The proportion of humanity held in slavery is probably the lowest it has ever been. And no human has been the legal property of another since the institution was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. (I think. It was an Arabian nation in the sixties anyway.)
The proportion of humanity held in slavery is probably the lowest it has ever been.
True, but I find proportional arguments fundamentally wrong. I mean, I can’t make up for any atrocity I commit simply by out-breeding my victims! So if slavery is wrong, then the situation is certainly much worse right now than it ever was in history, regardless of how many non-slaves there are now.
I can’t make up for any atrocity I commit simply by out-breeding my victims!
That’s true. But IMHO every moral evaluation has to distinguish between the action in question and the consequent state of the universe.
I think you’re still a bad person if you father three children (who are really happy most of the time) but also rape one child. Why not simply father three children without the raping-part? Almost everybody can do that!
But it’s not inconsistent to claim that an universe without the raped child and whithout the three happy children is worse than the universe with all four children.
I agree that we also have to look at actions, in the sense that even if my biased treatment of my children (treat some well, others badly) would reduce the proportion of suffering children, you might still condemn that because it at least encourages me to not just treat all children well and so to pursue inefficient solutions.
(According to Wikipedia, child sexual abuse affects about 19,7% of female and 7,9% of male children, btw. I’d be careful with using “almost everybody”.)
I do disagree that “1 more suffering person, 3 more happy persons” (or whatever ratio) is better than “no additional people”. I find it non-obvious that it should be true, even just as an intuition. I find the opposite intuition much more plausible.
I think the claim rests on two (somewhat independent) assumptions:
Benefits and harm to a person can be directly compared, so that if I harm you for −3 utilons and benefit you for +5 utilons, that’s equivalent to benefiting you for +2 utilons.
Bringing more people into existence is not bad, at least on average.
Assumption 1) is of course straightforward utilitarianism (in most formulations), but it’s not clear to me at all why it should be true. My previous comment was meant to highlight the fact that I find this assumption (common as it is) absurd, especially because it makes you look at 10+ million slaves and propose that slavery is basically gone, simply because non-slaves drastically outnumber them. It’s not a solid argument (nor intended as one), but at least for me, it’s a stronger illustration of the underlying disgust I feel when considering the closely related Repugnant Conclusion.
Maybe as a different illustration, imagine a room with 3 suffering and 6 happy people in it. If I now bring in 6 more happy people, have I halved the harm inside the room? Have I improved the situation even at all? Of course, this is just an appeal to intuition, not an actual argument, but maybe it demonstrates how “more happy people” is suspect.
Assumption 2) is not obvious either way, I think, but I presently favor denying it, so that more slaves is bad, just as more non-slaves is bad. In other words, just because there are ~6 times more people now than 100 years ago, means that the world is dramatically worse off. So celebrating moral progress when people still breed weirds me out. But of course, this is really not a specific problem with Luke’s post, just an aspect that proportional arguments tend to miss. Basically, I deny “Yay less harm per person!” if you achieved it by making more people in the process.
Of course it’s not inconsistent to accept 1) and 2), or something similar to them, but I find them very alien, almost paperclippy values. (No offense to actual Paperclippers.)
(According to Wikipedia, child sexual abuse affects about 19,7% of female and 7,9% of male children, btw. I’d be careful with using “almost everybody”.)
Oops. (Let’s change “rape” to “rape and eat them while they’re alive”. That should be sufficiently evil, even for humans.)
I think the claim rests on two (somewhat independent) assumptions: …
That’s probably correct. FWIW I think that 1) is true (say 85%) and 2) is also true, but I’m less confident in my judgement (say 65%).
I guess most folks believe that 1) and 2) are true and are much more certain than I am.
Seems like you’re surrounded by Paperclippers.
The proportional argument is relevant insofar as one is interested in the efficacy of legal prohibitions on slavery. If slavery was legal in the 21st century, do you not think the situation would be much worse than it is now?
If slavery was legal in the 21st century, do you not think the situation would be much worse than it is now?
I don’t think we can draw this conclusion. For one, we don’t have any kind of control. However, looking at other illegal trades like the drug war, I don’t think there is any good reason to assume laws to be effective. It seems that things like urbanization and ending poverty are the major factors here, but I’m certainly not an expert nor have I yet had time to look at the literature.
If, say, the volume of human trafficking before and after the introduction of legislation outlawing it fell sharply, I would consider such laws successful. I doubt good numbers exist, but I haven’t had the time to look for them yet.
