The problem you pose has a more immediately-relevant application: What is a good proportion of resources to devote to non-human life? For instance, when is it better to save a non-human species from extinction, than to turn its habitat into farmland to sustain an equal number of humans? We might agree that one human is worth more than one spotted owl; but not that the ten-billionth human is worth more than the last spotted owl. This is because humans are similar to each other. The identity you invoke is just the most extreme case of similarity.
I’ve mentioned before on LW that the best moral principle I know, where the goodness of a moral principle is measured as something like
1 / [ bits needed to specify moral principle x Kullback-Leibler divergence(distribution of actions governed by the moral principle || distribution of actions that I endorse)]
is that higher informational complexity is better than lower informational complexity. This nicely deals with this problem, as well as with its generalization to cases where the duplicate copies are not exact duplicates, but merely highly correlated.
We might agree that one human is worth more than one spotted owl; but not that the ten-billionth human is worth more than the last spotted owl.
How does that work? Do you choose the ten-billionth human by lottery and then tell her, sorry you lost, now it’s you being weighed against the last spotted owl?
Added: also, ‘last’ isn’t very different from ‘first’. How about this scenario: in this universe where spotted owls never existed, I have bio-crafted the First Spotted Owl, a work of art! Unfortunately, it can’t breed without a Second Spotted Owl, and I don’t have the resources to make that. This makes my First Owl the Last Owl as well, and so worth more than the ten-billionth human. I thus get the moral right to kill said human and transmute it into the Second Owl!
(I have given Spotted Owls onwards the ability of hunting humans for breakfast, so I don’t need to worry about the chicks.)
I’m not convinced informational complexity gets you what you want here (a cloud of gas in thermal equilibrium has maximum informational complexity). I also don’t agree that the last spotted owl is worth more than the 10 billionth human.
Yes, it does kind of depend on “worth more to whom?”. To the 10-billionth human’s mother, no way. The aggregate worth to all humans who benefit in some small way from the existence of spotted owls, maybe.
If you took a vote, most of those humans still might say no (because who knows if the next vote will be whether they themselves are worth less than the last of some species of shrew).
Upvoted. In the words of Penn Fraser Jillette: “Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie with AIDS.”
That statement has always puzzled me a bit. Why does it matter that the junkie has AIDS? That’s a death sentence, so either “saving” the junkie means curing the AIDS and it doesn’t add anything to stipulate that it was originally suffered (unless it’s just an intuition pump about AIDS sufferers tending to be seen as a particularly worthless echelon of humanity?). Or, it means rescuing the junkie from a more immediate danger and leaving the AIDS intact, in which case no real saving has happened—the cause of death has just changed and been put off for a while. And over those remaining years of the junkie’s life there’s a nontrivial chance that the voluntary slaughter of all those chimps will ultimately result in another AIDS infection, which is another death sentence!
I always took the statement to be more about: Ignoring real-world effects of chimpanzees going extinct, no amount of animal death, in and of itself, is considered more horrible than any amount of human death. Animal life has no inherent worth. None.
I assumed the meaning was ‘to save one junkie with AIDS from some imminent death that has nothing to do with junkie-ness or AIDS’. I.e., I would value even a few extra months of a junkie’s life over any amount of chimpanzee lives.
The identity you invoke is just the most extreme case of similarity.
Yes, this is what I was referring to in the sentence starting “A full account should also address more complex cases”. I wanted to start with identity because we can establish that discounting for similarity is necessary in at least one case, due to the relative clarity of our intuition in that case. But I think once we move away from fully identical copies, we’d have a lot more disagreement about how the discounting should work. One might argue that even with a billion humans, the discount factor should be negligible.
I’ve mentioned before on LW that the best moral principle I know
Do you have a full write-up of this somewhere? I can’t make much sense of it from what you wrote in the comment.
No write-up. The idea is that you can decide between two situations by choosing the one with greater information or complexity. The trickiness is in deciding how to measure information or complexity, and in deciding what to measure the complexity of. You probably don’t want to conclude that, in a closed system, the ethically best thing to do is nothing because doing anything increases entropy. (Perhaps using a measure of computation performed, instead of a static measure of entropy, would address that.)
This gives you immediately a lot of ethical principles that are otherwise difficult to justify; such as valuing evolution, knowledge, diversity, and the environment; and condemning (non-selective) destruction and censorship. Also, whereas most ethical systems tend to extreme points of view, the development of complexity is greatest when control parameters take on intermediate values. Conservatives value stasis; progressives value change; those who wish to increase complexity aim for a balance between the two.
(The equation in my comment is not specific to that idea, so it may be distracting you.)
(Perhaps using a measure of computation performed, instead of a static measure of entropy, would address that.)
This is exactly what I have been thinking for a while also. In this view, when thinking about how bad it would be to destroy something, one should think about how much computation it would take to recreate it. I think this seems like a really promising idea, because it gives a unified reason to be against both murder and destruction of the rain forests.
Still, it is probably not enough to consider only the amount of computation—one could come up with counterexamples of programs computing really boring things...
