All else being equal, a murder is better than an accidental death, because a murder at least satisfies someone’s preferences.
I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I’m not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.
And then my brain came up with other thoughts that defeated the reductio and I’m just as consequentialist as before.
For some reason, this was all very scary to me. This is the third data point now in examples of, “Grognor’s opinion being changed by arguments way too easily”. I think I’m gullible.
Three things: 1) I’m curious if other consequentialists will find the same knockdown for the reductio that I did; 2) Should I increase my belief in consequentialism since it just passed a strenuous test, decrease it because it just barely survived a bout with a crippling illness, or leave it the same because they cancel out or some other reason? 3) I can’t seem to figure out when not to change my mind in response to reasonable-looking arguments. Help
Maybe you need to pay more attention to the ceteris paribus. When you include that, it seems perfectly sensible to me.
Consider a world in which in 1945 Adolf Hitler will either choke to death on a piece of spaghetti or will be poisoned by a survivor of the death camps that bribed his way into Hitler’s bunker...
Pop psych states that murder, especially first-time murder, induces lifelong psychological trauma in neurotypical adult people—and that, therefore, most of them lose more (I’m not saying “more utility”) than they gain. Clearly, that wouldn’t be the case with the death camp survivor [1], but I can see a sane, relatively untraumatized civillian who’d volunteer for Hitler’s post-war execution regretting their loss of innocence afterwards.
[1] I’ve heard that this was what happened with the commandant of Dachau and some of the SS guards there, who were turned over to the liberated prisoners by American soldiers, and presumably torn apart by them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_massacre
Not being a murderer, regardless of the utilitarian pay-offs is an important part of people’s identify and reasoning about morality.
It is fascinating just how damn crushing such tags can get once you start multiplying them. Even in the eyes of other people. Consider someone who has killed for the greater good. Now consider someone who has killed, raped and pillaged for the greater good (by historical standards this is the regular war hero pack).
Now consider someone who has killed, raped, blackmailed and tortured for the greater good. One may be glad that such people do exist and that they are on ones “side”. But wouldn’t you feel uneasy around such a person? Especially if you couldn’t abstract away their acts but had to watch say videos of them being performed.
Imagine carrying those memories, what is your self-conception? The only tale of virtue you have left when you are alone at night is that you posses the virtue of being the kind of person who is capable of suspending moral inhibitions based on long chains of reasoning. Maybe you are just that good at reasoning. Maybe.
Now consider someone who has killed, raped and pillaged for the greater good (by historical standards this is the regular war hero pack).
The parenthetical is true but the raping and (for most part) the pillaging was for personal gain, not the public good. It takes much more effort to contrive scenarios with folks who “rape for the public good”.
No more than torture for the public good, since rape can be used as a form of torture. It also has been used as a form of psychological warfare. Also pillaging can be vital to easing logistic difficulties of your side.
Also pillaging can be vital to easing logistic difficulties of your side.
Indeed, if the good guys are murdering whom they want and extorting stuff from the populace, it’s called a resistance movement, and in a generation there’s hardly anyone who thinks ill of them. See Russia, Spain, China etc.
By implying by omission that the killing was not mostly for personal gain, do you mean to suggest that it was for the public good, or to invoke a non-excluded middle?
By implying by omission that the killing was not mostly for personal gain, do you mean to suggest that it was for the public good, or to invoke a non-excluded middle?
I make no claim about the killing—that is at least arguable and inclusion would distract from the main point that the raping in the example given (historic war bands) was not.
Also—and primarily—this. Damn, of course I considered those aspects too, I’m not so psychologically blind as to not understand them. I just was too lazy to hammer that idea into shape for my comment. So you deserve all the karma for it.
Yep, but you see, there’s a difference between “mere” emotional anguish, which is, after all, biologically constrained in a way, and identity-related problems (which, as I understand it, can ruin a person precisely by using their “normal” state, with conscious voiced thoughts, as a carrier). It’s mostly bad to feel bad about yourself, but to know bad about yourself—seemingly in the empirical sense, just like you know there’s a monitor in front of you—is even worse.
Not everyone would see this in my phrase; I should’ve elaborated.
BTW, I’ve sent you a few PMs with interesting (IMO) questions over the last few weeks/months, and none have been answered! I don’t wish to embarrass you, I’m just curious if they might’ve been simply eaten by the mail gremlins. :) Might I just copy them and re-send them, so you could share an opinion or two at your leisure?
