I do actually think that the general trope of “the rebels winning is sufficient for a happy ending” is pretty indicative of poor ethical thinking.
But even Hollywood balks at their heroes ending up with literal godlike control of the world. For example (though I haven’t watched the series) my impression of the Avengers franchise is that they introduce a plot device (the infinity gauntlet) that gives its wielder godlike powers, the heroes use it specifically to defeat the bad guy and undo the damage he caused, and then they destroy the device.
In other words, they got to the exact point that ratfic heroes got to, and then their happy ending specifically involves them giving up the same kind of godlike power that ratfic heroes typically use to make themselves dictators of the universe.
Similarly for Superman: his happy endings involve him successfully using his godlike powers to beat the bad guys without changing the established world power structures basically at all. And I feel pretty confident that a big reason Superman doesn’t end up taking over the world is because the writers and viewers would have moral qualms about that kind of ending.
tl;dr: there are many ways to make a story have a happy ending, and it’s quite indicative of the authors’ ethical and political views which endings they consider to be happy. The kind of endings that rationalists often portray as happy, mainstream scriptwriters seem to go out of their way to avoid.
And I feel pretty confident that a big reason Superman doesn’t end up taking over the world is because the writers and viewers would have moral qualms about that kind of ending.
Yes. And I claim they’re wrong about that.
There’s lots of banal evil (some of which that is not regarded as evil by typical social morality, some of which is, but is generally treated as normal and ignored). I would fight a war to end factory farming, if that would help.
If I ended up with “ultimate power” somehow, by some mechanism that didn’t involve me taking on ultimate power for a specific narrow mandate, I think it is both ethically correct to use it to permanently end many (but probably not all) of those evils.
Oh, I think of “ending factory farming” as very far from “taking over the world”.
If Superman were a skilled political operator it could be as simple as arranging to take photoshoots with whichever politicians legislated the end of factory farms.
Or if he were less skilled it could involve doing various kinds of property damage to factory farms (potentially even things which there aren’t laws against, like flying around them in a way which blows the buildings over).
This might escalate to the government trying to arrest him, and outright conflict, but honestly if Superman isn’t skillful enough to defuse that kind of thing, given his influence, then he doesn’t have much business imposing political changes on the world anyway. A politically unskilled and/or unvirtuous Superman trying to end factory farming could quite easily destabilize society in a way that is far worse long-term than letting factory farming end on whatever the natural counterfactual timeline is (without AI, maybe 20 or 30 years?)
Relatedly I’m increasingly coming to believe that this reasoning applies to Lincoln, and that we’d be in a much better position if he’d let the Confederacy secede and then imposed strong economic and moral pressure on them to end slavery.
Relatedly I’m increasingly coming to believe that this reasoning applies to Lincoln, and that we’d be in a much better position if he’d let the Confederacy secede and then imposed strong economic and moral pressure on them to end slavery.
Why? Because that was the beginning of the centralization of power with the federal government?
I think Alexander Hamilton was the beginning, but this seems like a big step. Vassar talks about how, from the civil war onwards, the American legal system needed to be optimized to rule a vassal state while also pretending that they weren’t ruling a vassal state. Can’t remember the specific examples he cited to me but I found it fairly compelling.
This might escalate to the government trying to arrest him, and outright conflict, but honestly if Superman isn’t skillful enough to defuse that kind of thing, given his influence, then he doesn’t have much business imposing political changes on the world anyway.
This seems like a weird set of claims to me.
First of all, yes, it seems very likely to escalate to conflict? Many nations would consider Superman’s property damage to their factories to be an act of war by a foreign power, and that he’s doing it in ways that technically circumvent existing laws is not going to make much of a difference. (That seems more annoying actually.)
He could try to negotiate for big, universal, changes to the food supply chain via diplomatic channels, backed by offers to trade various things he can provide, which generally seems like a better way to go about it. But if push comes to shove, I think he should back up his demands with effectively military intervention, if that could work. (Actually, my guess is that if he’s resorting to violence, he should mainly be relying on targeted assassinations.)
