex. hate speech, racism, threats etc. targeting an individual to such an extent as to impair daily life for no good reason at all. I think most people would agree that this should be illegal.
So the question is where to draw the line, and here opinions differ. Some think hate speech in general (such as in public and not directed at an individual) should also be illegal, (but I don't think many people would count this as harassment). Scott is also not arguing that harassment should be protected under free speech - he is arguing (I think, I didn't check the article) that a particular phrase that some consider hate speech should be protected under free speech.
Outside the USA, sure - almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech.
As an aside - the 'river/sea' phrase is annoying because its interpretation is very broad - so for some people it's an expression of solidarity with an oppressed people, and others claim it to be hate speech. A lot of the discussion about it seems hopelessly compromised - but whether it's a problem clearly hinges on local factors.
Inside the USA, I certainly have the impression that the interpretation of the first amendment to its constitution is as broad as the interpretation of the "river to the sea" phrase. I haven't done a poll or anything, but a) the wikipedia page includes the text "there is a common misconception that it prohibits anyone from limiting free speech, including private, non-governmental entities," and b) political campaign donations are officially considered "free speech".
To be clear, I assume Scott understands the intent of it pretty well, but when you say "almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech", well, that seems questionable to me.
However, given the above article and his comment on how a country with a different culture and its own different set of problems wants to govern itself, it does seem to me that he hasn't properly appreciated the conflict between these two 'moral' rules.
I don't think this post passes the ideological turning test. I'd argue it doesn't bother trying to.
Scott may find himself supporting the spread of misinformation if it resulted in actions that actually, really, physically threatened the people he cares about. He may well support protests that block traffic if he found himself with few enough other options. People who oppose mixing morality in math might be worried that this would lead to optimization for the wrong value. I could go on and so could Scott.
Put this way, it kinda looks like the "feels utilitarian" vs "I don't think ends justifies means BUT" discrepancy is at least in part people only engaging with utilitarianism when they really have to. (And maybe being mad that they have to.)
I think the thing is that dividing policies into means/ends or cost/benefit is already a utilitarian framing, and a less natural part of more virtue-based perspectives. So eg dissent-shaming isn't something that costs the evil of harassment for the benefit of good beliefs, but an indivisible moral action. It's a moral question either way, so deontologists and utilitarians each have relevant principles and can comfortably argue past each other without noticing.
The groupings here seem roughly sorted along immorality vs amorality. Immoral costs already have a moral valence and are already part of philosophies that stepped around cost-benefit consideration. Amoral costs are really weird in virtue ethics.
Things like calibrating regulations or moving disposable income are hard to morally assess without at least imagining a utilitarian mindset. To engage, you kinda need to either take on a utilitarian pov enough to make a content argument (h/t EA Forums) or make an abstract and kinda circuitous meta-argument about ethics that's liable to make you look like an ass or an outsider. Sometimes people would rather just trust that it's not trustworthy.
(I kind of sympathize*. When I see eg very religious thinkers, I'm comfortable enough with the things like beauty and charity that I can think about secularly, but once destiny or scripture comes up -- I'll still have opinions, but they'll be misfit for the framing, my ability to make a talmudic argument will be even worse than my ability to argue for or against the authority of clergy in general, and mostly I'll be mad I have to engage with religion.)
*((I mostly don't. Post-hoc justification of semi-legible visceral discomfort is a terrible basis for critique.))
> More focus on preventing existential risks that could kill billions of people
...
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math)...
In the context of existential / AI risk, I think of utilitarians as willing to do evil for the sake of greater good because they've said they're cool with evil for the sake of the greater good. I don't think this has anything to do with a innate repulsion for calculation.
Consider:
- Yudkowsky saying we should be willing to risk nuclear war to bomb GPUs in foreign countries to minimize x-risk (Times Op Ed)
- Nick Bostrom's "Black Ball" thought experiments, which explicitly justifies absolutely complete panopticon surveillance to avoid x-risk.
- You, saying that "So Google takes over the world? Fine," and how such dictatorship wasn't such a bad outcome because it avoided x-risk (In your old article in "Should AI be open?")
I don't want to litigate here if these are *justified* or *true* beliefs, or whether the trade-off makes sense. In all the above, I think that the proposed course of action will just makes the world worse, and probably *much* worse, because the trade-off is actually bad and utilitarians making these calls are making classic straw-utilitarian mistakes and not considering unintended effects. You might think that I'm wrong about this.
But -- whether or not these beliefs are are justified -- they do perfectly match the paradigm of "Let's let some great evil pass for the sake of greater good" and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that utilitarians thus match the naive notion.
I think the easiest explanation for List 1 endorsements is that people don't actually see those rules as "sacred." A lot of people *talk* as if they do but are inconsistent enough that I don't really believe them. I've also interacted with more logically consistent people who openly reject them (e.g., free speech is a legal concept and freedom of expression isn't necessarily sacred without considering what's being expressed). So it's not clear to me that these folks view themselves as doing harm for the greater good.
I find myself reminded of this quote from Bryan Caplan:
"The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities."
I think this is the difference between Scott's utilitarianism and the utilitarianism-like things he opposes. Scott checks his work, and he uses utilitarian logic for non-emotionally-inspiring causes, instead of only to justify emotionally-inspiring rule violations. That's what upsets people, not utilitarianism itself.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I'd like to propose an alternative way of framing the opposition that might bear a distinction. I think you've got the broad strokes right already. Here goes:
There's a deep-seated sense, an intuitive aversion, that most people share about formalizing morality because it's an inherently reductive process. Something ineffable is lost whenever we employ propositional logic to describe a moral issue. Then, based on an insufficient description, we proceed to metricize 'The Good' and apply optimization pressure to maximize moral utility. Goodhart's Law tells us what to expect at this point; an incontrovertible perversion of whatever measures of good were established.
In other words, there's a suspicion that you're inevitably gravitating towards disaster any time you try to formalize morality (which by this logic is properly holistic and irreducible) in such a way that accommodates optimization.
I dunno, the main thing going on here, it seems to me, is that you have both utilitarian and libertarian intuitions. There's nothing inherently contradictory in that; maybe a generally libertarian social order is conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Heck, John Stuart Mill himself is the author of both 'Utilitarianism' and 'On Liberty.'
I do think you're onto something in observing that people are put off by a "mathy" approach to ethics. (I also think people are mostly right to be put off by it, which is not to say it's *never* appropriate.) But the examples of your own views that you describe aren't even particularly mathy. If the utilitarian/libertarian alignment of views goes against expectations, I'd think it's just because the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it (potentially) sacrifices rights for the sake of the greater overall happiness. And I think the reason that is the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it is a good objection! Utilitarianism *might* be consistent with a commitment to rights, but that's contingent on whether rights are actually conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Which, maybe they are. But most people have an *absolute* commitment to rights, seeing it as a good irrespective of other goods like the greatest happiness principle. If "the math" turned out to show that large-scale infringement of rights actually did bring about the greatest happiness, a lot of people would still object to the large-scale infringement of rights - not because they were offended by the mathy calculation but because they hold rights as a fundamental good.
I.e. utilitarianism for me, deontology for thee. *Other* people should just follow the rules. But *me*? I'm smart and virtuous enough to responsibly weigh the trade-offs. When *other* people spin the facts? That's misinformation and evil. But when *I* spin the facts? Well, a little white lie never hurt anyone. Besides, my intentions were pure. No I'm not evil, stop being hyperbolic.
I believe you advocated for this before, Scott. In your post where you complain that nobody actually adheres to principles on the metalevel when doing so would be inconvenient to the issue on the object level. E.g. whether the right/left advocates for gay marriage being decided on the state level or federal level depends on who has the upper-hand culturally. Maybe i'll find the link later.
>”Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity.”
I agree with you on all of the other things on that list, which is why this one sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess I don’t really disagree with it per se, but it’s circular. You can’t use the word “ethically” as an undefined qualifier when defining your own ethical positions. All of the interesting information about what your position might be is hidden in the phrase “ethically and legally”. If a company that donates lots of money to charity is late to file a licensing renewal, does that invalidate them from consideration of support? Probably not. Where is the line?
> "Sometimes utilitarianism is conceptualized as “being willing to do bad things for the greater good”, so it always surprises me how much less willing I am to do this than most people."
I think this is common: a major theme in the utilitarian tradition (since at least Mill) is how damaging *naive instrumentalist* beliefs are. Due to better appreciating the harms of censorship, etc., utilitarians are disproportionately likely to be principled defenders of free speech compared to non-consequentialist academics (who often seem much more open to naive instrumentalism in pursuit of their non-utilitarian moral goals).
I think there are two different concerns at play here, one justified the other not.
The justified concern is that a utilitarian is in some sense more unpredictable or untrustworthy. What they're going to decide to do in a situation depends on many relatively obscure factors you might not be aware of so it's harder to know if you can trust them. Will they actually take the company's deposits to the bank or will they skim off 10% for the needy?
Sure in practice most utilitarians don't (and shouldn't) do most of those things but the very fact they claim to follow that kind of rule does increase the worry.
The unjustified one is simply that it more effectively obscures your tribal/values affiliation. Maybe I care about the poor or maybe I'm using utilitarinism as an excuse to reach results that claim to have that goal but actually serve some other interest.
I think people's instrumental beliefs are likely to be more illuminating than their final values for assessing their trustworthiness.
Someone with naive instrumentalist beliefs -- who thinks that breaking the rules is likely to improve their chances of achieving their goals -- is more likely to break the rules regardless of their moral theory. (They'll find a way to rationalize it if they need to.)
Someone who thinks that reliable rules are the best guidance we have for promoting the good over the long term is more likely to be trustworthy even if their final values imply that there are possible situations in which it would be justified to break the rules.
So anyone who is worried about norm-violations should worry about naive instrumentalist beliefs, not utilitarian ones.
Trustworthy and doing the right thing are often opposed. Schindler was untrustworthy as were the plotters who tried to kill Hitler because they were moral.
But re: saying that reliable rules are best guide. I kinda doubt that degree of abstraction bears too much on what someone does in real life especially because if you are less worried about rules you are less worried about whether you accurately stated the theory you apply.
For the most part people don't actually decide what to do by consulting moral theory and seeing what it suggests. Mostly we decide what to do based on emotional/intuitive thoughts and then use our intelligence to justify it post hoc. Maybe Peter Singer is an exception but quite likey not.
If that's your model than a utilitarian looks like someone whose bullet biting demonstrates that they are morally unconstrained. If they emotionally want to build/stop AI, steal money from their company or run horrific experiments they'll manage to justify it because it's only emotions not cognitive theories that do practical work constraining our actions.
I even think this is pretty true. It's just irrelevant to whether utilitarianism is true. I believe in it because I think it's true not because I believe that it does much to make me a better person.
My guess is that your fundamental violation is *thinking about it* rather than following the social consensus of the people around you on an issue-by-issue basis. That social consensus is created/maintained/modified by a complicated "organic" process that I've never seen analyzed. (We sometimes have "ethics experts" but we rarely follow their advice.) In the long run, what controls a culture's mores is going to be the various features of Darwinian inter-culture competition, not whether it conforms to some logical/philosophical framework.
There's an additional fact that mores are *traditional*, that is, they're only allowed to change slowly. One consequence is to reduce the motivation to argue for changing the mores in a way that specifically benefits yourself in your current situation, because you're going to have to live with the change for a long time, and your situation (and thus your interaction with the changed more) can easily change.
Reading this, I get the feeling that Scott is a closeted virtue ethicist. Don't worry Scott, it gets better! There are millions of people just like you who won't condone immoral acts for some "greater" good!
*Copypasta South Park*
Okay, less sarky explanation of why virtue ethics not consequentialism:
1. Knowability. You cannot know in advance all the consequences of a given action; your actions echo in eternity. But you can, really easily, understand the nature of a given action, if it is honest or dishonest, just or unjust. And, over time, good actions will have good consequences.
2. Effect on Actor. The problem with being okay with bad actions for a good purpose is they affect the actor. If you are willing to do shitty things for a greater good, it will make you a shitty person, and what good, greater or otherwise, can a shitty person achieve?
Okay, but what about carefully looking up whether bednets save more lives than political donations? I'd say that falls under the virtue of Honesty. If you honestly are determined to do good, rather than appear good, you will do research, think through options etc.
So, yeah. It's okay, Scott, you can come out now. No one will think less of you 🙂
If consequentialist arguments lead to the conclusion that virtue-ethical arguments are better than consequentialist arguments, the conclusion isn't "virtue ethicists are really consequentialists", it's "favouring consequentialism over virtue ethics is internally inconsistent".
Regarding organ donation, there is absolutely a bright line being crossed: the principle that a doctor is, at any given time, serving the interests of a single patient. Organ donation is voluntary, and you as the donor are allowed to back out until the very last minute, without negative consequences to you. If we are to maintain these nice principles, then people cannot make credible commitments to selling their organs.
That's on top of the social slippery slope, where eventually people who haven't donated a kidney yet get disqualified from food stamps or whatever, because they're sitting on $20k of "assets" that they're refusing to sell.
As usual whenever this topic comes up, I highly recommend "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets" by economist Al Roth. I know that it's slightly rude to ask someone to do background reading before deigning to engage with them. But in this case it's a short, compelling read.
How good must one be at decoupling what's good for me from the greater good in order for utilitarianism to be a good principle to put into practice?
How confident in one's calculations must one be in order to responsibly take on the responsibility to calculate for others the best course of action?
It's one thing to kill 1 to save 5. That's net +4. But what about killing 1 to save 10 with 50% probability? Or killing 1 to save 10 with 5-95% probability? Or killing 1 now to save 5 in the distant future?
It seems to me that utilitarians are loathe to actually put their principle into practice. Who wants to argue that it's right to steal from degenerate gamblers to fund AI safety? Who would advocate for assassination campaigns against agribusiness execs and investors?
Now, you can always retreat to the claim that such moves are negative EV once nth order effects get accounted for. But to actually account for these things is to have perfect predictive ability, which none of us do.
So in the end, we are left with heuristics, and the real meat of utilitarianism is the confidence that one can estimate consequences better than the average member of their society, better than simply following societal norms.
In many cases this confidence may be correct, but what is the moral valence of the elitism that undergirds it? Is it good to believe oneself to be a superior decision-maker?
Arguably, the naive utilitarian protester who stops traffic would be better served by ceasing belief that they are morally superior to society.
One paradoxical outcome of true utilitarianism is to discourage the masses from practicing it.
Time and time again we've seen child labor bans just get circumvented and result in kids doing illegal jobs without workplace protections like wage laws.
Compulsory Education however does abolish child labor because no parent can use "I can't afford to send him to school" as an excuse to have a child not in school, and an impoverished child not in school "might as well pitch in", which is how they end up getting factory jobs.
If you abolish compulsory education there will be children working in Amazon warehouses. We've already seen in states in the deep South that have poor enforcement of homeschooling quality or have defunded and allowed their public schools to wither, and don't enforce education, that poor kids get pulled out of school to spend their time someplace more productive for their parents: a Hyundai plant.
I hated school as a kid too. Fortunately new and avant garde forms of school are trying to break the shackles of Foucault's Prison if your kid can't handle it but no harm done to a kid in school is worse than the harm done to that kid on the factory floor. Organic childhood is a modern imaginary phenomenon and a utopian ideal invented by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In the nature of things anyone with two or more moral principles is going to find them coming into conflict occasionally. Each moral principle, according to itself, should take precedence. So there is no rational way to choose which principle to give priority to. If there was, you wouldn't have multiple moral principles after all.
So you can be irrational with several moral principles, or a monomaniac with only one.
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
Because you are arguing against the weakest strawman of what a "non-utilitarian" looks like and then giving yourself points for being better than it.
A non-utilitarian who is a good person hates all of your examples also.
"Being pro-gun-control sacrifices the right to bear arms for the greater good of fewer deaths; being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms."
I do get what you're saying (maybe?). But in terms of details, I don't think it's fair that you compare a means with an end, here. Being pro-gun-control seeks to prevent some suicides and accidental gun deaths. Rhetorically, gun control advocates seek primarily to prevent mass shootings, but from a utilitarian standpoint, mass shootings are a very small effect relative to others being discussed. Gun control potentially denies innocent people a means to defend themselves against aggression, both from their neighbors and from the government. If "a right to bear arms" was the sacred thing on one side then "a right for the government to control its citizenry" would be the thing it was balanced against or, perhaps, 'the need to prevent school shootings at the expense of all other harms.' If "reducing accidental gun deaths, mass shootings, and suicides" was the profane thing on one side then "self defense, hunting for sport and food, and a long-term hedge against tyranny" would be the profane thing on the other side.
I agree entirely that these disagreements involve trade offs, which was your point. But I'm skeptical that the people making the arguments are willing to acknowledge them as such, for rhetorical reasons. 2nd Amendment supporters are likely to disbelieve studies supporting gun control as biased, because they are engaged in a conflict. And I'm not sure how to categorize such low-key bad faith arguments. As you've mentioned in other writing, to try and steelman such self-delusional conflict-based arguments potentially distorts their nature. The Second Amendment seems basically like a Schelling Point for the pro-gun-ownership side.
I think most people who ick at Utilitarianism or Consequentialism as a general category are operating on the approximate moral principle of "anything that decreases the predictability of my environment is bad". This fits with all of the examples in the article, and also explains why in general people find deontologists more trustworthy than utilitarians.
That is to say, it's not so much that people expect utilitarians will do bad things, it's that figuring out the specific thing utilitarians will do is much harder than just assuming they will follow predetermined rules you can readily anticipate and account for.
Worse still, it is much less legible whether or not the things a purported utilitarian is doing are in fact intended for the greater good. A nefarious agent purporting to be a utilitarian has a lot more leeway for excusable behavior than one purporting to be a deontologist who has committed to a broadly agreed upon set of rules in advance.
How is it even possible to type the words "usual moral rule against inconveniencing people" without the words "this may be a reach" popping into your head?
Most if not all of the things in your first list of things you oppose have very plausible utilitarian objections, though. And in fact I hear the utilitarian objections way more frequently than the pure principal objections.
Like for censorship, yes I'm sure there are still some classical liberals or what have you who oppose censorship purely out of their commitment to a free society. But the more common objection is lack of trust in the people who would be doing the censoring, a fear that censorship will be used against them and people they care about in the future should it become normalized, and a strong historical track record of censorship being used to target legitimate dissent. All of which is entirely utilitarian-compatible.
Likewise when I hear people complaining about disruptive protests they're usually focused on the very concrete and direct harm that such protests do to people, up to and including causing deaths due to the delay of emergency services. They're not concerned with some abstract principal that prohibits inconveniencing people.
Utilitarianism has a bad reputation because utilitarianism defenders tend to really insist running around saying that "yes, you should be willing to kill someone to use their organs to save 5 people".
I don't think I've ever seen that, I've only seen that being used as an attack on utilitarianism, or when utilitarianism defenders are explaining why it wouldn't actually lead to the most utility if society killed people for their organs.
As for increasing the supply of organs, why not institute a policy of only people who check the organ donor box on their licenses are eligible to receive donated organs? For children who aren't yet old enough to drive, their parents checking the organ donor box would be enough.
I don't know what the "normal people" think, but I personally have two objections to actual real life utilitarians.
One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Second is that IRL utilitarians are prone to violating deontological norms for the thrill of it, in a reverse logic of "if what I'm doing is important then I should violate the norm", by violating the norm they affirm that they are important. See Eliezer Yudkowsky's suppression of Roko's Basilisk. Also, if Eliezer is in charge of building a Friendly AI, why wouldn't he make it a Basilisk? Why haven't you ever seen it discussed?
>One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Partially agreed. I think that a strong case can be made that valuing
>the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's
is a _niche_ view among people in general (despite it being a popular view amongst western philosophers). Some nice numerical data on this is in Bian Deng's thesis "WHEN YOUR LOVED ONE IS ON THE TROLLEY TRACK: A STUDY OF
MORAL DILEMMA WHEN CLOSE RELATIONSHIP IS INVOLVED" [ all caps in the original :-( ]
table 1 (I'm just going to quote the Western numbers):
numbers of strangers save loved one save strangers
1 43 4
10 33 14
100 26 21
1000 26 21
For _none_ of the probed ratios of strangers saved to a loved one saved did more than half of the western participants pick saving the strangers. At a 1:1 ratio, only 4 western participants picked saving the strangers (I'm kind of surprised _any_ did. I would have expected that it would take at least a 1+epsilon ratio to get even people who valued strangers as much as their family to choose to save the strangers in preference to family. I wish Deng had included a 1:2 ratio row, which would have been a cleaner test). If I use the 1:10 ratio row, then the western participants favor saving their family members by a 33:14 majority.
I'm not saying that the stranger-savers are "wrong", but I _do_ say that they are a _niche_ view. And I also say that philosophers who espouse a view of all lives counting equally are screwing up. Insofar as they are trying to formalize a consistent system that echos predominant intuitions, they are failing to accomplish that, instead echoing a _niche_ view.
I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids.
Is some of this due to the fact that it's still illegal to not go to school, so you only get kids with not very in-control or invested parents (including migrants living with non-parents) doing it? Sure, but the in-control and invested parents already have the option of homeschooling, which is now easier than ever with online curricula, including that allow a lot of going at your own pace.
So, what kids are served well by ending compulsory schooling who are not served now by homeschooling/alternative school options? It's not the kid with parents who aren't on board with their non-public-school options, because even if the state isn't making you attend school, your parents still can. Kids who don't want to go to school with parents who don't really care one way or the other? I'll buy that some of those are kids who legitimately could create fine educational experiences for themselves. But really, how many?
"I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids."
Agreement here from my time working in a school (and concurrent with that, an early school leaver programme).
We had to keep track of truancy/non-attendance and after a certain threshold of days missed without good reason (e.g. if the reason your kid is not in school is because they're in the hospital), that triggered intervention.
Either kids were being kept at home to do household work and childminding of younger siblings, because the parent/parents couldn't cope (broken families, mental problems, other problems) or didn't want to, or the kids were roaming around town like feral dogs. They certainly were not being kept out of school because Mama and Papa were bringing them on day trips to museums, art galleries, libraries and the opera while the bright and eager self-motivated learners just gobbled up all the opportunities for investigation and free-range unschooling.
They generally weren't old enough to work in factories, and the ones just about legally old enough (the early school leavers/drop-outs) were often not interested in working. *Some* of them, sure. They recognised the programme was their last chance not to slip through the cracks and they tried their best.
Some of them - not so much. These were the ones on the path to prison, which is a terrible thing to be able to forecast about a fourteen or fifteen year old. Even a seventeen year old. But they certainly were not interested in advancing their learning beyond the limits imposed by public schooling, or getting a job, or anything except easy money (via petty crime), weed, booze, and sex if they could get it.
I understand and basically agree. But unless your *reasons* for agreeing with Scott are not the same reasons that a consequentialist would use to be against them, then even if you have ancillary beliefs that are non-utilitarian, if those beliefs do not play a predominant role for why you agree with Scott, then they don't matter. Of course, you do say you have orthogonal reasons, but given the list I have a hard time seeing what an orthogonal reasons would look like for those cases that are not identical or nearly so to utilitarian ones (I'm on my phone, and it won't let me see the post while writing this). I would like to see such orthogonal reasons outlined for those specific cases!
I also feel like there is a trick being pulled, one very common among non-utilitarians: reductionism of utilitarianism. When I read JSMill, I don't see some mandate that utilitarianism ignore norms, or intergenerational bonds, or character as meaningful and important categories, quite the opposite.
I'm a syncretist about these things, I suppose, and so think that people spend too much effort finding as little common ground as possible. Since anti-utilitarianism is popular again, I feel prone to defend it a bit more.
Hm, I'm not utilitarian, and frequently argue against utilitarianism, but I agree with you on all of list 1 (there are plenty of non-utilitarian reasons for being against that), and most of list 2.
My position is a _little_ about the "ends justify the means" thing, but I can state it more clearly. For me, and I think most people (subconsciously or consciously), emotions and instincts are a more reliable source of identifying "good" than cognition, so we are (rightly) suspicious of anyone who seems to be trying to assign the job of being "good" primarily to cognition. Cognition can easily rationalize. It's too easy to make a set of assumptions and a reasonable-looking argument to justify virtually anything, and people do this all the time. Politicians have made a bad name for cognition. Morality is something much more obvious and more ancient than this. Good people are generous, kind, forgiving, curious, and honest/reliable. Not as descriptive of behaviors, but as personality traits and internal experiences. These things come first.
Many "ends justify the means" utilitarian arguments are very suspicious because they do not take into account the internal state and humanness of the actor. Someone might say "I'm going to get rich to donate to the poor". Frankly, I don't really believe someone who says this. Becoming rich and powerful is incredibly corrupting. Even if you are kind and generous now, I don't believe that you're very likely to become rich and powerful and stay kind and generous. Especially when becoming rich might require suspending giving stuff away in the immediate term. How I prefer to say "the ends don't justify the means" is "you can't burn your soul for fuel and expect to keep your heading".
See also "The Power Paradox" by Dacher Keltner. Machiavellians are not good at becoming powerful. Being powerful makes you Machiavellian.
Whether I'm anti-utilitarianism in _theory_, or I simply don't trust utilitarian thinking to encourage people to be good on average is both less clear, and a moot point.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying, to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
There's something weird going on here. The usual moral rule is, very clearly, that you should shame and insult people who are on the wrong side of moral issues.
But I think you're right that modern American culture states a rule against bullying, or other analogous rules. You just aren't expected to believe in those rules; the cultural avowal of them is the equivalent of someone asking "How are you?" when they meet you, or of North Korea avowing that it is a Democratic People's Republic.
I remember reading a tvtropes page about Alfred Hitchcock famously having said that the audience [of a movie] has no morals, elaborating that you can easily get the audience to sympathize with a murderer.
And I think this is a confusion that it's important to avoid. The reason you can easily get movie audiences to sympathize with murderers is that murder, as depicted in the movie, doesn't violate their morals. You can't make the audience sympathize with whatever you want; you have to appeal to their morals.
But you also can't confuse what the audience says their morals are with what their morals actually are.
If you're wondering why so many people characterize utilitarianism as "being willing to do bad things for the greater good", and often with the "bad things" part in boldface all caps, then I think you have to consider the part where when utilitarians are asked to explain their moral philosophy, the go-to examples are various thought experiments where it is shown to be morally righteous to deliberately kill an innocent person. Or sometimes just to torture them, and then there's the one where rape is just fine if you do it perfectly. But hey, we're the hot new moral philosophy that tells you why it's OK to rape and torture and kill, whereas all the old and busted moral philosophies just tell people not to do that stuff.
I can see a utilitarian being willing to own the "correct" solution to the Trolley Problem and say that, yep, they're definitely going to kill that innocent fat guy because he is fat and in the right place at the right time for killing fat guys. But if you don't want people to look at you funny, maybe save those examples for the advanced class and come up with something less bloodthirsty for the 101 version or the initial pitch.
I’m so far from arguing on this topic, but could you enlighten me about which philosophies say it’s okay to rape and torture? I’m pretty lazy when it comes to reading philosophy (and just about everything else) but that seems like a compelling place to start. (No not because I’m interested in rape and torture)
A thing happened fairly recently in the world involving just those actions, based in religion and at times citing scripture. (I don't think you'll find an ideology that *always* says it's ok to rape and torture, but of course utilitarians don't think that, either.)
The prohibition on explicitly killing known-innocent people is pretty universal, I think. One can kill scoundrels of various sorts, and there's debate about which sorts. And accidental killing of innocents (e.g. by shooting at scoundrels and missing) is acceptable to the extent that one exercised reasonable care to avoid such accidents, again debatable at the margin. Pushing innocent people in front of trains is no accident, and is right out under most moral philosophies.
The prohibition against rape is also pretty universal. There's a lot of disagreement as to the *boundaries* of rape, but the central example of a malevolent stranger who crawls through an innocent woman's bedroom to forcibly penetrate her against her will, is prohibited by pretty much every non-utilitarian moral philosophy.
My beef with utilitarianism is that the objective function is plain wrong. Too many organisms are stuck too low on Maslow's pyramid to make interpersonal comparison of utility a good idea.
The benthamite objective is so crude that E/Acc counter-proposal against utilitiarian E/A to switch from maximizing pleasure to maximizing free energy looks like an improvement. One does not build a civilization by maximizing welfare in shrimp farms.
We know that there is so much we don't know that the objective needs to include heavy penalties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_method) on any coercion or distortion to incentives.
>repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Calculating things about morality is wrong not as in "morally wrong" but as in "2+2=5 is wrong", incorrect. It's not about repulsion but about no, it doesn't work.
A non-utilitarian position: let's solve issues on a concrete case by case basis.
Utilitarian: it won't do, making generalizations and calculations on a grander scale yields greater benefits.
A non-utilitarian: but oversimplified calculations on complex systems replete with self-reference is not easy, bound to be incorrect in the long term.
U: we can still give it our best.
NU: it's not not easy as in damn we need to write steps down, but as in three body problem.
Strawman-but-commited-utilitarian: now, let me tell you about those three bodies, see we draw some lines like this, and there ya go, tomorrow they'll be in roughly these positions.
U: we can still do good with this reasoning in some concrete generalized cases.
NU: yes, mosquito nets are likely fine.
SBCU: but seeing those benefits, can't we stick to the same principles in general and hope for the equally nice results?
Of course not.
Humans are in general not not reducible to numbers because they're sacred divine sparks* or whatever, but because they're self-aware, conscious, they have memory and agency. And when there's more then one involved, well, that's where we veer off into pure chaos theory, linear equations just won't do. Which precludes most of utilitarianism espoused online.
• - albeit plenty of those who do hold them as "sacred divine sparks" do so as a poetic shorthand for the self-aware, conscious etc etc stuff.
After reading many great posts here on utilitarism, I think deep utilitarism considering nth order effects is a good moral framework - but due to the uncertainty of said nth order effects, it seems that this leads to simpler heuristics - something close to virtue ethics, most of the time.
However, I think naïve, 1st order utilitarism is often used as argumentation in the real world. Consider the EA argument that charity money is most efficiently used where the marginal dollar saves most lives, leading to the investment i malaria bednets. This seems, at least superficially, to be a 1st order argument. Considering nth order effects, one might intuitively suspect that investing in infrastructure, energy production or education may look better.
These 1st order utilitarian calculations may be what people intuitivly react to when they oppose utilitarism, maybe rightly so.
You are not supporting things from the first list on utilitarian grounds, are you? Or do you literally turn off your utilitarinism while thinking about these questions?
вот результат моего опыта ковида, до и после его прихода меня совершенно не вдохновляет страна где я проживаю, мое сознание будто не вписывается ,такое ощущение ,что вокруг меня не та цивилизация
I think the biggest error here is the assumption that the Utility Function can be computed from some arbitrary "I know it all" belief...
A Utilitarian should use the scientific method to discern wether most of these policies are good or bad.
For example "Letting people get paid to donate their organs" has a myriad of possible ramifications...
Let some countries do it (or states, or counties, for example by restricting to only those domiciled there before the legislation passed) and make statistics about the life of donors and who received the organs.
The belief that we can a priori understand all the possible ramifications of such a policy is not warranted.
Personally I think overall such a policy would be bad for society but I would love to be proven wrong...
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Maybe, but it also might be because utilitarians are pretty bad at calculating things about morality. They tend to focus on the positives, and ignore the negatives. To use a recent example, cryptocurrency was supposed to usher in a new era of economic prosperity unconstrained by the old power structures, but in reality it just produced a new currency speculation market plus a whole bunch of new and exciting scams. But in fact utilitarians have a long history of mediocre successes and predictable failures, and on that basis trusting someone with your future just because he says "it's ok, I can multiply numbers" appears to be a bit reckless.
It's also possible that people are mathematicians who think your and philosophy's use of math is *extremely* dubious and there's little to no evidence of moral optimization having value beyond a certain satisficing threshold. Probably these people agree with a lot of your views from both lists, but question your methods, and think we should *all* admit high levels of back justified gut instinct.
But sure, focus on the easy critics who haven't examined their moral systems with regard to some questions you picked.
I let this message pass through two of Rumi's gates.
Edit: And I'm glad you're roundly and soundly being taken to task in the comments by a bunch of people who dislike or question the *quality of the utilitarian method*. Please, please take this as a learning and go back to *investigating* strong positions instead of *fighting against* weak ones. I miss 2015 Scott.
I love your writing, Scott, but this essay strikes me as underbaked. I also have strong utilitarian leanings, and I think you're a very insightful guy, a wonderful writer, and a terrific person, but I don't think this essay accomplishes much.
First, I think you're straw-manning the people who are uncomfortable with utilitarians. Yes, some people who don't like utilitarians think dumb things. So what? So do some utilitarians! You're smarter and more thoughtful than 9,999 people out of 10,000, so if you were a rules-based moralist, you would also reach good results, as many have. I'd be much more interested in seeing you steelman criticism of utilitarians first, then respond to that.
Second, there are whole books on these questions. I have so many objections, I don't even know where to start.
- Do people really think kids should go to school because they are following rules based morality instead of utilitarianism? I mean, if you said "I think the kids involved and society as a whole are worse off as a result of requiring kids to go to school," you think their answer would be "I agree, but let's make them go to school anyway because I have a moral belief that kids should go to school even if it harms them and leaves us all worse off?"
- I don't see anything in your essay that addresses how you factor the Omelas function into your moral schema. If someone has a different upper bound on the suffering that can be imposed on the losers for the sake of the winners, or acceptable distributions of suffering that result in overall gains, why are you right and they are wrong? What's your Omelas function and does it make you not a utilitarian?
- Does utilitarianism require that we obey the best mathematicians in determining what's right and wrong? If not, aren't we going to end up in some case where almost everyone argues that their moral structure is overall best for the world, but then we all argue that everyone else is reaching their conclusion wrong? You can accuse them of motivated reasoning (probably correctly), but my take is most moral rules people believe that the risk of harmful error from Peter Singer-esque reasoning outweighs the possible gains.
Yes, these are big questions, but that's why I don't think your essay gets very far. (Unless I don't get it, but I'm looking forward to "Best of the Comments on Less Utilitarian than Thou" for more detail.)
I agree that you are a lovely person and you identify as a utilitarian. But if that's the argument, then this could have been a tweet, and if there's more to it than that, I don't get it.
I ask because my perception of blocking traffic (often done by *getting a parade permit for your protest*) is that it's an inconvenience that does not damage to people or property, and if you cross off all protests where somebody can legitimately say "this inconveniences me as much as having to take an alternate route to work" then you're not left with, well, any that have ever accomplished anything.
Should protests achieve anything? Should the views of people with the time and inclination to go round shouting in the street be privileged over the views of people with something better to do?
Historically, people who are deprived of rights get them through violence, nonviolent protest, or not at all.
Since I'm in favor desegregation and same-sex marriage, and against apartheid and the Reign of Terror, my answer to "should protests achieve anything?" is "at least sometimes, yes."
If there is a broad and serious injustice in your society, then the people who are working their 9-5 office jobs and going home at the end of the day do indeed have something better to do. They're just not doing it.
This isn't the case for all protests, but it is for some. And, ultimately, history is made by the people who show up. Always has been, always will be.