Oh don’t worry I’m going to respond to all of those in order, if you remember I did send you a PM explaining that I was going to respond to them eventually (that dreadful word). Quite honestly though I really dislike LW’s PM system, for starters my inbox contains both PMs and regular public responses and they get kind of lost in the mail, so there is that trivial barrier to responding.
I think I’ve already mentioned that I’d like to move our correspondences to email, so if you wouldn’t mind sending the text of your previous unanswered PMs in that format or me sending you an email quoting them I would much prefer that mode of communication. I’m also very much open to communicating live via skype or other IM programs.
Though obviously we’ll probably PM such contact data instead of disclosing it publicly.
All else being equal, a murder is better than an accidental death, because a murder at least satisfies someone’s preferences.
I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I’m not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.
It can’t be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn’t even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn’t get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.
3) I allot a reasonable-seeming amount of time to think before deciding to drastically change something important. The logic is that the argument isn’t evidence in itself—the evidence is the fact that the argument exists, and that you’re not aware of any flaws in it. If you haven’t thought about it for a while, the probability of having found flaws is low whether or not those flaws exist—so not having found them yet is only weak evidence against your current position.
So basically, “Before you’ve had time to consider them”.
3) I can’t seem to figure out when not to change my mind in response to reasonable-looking arguments. Help
See this quote. Presumably you already had strong arguments in favour of consequentialism. So when you came across a knock-down counterexample your first reaction should have been confusion. When you encounter a convincing argument against a position you hold strongly, bring to mind the arguments that first convinced you of that position and try to bring the opposing arguments into direct conflict with them. It should then be clear that one of the arguments has a logical flaw in it. Find out which one.
Hmmm. Murder decreases the ‘expected utility’ (cfg. life expentancy), so I think it would still be considered bad in some forms of consequentialism. The corner case—where expected utility would not change (much) would be e.g. shooting somebody who is falling off a cliff who will certainly not survive.
More general, it seems ethical systems are usually post-hoc organizing principles for our messy ethical intuitions. However, those intuitions are so messy, that for every simple set of rules, we can find some exception. Hence we get things like the trolley problem...
My brain came up with this thought:
I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I’m not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.
And then my brain came up with other thoughts that defeated the reductio and I’m just as consequentialist as before.
For some reason, this was all very scary to me. This is the third data point now in examples of, “Grognor’s opinion being changed by arguments way too easily”. I think I’m gullible.
Three things: 1) I’m curious if other consequentialists will find the same knockdown for the reductio that I did; 2) Should I increase my belief in consequentialism since it just passed a strenuous test, decrease it because it just barely survived a bout with a crippling illness, or leave it the same because they cancel out or some other reason? 3) I can’t seem to figure out when not to change my mind in response to reasonable-looking arguments. Help
Maybe you need to pay more attention to the ceteris paribus. When you include that, it seems perfectly sensible to me.
Consider a world in which in 1945 Adolf Hitler will either choke to death on a piece of spaghetti or will be poisoned by a survivor of the death camps that bribed his way into Hitler’s bunker...
Pop psych states that murder, especially first-time murder, induces lifelong psychological trauma in neurotypical adult people—and that, therefore, most of them lose more (I’m not saying “more utility”) than they gain.
Clearly, that wouldn’t be the case with the death camp survivor [1], but I can see a sane, relatively untraumatized civillian who’d volunteer for Hitler’s post-war execution regretting their loss of innocence afterwards.
[1] I’ve heard that this was what happened with the commandant of Dachau and some of the SS guards there, who were turned over to the liberated prisoners by American soldiers, and presumably torn apart by them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_massacre
Not being a murderer, regardless of the utilitarian pay-offs is an important part of people’s identify and reasoning about morality.
It is fascinating just how damn crushing such tags can get once you start multiplying them. Even in the eyes of other people. Consider someone who has killed for the greater good. Now consider someone who has killed, raped and pillaged for the greater good (by historical standards this is the regular war hero pack).
Now consider someone who has killed, raped, blackmailed and tortured for the greater good. One may be glad that such people do exist and that they are on ones “side”. But wouldn’t you feel uneasy around such a person? Especially if you couldn’t abstract away their acts but had to watch say videos of them being performed.