Also, the factory farming is not the only evil that our hypothetical superman should end. I think he should probably initiate regime changes in various authoritarian or dictatorial countries (eg North Korea, Eritrea, Afghanistan), or otherwise enable residents to leave the territory of those regimes. Again, he should attempt to negotiate for that diplomatically, first, but this is very clearly against the core interests of those regimes, and it seems very likely that he’s going to end up going to war with them.
Are you saying that if the diplomatic negotiations deteriorate to the point of military action, that means that our hypothetical superman has failed, and he would be better off retiring? Don’t existing legitimate countries go to war for far less noble reasons all the time?
I do think that having a superman around is extremely scary, and among other things, he should make the standards that he’s enforcing extremely clear and legible. He should make a point to never be capricious. He should write clear manifestos declaring the moral principles that he’s upholding and the logic behind them. And if his principles change for some reason, he should telegraph that very clearly. He should telegraph his actions with a lot of lead time, so that he’s a predictable agent to make plans around.
But ultimately he should declare:
Factory farms and oppressive regimes that people are not allowed to leave should not be allowed to exist. I am open to negotiations regarding the safest and stablest and overal best path toward ending those institutions. But that they are ending is not open to negotiation. After an offramp plan has been agreed to, or if the international community cannot reach a consensus on an offramp plan, I will oppose anyone maintaining these institutions, with superpowered military force.
If you don’t like that, tough noogies for you. Your national sovereignty is not more sacred than the sentient rights on which your actions are infringing.”
This is basically how I would want a hegemonic morally-motivated nation-state to behave.
What standard do you want to hold our superman / morally-motivated nation state to?
Are you saying that if the diplomatic negotiations deteriorate to the point of military action, that means that our hypothetical superman has failed, and he would be better off retiring? Don’t existing legitimate countries go to war for far less noble reasons all the time?
I indended this to refer to scenarios where the US itself (or other leading western powers) were taking military action against Superman. I care much less about whether he destabilizes North Korea or Eritrea or even countries similar to those but better-governed. But I care a lot about whether he destabilizes the countries I consider the best and most important ones.
Many nations would consider Superman’s property damage to their factories to be an act of war by a foreign power
Maybe. Or maybe they really wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Superman. Or maybe they would issue an angry press release then not do anything. In a setting where Superman holds basically all the cards in terms of physical force, most nations would try quite hard to defuse tensions with him (unless, as I discussed, he’s very unskilled).
I’m still not sure what standard you’re holding our hypothetical superman too. You just don’t want him to destabilize the countries that you consider most important?
If he overthrows the Communist Party of China, is he violating your standards?
If he forcibly institutes electoral reforms to make the US government more functional, is that violating your standards? Is the “forcibly” there a problem, and if it comes to using military force to push for electoral reform, he should hold off?
I claim that there are some people such that, if they were dictators of China, that would be much worse than the current situation. And there are some people such that, if they were dictators of China, that would be much better than the current situation. Which category a given person falls into depends a lot on their honesty, integrity, wisdom, ability to understand political dynamics, ability to resist manipulation, etc.
There are no particular limits I’d want to place on a sufficiently virtuous Superman. E.g. I want Superman to follow a policy that leads him to overthrow the government of China iff he is in the latter category. The big question is how Superman can gain justified confidence that he’s in the latter category, given that unvirtuous people are prone to a lot of self-deception. One way he can do it is by setting limits on his own behavior so that he can gain more evidence about what kind of person he is. E.g. maybe he thinks he’s really wise about politics—wise enough that him having control over US electoral policy is a good idea. If so, he should try to test that wisdom by implementing political change without using violence. If he starts telling you that he doesn’t need to pass such tests, because he’s already so confident that his plan is a good idea, then you should start getting worried.
In other words, when I think about a question like “should Superman forcibly institutes electoral reforms to make the US government more functional”, I expect that there are some ways to do this that are really good, and some ways to do this that are really bad. And the kinds of people who are capable of doing it in a really good way (given that they’re Superman) are also generally the kinds of people who wouldn’t need to use much force to make it happen (given that they’re Superman).
(Modulo, I have more uncertainty about how much force the wisest path entails when, one has hegemonic power. Certainly using military force to get your way has major costs, and so, taking those costs into account, I would expect the wiser courses of actions to be more peaceful, generally.)