Thanks Scott. I think it's key to clarify whether you apply calculate utility for specific cases, or for the rules. I'm sure there's some good terminology for this which I don't know. When you are against protestors blocking roads I'm guessing you don't calculate the utility of furthering their specific cause vs. the negative utility of blocking that specific road. Rather you weigh up the utility of allowing all kinds of protestors to block roads vs. the utility of having a law banning this.
I agree with the fact that Anti-Utilitarians tend to strawman Utilitarianism as "do evil for the greater good". But I think Scott sets up his own strawman for Anti-Utilitarians with the "math is taboo" assertion. I'm generally pro-Utilitarian, but there are good reasons to be skeptical of the mathematization of morality.
Internet pseuds love utilitarianism because it's easy to understand and seems to solve a problem while actually just kicking the can down the road. They reveal how little they actually know about the history of philosophy when they are completely unaware of things like the open question argument.
"Holding protests that block traffic, damage property, or harass people. These violate the usual moral rule against inconveniencing people, to serve the supposed greater good of raising awareness of a cause."
I'd have to strongly disagree on this one, some causes are simply too important to follow traffic laws. What possible alternative can you suggest for the powerless masses to effectively protest?
There is no meaningful alternative and with stupid laws protecting drivers rights to be workers and shoppers were designed and written, like anti-BDS laws for Israel only in American state governments, to curb protests and social change. It is inevitable those laws or 'norms' will be broken.
The purpose of the protest is to break them and disrupt commerce as that's one of the few things the elites care about. It is also very strange to combine property damage and harassment of regular people with the very different things of blocking traffic or protesting leaders who have chosen to be in public positions. Politicians promoting and enacting genocide should be shouted down and harassed in public and they should be put on trial and thrown in prison where they are guilty. Or in the case of the French revolution when starving crowd is told to eat cake when they do not have bread, they simply cut her head off. Since then the French have had zero problems from their 'royal' family. Now with an endless revolving door of endless psychopaths, there is no purpose in such a thing, so disrupting commerce is the new guillotine in our supposed democratic governments which routinely ignore 80% plus of the people's views for a ceasefire now. Or any of another hundred vital issues to the common people with 70% plus support which are 'politically impossible'.
When we look at the sit-ins and other mass protests from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA South and elsewhere against segregation, when we look at the stop work protests in the Indian liberation movement, when we look at the protests which led to the end of apartheid South Africa or the Vietnam 'war' protests. Nearly every effective mass movement has used this tactic to block traffic and to 'harass' public officials and other leaders in order to push their cause along with causing all sorts of other disruptions. Are you telling them not to have done these things? To go back in time and say 'yea yea, segregation bad, but seriously, get off the bridge and get out of that restaurant which will not server you for being black?' It sounds like you're saying that.
While angry mobs are real and can turn into destructive riots or block emergency vehicles at times (more often at an English football game than a peaceful protest), there are also agent provocateurs and other government and intelligence intervention in recent decades where a lot of the risk of violence and property damage comes from these kinds of incitement or small incidents of less than 0.5% of people at a protest which the corporate propagandist media fixate on. How many times was that mkultra asset, test subject, and cult leader let off of criminal charges before they put in him prison? Why was it on the day of Malcom X's assassination that the usually ubiquitous police presence at every single on of his events was absent? Such as the tiny handful of a few hundred people who largely peacefully spilled into the capital building on Jan 6 out of well over 500,000 people there that day. All while FBI and other agents or assets are on camera shouting to incite people to go into the building, you can watch the footage. All of whom somehow don't get charged or walk away with zero prison time, while dumb rubes who stumbled into the lobby have gone to prison. Piles of expensive bricks left out unattended in New York just before a protest while normally you'd never see any construction material left out, locked up behind high fences.
Regardless, this doesn't seem like a viable position to be against all disruptive protests all the time for all causes.. No justice, no peace. Shut it down, and other similar sentiments have been one of the only tools common people have had and have effectively used to bring about change. The simple fact that enough people disagree with something strongly enough to put their bodies and time into such a protest in a free society means they should be able to do so. I know of many environmental protest which only succeeded due to such protest of people chaining themselves to trees or up on 3-pole death platforms where removing one poll causes the person to fall to their death. It worked and many forests still stand due to such protests. Such anti-protest laws only benefit the elite to pursue more crimes and war crimes against commoners and our collective environment.
If you feel this way about traffic laws, then I'd wonder how you feel about unions stopping work for safer conditions or fair wages?
Not that it matters and people will simply not listen to or look to you for leadership on this issue of effective protest movements both historically and now. Those who march against the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank because they live, suffer, and die under a brutal expansionist apartheid Israeli military law and bombardment are not particularly interested in such anti-protest laws to muzzle them. All while the elite profit from arms sales for bombs dropped on women and children who live in a concentration camp turned death camp.
But if someone were to listen to your love of western traffic laws, what alternatives would you suggest people take to stop what they perceive as a genocide and new holocaust? What is the correct response to a holocaust as we watch things like the Flour Massacre gunning down intentionally starving people trying to get food from a limited entry aid truck? While psychopaths run a festival to block the aid trucks with bouncy castles and cotton candy? Not that the IOF was letting aid trucks of food in before that insane genocide festival. Should we be meekly and quietly marching on a weekend and being ignored by the media who love to lie about the numbers of protesters present and what they are saying and doing? What more effective altruistic action would you propose to stop or at least protest a genocide?
What should we do when there is a new Mai Lai massacre, or more than one, happening every single day in Gaza for 150 days now? We can't all have Aaron Bushnell's moral conviction to set ourselves on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in DC. Or Thich Quang Duc who did so against the genocide in Vietnam where the USA relentlessly blew up hospitals, villages, and killed civilians on purpose with horrific war crime napalm and land mines which are still a danger 50 years later. Such enlightened moral capacity is exceptionally rare to self immolate. Sadly the war criminals seem to rise up in abundance.
What else can a common person do besides block traffic and stop commerce? In one of the greatest epics of our era made into movies and films over and over again we have Dune where 'the spice must flow' and the blockage of commerce of spice, which was basically oil in the story, was the penultimate tool the people of the planet Dune had to protest their exploitation.
Such a tactic is held up as a pinnacle of moral protest when we look to India or the American civil rights movement. it is odd to spit on that tactic and you're perfectly right a lot of people don't like or agree with such a position. Such as the farmers and truckers in europe right now. They have your attention right? You know about them right? What if they just quietly marched on a side street, then no one would know about them.
Even the credit hungry political class love such traffic blocking protests, historically only, and the VP of the USA recently gave a speech at a famous bridge in the American south which was shut down by a protest march in the civil rights era of the 1960s. It seems a wholly untenable position to put the free flow of traffic or not disrupting politicians speeches as some sacrosanct principle which goes above all protest movements for all causes no matter what.
The protestors who stand daily with fake blood on their bodies who harass the ultra zionist genocider Blinken at his mansion are doing a great job. Public figures are subject to public scrutiny and disapproval when their actions are so barbaric and evil. Should Hitler and Himmler have enjoyed peaceful and quiet existences free of protest in your view? Would you have opposed protests outside their mansions or villas? Or would that be harassment or breaking traffic laws?
I for one wish more people had protested and shut down traffic in the late 1930s and during WWII to draw attention to the Nazi holocaust against jews, gypsies, blacks, gays, and what they did in Poland. Or what the Americans did in Germany and Japan, the only nation to use nuclear weapons used it on the civilian population on purpose to try to terrorise Japan into surrendering - aka violence against civilians for political purposes. I'd bet the Chinese and anyone of good conscience wish more streets had been shut down due to what Japan had been doing to them in that same era. Did the people of Rwanda wish more attention was given to their cause and more roads shut down in protest? The Armenian genocide is still largely ignored and was basically unknown at the time it occurred.
Just as today it is important and correct for protest events such as when Jewish American protesters shut down 8 bridges in 8 American cities during Hanukah in 2023 to protest the genocide in Gaza and many other such protests shut as shutting down central station in New York by Jewish anti-genocide and antizionist protesters along with the thousand of other such protest to draw attention to their cause of not murdering children.
I had thought it a common moral position to be against the dismemberment and intentional starvation of children, but I was wrong and starving civilians through sanctions is extremely common for the American empire as it turns out. Seeing the skeletons of children who died of starvation, orphaned by bombs and bullets before their neglected painful deaths...it just...makes me want to scream, cry, and block traffic sometimes.
Not all causes are equal, but a blanket idea of 'never block traffic' is just not tenable. The elite are ever willing to expend our lives like water at their connivence, but when commerce is blocked they suddenly give a damn. If the spice must blow, then the spice will not flow until the mass school shooter genocidal actions stop.
If we are to care about the free flow of traffic or emergency services, what until I tell you about the 650 internal checkpoints in the West Bank which are an illegal occupation under international law. They routinely block and slow emergency vehicle son purpose so that people will die. Or about all the ambulances in Gaza which were blown up, along with their associated hospitals. Talk about a problem of a protest causing disruptions.
Those protest happen to be from the Israeli military, but I'm betting there are all sorts of principles of traffic law which you'd be upset about. I look forward to your essay on this problem of military disruption of traffic in occupied Palestine. Their military leader said no food, no fuel, no water...but he also has a no traffic issue and blocks thousands of aid trucks from getting in.
I'm curious where the "guns cause deaths" association came from. I've haven't seen that the number of gun owners is correlated with the number of murders.
If you're talking about gun-related accidents, I acknowledge that they exist-- but should we ban everything that has the potential to kill?
hey scott — looks like your link on “repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality” is broken.
(it says “access denied”)
same here. I am going to assume it was a link to this classic Phil Tetlock article
Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(7), 320-324. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9
Abstract
Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo. Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Research shows that, although people do respond with moral outrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce when secular violations of sacred values are rhetorically reframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The results reveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries on what is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid and forgivingly flexible.
Forgive me for being the party pooper, but this is an another example of research “finding out” information that is readily available to anyone paying attention to human behavior.
Yes, research should avoid stating anything that confirms our priors. That should be left as an exercise for the reader.
Because many such "readily available" things are either false or only available to neurotypicals, explicating them is good.
Thanks, hopefully fixed.
Yeah funny. I’ve written about a hundred articles defending utilitarianism and yet I find myself less willing to support those things than is typical. Weird.
Not that weird - these things all *sound* utilitarian, because the closest simple thought experiment is one in which a utilitarian would recommend them.
But all of us know the real world isn't a thought experiment, and things won't actually work out the way the speller of the thought experiment invites us to think it'll magically work.
Except when the real world involves just a steel switch moving steel rails that direct steel wheels - that's pretty certain, so the real world does support the simple utilitarian-sounding thought there.
>Except when the real world involves just a steel switch moving steel rails that direct steel wheels
Huh, when did you last encounter that situation? My biggest beef with emphasizing steel rail-based thought experiments is precisely that real world almost never presents cut-and-dried decisions with perfect information to you, so training your morality on them is pretty much the least optimal thing to do.
It seems to me that the usefulness of appreciating the correct choice in the classic Trolley thought experiment is to *train out* the pernicious active/passive distinction, which underlies mass complacency toward immense real-world harms.
Well, the old chestnuts of "first, do no harm" and "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" are evergreen for good reasons. Of course, the thing you refer to is real as well, the classic "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics" essay is a good elaboration, but even if you may not endorse it, others do, and will treat you accordingly, so taking it into account is prudent.
"are evergreen for good reasons"
Because they evoke warm, fuzzy feelings in people who don't think about them for more than a second? Yeah, quite a few chestnuts are like that, now that you mention it. ;-)
No one whom we'd ever describe as a decent physician remotely follows "first, do no harm". You couldn't have chemo or radiation. You couldn't have surgery. You couldn't have opiates for extreme pain, because of the omnipresent risk of addiction.
> You couldn't have opiates for extreme pain, because of the omnipresent risk of addiction.
Ha! Doctors are way ahead of you there - since the Sackler thing, legal prescriptions for opiates are wayyyyy down, it's basically impossible to get pain relief no matter how well attested or legitimate now.
The only situation you can get them is when your specific doctor knows you individually and likes you more than other patients, and decides to allocate a part of their (presumably forever-dwindling) quota of "okay, you can prescribe *this much* without us calling you a quack and witch-hunting you into extinction" supply.
I draw a distinction between "First do no harm" and "Above all else do no harm". The *first* question a physician should ask is "will this harm the patient?" After that comes "will this heal the patient?". This is superior to "First heal the patient" where the physician considers the potential harm of surgery in the light of the benefits that they have already considered and become somewhat committed to, and superior to "Above all else do no harm" where the physician considers the potential harm of surgery and says "welp, my only responsibility is avoiding harm, no surgery for you."
Those old chestnuts exist because real-world outcome are subject to both limited information and probabilistic outcome. Contrived trolly-experiences are unrealistically clear. It is a classic map is not the territory, type issue. Sometimes a simplified example allows for a better examination of the primary principles involved, but in this case I think it shows how our intuitions are actually more tied to the practical uncertainties.
Perfect information is indeed a trap. The human condition is that we have to live and decide and act without it. That’s way more interesting.
Right. That's my point. It's the only thought experiment where our intuitions are reliable, because it's the only thought experiment where reality behaves like a thought experiment.
Thought experiments aren't about training morality - they're about testing theories of morality to see if they agree with what we pre-theoretically believed. People claim utilitarianism is wrong because it gives the "wrong answer" in many thought experiments. But that's because those thought experiments (other than the trolley problem) aren't realistic.
As a utilitarian myself, I'd say there are plenty of very real situations where utilitarianism gives an answer that conflicts with normal Human-Moral-Intuition. For example if you have to lie, cheat or, betray someone. I think a good fraction of utilitarians will face at least one situation in their life where they have to do one of those in a non-trival way.
I'm not clear what you are suggesting here? There are mountains of cultural narratives where some form of deceit or betrayal is lauded for the overall good it enabled. Often those are portrayed as "necessary evils" - but isn't that fully aligned with utilitarianism?
I'm a little confused by your question. I just mean to say that the idea that utilitarianism has unintuitive implications is correct and that's ok; all theories do - it's just that they are usually too vague to have any implications at all. Of course, utilitarians should be mindful of hubris and selfish-rationalization etc., but there are still real cases where unpalatable "greater-good" reasoning is appropriate.
When presented with The Trolley Problem, it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to think of Sophie Zawistowska at Auschwitz giving up Eva to save her son.
Things are never so cut and dried. Check please.
Now see, I always thought the trolley experiment was a good example of the hazard of what you call out as magical thinking.
You say steel rails, certainty. I say, if you, laymen bystander, see a speeding train, PLEASE dont run over and flip a switch just in front of it. You are more likely to derail the train than save any lives.
Don Quixote has this one right.
https://qr.ae/psINpK
Don't you support involuntary organ donation?
No. I support it in some far-off hypothetical worlds, not in the actual one.
I'm one of the critics who strongly rejects utilitarianism and consequentialism –– and I'm also pretty strongly against the list of things you list as things you're against. I think they're bad ideas for reasons mostly orthogonal to utilitarianism, so I don't think this list really gets at anything about utilitarianism.
Yes, and conversely it is possible to argue for those things from a non utilitarian perspective. He bizarrely writes as though he thought it was self evident that non utilitarians would be against those things (“These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good”).
I agree. The list had fairly simple what I consider to be utilitarian arguments in the other direction as well. It felt very unpersuasive if his point was that it seems odd for a utilitarian not to espouse those values.
It also gets to the heart of confusion around situational and rule-based utilitarian meta-games. It might be better to have social norm or laws that produce downside outcomes, or result in social nash-equilibria or whatnot. In fact you could make strong utilitarian cases for every position he cites.
Though I'm slightly partial to the belief that nearly all universalist moral systems are utilitarian in some higher-order sense. If the you believe "my entire belief system will make everyone better off" as surely most modern ones do, then how isn't it utilitarian? At that point aren't we just arguing about the granularity of rules and tradeoffs within the system as a whole, or empirical considerations up with which the specifics rest?
I think you're really referring to consequentialism, and when used in that context, where "all ethical forms are really a kind of consequentialism" -- well, yes.
But that's kind of a circular definition: the point of all moral / ethical system is to make the world a better place, ultimately -- it's just that what counts as a "better world" is hugely important, and keeping consequentialism or utilitarianism so broad makes them effectively meaningless.
Utilitarianism, to me, carries an implication of being able to actually in some way *calculate* what is the "greatest utility" (at least in the rationalist understanding of utilitarianism). That one can objectively determine the best outcome. Scott's formulation seems to be that it's a good tool for choosing between two (or even several) well-defined options; I think that makes a lot of sense. But when utilitarianism starts to stand on its own, and needs to account for a more full set of moral theory, well, it doesn't generalize well, and often leads to absurdity. That doesn't make it particularly different from most other rigid ethical systems; they all fail when they try to universalize.
I don't know how this could make sense. What is a non-consequential reason for being against the list of things you are against? I would be very surprised if that didn't cash out ultimately in some consequential reasoning about what sorts of actions lead to human flourishing. Even Aristotle is consequentialist about things like those found on the list, i.e. things concerning political order and prudence. (And Kant can't help but use just a bit of consequentialism to justify the Categorical Imperative.)
This is a common mistake made by naive consequentialists. "Consequentialism" is not the trivial claim that consequences matter. Everyone, including Aristotle, holds that consequences matter. Rather, "consequentialism" is the claim that, in some strong sense, *only* consequences matter. Aristotle is absolutely not a consequentialist, correctly understood, in regard to the political order, or anything else.
So, what could possibly matter besides consequences? Lots of things. Like virtues and norms.
Here, the consequentialist will try to play an obvious and familiar trick: reductionism. "Surely, virtues and norms and anything else can only possibly matter because of their consequences?" But this is only true in an equivocal and weak sense. Virtue and norms matter "because of their consequences" only by taking the "integral of the function" over long periods of time: not merely over one's own lifetime, but over very many generations. And this results in a very different analysis from looking at the identifiable consequences of particular actions, one that is simply incorrect to call "consequentialism."
I see what you’re getting at. Could we not simply differentiate first order consequences from second, third, etc? I think the issue in modern philosophy is that every reason for doing something hard probably eventually needs to cash out to some kind of tangible benefit, whether that’s avoiding moral hazard, setting fair precedents, or much more direct stuff like feeding people. We don’t have sacred virtues or religion to reach for like the ancients, and we need to answer that series of “but why”s or any moral choice we might make looks pretty arbitrary.
It's true that virtues and norms matter, in part, because of the second- and third-order consequences of actions. Consequentialists often protest that, when they say "consequences," they mean to include the latter. The problem is that, in practice, they don't, and the protest becomes a classic motte-and-bailey. Higher-order consequences are difficult to explicitly model in the way rationalists like, so in practice, they usually just get dropped.
I believe that it is cleaner and more honest to treat virtues and norms as first-class objects, rather than as "mere" heuristic summaries of higher-order consequences.
You are mostly like me, except I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth. The fact that the harm of not going to school is distant doesn’t factor.
Scott has written before about the downsides of public schooling, and it’s not exactly an unpopular view around here. So not so much a distant harm to avoiding public schools but an immediate benefit of alternative schooling. Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone in every environment, but if you’re unfamiliar with the arguments maybe check out Caplan’s The Case Against Education.
My younger brother and I each graduated from one of the nation's first and most successful public "alternative" high schools, attendance at which was entirely voluntary. (In the sense that nobody was assigned to it you had to decide to attend it.) Its curriculum was explicitly designed in reaction against traditional American school pedagogy and practices. That included, for more than half the teachers, being explicitly indifferent about whether students felt the need to show up in classrooms (we could instead do independent-study programs). It was a great experience for both my brother and I and we each thrived at that school.
Neither of us though opposes compulsory schooling including in places where the only version of it available is the traditional one. That's because as well as seeing the upsides of breaking out of that model we also saw the downsides, which were just as powerful for some kids as the upsides were for us personally. If not moreso actually.
Best is for families to have choices -- traditional schools both public and private, home schooling, religious schools if that's their thing, variations on the trad school model like STEM or arts focused magnet schools, etc. [Indeed in my case I ended up at that alternative school after having emphatically demonstrated that traditional high schools were not ever going to be my path and my mother was frankly grasping at straws.] Obviously such a range of options is not practical outside of significant population centers. As a parent I've consciously chosen to live in places where such a range of options is available but I'm relatively privileged so could do that.
There does though have to be a default general way of trying to get all children up to a certain basic level of functional education. Compulsory schools still seem like the most effective default setup all things considered. They don't need to be viewed as anything more than that.
Attendance-optional schooling sounds like an interesting concept and I’m sure it works well for some (probably a fairly small group I suppose). But when Scott opposes “mandatory public schooling” I’m guessing his issue is more with the “public” and less with the “mandatory”. I don’t see any issue with parents forcing their kids to go to school, but the government forcing parents to send their kids to a particular school is a problem, especially considering the state of the education system.
It's not the parents' rights that are being violated (under the view that school is a truly awful experience). It's the child. Parents forcing kids to go to school would absolutely be a problem.
The disconnect here is that you feel school is at most marginally unpleasant while being very beneficial long term. There are some people who felt that school was worse than many other things we'd consider to be child abuse and that the benefits are dubious. Under that framework, giving the parents the choice is akin to letting parents choose whether to sell their children to forced-labor camps instead of forcing parents to do so: it's better, but many kids would still be sold to labor camps against their will (assuming a hypothetical society that's okay with that sort of thing).
This wasn't my experience in school, and I'm not convinced school should be optional. But I'm not going to deny that some people had the terrible experience they say they did and under those assumptions (terrible experience for little benefit), being against forced schooling is reasonable.
My experiences from school were pretty worthless (from an educational standpoint) and negative (from a social standpoint) until I got to college. It felt like I had to waste 12 years doing pointless busywork, then go into debt before I was allowed to start learning anything interesting or properly challenging. I also see real value in apprenticeships starting from a young age, to the point where I’d support a system that detractors would call child labor. Thanks to OSHA I don’t think there are any working environments left that are truly dangerous enough to disallow children on that basis (the children yearn for the mines, let them mine!)
I’ll argue against sending your kids to public school til my face turns blue. That being said, allowing children to make those decisions for themselves doesn’t seem like a workable solution to me, for at least 99% of people.
I really agree with this, just with a little bit less certainty.
What I'm unsure about are the exact numbers of how many would benefit and how many would suffer if grade school were optional. Scott Alexander, in my opinion, is not your average writer and probably wasn't your average student. He's a really excellent writer with one of the best substacks in its category. He says he was miserable in school and I don't really doubt he would have been better off (happier) without mandatory grade school. There are many kids who are naturally bright and curious and would probably do just as well in life if they didn't have to sit through K-12, and could get an earlier start on doing things more interesting and useful to them.
But people (adults and children alike) will also act against their own best long-term interests if given the choice. Most overweight people continue to eat too much when they have access to delicious food even if they'd like to lose weight (a somewhat tautological statement as the ones who don't are no longer overweight). I'm sure most kids would rather play video games or watch TV than do their homework assignment if given the choice (as would most adults). Giving people the freedom to harm themselves isn't a problem unique to children because children are dumber or something. But it is a problem. Adults are incentivized to work because they need money. I'm not sure what would incentivize kids to attend school if it were their own choice.
My uncertainty stems from stems from the questions: What percentage of kids actually benefit from K-12? How much? How many kids are truly miserable at school? How much would they learn doing whatever they would do as an alternative to school (eg self-study, apprenticeship, etc)? How would we incentivize people to prioritize their long-term well-being over short-term gratification?
My suspicion is that school caters most to students in the middle and kids at either extreme (very smart or very dumb) see the least benefit from school. And on top of that, a lot of schools are just low-quality all around.
Traditional schools still steal a lot more time than necessary. If you want to teach the basics (Basic Arithmetic and Primary Language skills + civic/political education), something like a Sunday school for a few years would probably suffice. Even if you have to make it compulsory, you can shorten the duration of the compulsory part.
To quote Scott from "Book Review: The Cult of Smart"
"Did you know that when a superintendent experimented with teaching no math at all before Grade 7, by 8th grade those students knew exactly as much math as kids who had learned math their whole lives? Sure, cut out the provably-useless three hours a day of homework, but I don't think we've even begun to explore how short and efficient school can be."
Against Education doesn't argue that all education is bad, or that is bad in the sense of rights violation.
Right, but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value. Which imo is a pretty big indictment against anyone making a “greater good” argument for mandatory public schooling. If the value is primarily in signaling, then doesn’t making it optional send an even stronger signal?
> Right, but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value
There's some truth to this for a Harvard BA, but I'm not convinced there's a lot of it for K-12. The average kid who doesn't go to school (and doesn't have parents who are interested in a strong well-designed home-schooling program) just winds up illiterate and innumerate.
My five-year-old is at school right now. I don't send her because I think it will help with signalling later in life, I send her so that she can darn well learn to read and write, and all the other stuff of which she's currently ignorant.
(Side note: I've been trying to teach her to read since she was three and she's shown no interest in the idea, but she's made more progress in the one month she's been in school than in the previous years. I'm not sure whether that's because the teachers are better at teaching basic literacy than I am, or whether she's just a lot more motivated to learn it when she sees other kids doing it too.)
Ok sure, if you’re not shooting for an elite university, signaling has dubious value at that level. But then again the people who attend elite universities have an outlandishly outsized impact on our country’s future, and signaling for them begins by preschool. Hell, there’s even signaling value in the zip code you grew up in...
Then from the opposite end, there’s also signaling in the determination of the curriculum. Signaling how important you think arts and crafts is for the proper development of our precious children, is so blue it hurts...
> but it argues that the primary value of the modern education system isn’t in the education itself, but rather in its signaling value.
It's also primarily about tertiary education, which can act as a signal because not everyone has it. So it's still pretty irrelevant to compulsory secondary education.
> it’s not exactly an unpopular view around here
This may very well be true for US rationalist/libertarian circles, but AFAIK in the wider world, the idea of equating schools to prisons for children is even more fringe than the “taxes are theft” slogan, so is very puzzling that Scott treats it like a moral axiom here.
Is it of any significance that the absolute majority of parents and other adults that attended schools when young consider schools as a net good for self interest reasons (of them and their children) and not necessarily for the public good, or should we assume everyone educated by "the system" is brainwashed to think in this way and all those people’s opinions on this topic should be dismissed? /s
This makes me wonder if your schools are actually better than ours. I also wonder if most people feel that school was a net benefit, or rather feel their life turned out better than they deserved and thus feel an obligation to attribute that to something...
Plus, public schooling actually gives children more liberty because then their lives are ruled by two separate estates rather than just one. If one of those is being abusive or negligent, there is still a chance that the other one will help. If your homeschooling mom is a fundamentalist, you're screwed.
If the focus of the issue here is the child's well-being and self-determination, I don't get why "separating children from their parents" is taboo (even when the kids still get to see their parents daily) while "forcing children to stay with their parents" isn't. Isn't it just a relic from the time when children were regarded as their parents' property?
Alternatively, it give kids two chances to be physically beaten.
Hard to believe that teachers beating kids in a US public school is a common thing in this day and age. "Being beaten" is much much more common at home, where most parents spank. If anything, school rescues them from "being beaten".
I'm not talking about the teachers, I'm talking about the other kids.
Oh, that's just part of the process of socialization. It builds character. </sarcasm>
Was Calvin's dad a Buddha?
Fights between kids happen outside school too, believe it or not.
Unless you plan to keep your kids at home, never allowed to leave the house to meet other kids. And with no siblings either, because siblings fight a lot.
If they're outside of school, they're far more likely to be resolved in a proper manner instead of being swept under the rug, or "both sides" arbitrariness.
You changed getting beaten to "fighting", and you're including common sibling fighting. Those two things are not the same. You replaced something awful with something mild, two-sided, and normal.
Bullying can happen many places but the bullied person needs to be in a situation where they can't just avoid their bully. If some kid in a park is beating up another kid, the kid just won't go to that park. School forces you to go back to where you're getting bullied every weekday.
It does happen - usually they know better than to leave marks, so they do stuff like taking a book and making like they're going to wallop you in the face with it but deliberately miss, or hold you down and force you to breathe smelling salts. Early on they really liked putting me in a chokehold for some reason.
I did get just straight up pushed over and kicked in the ribs once though, and I got picked up and thrown when I was little. That last one was an administrator rather than a teacher.
"there is still a chance that the other one will help."
Which would be parents pulling their children out of public schools.
Yes, or teachers calling the authorities on the parents. Checks and balances is the point.
Except you're arguing that the parents shouldn't get to apply those checks. They have to leave their kids in public school regardless of what the school does.
Hi, I was homeschooled by a fundamentalist mom for one year. Best year of school I've had. I did have to go back to public school for 6-12 grades though because she wasn't enough of an expert on all the different subjects.
I apologize for generalizing, and for associating the failure mode of homeschooling with a particular demographic.
Forgive my ignorance on the topic but homeschooling is definitely something I plan to look into if I have kids. Was this a self-imposed decision by your parents or were you forced back to public school? Is there some kind of competency certification for parent-teachers?
(I imagine it probably varies substantially by state but would appreciate any general info)
It was a self-imposed decision after we noticed I had gotten 2 years ahead in math but 1 year behind in English and history. I don't know much about certification other than it depends on the state. I remember still having to go to school a couple days to take the state tests. My mom did happen to be a certified English (as a second language) teacher working at a public school, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't necessary.
She pretty much just gave me a math textbook and told me to do a chapter every day. When it ran out, we got a new one. (We later found out the chapters were intended to take a week.) I was supposed to be self-studying science off wikipedia as well, but I wasn't satisfied with how that turned out. I didn't know what questions to ask, so I think a textbook would have been better. She'd also occasionally suggest I write an essay, but I never did.
My experience with regard to education via textbooks, is that if you actually want to understand the material, the textbook is usually a better teacher, but if you want to pass the tests, a teacher is infinitely more "efficient". If you're reasonably intelligent, you can do the homework and pass the tests based solely on in-class lectures without ever even opening the assigned textbook, but you're really doing yourself a disservice. If I had to choose exclusively textbook learning for my kid, or exclusively in-person lectures, I would expect the textbook to produce better results.
In California when we home unschooled our kids it was effectively unregulated. You signed some forms making your home a school, were supposed to keep some records that nobody ever asked you for. That was more than ten years ago; I don't know the situation at present.
Parents don't have to know everything covered in high school, both because you don't have to learn all those things — the HS curriculum is a mostly a random selection from a much larger set of things that are worth learning for some people, useless for others — and because you can learn things from books and online.
In strictly utilitarian term the assumption you are making is that the likelihood of the parents making good choices for their children is on the same order of magnitude as the state making good choices for the child and so the diversification here is good.
The heuristic of let families decide what is best for their children is based on the assumption that parents are far, far, more likely to make good decisions in the best interest of their child than is the state. I think reality supports that assumption. Whatever examples of bad parenting you can bring up, there will be 10+ times more of bad state-ing.
There is still the mechanism of the state overriding the parents though even in places that allow home schooling. Its called child services in the US. As an institution it is probably fine, but society should demand a huge burden of proof on the state anytime they propose such an intervention. It should not just be the default position.
The parents are forced to give up their kids to school. In my country (Germany). Admittedly, most parents are most of the time very happy for this "free day-care" + a chance the kid might learn sth.. Then again, if we want to fly to my wife's family, on the other side of the planet, for a month, but school-vacations are only 2 weeks ... you are in trouble deep and at the mercy of a system not eager to be merciful. (On the last two days before vacation, you need to come in person to school to excuse a sick kid - because else parents might just take their kid a day early for vacation. 'Inconceivable'. I assume, all are aware how much learning is happening last day of school.)
> he parents are forced to give up their kids to school. In my country (Germany).
The US is comparitvely liberal about things like homeschooling -- just not enough to please Scott.
Well, Scott did not write "in the US". Home-schooling is not a crime in (most of?) the US, but school is compulsory in many countries - and even in the USofA the state-school system tends to strongly "nudge" parents to sent their kids into far-from-perfect (often miserable) state-schools (Scott knows that even many private schools are far from perfect - he taught English to kids in Japan). Still, in all those countries most people claim the suffering of kids is something to accept or even cherish for some "greater good". Utilitarianism in extremo.
I'm guessing you don't know much about homeschooling. Also, seems like you are not taking into consideration the harm school does. Is it unthinkable to you that it does harm? I am absolutely positive it harmed me. And I had an easier time of it than a lot of gifted people I've met.
I wouldn't say school harmed me. I went to what was probably the best private school in Illinois, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us spent most of our time in school being bored. We thought we could do better for our kids.
That isn't the choice. It ought not to be a choice whether or not to educate your children, but how they are educated ought to be a choice of the family. One option can be public schooling.
Isn't this the world we already live in? You can choose public school, homeschool, or private school. Help me out, I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
I honestly don't know about what one must do for educating one's children. I assumed if you didn't send your kids to public school then you had to actively opt-out somehow, indicating you were doing something different.
I was responding to "I do not agree that giving kids the choice whether or not to go to school is any better than giving them the choice to run out into traffic, play with sharp objects, or not brush their teeth." The kids don't have the choice, but the parents should.
The top level comment was advocating a change to the status quo
Oh okay, I read it as advocating for the status quo (kids must go to school but it doesn't have to be public school) and against some unspecified change Scott was implying in the post.
Yeah I think OP was confused thinking Scott was suggesting leaving it up to the kids (which is laughably absurd imo) but I’m pretty sure his position is actually just not leaving it up to the state.
give the choice to the parents then. if school were so great, parents would be clamoring for it anyway.
you are giving the parents the choice, not the kids the choice. The heuristic is parents know best, or can be relied on to consider their childs best interest far more than can the state.
I agree that if Scott’s standard is that compulsion of kids to do things they don’t want to do “for the greater good” is bad, a lot baby is going to get swept up with that bath water.
I am also fine with compulsory education, but I think you're treating the opposite of government enforced schooling with 'kids get to decide' instead of with 'parents get to decide' (which may be Scott's view?).
I could be wrong, maybe you think the government ought to make laws about dental care. Missing dental appointments or poor care revealed at them should result in fines or imprisonment, and government inspectors should routinely enter your house to check whether you've locked the sissors away from the kids?
The distinction between “moral rule” and “greater good” seems quite arbitrary here.
One could say that the “moral rule” is that lies are bad, and that free speech is merely a utilitarian justification for allowing lies.
I don’t know if there’s a “moral rule” against removing people from places for 7 hours a day. “Forcible separation” sounds like a bit of a stretch—the connotation of forced separation implies significantly longer separation.
One could have a moral rule that says “don’t knowingly incite mobs to kill Asians”—but view wipe spread dissemination of truth about COVID a necessary measure to advance society.
One could believe that there is a moral obligation to protest through the most visible means—irrespective of effectiveness—but decide not to annoy some people for fear of consequences.
I think you may be rather more charitable here than necessary or perhaps defensible. People largely like in-group causes and dislike out-group causes. Thinking seriously about the pros and cons weakens the sense of innate rightness on our side. Scott we're clearly facing inhuman barbarians here, we don't need any bean-counting to dtermine our rectitude in the face of such evil.
You tangentially reminded me of a really old (2009) Scott essay arguing that "the normal mental algorithms for resolving moral problems use emotivism... aka the yay/boo theory, the belief that moral statements, however official they may sound, are merely personal opinions of preference or dislike" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2LWXsJxKS626QNEA/the-trouble-with-good
When this guy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
Is one your movement’s most recognizable spokesmen, it’s hardly surprising people are repulsed.
