Echoing RichardKennaway, IMO most of the strong arguments for libertarianism (as a set of policies) are consequentialist ones by economists.
The other issue is how to classify someone if they defend some mix of consequentialism and deontology. For example, Robert Nozick argued for rights as side constraints in an otherwise utilitarian moral theory, and Roderick Long argues for deontology based on consequentialist grounds. I’ll raise my hand as someone who could probably truthfully describe myself as either, but settled on consequentialist in part for social reasons.
IMO most of the strong arguments for libertarianism (as a set of policies) are consequentialist ones by economists.
Do any of these economists have a consistently successful track record of prediction? Remember, this is a field where opinions of serious economists on the recent stimulus package ranged from “it won’t have any effect” to “it will make things worse” to “it doesn’t go far enough”.
Economists talking about large-scale political structures should be assumed to lack credibility until proven otherwise via actual, consistent predictive results.
EDIT: Requesting clarification on why this comment was voted down to −2. Robin has posted repeatedly on many experts’ allergies to predictions. Have I made a mistake in my conclusions here?
lesswrong is not completely there yet, but it’s steadily heading toward reddit’s “downvote to disagree”. It’s a natural consequence of reddit-style comment up/down-voting system, don’t think about it too much.
Strongly disagree about “don’t think about it too much,” but upvoted for pointing out this important problem. Everyone: upvote for useful discourse, not agreement!
“don’t think about it too much” as in “don’t think about things you cannot affect”. Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.
This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it’s smaller problem than “downvote to disagree”, but I have no strong evidence about it.
Consequentialism and deontology don’t really ‘mix’ well. Either the consequences ultimately matter, or the rules ultimately matter. So it’s either ‘consequentialism’ that collapses into deontology, or ‘deontology’ that collapses into consequentialism, or some inconsistent mix, or a distinct theory altogether.
Act A will certainly generate X units of good, and has a Y% chance of violating some constraint (killing somone, say). For what values of X and Y will you perform A? It’s very tough for deontology to be dynamically consistent.
This is a problem for deontology in general, not a specific problem that arises when trying to combine it with consequentialism.
Whatever probability Y a deontologist would accept can simply be built into the constraint. If the constraint is satisfied, then you do A iff it maximizes X. Otherwise you don’t.
Sure, but the point is that one concern will probably collapse into the other. For a pure consequentialist, question 2 is either irrelevant or answered by question 1, and for question 1 you will end up in a bit of a circle where “because it maximizes overall net utility” is the only possible answer, with maybe an “obviously” down the line.
Well, yes. But we’re not talking about pure consequentialists. It’s obvious that hybrid deontology-consequentialism is inconsistent with pure consequentialism; it’s also beside the point.
Deontological constraints are seldom sufficient to determine right action. When they’re not it seems perfectly natural to try to fill the neither-prohibited-nor-obligatory middle ground with something that looks pretty much like consequentialism.
Why not? If libertarianism (more than other ideologies) reflects statistical truths of human existence, we’d expect to reach the same conclusion from different avenues of argument.
Echoing RichardKennaway, IMO most of the strong arguments for libertarianism (as a set of policies) are consequentialist ones by economists.
The other issue is how to classify someone if they defend some mix of consequentialism and deontology. For example, Robert Nozick argued for rights as side constraints in an otherwise utilitarian moral theory, and Roderick Long argues for deontology based on consequentialist grounds. I’ll raise my hand as someone who could probably truthfully describe myself as either, but settled on consequentialist in part for social reasons.
Do any of these economists have a consistently successful track record of prediction? Remember, this is a field where opinions of serious economists on the recent stimulus package ranged from “it won’t have any effect” to “it will make things worse” to “it doesn’t go far enough”.
Economists talking about large-scale political structures should be assumed to lack credibility until proven otherwise via actual, consistent predictive results.
EDIT: Requesting clarification on why this comment was voted down to −2. Robin has posted repeatedly on many experts’ allergies to predictions. Have I made a mistake in my conclusions here?
lesswrong is not completely there yet, but it’s steadily heading toward reddit’s “downvote to disagree”. It’s a natural consequence of reddit-style comment up/down-voting system, don’t think about it too much.
Strongly disagree about “don’t think about it too much,” but upvoted for pointing out this important problem. Everyone: upvote for useful discourse, not agreement!
“don’t think about it too much” as in “don’t think about things you cannot affect”. Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.
This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it’s smaller problem than “downvote to disagree”, but I have no strong evidence about it.
Unless or until we get separate voting for “agreement” vs. “quality”, as people have mentioned a few times.
Listen to Robin Hanson discuss this phenomenon on EconTalk. Starts with half-hour monologue by presenter, but I find the presenter quite interesting too.
Consequentialism and deontology don’t really ‘mix’ well. Either the consequences ultimately matter, or the rules ultimately matter. So it’s either ‘consequentialism’ that collapses into deontology, or ‘deontology’ that collapses into consequentialism, or some inconsistent mix, or a distinct theory altogether.
What’s wrong with maximize [insert consequentialist objective function here] subject to the constraints [insert deontological prohibitions here]?
Act A will certainly generate X units of good, and has a Y% chance of violating some constraint (killing somone, say). For what values of X and Y will you perform A? It’s very tough for deontology to be dynamically consistent.
This is a problem for deontology in general, not a specific problem that arises when trying to combine it with consequentialism.
Whatever probability Y a deontologist would accept can simply be built into the constraint. If the constraint is satisfied, then you do A iff it maximizes X. Otherwise you don’t.
Then there are further questions:
why maximize that? , and
why use those constraints?
Note that both of these are ethical questions. The way you answer one might have implications for the answer to the other.
Can’t both of these questions be asked of pure consequentialists?
Sure, but the point is that one concern will probably collapse into the other. For a pure consequentialist, question 2 is either irrelevant or answered by question 1, and for question 1 you will end up in a bit of a circle where “because it maximizes overall net utility” is the only possible answer, with maybe an “obviously” down the line.
Well, yes. But we’re not talking about pure consequentialists. It’s obvious that hybrid deontology-consequentialism is inconsistent with pure consequentialism; it’s also beside the point.
Deontological constraints are seldom sufficient to determine right action. When they’re not it seems perfectly natural to try to fill the neither-prohibited-nor-obligatory middle ground with something that looks pretty much like consequentialism.
Why not? If libertarianism (more than other ideologies) reflects statistical truths of human existence, we’d expect to reach the same conclusion from different avenues of argument.