Should I then summarize your criticism of ratfic protagonists as something like:
Trying to radically reform the world isn’t bad. The world does need reforming in many respects. But whether you are doing will do a good job at such a high stakes task depends on your personal virtue.
We can get evidence about how virtuous a person is by seeing how wisely and skillfully they comport themselves in lower-stakes situations where they don’t have all the power. Wise and virtuous people can generally make meaningful progress on their goals without needing ultimate power over everything, and without remaking the whole world in one shot.
Therefore, if a given person’s plan is to attain ultimate power, and only then use it to remake the world (instead of a more incremental process that doesn’t depend on centralizing power in their own hands) that’s a big red flag that even if they did end up with ultimate power, they wouldn’t be skilled or virtuous enough to use it well—they will likely make things much worse.
In general, ratfic protagonists tend to think that they already have all the virtue that they need to wield ultimate power, because they can see the inadequate equilibria in the world and can identify the better equilibria which could exist if only they had the power to make them so. They act as if most of the problem of wielding power is correctly identifying what to aim for, rather than procedural and personal questions of how to wield power well (so that you end up accomplishing your noble aims at all, and avoid causing a lot of harm along the way).
The more a person thinks that the thing that they need to make everything good is “more power”, the more concerned we should be that they are undercounting the importance of virtue and wisdom, and the more worried we should be if they actually ended up with ultimate power.
I’m also reminded of something that Val used to say: “power felt is power wasted”. Deploying a lot of force to make things go your way is very inefficient.
If you’re skilled, you should be able to get what you’re aiming for while deploying very little actual force (“speak softly and carry a big stick” for instance, but also using soft power and good leadership more generally). Someone with a little power and a lot of skill can often do as much (and with less collateral damage) as someone with a lot of power trying to muscle through.
Power is definitely useful, but the more you think that the thing you need to accomplish your aims, the more that indicates that you don’t have skill with using power efficiently.
I broadly agree with this comment too, though not as much as I agree with the other one.
Power felt can also be a kind of honesty—e.g. if a law is backed by force, then it’s often better for this to be unambiguous, so that people can track the actual landscape of power.
(Of course, being unambiguous about how much force backs up your laws can also be a kind of power move. I expect that there are ways to get the benefits of honesty without making it a power move, but I don’t have enough experience with this to be confident.)
In other words, I expect that the kind of inefficiency Val is talking about here is actually sometimes load-bearing for accountability.
Brandon Sanderson’s books have some interesting variants of this as well.
Spoilers for the Mistborn series (to the best of my recollection and with some consulting of the fandom wiki) (putting in collapsible for now, because I can’t get spoiler blocks to work with this new editor):
At the end of The Well of Ascension, Vin gets a hold of the power of Ruin (one of the Shards, roughly god-like entities of the universe). She knows that she can use it to eliminate lots of the world’s atrocities etc. Sazed, informed by a misty ghost, tells her that “it’s a trap” and she needs to release the power. Some other misty ghost appears out of nowhere and stabs Elend, nearly lethally, apparently to force Vin to accept the power, so that she can save her loved one. But she doesn’t do that, releasing the power, which turns out to free its prior weilder who is the bad guy and now goes on to destroy the world. He was also the spirit that told Sazed to stop Vin. Whereas the ghost that stabbed Elend was the Vessel of another shard, Preservation, a good guy (relative to Ruin, at least).
At the end of the next book, The Hero of Ages, Sazed accepts the powers of Ruin and Preservation, ascending to godhood and becoming Harmony. He approximately fixes the world, but then in the following series, it turns out that he’s not as powerful, as we might have predicted, and also the divine power that he has been wielding starts shaping his mind, so that he becomes more interested in things being Harmonious, than in “goodness”.
ETA: it’s plausibly relevant that Sazed, at the moment of Ascension, absorbed all the knowledge that had been stored for millennia in his Coppermind “amulets”, so that he could learn from the mistakes of the past generations and not screw things up as much.