I think this kind of sneering without bothering to actually express an argument fails to live up to the standards of discussion we'd like to see here.
It’s the natural consequence of utilitarian thinking and utility functions that that kind of logic prevails. Utilitarianism would logically argue that the homeless village drunk be killed, if he has a lower personal utility than the increase in utility to all the villagers who are not woken by drunken singing when he’s gone.
But a utilitarian who can see more than one move ahead also realizes that legitimizing violence against inconvenient people will not merely result in that one drunk being removed. I've little doubt we would have killed such drunks centuries, or millennia, or millions of years ago. And now we have cultural and biological guardrails preventing us from doing so. A utilitarian who fails to consider those and their meaning is not a very thorough one.
Seriously, how do people still bring this point up every time, when every utilitarian will always just say, that they are willing to consider second order effects and follow societal rules.
And even if something seems good and they can't think of any way the negative consequences could outweigh the positive ones almost every utilitarian still says, if I'm uncertain enough I won't do it in case I just missed some big negative consequence.
It's very hard to prove or disprove that the size of a second order effect is enough to reverse the gain from the first order effect, so "second order effect" amounts to an epicycle that utilitarians can add whenever they want to arbitrarily rule out uncomfortable conclusions.
>And even if something seems good and they can't think of any way the negative consequences could outweigh the positive ones almost every utilitarian still says, if I'm uncertain enough I won't do it in case I just missed some big negative consequence
And that's an even worse arbitrary decision. If you can ignore utilitarian conclusions when you're "uncertain", even though you admittedly see no negative consequence, your actual moral system isn't utilitarianism, it's wherever your uncertainty comes from.
I'd rephrase that to "naive armchair utilitarianism" -- seems straightforward to a more practical utilitarian that killing the homeless village drunk would be bad, cf https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ (ctrl+F "The problem with murder isn’t just that it creates a world in which one extra person is dead")
All moral systems have their own "repugnant conclusions" at the edges, in different ways. Utilitarians have to make sacrifices for avoiding dust specs, deontologists have to tell the truth to murderers, and virtue ethicists have to love Mao for wanting the best though ending up killing people. It's hopeless.
Great point. This seems vastly underrepresented in these kinds of discussions.
I don't think it's hopeless. Tradeoffs obviously exist, and had Y. used a different example of a hardship for n people to relieve a lesser hardship for N people, where N >> n, a nice debate could be had.
But he used torture. He used somebody - not himself - condemned to a lifetime of deliberately inflicted unimaginable suffering so that he - and others - avoid a dust spec in the eyes.
Of all examples he could pick, he picked THAT one.
Well he wanted to make the example as strong as possible, to reach the very edge of an edge case, right. This is what a philosopher would do. And the conclusion is decidedly repugnant. It gives us information, which is maybe something like: our model needs tweaking, e.g. (just the first thought that comes to my mind) let's ask all these people with dust specks whether they would prefer someone to go through torture for them to get rid of the specks; we'll get a majority "no" answer and that solves it. We shouldn't go through with a repugnant conclusion when it's very clearly repugnant for 99% of people reading it.
Exactly. The thought is not "well, now we know we need to torture someone in this case." It's "huh, how is my model so wrong?" (I'd suggest that if your model implies you can sum minor discomforts infinitely until they reach the level of a major suffering, to the point where they are in some sense comparable, then your model is seriously flawed and you need to update it -- badly.)
He did. But his conclusion wasn't "obviously we reached a terrible result, no one should be tortured". Quote:
"Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I think the answer is obvious. How about you?"
And then the same guy wants to nuke server farms for reasons. Surprise.
Ethical systems are simply tools to help us better understand and develop our own feelings of morality. Anyone who says "I'm a utilitarian" or "I'm a deontologist" is lying to themselves. We all use all of these systems as we feel it produces what we decide is the moral outcome (and often, which systems we choose to apply to which situations informs how our - changing! - moral beliefs develop).
Morality always ends (or starts?) in feelings. Well, unless you believe in a moral arbiter which exists entirely outside the universe (which is typically called "god"). Then morality is a matter of objective truth, and it's our job to discover that truth. Suffice it to say that is not my belief.
Can we say this: all the three main ethical systems reduce into consequentialism when you pick them apart. Ask someone why they think virtue ethics is the right one; they'll argue that even though good intentions can lead to bad outcomes sometimes, they usually don't, and therefore, just by holding up human virtues as the most important things, we'll make the society a better place to live. This is a consequentialist argument: make a better place. Likewise deontology: yes, in very specific circumstances it leads to doing bad things, but generally it gives a very strong and rigid scaffolding that keeps people from doing the worst things most of the time, therefore leading to a safer and happier society. Religious deontology: this is what God wants, we should do what He wants because He has absolute power over us (and/or we love him) so it's really best for our outcomes if we do so. Again the reasons are totally consequentialist: safer and happier society; best for our outcomes. I can't make up any justification for virtue ethics or deontology that are clearly not consequentialist. The latter seems like the... one ring to rule them all.
No, because there are people who value certain things beyond their material consequences. Some people believe that doing the right thing is its own reward. Some people believe that following the moral structure of their god / religion is a religiously "good" thing that they owe their creator. Unless you broaden consequentialism to include all things, such as, "it makes me feel better, and thus feeling better is a consequence of my action" or somesuch. At that point, I start to feel like consequentialism is "obviously correct / reflective of ethical systems but at that level, not a very useful tool."
I don't see what's so repugnant about telling the murderer at the door the truth (about the fact that I refuse to give him any information).
Really I don't even need to go to that, there's no deontological principle that prevents me from just shutting the door on him without saying anything.
*Kantians* have to tell the truth to murderers. There are many kinds of deontology; you can fine-tune your system to get as closely in tune with common intuitions, which is its main advantage. And sure, *if you assume* that Mao was motivated entirely by good intentions, then if you're a viture ethicist you'd have to say he was in some sense a good person (though even then while you might credit him with the virtues of courage and justice, you'd definitely have to deny him wisdom and temperance). This doesn't seem like much of a bullet to bite.
I think you're making a false equivalence. Utilitarianism really is uniquely (and unapologetically) repugnant.
After ignorantly fumbling around this topic here for a while, and reading other peoples answers, including the host's old FAQ he linked below, I realized that pure deontology is insane and all non-pure "deontology" (and "virtue ethics"), which are defendable in polite society (meaning they don't imply that some things must be done just because a deity said so and that's good enough even if it leads to horrible outcomes), converge into consequentialism. We celebrate good virtues and allow/forbid certain acts because these have generally good/bad consequences and that's what we actually care about. Therefore, nice people are all consequentialists deep down, even if they express virtue ethics/deontological sentiments every now and then. Only a crazed fundamentalist celebrates clearly bad-consequence things because God said so, or you know, who was that guy who got himself killed because he couldn't escape through a legume field for it would have lowered his virtue (sorry, I can't remember and I don't know another example of a true virtue ethicist). The latter are pure deontologists and pure virtue ethicists who regard consequences as unimportant. Did I get something wrong?
However, if you start doing *math* to find the best consequences or calculate the utility, this must be hard, it's easy to forget to add important things to your model or give wrong weights to variables, etc. Of course it leads to repugnant conclusions, regularly. I'd trust such calculations in very simple cases, e.g. when calculating, which action saves more children from measles, but not so much in complicated cases where the utility reduction caused by dust specks is compared to that of torture.
Editing to add: but of course you have to calculate these things, for how else will the AGI know what we actually value. This is a horrifying problem, just thinking about how a machine would solve the dust specks vs torture problem if we haven't done it first makes me uneasy.
"Did I get something wrong?"
I think you're using "utilitarian" and "consequentialist" interchangably, for one thing (as are, it seems, most people). Consequentialism is broad with many forms (of which utilitarianism is just one), much like deontology has many forms (Kantianism, rights-based theories, divine-command theories, contractualist theories) as does virtue ethics (many choices of possible virtues to accept or reject). It's utilitarianism that is often regugnant because it literally ignores all values except base utility (pleasure or desire). Other forms of consequentialism can accept all kinds of values to maximise (e.g. rights, equality, justice, promise-keeping) and may not have any such regugnancy.
The other issue is implying that deontological theories ignore consequences. Some do, but many take account of consequences, just not *only* consequences. (I'm not sure, though, if it makes sense for virtue ethicists to weigh consequences). So yes, you could get a consequentialist form of, say, a rights-based theory that is very similar to the deontological form. But it would still have important differences: the consequentialist rights-theory would tell you to infringe rights if that would minimise rights-infringements overall. So, it would say it's right to torture soneone if that would stop several other people from being tortured. Or that the true pro-freedom-of-speech position is to outlaw political movements (nazism, communism) that would infringe speech if they took power. Which are similar problems to utilitarianism though not as horrifying. The deontologocal theory would say never do those things no matter what good may come of it, because it's the *act* that has the moral significance.
As for AGI, it seems to me we would be much better off trying to align it with strict deontological values (e.g. Asimov laws, or just criminal laws and constitutional rights in general). The potential for disaster seems vastly lower, unless I'm missing something.
> realized that pure deontology is insane
If you include absolutism and divine command theory into your deontology, it's crazy, but it is not pure.
When I was in my 20s, I wrote a consequentialist FAQ. I'm linking it here even though it's embarrassing in the same way everything one writes as a young person is embarrassing. You want section 6. https://web.archive.org/web/20140220063523/http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html .
I expanded on some of these questions more recently in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
I distinguish between a) are utilitarians more likely to say what Yudkowsky said about the torture v. dust specks case, as a matter of fact, and b) do only utilitarians have moral beliefs that taken together in fact imply dust specks is worse, whether or not they are prepared to recognize that. A is true, almost certainly, but B is probably false.
The assumptions needed to generate the offensive/paradoxical conclusion are *far* weaker than full-blown utilitarianism, and they don't rely on the idea that it is ever okay to cause, rather than fail to prevent, great harm.
Suppose you have an absolutely forced choice between 1) preventing 1 person from being tortured for 50 years or 2) preventing a million people being tortured for 50 years very, very slightly less painfully. Obviously, you should prevent 2: Your not doing evil to bring a good about (except the unavoidable evil of not preventing at least one person being tortured, since you can only do 1 OR 2.) And a very slight decrease in how bad the torture is for the number of victims is clearly much less important multiplying the number of victims by 1 million. But if you concede that you should prevent 2) over 1, you will also concede that you should 3) prevent trillions of people being tortured very slightly less intensely than the people in 2, over preventing 2. Keep on with this pattern of massively increasing the number of people hurt, while making an incredibly small reduction in the level of harm per person. It seems like each time, you should prevent the very slightly smaller harm to vastly more people, over the very slightly bigger harm to vastly less people. Since you can keep reducing harms by tiny fractions forever, eventually you will end up arriving at a trivial harm to an unimaginably large number of people from 50 years of torture to one person, by a series of steps where at every point, you agree that it is more important to prevent the next-in-series trivially smaller harm to vastly more people, than the previous-in-series trivially larger harm to vastly less people.
To reject this argument you have to reject either
-that some things are more worth preventing than others (in which case you are rejecting the "torture is worse than dust specks" conclusion just as much as Eliezer, you just don't think dust specks is better either)
-that it is always more important to prevent a trivially smaller* harm to a vastly larger number of people than to prevent a trivially larger harm to vastly less people.
-That if it's there's a chain where it's more important to prevent B than A, and more important to prevent C than B and more important....to prevent Z than Y, then it's also more important to prevent the Z than A. (In technical terms, this is something like "more important to prevent than is transitive").
Some hyper-consistent academic philosophers might indeed reject one of those 3 claims (I know of some who reject the 3rd). But even put together they are a vastly weaker claim than utilitarianism (they don't for example entail that it is sometimes ok to inflict harm in order to prevent a greater harm, since they are just about forced choices between two preventing acts that aren't harmings.) I'd guess most people who understand them implicitly accept them, except in cases like the current one where their weird consequences have been pointed out.
It may indeed reveal something bad/dangerous/discrediting about utilitarians as people, that they are disproportionately prepared to say 'although that conclusions seems horrendous, the argument for it is so strong that I accept it". But that's a separate matter from whether the case raises intellectual trouble for people who aren't utilitarians, or indeed, whether the failure of non-utilitarians to see that the case raises trouble for them reveals something bad about non-utilitarians.
*The difference can be arbitrarily small: say well under a second more/less of torture.
I reject this reasoning thusly: at some reduction point, "torture" becomes "discomfort", and at that point there's no number of people subjected to discomfort that outweigh one person being skinned alive.
If the gaps I'm suffering are tiny each time, it's implausible that there is any adjacent pair in the series where the harm to a much larger number fails to be worse. As you go through the series and make individual worse-than judgments, you are never comparing a really, really bad harm to one person to a trivial one to others. So you can't explain why any of the individual judgments that the harm to the larger number is worse is wrong by saying that no amount of minor suffering can outweigh super-heavy suffering; the suffering of the individuals in the two groups is nearly identical every single time. It's only when you put all the different individual judgments together that you get "discomfort for many outweighs torture for a few". But that's the conclusion of the argument, not a principle violates by any of the individual judgments about pairs in the series that the argument is using as premises.
Of course, you can just say that torture for 1 *is* worse than discomfort for many so the argument goes wrong somewhere. And that very well may be right. But then you have to deny either that some things are worse than others (non-starter) or deny one incredibly intuitive judgment about the pairs in such a series, none of which judgments involve comparing suffering of a torture level to mild discomfort (seems very implausible) or you have to deny the transitivity of "worse than" (which it's hard to even make sense of).
It's a really, really nasty problem, that arises from deep tensions in our moral beliefs. It's not just a result of people thinking utilitarianism sounds good when they first hear about it and then being stupidly dogmatic when confronted with an obvious counterexample.
I understand and agree in principle, but find it hard to apply to this specific case. It's really hard to think of a way to consistently increase discomfort by tiny amounts. Human perception of pain and suffering is highly nonlinear and unstable. Damage is obviously discontinuous: the bone holds, or cracks. Pain perception is also highly context-dependent. All of this makes it a terrible example to hang an incremental philosophical argument on.
You can also deny a linear relationship between harm and moral wrongness.
The answer is the same as the heap paradox. If you slightly reduce the size of a heap, you'll still call it a heap, right? So you can reduce it to nothing. And clearly you can't transition from "is a heap" to "isn't a heap' just because it got smaller by a tiny amount.
My definition of a heap is fuzzy enough that there's a borderline size where if you ask me if it's a heap, I'll say "it's sort of heapish" and my estimation of how heapish it is will gradually go up or down as you vary from that size.. By the time you get down to one grain, I'll always say "no" even though there has been no sudden change where I went from "is a heap" to "isn't a heap".
The same applies to reducing the intensity and increasing the number. I'll gradually get less and less confident that it's a bad thing.
Actually, your argument is a version of the repugnant conclusion, and implies that you endorse the repugnant conclusion--do you?
Well the sorites (the heap thing) is also arguably an unsolved paradox. People get annoyed when you say that because actually worrying about the sorites seems silly. But amongst people who actually study it there is no single consensus solution. (Maybe supervaluationism is close.) And the "solutions" on offer tend to have unpleasant features like "entails that actually there is an exact nu
number no. of grains that make a heap" or "entails that All Fs are Gs can be false even when there are Fs and none of them are a counterexample."
So even if the argument is just a sorites that wouldn't tell us that it's easy to identify where it goes wrong. (Though it would tell us it goes wrong somewhere, since sorites arguments are bad, even though it's hard to say why.)
I don't think it *is* a sorites though. In a classic sorites, the reason you appear allowed to move a property-say being not a heap- from the n-1th member of the series to the nth is that a) the change is too small to plausibly make a difference as to whether the object has the property and b) (more persuasive in my view), of your not allowed to make the move each time, there has to be an exact cut-off point for when things change from having the property to not having it and that's implausible. But in the series I gave, one reason why it seems OK to keep saying the next thing is worse than the previous isn't that some change is too small to make a difference in whether something has a property. And it's not that if we chose some point to say "that's where the bigger numbers cease to count" that point would look arbitrary". It's that at each step, it seems crystal clear that the n-th event is worse than the previous.
In comparison, the following is probably bad-for-whatever reason the sorites is bad, I think: "So-and-so says they'd save many more people from a smaller harm rather than less people from a larger harm, when the gap in harms is small, but not when it is big, this must be wrong, because it implies there's an exact size of the gap in harms where things switch over". But that ISN'T the argument I made.
I admit I am not certain about it not being a sorites: this stuff is really hard to think through. But it's not a sorites just because it involves moving a property up a continua in small steps. That is true of some famous arguments, like ones for the Repugnant Conclusion that, whether they work or not, no one thinks are soritical.
As for whether I accept the Repugnant Conclusion itself: not sure. It is highly counterintuitive, but very strong arguments can be given for it. I don't know whether you should believe the conclusion of the argument I gave here either, it does seem pretty repellent. My point is just that the difficulties here don't stem from utilitarianism, and that you probably have to say *something* that seems wrong.
Seems strawmannish to me, a utilitarian can argue that the world would in some sense be a better place without the drunk, without advocating for his death (because among other things it weakens useful norms against killing and discarding our humanity that should not be done lightly)
And if the drunk is molesting kids then yeah maybe he should be killed, so in this case the "populist moral intuition" may well align with the utilitarian view
If a drunk ran around blaring a bullhorn at midnight, such that nobody could sleep, there was no government to arrest/try him, and he refused to stop even when threatened with guns; yes, shoot him.
Tbh, that was the first thing from Yudkowsky that I happened to chance upon, and it made me entirely dismiss him for a couple of years.
I have a visceral reaction to casual propositions of torture and often forget this is not how others feel.
My argument is simple: don't. Don't torture people. Don't propose torturing people. Don't make torture a part of some philosophical discussion about tradeoffs.
But why not? There are actual, real world involves tradeoffs which approximate "torture" in various ways. The thought experiment is a device for understanding how our moral intuitions work in the extreme which (arguably) helps us contend with them better in reality. If you just taboo discussing things because you are triggered by them who is this helping? Do you think that the thought experiment somehow makes it more likely that torture is actually proposed in reality and carried out or...?
"Do you think that the thought experiment somehow makes it more likely that torture is actually proposed in reality and carried out"
Yes I actually believe that. One of the greatest crimes of W. Bushes' presidency was normalization of the torture discourse. For all his flaws, John McCain had an admirable moral clarity about this issue.
One can make philosophical points without proposing drilling holes into kneecaps.
But philosophical thought experiments including torture are not unique to utilitarians, all flavors of philosophers use them where necessary.
I understand you well, I also find it hard to endure such visuals (too many mirror neurons or whatnot). It even makes it more difficult to follow the reasoning of an argument if I spend my energy on trying not to imagine too well.
But Yudkowsky was trying to find a way to teach the AGI, an alien mind that has no feelings whatsoever about torture. You can't care about your own sensitivity in such a situation, it's way too bad if the machine gets some wrong idea.
If it really is a utilitarian argument, it's an odd one in that it doesn't actually need to mention torture. A feature, or bug. of utilitarianism is that intentions don't matter. So the pain of the torture could be the result of a chronic illness, instead. What's more, phrasing it as torture, as something intentional rather than something natural, encourages people to choose the wrong conclusion. Most people aren't utilitarians, and do care about intention, so if you ask them which is morally worse out of an intentional act, and an unintentional occurrence, they are likely to choose the intentional act.
Yep, it’s “insane” (sociopathic / ridiculous / wrong) not to consider intent. Spherical-cow-ish. Intent is key to everyday functioning, and criminal law, and etc. It matters a huge deal if I lose control of my vehicle and hit a pedestrian vs intentionally driving into one.
I feel silly even typing this.
Well, that comment obviously wasn't kind. But I'd say it was both true and necessary: True, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of people really do find Yudkowsky's conclusion to be utterly disgusting. Necessary, because Rationalists need to understand that most people are disgusted by it, and even more important, to understand *why* most people are disgusted by it. (And no, condescendingly writing off the average person's disgust as irrational doesn't count as understanding it.)
I think to pass the bar of "true and necessary" you need to actually include some argument and justification. A one-sentence pot shot about a controversial topic doesn't make the conversation better even if in the end you're correct.
I agree, and responded with one.
Next time, start with one. We don't want the comment section turning into a series of links with no commentary.
Will do.
Yeah, that argument is what made me realize that I wasn't actually a utilitarian (except in the sense that I have a utility function, just like most non-insane people, even if they've too stupid to realize it).
Do you believe that consistently? There are real world parallels to that argument, for example building a road that lets everyone have a nicer commute, but 1 in 1000 people will die horribly at a car crash at a young age. Most people out there choose in favor of building the road.
<statistical gallows humor>
Or even 12 in 1000...
( 42,939 United States vehicular accident deaths in 2021 / 3,464,231 total deaths)
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db456.htm , respectively
</statistical gallows humor>
I WOULD build roads despite increases in car crashes. I would NOT horribly torture someone to prevent dust specks in eyes. If utilitarianism decrees that consistency requires I do either both or neither, then a pox on utilitarianism.
I think regardless of moral system, consistency requires an attempt to describe the boundary between the space of acceptable tradeoffs and unacceptable. That is, what is (or what are the characteristics of) the most emotionally/intuitively repugnant tradeoff that you would still endorse, and similarly for the most appealing tradeoff that you still think we should reject? Having identified that point, is there anything that inherently distinguishes it from any other boundary you could have drawn, or is it an equilibrium point reached by influences pulling you in different directions over the course of life? Does every wrong thing have something in common with the dust-speck scenario that isn't shared with the road-crash scenario?
If we don't at least attempt to deal with those things, then we're in the realm of "I know it when I see it", which is a surrender or indifference to inconsistency, not a resolution of it.
I think this is just a fundamental personality difference here.
When I read something like that, I'm really fascinated by the idea that the reasoning I use in most cases seems to support something I wouldn't agree with. Either something is wrong with my usual reasoning, or I have to change my mind on a big issue, or there's some missing philosophical link I just can't grasp. It gives me the same kind of "that's funny" itch that I imagine scientists get when they find some anomalous data that quantum physics or relativity doesn't quite explain which might point the way to a deeper theory.
But other people seem to view it as "Ha ha, high-status person talked about a thing that makes him easy to dunk on!"
I guess I’m the “other people”…
But it doesn’t make me want to “dunk on” a “high-status person” (the fact that this fool is somehow can be described like this is in itself a bizarre thing).
It makes my blood boil. This armchair pontificator proposes that someone else (not high-status, I guess), tortures some other low-status person for 50 years. And thinks this is so obviously good and rational that anyone who disagrees is a moron.
Note how he doesn’t volunteer.
Let me go one step further and make it really visceral.
He is proposing that you torture your child for 50 years so that he and everyone else avoids a spec of dust in their eyes.
How about no one gets tortured? Please?
Imagine that there is some medical treatment that can make it so you never get a dust speck in your eye again. If it was free, would you be willing to drive to the doctor's office to get it? If so, recall that there is a nonzero chance that you will be injured in a car accident on the way to the office, and a nonzero chance the injury will cause you severe chronic pain for the rest of your life.
Now imagine that the treatment is rolled out worldwide. Most people get the treatment. Most are fine, but one person does get into a freak accident and spends the rest of their life in pain.
You could make a number of arguments that the scenario I outlined is not analogous to torture vs dust specks. Maybe it's because everyone chose to drive freely or something like that. But I don't think you could argue that it would be a bad thing such a treatment was invented at all, since it tempted one person to a terrible fate. I'm not saying you should agree with Yudkowsky, I am saying that dismissing his argument as completely ridiculous doesn't make sense and doesn't reflect how humans think about risk in real life. Most people are willing to accept a tiny chance of death or something like torture to avoid a certainty of dust specks.
There's a moral and practical gulf between "chance injury in an accident" and "deliberately causing excruciating pain and disfigurement for 50 years with no hope of relief". On simple practical level, I challenge anyone to come up with an untreatable chronic pain that rises to the level of, just an example, slicing skin off and salting the area (or what do you think "torture" means?!).
His argument is not ridiculous, it's horrifying. I don't know any human in real life who considers being tortured for 50 years as any part of a risk they need to account for.
Vaccines. Full stop. Guillain-Barré syndrome is horrific and can kill you. Someone (say, a child) who is compelled to get vaccinated might well become unable to walk and experience chronic pain for the rest of their life. And yet...the tradeoff certainly seems worth it.
A more productive framing: Suppose a vaccine has a 1-in-1,000,000 chance of causing Guillain-Barré syndrome, has zero other side effects, and is 100% effective at preventing both the onset and spread of a disease. How banal of a disease would justify mandating this vaccine in children? Would your answer change if the world population was 100,000 people? One billion? Ten billion? One trillion?
This is an interesting real-world tradeoff. I'm glad I don't have to actually make this decision.
But I still find the deliberate torture to be different, on a visceral level. I don't suffer from chronic pain, but certainly had my share of excruciatingly painful things happen. In no way I would say that they were equivalent to being tied to a chair having a blowtorch boiling my eye out. An emotional abuse of someone having the power to inflict arbitrarily painful suffering on you for no reason, while laughing and sneering, is quite different from suffering from a health condition.
The diseases that vaccines prevent can typically cause suffering on a similar order of magnitude per individual as Guillain-Barre, so this is not an example in favor of torture in the thought experiment, and it explains why we do indeed vaccinate; what supports favoring dust specks for the many is that we wouldn't vaccinate the whole hypothetically colonized universe against a one-time one-second ocular discomfort if it was presumed to cause decades-long persistent intense pain in a single individual.
There have historically been maniacs who kidnap and torture people for years before they are caught. That means there is a tiny chance that it might happen to someone. However, we generally do not plan our lives around the remote possibility that a maniac might kidnap and torture us. If I need to go to the corner store to pick up some ice, I am probably slightly increasing the odds that a passing maniac might kidnap me. But the odds are so unlikely I consider it worth the risk to deal with a trivial inconvenience like being out of ice.
That being said, if you want to argue that dust specks are so small as to be incomparable to torture, I think Yudkowsky addresses that. He suggests the same argument, but replace dust specks with some pain the is larger than dust specks, but smaller than torture, that you do consider comparable.
That's the usual reaction when detecting an anomaly within a paradigm until they pile up so much that it causes a crisis. After reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it's hard to not see things that way
Ok, but have you identified something wrong with your reasoning, or changed your mind on a big issue, or found a missing philosophical link? It feels like you're just shrugging and saying "Huh, looks like I support moral horrors. Oh well." If that doesn't actually make you *change your mind*, it sure looks like you're starting with your conclusion of utilitarianism and just refusing to consider evidence against it. The point is not dunking on a high-status individual, it's a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism.
"Either something is wrong with my usual reasoning, or I have to change my mind on a big issue, or there's some missing philosophical link I just can't grasp."
But are you (or Rationalists in general) actually doing one of those three things? I think people would be a lot less antagonistic if Rationalists used the thought experiment to say "hmm, this obviously can't be right, I should try to figure out exactly where this line of reasoning went wrong." But instead, a lot of Rationalists seem to be unironically agreeing with the conclusion, however begrudgingly. That's the part people are getting upset about.
Also, it's not that novel of an idea. It's basically just an inverted version of Nozick's utility monster, which was intended as an argument against utilitarianism. It's also the premise of a famous sci-fi novel, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." And an even more famous novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," had a similar thought experiment all the way back in 1880, when the nihilist Ivan asked his pious brother Alyosha if he would accept a world of perfect peace and harmony at the cost of torturing one child to death.
I think the problem with that reasoning is that utilitarians assume that the equation that best represents morality is something as simple as 'Value = x - y", take some arbitrary numbers, get results that contradict common sense, and claim that 'people are just repulsed by math' instead of reconsidering the model they began with. If your goal is to formalize moral intuition, you should test various frameworks for your calculations and find out which one aligns the most with intuitive morality. What if the best equation is 'Value = (x + y + z^1.5 + exp(w))/ log(a + b)' or something even more complicated? Is 'Value' a real number at all or is it an n-dimensional vector? What if torture is 3↑↑↑↑↑3 times worse than a dust speck and therefore 3↑↑↑3 people getting dust specks is a better alternative to torture of a single person? If you stick with the first model you came up with, you will likely end up with 'garbage in, garbage out' situation.
Yes, thank you for that point. It's actually such a naive way of thinking, that a large X can be somehow made equivalent to an N of small x, that I don't even know where to start... Nothing in real life works like this, I can lift 10 kg hundreds of times, 100 kg maybe once, and 1000 kg never. 10^10 linear-range strains cause no damage to a spring at all, but one instant of a strain beyond the breaking point obviously breaks it.
I agree. But its' even worse than that. What if the outputs of "utility for person A" and "utility for person B" are incomparable values (e.g. "blue" and "justice")? There may not be *any* mathematical way to compose or compare utility values *even if we could even theoretically derive such things in the first place* (which is a disputed concept).
Utilitarianism presumes that
1. Utility exists as a measurable, quantifiable, *calculable* value that can be straightforwardly and unambiguously calculated from a situation/event/action.
2. Utility calculated for different situations can be compared
3. Utility calculated for different situations can be *combined* to produce another utility value that makes sense.
-3- (actually 4, numbering is hard). That comparison is *simple* in the sense that it follows a straightforward, no-context-needed (only inputs are utilities), constant (in time and situation-space), and most of all *linear* fashion.
All of those are, as far as I can tell, deeply disputed ideas. But without *any* of them, the entire concept of a tractable moral calculus vanishes.
Note that even some scientific values (such as temperature) fail these conditions--while you can compare (absolute) temperatures and calculate them from situations (or more precisely measure them for non-trivial systems), you cannot combine them in any sane or linear way with the sole exception of taking a difference between absolute temperatures. You can't add temperatures and get a meaningful value that represents anything physical, for example. And the ways that do allow you to do that (ensemble thermodynamics) are neither simple nor linear, and require lots of context and other assumptions.
Exactly. You get the correct version of utilitarianism (without any 3^^3 nonsense) if you relax one of the VNM assumptions, the one that utility can be modeled by real numbers.
The real number version of utilitarianism is still a useful theory in its newtonian envelope for writing reinforcement learning papers, I guess.
So, overall agreed. But, hypothetical-infinitely-sophisticated-utilitarian response, the "linear" assumption for 4 (or 3 part 2) probably does hold well enough for everyday moral concerns, much like Newtonian physics hold for everyday individual walking around, sports, driving, etc.
It's only when you get to massive scales and/or GPS that you have to break out the in-depth probability calculations or General Relativity.
And in the meantime, linearity allows for making the moral calculations we were already doing anyway (see, e.g., sentencing guidelines) explicit.
An assumption about linearity is *usually* appropriate. But we need to be very clear that we're making simplifying assumptions and that we're throwing away lots of complexity.
And the thing that scares me is that we *don't know* when the assumption of linearity holds and when it doesn't, because we don't even have the beginnings of an idea of what the real underlying calculation is...or even if it exists! In physics, we can actually fairly rigorously show and test the limits of these assumptions, because we have access to the underlying reality outside the models. In morality...we can't. Because toy problems don't actually illuminate anything other than the preconceptions of the people making the toy problems.
And sentencing guidelines, in particular, are kinda a bad example of anything but politics. There's no moral calculus going on there, explicit or implicit. Just horse trading and moral posturing.
Yes to all this.
I disagree; the moral calculations going into sentencing guidelines may be *wrong*, but that's not the same as them being *nonexistent*. Just because we're still mostly eyeballing it doesn't mean there's nothing to see once the microscopes come out.
Punishment in general is a fairly central example of where moral calculations occur: people believe it has moral weight, but they disagree about what that weight is.
Part of the issue, I think, is that any shared morality simple enough to be predictable can, by the same token, be faked - and in a large enough population, *will* be faked by someone who does not have your best interests at heart. The human alignment problem, as it were.
You can analyze them with "moral calculus", but *that's entirely post hoc*, and as such reflects only the post-hoc assumptions and inputs. There wasn't any actual calculations done in deriving them. There was only moral posturing and politics. For example, crack cocaine and powder cocaine were treated very differently for a long time, like *orders of magnitude* differently. Despite being fairly similar in overall effects. Why? Politics.
Oregon, for example, has a 2-dimensional grid. Seriousness vs history. But the breakpoints are completely arbitrary and is non numerical. For example, attempts are classified as 2 categories below the full crime on Seriousness. Why? Because that's what the legislature defined. That makes an attempted seriousness 11 (the worst other than non-ranked ones like murder 1) offense reduce from (for equal histories in category A, the worst category) 225-269 months to 66-72 months (3.41x reduction), but for history category I (the least-bad), it reduces the same offense from 120-121 months down to 34-36 months, a 3.52x reduction. So you get a (relative) discount on attempt vs actual for a worse history. Basically, they chose nice-seeming numbers and loosely threw things into bins, with political horsetrading to make the numbers come out looking "normal." That's not moral calculus worth calling such--it's just politics.
Nobody qua nobody does actual moral calculus (like with actual numbers) on anything but toy problems (and yes, all of AI risk is toy problems) where all the values are pulled ex nihilo. Because it's not actually possible to derive any of the values involved *even relatively* from first or even second principles. There is no objective, commonly-accepted way to quantify any of the situations involved.
So people may *rank order* moral things (X is worse than Y but better than Z), but that's not moral calculus. That's just, well, *rank ordering things by whatever criteria, mathematical or not, they feel like*.
> What if torture is 3↑↑↑↑↑3 times worse than a dust speck and therefore 3↑↑↑3 people getting dust specks is a better alternative to torture of a single person? If you stick with the first model you came up with, you will likely end up with 'garbage in, garbage out' situation.
As the dust specks post says, the argument allows you to have very different cutoffs, but it is making the fundamental point that there's a tradeoff *somewhere*. Even for something as minor as stopping dust specks in people's eyes.
Seeing people, even in the ACX comments, display reasoning that starts and effectively ends at 'Can't rationalists SEE that TORTURE is HORRIFICALLY BAD???' (when they can, almost everyone does, and recognising that is in fact key to the thought experiment being interesting) makes me incredibly depressed about humanity's reasoning capabilities.
On a slightly more constructive note, people around here often wax about the importance of IQ for making society more effectively intelligent, but I think that's wrongheaded because in practice IQ is almost never the limiting factor on people's ability to be basically rational, and this thread is an excellent case study in that; anyone with an IQ >75 is capable of grasping the simple logic of the issue, but even an arbitrarily high IQ is no defense against the erroneous *ways of thinking* which cause vast swathes of the population to stop thinking logically the moment they encounter an emotive concept.
FWIW, as someone else has already pointed out, the answer to the question isn't actually obvious because the ratio of real-terms suffering could be comparably vast to the number of people suffering mild inconvenience, but most objecting reasoning clearly breaks down before that point.
The answer is obvious. Don't torture people. Don't casually equate minor inconveniences to having your toes smashed with a hammer. Don't pretend that 100 rabbits somehow make up an elephant.
No, I don't care what IQ anyone has, and I don't care about thinking logically about torture, we had President Bush and Attorney Yoo do this for us, they were really good at it. What was it, "if not severe organ damage, then not torture", really, who needs anesthetics for a root canal, Yoo said it was ok.
I don't need to be "basically rational" about torture, I have my engineering job that takes a lot of rationality to do. I can make a simple moral judgement, and I do: Don't. Torture. People. Don't invent clever arguments for when sometimes it's a preferred action. And if you can't not do this, volunteer yourself for the privilege.