This comment doesn’t seem completely silly when read as referring only to the legal abolition of slavery in undeveloped, backwater countries at the end of the twentieth century. But it’s not the only reading that makes sense given context of the discussion.
Historically there existed societies that were well-developed by the standards of their respective periods and had a strong rule of law and could effectively prohibit slavery but still chose not to. In fact, in one such nation, not too long ago, slavery was abolished rather abruptly. I heard there was a huge civil war over the entire business which suggests to me that in that particular country the laws could be (and eventually were) effectively enforced.
If developed, stable societies didn’t choose to abandon slavery over the last 150 years or so, the situation today would be much worse and we don’t need any kind of control to draw that conclusion.
So if slavery is wrong, then the situation is certainly much worse right now than it ever was in history, regardless of how many non-slaves there are now.
This implies a number of quantitative measures that I’m not quite sure I agree with.
I could have been clearer in the grandparent. As stated, the great-grandparent can be taken several different ways, and most of them I have trouble with.
One interpretation is that you’re essentially judging a business by its expenses and nothing else. I agree with you that proportional measures are sometimes dodgy- oftentimes it’s better to look at profit than profit margin- but just because there are more slaves today than there were when the world was much smaller doesn’t mean that things are worse now than they ever were in history.
That suggests a deeper contention: I think pure harm-minimization ethics are, well, bland.
I mean, I can’t make up for any atrocity I commit simply by out-breeding my victims!
I think this is a good reductio of many meta-level non-moral-realist FAI approaches like CEV. They retrospectively endorse genocide. (ETA: And of course they also very much disendorse anti-natalist preferences/tendencies, for whatever that’s worth.)
I think this is a good reductio of many meta-level non-moral-realist FAI approaches like CEV. They retrospectively endorse genocide.
I’ve had thoughts along similar lines myself. However I must point out that it isn’t CEV that is retrospectively endorsing genocide so much as it is the hypothetical people who commit genocide prior to having their CEV calculated that are (evidently) endorsing genocide. Yes, extrapolating the volition of folks who are into genocide (that you don’t approve of) is a bad idea. It is rather critical just which set of agents you plug into a CEV algorithm!
it is the hypothetical people who commit genocide prior to having their CEV calculated that are (evidently) endorsing genocide.
I wasn’t really thinking of the same people doing both so much as Germans gaining more biological fitness than Poles due to the Holocaust, where their descendants’ population differences might have massive effects on the output of CEV. You can’t really blame the current Germans or Poles for existing more or less and yet CEV still doesn’t attempt to adjust for this, which seems to violate normal moral intuitions about consistency. If we accept that natural selection isn’t a moral process and is beyond the reach of God (which doesn’t make any sense, but whatever), then it seems really odd to just accept its results as moral even after we’ve gained the ability to reflect and fix past errors.
You can’t really blame the current Germans or Poles for existing more or less and yet CEV still doesn’t attempt to adjust for this, which seems to violate normal moral intuitions about consistency.
I don’t see any violation of moral intuitions there. It isn’t the business of CEV to second guess what morality should be. It works out the morality (and other preferences) the input class has and seeks to satisfy them. So if you look at CEV you will see a CEV that does take into account the impact of past injustices according to whatever your moral intuitions are.
If we accept that natural selection isn’t a moral process and is beyond the reach of God (which doesn’t make any sense, but whatever), then it seems really odd to just accept its results as moral even after we’ve gained the ability to reflect and fix past errors.
Once you eliminate the effects of natural selection—and assorted past genocides—you don’t have anything left. It isn’t odd to accept whatever morality you happen to have as morality when there isn’t anything else. I happen to have my morality because having it helped my ancestors kill their rivals, stay alive and get laid. Take away those influences doesn’t leave me with a more pure morality it leaves me with absolutely nothing.
It is rather critical just which set of agents you plug into a CEV algorithm!
I take this (very real) possibility as strongly indicating that CEV-like approaches are insufficiently meta and that we should seriously expend a lot of effort on (getting closer to) solving moral philosophy if at all possible. (Or alternatively, as Wei Dai likes to point out, solving metaphilosophy.)
Put slightly differently: if I have some set of ethical standards S against which I’m prepared to compare the results R of a CEV-like algorithm, with the intention of discarding R where R conflicts with S, it follows that I consider wherever I got S from a more reliable source of ethical judgments than I consider CEV. If so, that strongly suggests that if I want reliable ethical judgments, what I ought to be doing is exploring the source of S.
Conversely, if I believe a CEV-like algorithm is a more reliable source of ethical judgments than anything else I have available, then I ought to be willing to discard S where it conflicts with R.