IDK what the morale is supposed to be here, if any. “Sometimes you need to power-grab because otherwise someone else will power-grab in your place, but also beware because power corrupts and divine power corrupts in an ungodly way, so attaining instrumentally convergent goals is of limited value if it meddles with your utility function in unendorsed ways, be it due to some contingent peculiarity of your mental structure, or some more general fact of how minds work.”?
(There might also be something along those lines in other Sanderson cosmere books, but it’s been long since I’ve read any and I’m not up to date.)
ETA: Another relatedly interesting plot twist in Mistborn is that it turns out that the original bad guy, the Last Emperor, who gets killed at the end of the first book, imposed an oppressive regime in order to prevent humanity from Ruin. He also changed the planet for altruistic reasons that turned out to be misguided and hence harmful.
Relatedly, A Practical Guide to Evil is one of my favorite books/series, and grapples with the tension between trust and power very well. It’s one of the very few narratives I’ve seen written skillfully enough that the protagonist giving up power didn’t seem straightforwardly stupid to me (even when I was in a classic rationalist mindset).
I do actually think that the general trope of “the rebels winning is sufficient for a happy ending” is pretty indicative of poor ethical thinking.
But even Hollywood balks at their heroes ending up with literal godlike control of the world. For example (though I haven’t watched the series) my impression of the Avengers franchise is that they introduce a plot device (the infinity gauntlet) that gives its wielder godlike powers, the heroes use it specifically to defeat the bad guy and undo the damage he caused, and then they destroy the device.
In other words, they got to the exact point that ratfic heroes got to, and then their happy ending specifically involves them giving up the same kind of godlike power that ratfic heroes typically use to make themselves dictators of the universe.
Similarly for Superman: his happy endings involve him successfully using his godlike powers to beat the bad guys without changing the established world power structures basically at all. And I feel pretty confident that a big reason Superman doesn’t end up taking over the world is because the writers and viewers would have moral qualms about that kind of ending.
tl;dr: there are many ways to make a story have a happy ending, and it’s quite indicative of the authors’ ethical and political views which endings they consider to be happy. The kind of endings that rationalists often portray as happy, mainstream scriptwriters seem to go out of their way to avoid.
Yes. And I claim they’re wrong about that.
There’s lots of banal evil (some of which that is not regarded as evil by typical social morality, some of which is, but is generally treated as normal and ignored). I would fight a war to end factory farming, if that would help.
If I ended up with “ultimate power” somehow, by some mechanism that didn’t involve me taking on ultimate power for a specific narrow mandate, I think it is both ethically correct to use it to permanently end many (but probably not all) of those evils.
This is indeed pretty scary.
Oh, I think of “ending factory farming” as very far from “taking over the world”.
If Superman were a skilled political operator it could be as simple as arranging to take photoshoots with whichever politicians legislated the end of factory farms.
Or if he were less skilled it could involve doing various kinds of property damage to factory farms (potentially even things which there aren’t laws against, like flying around them in a way which blows the buildings over).
This might escalate to the government trying to arrest him, and outright conflict, but honestly if Superman isn’t skillful enough to defuse that kind of thing, given his influence, then he doesn’t have much business imposing political changes on the world anyway. A politically unskilled and/or unvirtuous Superman trying to end factory farming could quite easily destabilize society in a way that is far worse long-term than letting factory farming end on whatever the natural counterfactual timeline is (without AI, maybe 20 or 30 years?)
Relatedly I’m increasingly coming to believe that this reasoning applies to Lincoln, and that we’d be in a much better position if he’d let the Confederacy secede and then imposed strong economic and moral pressure on them to end slavery.
Why? Because that was the beginning of the centralization of power with the federal government?
I think Alexander Hamilton was the beginning, but this seems like a big step. Vassar talks about how, from the civil war onwards, the American legal system needed to be optimized to rule a vassal state while also pretending that they weren’t ruling a vassal state. Can’t remember the specific examples he cited to me but I found it fairly compelling.
This certainly seems to be the case with Trump’s (in my understanding) limited ability to govern blue states and cities.
This seems like a weird set of claims to me.
First of all, yes, it seems very likely to escalate to conflict? Many nations would consider Superman’s property damage to their factories to be an act of war by a foreign power, and that he’s doing it in ways that technically circumvent existing laws is not going to make much of a difference. (That seems more annoying actually.)