Man I just don’t get the thing about school.
What don't you get? In Michael Malice's phrasing (which I endorse wholeheartedly), they're "literal prisons for children and the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives."
"...the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives."
Until they have children. Not defending institutions here, but the nature of the target population probably plays some role.
Then again, concentrating large numbers of low social skill individuals might be expected to go poorly, which might be an argument for not doing that thing if you can avoid it.
School is exactly the kind of controlled environment with low-capability individuals you want kids encountering violence, if only a little bit.
I would still strongly choose homeschooling / unschooling, and just enroll them in martial arts from a young age.
I'd bet pretty heavily they're going to get much more effective tools for defusing and/or dealing with violence competently from the martial arts training than from public school, too.
The best defence against bullying isn't martial arts, it's social skills.
The best way to avoid bullying is not to karate-chop your bully, but to have a dozen good friends that will stand up for you.
What's "a little bit", out of interest? Head down the loo while it's flushed? Broken nose? Concussion?
Few events. The violence itself is instructive, and as long as it doesn't cause permanent damage, one or two incidents are good for kids. More experience is good.
I think this is wrong, and I didn’t read a lot of studies, but every study I read show it is actually quite destructive.
Every violence can cause permanent damage in some way. And what violence teach you, is often submission or hatred.
If more experience with violence is good, and if it's justified to force children to attend school so that they can get this valuable experience, then surely it's also good for adults. I propose we do a national survey to find all adults who never experienced violence in school (and thus missed out an important lesson), and send the police to beat them up. Not hard enough to cause permanent damage but hard enough to be instructive.
As I see it, there is a small minority of aspies who do not have the social skills necessary to handle school, while also being academically gifted enough (and having dedicated enough parents) to succeed in many aspects of life without school. These individuals might be better off without school, but then they project what might be good for them onto everyone else.
I expect libertarians would have a nice answer to that: sure, feel free to send *your* kids to school if you think it's good for them, and let me decide what I want for mine.
Do libertarians think their kids are their property? If not, what does this have to do with libertarianism?
I don't believe they do, but why would the general laissez-faire attitude be limited to property? Anyway, I'm not a libertarian myself (a sympathizer, maybe) so I'll let them speak for themselves.
I classify myself as conservative, rather than libertarian, but I believe they would think their kids are their *responsibility*, rather than their property. If I feel I can fulfill my responsibilities better without public school, then I should have the freedom to do that.
Ah, but if the school feels they can fulfill their responsibility better than the parents?
Don't get me wrong, I think parents should generally have control over their kids' decisions to a much greater extent than outsiders such as the government. But this is not a deep philosophical principle, it's a presumption based on factors such as the typical strength of emotional ties between parents and children, but as a presumption it can be overridden when circumstances require it. And it seems to me that (say) requiring education, but letting parents decide whether that education is public or private or homeschooling, is a reasonable compromise between parental control and society's interest in educating people.
>Ah, but if the school feels they can fulfill their responsibility better than the parents?
institutions aren't people and are not entitled to "moral rights"
One can't hide behind a general principle of laissez-faire libertarianism so long as one accepts there are at least some things society shouldn't allow people to do to their kids. We do generally accept this, because kids are also people and deserve at least the same help and protection society extends to any other people. Once we do accept that, however, the conversation is no longer about the general principle, but about whether this thing in particular belongs in that set.
It's not a "principle" so much as a heuristic and a preference. In this particular case, I think it is mine, too (in case you were going to accuse me of hiding behind hypothetical libertarians). Without thinking on it too hard, I am fine with the society setting some reasonable standards for homeschooling or whatever else people might prefer to public schools. Regarding both the current well-being of the kids and the knowledge they are expected to acquire.
I had the skills necessary to handle school, but I still hated it throughout. I suppose it was useful to learn what peer interactions can often be like, but a couple of years would have sufficed.
This is about *much* more than social skills - if your kid is at all gifted or talented, public school is an *agonizingly* slow crawl over broken glass to learn anything. And that's risky, because A) they're never going to learn good study habits or how to apply themselves, because the subject matter and talent level is so much lower than where they are, and B) they will likely be extremely bored, and can either get disruptive, check out of academics entirely, or do other things that put them on a bad path.
This is just my individual opinion, but if your kid is smart, you should literally aim to have them completely through HS and entering undergrad by 15-16, because that's about the appropriate learning level for a smart 15-16 year old. Even *undergrad* is a huge waste of time with basically zero learning for at least half of it when you consider how many gen-eds they force you to take!
There are things like tracking and acceleration which help a lot with that. For the vast majority of kids who are "at all gifted or talented", that's sufficient to challenge them.
The same "tracking" that's the bugbear of educators everywhere, and that's being systematically eliminated in just about every public school system across the country due to "disparate impact?"
I wish Tracing Woodgrains were in here, they're a SME in this, but it's my understanding tracking has been under a decades-long sustained assault bent on eliminating it everywhere. Even the handful of magnet schools left in NYC are at risk.
"The same "tracking" that's the bugbear of educators everywhere, and that's being systematically eliminated in just about every public school system across the country "
"Everywhere", or "the country"? Tracking is taken for granted in many non US countries.
Oh yeah, sorry for using "everywhere" instead of "across the USA" or something like that - sometimes I forget that Scott has a decent international audience.
> There are things like tracking and acceleration
Definitely not enough of them.
Well, it depends on the country and the city you are living it, so I can't talk for everyone. But to give a personal example: there is a school for gifted kids in the city where I live, so I checked the conditions and my daughter easily passes all of them. So we applied to the school. However, it turned out that there were 200 kids who applied to the school and passed the conditions that year, but the school only has the capacity to admit 40 of them each year. Too bad, my daughter didn't get to the selected 40.
So we decided to try another school. That one was not for gifted children in general, but for mathematically talented. Okay, my daughter can do that, too, so we applied. Again, the same story, about 200 kids passed the test, they could only take 40, my daughter didn't get to the selection.
So now she attends a school for normal kids. We live in one of the better parts of the city, so the school is way above average in quality of education; all her classmates are generally smart. But despite that, she is bored at many subjects; for example in math she essentially hasn't learned anything new during the first 2 1/2 years, because she already knew all of that when she was 5.
Thus my experience is that on one hand, the opportunities for gifted kids *exist*, but on the other hand, realistically maybe 1 in 10 gifted kids gets the opportunity to *actually use* them; there is simply not enough capacity.
And that's me, living in the better part of the city where the opportunities are concentrated. My sister lives in a worse part of the city, her son is super talented at math and all technical things, but there are no opportunities for that nearby, and even the average education is hard to get. (This year they got a new teacher; it is some crazy old lady who basically doesn't teach at all. There are simply not enough people willing to teach, so the schools accept almost anyone.)
Speaking as somebody who was so bored in public school that I literally became a delinquent, and then was further reinforced because the "bad kids' school" actually gave you all your work for the week on Monday at 8am, so you could literally finish the whole week of pablum and nonsense in a couple of hours and then flirt and make trouble with the other delinquent kids for all the rest of the week, I would recommend home-schooling or unschooling where your kids can set their own pace.
School is CRUSHINGLY boring if you're actually smart. There's no better way to bitterly extinguish the love of learning and academics than forcing somebody smart into public school, they're literally prison-factories built to grind that joy out of you. I mean, I'm sure you've heard us all bitch about public schools in this comment section multiple times.
Online home school curriculums are cheap. Grad students are cheap. There has to be a better way.
I think that you vastly overestimate the degree of "academic giftedness", or whatever, that is required of either child or parent for homeschooling to work. Normal people can pull it off, usually without too much effort. I've seen it happen.
From what I have seen, it usually requires a stay-at-home mom, so "not too much effort" is actually one person working full-time.
But if that's what you wanted to do anyway, then yes... you simply buy the textbooks, read them with your kids (1 hour of learning at home is about as efficient as an entire day at school), and network with other homeschooling families so you can share advice about textbooks, buy and sell used textbooks, and maybe organize some group learning and field trips.
Really only one person working half time at the margin, I think - they were going to be working half time as a homemaker/caregiver even if they did send the kids to school and even if they were also working a full-time job outside the home.
But yes, it's mostly contingent on one parent being willing to stay home with the kids.
"As I see it, there is a small minority of aspies who do not have the social skills necessary to handle school, while also being academically gifted enough (and having dedicated enough parents) to succeed in many aspects of life without school. These individuals might be better off without school, but then they project what might be good for them onto everyone else."
Yes, exactly, with the "and having dedicated enough parents" being by far the most important part.
I'm not rejecting the anti-school argument at all (I happen to think the entire education system should be burned to the ground) but it's annoying that no one seems to be engaging with the central argument for mandatory schooling: equality of opportunity. Everything that people are condemning in schools (bullying, lack of support for gifted kids) would be, and has been historically, the norm without schools. The smart kids with smart parents would be better off (though even now they still have that at-home advantage and ability to learn on their own time, the issue being the waste of time spent at school, not deprivation of learning as such) while the smart kids with stupid, disengaged parents (no interest or value for education, no books in the house or knowledge of where to find learning material) would be immeasurably worse off. This is often being put as weighing the interests of smart kids against those of dumb kids, when it really should be (far more importantly) smart kids with smart parents vs smart kids with dumb parents.
And the same is true for bullying. For kids with good parents, school increases the risk of bullying. For kids with bad parents, who without school would probably send their kids off to the park or street corner every day with innumerable opportunities to be beaten up with no adults around at all, even the worst school outcome (of taking no action at all on bullying, which is obviously not the case at every school) is still no worse than the norm without school (and probably still slightly better due to the mere presence of adults, however incompetent).
I don't imagine this constitutes much of a defence of schools, which are on the whole so bad it's almost a feat to have managed to create a system that works *this* badly. But the same people who create and run these horrible schools would, absent schools, be (along with many others like them and even worse) be "running" their own children's "education" in the same way, just with no oversight or attempted standards at all. The basic argument for schools would be every child getting a somewhat similar method of education and daytime supervision instead of it varying enormously by parental quality. I'd just like to see this argument more clearly addressed.
> Everything that people are condemning in schools (bullying, lack of support for gifted kids) would be, and has been historically, the norm without schools.
School segregates kids by age, and separates them from their relatives and older friends.
If a child is bullied on the street, there are a few options -- avoid that specific street (maybe the bully is less interested in bullying specifically you, and more interested in dominating a specific territory), ask a stronger/older friend or relative for protection, or stay at places where the adults can see you and can intervene. This limits your freedom, of course, but many kids who are bullied at school would gladly pay the price.
Instead, the school demands that the child leave everyone who could protect them, and spend half of the day in the presence of the bully, five days a week. In my opinion, that makes things more intense.
Gifted kids naturally try to discuss complicated topics with older kids or adults. Or they read books when they are older. The school, again, removes this option -- the only adult in the room is the teacher, and the teacher is talking to the average kids, and cannot have a parallel conversation with you. And no, you are not allowed to read a book, just because you already understand the current lesson; you still have to keep paying attention (to what exactly?).
Yep.
Wherever two or three Rationalists are gathered together, they will moan about the education system. But not in a very rational way. It's a topic that rationalists are predictably irrational about. They note that they personally had a bad time at school, and conclude that education is bad. They note that they could educate themselves , and conclude that everyone could. Both arguments commit the rationalist sin of typical-minding.
the kids in the behavioral bottom ~10% make life hell for everyone else involved.
I also don't get it when I reflect on my own experience. I suspect a big ingredient is the high variance in school quality. I suspect many of the vocal anti-school people went to not-great schools.
Agreed. I disliked school quite a bit, but I don't see most people (possibly even myself despite teaching myself programming) learning much without a decently structured setup.
For the same reason that you need some disincentive for crime (whether that be jail or rehabilitation) even if you try to make so things don't get there in the first place, I think you do need some way of going "you do need to learn kiddo". Saying that you spend X hours in a classroom that you're not supposed to leave is that method. We could infact setup society so that if the kid wants to drop out and learn nothing on their own, then they can, but I value a mix of their long-term capabilities & happiness rather than immediate short-term happiness.
The problems with schools is of course that they use up too much time and aren't customizable enough. AI will help with that, but you still want the kids to learn rather than, well, not learning much and watching funny videos all the time.
Homeschooling can work if the parent is competent enough, but imo most parents aren't and this would only grow worse because there'd be more baseline variance. (but of course also AI completely flips this on its head, have to be careful of forecasting while ignoring that major change)
What about killing everyone who wants to do the things you consider bad? How utilitarian can one really be if one is not willing to drown this world in blood to create a better one?
You're strawmanning utilitarians as ignoring higher order effects here. See "In favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
Is drowning this world in blood actually going to result in a better one? How many past instances of world-blood-drowning can be described as improvements in the state of the world? If I may link to myself, https://www.tumblr.com/o-craven-canto/743070555595489280/even-in-a-purely-coldly-utilitarian-moral-system
Using inductive reasoning to support utilitarianism is kind of wild. It seems like one of the hallmarks of consequentialists (not the ideologies themselves, but the people who espouse them) is arguing that some idea that violates a cultural taboo (the way we've done things in the past, traditions, moral rules, etc.) is actually better in the long run for some amount of "good" (hedonistic, utilitarianism, etc.) The way something has turned out in the past usually wouldn't have much bearing on if it was done correctly if the math works out that way.
Sorry, somehow it "corrected" hedons and utils to the ideologies, but I think my point is there
This is not wild at all, everybody is using inductive reasoning all the time.
And yes violating some taboo can be better in the long run and we have a lot of examples of that. It isn’t, inductive reasoning vs something else, nor utilitarianism vs something else, it is just different positions about the likely outcome of X or Y.
> The way something has turned out in the past usually wouldn't have much bearing on if it was done correctly if the math works out that way.
Ok but inductive reasoning, higher order effects, etc… could absolutely be included in the math.
If the expected consequences is far off of what we can have deduced with the information we have, then the math is just not done correctly (and indeed it is never completely possible to do it correctly except in thought experiments, it is an ideal).
When I was in my 20s, I wrote a consequentialist FAQ. I'm linking it here even though it's embarrassing in the same way everything one writes as a young person is embarrassing. You want section 6. https://web.archive.org/web/20140220063523/http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html .
I expanded on some of these questions more recently in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
You consistently seem to accord states/governments a privileged moral position; you said something similar in "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck." I do not share this view.
Flip the causality: less that states have a privileged position, and more that the things that have that privileged position are states. The response that nothing should hold the privileged position is a standard libertarian/anarchic argument, and disagreeing is common.
Libertarians might say that nothing SHOULD hold such a privileged position. Anarchists would say nothing DOES.
Also, you can't simply flip the causality: what characterizes states is POWER, and the ability to label its threats "laws" and its violent enforcement thereof "justice" is downstream of that.
Nah. The usefulness of violence is baked into the universe, the human condition - dissolve all governments, and armed robbery still functions just fine. "All violence is equally illegitimate" is a meaningless bit of linguistic nihilism; we can do better.
If you ever want to establish 'illegitimate violence' as a meaningful category you need a legitimate alternative. Draw up the system that results in that high ground and bam, there's your government.
(It's totally possible for the legitimate user of violence to be powerless, but then they're irrelevant and the same mechanism operates one epicycle down.)
I prefer to categorize violence by color. Mine is a richer system than yours (and so LESS linguistically nihilistic), because while you can only sort into "legitimate" and "illegitimate," I have a much broader spectrum to choose from.
Also, I wouldn't actually say all violence is equally illegitimate: I am not a strawman pacifist. Violence that helps me and my family/friends, or that hurts my enemies, or amuses me despite not otherwise being helpful, is righteous, moral, divinely mandated, legitimate, etc.
This seems like a fully general argument against justice. For instance, replace "killing" with "imprisoning" and "blood" with "inmates' suffering" in your sentence and you have a pretty accurate (if emotionally charged) description of criminal law, as practised in many countries around the world.
(I'm also eliding the distinction between "wants to do <bad thing>" and "already did <bad thing>", but the first of those is at the very least a notable component of our present notions of justice, considering we see premeditated murder as more serious than manslaughter.)
What's "criminal law" got to do with "justice"?
You don’t think criminal law is widely considered to be a tool that can be used to administer or deny justice?
Can you be more specific as to how criminal law has nothing to do with justice?
I understand the overwhelming majority of people recognize no distinction between criminal law and justice. But among the few who do, the realization that they are essentially orthogonal is not rare.
I'm not sure what you mean. Literally nothing? Zero, zip, zilch, nada? Bugger all? Surely it isn't just that you're confused by terms like "justice system"? Plenty of individuals and entities protect their interests by issuing threats backed up with violence, of which the state is one (possibly the most powerful, but I don't consider that germane).
>I'm not sure what you mean. Literally nothing?
Sorry I’m being so vague. You asked what criminal law had to do with justice. That indicated to me that you thought one had nothing (zero) to do with the other—that you thought the two things, criminal law and justice, were unrelated. I can see how the two things could be related, but not how they couldn’t be, so I was hoping you might explain it to me.
Okay, let's see: can you imagine an unjust law? Is that a coherent concept to you, or does that sound oxymoronic?
It's precisely that idea, but realizing that it's not merely a few isolated (perhaps even exclusively historical) examples, but a widespread (I'd argue universal) feature of how states pass and enforce laws.
"These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good, but for some reason the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
What? People who worry about utilitarianism do talk about those exact things, all the time. They're all incredibly common libertarian/classical liberal talking points, and often espoused by deontological libertarians and classical liberals whose opposition to the state is rooted in an opposition to utilitarianism in general.
Non-consequentialists don't see "utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good". That's a utilitarian framing of the issue. The very concept of a "greater" good, as if you could measure or compare or do math with goodness, is the problem to begin with.
When the people you don't like want to censor speech or cancel people or whatever, they don't frame that mentally as performing a lesser evil in service of a greater good, unless they have consequentialist leanings to begin with. The censoring or cancelling are acts that are good in themselves. Or they evince certain personal virtues that are good in themselves. There is no justification in terms of future good that might result from present evil, as if we could predict future consequences or that they are even relevant to moral choices! The act in itself, or the personal qualities that lead to the act in themselves, should be judged by itself.
So when you look at people that accuse utilitarians of thinking as if you can perform lesser evils in service of greater good, and then respond by thinking of the lesser evils they do in service of greater goods, you're not refuting them. You're doing exactly what they are accusing you of, what they find problematic.
Yeah, it reminds me of the "Mistake theorists think conflict theorists are making a mistake, conflict theorists think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict" post.
Exactly! Nice catch.
And in case we get to the utilitarian talking point of "OK, you have certain rules and principles for how to act, or what virtues to embody, but if those rules and principles conflict you must have some method to deconflict them? Isn't that then choosing a lesser evil over a greater evil, breaking one rule to keep another?" Again, that's not the mindset. Sometimes the rules have a specific hierarchy -- cannibalism is bad, but there is an exception for when life must be saved -- in which case the totality of the hierarchy of rules is being kept when a starving man has to eat a corpse, no lesser or greater evil tradeoff. Sometimes there is simply no way to compare, in which case we can be indifferent in the choice between two conflicting rules. They are not a lesser or greater evil, just a choice that is not meaningful either way as long as the rules as a whole are respected. There is no calculation the way that a consequentialist would assume or expect.
"Sometimes the rules have a specific hierarchy -- cannibalism is bad, but there is an exception for when life must be saved"
Where did that exception come from if not utilitarian reasoning?
Scripture, in this case.
But there are other sources of meta-ethics. Tradition. Heuristics. Descriptive ethics. The explicit comparison of the utility of outcomes is not the only way to reason about which rules
I'd guess most people in the world would accept cannibalism under certain circumstances even though only a tiny proportion must know and care about whatever passage in scripture you're referencing, so it sounds like scripture is only restating the common man's utilitarian reasoning.
Citing "tradition" doesn't really describe where tradition comes from or why it persists. Is it an appeal to popularity? Did someone make the utilitarian or consequentialist calculation or virtue ethics based proclamation and others just trusted in their correctness. Heuristics are rules of thumb that approximate some other kind of reasoning. I don't really know anything about descriptive ethics.
"You may ask, 'How did this tradition get started?' I'll tell you. I don't know." -- Tevye, "Fiddler on the Roof"
Meta-ethical theories didn't develop in a vacuum. They are based on epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. It's not about an appeal to popularity or utilitarian math, it's about which meta-ethical theory is derived from a which metaphysical or epistemological theory and the truth value of those underlying claims.
This is actually the biggest flaw in virtue ethics, because in order to convince someone of the correct set of virtues and moral exemplars, you have to convince them of the truth value of your other claims, which is more difficult than relying on a shared paradigm of empirical knowledge and weights of resulting effects of actions.
There is no deep difference between some things are more good/bad than each other and sometimes you should choose one thing over another. They are just different ways of saying the same thing. When consequentialists make claims with numbers in them representing "utilities", those are just short-hand for way longer and more complicated claims about preferability rankings.
Maybe Scott meant that this is how non-consequentialists see utilitarians as justifying their actions.
Side question. I'm curious as to whether your opposition to mandatory public schooling is entirely because it's mandatory or in part due to you thinking it's actively bad for kids or a waste of time at best?
My opposition is entirely consequentialist: competitive markets tend to work very well, and the governmental near-monopoly has produced predictable calcified inefficiencies. If it were not mandatory but rather enforced by strong social feedback (as university education is for middle castes), I would have the same objection to its wastefulness.
My boring liberal compromise solution is that I would like states to allow vouchers and home schooling. After that I don't really care or have strong opinions.
Why are so many otherwise intelligent people so hung up about ideological consistency? Why do they put themselves in a box, stressing over whether there is something wrong if they or someone else believes that some policy or action or thought doesn't conform to a construct of belief that results in the best outcome for the most people or results in a bad outcome for some people or doesn't lead to equality or helps some at the expense of others or reflects conservative values (whatever they are this day, "am I supposed to for free trade or protectionism) or progressive ones (are Jews the oppressors or the oppressed). It seems to me that this preoccupation with ideology, is just a way to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to struggle with the reality that in the end the world is messy, there is no one compass you can rely upon, you just have to fight your way through conflicting values and make the best judgment you can, understanding that actions have consequences, that someone comes out ahead and someone does not and that no matter what we decide now, we may never know or only know in hindsight whether it was the right thing to do.
You criticize people for crystallizing reusable principles instead of deciding what's best on a case-by-case basis. But what algorithm do you use to decide what's best on a case-by-case basis, without relying on principles? Whatever algorithm you actually use, how is that different/better compared to principles?
Making your algorithm more transparent (simpler, easier to model, etc.) has some strategic advantages in organizing cooperation (makes it safer for people to cooperate with you because they can better predict your stances) and also in combating your own biases.
Making your decisions more consistent also has strategic advantages in that you will spend less time undoing your own efforts (see: the whole class of "money pump" arguments).
I think it’s the crystallizing aspect of it that might concern some people. All ideologies are flawed to varying degrees. Some seem to be better for more people than others. I think it’s important to “define the process” as Ryan W. put it below, in the service of improving it, but it’s worth considering the value of maintaining some degree of freedom outside of one’s convictions.
I think that it's a good idea to keep some humility and doubt about your conclusions, so that you can change them if you encounter evidence that you made a mistake.
But you seem to be suggesting that this is opposed to having principles or to striving for consistency, and I don't think I agree with that framing. I think the amount of clarity in your decision process and the amount of certainty in your decision process are different.
I worry that some people fall into a trap that goes something like:
1. They try adding some clarity
2. They can now see a bunch of problems
3. They conclude that the clarity created the problems (when actually it just revealed them)
4. Therefore they remove the clarity
5. And, perversely, they become MORE confident in their unclear decision process, now that they have "successfully" rejected a thing that was making it bad
6. Now you have a person who is bad at moral reasoning, yet confident in their moral conclusions, and inoculated against any attempt to fix this
>a person who is bad at moral reasoning, yet confident in their moral conclusions, and inoculated against any attempt to fix this.
Yes. I probably said it poorly but this is precisely the kind of person I was trying to discourage against being by emphasizing the importance of maintaining some degree of freedom outside of one’s convictions.
In this particular case, parts of the community here descend from the "rationalist" project, which on some level was an attempt to come up with ethical systems that would work for a superintelligent AI. That is, the assumption was that humanity would build a superintelligent AI, and the goal is to make sure that it a) didn't eliminate or invert all value in the universe, and b) would, if possible, make the universe better.
But what ethical systems would work? How can we be sure that the superintelligent AI will muddle through to something good? How comfortable would you feel if you handed the future of humanity over to whatever Google or OpenAI come up with?
Well, and also, we're in position where AI is plausible due to scientific progress, which is based on ever refining consistent models of the world. In particular, we have good reasons to believe that certain conservation laws haven't been broken once in the entire history of the universe. So, the logic goes, if the physical world is consistent and predictable for the wise, why shouldn't the world of ideology and morality be?
If you cannot define your process you cannot improve your process.
When you think about usual situations, you do not need much of a theory. Do what you did the last time, or do what people around you are doing. Intelligent people are more likely to consider new situations, or new possible reactions to existing situations. Then they need some language to communicate and defend their conclusions.
Is it okay to exterminate the mosquitoes because it could save lives of millions of people? Or is it wrong because it is playing God?
Is science always good because "science!" and "progress!"? Or should we abstain from certain kinds of research, such as gain-of-function research of deadly viruses?
I'm confused what you believe.
Suppose that someone is extremely pro-life, pickets abortion clinics and screams at the people trying to go in, etc. Then when they're pregnant and it's inconvenient for them, they immediately have an abortion and don't feel guilty. Then they go back to picketing abortion clinics, and they don't see anything wrong or inconsistent with their behavior. Is anything bad about this?
EDIT: I think my answer here is that consistency is the only real source of insight into morality that we have. If some psychopath says "I love killing people, no problem there", then there isn't really a solution - you just have to kill him before he kills you. But if someone is a basically moral person but disagrees with you about one thing, then you get a chance to appeal to their own principles and show that actually they should support you (which sometimes works). This is basically the project that civilization is built upon - getting everyone to sign Platonic contracts which sort of require their value function to have an elegant profile in conceptspace or else they don't work. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/
<mild snark>
>Then they go back to picketing abortion clinics, and they don't see anything wrong or inconsistent with their behavior. Is anything bad about this?
Perhaps it implies that they should run for Congress (which has been known to exempt itself from from laws it has passed)? :-)
</mild snark>
A) models are useless, but modeling is indispensable. it allows for predicting out-of-distribution scenarios with error-correction mechanisms.
B) because ideology has network effects. Consistency in protocols is why you're allowed to use the internet right now.
I don't think restricting free speech is actually a "bad thing" in the relevant sense. If you punish a mob boss for ordering his subordinates to commit a robbery, is that "doing a bad thing for the greater good"? What's innately evil is violently suppressing the truth. (Actually, even this is probably insufficiently nuanced -- I think it's fine to punish someone for leaking classified information to a wartime enemy, for example -- but trying to develop a fully-worked-out model of the moral principle that free speech proxies would probably take too long to fit in a blog comment.) So, in theory, enforcing laws against misinformation doesn't require doing any evil. In practice, we shouldn't do this because the risks of trusting the state to judge what is misinformation are too high to be worth it, but that's not a deontological argument.
It looks like you believe evil things are good actually, and I don't know that one can reconcile such conflicting deontological views.
I don't see why I should need to reconcile a conflict between my views and yours. It would only be a problem for me if my views were in conflict with themselves.
Yeah, agreed. My point was more that you were arguing against the deontology of the essay with your conflicting one, which is pointless.
Well, if you accept that we should act according to deontological principles in at least some cases, then there has to be some way of deciding whether a principle is actually deontological or not.
Restricting free speech is a bad thing because free expression is an important component of being human. A free society is a beautiful and possible thing.
Exactly. Being able to form and express opinions and beliefs is what separates humans from animals, so when you suppress someone's speech, you are depriving them of part of their humanity.
A forum where people are genuinely free to express themselves in literally whatever way they want doesn't look like this comments section. It looks like 4chan's /b/.
I can say many things about /b/, and I am glad a place like that exists. I would not, however, call /b/ beautiful, nor would I want every place to be like that.
This is flatly untrue, unless (perhaps; I'm more of an /a/ guy) said users only post on /b/ and never check the rest of the site.
Every other board, including /pol/, has rules. Bans for violating them are often global, and 4chan janitors are infamously arbitrary in how they apply them; I doubt I'm alone in having served a variety of temp bans over the years. Sometimes I deserved them, other times it was for things like "replying to an off-topic thread" (and one that was dubiously off-topic) or for getting caught in an automated filter.
I call out /b/ specifically precisely because those other places have rules and bans; there are things people cannot say there and ways people cannot express themselves, and because of these restrictions on speech it is possible for more civil discussion to happen.
This is, in fact, my entire thesis.
(Even /b/ is not absolutely free: speech in the US is not entirely free, and you cannot post content that is illegal under US law; people do regularly try, but those posts get promptly deleted. Still, it is about as free as any US-hosted social media site can be while staying legal, and I find it hard to believe that permitting illegal content would improve the quality of discourse.)
Just tried to find 4chan /b/, but couldn't. I assume it's a place where there is no limit to how lewd, weird and politically incorrect people are willing to be. But is it really a place where you can say absolutely anything without being censured by other posters? Can you say really woke things, and insist that any decent person would think the same? Can you talk about how lame people of 4chan are? Can you say you're a pedophile and it's a free country and you should be able to impose sex on any child you can corner?
>Can you talk about how lame people of 4chan are?
I actually laughed aloud at this, because they scarcely talk about anything else. It's a phantasmagorical panoply of deeply held, very specific hatreds of basically any group you could name, but I really don't think anything is more unifying than how much the median /b/ user seems to despise (a) himself, and (b) every other motherfucker on the website.
Actually to your broader question, I think part of the wild west vibe is because the baseline level of hostility is so incredibly high that it's hard to differentiate which abuse is meant to be censure for misconduct, and that saps its effectiveness.
https://boards.4chan.org/b/
There are posts saying each of the things you mention, and worse, on a daily basis. Other users absolutely do respond with censure and hostility, as they do to every post no matter how innocuous. All of this free speech is permitted - none is removed, blocked or otherwise silenced. Everyone is genuinely free to express themselves however they wish. It is, in its own way, beautiful.
> without being censured by other posters?
...at some point here the goalposts seem to have shifted from being free to say what you want to silencing other users' responses to what you've said.
What about /their/ freedom of speech?
People being angry at you for saying something, while that post stays up for everyone to read, is not censorship. Deleting your post against your will would be censorship; as would deleting your detractors' against theirs. So long as the responses are limited to speech, it's all speech. You are not prevented from saying what you want; neither are they. A free speech absolutist ought to support it all. Otherwise we're just censors haggling over the price.
How to I get on /b/? I googled
It and didn’t see a way in a quick look, and I fact saw a couple things that suggested it doesn’t exist any more.
As the other reply above said, it is here:
https://boards.4chan.org/b/
If that URL does not work for you, your ISP is probably blocking the site; consider a VPN or a different ISP.
I don't think that's a good argument for free speech. There are a lot of important components of being human -- everything from taking a shit to falling in love to knowing you will die to liking music. Unless you can name some way that freedom of speech is a more essential component than the many others, what you said doesn't make sense. And besides, nobody has anything like real freedom of speech even in a country where free speech is protected by law. In virtually all settings there are many things you can't say without suffering a consequence so bad that for all practical purposes you simply are not allowed to say them. I'm sure that has been true since the hunter gatherer days. Groups can't cohere if people vocalize all their opinions and passing thoughts. And in most people's lives unspoken rules suppress far more speech than laws against hate speech or whatever do.
There's another aspect to consider: "restricting free speech" might not be about suppressing truth so much as about allowing an exchange of ideas to actually take place without being drowned out by noise.
If I wade into the comments section to put forward the thesis that <person> is a <pejorative>, I would expect to be moderated, and rightly so. From my POV, however, I am stating the truth as I perceive it, and being silenced for it.
If I wade into every single conversation in the comments section to politely put forward my green-ink cosmology/flat earth/whatever theory, I would be told to give it a rest. But I am simply stating truths! The world clearly needs to hear them; the place is full of people who have not yet seen the light. The problem must be that I am not shouting loudly or ubiquitously enough!
Often, the debate is actually not so much about the principles involved as about /the category/ of whatever thing it is I want to shout from the soapbox that most of the people I'm shouting at don't want me polluting their environment with. It is in their interest to paint my ranting as noise to be moderated. It is in my interest to paint it as ideas to be exchanged in the spirit of free speech.
Well, I assumed Scott was talking about people who wanted *the government* to suppress misinformation or hate speech, since arguing from the premise of "it's a sacred, fundamental moral principle that Internet forums shouldn't be moderated" would be obviously ridiculous.
Government censorship is certainly the motte, but IME ~99% of all internet conversation about censorship and the principles of free speech - including on this substack - involves some person or group being "silenced" following decisions made by some private entity to drop content from a platform owned or managed by that entity.
Still, I guess it's possible Scott could have meant that. I'll stand down.
Most of those private entities are owned by billionaires, often the same billionaires, and some even get pressured by the state to censor as an end-run around the first amendment.
In the age when forums dominated the internet, and most topics had multiple competing forums, this argument was at least a bit sympathetic. Today, as applied to the Facebooks and Reddits of the world, it's considerably less so. (For everyone except for those "at least it's not the government" libertarians, I suppose.)
...and, yup, there's the bailey, right on cue.
Further discussion at this point necessarily focuses on specifics - is a particular thing someone wants to say mere noise that it's right to moderate to enable sacred exchange of valuable ideas, or is it sacred free speech that should never be silenced?
The person wanting to say whatever it is will, of course, inevitably pursue the discussion to the best of their ability, aiming to show the latter.
It's one of those irregular verbs - I am exchanging valuable truths; you are expressing your feelings; he/she/it is a troll heading for a ban.
IMO we must accept some level of restriction on speech in most places, lest everything becomes 4chan's /b/ and no productive discussion can take place. But the thing is, once you accept any restrictions on anyone at all, the ship has sailed; as the joke goes, we have already established what we are, and are now just haggling over the price.
I'd suggest it's because the small scale individualist utilitarianism you describe invariably ends up eroding the laws and regulations put in place to protect "ordinary people" from the invasive governmental strong-arm do-as-your-told form of utilitarianism.
I think people are ok with doing bad things to achieve greater good, as long as it is done as part of a rule they know to be a predictable part of social contract. Conversely, people oppose to the meta-rule which would let individuals make on the spot, subjective, utilitarian judgements, because that's unpredictable and might lead to constant fear. I'd be afraid to get into a taxi in a society in which it would be ok for the driver to make a decision to sacrifice me for a greater good based on their view of values.
I think normative and consequential approach converge once you start taking second (third, nth) orders into account. An action is only achieving a greater good, if a society which adopted it as a rule would be nicer.
But this is difficult, as it requires careful consideration of all pros and cons by various members of society, some precomitment, enforcement, and becomes undistinguishable from democratic process of establishing norms.
This is my view as well. One major people have against utilitarians is that they are calculating the incalculable. If you start adding second and higher order effects, then it really is incalculable, and some level of epistemic humility is required. That's why I'm generally against causing first-order harms in order to bring about higher-order benefits.
I think this is what I was trying to argue against in my Footnote 2.