Here’s a version, then, that does not rely on the number of non-slaves: If the growth rate of the number of slaves was x, and now it is x/2, then I’d say the situation has improved, even if the number of slaves is higher now.
Could the downvoters please explain their decision? I’m genuinely confused why this warrants −4 at the time of writing.
I can speculate that they might think proportional arguments in such cases are obviously correct. If so, could you at least, say, link to an argument? (The controversial nature of the Repugnant Conclusion at least shows that it isn’t obvious.) Or is it something else?
The point of the slavery example is that all countries have decided slavery is bad, and fought to stamp it out. That humankind, after millennia of slavery as the way things are, has rejected slavery. This is an example of moral progress. You pointed out that some people are slavers, and this is a good point; despite moral progress, even moral progress for all of humanity, some people still choose to do things that are wrong: there is hope of exposing evil, and hope of fighting it alongside all the world’s governments, but not so much hope of every human rejecting evil, unlike in the baboon story. Yet, Barry Cotter says, this doesn’t mean the fight is insincere—lip service and government passing silly laws like the drug war—it does reduce slavery. There may be little hope of every human rejecting slavery, yet humankind has in fact decided that slavery is wrong, and will free as many slaves as it can. Moral progress is a real force in the world.
That it can’t necessarily help people faster than they are born, and thus may let total damage grow, is completely irrelevant.
I haven’t downvoted but my guess for the reasons is that people see your argument as unreasonable and forced plus the fact that what you said resembles an attempt to signal world-weary cynicism or fatalism and that sort of thing isn’t looked upon kindly around here.
Good point about the cynicism. Can you think of a way I could’ve said it that wouldn’t have signaled that? I find it problematic to express “Luke’s cheering strikes me as weird, or at least way too premature, given what bad shape the world is in” without it sounding cynical.
I also don’t object to Luke’s intention, namely to write some propaganda that progress is possible, but his specific examples (killing half the male population, questionable (and very costly) abolishment of slavery, even worse anti-religion sentiments, premature cheering for rationality feats that haven’t proven their worth yet) don’t support it and so I think the post is manipulative, though probably not maliciously so.
I agree with taw that if he had simply made a point that demographic changes can bring rapid behavioral changes and stuck to the baboons, it would have been a much better article.
I didn’t read lukeprog as asserting a proportional argument. Rather, he was asserting an argument about historical trajectory. As far as I can tell, the amount of slavery-suffering occurring now is irrelevant regarding whether European and United States abolition of slavery (and serfdom) was a net positive.
(Upvoted grandparent towards zero. I don’t support absolute arguments any more than I support proportional arguments but there is nevertheless a point to be made along the one you made there.)
I think this is wrong, though that’s a clever point regarding outbreeding as a reason for decreased slavery.
Even if that’s true, it’s done and gone, a sunk cost. The fact that there are far fewer slaves, a much lower proportion, and no legal slavery is what we should be concerned about.
Even if that’s true, it’s done and gone, a sunk cost. The fact that there are far fewer slaves, a much lower proportion, and no legal slavery is what we should be concerned about.
I don’t understand what you mean. What’s the sunk cost here?
Luke was making a point that outlawing slavery has ended an institution that has existed throughout much of recorded history, but that’s disingenuous, I think, because there are more slaves than there ever were. I don’t see how changing the legal status of an institution, without changing the actual practice (in fact, making it more widespread) has improved the situation. It reminds me of war-against-drugs rhetoric.
Another point in favor of disregarding lower proportions: would you feel better if tortured one of my children, if I also made two other children I treated nicely? After all, I would’ve decreased the rate of tortured children in the world.
Luke was making a point that outlawing slavery has ended an institution that has existed throughout much of recorded history, but that’s disingenuous, I think, because there are more slaves than there ever were
If one looks only at absolute numbers, I imagine there are very few things, good or bad, which are not at a historic peak.
Another point in favor of disregarding lower proportions: would you feel better if tortured one of my children, if I also made two other children I treated nicely? After all, I would’ve decreased the rate of tortured children in the world.
This is a restatement of the fundamental meaning of utilitarianism, if one eliminates the rhetorical equation of ‘torture’ with ‘treated nicely’. Given the survey results, I feel fairly confident that he would, yes.
[...] would you feel better if tortured one of my children, if I also made two other children I treated nicely?
[...] Given the survey results, I feel fairly confident that he would, yes.