He could try to negotiate for big, universal, changes to the food supply chain via diplomatic channels, backed by offers to trade various things he can provide, which generally seems like a better way to go about it. But if push comes to shove, I think he should back up his demands with effectively military intervention, if that could work. (Actually, my guess is that if he’s resorting to violence, he should mainly be relying on targeted assassinations.)
Also, the factory farming is not the only evil that our hypothetical superman should end. I think he should probably initiate regime changes in various authoritarian or dictatorial countries (eg North Korea, Eritrea, Afghanistan), or otherwise enable residents to leave the territory of those regimes. Again, he should attempt to negotiate for that diplomatically, first, but this is very clearly against the core interests of those regimes, and it seems very likely that he’s going to end up going to war with them.
Are you saying that if the diplomatic negotiations deteriorate to the point of military action, that means that our hypothetical superman has failed, and he would be better off retiring? Don’t existing legitimate countries go to war for far less noble reasons all the time?
I do think that having a superman around is extremely scary, and among other things, he should make the standards that he’s enforcing extremely clear and legible. He should make a point to never be capricious. He should write clear manifestos declaring the moral principles that he’s upholding and the logic behind them. And if his principles change for some reason, he should telegraph that very clearly. He should telegraph his actions with a lot of lead time, so that he’s a predictable agent to make plans around.
But ultimately he should declare:
This is basically how I would want a hegemonic morally-motivated nation-state to behave.
What standard do you want to hold our superman / morally-motivated nation state to?
I indended this to refer to scenarios where the US itself (or other leading western powers) were taking military action against Superman. I care much less about whether he destabilizes North Korea or Eritrea or even countries similar to those but better-governed. But I care a lot about whether he destabilizes the countries I consider the best and most important ones.
Maybe. Or maybe they really wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Superman. Or maybe they would issue an angry press release then not do anything. In a setting where Superman holds basically all the cards in terms of physical force, most nations would try quite hard to defuse tensions with him (unless, as I discussed, he’s very unskilled).
I’m still not sure what standard you’re holding our hypothetical superman too. You just don’t want him to destabilize the countries that you consider most important?
If he overthrows the Communist Party of China, is he violating your standards?
If he forcibly institutes electoral reforms to make the US government more functional, is that violating your standards? Is the “forcibly” there a problem, and if it comes to using military force to push for electoral reform, he should hold off?
What’s the line that he shouldn’t cross?
I claim that there are some people such that, if they were dictators of China, that would be much worse than the current situation. And there are some people such that, if they were dictators of China, that would be much better than the current situation. Which category a given person falls into depends a lot on their honesty, integrity, wisdom, ability to understand political dynamics, ability to resist manipulation, etc.
There are no particular limits I’d want to place on a sufficiently virtuous Superman. E.g. I want Superman to follow a policy that leads him to overthrow the government of China iff he is in the latter category. The big question is how Superman can gain justified confidence that he’s in the latter category, given that unvirtuous people are prone to a lot of self-deception. One way he can do it is by setting limits on his own behavior so that he can gain more evidence about what kind of person he is. E.g. maybe he thinks he’s really wise about politics—wise enough that him having control over US electoral policy is a good idea. If so, he should try to test that wisdom by implementing political change without using violence. If he starts telling you that he doesn’t need to pass such tests, because he’s already so confident that his plan is a good idea, then you should start getting worried.
In other words, when I think about a question like “should Superman forcibly institutes electoral reforms to make the US government more functional”, I expect that there are some ways to do this that are really good, and some ways to do this that are really bad. And the kinds of people who are capable of doing it in a really good way (given that they’re Superman) are also generally the kinds of people who wouldn’t need to use much force to make it happen (given that they’re Superman).
Ok, I agree with all this!
(Modulo, I have more uncertainty about how much force the wisest path entails when, one has hegemonic power. Certainly using military force to get your way has major costs, and so, taking those costs into account, I would expect the wiser courses of actions to be more peaceful, generally.)
Should I then summarize your criticism of ratfic protagonists as something like:
Yes, great summary, I fully endorse it.