This parallels some of the work I’m doing with fun-theoretic utility, at least in terms of using information theory. One big concern is what measure of complexity to use, as you certainly don’t want to use a classical information measure—otherwise Kolmogorov random outcomes will be preferred to all others.
The problem you pose has a more immediately-relevant application: What is a good proportion of resources to devote to non-human life? For instance, when is it better to save a non-human species from extinction, than to turn its habitat into farmland to sustain an equal number of humans? We might agree that one human is worth more than one spotted owl; but not that the ten-billionth human is worth more than the last spotted owl. This is because humans are similar to each other. The identity you invoke is just the most extreme case of similarity.
I’ve mentioned before on LW that the best moral principle I know, where the goodness of a moral principle is measured as something like
1 / [ bits needed to specify moral principle x Kullback-Leibler divergence(distribution of actions governed by the moral principle || distribution of actions that I endorse)]
is that higher informational complexity is better than lower informational complexity. This nicely deals with this problem, as well as with its generalization to cases where the duplicate copies are not exact duplicates, but merely highly correlated.
How does that work? Do you choose the ten-billionth human by lottery and then tell her, sorry you lost, now it’s you being weighed against the last spotted owl?
Added: also, ‘last’ isn’t very different from ‘first’. How about this scenario: in this universe where spotted owls never existed, I have bio-crafted the First Spotted Owl, a work of art! Unfortunately, it can’t breed without a Second Spotted Owl, and I don’t have the resources to make that. This makes my First Owl the Last Owl as well, and so worth more than the ten-billionth human. I thus get the moral right to kill said human and transmute it into the Second Owl!
(I have given Spotted Owls onwards the ability of hunting humans for breakfast, so I don’t need to worry about the chicks.)
I’m not convinced informational complexity gets you what you want here (a cloud of gas in thermal equilibrium has maximum informational complexity). I also don’t agree that the last spotted owl is worth more than the 10 billionth human.
Yes, it does kind of depend on “worth more to whom?”. To the 10-billionth human’s mother, no way. The aggregate worth to all humans who benefit in some small way from the existence of spotted owls, maybe.
If you took a vote, most of those humans still might say no (because who knows if the next vote will be whether they themselves are worth less than the last of some species of shrew).
Upvoted. In the words of Penn Fraser Jillette: “Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie with AIDS.”
That statement has always puzzled me a bit. Why does it matter that the junkie has AIDS? That’s a death sentence, so either “saving” the junkie means curing the AIDS and it doesn’t add anything to stipulate that it was originally suffered (unless it’s just an intuition pump about AIDS sufferers tending to be seen as a particularly worthless echelon of humanity?). Or, it means rescuing the junkie from a more immediate danger and leaving the AIDS intact, in which case no real saving has happened—the cause of death has just changed and been put off for a while. And over those remaining years of the junkie’s life there’s a nontrivial chance that the voluntary slaughter of all those chimps will ultimately result in another AIDS infection, which is another death sentence!
I always took the statement to be more about: Ignoring real-world effects of chimpanzees going extinct, no amount of animal death, in and of itself, is considered more horrible than any amount of human death. Animal life has no inherent worth. None.
Neither does most human life, according to many people who agree with this statement.
I assumed the meaning was ‘to save one junkie with AIDS from some imminent death that has nothing to do with junkie-ness or AIDS’. I.e., I would value even a few extra months of a junkie’s life over any amount of chimpanzee lives.
Yes, this is what I was referring to in the sentence starting “A full account should also address more complex cases”. I wanted to start with identity because we can establish that discounting for similarity is necessary in at least one case, due to the relative clarity of our intuition in that case. But I think once we move away from fully identical copies, we’d have a lot more disagreement about how the discounting should work. One might argue that even with a billion humans, the discount factor should be negligible.
Do you have a full write-up of this somewhere? I can’t make much sense of it from what you wrote in the comment.
No write-up. The idea is that you can decide between two situations by choosing the one with greater information or complexity. The trickiness is in deciding how to measure information or complexity, and in deciding what to measure the complexity of. You probably don’t want to conclude that, in a closed system, the ethically best thing to do is nothing because doing anything increases entropy. (Perhaps using a measure of computation performed, instead of a static measure of entropy, would address that.)
This gives you immediately a lot of ethical principles that are otherwise difficult to justify; such as valuing evolution, knowledge, diversity, and the environment; and condemning (non-selective) destruction and censorship. Also, whereas most ethical systems tend to extreme points of view, the development of complexity is greatest when control parameters take on intermediate values. Conservatives value stasis; progressives value change; those who wish to increase complexity aim for a balance between the two.
(The equation in my comment is not specific to that idea, so it may be distracting you.)
This is exactly what I have been thinking for a while also. In this view, when thinking about how bad it would be to destroy something, one should think about how much computation it would take to recreate it. I think this seems like a really promising idea, because it gives a unified reason to be against both murder and destruction of the rain forests.
Still, it is probably not enough to consider only the amount of computation—one could come up with counterexamples of programs computing really boring things...
This parallels some of the work I’m doing with fun-theoretic utility, at least in terms of using information theory. One big concern is what measure of complexity to use, as you certainly don’t want to use a classical information measure—otherwise Kolmogorov random outcomes will be preferred to all others.