Really? I recall the Less Wrong survey result that most of us are consequentialists. And it’s safe to assert that torturing a baby is theoretically compensated by an improvement in the welfare of a sufficient number of preexisting babies (with some hedges thrown in that might prevent torture in practice). But the ethical significance of creating new persons is not clear, especially in light of impossibility results in population ethics. And in light of anthropic difficulties, Eliezer himself leans towards privileging the welfare of already-existing persons.
would you feel better if tortured one of my children, if I also made two other children I treated nicely? After all, I would’ve decreased the rate of tortured children in the world.
It is not obvious that over 34% of children in the world right now are being tortured.
You’re right, my intuition failed me. I would’ve to compensate according to the present rate, and of course child torture was a gratuitous example, so I retract it.
Luke was making a point that outlawing slavery has ended an institution that has existed throughout much of recorded history, but that’s disingenuous, I think, because there are more slaves than there ever were.
“Wrong” or “misleading” seem like more appropriate terms here. There is no indication that Luke isn’t being sincere.
The proportion of humanity held in slavery is probably the lowest it has ever been. And no human has been the legal property of another since the institution was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. (I think. It was an Arabian nation in the sixties anyway.)
According to the Abolition of slavery timeline (linked to in the article), it’s 1981 in Mauritania.
True, but I find proportional arguments fundamentally wrong. I mean, I can’t make up for any atrocity I commit simply by out-breeding my victims! So if slavery is wrong, then the situation is certainly much worse right now than it ever was in history, regardless of how many non-slaves there are now.
That’s true. But IMHO every moral evaluation has to distinguish between the action in question and the consequent state of the universe.
I think you’re still a bad person if you father three children (who are really happy most of the time) but also rape one child. Why not simply father three children without the raping-part? Almost everybody can do that!
But it’s not inconsistent to claim that an universe without the raped child and whithout the three happy children is worse than the universe with all four children.
Or does that sound completely bizarre to you?
I agree that we also have to look at actions, in the sense that even if my biased treatment of my children (treat some well, others badly) would reduce the proportion of suffering children, you might still condemn that because it at least encourages me to not just treat all children well and so to pursue inefficient solutions.
(According to Wikipedia, child sexual abuse affects about 19,7% of female and 7,9% of male children, btw. I’d be careful with using “almost everybody”.)
I do disagree that “1 more suffering person, 3 more happy persons” (or whatever ratio) is better than “no additional people”. I find it non-obvious that it should be true, even just as an intuition. I find the opposite intuition much more plausible.
I think the claim rests on two (somewhat independent) assumptions:
Benefits and harm to a person can be directly compared, so that if I harm you for −3 utilons and benefit you for +5 utilons, that’s equivalent to benefiting you for +2 utilons.
Bringing more people into existence is not bad, at least on average.
Assumption 1) is of course straightforward utilitarianism (in most formulations), but it’s not clear to me at all why it should be true. My previous comment was meant to highlight the fact that I find this assumption (common as it is) absurd, especially because it makes you look at 10+ million slaves and propose that slavery is basically gone, simply because non-slaves drastically outnumber them. It’s not a solid argument (nor intended as one), but at least for me, it’s a stronger illustration of the underlying disgust I feel when considering the closely related Repugnant Conclusion.
Maybe as a different illustration, imagine a room with 3 suffering and 6 happy people in it. If I now bring in 6 more happy people, have I halved the harm inside the room? Have I improved the situation even at all? Of course, this is just an appeal to intuition, not an actual argument, but maybe it demonstrates how “more happy people” is suspect.
Assumption 2) is not obvious either way, I think, but I presently favor denying it, so that more slaves is bad, just as more non-slaves is bad. In other words, just because there are ~6 times more people now than 100 years ago, means that the world is dramatically worse off. So celebrating moral progress when people still breed weirds me out. But of course, this is really not a specific problem with Luke’s post, just an aspect that proportional arguments tend to miss. Basically, I deny “Yay less harm per person!” if you achieved it by making more people in the process.
Of course it’s not inconsistent to accept 1) and 2), or something similar to them, but I find them very alien, almost paperclippy values. (No offense to actual Paperclippers.)
Oops. (Let’s change “rape” to “rape and eat them while they’re alive”. That should be sufficiently evil, even for humans.)
That’s probably correct. FWIW I think that 1) is true (say 85%) and 2) is also true, but I’m less confident in my judgement (say 65%). I guess most folks believe that 1) and 2) are true and are much more certain than I am. Seems like you’re surrounded by Paperclippers.