On the other hand I'm generally anti-utilitarianism but it's hard to find actual real-world scenarios in which I'd actively _disagree_ with utilitarianism. My disagreements with utilitarianism are either pretty abstract (utility can't be computed in practice and therefore can't be maximised in practice) or only occur in hypothetical philosophical situations, not real ones.
I think most anti-utilitarians have this in common; you won't often find someone who explicitly says "it's right to do X, even though doing Y would make the world a better place". Non-utilitarians will usually have an argument why the thing that they propose doing for un-utilitarian reasons also just happens to be the utilitarianally optimal thing anyway.
Well, utilitarianism says that you have to donate all your possessions to those poorer that you. I assume that you haven't in fact been doing that, which seems to me to count as a real-world scenario. Of course, this applies to pretty much all the so-called utilitarians as well. Some of them do feel guilt about this, to their credit.
*Maximizing* consequentialism says that. The scalar consequentialism I espouse only says that ceteris paribus you'd be a more morally good person if you donated more possessions to those for whom they did more good. Of course we realize that none of us prioritize *only* moral goodness in our decision-making, or ever will, nor do we imagine that forcing others is a reliable way to increase first-order good behaviors by more than the badness of the higher-order consequences.
I think that one area where utilitarianism in practice often breaks down is that it tends to focus people on short term effects. It also potentially leads to a kind of tunnel vision where only a very limited set of goals or surrogate endpoints are considered. This isn't a requirement of utilitarianism. But it's a very common rookie mistake, so it's worth acknowledging.
My guess? This is less about you (Scott) than your comments section, but in the space here, the general vibe often seems to be "ethics as sport," ie "let's play out any argument no matter how many common taboos we are contemplating violating because we understand this is all part of a game we are playing to arrive at some kind of deeper consensus or understanding of principals or common notions or whatever." Which yes, gives people the vibe that this is a space where people think anything is at least theoretically permittable. To most people, ethics is more like war, you don't suggest arguments unless you are laying the groundwork for an attack. So the sentence "the most cogent argument I can think of for eating babies" will make most people think you are trying to legitimately justify the eating of babies, not that you are conducting rationality katas or whatever the fuck people think they are doing around here.
This, btw, is why in most spaces if people discuss morality at all, they spend half the time virtue signaling, when everybody knows what tribe you belong to, it allows you to make hypothetical arguments without anyone thinking you are trying to secretly incept outcomes that run counter to the groups common moral code. But with utilitarians (or at least, internet rationalist-utilitarians), the highest common goal of the tribe is "let's discuss anything and everything in the most rational light possible, no matter how uncomfortable," and thus the only virtue signaling you get is people racing to show how adept they are at justifying absolute horror that they don't even really believe in, just to prove they are capable of the exercise.
Well, if reason is your highest virtue, that's actually a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I think you meant:
"...a perfectly virtuous thing to do"
Maybe he meant "a reasonably virtuous perfect thing to do".
Yeah, probably. I had originally written "if intelligence is your highest virtue," but I reconsidered, and didn't rewrite the end.
In rationalist-speak, this is "conflict vs mistake" and "decoupling vs contextualizing".
You betcha. Why just the other day we were discussing whether, if you cannibalize you mother, it made the deed more reprehensible to cook her with bacon for flavoring , since adding the bacon gave you partial responsibility for the death of a second sentient being. Some brought recipes.
I think the anti-utilitarians come in various flavors.
1. The Nate Silver flavor: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1742636333624107121 of doing-bad-things-has-good-result-and-don't-worry-about-indirect-consequences. This is, by far, the most common. This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way.
2. The I-need-a-philosophy-job flavor. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor; I don't want to degrade the entire profession. But the absolutely awful critiques I've been reading for decades persist. (Some critiques require work and there are hard problems. But man, so many are just bad. In college, I read a textbook that explained that utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism. I made up the names of the cereals, but not the argument.)
3. As you observe, the math-is-bad flavor. These folks seem to be wrong, and uninterestingly so.
I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well. I do think in practice given our human limitations, rule-following is a good default heuristic. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this.
But I don't think I am.
> This is attacking a very naive utilitarianism that doesn't exist in a serious way
I don't know what you mean by a serious way. If you mean that philosophy professors don't believe it then maybe you're right, but "very naive utilitarianism" is the version that you're most likely to encounter in the wild.
Very naive utilitarianism is worth attacking not because philosophy professors believe it but because actual jerks in the real world use it to make (or at least to justify) the very real harms they want to inflict on the world.
"It's okay to block the highway to protest because...", "It's okay to lie to the public, because...", "It's okay to kill all the kulaks, because..." -- these are things that get said by jerks who genuinely believe in very naive utilitarianism.
Perhaps we need a term that helps us differentiate between "deep utilitarianism" and "shallow utilitarianism"?
Deep utilitarianism is really hard, because you have to deal with time horizons (where probabilities decrease as distance in time gets bigger), nth order effects (with decreasing probabilities as `n` gets bigger), and uncertainty in all things.
Shallow utilitarianism is really easy, because you just look one step into the future and decide if a thing is good or bad and then stop. It also is *very* easy to do a bad thing this way.
I think many long-held social norms are a sort of emergent form of deep utilitarianism. Things like "don't murder all of the x in your society" exists for the reasons a deep utilitarian would argue, but no one sat down and calculated them out 1000 years ago. Instead, societies tried different things and the ones that didn't murder all x in their society seemed to do better over the last 10,000 years than the ones that did.
My thoughts too. But if I think about that more, how much of a society's outcomes are determined by it having the right values and how much by them having lots and lots of oil? Or: maybe you are unlikely to stumble upon the industrial revolution unless you have certain values, but you don't need them to industrialize if you already know what to do, and your outcomes might even be better afterwards. Or: maybe some values we think are important for good outcomes are actually dependent on the *true* reasons of those outcomes (e.g. a lot of European's success since the Enlightenment was the result of tolerance to Jews but the real "lesson" might not have been "be tolerant to minorities", but rather "breed a highly intelligent population by unintentional unethical eugenics and use them to solve hard problems").
Yes, there is a huge number of confounding variables when you look at history, and one can make arguments for many possible explanations for an outcome. We do our best to try to reason about which one is most likely, but IMO a good utilitarian will recognize that their confidence is not certain for any of this. Historically, more liberal societies tended to advance faster, but there are enough confounders to make it so we can't say for sure that a more liberal society today will advance more/faster than a less liberal society today.
Thinking about historical examples, the ideological landscape of a society seems to matter quite a lot, but perhaps not in the kind of ways they themselves might have thought about it. The Romans for instance would have attributed their success to virtus, disciplina, pietas, fides, etc, but we would be inclined to think that it wasn't their martial bravery (which they'd be ready to admit barbarians also possessed in spades) or even bravery tempered by discipline (that barbarians supposedly lacked), never mind dutiful worship of Jupiter in accordance with the tradition of their ancestors, but e.g. a large freeholding middle-class wealthy enough to equip themselves as heavy infantries, a political career path (cursus honorum) that ensured a large supply of broadly competent military leaders, and their way of treating conquered peoples not as subjucated subjects but allies - an uneven relationship mirroring patron-client relationship already present in those societies and thus making the arrangement more palatable - but allies nevertheless, all of these factors among others allowing them to mobilize their available military resources entire order of magnitude more efficiently than many of their contemporary rivals. These sort of factors, more so than pure happenstance of geography or a series of great men, seem to account for their success, and you can cast these factors in terms of values: republicanism, equality, enfranchisement, etc.
Can't help but notice that the Romans attributed their success to what they valued and you (tentatively) attribute their success to what our society values. I expect we are better at sociology than the Romans but are we really good at it?
"It's okay to burn the witches, because God said so" was historically said by people who would probably be horrified by the idea of utilitarianism.
Indeed. Stare too long unto the abyss, and it stares unto you.
Aha, thank you for the perfect excuse to recommend the newest History for Atheists blog post on The Inquisition!
https://historyforatheists.com/2024/02/the-great-myths-14-the-inquisition-myths-and-history/
Sam Harris getting things wrong? Can such a thing be? 😁
Is there a short summary? Most of the article is about alleged torture instruments; I said nothing about that.
Yes, there are people who believe that Inquisition did nothing wrong, and they sound about as impartial as people who believe that Hitler did nothing wrong.
So you prefer to remain in your ignorance, rather than correct your misconceptions?
The article is not about "the Inquisition did nothing wrong", it's about "all the things you think you know about the Inquisition are wrong".
This isn't "Hitler did nothing wrong", it's "I know Hitler was a giant radioactive dinosaur who flattened Tokyo and you can't tell me otherwise, you Tokyo-destruction apologist!"
If I replaced "witches" by "heretics", would that address your objection sufficiently?
(Actually, I didn't even say it was Inquisition, or even Catholics. So are we debating whether anyone has ever burned witches?)
Sorry, I've researched this subject myself, and your myth is a myth. See my thoroughly-documented work-in-progress, "Christianity was Totalitarian" ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F1ZhOKn3VT6biu_SzbCV2RcSP0Qn4xbkDO8BajSZSlE/edit ), under "The Bloody Cross", for a VERY LONG chronological list of atrocities committed in the name of Christ.
Making war on heretics was popular in the 6th-9th centuries, and caused the Dark Age. It wasn't the barbarians who destroyed Rome; it was the 20-year war between the Eastern and Western empires instigated by Emperor Justinian in the name of killing Arian Christians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(535%E2%80%93554)). Charlemagne's wars, also in the name of killing Arians, devastated what is now France and Germany.
Crusades to kill heretics were big in the 13th century. The Catholic church's biggest and most-lethal crusades weren't against Muslims, but against other Christians. Witch-burning was a Big Deal in the 14th - 16th century. War between Protestants and Catholics was the game in the 16th+17th centuries.
The Puritans exterminated most of the Native Americans in Massachusetts, tho I don't think I have that on my list yet. The Catholic church committed what amounted to partial genocides all around the world throughout the colonial period, all in one way or another designed to convert people to Christianity. (For instance, in the Belgian Congo, hundreds of Catholic clergy, including the Pope, covered up the massacre of at least 5 million Congolese for decades, because they had a deal with the Belgian King that Catholic missions would get to raise all the resulting orphans as Christians.) During WW2, Catholic clergy helped execute about 800,000 people, mostly Orthodox Christians. The total number of people whose deaths Christians either committed directly, or participated in, in the name of Christ, is about 20 million, if we don't count the role of Catholic priests in instigating the Rwandan genocide (because that was, unlike the previous genocides, not authorized by the Vatican). That's just the ones documented. The real number could easily be twice as large. And most of those were killed in a world with much smaller populations than in the 20th century.
Number of witches killed can only be estimated by sampling areas where records were kept and survived to this day. The numbers in that web page are a gross under-estimate, by 1-2 orders of magnitude, because so few records remain.
You know what /is/ a myth? The idea that the Roman empire persistently persecuted Christians. There were something like 10 years in its history that it persecuted Christians seriously, and the total number killed is unknown, but might only be in the hundreds.
Hello, Mr. Gibbon. Still scribble, scribble, scribble, I see?
"Making war on heretics was popular in the 6th-9th centuries, and caused the Dark Age."
That sentence alone means I don't need to read any further.
You really should read the long list of well-documented Christian mass atrocities. But that would challenge your beliefs, so I suppose you won't.
Gibbon claimed something quite different: that Christianity weakened the Roman spirit, allowing it to be conquered by barbarians. But saying Rome was "conquered by the barbarians" in the 5th century because Germanic peoples were in charge is a little like saying that New Mexico was conquered by Mexico in 1917 because it elected a Mexican-American governor. They were Romanized barbarians.
But burning witches is clearly a good thing.
(Most of these people were actually burning innocent people falsely accused of being witches, which was bad, but the problem there was an error of epistemology, not moral philosophy.)
Someone's read C. S. Lewis. :)
"There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there."
I used to believe that moral mistakes are a separate category from epistemic mistakes, but then I realized that most people actively reject information that would challenge the morality of their behavior.
So by that calculus, the most moral person in the world would be some arrogant asshole who never listens to others and never reflects on his own behavior, because then all of his mistakes would be epistemic ones.
I don't know how many people are out there making consciously utilitarian arguments for highway-blocking protests. Other than, e.g., delaying an ambulance with a critical patient (which they would imply is rare), I think most would just deny that there is any harm to weigh against. Rather, the motorists are being given an opportunity to realize that <protest issue> is actually more important than wherever they thought they needed to be, which will make them better people. Any irritation or discomfort is actually just embarrassment at being confronted with something they were ignoring.
"utilitarianism was wrong because if you ate Corn Chex instead of Wheat Chex and you would have liked the Wheat Chex better you had acted immorally and obviously that defeated utilitarianism."
What? I can't make any sense of that. Is it that you would like the Wheat Chex better, knew you would like them better, but ate the Corn Chex for some other reason? And thus you were not being utilitarian because you weren't making the choice that gave you the greatest happiness? And that's immoral? No, that can't be right.
You thought the Corn Chex would give you the greatest happiness/utility, which is why the utilitarian choice was to eat them. But this was wrong, so utilitarianism is wrong. But that doesn't make it immoral, just mistaken.
I'm not getting it.
One issue discussed by W. D. Ross and some later utilitarian philosophers is the question of whether or not it is permissible to miss an opportunity for "innocent pleasure." So yes, on one utilitarian view, it is indeed immoral to choose the Corn Chex if you would have enjoyed the Wheat Chex more. (I think the anti-utilitarian argument here is to suppose that this controversial position within utilitarianism is representative of utiltarianism as a whole, that it is obviously wrong, and that therefore utilitarianism as a whole is obviously wrong. But I don't know what book John R. Mayne was talking about, so I can't say for sure.)
But you might think you would like the Corn Chex more, so it wasn't until you tried them that you decided "No, I prefer the Wheat Chex". Or you might know that you prefer Wheat Chex, but you prefer them *too* much and eat way too many of them, so you pick the Corn Chex in order not to overeat. Or you might make a choice to mortify your appetites in order to gain self-control. I can't see those cases as immoral, but I suppose I'm forgetting this is a philosophical conundrum and the abstract thought experiments go to crazy places (like our infamous Trolley problem: "ordinary people are squeamish about the notion of deliberately killing someone, isn't that weird?")
>I would note - as I think our host has - that deontologists seem to do better at utilitarianism than utilitarians, primarily because rule-following generally works well.
There's this study about whether ethics professors act more ethically than non-ethics professors, the result of which (basically no difference) gestures towards a conclusion that might be more illuminating: humans in general are ethics-satisficers rather than ethics-maximizers, and this leads to people to act about as decently as their peers, which permits a whole lot of wrongdoing (like eating meat if you believe eating meat is unethical) since ethical theories only really tend to disagree at edge cases.
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism are not the same things. You can be a non-Utilitarian and a Consequentialist, and you can be a Utilitarian without being a Consequentialist, despite what professional moron and evil person, Peter Singer, might say in a cited paper.
You are a Utilitarian because you're a Utilitarian. You've self described this way, you've wrote about how you think this is the only theory of ethics that even tries to "solve the problem", you've strenuously defended the position in the past, and you frequently talk about other moral theories in such ways as to suggest you are incapable of understanding alternate positions in the first place. This isn't an insult, you've admitted this in previous blogs, including ones specifically about things missing from one's awareness.
This post is itself is an example, since I have no idea who these people are who are pro the first list, but against the second. Don't worry, I'm against both lists, because the first list is obviously bad, and for the second list, I'm forced to fill in the blanks of what you actually mean by your own personal actions, to which I am against.
"So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I think utilitarians are uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and also utilitarians are very likely to accept everything in that first list. To be sure, it's completely possible to be a utilitarian and reject the first list, but I notice most self described utilitarians have no understanding of anything, whether they be blog authors or Peter Singer, so I would be really surprised to see an example that I believed. We might point to Peter Singer especially as the most obviously willing-to-do-evil Utilitarian, somebody who clearly doesn't understand anything, and, due to prominence, a large chunk of why Utilitarianism gets a bad rap from normal people who are just into politics and not philosophy.
But ignoring the reason from mere prominent individual, I think your confusion is based on, once again, an inability to understand the alternatives.
In itself, "calculating lives" is not utilitarianism, nor consequentialist. Nobody cares about that. What is utilitarianism is the part where you say that the calculation is the crux of the "science" of ethics, and the consequentilist part is where you say the nature of the outcome-as-outcome is the most important and/or primary factor in determining what to do.
Somebody like great hero Achilles might take both the calculation of lives, and the consequences of the action as important in a moral judgement, for example "we must kill as many of the enemy as possible." But great hero Achilles is a virtue ethicist, and so the consequences-in-themselves are not the marker, but rather how they conform to the virtues necessary for heroism, such as bravery, piety, martial prowess, leadership, and so on, is the marker. The calculation of lives or their maximisation is not the primary motive, but rather, these are the extension of what it means to create victory, which in this case is heroic.
But IF Achilles was a utilitarian consequentialist in the mould of most internet utilitarians, or Peter Singer, we might decide to maximise the deaths of our enemies and lives of our friends. But we need to realise that all animals are equal and infanticide is fine, also we need to be long thinkers and consider future enemies and friends. In conclusion, utilitarianism is a mathematical attractor for the annihilation of all life in the universe. Absolutely perfect for people obsessed with AI, people who think everything can and should be put under the label of "science", and other such Moloch worshippers.
> Utilitarianism and Consequentialism are not the same things.
Darn it, I keep forgetting to separate these things in my thinking. Thank you for the reminder.
>you can be a Utilitarian without being a Consequentialist
Any examples?
Off the top of my head, you could generalise hypothetical modern Rule Utilitarianism that define "good" in ways that veer into Deontology or Virtue.
We can say that are three different kinds of moral reasoning. Consequences, obligation, and character. One might consider Utilitarianism as primarily a method, rather than a judgement about which moral reasoning is best. This method would be deciding numerical or numerical-like values to be weighed against other such values, to calculate and maximise some and/or minimise others.
You see this happen a lot in the self-help world. Mentions of how to build up a habit, for example, usually will set a number of days, weeks, or months, in order to get the character benefit you want. You would be using a utilitarian method to reach a character goal.
Another common case would be the aforementioned Rule Utilitarians. It is quite common, for example, for self described Utilitarians to promote veganism, or vegetarianism, and then extend this to a broadly progressive environmentalist position generally. Dig down, and in at least some cases it would because they believe there's some deontological obligation to care about the planet as a broad concept. Some might even be honest about this.
Now I didn't say this was particularly prominent or coherent, or even something people would self-credit. Probably, people who fall into this weird notion would see the label as an insult. Or, they'd be really confused about what it is they're doing or caring about. But I accuse Utilitarians in general of being "really confused".
Hmm, as I understand it, utilitarianism is primarily about "the greatest good for the greatest number", and since you have to operationalize this somehow that's where numerical-like values come in.
The self-help thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with this, it's more like a typical case of the inverse, consequentialism without utilitarianism.
Rule utilitarianism is just utilitarians acknowledging that they can't actually calculate all of the important stuff and essentially replacing it with deontology, except without the usual religious carrot-and-stick connotations.
"murder is qualitatively bad, but not in a quantifiable way."
As a non-utilitarian, I too am against the things you are against in your first list.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good” - even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I get your point. But my problem with utilitarianism isn’t about mixing human lives with math, but rather that utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people. These third parties do not know how their calculations or policies are going to affect people they meant to affect, they can never calculate it with the perfect information, information only individuals themselves possess. Me knowing what I know about myself, can use math all I want to calculate what’s good for me and test them out in the real world, but I would not think I can/should do it for other people. There are two problems with “Doing an evil thing for the greater good”: 1) the “evil things” sometimes violates individual’s natural rights. 2) there is no such thing as the greater good. What’s good for me might not be good for you. Everyone’s so different in terms of believes, personality, individual circumstances at any given time. The best one to decide what’s good for a person is a person himself. Not an outside calculation with imperfect information and the goal to maximize group interest.
> utilitarianism ignores natural rights of individuals, in favor of third party (often the government or its “experts”) calculations for large group of people.
I think only *bad* utilitarians do this. If you think 1 step into the future then "government should control X" seems like a good idea. If you think a few more steps into the future you realize "giving the power to do X to a small group of people historically always ends poorly, so even though we may get short term gains, long term we'll see a lot more suffering."
Human society has come up with these "natural rights" through exploration and we have found that things like freedom and liberty result in societies with a lot less pain and suffering than societies that don't have those things. A utilitarian who is good at their job will recognize this and put a whole lot of weight on the benefits of these fundamental rights and be incredibly unlikely to override them.
Scott gets to this sort of when he talks about things like compulsory education. It sounds good if you don't consider that creating an institution that has the ability to force you to raise your children a certain way leads to a society that is unable to explore the child-rearing landscape and come up with new, better, ways of child rearing. It also puts power of indoctrination into the hands of a small number of people which history has shown can be abused to great effect (see Chinese cultural revolution as an example). The "basic human right" to raise your children how you see fit is sacred for a good reason, and a utilitarian should not ignore that without an *incredibly* good reason.
If natural rights (without quote) are fully recognized and respected by utilitarians who’s good at their job, then what is left worthy for them to calculate? When you are faced with the decision of whether mandatory schooling is good for society or not, and you think in terms of Maximizing group interest, you can argue a good utilitarian concludes “mandatory schooling is bad” and a bad utilitarian concludes the opposite. But a non-utilitarian who does not want to maximize group interest - because they know they don’t know other people as well as those people know themselves - naturally do not agree with anything compulsory. There is no need for the good utilitarian here even though he might conclude the same as non-utilitarian. But can a good utilitarian stay “good” consistently throughout all issues all the time? I think that would be incredibly hard, not to mention unnecessary due to the fact that people can and should and are better off to decide for themselves.
I agree with your premise and general argument. However, I would like to posit that the person who is blindly following some heuristic that seems to work broadly will also get things wrong sometimes. The important question is how much effort both have to put into decision making to achieve similar success rates, and can they both achieve the same high success rate or will one always be strictly better.
Given infinite time to contemplate all decisions, I think a particularly smart/clever utilitarian will come out ahead. Given finite time to contemplate all decisions, I believe that the natural rights believer (for some set of natural rights I agree with) will probably come out ahead.
However, a utilitarian can always fallback to natural rights when they need to make decisions quickly, and only switch over to calculations when they have the time necessary to really think deeply. For me personally, I have some heuristics that seem to get things right 99% of the time that I used, and I occasionally do deep utilitarian calculations. Every time my utilitarian calculations align with my general purpose heuristics, it reinforces my belief that my heuristics are good, and when the calculations don't align, it helps give me feedback on where I may need better heuristics.
I think most greater good arguments are slippery slopes. And yet I am comfortable with the caveat you have, even though I am a deontologist. Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal, which is what scares me about the whole consequentialist attitude.
I have a pet theory that humans evolved a distrust of anyone relying heavily on system 2 for their decisions because system 2 is better at deception than system 1. (Not everyone using system 2 is an evil mastermind, but every evil mastermind is using system 2.)
The other part of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which doesn't get as much discussion, is about the theory that our system 2 was evolved to coordinate group action. To persuade ourselves and others to join together. It's purely an accident that it can be used for rational thinking. What it's really for is rationalization and politics.
Thinking that a mother's love is virtuous and sacred? Sure, that's deep inside our system 1. Following the dude who's saying "burn the witch?" Heck yes, we want to be part of the burners, not the burnees. But we're not really evolved to follow someone who's talking to themselves and claims they've figured out something new. That's weird and dangerous. Better to stay away until they have a track record, or at least until a lot of other people sign on first.
I think Lesswrong once posted a theory that drinking was analogous to handshaking qua psychological disarmament. maybe i'll find it later.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're a utilitarian or a consequentialist. You don't seem to have any coherent moral philosophy at all. Which is fine, because no one does. Everyone just does what makes them feel good. It's not any more complicated than that.
That wasn't the impression I got of Scott from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2LWXsJxKS626QNEA/the-trouble-with-good (but you'd be right for most people, again cf. that post)
That post is 15 years, 2 blogs, and several life-changing events old. I wonder how much of it Scott still endorses?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
Ctrl+f for "Bay Area transit system"
Utilitarianism isn't any more objective than emotivism because any value it optimizes for is ultimately still arbitrary. There is no objective value to human life or death, happiness or suffering, order or chaos. You're still just operating on your own preferences. Thus, utilitarianism is just a way of practicing emotivism, not a separate moral system.
I admit I have not yet completely solved ethics. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/ is the closest I've gotten.
I feel like i've solved metaethics tbh. I told mike hind I would write something about it but i've been procrastinating.
Can you point out specific reasons you believe this? (I'm not sure how you'd get that from this post at all)
None of Scott's posts have shown that he has any truly consistent values. Utilitarianism requires that you have utility values that you optimize for. Scott allegedly optimizes for decreasing suffering and fulfilling preferences, yet most of his objections in the first part revolve around freedom, something completely orthogonal to well-being. Also he's against wireheading, which is the obvious optimal outcome of optimizing for those things. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-thrones/
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with any of this. He's just human. Even utilitarianism doesn't make the values you optimize for any less arbitrary. But at least it's actually honest about what you want (in theory). But what does anyone actually want? Happiness? But then why do so many make so much effort to avoid it? None of this makes any sense...
'Freedom' is a preference that many humans value being fulfilled, and thus he values it being fulfilled for them. He probably also has some personal preference directly for people being free to choose what they want.
I can believe he's not a hedonistic utilitarian (or a suffering - somehow weighted preferences_fulfilled utilitarian), but that doesn't lead to "not consequentialist".
I don't think I agree that Scott's posts haven't shown consistent values. I think he chooses different parts to focus on at times for the topic of a post, and I think he's confused in some manners (of course because I believe I got the right answer), but I still don't see them as inconsistent as you are saying they are.
(of course they're not a fully formed tightly written utility function, but whatever)
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It is easy to be against wireheading if you value some form of fulfilling preferences, because ~most people have preferences about the real world and want their happiness to be linked to something real. Wireheading is the optimum for a hedonistic utilitarian who only values happiness where happiness is defined as certain chemicals, but it isn't the optimum for fulfilling preferences.
(I think the Fun Theory sequence on LW is the response I'd throw at his Wirehead gods post)
I think most people are deontologists, even if they don't realize it, even if they're atheists. They have specific commandments that demand specific actions, and also a (sometimes quite crude) framework for dealing with conflicts between commandments. Sometimes the framework involves utilitarianism, but other times it involves a hierarchy. And they view it as a hostile and profane act for someone else to come in and start homogenizing their sacred commandments with math.
Just as people don't like putting prices on sacred things (such as a mother's love, or clean air), because that transforms them into secular things which can be traded in the market. Money is market is economics is math, and once you start denominating your virtue in numbers, you've lost touch with the Source.
Now anyone more clever than you can throw some numbers at you and make you do whatever they want.
(Who argues for utilitarianism? Clever people.)
Most people are consequentialists when the tradeoff is the status quo. Not-absurdly-slow speed limits trade some probability of death and serious injury to the few against increased convenience to the many. It's okay that the side effects of chemotherapy kill many people, because avoiding chemo would kill a larger number of people, some of whom are not the same people. Consequentialism is an essential pillar of any complex society, and only appears as a demon when the particular tradeoff is new and feels weird.
One value to utilitarianism is as a critic, notably when a deontologist is pursuing a course of action that make _everybody_ worse off.
I suggest set her free.
It seems we really like punishing self-awareness.
"I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality" -- Yes, this.
Utilitarians, and people who are against utilitarianism, may both say "the ends justify the means," but they mean it differently. A utilitarian would mean that the action has expected positive net utility. An anti-utilitarian would typically mean that the ends are /permanent/, while the means are /temporary/.
I'm only slightly over-generalizing when I say that there are two types of people: people who think of reality as a state, and change as discrete transitions between states; and people who think of reality as a continuous dynamic system. People who model change in the world with state transitions don't count the cost of the path from here to there, because there is no path. The in-between part literally doesn't exist for them; it doesn't count in their (subconscious) utility function. And people who model the world with state transitions, believe that states are stable, and actions are initiated only by agents; so if you achieve a new state, you'll remain in that state until someone instigates some other revolutionary state transition. The new, more-perfect state will be permanent, unless you failed to eliminate all the evil people who would try to change it. So it's the only thing that counts.
The state-based model of reality is part of a larger system of metaphysics and ethics, that found in Plato, Christianity, Marxism, and the Social Justice Movement, which believes that the morality of actions can be certain, and forbids the use of numeric calculations in ethics in order to guarantee certainty. Where there are measurements, there are errors; where values of different goods are compared, there are disagreements. So for instance Marx didn't adopt the labor theory of value because it makes sense--it doesn't--but because it provides an objective measure of value that everyone can agree on. Modeling reality as a continuous dynamic system would require measuring all sorts of things, including how long an incentive must be applied before society reaches its new, more-perfect state. This kind of ethical system refuses to measure, so it just ignores that part of the calculation.
Ethical systems of this type usually avoid using numeric values at all by making ethical valuations ordinal (position in a sequence), not cardinal (an independent numeric measure). An ethical rule of lower ordinality (coming earlier in the sequence) always takes precedence over a rule of higher ordinality (later in the sequence). This is why SJWs think it makes sense to say "first we will eliminate all racism; next we will eliminate global warming; next we will eliminate homelessness." It is immoral under these systems to give anyone a tax break while one person is still homeless. In fact, these systems simply provide no way to think ethically about taxation--taxation is numeric, and can't be integrated with or connected to their system of ethics.
These systems still come into irreconcilable conflicts when they must rank a high-priority rule applied to a low-priority object (eg "do not hurt chickens") against a low-priority rule applied to a high-priority objects (eg "feed humans enough protein").
I would summarise my anti-utilitarian argument as "the downside of the means is certain, the upside of the ends is unpredictable". People who say that the ends justify the means are usually acting with an unjustifiable certainty about what the ends will actually be.
That is a straightforwardly utilitarian/consequentialist argument.
Agree. I also agree with Melvin that people who say that the ends justify the means are usually acting with an unjustifiable certainty about what the ends will actually be. Utilitarianism doesn't work when combined with unjustifiable certainty. That may be another major reason some people hate it--they imagine a utilitarian acting with the same certainty they have in their actions.
I had a long argument with my brother once, who's still a fundamentalist Christian, about moral certainty. He insisted that you can't act morally without absolute certainty--but it turned out he didn't mean certainty about the outcome, but absolute certainty about the morality of the action, /regardless/ of the outcome. I probably told him he was using the word "morality" wrong. Neither of us understood each other at all.
Well, sure. I do wish people who are arguing against some self-described utilitarians making mistakes that are straightforwardly described in utilitarian terms, would say so, rather than say they're arguing against utilitarianism.
Regarding your brother: I think quite a bit these days about the relations between fixed moral personality psychology and normative theories. As a scalar consequentialist, I have very little trouble doing many kinds of good without the concept of moral obligation, but I increasingly feel like I'm running into a brick wall trying to explain it to some people, as if their motivational and self-assessment systems just can't work if they don't feel like there's a clear line between "good person" and "bad person" that they're on the right side of.
That seems like "just following the rules" morality.
It is often difficult to know the consequences of your actions, but easier to determine whether you have followed the rules.
That's true; I think all moral systems are ultimately aimed at the same goal -- good things happen and bad things don't.
Utilitarianism is about attempting to get there via an overly naive optimisation, like trying to get to the South Pole by walking directly south. You won't get there and you'll probably just wind up trampling on your neighbours' garden before eventually hitting a wall.
I disagree strongly with your first sentence. Deontology seems to be aimed at preserving the agent's ability to claim moral purity, regardless of how many bad things are happening outside the walls of self.
There are two types of people in the world. People who believe in binary thinking about people thinking in binary, and people who don’t.
Yes, but what about the second kind of person?!
Why do we only care about the kind of person who believes in binary thinking about people thinking in binary and believes in the people who don't?
Is the second kind of person the kind who believes in ambiguous translation from English to boolean logic?!
Boolean Philosophers demand to know.
Scott, I'm curious how you as a utilitarian make up your mind on issues like the above.
When faced with a particular disruptive protest, do you sit down and calculate all possible outcomes, their relative probability, assign a utility value to each, and make up your mind based on that?
Or do you fall back on some general sorts of principles like "it's wrong to inconvenience people even if you think it's for a good cause" and "this sort of thing is generally counterproductive anyway"?
I suspect it's closer to the latter than to the former, in which case are you _really_ being a utilitarian, or are you just following the same sort of heuristic-based morality that a non-utilitarian would?
I can't imagine meeting any self-described ethical consequentialist who is opposed to heuristics for daily decision-making.
I agree I'm following the heuristic based morality, I just think utilitarianism is the thing it's a heuristic for. That is, usually it's fine to rely on "don't kill people", but if someone else proposes that we *should* kill people in some situation (eg capital punishment), and we need to examine the heuristic and figure out whether it applies, then utilitarianism is the level we retreat to when we're trying to do that.
(often this is impossible, and so we instead retreat to even deeper heuristics, and maybe try to justify *those* by utilitarianism. Maybe utilitarianism never gets invoked at all; I just find it reassuring to know that there's an actual point to all the heuristics hiding somewhere in the background).
See also RM Hare's two-level utilitarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-level_utilitarianism
I would suggest that within the space of possible values, there's no preferred basis for selecting preference-satisfaction over preference-dissatisfaction, pleasure over pain, or any of that over paperclips. We care about these, not because they are fundamental, but because they are part of our innate evolved sense of morality and values. So it strikes me that utilitarianism isn't the final level to retreat to.
Instead, what if we take evolved human morality as fundamental, and call an agent behaving in accordance with this set of values "virtuous"? I find that wisdom and prudence would characterize that agent among others traits, and thus allow derivation of consequentialist reasoning for the sort of edge cases where it's appropriate.
Well that's fair enough, but I'm not sure how your moral system is practically different to anyone else's. The most ardent deontologist will, if asked, say that his heuristics, if followed consistently, would lead to a morally optimal world.
If there's any difference at all between real-world practical utilitarianism and real-world practical deontology it's that utilitarianism gives you more flexibility and encourages you to bend your heuristics when it seems like a good idea. This allows you to do things like murdering your landlady with an axe because you think you'll be the next Napoleon. If men were angels then this sort of flexibility would probably be a good idea, but since we're not I'm inclined towards a "no really, obey the heuristics" meta-rule.
"trying to play down concerns about COVID because that might incite mobs to attack Chinese people. This violates the usual moral rule against deception to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the panic."
Not quite a fair description-- individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly.
But it would still be deception, and deception is bad, apparently.
Eh, we know you don't mean that.
Yes, it would still be deception, but I think it's important to get the history right.
What he said doesn't actually preclude that. They were playing down covid BEFORE many, if not any of these supposed attacks took place, so what he said makes perfect sense.
And saying "individuals really were attacking Chinese people randomly" is vague to the point of meaningless. How many? How often? Probably less often that black people randomly attack white people, but anyway...