Imagine carrying those memories, what is your self-conception? The only tale of virtue you have left when you are alone at night is that you posses the virtue of being the kind of person who is capable of suspending moral inhibitions based on long chains of reasoning. Maybe you are just that good at reasoning. Maybe.
The parenthetical is true but the raping and (for most part) the pillaging was for personal gain, not the public good. It takes much more effort to contrive scenarios with folks who “rape for the public good”.
No more than torture for the public good, since rape can be used as a form of torture. It also has been used as a form of psychological warfare. Also pillaging can be vital to easing logistic difficulties of your side.
Indeed, if the good guys are murdering whom they want and extorting stuff from the populace, it’s called a resistance movement, and in a generation there’s hardly anyone who thinks ill of them. See Russia, Spain, China etc.
By implying by omission that the killing was not mostly for personal gain, do you mean to suggest that it was for the public good, or to invoke a non-excluded middle?
I make no claim about the killing—that is at least arguable and inclusion would distract from the main point that the raping in the example given (historic war bands) was not.
Also—and primarily—this. Damn, of course I considered those aspects too, I’m not so psychologically blind as to not understand them. I just was too lazy to hammer that idea into shape for my comment. So you deserve all the karma for it.
Um, sorry, I’m just frustrated by how often I neglect to mention some facet of an argument due to it being difficult to communicate through written word.
I was merely elaborating on an argument that I thought was already there but deserved some more attention. Particularly in this line:
Yep, but you see, there’s a difference between “mere” emotional anguish, which is, after all, biologically constrained in a way, and identity-related problems (which, as I understand it, can ruin a person precisely by using their “normal” state, with conscious voiced thoughts, as a carrier). It’s mostly bad to feel bad about yourself, but to know bad about yourself—seemingly in the empirical sense, just like you know there’s a monitor in front of you—is even worse.
Not everyone would see this in my phrase; I should’ve elaborated.
BTW, I’ve sent you a few PMs with interesting (IMO) questions over the last few weeks/months, and none have been answered! I don’t wish to embarrass you, I’m just curious if they might’ve been simply eaten by the mail gremlins. :) Might I just copy them and re-send them, so you could share an opinion or two at your leisure?
Oh don’t worry I’m going to respond to all of those in order, if you remember I did send you a PM explaining that I was going to respond to them eventually (that dreadful word). Quite honestly though I really dislike LW’s PM system, for starters my inbox contains both PMs and regular public responses and they get kind of lost in the mail, so there is that trivial barrier to responding.
I think I’ve already mentioned that I’d like to move our correspondences to email, so if you wouldn’t mind sending the text of your previous unanswered PMs in that format or me sending you an email quoting them I would much prefer that mode of communication. I’m also very much open to communicating live via skype or other IM programs.
Though obviously we’ll probably PM such contact data instead of disclosing it publicly.
Kthx.
It can’t be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn’t even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn’t get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.
3) I allot a reasonable-seeming amount of time to think before deciding to drastically change something important. The logic is that the argument isn’t evidence in itself—the evidence is the fact that the argument exists, and that you’re not aware of any flaws in it. If you haven’t thought about it for a while, the probability of having found flaws is low whether or not those flaws exist—so not having found them yet is only weak evidence against your current position.
So basically, “Before you’ve had time to consider them”.
See this quote. Presumably you already had strong arguments in favour of consequentialism. So when you came across a knock-down counterexample your first reaction should have been confusion. When you encounter a convincing argument against a position you hold strongly, bring to mind the arguments that first convinced you of that position and try to bring the opposing arguments into direct conflict with them. It should then be clear that one of the arguments has a logical flaw in it. Find out which one.
That seems like it could easily slip into rehearsing the evidence, which can be disastrous. Watch out for that.
Yes, I only felt okay about recommending it because Grognor was complaining of exactly the opposite problem.
Hmmm. Murder decreases the ‘expected utility’ (cfg. life expentancy), so I think it would still be considered bad in some forms of consequentialism. The corner case—where expected utility would not change (much) would be e.g. shooting somebody who is falling off a cliff who will certainly not survive.
More general, it seems ethical systems are usually post-hoc organizing principles for our messy ethical intuitions. However, those intuitions are so messy, that for every simple set of rules, we can find some exception. Hence we get things like the trolley problem...
Since I’m not a consequentialist, will you just tell me?
No. That would defeat one of his stated purposes for posting.
He could PM me, I mean.