The proportional argument is relevant insofar as one is interested in the efficacy of legal prohibitions on slavery. If slavery was legal in the 21st century, do you not think the situation would be much worse than it is now?
I don’t think we can draw this conclusion. For one, we don’t have any kind of control. However, looking at other illegal trades like the drug war, I don’t think there is any good reason to assume laws to be effective. It seems that things like urbanization and ending poverty are the major factors here, but I’m certainly not an expert nor have I yet had time to look at the literature.
If, say, the volume of human trafficking before and after the introduction of legislation outlawing it fell sharply, I would consider such laws successful. I doubt good numbers exist, but I haven’t had the time to look for them yet.
This comment doesn’t seem completely silly when read as referring only to the legal abolition of slavery in undeveloped, backwater countries at the end of the twentieth century. But it’s not the only reading that makes sense given context of the discussion.
Historically there existed societies that were well-developed by the standards of their respective periods and had a strong rule of law and could effectively prohibit slavery but still chose not to. In fact, in one such nation, not too long ago, slavery was abolished rather abruptly. I heard there was a huge civil war over the entire business which suggests to me that in that particular country the laws could be (and eventually were) effectively enforced.
If developed, stable societies didn’t choose to abandon slavery over the last 150 years or so, the situation today would be much worse and we don’t need any kind of control to draw that conclusion.
This implies a number of quantitative measures that I’m not quite sure I agree with.
… which are?
I could have been clearer in the grandparent. As stated, the great-grandparent can be taken several different ways, and most of them I have trouble with.
One interpretation is that you’re essentially judging a business by its expenses and nothing else. I agree with you that proportional measures are sometimes dodgy- oftentimes it’s better to look at profit than profit margin- but just because there are more slaves today than there were when the world was much smaller doesn’t mean that things are worse now than they ever were in history.
That suggests a deeper contention: I think pure harm-minimization ethics are, well, bland.
I think this is a good reductio of many meta-level non-moral-realist FAI approaches like CEV. They retrospectively endorse genocide. (ETA: And of course they also very much disendorse anti-natalist preferences/tendencies, for whatever that’s worth.)
I’ve had thoughts along similar lines myself. However I must point out that it isn’t CEV that is retrospectively endorsing genocide so much as it is the hypothetical people who commit genocide prior to having their CEV calculated that are (evidently) endorsing genocide. Yes, extrapolating the volition of folks who are into genocide (that you don’t approve of) is a bad idea. It is rather critical just which set of agents you plug into a CEV algorithm!
I wasn’t really thinking of the same people doing both so much as Germans gaining more biological fitness than Poles due to the Holocaust, where their descendants’ population differences might have massive effects on the output of CEV. You can’t really blame the current Germans or Poles for existing more or less and yet CEV still doesn’t attempt to adjust for this, which seems to violate normal moral intuitions about consistency. If we accept that natural selection isn’t a moral process and is beyond the reach of God (which doesn’t make any sense, but whatever), then it seems really odd to just accept its results as moral even after we’ve gained the ability to reflect and fix past errors.
I don’t see any violation of moral intuitions there. It isn’t the business of CEV to second guess what morality should be. It works out the morality (and other preferences) the input class has and seeks to satisfy them. So if you look at CEV you will see a CEV that does take into account the impact of past injustices according to whatever your moral intuitions are.
Once you eliminate the effects of natural selection—and assorted past genocides—you don’t have anything left. It isn’t odd to accept whatever morality you happen to have as morality when there isn’t anything else. I happen to have my morality because having it helped my ancestors kill their rivals, stay alive and get laid. Take away those influences doesn’t leave me with a more pure morality it leaves me with absolutely nothing.
I take this (very real) possibility as strongly indicating that CEV-like approaches are insufficiently meta and that we should seriously expend a lot of effort on (getting closer to) solving moral philosophy if at all possible. (Or alternatively, as Wei Dai likes to point out, solving metaphilosophy.)
Sure.
Put slightly differently: if I have some set of ethical standards S against which I’m prepared to compare the results R of a CEV-like algorithm, with the intention of discarding R where R conflicts with S, it follows that I consider wherever I got S from a more reliable source of ethical judgments than I consider CEV. If so, that strongly suggests that if I want reliable ethical judgments, what I ought to be doing is exploring the source of S.
Conversely, if I believe a CEV-like algorithm is a more reliable source of ethical judgments than anything else I have available, then I ought to be willing to discard S where it conflicts with R.
Here’s a version, then, that does not rely on the number of non-slaves: If the growth rate of the number of slaves was x, and now it is x/2, then I’d say the situation has improved, even if the number of slaves is higher now.