A different angle (black attacks on Chinese people not being taken as seriously as white attacks), but there were enough attacks that there were two mailing lists about them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h4Yq9NXbT4&t=26s&ab_channel=CharlieCheon
https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/AAPI-hate-crimes
I tend to agree with your positions here, but I think what people are getting at when they describe your positions as more utilitarian is that they exhibit certain tendencies common in utilitarianism, namely focusing on legible, quantifiable, localized, easy-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits over illegible, unquantifiable, diffuse, difficult-to-calculate/predict harms/benefits. Now, I'm not entirely against that tendency, but I think it is a genuine hurdle to deal with when trying to reason consequentially, and I think the list of issues you posted on each side very clearly falls into this dichotomy, with the first list generally involving a localized harm for a diffuse benefit, and the latter list involving a localized benefit for (perhaps) a diffuse harm
this is such a well put and useful point, and i think the reason i’m so taken with it is that it doesn’t pretend to glibly or simplistically resolve the question at a fully general level: one can’t just declare the diffuse and incalculable side should win, any more than the localized and calculable side. i don’t think it will resolve most specific problems. i think it’s a very good way to check that one’s mental model of the problem isn’t catastrophically incomplete. i’m always troubled by the loss of context that imo adds meaningful implicit risk in ‘decoupling’ approaches to problem-solving.
I’m confused by what statements like “forcably separating children from their families” are meant to imply. It seems like some real concerns about schooling have been turned into abstract principles that don’t make a lot of sense once I think about them more.
For one thing, it sounds like something done without parents’ consent. That seems rare? It seems like parents, at least, have choices, since private and home-schooling exist? In practice, this “family separation” is typically parents making their children go to school.
If parents decide that, all things considered, their local public school is pretty good, characterizing it as an unusual form of coercion seems wrong. It doesn’t seem different from parents making many other decisions they make for their kids. Is sending the kids off to summer camp wrong too?
It seems like the answer is always going to be “it depends,” but typically parents are given pretty wide latitude when deciding what’s best for their kids.
Also, most parents work and need someone else to take care of the kids while they work, because many jobs are incompatible with babysitting. So isn’t this “forceable separation” really due to the necessity of working to make a living?
And as to “confining them in a space that they’re not allowed to leave” - isn’t that the state of all children? At young ages there are physical limits (playpen, barriers). Later, parents will watch over their kids or make rules that they need to follow. It’s not like they can live where they wish and go where they please.
Maybe there’s some better way of describing what’s wrong and what needs to change.
My understanding of the school system in the US is that it is no longer as voluntary as it used to be. If you want to home school your child, in many cases you have to convince the state that you are doing it in a "correct" and approved way. You cannot just say "I'm homeschooling my child" and then proceed to leave them to play unsupervised in the back yard and call it a "Montessori educational program".
That's because the actual requirement is to educate your children, not send them to school, lest the children suffer the fate of these kids. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1fsat6o3
Note: My first comment below is slightly sarcastic, other two are more serious.
Given how notoriously successful in life Jewish people allegedly are (I don't have first hand knowledge of the truth to this), it seems silly to tell Jewish people that they are educating their children wrong.
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The problem with compulsory education, is that the people who define what education is are not infallible. Do you trust both an extreme left wing government, and an extreme right wing government to define what education looks like more than individual parents? Are you OK if they force teaching creationism? If they force teaching of evolution? If they force teaching of a whitewashed history? If they force teaching of critical race theory?
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Centralized definitions of what an education removes people's ability to explore the landscape of possible educational systems. Montessori schools are an example of a novel educational strategy that people are trying out. Maybe it works great, maybe not, but we won't know unless some people try it. Maybe the school referenced in your article churns out the best and the brightest, for reasons we don't yet understand but will become apparent to us later.
"Jew" is a large category, and the ones that are successful are not the same ones who are going to fake schools like this.
At the school in question "teaching in done only in Yiddish, and no lessons in English, reading, spelling, writing, math, geography, history, civics, or science were carried out." So I rather doubt that they "churn out the best and the brightest." And, in fact, there is lots of evidence that they don't. Nor do I think it is ethical to essentially gamble with kids' futures on the off chance that "for reasons we don't understand" things will turn out for the best.
More importantly, you are not addressing the issue I raised. You are assuming that the state tells private schools how to teach and dictates specific curriculum. It is my understanding that that is not the case; schools are required to teach subjects like math and science, but there is very little in the way of mandates re the specifics thereof. For example in California, "Students attending private schools are exempt from California's compulsory attendance law if the schools offer instruction in the several branches of study required in the state's public schools. Private schools are not required to follow the state's adopted Content Standards." https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/non-public-education/regulation-map/california.html
> schools are required to teach subjects like math and science
This exemplifies the crux of our disagreement. IIUC, you are of the belief that teaching these core subjects should be mandated and all parents should be forced to ensure their children receive education in those subjects.
While I personally agree that these are good subjects to teach and I would encourage parents to ensure their children receive an education in these areas, I do not believe that I should have the right to override parent choices for their children's education.
Long ago teaching religion was considered critical, and reading/writing/arithmetic/science was not. Society at the time felt this was the best way to create a society of good/productive citizens. Today, we believe that reading/writing/arithmetic are the best way to create a society of good/productive citizens. We are probably more right today than we used to be, but perhaps in the future we'll realize that we were wrong. The best way to find out is to allow parents to educate their children how they wish and see which ones turn out the best. Some children *will* receive poor educations, but some will receive superior educations and so we make the trade in hope of a better future.
As an example, while I do believe reading/writing/arithmetic are quite useful, I actually think that teaching children how to learn, how to be curious, the scientific method, how to find truth, philosophy of knowledge, etc. are more useful and more important to teach at a young age. If a parent wanted to experiment with focusing on these things I would be quite interested to see the outcome, but this would be illegal in California based on the rules you linked.
>I do not believe that I should have the right to override parent choices for their children's education.
Yes, you do, because you are protecting the rights of children, which you completely ignore. A child who goes through the school mentioned in the article will have very few opportunities in contemporary society and will be deprived of the ability to make all sorts of choices as an adult. It is immoral to do that to a child, and to sacrifice them to some vague notion that, if we sacrifice enough of them, we might hit upon a a successful path.
> but this would be illegal in California based on the rules you linked.
That is completely incorrect. You are conflating content areas and skills. California in fact says that schools should teach all of the things you mention. Eg: https://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/documents/cangsskinder-topicdci.pdf
> is typically parents making their children go to school.
What??
They're literally legally required to send their kids to school, even if they don't want them there
It seems this is contested:
> In Meyer v. Nebraska and Farrington v. Tokushige, U.S. Supreme Court cases of the 1920s, the fundamental right of parents to direct the education of their children was established. These decisions are still heavily cited today by those claiming the right to home school in federal and state courts.
https://www.findlaw.com/education/education-options/home-schooling-and-the-u-s-constitution.html
> The United States Department of Education estimates that 1.5 million K–12 students were homeschooled in the United States in 2007 (with a confidence interval of 1.3 million to 1.7 million), constituting nearly three percent of students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_States
When I say "mandatory public schooling", I mean "schooling which is mandatory whether or not parents consent".
Although most parents don't make a giant fuss about it, I feel like this is similar to how most people don't make a fuss about paying their taxes, even if they wish the tax rate was lower - it's not really worth making a fuss when you'll definitely lose.
But why would they lose? Home schooling is a thing. What sort of dispute are you imagining that parents would lose?
It seems like home schooling makes public school optional in practice, except that someone does still need to take care of the kids, so it’s often difficult to implement.
My understanding is that in many places in the US (I'm not sure if it is a state or federal thing), if you homes chool your children you must do so in a way approved by the state. You cannot simply let your children help you at work, or play in the back yard all day. You must prove to the state that you are "educating them" in a way that the state approves of.
Yes, that matches my understanding of how it works. But it’s not a “forcable separation” and it’s not “public schooling.” I don’t know how rigorous those standards are. Do homeschoolers complain about them?
Presumably the parents who sent their kids to this private school are unhappy: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1fsat6o3. I have also heard anecdotal reports from home schooling parents complaining about the bureaucratic burden, as well as disagreements with what is required. Montessori schools for example may not have a curriculum that meets requirements in all states. And of course, there is the general discomfort (which I think is reasonable) of having a social worker come to your house and grade you on whether you are raising your children properly. There are also odd cases of corruption here and there where these procedures are weaponized, though these are outliers.
You can see requirements by state at https://hslda.org/legal, and in particular check out the red colored states which have incredibly strict requirements which includes number of hours, annual assessments, and credential requirements for the "teacher" (even if it is parent).
Adults who recevied no education under the guise of home schooling complain. The worst case scenario of home schooling is at least as.bad.as the worst case.scenario.of.public education.
Yeah, on Reddit you can find a place where adults talk about how their homeschooling was awesome, and also a place where adults talk about how their homeschooling was horrible. It seems like school gives you mostly an average experience, and homeschooling will send you to an extreme... but both extremes are possible.
The positive experience is typically: had more fun, more free time, learned more. We all know that, because that is how we would probably do it.
The negative experience, I remember two frequent patterns. One pattern is crazy parents, either religious fanatics or some other kind that... opposes the civilization in general and all its knowledge. These people are keeping their kids uneducated on purpose. It doesn't necessarily feel like "not learning" for the kids, because they sometimes have to read lots of religious texts or do some other kind of bullshit work. But ultimately they learn nothing useful, despite all the work.
Another pattern, which was a news for me, are basically parents who originally wanted to do it the right way, and then they... burned out, or suffered depression, or otherwise became unable to do homeschooling the right way... and they refuse to *admit it and give up*. So the kids are at home, but no one actually takes care of them; maybe they learn on their own, maybe they don't learn at all; but the parents are definitely not explaining things to them or buying textbooks or hiring tutors. The parents are presumably also not happy about the outcome, but they keep doing it anyway.
I am also from time to time described as a utilitarian. The relevant entry in the index of my first book is "Utilitarian, why I am not a."
Granted. And yet, without fail, every time I have the first conversation with a fellow self-described consequentialist libertarian, your name comes up quickly. And as consequentialists, we don't tend to truck in the "You're not a *real* x!" sorts of argument anyway.
I think this footnote is a bit disingenuous to the pro-gun side:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms.
I think a more correct description of their position would be:
> being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives today to protect against tyranny in the future.
This is definitely a utilitarian argument (lives today for lives in the future), but it isn't just sacrificing lives for the sake of being able to own a gun.
Good luck facing down the military, and extremely militarised police force(s) with a few pea shooters and shot guns. If gun rights supporters were serious about fighting for liberty then they should be arguing for mass ownership of tanks.
My point here was not to argue whether the anti-gun-control people are right or wrong, but rather to suggest that the article steel man their argument rather than straw man it.
The steel man is that the purpose of gun ownership is to fend off tyranny. If we agree that tyranny is bad, then the actual debate isn't about whether gun control works, nor whether gun control reduces short term deaths. It instead becomes an interesting debate about whether gun ownership prevents tyranny or not.
I probably won't engage much on the specific gun control debate in this thread, but the gist of the steel man for why gun ownership prevents tyranny is that it is extremely rare for a government trying to oppress a population to engage in a scorched earth strategy (e.g., nuking cities). Instead they tend to go door to door and try to surgically remove combatants while leaving the pliable people (useful labor) untouched. If everyone owns a gun, this strategy becomes *extremely* hard/costly to execute.
If the government starts doing indiscriminate killing of their rebelling citizens (e.g., nuking cities) they very rapidly lose support of their own military and rapidly radicalize the entire population against them. Nukes, fighter jets, and tanks don't work super well when your 10,000 man defense force around your seat of power is having its supply lines of food interrupted by by 10,000,000 people with rifles spread out over your entire country.
Exactly how many million americans do you imagine the military are going to be able to stop? You think they're just going to blow up entire city blocks?
The left really, really don't want conservatives owning guns and it has nothing to do with school shootings.
Look at how well do the drone-delivered grenades work in Ukraine and think how ideologically polarised the US is, then add 2+2. You're delusional if you think guerillas will be fighting boots-on-the-ground military in a hypothetical civil war.
Some people would rather die trying than become completely subjugated without a fight. Not hard to understand.
This is a dumb objection when it's illegal to own anything beyond, as you say, pea shooters and shot guns.
Private ownership of cannons is legal in the US.
Darn it, I don't like guns but now you have me perking up and wagging my tail.
A local orchestra version of the 1812 Overture with *real* artillery accompaniment? Don't tempt me! 😀
Sounds like an idea for a video game: spread culture *and* obliterate the enemy at the same time! Real cannon, real shells, real targets, ring them bells!
You know I had to look it up, seems like it's been done by several militaries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGPqtXv72Wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0cqBj_m08k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO-krN0xSZw
I'm presuming not with live ammo, though 😈
You might get a kick out of this (range day for a bunch of private cannons): https://youtu.be/T-xMCFOwllE?si=Nn3XqkT9NL2Ug5EN
Thank you for that link. Both entertaining *and* informative (I didn't know about Sir Joseph Whitworth previously).
There is definitely something in humans which likes "fire! boom! 'splodey!" and though future societies may decide to polygenically screen that out for the sake of harmony and such, I think we'll miss it. No more fireworks? No more "boom! fire! 'splodey!", we'll miss something.
There are many times throughout history where rebels with small arms managed to overthrow governments that were, on paper, much stronger militarily.
Bingo. Although I'm not 100% on the pro-gun side, it's an argument that I take very seriously as an ethical consequentialist.
Another thing that a consequentialist ought to mention about guns is crime deterrence, which (as with silently prevented harms in general) tends to be ignored by deontologists.
Pffft. I like guns, I've shot a bunch of them, my family has a ton of them, and although I'm apolitical, I hate the Left *at least* as much as the Right, and even with those factors in favor, I'm gonna say "to defend against tyranny" is a blatantly ridiculous, toothless reason.
10 years ago, we literally found out that our own government spies on literally everything you ever do, say, or send in any electronic medium whatsoever, and keeps all of it for all time on NSA servers to be correlated and machine-learninged and used against you whenever anyone feels like it in the future.
And what did the gun people do? These folks who had been *promising* us they were purely about preventing tyranny for decades, and boy, if ever any tyrant steps out behind the rosebush is HE going to be sorry! They did nothing. Not a peep. Not a protest, not a petition, not an "insurgency," not one gun fired in anger at all. With scarcely a whimper, they tucked their tail and scurried inside so they could eat fattening food in front of the TV for the next decade, all while continuing to use their electronic devices and allowing the government to spy on them however they wanted, literally 24/7/365.
You had your tyranny, and did literally nothing about it. People who think they'd defend against tyranny don't deserve guns, because they didn't and aren't.
A variant of this is to observe that people who cannot protect themselves will be more willing to tolerate oppressive government in exchange for police protection than people who can protect themselves. No knock raids, civil forfeiture, mass surveillance don't look so bad if you believe the alternative is being murdered in your bed, having your things stolen, being raped, ... . So it is sacrificing some lives to reduce tyranny in the present, with the conflict happening through ordinary political mechanisms, not civil war.
This part did catch my attention:
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
...That is not a "usual" moral rule. As far as I can see, very few people have any issue with telling others that their opinions are bad and that they should feel bad. This is just a case of your values being non-standard.
>As far as I can see, very few people have any issue with telling others that their opinions are bad and that they should feel bad.
He didn't say "telling others their opinions are bad".
He said: Shaming, insulting and doxxing people.
I don't believe you don't understand the difference.
It often elides into each other, doesn't it?
I tell the painful truth, you doxx, he censors
Russell conjugations are fun, aren't they?
"Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad" is about as close to the definition of "shaming" as I can see, and insulting is a normal rhetorical part of lots of discourse that, again, very few people have issue with. Doxxing is the one of these that's not like the others.
I think there's a usual moral rule against bullying and that sometimes this crosses the line into that.
My intuition is that people are perfectly fine with bullying as long as the target "deserves" it. Now, obviously people draw the line at very different places, but even the staunchest anti-bullying advocates aren't going to be against telling a literal, honest to god Nazi to jump off a cliff. In their eyes, it would be immoral for them *not* to stand against blatant evil.
You are the only person I've seen that's even close to a rhetorical pacifist. It's not that others are compromising their values, it's just that you have very different values than most. Most people are willing to fight bad ideas at their source, not content to let the "marketplace of ideas" sort it out.
All the things you list as reasons people call you utilitarian just seem like very normal political views lots of people have. I guess I find it unlikely this is really why people consider you a utilitarian? Isn't it more likely you get called a utilitarian for beliefs you have that are rare among non-utilitarian, like (just to take a random example I remember) that the math shows eating beef is morally better than eating chicken?
You've got it. Nearly everyone who's anti-utilitarian when the tradeoff is weird is tacitly utilitarian when the tradeoff is status quo.
Really? The organ markets and genetic engineering and earning-to-give are normal political views?
Organ markets and genetic engineering are common subjects of mainstream political debate with plenty of people on both sides. I found a 2012 poll with 72% support for compensation for organ donors (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/05/16/152498553/poll-americans-show-support-for-compensation-of-organ-donors#). The main concern in medicine with genetic engineering seems to be the safety of the current technologies and I think this is sincere. Embryo selection already exists and the most significant objections come from pro-lifers.
"Earning-to-give" is obscure as a concept that exists only within a single small movement, but the way you expressed it in the post ("Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity") is obviously really popular in the US. If you stated it as "the best thing a smart person who wants to do good should do is go into finance and make as much money as possible" it would be less popular but also perhaps suggest some more insight into why people object to utilitarianism.
That NPR article reads very differently to me. First of all, 72% seems to be the proportion *of people who approve of compensating donations* who also approve of having insurers deliver the compensation (with the non-exclusive alternatives of charities and the gov't). Second, the only form of compensation that finds majority approval (60%) is credit toward future health care, with direct cash transfer the least-approved at 41%. Third, by pooling two exclusive responses, I see 64% saying compensation should be less than about $33,900 in 2024 dollars (frustratingly the article doesn't clarify whether they asked about specific higher brackets, and the link to the full poll results is dead). Fourth, and I think most damning to the idea that this hints at a nascent pro-organ-market constituency, 60% say there is a meaningful distinction between "compensation" (as the survey consistently described the policy in approval questions) and "purchase".
Overall that speaks more to me of a public that admires or appreciates organ donation and wants to reward the people who do it for their nobility of spirit, but (speculative) is probably instinctively uncomfortable with the idea of anyone with zero innate moral urge to donate deciding to do so for compensation, and (much more speculative) might even be less concerned with the possibility of exploitation than the sense that that person doesn't deserve the reward in the same way as the determined altruist.
Somehow I just know selling organs is going to lead to the same outcome as we currently have with home mortgages. Where older people already own all the land you need to exist, and many young people will be pressured into selling their health to let an elderly citizen live a bit longer, just so that they can get a rung into the property ladder to have a stable roof over their head. Then the ones that make it to old age, will repeat the cycle, harvesting young peoples' organs to live another few years.
Might be interesting to look into the demographics of the people currently selling their full blood / blood plasma for monetary compensation, and compare to places where receiving compensation for blood donation is banned. Those are the same people who will feel obliged to donate their organs, for example to put food on the table for the next few years, or to get out of debt.
US-only study of plasma center locations: https://sites.fordschool.umich.edu/poverty2021/files/2022/07/Blood-Plasma-and-Poverty.pdf
I'd not be so opposed to a system where the government donates some amount of money to the charity of your choice when you make an organ donation, but any system based around direct monetary compensation will lead to 5000 - 40000 poor people donating a kidney because it will get them 100.000 dollars over 10 years. Then maybe after those 10 years they'll donate a lung, a cornea, or some other organ which it's nominally perfectly fine to live without but in sum will lead to lower QALY's for the donator only because they were made poor by the economic system.
>only because they were made poor by the economic system.
Is a person with an IQ of 70 *made* poor by the "economic system"? The only way that makes sense if you believe that an aggressive wealth redistribution not existing is "making" them poor, which is not really how the word would normally be used.
I do not believe trading a kidney for $100,000 will actually lead to a lower quality of life. I think it will lead to an astoundingly higher one.
> Then the ones that make it to old age, will repeat the cycle, harvesting young peoples' organs to live another few years.
Finally, a workable solution to the housing crisis!
Hi, Scott. Congrats on your (relatively recent) paternity.
Myself, I have a deep-seated dislike for Utilitarianism, and I'd attribute it to a pendulum swing - I was a committed Marxist when young, and I've grown to loathe any discourse of ends-justify-means EVER. That, indeed, is my greatest gripe.
I don't think I have an aversion to 'calculating things', but I frame things like paid organ-donation as the starting/facilitating step to a Greater Evil that will plausibly follow, meaning I would fight from getting started in the first place. I also have a Kantian dislike for lying that makes me extremely prone to a similar unwillingness to any trade-offs in this regard.
Another thing that irks me about Utilitarianism (just one more, as I could go on forever) is its disregard for individuals as such. Natural and inviolable rights might be a social construction, but building them as axioms that should never be broken is less prone to the typical bad tampering of "Benevolent" others.
Interesting. I consider Marx profoundly anti-utilitarian, since his theory of political change involves groups binding together and pursuing power to achieve their own self-interest, as opposed to the classical liberal enlightenment theory underlying utilitarianism, that reason and empathy can lead us toward objective universalist concern for well-being.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Peter Singer is a founder of the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
I'd say Marxism (especially as Marxism-Leninism) is strongly naively utilitarian in the sense of 'the end justifies the means' - attaining a classless egalitarian society is such an absolute good that practically no price is too much to pay to obtain it. It is also a good framed with 'a universalist concern for well-being', or at least for the vast majority of humans. In another way, Marxism is implicitly anti-moral (morality is just the superstructural propaganda by which a ruling class justifies its position), although this still leaves the issue of how intellectuals can 'betray their class' by adopting Marxist thought, and why it is so lucky and convenient that the working class, in fighting against its predecessor, will necessarily put an end to all class structures and domination.
comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the majical “sacred rule” nonsense try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
1) People with more deontological intuitions and preferences are seen as more trustworthy and preferable than consequentialists (even by people who report having consequentialist intuitions!), and this seems attributable to their being perceived to be more reliable and thus predictable - the preference swaps when you frame the consequentialists as more behaviourally consistent. Though consequentialists reliably do whatever produces the best consequences, since what counts as best varies with context, this makes them seem unreliable (Everett et al., 2016; Turpin et al., 2021). Is this just an evolutionary hang up, or something that's still relevant? I think the latter, because...
2) It seems conspicuous that the first group of things Scott endorses are 'norms that are already largely operative in society' (don't ban speech, don't harass, don't lie, don't shame) while the second are proposed changes to the current status quo with mostly untested consequences (New drugs, new gene editing, sell your organs. Note the main exception to the first category, getting rid of traditonal schooling, seems like more of a break from what's come before). Although utilitarians care about 'the greater good' they also really care about stable cooperation and coordination, which relies on people internalising norms and upholding them mostly unquestioningly. I'm nowhere near the first to say this, but there's a very plausible case to be made that once we're at the level of deciding which norms we want people to internalise for the long haul, the first category are the ones utilitarians would want people to land on (rather than 'attempt to maximise utility'), and this is going to require being disposed towards not breaking them even when it really seems like doing so would produce better consequences.
If the issue with weird new consequentialist proposals is risk aversion, it ought to be discussed as such, rather than mischaracterized as evidence against consequentialism. Status quo consequentialist tradeoffs are the backbone of any complex society.
Let me try this again. I have a better approach that doesn’t pretend to know best as to how others should live, nor fails to mention other arguments for positions than those you’ve mentioned. Try thinking about morality in terms of not using force to have others comply with how some would have them live. Respect personal choice as a “universal” for all. To site just two examples, instead of the magical “sacred rule” nonsense, try the fundamental right to defend oneself, or the right to use and dispose of one’s own body as personally chosen. There are good counter arguments for every position you’ve selected where coercion is chosen as a means to some end.
I don't think this works. Agreeing that everyone has the right to defend themselves -
1. Do you have the right to own nukes?
2. Do you have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like they're going to start trouble?
3. Do you have the right to shoot someone *really* suspicious if you estimate 99.9% chance they're going to start trouble?
4. If a kid pokes you in the supermarket, what levels of self-defense are permissible? What if they keep doing it and their parent won't stop them? What if it's an adult? What if they plan to fight back?
I think no clear-and-fast moral law, including ones about personal choice or right to self-defense, answer these questions. I think "personal choice" and "right to self-defense" are good rights that should be protected, but that we need a deeper basis for our moral reasoning before we even know what we're talking about when we talk about them.
To answer your questions: I don't have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like he's going to start trouble. I do have the right to shoot someone who in fact has started trouble. If a kid or an adult pokes me in a supermarket, does he persist in doing so or was it an accident? At what point is my life or health threatened? At that point I do have the right to defend myself. As for clear and fast moral laws, when actions are questionable, that's what courts are for. But, to violate my right to defend myself categorically is an authoritarian outrage of the foundational moral justification for the existence of civil authority in the first place.
Where I live I can legally defend myself (or others) against an illegal attack as long as my defensive measures does not go further than necessary to stop the attack, and is in proportion to the attack. This includes self defense against government agents if the attack and use of force is illegal.
That sounds pretty reasonable as a principle for when you have the right to self defense to me.
*edit so:
>1. Do you have the right to own nukes?
No
>2. Do you have the right to shoot someone suspicious who looks like they're going to start trouble?
No
>3. Do you have the right to shoot someone *really* suspicious if you estimate 99.9% chance they're going to start trouble?
No
>4. If a kid pokes you in the supermarket, what levels of self-defense are permissible? What if they keep doing it and their parent won't stop them? What if it's an adult? What if they plan to fight back?
You are allowed to talk to the kid or hold the kids wrist or similar to stop them, but no more use of force than necessary. Similar with an adult, but use of more force is reasonable. If they start fighting you, you can probably use enough force to stop them as necessary. Killing or seriously harming them would only be permittable if there were a real and imminent threat to you of serious injury or death.
This post sounds a bit 'Less Normal People Than Thou '?
This is a great post. Thanks for writing. Are parents actually legally prohibited from home schooling their kids in the US??
I think it depends on the state.
Every state lets you home school, it's just more of a pita in some than others.
I believe this is correct. On the whole, blue States seem to regulate homeschooling more tightly (not a surprise), but no State makes it flatly illegal.
https://hslda.org/legal
Such a prohibition exists in Germany.
More formally, children are required to go to school, regardless of the parents' wishes.
I don't really follow the argument here. You agree that you are utilitarian (or at least that that is a "fair descriptor"). I'm confident that you believe the utilitarian calculus supports your favoured policy in each of the examples you give (and I mostly agree with you). Therefore somebody who supported the opposed policies on utilitarian grounds would simply be empirically mistaken. But since you've given them as examples of "things many non-utilitarians believe are okay", they presumably support them on non-utilitarian grounds.
Supporting, on non-utilitarian grounds, policies which offend against the utilitarian calculus doesn't make someone a stealth utilitarian.
Scott,
The simplest explanation for why people do not see the items you listed as true exceptions to the usual morals, is that they do not really believe in rules like (I will use the verbiage they might adopt) freedom of platform use for Nazi recruitment drives, letting weirdos make their children as crazy as they are, telling people the truth when you think they'll do something stupid as a response to it, never interrupting the complacency of the public even when they are ignoring something awful, or setting aside a practice that has defined who is "in" and who is "out" for most of their childhood, right when it looks like the wrong people have managed to get "in."
In fact, I think it's been rather broadly advertised that, among a certain milieu, freedom of speech in particular is no longer a sacred principle. The question on their minds: would you violate their ("the") principles for the greater good? Conversationally, "your" principles are a stand-in for their principles.
When people here are talking about utilitarianism or ethics in general, I am never sure if they are talking about utilitarianism just being true or false, or about it being the nicest system for our civilization to use.
If you are a serious moral realist, you just think a certain morality is true. This could mean a moral rule really exists somewhere in the universe, or, as I find more plausible, people in different states of the world are somehow comparable. So one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B.
If one believes utilitarianism is true in this sense, it really just doesn't matter what our intuitions are or whether people often abuse utilitarianism for governmental overreach that causes greater harm. Utilitarianism would just literally be the correct framework in which one can decide whether a person, or a group of people, is better or worse off in World A or B. A moral system would just be true, like the laws of nature.
The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
I remember one Less Wrong comment about which open philosophical questions one has strong opinions on that went something like this:
"1. Clearly, moral realism is false and antirealism is correct.
2. Clearly, utilitarianism is the best moral system."
To me, this sounds like saying, "Clearly, physics isn't actually real and an illusion; also, clearly, Einstein was right about everything."
I think there are only 2 options:
1. either we live in a universe that somehow contains moral rules (probably utilitarian ones), or
2. there are no rules, and the world is just nihilistic.
Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way.
I suspect people find option 1. to be too woo and unscientific, but option 2. is too cruel and unhuman, so they pretend we can do ethics even in an only-atoms, no-rules world.
If anything, people should make it clear if they are talking about realist or antirealist ethics. If you are talking about realist ethics, saying something leads to bad decision-making, government overreach, people can't think about second-order consequences—all just aren't arguments. It would be like saying chemistry isn't real because it would allow people to make bombs.
However, if we are talking about anti-realist ethics, those might all be good arguments.
Top comment.
I don't think that there is a contradiction between thinking that 1. "ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation" and thinking that 2. "one can say that Pete is objectively better off in World A as compared to World B. All else being equal, world A is better than world B".
So, what I mean is that I can believe 1. that human moral intuitions stem from evolution, and are not somehow inherent in the universe, and 2. Due to my evolved moral intuitions, I want my fellow human beings to be happy - and to achieve that I should follow the moral system that has the highest chance of giving that outcome.
In fact, I think that 1. is trivially true, unless you believe that morals are infused by some metaphysical entity (e.g. god). If our moral intuitions come from our brain, then our brain was developed through evolution, and as such also our morals.
That's why I used the word "objective." Two identical stones have more mass than one times this stone. This is true even if no one knows it or if everyone thinks it is false. Clearly, you can think some person is better off in one of two worlds. But some people might disagree. The question is whether there is an objectively correct answer. Like there is in the example with the stones.
In the moral-realism-world, I also wouldn't equate our intuitions with the correct morality. This clearly can't be the case by just considering that people have very different intuitions, and only one of them could be correct.
If we live in antirealism-evolution-just-gave-us-intuitions-world, why should we care about our intuitions? Evolution also gave me lots of intuitions, like being scared of the dark, that I don't care about a lot. Why, if evolution made us prefer atoms in certain complicated structures, should we care about that now? Now that we know, evolution just gave us these beliefs.
I mostly don't want to just argue for moral realism because I am also not very convinced of it (although I think I find it more plausible than the average ACX reader). But I think there is a way ethics could be more than just intuition.
A priori, I would expect this universe, made of atoms, to be devoid of life and consciousness. Even if I learned about life, I think I would still expect it not to have consciousness. But, apparently, it does have consciousness. We don't know what it is, but somehow, atoms can create consciousness. And conditional on consciousness existing, conscious beings experiencing less suffering; being objectively the only thing that matters in the universe doesn't seem totally crazy to me.
But I notice mostly that I should read some more books on this topic.
> That's why I used the word "objective." Two identical stones have more mass than one times this stone. This is true even if no one knows it or if everyone thinks it is false. Clearly, you can think some person is better off in one of two worlds. But some people might disagree. The question is whether there is an objectively correct answer. Like there is in the example with the stones.
The only way there can be an objective "right" answer to this is if we have an objective and measurable definition of what is good. I don't believe that such a definition can exist outside our minds (or outside a mind, i.e. not necessarily a human mind), and that good and bad have no objective meaning in nature or in the universe. However, as with many abstract concepts, while the concept of what is good and what is moral is fussy in the edge cases, we can often more or less agree with some common core - and that is good enough. So in practice I believe it makes sense to say that world A is better than world B, and we should prefer world A. Someone might disagree - but so what? In that case we could try to discuss and come to a common understanding. Everybody would not be able to agree, but that doesn't mean we should not try to optimize for what we think is good.
>If we live in antirealism-evolution-just-gave-us-intuitions-world, why should we care about our intuitions? Evolution also gave me lots of intuitions, like being scared of the dark, that I don't care about a lot. Why, if evolution made us prefer atoms in certain complicated structures, should we care about that now? Now that we know, evolution just gave us these beliefs.
As I stated in the previous post, I think that we live in the evolution-gave-us-moral-intuitions world is trivially true, given that there are no metaphysical entity imposing such rules. So to me, this sounds a bit like arguing that we should believe in something because it gives a better outcome - which I reject. We should believe (and in fact have no choice than to believe) in what we believe to be the truth. Why should we care about morals, if there are no objective good? Well we don't have much choice do we? Why should we not care? After all this affects our felt well-being in a very real way. I certainly care about my well-being, and that of my fellow human beings, even if I can't define it precisely and know that others might disagree about what is good.
>A priori, I would expect this universe, made of atoms, to be devoid of life and consciousness. Even if I learned about life, I think I would still expect it not to have consciousness. But, apparently, it does have consciousness. We don't know what it is, but somehow, atoms can create consciousness. And conditional on consciousness existing, conscious beings experiencing less suffering; being objectively the only thing that matters in the universe doesn't seem totally crazy to me.
This is an argument for empiricism, and a good point. The world, in fact, often turns out to be more complicated and wonderous than what we would expect from pure logic and thought - this is an important insight, and one I agree with full-heartedly as an engineer. Therefore, we should always try to verify our theories with observed data and ground our thoughts.
> The other common viewpoint is that it doesn't make sense for the universe to contain ethics, which is an extremely good counterargument. But in that world, why are we even talking about ethics? Clearly, we all want to be happy, and most of us also want civilization to be well off, not oppressive, and so on, but why? If ethics is just made up by evolution to improve cooperation, why care about it?
because different strategies contain different trade-offs along a pareto frontier.
So, if I'm understanding you, your argument is something like:
1. Realist morality is either a "moral rule" existing out in the universe, which doesn't make sense, or;
2. An objective fact about what makes people better off, which is utilitarianism.
3. Antirealist "morality" is meaningless, leaving just a practical quasi-utilitarian day-to-day thinking (I'm not sure if you're saying this), but which either way certainly rules out any non-utilitarian morality.
4. Therefore, non-utilitarian morality is incoherent.
If that's the essence of your argument, the fault is in 2, which just assumes utilitarian ("better off") value is the only value, and is thus circular. One could just well argue "morality can only be either a rule floating out in the universe, or a description of the rules and principles by which people act, which is just deontology". Or replace "morality is either a rule floating out there, or a judgement about people's character, which is just virtue ethics", as an argument for either of those being the only coherent morality. It's a circular argument that just amounts to "I can't see any value in anything but x, therefore x is the only form of value" and ignoring the arguments made for other moral systems.
Nobody grounds morality in anything like "a rule floating out there in the universe". It's either grounded in reason (Kant) or emotion (Hume). Some would purport to ground it in God, which is antecedent to the universe (like reason) on any normal definition, but most of them don't *really* do so if they think about it, and if you point out the Euthyphro Dilemna: they'd usually ground it more or less ultimately in reason. And there arguments for many different moral theories following from reason, from the nature of human will or facts about reality. You've presented one of them (for utilitarianism) but it's far from the only one.
As for this
"Either it is actually bad if random people you don't know suffer, because suffering is just objectively bad. Or it just doesn't matter if people suffer; it's just atoms behaving in a certain way."
You can be a moral nihilist (it doesn't matter, there is no "matter"), or a relativist (it doesn't *objectively* matter, but it can to you), if not a realist. A relativist has to explain the existence of moral disagreement. A nihilist has to declare that all our moral feelings and moral language are an illusion that refers to nothing at all, and to explain where these illusions come from. And any appeal to "our evolved intuitions give us the illusion of this thing called morality which doesn't really exist" is going to look a lot less parsimonious than "morality exists and *just is* our evolved intuitions". And if some of those intuitions are near universal across humans, then that's close enough practically to realism, at least until we encounter an AGI or alien.
