This prevents predatory strategies from masquerading as altruism
I did not understand that. Is the worry that it’s hard to distinguish a genuine welfare maximizer from a predator because you can’t tell if they will ever give you back power? I don’t understand why this does not apply to agents pretending to pursue empowerment. It is common in conflicts to temporarily disempower someone to protect their long-term empowerment (e.g. a country mandatorily mobilizing for war against a fascist attacker, preventing a child from ignoring their homework), and it is also common to pretend to protect long-term empowerment and never give back power (e.g. a dictatorship of the proletariat never transitioning to a “true” communist economy).
Basic idea is that by conquering someone you may not reduce their welfare very much short-term, but you do reduce their power a lot short-term. (E.g. the British conquered India with relatively little welfare impacts on most Indians.)
And so it is much harder to defend a conquest as altruistic in the sense of empowering, than it is to defend a conquest as altruistic in the sense of welfare-increasing.
As you say, this is not a perfect defense mechanism, because sometimes long-term empowerment and short-term empowerment conflict. But there are often strategies that are less disempowering short-term which the moral pressure of “altruism=empowerment” would push people towards. E.g. it would make it harder for people to set up the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the first place.
And in general I think it’s actually pretty uncommon for temporary disempowerment to be necessary for long-term empowerment. Re your homework example, there’s a wide spectrum from the highly-empowering Taking Children Seriously to highly-disempowering Asian tiger parents, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that tiger parenting often backfires. Similarly, mandatory mobilization disproportionately happens during wars fought for the wrong reasons.
I did not understand that. Is the worry that it’s hard to distinguish a genuine welfare maximizer from a predator because you can’t tell if they will ever give you back power? I don’t understand why this does not apply to agents pretending to pursue empowerment. It is common in conflicts to temporarily disempower someone to protect their long-term empowerment (e.g. a country mandatorily mobilizing for war against a fascist attacker, preventing a child from ignoring their homework), and it is also common to pretend to protect long-term empowerment and never give back power (e.g. a dictatorship of the proletariat never transitioning to a “true” communist economy).
Ah, yeah, I was a bit unclear here.
Basic idea is that by conquering someone you may not reduce their welfare very much short-term, but you do reduce their power a lot short-term. (E.g. the British conquered India with relatively little welfare impacts on most Indians.)
And so it is much harder to defend a conquest as altruistic in the sense of empowering, than it is to defend a conquest as altruistic in the sense of welfare-increasing.
As you say, this is not a perfect defense mechanism, because sometimes long-term empowerment and short-term empowerment conflict. But there are often strategies that are less disempowering short-term which the moral pressure of “altruism=empowerment” would push people towards. E.g. it would make it harder for people to set up the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the first place.
And in general I think it’s actually pretty uncommon for temporary disempowerment to be necessary for long-term empowerment. Re your homework example, there’s a wide spectrum from the highly-empowering Taking Children Seriously to highly-disempowering Asian tiger parents, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that tiger parenting often backfires. Similarly, mandatory mobilization disproportionately happens during wars fought for the wrong reasons.