Could the downvoters please explain their decision? I’m genuinely confused why this warrants −4 at the time of writing.
I can speculate that they might think proportional arguments in such cases are obviously correct. If so, could you at least, say, link to an argument? (The controversial nature of the Repugnant Conclusion at least shows that it isn’t obvious.) Or is it something else?
The point of the slavery example is that all countries have decided slavery is bad, and fought to stamp it out. That humankind, after millennia of slavery as the way things are, has rejected slavery. This is an example of moral progress. You pointed out that some people are slavers, and this is a good point; despite moral progress, even moral progress for all of humanity, some people still choose to do things that are wrong: there is hope of exposing evil, and hope of fighting it alongside all the world’s governments, but not so much hope of every human rejecting evil, unlike in the baboon story. Yet, Barry Cotter says, this doesn’t mean the fight is insincere—lip service and government passing silly laws like the drug war—it does reduce slavery. There may be little hope of every human rejecting slavery, yet humankind has in fact decided that slavery is wrong, and will free as many slaves as it can. Moral progress is a real force in the world.
That it can’t necessarily help people faster than they are born, and thus may let total damage grow, is completely irrelevant.
I haven’t downvoted but my guess for the reasons is that people see your argument as unreasonable and forced plus the fact that what you said resembles an attempt to signal world-weary cynicism or fatalism and that sort of thing isn’t looked upon kindly around here.
Good point about the cynicism. Can you think of a way I could’ve said it that wouldn’t have signaled that? I find it problematic to express “Luke’s cheering strikes me as weird, or at least way too premature, given what bad shape the world is in” without it sounding cynical.
I also don’t object to Luke’s intention, namely to write some propaganda that progress is possible, but his specific examples (killing half the male population, questionable (and very costly) abolishment of slavery, even worse anti-religion sentiments, premature cheering for rationality feats that haven’t proven their worth yet) don’t support it and so I think the post is manipulative, though probably not maliciously so.
I agree with taw that if he had simply made a point that demographic changes can bring rapid behavioral changes and stuck to the baboons, it would have been a much better article.
The point of that is that slavery used to be something normal, and now it no longer is.
I didn’t read lukeprog as asserting a proportional argument. Rather, he was asserting an argument about historical trajectory. As far as I can tell, the amount of slavery-suffering occurring now is irrelevant regarding whether European and United States abolition of slavery (and serfdom) was a net positive.
(That said, I haven’t voted on the comment).
(Upvoted grandparent towards zero. I don’t support absolute arguments any more than I support proportional arguments but there is nevertheless a point to be made along the one you made there.)
I think this is wrong, though that’s a clever point regarding outbreeding as a reason for decreased slavery. Even if that’s true, it’s done and gone, a sunk cost. The fact that there are far fewer slaves, a much lower proportion, and no legal slavery is what we should be concerned about.
I don’t understand what you mean. What’s the sunk cost here?
Luke was making a point that outlawing slavery has ended an institution that has existed throughout much of recorded history, but that’s disingenuous, I think, because there are more slaves than there ever were. I don’t see how changing the legal status of an institution, without changing the actual practice (in fact, making it more widespread) has improved the situation. It reminds me of war-against-drugs rhetoric.
Another point in favor of disregarding lower proportions: would you feel better if tortured one of my children, if I also made two other children I treated nicely? After all, I would’ve decreased the rate of tortured children in the world.
If one looks only at absolute numbers, I imagine there are very few things, good or bad, which are not at a historic peak.
This is a restatement of the fundamental meaning of utilitarianism, if one eliminates the rhetorical equation of ‘torture’ with ‘treated nicely’. Given the survey results, I feel fairly confident that he would, yes.
Really? I recall the Less Wrong survey result that most of us are consequentialists. And it’s safe to assert that torturing a baby is theoretically compensated by an improvement in the welfare of a sufficient number of preexisting babies (with some hedges thrown in that might prevent torture in practice). But the ethical significance of creating new persons is not clear, especially in light of impossibility results in population ethics. And in light of anthropic difficulties, Eliezer himself leans towards privileging the welfare of already-existing persons.
It is not obvious that over 34% of children in the world right now are being tortured.
You’re right, my intuition failed me. I would’ve to compensate according to the present rate, and of course child torture was a gratuitous example, so I retract it.
“Wrong” or “misleading” seem like more appropriate terms here. There is no indication that Luke isn’t being sincere.
You’re right. I don’t question Luke’s sincerity, only his argument.