Tl: dr -- moral realism is the prima facie position. The correct form of it remains an open question.
That's pretty similar to what I meant, but I wasn't trying to make an argument for utilitarianism, mostly.
I think it's easiest to imagine a 2x2 matrix with realism or no realism and ethics important or unimportant.
The four combinations would be:
1. Nihilism (antirealism and ethics are fake)
2. Standard realism (ethics are real and important)
3. What everyone here seems to believe (antirealism and ethics are important)
4. I've never heard someone argue for this (realism and ethics are unimportant).
We can ignore 4., which I have never heard someone argue for. But the other three all seem about equally plausible to me. Some I find more convincing than others, but importantly, I would assign each one at least a 10% chance of being true.
But in this post, and generally on LW and ACX, people seem to always assume 3. This is especially important for this post because most of Scott's arguments only work in antirealism, but ethics is still an important world (as I argued in a different comment).
Also, if realism is true, I don't expect the true morality to be as simple as utilitarianism. I would expect it would be to utilitarianism as quantum physics is to Newtonian physics. But I agree with you that just saying that I find something consequentialist more convincing than something deontological isn't a sufficient argument here. But again, I mostly didn't want to argue for a specific point, but just say that to me, it seems like there are multiple positions that seem plausible, and this discussion seems to assume 3. being true.
>being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms
Citation needed. So far as I know, there's no established causation of more guns among the populace -> more deaths. America is of course an obvious outlier in its death-by-gunshot rate, but it's not the only country where people have plenty of legal guns, and those others don't seem to have the same problem.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Well I read a whole lot of supposedly scientific papers that try to calculate the impact of "misinformation" and other ideological content using statistical models, so I'm not sure about that. COVID response was a disaster partly because it consisted of imposing authoritarian decisions using justifications based in pseudo-scientific calculations.
Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful. But it looked like utilitarianism and that seemed to reassure people. So I don't know.
>Now that wasn't utilitarianism, because any actual properly done calculations showed that the cost/benefit tradeoff of basically everything done back then was insanely awful.
I keep seeing people on here saying that any proper cost/benifit analysis shows that covid measures were awful, but have yet to see any convincing analysis showing this. Do you have a link for this proper cost-benefit analysis?
Consider the Cochrane report that showed masks had no impact. The costs of making and buying all those masks was certainly >0, so, it therefore had a negative tradeoff.
Lockdowns also had no impact. There are studies showing no correlation between lockdown severity and outcomes. This is expected given what was known about the way the virus spread as early as April 2020 (or arguably earlier given that coronaviruses always spread in the same way). But obviously lockdowns were catastrophically expensive and the inflation we have now mostly traces to the cost of that.
That the masks had little impact sounds plausible to me, and this was also debated a lot at the time, but the cost of mask would be pretty negligible - I doubt i spent more than the equivalent of $100 on masks in total.
That lockdowns had no impact at all is a pretty extraordinary claim. That there is little correlation between the severity of lockdowns and outcomes proves very little, even if true. For example it would make sense if stronger lockdowns were correlated with harder hit places. In my country the lockdowns were pretty light, but people here generally were able and willing to lock down voluntarily to a larger degree than many other places due to good infrastructure (and culture) for allowing from home work for example. I find the cost-benefit and effect of covid measures and counterfactuals to be a very complicated question, and I find it very unlikely that the best course of action (for a government) was do nothing. And still I have not seen one thorough cost-benefit analysis that shows what you claim...
$100 per person multiplied by the entire population is a massive cost, and of course the cost of masks was not primarily monetary but social (children who found it harder to learn to speak, the constant stress and fear they created etc).
> That lockdowns had no impact at all is a pretty extraordinary
Heh. It's pretty anodyne and well accepted by people who followed COVID science closely. I mean if you go into spaces where people don't just blindly eat the words of public health officials, expressing this belief this would be considered a "How do you do fellow kids" kind of opening.
> That there is little correlation between the severity of lockdowns and outcomes proves very little, even if true.
It proves there can be no effect, because whilst correlation may not imply causation, causation always implies correlation.
Bear in mind that again, this is totally unsurprising. Lockdown was first trialled in ~Feb 2020 when there was an outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It was caught very fast and everyone, not only the index patients, were immediately restricted to their cabins. A cruise ship is the perfect place to implement lockdowns because people don't even have to leave their cabins to go to the supermarket, food and everything else can be brought to their door and left outside. Enforcement is likewise trivial. Yet the lockdown had no effect, instead COVID cases appeared randomly throughout the ship. By the time the outbreak was over however only about a quarter of people on board had become sick. Implications:
1. It was able to spread long distances via the air ducts, not only via droplets. Obvious, because SARS-1 could spread in the same way (and colds/flus must also be able to from lots of prior evidence). Lockdown and social distancing policy assumed exclusively close-distance droplet transmission.
2. Everyone was exposed but most people had pre-existing immunity. Therefore, COVID epidemics would stop before 100% of the population had become sick. Academic and public health models all assumed 100% susceptibility.
From these two facts you could immediate understand that none of the proposed policies would slow COVID down, and also that none of the doomsday scenarios would happen.
The Diamond Princess is strong evidence both that lockdowns did not work (a controlled experiment, in effect), and also explains why they had no effect.
> And still I have not seen one thorough cost-benefit analysis that shows what you claim...
I was going to dig up paper links until I read your comment, but if you can't even get past "no correlation = no causation" then why bother? To do a cost/benefit analysis you must first establish the benefit. Outside of controlled environments like cruise ships the best you can do is a regression of policy severity vs outcomes using public health data.
I can still dig up some of the papers that do this regression analysis, but you seem to incorrectly be rejecting the chain of reasoning up front so it presumably wouldn't convince you?
>$100 per person multiplied by the entire population is a massive cost, and of course the cost of masks was not primarily monetary but social (children who found it harder to learn to speak, the constant stress and fear they created etc).
The per capita measure is really the relevant measure here, any cost will become huge when multiplied by the entire population. Your assessment of social cost seem grossly hyperbolic to me - how a simple mask are supposed to cause this amount of stress I can't understand. Anecdotally masks caused ~0 stress to me or anyone I know.
> It proves there can be no effect, because whilst correlation may not imply causation, causation always implies correlation.
It proves no such thing, for the reason I stated before (more severe COVID is likely to cause more severe lockdowns). To show this, consider an island where there is no COVID and therefore no COVID deaths and no lockdowns, compared to an island infected with COVID where there are lockdowns and COVID deaths. The relevant comparison are instead two islands, equally affected by COVID, where one has lockdowns and the other not. Even then, the government imposed lockdowns, and the actual actions people take are not the same thing. People may lock-down and engage in avoidance voluntarily.
>1. It was able to spread long distances via the air ducts, not only via droplets. Obvious, because SARS-1 could spread in the same way (and colds/flus must also be able to from lots of prior evidence). Lockdown and social distancing policy assumed exclusively close-distance droplet transmission.
2. Everyone was exposed but most people had pre-existing immunity. Therefore, COVID epidemics would stop before 100% of the population had become sick. Academic and public health models all assumed 100% susceptibility
According to official sources this is not true. While COVID may also spread over long distances (through air ducts) the likelihood of infection increases with proximity - which makes perfect sense to me. Googling pre-existing immunity to COVID shows some recent papers and discussion on this - suggesting it might have had an effect, but I see nothing that justifies your take that "most people" had pre-existing immunity, and that this was the sole reason only a quarter of the population on the diamond princess got infected.
Are you suggesting I should disregard official sources and academics, and instead take your word for it, without any evidence?
> I can still dig up some of the papers that do this regression analysis, but you seem to incorrectly be rejecting the chain of reasoning up front so it presumably wouldn't convince you?
If you can dig up scientific evidence from good sources on this then it would change my point of view, yes. Of course one or two papers showing a regression analysis would not fully convince me, no. So far you have shown me no convincing evidence at all.
> any cost will become huge when multiplied by the entire population.
... which is why people pointed out that whole-population policies were terrible ideas.
> how a simple mask are supposed to cause this amount of stress I can't understand
You may not understand it for the same reasons you don't understand the other points here, even though they are obvious to other people. But they do cause stress. Perhaps a study will help:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9684903/
> It proves no such thing, for the reason I stated before (more severe COVID is likely to cause more severe lockdowns)
But there was no correlation between severity of lockdowns and severity of COVID, so that cannot be the case.
A simple example of this is to look at Europe. Sweden had some of the lightest touch policies and ended up near the bottom of the COVID death charts. The justification for lockdowns explicitly stated that outcome was impossible.
At any rate, the causes of lockdown policies are well understood. They were driven by models and what neighboring countries were doing, not severity metrics.
> People may lock-down and engage in avoidance voluntarily.
That was also taken into account by looking at phone data.
> According to official sources this is not true
Official sources are wrong.
> the likelihood of infection increases with proximity
Try and figure out how they might be measuring that!
> I see nothing that justifies your take that "most people" had pre-existing immunity
You were already given the evidence, which is definitive: an outbreak on a floating island (cruise ship) with 100% enforcement in which most people did not get sick despite there being no effect of proximity on who did get sick. The only way to get that is with 100% exposure and large amounts of pre-existing immunity.
> Are you suggesting I should disregard official sources and academics, and instead take your word for it, without any evidence?
You've been given lots of evidence. I keep repeating the evidence that you don't seem to be integrating even though it's definitive. I mean you literally quoted a section where I said what happened - and you can easily check that historical record for yourself, it even has a Wikipedia page about it - by answering "according to official sources this is not true", without even citing what those sources are.
If you want to have a discussion about evidence then you have to be open to the possibility that the sources you trusted previously aren't honest or reliable. That's why you can't think of any evidence you would accept, which makes debate pointless. You haven't even described what "good sources" or "official sources" you think you're using.
The covid measures came more quickly than the health based rationales for them. There were no doubt multiple motives for what went on, few having to do with the health outcome of any individual. The greater good(s) indeed! How about the wonderful opportunity for digital health passports. And there was a certain election coming up that was heavily influenced by changes in the law due to the plague, er, relatively mild respiratory virus. Where’s there’s no effort to measure assumptions about what truly constitutes the greater good, it’s merely a rationale. It’s just hand waving.
Here's my indefensible take: Dostoyevsky said that if torturing a single child to death would give the entire world eternal health and happiness, it would still be wrong to do. I think he was saying that caring about the wellbeing of others only happens if your thinking is sort of the opposite of utilitarian reasoning -- when it is done out of that feeling of compassion and indignation that arises when you are deeply moved by someone's suffering.
Most of the time I am not paying much attention to people I do not know. I am a car and they are traffic. Go do your thing, other people. Whatever. I am not thinking about whether they are suffering, and if it the possibility does happen to cross my mind, I am not distressed and soon move on to thinking about other things. ( I doubt that I am terribly unusual in all this.). But now and then it's like a spark jumps from some stranger's situation into my imagination, and suddenly I care a lot about what's happening to them, and will put a lot of effort into helping. So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided, and that makes sense if you want people to give the most help where it will do the most good, rather than in the situation that happens to give them a great feeling of emotional involvement. I totally get it that it will not work to just broadcast information about people in trouble, and hope some random person is moved by the situation of the random person in trouble and coughs up some help. It's stupid as fuck. But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers. I think the root objection is that it's hard to get enthusiastic about utilitarian-generated projects..
On the other hand, I found out recently that a high-rise apartment building with some rent-subsidized units may be put up in the pretty little neighborhood where my office is, and displace some pricey little boutiques and charming little coffee shops. Also it will reduce the property value of the lovely home of a colleague of mine who lives right next to the street of charming little thingies. She asked me to join in the effort to keep the high-rise out of "our" neighborhood, and plunk it in the one tiny ratty area in our upper middle class town, and I declined. Said I didn't know enough about the situation to judge whether it was fairer to trash our area than the other one, and I didn't want to protest out of simple self-interest.. So I guess I'm not impervious to considerations of fairness and maximizing benefit.
TLDR: most of us are selfish and find a way to justify what we want or don’t, without reference to any philosophy. The greater good is just an excuse. Because it’s the impossible to know what the greater good really is. I hate to bring up a certain German dictator, but he was acting on behalf of the greater good. Moreover, we don’t really care. We can’t really care about humanity. It’s an abstraction, a rationalization. But if we choose to save that one tortured child, we have saved humanity. The humanity that lives inside each one of us. A certain religious philosopher said “whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, so you do to me.” Same idea.
> So my problem with utilitarianism is that it just is not very motivating. There are no sparks. Appeals to emotion are avoided...
Just quickly here, but given the median profile of a Rationalist or Utilitatrian, don't you think it's plausible they don't *have* those sparks? Certainly not to the extent that you, or otherwise notably empathic people have? Like, maybe they'd have one in a lifetime, and a regularly empathic person has 6 a year, and a really empathic person has 24 a year?
If that's the case, them coming up with rational frameworks for doing more good is a net good, because they wouldn't have had or acted on those sparks to begin with due to their different neural and emotional architecture.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Maybe the utilitarians need to find ways to weave in things that would appeal to people whose desire to help runs on sparks. Say some little documentary segments about individuals who suffering greatly with one of those cheap-to-fix problems. For instance I've read that lots of babies in the 3rd world die of some minor illness that causes diarrhea. If you just give them bottles with a mixture of water, sugar and a bit of salt (or something like that) they get through the illness fine). So some segments showing the babies turning the corner once they get the electrolyte mixture -- their mothers' relief, etc.
Yes, yes, that's the stuff - you "feelers" put together the best heartstring-puller reel, and us nerds in the lab will A/B test it seventy six ways and place it to maximize the impact in the overall pitch!
Which I think basically happens at large non-profits - they have nerds and creatives, and mix them judiciously to drive better outcomes, right?
Is your desire more in these hypotheticals and thought scenarios for Rationalists to try to include the sparks / heartstring tuggers?
Or is it that quintessential Rat-causes like Against Malaria are too data focused on their impacts, and should include more personalized stories on their homepage?
Hypotheticals and thought scenarios.
I think of the lack of a spark as it relates to food drives. If you've come to the conclusion that you wish to support a food bank, then I have heard many convincing arguments that the best you can do is to make an automatic monthly cash donation. But if you do this thing which is probably the most effective thing, it is rather uninspiring.
Meanwhile, I live in a community where hundreds of people make a concerted effort to collect paltry amounts of old canned goods from neighborhoods, expending a lot of resources - time, gas, social capital, etc... - to give the food bank a large quantity of fairly random canned goods, which now must be carefully sorted, and checked for safety, and so on. But such events can bring a community together in a way that an automated monthly donation never will.
Is it better to be effective and uninspiring? Or ineffective, but inspiring? Even through a utilitarian lens, I'm not sure that the former is the better long-term approach.
> But I think people's objection to being logical and mathematical about how and where to help is not that it mixes the sacred, compassion, with the meaningless, numbers.
One can also object to to mathematical approach on dry, unemotional grounds, the incommeasurability of utility.
I find this post a bit baffling. Partly this is because I don't recognize the discourse it's criticizing. It's not ordinary back and forth about politics, because that discussion isn't at a level of moral generality where people are throwing accusations around "utilitarianism". It's not more academic or philosophical discussion about utilitarianism, because in those discussions skepticism about deception, restrictions on free speech, and so on are more closely associated with nonconsequentialist views than consequentialist ones, and it's just false that "the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them."
So regarding the core question:
"why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?"
I'm not sure "people" (which people? The hoi polloi? The people who argue about moral theories?) really do think that.
But suppose for the sake of argument I was such a person - someone who really is mad at utilitarians for doing evil for a greater good but accepted the reasoning in favor of the "normal" politics Scott mentions. Am I being inconsistent? No, because I think it can in most cases be plausibly denied either that the given policy genuinely violates the "usual moral rule" or that the "usual moral rule" provides strong genuine nonconsequentialist reasons. For example, if you independently think that shaming people for X is wrong, then of course it's going to look a lot like "bullying" and you're going to think it violates the "usual rule against bullying". But if you think people deserve to be shamed for X, then there's a relevant difference between shaming people for X and paradigmatic examples of bullying. And so people who support shaming people for X won't say that this is a case where bullying is justified by the consequences - they'll say it's not bullying. And if you force them to say that it's bullying, they'll say that the real moral rule is "no undeserved bullying" not "no bullying".
So there's nothing inconsistent about thinking that shaming people for X is justified by the consequences, but that other sorts of things the utilitarian is committed to sanctioning are genuine evils.
None of this is to say that the way actual people reason about this is rational. I think people will tend to latch on to basically whatever kind of reasoning available to them to justify their preexisting beliefs. So the people who antecedently like policy X will think it has good consequences and also, conveniently, that those policies won't interfere with any genuine nonconsequentialist constraints. And the people who antecedently don't like policy X will think that it is objectionably doing evil for a greater good and also, conveniently, that it's not really a greater good if you think about it. And libertarianish rationalist utilitarians who are predisposed to be against restrictions on free speech but can't appeal to nonconsequentialist constraints will of course find the math conveniently works out against those restrictions (or do some rule-y backflips).
You sound kind of like a libertarian, particularly back in the 90s and 2000s when they were more emphatically pro-gay rights. (Not that they're against them per se these days, just that it seems to be more of a peripheral 'red tribe' affiliation when it used to be more of a 'neither left not right' thing.) Which isn't really a bad thing IMHO, just pointing out your politics may be more about tribal affiliation (Gray Tribe?) and gravitating to the most comfortable laundry list of positions than you'd like to think. Like everyone else in the world, really. ;)
I'm not immune--I just never found a tribe I liked.
Gray tribe isn't a thing, at least these days. Deep down they're all just blue tribers who are embarrassed of the lower class blue tribers.
I don't agree, it seems the 'blue tribe' wokery that annoys gray tribers is practiced more heavily by the upper classes (where the remaining cishet white men can easily throw a poorer one under the bus) than the middle or lower.
I don't mean low class literally, I mean in the sense of crudeness of identity politics vs the 'sophistication' of Scott's views.
It's not even the same identity politics though. I've never heard Scott go against cishet white men.
We ethical consequentialists are deeply aware of the large role played by status quo bias in many common objections. We're alleged to be monsters for believing that one electrocuted repairman is an acceptable tradeoff for the dispersed pleasure of a televised World Cup final, whilst our critics would accept increased rate of death and injury from traffic accidents, alcohol consumption, fights, coal burning for electricity, ad nauseam, as tradeoffs for holding that same event. The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
>The true opposition rarely ends up being to substantial tradeoffs, but to substantial tradeoffs being explicit. Or worse, weird and explicit. First rule of fungibility club: we don't think about fungibility club.
LOL at the last sentence! Many Thanks!
I appreciate it!
I'm glad somebody hasn't forgotten that, despite their moral grandstanding over covid, the American left were full blown covid deniers until reality forced them to tell the truth. And that this is an example of "anti-racist" ideology doing very obvious and undeniable harm.
Ummm no. The lefties put on their black masks and asked the authorities to govern them harder, locked up their children at home, and tried to force everyone take an experimental gene therapy.
Hammond may be referring to the first ~2 months of covid being widely known (January and February 2020) when they seemed very concerned that China and Chinese people were going to get blamed and would be harassed about it. Nancy Pelosi even encouraged people to go to Chinatown shortly before SF was locked down.
I think Hammond is wrong in how strongly he presents this, but the left generally were grandstanding against Trump even to the point of downplaying covid up until it started spreading a lot in the US. There was a big blowup between Trump and the Democrats with him leaning on calling it things like "the China virus" and them trying to call him racist and doing whatever they could to not blame China (which I think plays into the lab versus market question, with the Democrats trying to claim there's no way it could have been a lab as an overreaction to Trump blaming the Chinese).
Fair point. But let me say it was, well, stupid to care about some theoretical deplorable blaming China. Maybe it’s my prejudice, but isn’t it important to find out what really happened? And as it turns out we, the USSA, are the likely baddies with our vast array of biolabs around the world. We had our mits deep in Wuhan. Would it be for the greater good that we suppress that information, if true? My bias is that I want to know the truth as nearly as possible. And yes I do believe truth serves the greatest good better than lies.
I think you're pulling a bit of a fast one by lumping all 'non utilitarians' together. I've publicly opposed purely consequentialist ethics and agree with you on all your examples, for the very reasons you give (except for the point about state schools, but my disagreement there is not rooted in a consequentialist argument).
In truth, most people don't have an 'ethical theory', and if you quiz them (anecdata, UK) you will generally find them to be quasi-utilitarians. Here's why. What's often lost in these discussions is that Utilitarianism was originally intended to be a descriptive model of reality, NOT a decision making framework. The pitch by Bentham was that a 'hedonistic calculus' is a very simple model with a great deal of explanatory power for people's instinctive morals and traditional moral codes that arise from them - what *is* as much as what *ought* to be.
If it gives you the 'wrong' answer you aren't supposed to blindly say 'hedonistic calculus go brrrr' and change your mind! You're supposed to question how you've attempted to quantify 'good' and refer back to whichever moral principles you usually accept to figure out whether and where you've gone wrong.
Not to lump the opposition needlessly together, but it has, indeed, occurred to one that many a passionate derider of utilitarianism does seem to resort to intellectually dishonest or otherwise bullyish rhetoric.
One must only assume that these people think this sort of thing is, if not actually good, at least _just fine_ in general, because if they thought said dishonesty/bullying to be somehow _bad_, they'd have to somehow _justify_ it with some greater cause. Hmh.
I think another key distinction to be drawn is between:
(1) the abstract normative question of whether you ought to do what maximises utility (utilitarianism) vs other normative positions (deontology, justice etc.)
(2) ~ descriptive beliefs about whether breaking established norms in the service of other ends tends to work well
Beliefs about these two can diverge. You can be a utilitarian who believes, descriptively, that lying, cheating, stealing, suppressing/oppressing others in the service of the greater good tends to go badly and rarely serve the greater good. Or you can be non-utilitarian, pro-justice activist, who readily believes that all this and more should be readily employed in the service of greater pro-justice ends.
The first and last examples in the list are interesting to me, because the two sacred rules involved conflict with each other.
You can either have a rule of free speech, or a rule against bullying (etc). You can't have both.
I think this kind of explains a lot - the USA makes a big deal of free speech, and harassment is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Europe... isn't all going to the other extreme, and varies much more - but perhaps different countries are trying to strike different balances between the two. Perhaps even because it's more culturally diverse.
Free speech and harassment are definitely in tension. I don't think you've got the direction of change correct, but I think it's a minor point compared to recognizing that tension. Society cannot fully realize either goal (lots of free speech, low harassment).
I think very few people (maybe hardcore libertarians) argue that rights to free speech should extend to harassment or bullying, so there are in practice always limits to free speech. The question is more what counts as harassment, and there are differing opinions on that.
Well, sure, but it was only back in "Links For January 2024" that Scott proclaimed America as a beacon of freedom for not banning a phrase many people claim to be hate speech; a call to genocide - while Germany would consider it (and decide against) - so you can include him among those very few.
Hate speech in general, and this particular phrase in particular is in no way a central example of harassment, so no that is not true.
It's not clear to me what you mean, which probably undermines whatever point you were trying to make.
My point was just that almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech - there is always some trade off. I think most people would agree that some level of harassment is not ok and should be illegal, even if that technically infringes on a right to free speech. A central example of such harassment would be frequent (such as daily) written or vocal attacks, f.ex. hate speech, racism, threats etc. targeting an individual to such an extent as to impair daily life for no good reason at all. I think most people would agree that this should be illegal.
So the question is where to draw the line, and here opinions differ. Some think hate speech in general (such as in public and not directed at an individual) should also be illegal, (but I don't think many people would count this as harassment). Scott is also not arguing that harassment should be protected under free speech - he is arguing (I think, I didn't check the article) that a particular phrase that some consider hate speech should be protected under free speech.
Outside the USA, sure - almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech.
As an aside - the 'river/sea' phrase is annoying because its interpretation is very broad - so for some people it's an expression of solidarity with an oppressed people, and others claim it to be hate speech. A lot of the discussion about it seems hopelessly compromised - but whether it's a problem clearly hinges on local factors.
Inside the USA, I certainly have the impression that the interpretation of the first amendment to its constitution is as broad as the interpretation of the "river to the sea" phrase. I haven't done a poll or anything, but a) the wikipedia page includes the text "there is a common misconception that it prohibits anyone from limiting free speech, including private, non-governmental entities," and b) political campaign donations are officially considered "free speech".
To be clear, I assume Scott understands the intent of it pretty well, but when you say "almost no one thinks that we should have unlimited rights to free speech", well, that seems questionable to me.
However, given the above article and his comment on how a country with a different culture and its own different set of problems wants to govern itself, it does seem to me that he hasn't properly appreciated the conflict between these two 'moral' rules.
"nobody previously decided that (eg) the right to bear arms was sacred but wanting fewer deaths wasn’t"
I seem to recall that the people who founded my country did in fact decide that, to the extent of putting it in writing in our founding documents.
The founding documents do in fact discuss a right not to be deprived of "life, liberty, or property".
I don't think this post passes the ideological turning test. I'd argue it doesn't bother trying to.
Scott may find himself supporting the spread of misinformation if it resulted in actions that actually, really, physically threatened the people he cares about. He may well support protests that block traffic if he found himself with few enough other options. People who oppose mixing morality in math might be worried that this would lead to optimization for the wrong value. I could go on and so could Scott.
Put this way, it kinda looks like the "feels utilitarian" vs "I don't think ends justifies means BUT" discrepancy is at least in part people only engaging with utilitarianism when they really have to. (And maybe being mad that they have to.)
I think the thing is that dividing policies into means/ends or cost/benefit is already a utilitarian framing, and a less natural part of more virtue-based perspectives. So eg dissent-shaming isn't something that costs the evil of harassment for the benefit of good beliefs, but an indivisible moral action. It's a moral question either way, so deontologists and utilitarians each have relevant principles and can comfortably argue past each other without noticing.
The groupings here seem roughly sorted along immorality vs amorality. Immoral costs already have a moral valence and are already part of philosophies that stepped around cost-benefit consideration. Amoral costs are really weird in virtue ethics.
Things like calibrating regulations or moving disposable income are hard to morally assess without at least imagining a utilitarian mindset. To engage, you kinda need to either take on a utilitarian pov enough to make a content argument (h/t EA Forums) or make an abstract and kinda circuitous meta-argument about ethics that's liable to make you look like an ass or an outsider. Sometimes people would rather just trust that it's not trustworthy.
(I kind of sympathize*. When I see eg very religious thinkers, I'm comfortable enough with the things like beauty and charity that I can think about secularly, but once destiny or scripture comes up -- I'll still have opinions, but they'll be misfit for the framing, my ability to make a talmudic argument will be even worse than my ability to argue for or against the authority of clergy in general, and mostly I'll be mad I have to engage with religion.)
*((I mostly don't. Post-hoc justification of semi-legible visceral discomfort is a terrible basis for critique.))
> More focus on preventing existential risks that could kill billions of people
...
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math)...
In the context of existential / AI risk, I think of utilitarians as willing to do evil for the sake of greater good because they've said they're cool with evil for the sake of the greater good. I don't think this has anything to do with a innate repulsion for calculation.
Consider:
- Yudkowsky saying we should be willing to risk nuclear war to bomb GPUs in foreign countries to minimize x-risk (Times Op Ed)
- Nick Bostrom's "Black Ball" thought experiments, which explicitly justifies absolutely complete panopticon surveillance to avoid x-risk.
- You, saying that "So Google takes over the world? Fine," and how such dictatorship wasn't such a bad outcome because it avoided x-risk (In your old article in "Should AI be open?")
I don't want to litigate here if these are *justified* or *true* beliefs, or whether the trade-off makes sense. In all the above, I think that the proposed course of action will just makes the world worse, and probably *much* worse, because the trade-off is actually bad and utilitarians making these calls are making classic straw-utilitarian mistakes and not considering unintended effects. You might think that I'm wrong about this.
But -- whether or not these beliefs are are justified -- they do perfectly match the paradigm of "Let's let some great evil pass for the sake of greater good" and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that utilitarians thus match the naive notion.
I think the easiest explanation for List 1 endorsements is that people don't actually see those rules as "sacred." A lot of people *talk* as if they do but are inconsistent enough that I don't really believe them. I've also interacted with more logically consistent people who openly reject them (e.g., free speech is a legal concept and freedom of expression isn't necessarily sacred without considering what's being expressed). So it's not clear to me that these folks view themselves as doing harm for the greater good.
I find myself reminded of this quote from Bryan Caplan:
"The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities."
I think this is the difference between Scott's utilitarianism and the utilitarianism-like things he opposes. Scott checks his work, and he uses utilitarian logic for non-emotionally-inspiring causes, instead of only to justify emotionally-inspiring rule violations. That's what upsets people, not utilitarianism itself.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
I'd like to propose an alternative way of framing the opposition that might bear a distinction. I think you've got the broad strokes right already. Here goes:
There's a deep-seated sense, an intuitive aversion, that most people share about formalizing morality because it's an inherently reductive process. Something ineffable is lost whenever we employ propositional logic to describe a moral issue. Then, based on an insufficient description, we proceed to metricize 'The Good' and apply optimization pressure to maximize moral utility. Goodhart's Law tells us what to expect at this point; an incontrovertible perversion of whatever measures of good were established.
In other words, there's a suspicion that you're inevitably gravitating towards disaster any time you try to formalize morality (which by this logic is properly holistic and irreducible) in such a way that accommodates optimization.
I dunno, the main thing going on here, it seems to me, is that you have both utilitarian and libertarian intuitions. There's nothing inherently contradictory in that; maybe a generally libertarian social order is conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Heck, John Stuart Mill himself is the author of both 'Utilitarianism' and 'On Liberty.'
I do think you're onto something in observing that people are put off by a "mathy" approach to ethics. (I also think people are mostly right to be put off by it, which is not to say it's *never* appropriate.) But the examples of your own views that you describe aren't even particularly mathy. If the utilitarian/libertarian alignment of views goes against expectations, I'd think it's just because the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it (potentially) sacrifices rights for the sake of the greater overall happiness. And I think the reason that is the most common objection to utilitarianism is that it is a good objection! Utilitarianism *might* be consistent with a commitment to rights, but that's contingent on whether rights are actually conducive to the greatest overall happiness. Which, maybe they are. But most people have an *absolute* commitment to rights, seeing it as a good irrespective of other goods like the greatest happiness principle. If "the math" turned out to show that large-scale infringement of rights actually did bring about the greatest happiness, a lot of people would still object to the large-scale infringement of rights - not because they were offended by the mathy calculation but because they hold rights as a fundamental good.
alternative hypothesis: hypocrisy.
I.e. utilitarianism for me, deontology for thee. *Other* people should just follow the rules. But *me*? I'm smart and virtuous enough to responsibly weigh the trade-offs. When *other* people spin the facts? That's misinformation and evil. But when *I* spin the facts? Well, a little white lie never hurt anyone. Besides, my intentions were pure. No I'm not evil, stop being hyperbolic.
I believe you advocated for this before, Scott. In your post where you complain that nobody actually adheres to principles on the metalevel when doing so would be inconvenient to the issue on the object level. E.g. whether the right/left advocates for gay marriage being decided on the state level or federal level depends on who has the upper-hand culturally. Maybe i'll find the link later.
>”Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity.”
I agree with you on all of the other things on that list, which is why this one sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess I don’t really disagree with it per se, but it’s circular. You can’t use the word “ethically” as an undefined qualifier when defining your own ethical positions. All of the interesting information about what your position might be is hidden in the phrase “ethically and legally”. If a company that donates lots of money to charity is late to file a licensing renewal, does that invalidate them from consideration of support? Probably not. Where is the line?
i think the qualifier exists to preempt complaints about Sam Bankman-Fried.
> "Sometimes utilitarianism is conceptualized as “being willing to do bad things for the greater good”, so it always surprises me how much less willing I am to do this than most people."
I think this is common: a major theme in the utilitarian tradition (since at least Mill) is how damaging *naive instrumentalist* beliefs are. Due to better appreciating the harms of censorship, etc., utilitarians are disproportionately likely to be principled defenders of free speech compared to non-consequentialist academics (who often seem much more open to naive instrumentalism in pursuit of their non-utilitarian moral goals).
I think there are two different concerns at play here, one justified the other not.
The justified concern is that a utilitarian is in some sense more unpredictable or untrustworthy. What they're going to decide to do in a situation depends on many relatively obscure factors you might not be aware of so it's harder to know if you can trust them. Will they actually take the company's deposits to the bank or will they skim off 10% for the needy?
Sure in practice most utilitarians don't (and shouldn't) do most of those things but the very fact they claim to follow that kind of rule does increase the worry.
The unjustified one is simply that it more effectively obscures your tribal/values affiliation. Maybe I care about the poor or maybe I'm using utilitarinism as an excuse to reach results that claim to have that goal but actually serve some other interest.
I think people's instrumental beliefs are likely to be more illuminating than their final values for assessing their trustworthiness.
Someone with naive instrumentalist beliefs -- who thinks that breaking the rules is likely to improve their chances of achieving their goals -- is more likely to break the rules regardless of their moral theory. (They'll find a way to rationalize it if they need to.)
Someone who thinks that reliable rules are the best guidance we have for promoting the good over the long term is more likely to be trustworthy even if their final values imply that there are possible situations in which it would be justified to break the rules.
So anyone who is worried about norm-violations should worry about naive instrumentalist beliefs, not utilitarian ones.
Trustworthy and doing the right thing are often opposed. Schindler was untrustworthy as were the plotters who tried to kill Hitler because they were moral.
But re: saying that reliable rules are best guide. I kinda doubt that degree of abstraction bears too much on what someone does in real life especially because if you are less worried about rules you are less worried about whether you accurately stated the theory you apply.
Let me try steelmaning a concern here.
For the most part people don't actually decide what to do by consulting moral theory and seeing what it suggests. Mostly we decide what to do based on emotional/intuitive thoughts and then use our intelligence to justify it post hoc. Maybe Peter Singer is an exception but quite likey not.
If that's your model than a utilitarian looks like someone whose bullet biting demonstrates that they are morally unconstrained. If they emotionally want to build/stop AI, steal money from their company or run horrific experiments they'll manage to justify it because it's only emotions not cognitive theories that do practical work constraining our actions.
I even think this is pretty true. It's just irrelevant to whether utilitarianism is true. I believe in it because I think it's true not because I believe that it does much to make me a better person.
My guess is that your fundamental violation is *thinking about it* rather than following the social consensus of the people around you on an issue-by-issue basis. That social consensus is created/maintained/modified by a complicated "organic" process that I've never seen analyzed. (We sometimes have "ethics experts" but we rarely follow their advice.) In the long run, what controls a culture's mores is going to be the various features of Darwinian inter-culture competition, not whether it conforms to some logical/philosophical framework.
There's an additional fact that mores are *traditional*, that is, they're only allowed to change slowly. One consequence is to reduce the motivation to argue for changing the mores in a way that specifically benefits yourself in your current situation, because you're going to have to live with the change for a long time, and your situation (and thus your interaction with the changed more) can easily change.
It seems like the first list is what the far left does, and the second list (except perhaps the last item) is what libertarians do.