I’m also reminded of something that Val used to say: “power felt is power wasted”. Deploying a lot of force to make things go your way is very inefficient.
If you’re skilled, you should be able to get what you’re aiming for while deploying very little actual force (“speak softly and carry a big stick” for instance, but also using soft power and good leadership more generally). Someone with a little power and a lot of skill can often do as much (and with less collateral damage) as someone with a lot of power trying to muscle through.
Power is definitely useful, but the more you think that the thing you need to accomplish your aims, the more that indicates that you don’t have skill with using power efficiently.
I broadly agree with this comment too, though not as much as I agree with the other one.
Power felt can also be a kind of honesty—e.g. if a law is backed by force, then it’s often better for this to be unambiguous, so that people can track the actual landscape of power.
(Of course, being unambiguous about how much force backs up your laws can also be a kind of power move. I expect that there are ways to get the benefits of honesty without making it a power move, but I don’t have enough experience with this to be confident.)
In other words, I expect that the kind of inefficiency Val is talking about here is actually sometimes load-bearing for accountability.
This is very optimistic. Why do you think so? Alt. proteins outcompeting factory farmed meat?
He might be picking it from Jeff Sebo et al. https://verfassungsblog.de/global-ban-on-industrial-animal-agriculture/
Can you elaborate on that? I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
This version of the criticism I do kinda agree with. However I think it’s relatively mild.
Brandon Sanderson’s books have some interesting variants of this as well.
Spoilers for the Mistborn series (to the best of my recollection and with some consulting of the fandom wiki) (putting in collapsible for now, because I can’t get spoiler blocks to work with this new editor):
At the end of The Well of Ascension, Vin gets a hold of the power of Ruin (one of the Shards, roughly god-like entities of the universe). She knows that she can use it to eliminate lots of the world’s atrocities etc. Sazed, informed by a misty ghost, tells her that “it’s a trap” and she needs to release the power. Some other misty ghost appears out of nowhere and stabs Elend, nearly lethally, apparently to force Vin to accept the power, so that she can save her loved one. But she doesn’t do that, releasing the power, which turns out to free its prior weilder who is the bad guy and now goes on to destroy the world. He was also the spirit that told Sazed to stop Vin. Whereas the ghost that stabbed Elend was the Vessel of another shard, Preservation, a good guy (relative to Ruin, at least).
At the end of the next book, The Hero of Ages, Sazed accepts the powers of Ruin and Preservation, ascending to godhood and becoming Harmony. He approximately fixes the world, but then in the following series, it turns out that he’s not as powerful, as we might have predicted, and also the divine power that he has been wielding starts shaping his mind, so that he becomes more interested in things being Harmonious, than in “goodness”.
ETA: it’s plausibly relevant that Sazed, at the moment of Ascension, absorbed all the knowledge that had been stored for millennia in his Coppermind “amulets”, so that he could learn from the mistakes of the past generations and not screw things up as much.
IDK what the morale is supposed to be here, if any. “Sometimes you need to power-grab because otherwise someone else will power-grab in your place, but also beware because power corrupts and divine power corrupts in an ungodly way, so attaining instrumentally convergent goals is of limited value if it meddles with your utility function in unendorsed ways, be it due to some contingent peculiarity of your mental structure, or some more general fact of how minds work.”?
(There might also be something along those lines in other Sanderson cosmere books, but it’s been long since I’ve read any and I’m not up to date.)
ETA: Another relatedly interesting plot twist in Mistborn is that it turns out that the original bad guy, the Last Emperor, who gets killed at the end of the first book, imposed an oppressive regime in order to prevent humanity from Ruin. He also changed the planet for altruistic reasons that turned out to be misguided and hence harmful.
Very interesting.
Relatedly, A Practical Guide to Evil is one of my favorite books/series, and grapples with the tension between trust and power very well. It’s one of the very few narratives I’ve seen written skillfully enough that the protagonist giving up power didn’t seem straightforwardly stupid to me (even when I was in a classic rationalist mindset).
Interesting. Looks like plausibly in a similar vibe/direction as Venkatesh Rao’s Be Slightly Evil.