So instead of a utilitarian you sound like a soft libertarian.
Reading this, I get the feeling that Scott is a closeted virtue ethicist. Don't worry Scott, it gets better! There are millions of people just like you who won't condone immoral acts for some "greater" good!
*Copypasta South Park*
Okay, less sarky explanation of why virtue ethics not consequentialism:
1. Knowability. You cannot know in advance all the consequences of a given action; your actions echo in eternity. But you can, really easily, understand the nature of a given action, if it is honest or dishonest, just or unjust. And, over time, good actions will have good consequences.
2. Effect on Actor. The problem with being okay with bad actions for a good purpose is they affect the actor. If you are willing to do shitty things for a greater good, it will make you a shitty person, and what good, greater or otherwise, can a shitty person achieve?
Okay, but what about carefully looking up whether bednets save more lives than political donations? I'd say that falls under the virtue of Honesty. If you honestly are determined to do good, rather than appear good, you will do research, think through options etc.
So, yeah. It's okay, Scott, you can come out now. No one will think less of you 🙂
Aren't those two arguments both ... consequentialist? :-)
If consequentialist arguments lead to the conclusion that virtue-ethical arguments are better than consequentialist arguments, the conclusion isn't "virtue ethicists are really consequentialists", it's "favouring consequentialism over virtue ethics is internally inconsistent".
No. Not unless you expand the definition to be tautological.
Consequentialism implicitly assumes you can know the consequences. Virtue Ethics are a way of dealing with the ultimate uncertainty of life.
Regarding organ donation, there is absolutely a bright line being crossed: the principle that a doctor is, at any given time, serving the interests of a single patient. Organ donation is voluntary, and you as the donor are allowed to back out until the very last minute, without negative consequences to you. If we are to maintain these nice principles, then people cannot make credible commitments to selling their organs.
That's on top of the social slippery slope, where eventually people who haven't donated a kidney yet get disqualified from food stamps or whatever, because they're sitting on $20k of "assets" that they're refusing to sell.
As usual whenever this topic comes up, I highly recommend "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets" by economist Al Roth. I know that it's slightly rude to ask someone to do background reading before deigning to engage with them. But in this case it's a short, compelling read.
How good must one be at decoupling what's good for me from the greater good in order for utilitarianism to be a good principle to put into practice?
How confident in one's calculations must one be in order to responsibly take on the responsibility to calculate for others the best course of action?
It's one thing to kill 1 to save 5. That's net +4. But what about killing 1 to save 10 with 50% probability? Or killing 1 to save 10 with 5-95% probability? Or killing 1 now to save 5 in the distant future?
It seems to me that utilitarians are loathe to actually put their principle into practice. Who wants to argue that it's right to steal from degenerate gamblers to fund AI safety? Who would advocate for assassination campaigns against agribusiness execs and investors?
Now, you can always retreat to the claim that such moves are negative EV once nth order effects get accounted for. But to actually account for these things is to have perfect predictive ability, which none of us do.
So in the end, we are left with heuristics, and the real meat of utilitarianism is the confidence that one can estimate consequences better than the average member of their society, better than simply following societal norms.
In many cases this confidence may be correct, but what is the moral valence of the elitism that undergirds it? Is it good to believe oneself to be a superior decision-maker?
Arguably, the naive utilitarian protester who stops traffic would be better served by ceasing belief that they are morally superior to society.
One paradoxical outcome of true utilitarianism is to discourage the masses from practicing it.
Compulsory Education prevents child labor.
Time and time again we've seen child labor bans just get circumvented and result in kids doing illegal jobs without workplace protections like wage laws.
Compulsory Education however does abolish child labor because no parent can use "I can't afford to send him to school" as an excuse to have a child not in school, and an impoverished child not in school "might as well pitch in", which is how they end up getting factory jobs.
If you abolish compulsory education there will be children working in Amazon warehouses. We've already seen in states in the deep South that have poor enforcement of homeschooling quality or have defunded and allowed their public schools to wither, and don't enforce education, that poor kids get pulled out of school to spend their time someplace more productive for their parents: a Hyundai plant.
I hated school as a kid too. Fortunately new and avant garde forms of school are trying to break the shackles of Foucault's Prison if your kid can't handle it but no harm done to a kid in school is worse than the harm done to that kid on the factory floor. Organic childhood is a modern imaginary phenomenon and a utopian ideal invented by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In the nature of things anyone with two or more moral principles is going to find them coming into conflict occasionally. Each moral principle, according to itself, should take precedence. So there is no rational way to choose which principle to give priority to. If there was, you wouldn't have multiple moral principles after all.
So you can be irrational with several moral principles, or a monomaniac with only one.
> So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
Because you are arguing against the weakest strawman of what a "non-utilitarian" looks like and then giving yourself points for being better than it.
A non-utilitarian who is a good person hates all of your examples also.
"Being pro-gun-control sacrifices the right to bear arms for the greater good of fewer deaths; being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms."
I do get what you're saying (maybe?). But in terms of details, I don't think it's fair that you compare a means with an end, here. Being pro-gun-control seeks to prevent some suicides and accidental gun deaths. Rhetorically, gun control advocates seek primarily to prevent mass shootings, but from a utilitarian standpoint, mass shootings are a very small effect relative to others being discussed. Gun control potentially denies innocent people a means to defend themselves against aggression, both from their neighbors and from the government. If "a right to bear arms" was the sacred thing on one side then "a right for the government to control its citizenry" would be the thing it was balanced against or, perhaps, 'the need to prevent school shootings at the expense of all other harms.' If "reducing accidental gun deaths, mass shootings, and suicides" was the profane thing on one side then "self defense, hunting for sport and food, and a long-term hedge against tyranny" would be the profane thing on the other side.
I agree entirely that these disagreements involve trade offs, which was your point. But I'm skeptical that the people making the arguments are willing to acknowledge them as such, for rhetorical reasons. 2nd Amendment supporters are likely to disbelieve studies supporting gun control as biased, because they are engaged in a conflict. And I'm not sure how to categorize such low-key bad faith arguments. As you've mentioned in other writing, to try and steelman such self-delusional conflict-based arguments potentially distorts their nature. The Second Amendment seems basically like a Schelling Point for the pro-gun-ownership side.
I think most people who ick at Utilitarianism or Consequentialism as a general category are operating on the approximate moral principle of "anything that decreases the predictability of my environment is bad". This fits with all of the examples in the article, and also explains why in general people find deontologists more trustworthy than utilitarians.
That is to say, it's not so much that people expect utilitarians will do bad things, it's that figuring out the specific thing utilitarians will do is much harder than just assuming they will follow predetermined rules you can readily anticipate and account for.
Worse still, it is much less legible whether or not the things a purported utilitarian is doing are in fact intended for the greater good. A nefarious agent purporting to be a utilitarian has a lot more leeway for excusable behavior than one purporting to be a deontologist who has committed to a broadly agreed upon set of rules in advance.
>Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue.
I refer to this as "Proof by Intimidation". In addition to the bullying issue, it's also a sin against epistemology.
How is it even possible to type the words "usual moral rule against inconveniencing people" without the words "this may be a reach" popping into your head?
Most if not all of the things in your first list of things you oppose have very plausible utilitarian objections, though. And in fact I hear the utilitarian objections way more frequently than the pure principal objections.
Like for censorship, yes I'm sure there are still some classical liberals or what have you who oppose censorship purely out of their commitment to a free society. But the more common objection is lack of trust in the people who would be doing the censoring, a fear that censorship will be used against them and people they care about in the future should it become normalized, and a strong historical track record of censorship being used to target legitimate dissent. All of which is entirely utilitarian-compatible.
Likewise when I hear people complaining about disruptive protests they're usually focused on the very concrete and direct harm that such protests do to people, up to and including causing deaths due to the delay of emergency services. They're not concerned with some abstract principal that prohibits inconveniencing people.
Utilitarianism has a bad reputation because utilitarianism defenders tend to really insist running around saying that "yes, you should be willing to kill someone to use their organs to save 5 people".
I don't think I've ever seen that, I've only seen that being used as an attack on utilitarianism, or when utilitarianism defenders are explaining why it wouldn't actually lead to the most utility if society killed people for their organs.
As for increasing the supply of organs, why not institute a policy of only people who check the organ donor box on their licenses are eligible to receive donated organs? For children who aren't yet old enough to drive, their parents checking the organ donor box would be enough.
I don't know what the "normal people" think, but I personally have two objections to actual real life utilitarians.
One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Second is that IRL utilitarians are prone to violating deontological norms for the thrill of it, in a reverse logic of "if what I'm doing is important then I should violate the norm", by violating the norm they affirm that they are important. See Eliezer Yudkowsky's suppression of Roko's Basilisk. Also, if Eliezer is in charge of building a Friendly AI, why wouldn't he make it a Basilisk? Why haven't you ever seen it discussed?
>One is Moldbugian/Libertarian conviction that people who value the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's (or the wellbeing of animals, or rocks), are extremely prone to doing harm. We are much better off when everyone cares for themselves and their own first and foremost but tries to not step on others' toes. This is just an observation but of course anyone could make up all sorts of explanations for it.
Partially agreed. I think that a strong case can be made that valuing
>the wellbeing of people far removed from them the same as their own children's
is a _niche_ view among people in general (despite it being a popular view amongst western philosophers). Some nice numerical data on this is in Bian Deng's thesis "WHEN YOUR LOVED ONE IS ON THE TROLLEY TRACK: A STUDY OF
MORAL DILEMMA WHEN CLOSE RELATIONSHIP IS INVOLVED" [ all caps in the original :-( ]
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwicoKexvdGEAxX2GFkFHV5lB0oQFnoECBIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fecommons.cornell.edu%2Fserver%2Fapi%2Fcore%2Fbitstreams%2F8fe2ff49-f502-4f6f-8d64-087d399c354f%2Fcontent&usg=AOvVaw2VR46Cwq_9aH3lj0LbW6mo&opi=89978449
table 1 (I'm just going to quote the Western numbers):
numbers of strangers save loved one save strangers
1 43 4
10 33 14
100 26 21
1000 26 21
For _none_ of the probed ratios of strangers saved to a loved one saved did more than half of the western participants pick saving the strangers. At a 1:1 ratio, only 4 western participants picked saving the strangers (I'm kind of surprised _any_ did. I would have expected that it would take at least a 1+epsilon ratio to get even people who valued strangers as much as their family to choose to save the strangers in preference to family. I wish Deng had included a 1:2 ratio row, which would have been a cleaner test). If I use the 1:10 ratio row, then the western participants favor saving their family members by a 33:14 majority.
I'm not saying that the stranger-savers are "wrong", but I _do_ say that they are a _niche_ view. And I also say that philosophers who espouse a view of all lives counting equally are screwing up. Insofar as they are trying to formalize a consistent system that echos predominant intuitions, they are failing to accomplish that, instead echoing a _niche_ view.
I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids.
Is some of this due to the fact that it's still illegal to not go to school, so you only get kids with not very in-control or invested parents (including migrants living with non-parents) doing it? Sure, but the in-control and invested parents already have the option of homeschooling, which is now easier than ever with online curricula, including that allow a lot of going at your own pace.
So, what kids are served well by ending compulsory schooling who are not served now by homeschooling/alternative school options? It's not the kid with parents who aren't on board with their non-public-school options, because even if the state isn't making you attend school, your parents still can. Kids who don't want to go to school with parents who don't really care one way or the other? I'll buy that some of those are kids who legitimately could create fine educational experiences for themselves. But really, how many?
"I can tell you what it looks like when compulsory education laws are not enforced and it's not exactly a thousand pro-social, productive flowers blooming. It's pretty much just loitering, assault, and the occasional carjacking for some kid and factory work for other kids."
Agreement here from my time working in a school (and concurrent with that, an early school leaver programme).
We had to keep track of truancy/non-attendance and after a certain threshold of days missed without good reason (e.g. if the reason your kid is not in school is because they're in the hospital), that triggered intervention.
Either kids were being kept at home to do household work and childminding of younger siblings, because the parent/parents couldn't cope (broken families, mental problems, other problems) or didn't want to, or the kids were roaming around town like feral dogs. They certainly were not being kept out of school because Mama and Papa were bringing them on day trips to museums, art galleries, libraries and the opera while the bright and eager self-motivated learners just gobbled up all the opportunities for investigation and free-range unschooling.
They generally weren't old enough to work in factories, and the ones just about legally old enough (the early school leavers/drop-outs) were often not interested in working. *Some* of them, sure. They recognised the programme was their last chance not to slip through the cracks and they tried their best.
Some of them - not so much. These were the ones on the path to prison, which is a terrible thing to be able to forecast about a fourteen or fifteen year old. Even a seventeen year old. But they certainly were not interested in advancing their learning beyond the limits imposed by public schooling, or getting a job, or anything except easy money (via petty crime), weed, booze, and sex if they could get it.
I understand and basically agree. But unless your *reasons* for agreeing with Scott are not the same reasons that a consequentialist would use to be against them, then even if you have ancillary beliefs that are non-utilitarian, if those beliefs do not play a predominant role for why you agree with Scott, then they don't matter. Of course, you do say you have orthogonal reasons, but given the list I have a hard time seeing what an orthogonal reasons would look like for those cases that are not identical or nearly so to utilitarian ones (I'm on my phone, and it won't let me see the post while writing this). I would like to see such orthogonal reasons outlined for those specific cases!
I also feel like there is a trick being pulled, one very common among non-utilitarians: reductionism of utilitarianism. When I read JSMill, I don't see some mandate that utilitarianism ignore norms, or intergenerational bonds, or character as meaningful and important categories, quite the opposite.
I'm a syncretist about these things, I suppose, and so think that people spend too much effort finding as little common ground as possible. Since anti-utilitarianism is popular again, I feel prone to defend it a bit more.
Hm, I'm not utilitarian, and frequently argue against utilitarianism, but I agree with you on all of list 1 (there are plenty of non-utilitarian reasons for being against that), and most of list 2.
My position is a _little_ about the "ends justify the means" thing, but I can state it more clearly. For me, and I think most people (subconsciously or consciously), emotions and instincts are a more reliable source of identifying "good" than cognition, so we are (rightly) suspicious of anyone who seems to be trying to assign the job of being "good" primarily to cognition. Cognition can easily rationalize. It's too easy to make a set of assumptions and a reasonable-looking argument to justify virtually anything, and people do this all the time. Politicians have made a bad name for cognition. Morality is something much more obvious and more ancient than this. Good people are generous, kind, forgiving, curious, and honest/reliable. Not as descriptive of behaviors, but as personality traits and internal experiences. These things come first.
Many "ends justify the means" utilitarian arguments are very suspicious because they do not take into account the internal state and humanness of the actor. Someone might say "I'm going to get rich to donate to the poor". Frankly, I don't really believe someone who says this. Becoming rich and powerful is incredibly corrupting. Even if you are kind and generous now, I don't believe that you're very likely to become rich and powerful and stay kind and generous. Especially when becoming rich might require suspending giving stuff away in the immediate term. How I prefer to say "the ends don't justify the means" is "you can't burn your soul for fuel and expect to keep your heading".
See also "The Power Paradox" by Dacher Keltner. Machiavellians are not good at becoming powerful. Being powerful makes you Machiavellian.
Whether I'm anti-utilitarianism in _theory_, or I simply don't trust utilitarian thinking to encourage people to be good on average is both less clear, and a moot point.
> Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying, to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
There's something weird going on here. The usual moral rule is, very clearly, that you should shame and insult people who are on the wrong side of moral issues.
But I think you're right that modern American culture states a rule against bullying, or other analogous rules. You just aren't expected to believe in those rules; the cultural avowal of them is the equivalent of someone asking "How are you?" when they meet you, or of North Korea avowing that it is a Democratic People's Republic.
I remember reading a tvtropes page about Alfred Hitchcock famously having said that the audience [of a movie] has no morals, elaborating that you can easily get the audience to sympathize with a murderer.
And I think this is a confusion that it's important to avoid. The reason you can easily get movie audiences to sympathize with murderers is that murder, as depicted in the movie, doesn't violate their morals. You can't make the audience sympathize with whatever you want; you have to appeal to their morals.
But you also can't confuse what the audience says their morals are with what their morals actually are.
If you're wondering why so many people characterize utilitarianism as "being willing to do bad things for the greater good", and often with the "bad things" part in boldface all caps, then I think you have to consider the part where when utilitarians are asked to explain their moral philosophy, the go-to examples are various thought experiments where it is shown to be morally righteous to deliberately kill an innocent person. Or sometimes just to torture them, and then there's the one where rape is just fine if you do it perfectly. But hey, we're the hot new moral philosophy that tells you why it's OK to rape and torture and kill, whereas all the old and busted moral philosophies just tell people not to do that stuff.
I can see a utilitarian being willing to own the "correct" solution to the Trolley Problem and say that, yep, they're definitely going to kill that innocent fat guy because he is fat and in the right place at the right time for killing fat guys. But if you don't want people to look at you funny, maybe save those examples for the advanced class and come up with something less bloodthirsty for the 101 version or the initial pitch.
I wouldn't say *all* the old moral philosophies tell you it's not ok to rape and torture and kill. And very few say you should *never* kill.
I’m so far from arguing on this topic, but could you enlighten me about which philosophies say it’s okay to rape and torture? I’m pretty lazy when it comes to reading philosophy (and just about everything else) but that seems like a compelling place to start. (No not because I’m interested in rape and torture)
A thing happened fairly recently in the world involving just those actions, based in religion and at times citing scripture. (I don't think you'll find an ideology that *always* says it's ok to rape and torture, but of course utilitarians don't think that, either.)
This is frustratingly vague...
...They're obviously talking about the October 7 attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel
Islam has a lot of technical details about how to ethically rape your female slaves.
The prohibition on explicitly killing known-innocent people is pretty universal, I think. One can kill scoundrels of various sorts, and there's debate about which sorts. And accidental killing of innocents (e.g. by shooting at scoundrels and missing) is acceptable to the extent that one exercised reasonable care to avoid such accidents, again debatable at the margin. Pushing innocent people in front of trains is no accident, and is right out under most moral philosophies.
The prohibition against rape is also pretty universal. There's a lot of disagreement as to the *boundaries* of rape, but the central example of a malevolent stranger who crawls through an innocent woman's bedroom to forcibly penetrate her against her will, is prohibited by pretty much every non-utilitarian moral philosophy.
My beef with utilitarianism is that the objective function is plain wrong. Too many organisms are stuck too low on Maslow's pyramid to make interpersonal comparison of utility a good idea.
The benthamite objective is so crude that E/Acc counter-proposal against utilitiarian E/A to switch from maximizing pleasure to maximizing free energy looks like an improvement. One does not build a civilization by maximizing welfare in shrimp farms.
We know that there is so much we don't know that the objective needs to include heavy penalties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_method) on any coercion or distortion to incentives.
Utilitarianism with deontological characteristics is the way.
>repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Calculating things about morality is wrong not as in "morally wrong" but as in "2+2=5 is wrong", incorrect. It's not about repulsion but about no, it doesn't work.
A non-utilitarian position: let's solve issues on a concrete case by case basis.
Utilitarian: it won't do, making generalizations and calculations on a grander scale yields greater benefits.
A non-utilitarian: but oversimplified calculations on complex systems replete with self-reference is not easy, bound to be incorrect in the long term.
U: we can still give it our best.
NU: it's not not easy as in damn we need to write steps down, but as in three body problem.
Strawman-but-commited-utilitarian: now, let me tell you about those three bodies, see we draw some lines like this, and there ya go, tomorrow they'll be in roughly these positions.
U: we can still do good with this reasoning in some concrete generalized cases.
NU: yes, mosquito nets are likely fine.
SBCU: but seeing those benefits, can't we stick to the same principles in general and hope for the equally nice results?
Of course not.
Humans are in general not not reducible to numbers because they're sacred divine sparks* or whatever, but because they're self-aware, conscious, they have memory and agency. And when there's more then one involved, well, that's where we veer off into pure chaos theory, linear equations just won't do. Which precludes most of utilitarianism espoused online.
• - albeit plenty of those who do hold them as "sacred divine sparks" do so as a poetic shorthand for the self-aware, conscious etc etc stuff.
After reading many great posts here on utilitarism, I think deep utilitarism considering nth order effects is a good moral framework - but due to the uncertainty of said nth order effects, it seems that this leads to simpler heuristics - something close to virtue ethics, most of the time.
However, I think naïve, 1st order utilitarism is often used as argumentation in the real world. Consider the EA argument that charity money is most efficiently used where the marginal dollar saves most lives, leading to the investment i malaria bednets. This seems, at least superficially, to be a 1st order argument. Considering nth order effects, one might intuitively suspect that investing in infrastructure, energy production or education may look better.
These 1st order utilitarian calculations may be what people intuitivly react to when they oppose utilitarism, maybe rightly so.
I'm probably just confused by the title.
You are not supporting things from the first list on utilitarian grounds, are you? Or do you literally turn off your utilitarinism while thinking about these questions?
Привет Скотт ,как ты там) что там с волшебным джином ))
вот результат моего опыта ковида, до и после его прихода меня совершенно не вдохновляет страна где я проживаю, мое сознание будто не вписывается ,такое ощущение ,что вокруг меня не та цивилизация
I think the biggest error here is the assumption that the Utility Function can be computed from some arbitrary "I know it all" belief...
A Utilitarian should use the scientific method to discern wether most of these policies are good or bad.
For example "Letting people get paid to donate their organs" has a myriad of possible ramifications...
Let some countries do it (or states, or counties, for example by restricting to only those domiciled there before the legislation passed) and make statistics about the life of donors and who received the organs.
The belief that we can a priori understand all the possible ramifications of such a policy is not warranted.
Personally I think overall such a policy would be bad for society but I would love to be proven wrong...
Sure, but you still have a moral duty to let the hospital employee rape the coma patients, yes?
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality
Maybe, but it also might be because utilitarians are pretty bad at calculating things about morality. They tend to focus on the positives, and ignore the negatives. To use a recent example, cryptocurrency was supposed to usher in a new era of economic prosperity unconstrained by the old power structures, but in reality it just produced a new currency speculation market plus a whole bunch of new and exciting scams. But in fact utilitarians have a long history of mediocre successes and predictable failures, and on that basis trusting someone with your future just because he says "it's ok, I can multiply numbers" appears to be a bit reckless.
It's also possible that people are mathematicians who think your and philosophy's use of math is *extremely* dubious and there's little to no evidence of moral optimization having value beyond a certain satisficing threshold. Probably these people agree with a lot of your views from both lists, but question your methods, and think we should *all* admit high levels of back justified gut instinct.
But sure, focus on the easy critics who haven't examined their moral systems with regard to some questions you picked.
I let this message pass through two of Rumi's gates.
Edit: And I'm glad you're roundly and soundly being taken to task in the comments by a bunch of people who dislike or question the *quality of the utilitarian method*. Please, please take this as a learning and go back to *investigating* strong positions instead of *fighting against* weak ones. I miss 2015 Scott.
I love your writing, Scott, but this essay strikes me as underbaked. I also have strong utilitarian leanings, and I think you're a very insightful guy, a wonderful writer, and a terrific person, but I don't think this essay accomplishes much.
First, I think you're straw-manning the people who are uncomfortable with utilitarians. Yes, some people who don't like utilitarians think dumb things. So what? So do some utilitarians! You're smarter and more thoughtful than 9,999 people out of 10,000, so if you were a rules-based moralist, you would also reach good results, as many have. I'd be much more interested in seeing you steelman criticism of utilitarians first, then respond to that.
Second, there are whole books on these questions. I have so many objections, I don't even know where to start.
- Do people really think kids should go to school because they are following rules based morality instead of utilitarianism? I mean, if you said "I think the kids involved and society as a whole are worse off as a result of requiring kids to go to school," you think their answer would be "I agree, but let's make them go to school anyway because I have a moral belief that kids should go to school even if it harms them and leaves us all worse off?"
- I don't see anything in your essay that addresses how you factor the Omelas function into your moral schema. If someone has a different upper bound on the suffering that can be imposed on the losers for the sake of the winners, or acceptable distributions of suffering that result in overall gains, why are you right and they are wrong? What's your Omelas function and does it make you not a utilitarian?
- Does utilitarianism require that we obey the best mathematicians in determining what's right and wrong? If not, aren't we going to end up in some case where almost everyone argues that their moral structure is overall best for the world, but then we all argue that everyone else is reaching their conclusion wrong? You can accuse them of motivated reasoning (probably correctly), but my take is most moral rules people believe that the risk of harmful error from Peter Singer-esque reasoning outweighs the possible gains.
Yes, these are big questions, but that's why I don't think your essay gets very far. (Unless I don't get it, but I'm looking forward to "Best of the Comments on Less Utilitarian than Thou" for more detail.)
I agree that you are a lovely person and you identify as a utilitarian. But if that's the argument, then this could have been a tweet, and if there's more to it than that, I don't get it.
What kind of protests do you like?
I ask because my perception of blocking traffic (often done by *getting a parade permit for your protest*) is that it's an inconvenience that does not damage to people or property, and if you cross off all protests where somebody can legitimately say "this inconveniences me as much as having to take an alternate route to work" then you're not left with, well, any that have ever accomplished anything.
Should protests achieve anything? Should the views of people with the time and inclination to go round shouting in the street be privileged over the views of people with something better to do?
Historically, people who are deprived of rights get them through violence, nonviolent protest, or not at all.
Since I'm in favor desegregation and same-sex marriage, and against apartheid and the Reign of Terror, my answer to "should protests achieve anything?" is "at least sometimes, yes."
If there is a broad and serious injustice in your society, then the people who are working their 9-5 office jobs and going home at the end of the day do indeed have something better to do. They're just not doing it.
This isn't the case for all protests, but it is for some. And, ultimately, history is made by the people who show up. Always has been, always will be.
Thanks Scott. I think it's key to clarify whether you apply calculate utility for specific cases, or for the rules. I'm sure there's some good terminology for this which I don't know. When you are against protestors blocking roads I'm guessing you don't calculate the utility of furthering their specific cause vs. the negative utility of blocking that specific road. Rather you weigh up the utility of allowing all kinds of protestors to block roads vs. the utility of having a law banning this.
I agree with the fact that Anti-Utilitarians tend to strawman Utilitarianism as "do evil for the greater good". But I think Scott sets up his own strawman for Anti-Utilitarians with the "math is taboo" assertion. I'm generally pro-Utilitarian, but there are good reasons to be skeptical of the mathematization of morality.
I wrote a detailed rebuttal here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/steelmanning-anti-utilitarianism
Utilitarianism lacks a good answer to G.E. Moore's open question argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument
Internet pseuds love utilitarianism because it's easy to understand and seems to solve a problem while actually just kicking the can down the road. They reveal how little they actually know about the history of philosophy when they are completely unaware of things like the open question argument.
"Holding protests that block traffic, damage property, or harass people. These violate the usual moral rule against inconveniencing people, to serve the supposed greater good of raising awareness of a cause."
I'd have to strongly disagree on this one, some causes are simply too important to follow traffic laws. What possible alternative can you suggest for the powerless masses to effectively protest?
There is no meaningful alternative and with stupid laws protecting drivers rights to be workers and shoppers were designed and written, like anti-BDS laws for Israel only in American state governments, to curb protests and social change. It is inevitable those laws or 'norms' will be broken.
The purpose of the protest is to break them and disrupt commerce as that's one of the few things the elites care about. It is also very strange to combine property damage and harassment of regular people with the very different things of blocking traffic or protesting leaders who have chosen to be in public positions. Politicians promoting and enacting genocide should be shouted down and harassed in public and they should be put on trial and thrown in prison where they are guilty. Or in the case of the French revolution when starving crowd is told to eat cake when they do not have bread, they simply cut her head off. Since then the French have had zero problems from their 'royal' family. Now with an endless revolving door of endless psychopaths, there is no purpose in such a thing, so disrupting commerce is the new guillotine in our supposed democratic governments which routinely ignore 80% plus of the people's views for a ceasefire now. Or any of another hundred vital issues to the common people with 70% plus support which are 'politically impossible'.
When we look at the sit-ins and other mass protests from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA South and elsewhere against segregation, when we look at the stop work protests in the Indian liberation movement, when we look at the protests which led to the end of apartheid South Africa or the Vietnam 'war' protests. Nearly every effective mass movement has used this tactic to block traffic and to 'harass' public officials and other leaders in order to push their cause along with causing all sorts of other disruptions. Are you telling them not to have done these things? To go back in time and say 'yea yea, segregation bad, but seriously, get off the bridge and get out of that restaurant which will not server you for being black?' It sounds like you're saying that.
While angry mobs are real and can turn into destructive riots or block emergency vehicles at times (more often at an English football game than a peaceful protest), there are also agent provocateurs and other government and intelligence intervention in recent decades where a lot of the risk of violence and property damage comes from these kinds of incitement or small incidents of less than 0.5% of people at a protest which the corporate propagandist media fixate on. How many times was that mkultra asset, test subject, and cult leader let off of criminal charges before they put in him prison? Why was it on the day of Malcom X's assassination that the usually ubiquitous police presence at every single on of his events was absent? Such as the tiny handful of a few hundred people who largely peacefully spilled into the capital building on Jan 6 out of well over 500,000 people there that day. All while FBI and other agents or assets are on camera shouting to incite people to go into the building, you can watch the footage. All of whom somehow don't get charged or walk away with zero prison time, while dumb rubes who stumbled into the lobby have gone to prison. Piles of expensive bricks left out unattended in New York just before a protest while normally you'd never see any construction material left out, locked up behind high fences.
Regardless, this doesn't seem like a viable position to be against all disruptive protests all the time for all causes.. No justice, no peace. Shut it down, and other similar sentiments have been one of the only tools common people have had and have effectively used to bring about change. The simple fact that enough people disagree with something strongly enough to put their bodies and time into such a protest in a free society means they should be able to do so. I know of many environmental protest which only succeeded due to such protest of people chaining themselves to trees or up on 3-pole death platforms where removing one poll causes the person to fall to their death. It worked and many forests still stand due to such protests. Such anti-protest laws only benefit the elite to pursue more crimes and war crimes against commoners and our collective environment.
If you feel this way about traffic laws, then I'd wonder how you feel about unions stopping work for safer conditions or fair wages?
Not that it matters and people will simply not listen to or look to you for leadership on this issue of effective protest movements both historically and now. Those who march against the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank because they live, suffer, and die under a brutal expansionist apartheid Israeli military law and bombardment are not particularly interested in such anti-protest laws to muzzle them. All while the elite profit from arms sales for bombs dropped on women and children who live in a concentration camp turned death camp.
But if someone were to listen to your love of western traffic laws, what alternatives would you suggest people take to stop what they perceive as a genocide and new holocaust? What is the correct response to a holocaust as we watch things like the Flour Massacre gunning down intentionally starving people trying to get food from a limited entry aid truck? While psychopaths run a festival to block the aid trucks with bouncy castles and cotton candy? Not that the IOF was letting aid trucks of food in before that insane genocide festival. Should we be meekly and quietly marching on a weekend and being ignored by the media who love to lie about the numbers of protesters present and what they are saying and doing? What more effective altruistic action would you propose to stop or at least protest a genocide?
What should we do when there is a new Mai Lai massacre, or more than one, happening every single day in Gaza for 150 days now? We can't all have Aaron Bushnell's moral conviction to set ourselves on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in DC. Or Thich Quang Duc who did so against the genocide in Vietnam where the USA relentlessly blew up hospitals, villages, and killed civilians on purpose with horrific war crime napalm and land mines which are still a danger 50 years later. Such enlightened moral capacity is exceptionally rare to self immolate. Sadly the war criminals seem to rise up in abundance.
What else can a common person do besides block traffic and stop commerce? In one of the greatest epics of our era made into movies and films over and over again we have Dune where 'the spice must flow' and the blockage of commerce of spice, which was basically oil in the story, was the penultimate tool the people of the planet Dune had to protest their exploitation.
Such a tactic is held up as a pinnacle of moral protest when we look to India or the American civil rights movement. it is odd to spit on that tactic and you're perfectly right a lot of people don't like or agree with such a position. Such as the farmers and truckers in europe right now. They have your attention right? You know about them right? What if they just quietly marched on a side street, then no one would know about them.
Even the credit hungry political class love such traffic blocking protests, historically only, and the VP of the USA recently gave a speech at a famous bridge in the American south which was shut down by a protest march in the civil rights era of the 1960s. It seems a wholly untenable position to put the free flow of traffic or not disrupting politicians speeches as some sacrosanct principle which goes above all protest movements for all causes no matter what.
The protestors who stand daily with fake blood on their bodies who harass the ultra zionist genocider Blinken at his mansion are doing a great job. Public figures are subject to public scrutiny and disapproval when their actions are so barbaric and evil. Should Hitler and Himmler have enjoyed peaceful and quiet existences free of protest in your view? Would you have opposed protests outside their mansions or villas? Or would that be harassment or breaking traffic laws?
I for one wish more people had protested and shut down traffic in the late 1930s and during WWII to draw attention to the Nazi holocaust against jews, gypsies, blacks, gays, and what they did in Poland. Or what the Americans did in Germany and Japan, the only nation to use nuclear weapons used it on the civilian population on purpose to try to terrorise Japan into surrendering - aka violence against civilians for political purposes. I'd bet the Chinese and anyone of good conscience wish more streets had been shut down due to what Japan had been doing to them in that same era. Did the people of Rwanda wish more attention was given to their cause and more roads shut down in protest? The Armenian genocide is still largely ignored and was basically unknown at the time it occurred.
Just as today it is important and correct for protest events such as when Jewish American protesters shut down 8 bridges in 8 American cities during Hanukah in 2023 to protest the genocide in Gaza and many other such protests shut as shutting down central station in New York by Jewish anti-genocide and antizionist protesters along with the thousand of other such protest to draw attention to their cause of not murdering children.
I had thought it a common moral position to be against the dismemberment and intentional starvation of children, but I was wrong and starving civilians through sanctions is extremely common for the American empire as it turns out. Seeing the skeletons of children who died of starvation, orphaned by bombs and bullets before their neglected painful deaths...it just...makes me want to scream, cry, and block traffic sometimes.
Not all causes are equal, but a blanket idea of 'never block traffic' is just not tenable. The elite are ever willing to expend our lives like water at their connivence, but when commerce is blocked they suddenly give a damn. If the spice must blow, then the spice will not flow until the mass school shooter genocidal actions stop.
If we are to care about the free flow of traffic or emergency services, what until I tell you about the 650 internal checkpoints in the West Bank which are an illegal occupation under international law. They routinely block and slow emergency vehicle son purpose so that people will die. Or about all the ambulances in Gaza which were blown up, along with their associated hospitals. Talk about a problem of a protest causing disruptions.
Those protest happen to be from the Israeli military, but I'm betting there are all sorts of principles of traffic law which you'd be upset about. I look forward to your essay on this problem of military disruption of traffic in occupied Palestine. Their military leader said no food, no fuel, no water...but he also has a no traffic issue and blocks thousands of aid trucks from getting in.
> I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math).
Also, most people don’t like math.
I'm curious where the "guns cause deaths" association came from. I've haven't seen that the number of gun owners is correlated with the number of murders.
If you're talking about gun-related accidents, I acknowledge that they exist-- but should we ban everything that has the potential to kill?