Should you work with evil people?
Epistemic status: Figuring things out.
My mind often wanders to what boundaries I ought to maintain between the different parts of my life and people who have variously committed bad acts or have poor character. On the professional side, I think it is a virtue to be able to work with lots of people, and be functional in many environments. You will often have to work with people you dislike in oder to get things done. Yet I think that it is not the correct call to just lie on your back and allow people in your environment to do horrendous things all the time without providing meaningful pushback (as per both Scott Alexander and Screwtape).
From one perspective, this a question of how much should you be exposed to other people’s crazy beliefs. Suppose that someone comes to the belief that you are evil. Perhaps they think you secretly murdered people and got away with it, or have ruined many many people’s lives in legal ways, or that you’re extremely power-seeking and have no morals. What should they do?
I think it’s natural that they might not want to work with you, and even may wish to impose costs on you, or punish you for your misdeeds. Even if you are ‘getting away with it’ to some extent, society functions better when misdeeds are punished. But then you get into vigilante justice, where an insane person can cause a massive mess by being wrong. There have been many false mob lynchings in the history of humanity, still to this day.
Another perspective I’ve thought about this is as an infrastructure provider. Everyone rests on so much infrastructure to live in the world. Amazon, Stripe, ChatGPT, the bank system, gas and electricity, being able to get legal defense, public transport, etc. When one of these places decides not to support you, it is really difficult to get by. Part of the point of having a civilization is so that different people can specialize in solving different problems, and provide their solutions to everyone else. You’re not supposed to rebuild all of these pieces of infrastructure for yourself, and to have to do so is a major cost to your ability to function in society. As such, it’s really costly for infrastructure like this to remove your access to it, even if they have a good reason. If they think that you support a terrorist organization, or that you are a cruel and nasty person, or that you’re physically and emotionally abusing your family, or whatever, it’s not good for them to take away your ability to use infrastructure.
This is for two reasons: first, they’re not very invested in this. If they hear a rumor that they trust, and ban you, you’re screwed in terms of persuading them otherwise. There’s no due process where you can repudiate the claim. Second, they’re not very skilled at it, and they can get it wrong. They’re not investigators of bad behavior in full generality, and shouldn’t be expected to be great at it.
However, I think there are kinds of bad behavior that should get you banned. Banks should analyze if you’re committing financial fraud with their system. Public transport systems should check if you’re not paying for your tickets, and ban you. Amazon should check if you’re producing fraudulent products and ban you. This is because they’re unusually skilled and experienced with this kind of thing, and have good info about it.
But overall each piece of infrastructure should not attempt to model a full justice system.
...which is a bit confusing, because everyone should strive to be morally good, and to attempt to right the wrongs that we see in the world. If you see someone you know do something wrong, like steal something or physically assault someone, it’s right to call them out on it and help them be punished for the behavior. If you see them lie, it’s good to inform the person that they lied to (if that’s easy) and let people know that they lied. Holding people to good standards helps spread good standards for behavior.
So it’s a bit counterintuitive that sometimes you shouldn’t do this, because you aren’t good at it and might get it wrong and aren’t being fair to them or cannot offer them due process.
Some heuristics so far that I’ve developed include (a) you should attempt to set and enforce standards for good behavior with the people in your life, but also (b) infrastructure providers should only police things directly relevant to the infrastructure (e.g. banks should police fraudulent behavior, hotels should police damaging the rooms, amazon should police not providing the product you’re selling, etc).
But I still want to know when (a) ends. When should you stop trying to police all the behavior around you?
I think that most rules here will be phrased about where the limits are. Let me start with the opposite. It is possible that vigilante justice is sometimes appropriate. I will not rule it out prematurely. The world is full of surprising situations. But it would be very surprising. If I were to come across the leader of a successful terrorist organization (e.g. Osama Bin Laden), that would be surprising, but I hope that I would take some action to apprehend him and not be overly concerned about not physically hurting him in the process of doing so, even though I have never been involved in any serious violence in my life and believe in there being very strong lines against it in almost all situations I’m in. So I don’t think I want to simply rule out classes of action (e.g. never commit violence, never try to destroy someone’s life, etc) because I expect for all actions there are edge-cases where it’s appropriate.
(One constraint is that it’s just kind of impossible to police all behavior. There’s ~8 billion people, you cannot track all the behavior. Heck, I have a hard time tracking all the good and bad behavior done by just myself, never mind everyone else.)
A different heuristic is a purity one, of not letting evil get near to you. By evil, I mean a force for that which is wrong, that prefers bad outcomes, and is working to make them happen. This is the Joker in Batman, and also sadists who just like to hurt others and endorse this. Some evil people can be saved, some cannot.
But what about people who are merely behaving atrociously, who are not themselves evil, as is the far more common state of affairs?
(As I say, I think it’s a relatively common occurrence that people end up optimizing explicitly for bad things. While the easy answers are desires for sadism and dominance, I think the main thing is culture and believing that it is how to get power. There are many perverse incentives and situations that arise that teach you these awful lessons. I think then, there’s a question of how much to shun someone who has learned these lessons. In some sense many people around me are committing grave misdeeds that we haven’t noticed or learned to notice e.g. think of a Muslim teenager participating in stoning an adulterer on the advice of their parents; they are less worthy of punishment than if a non-Muslim Westerner stoned an adulterer.)
I think that the purity mindset can still make some sense? I think that people who commit atrocious behavior are often (a) bringing very bad culture with them, and (b) hard to predict when and how they will do this behavior. I think it is good to build boundaries around spaces where no such person can freely enter. For instance, your personal home. I think it reasonable to say that a member of your family cannot bring Sam Bankman-Fried over to stay, nor bring them as a date to your wedding, for you don’t want his culture and behavior to corrupt people who were not expecting to have to protect themselves from that force.
This is broadly where I’m at currently: don’t withhold infrastructure punitively unless it’s about specific abuse-of-that-infrastructure; and build spaces with strong moral boundaries where you can (e.g. family, friends, community, etc).
There’s a wide range of behaviors and responses that are better framed as “protect yourself” than “seek justice” or “punish defectors”. I’d argue that the majority of thinking (for non-universal, non-government topics) should be framed in terms of exclusion to avoid costs, rather than punishment.
Amazon could be skilled at this kind of thing, but they’re famously frugal and are optimizing for throughput, not for justice or even safety. They do, in fact, ban sellers and customers who are significantly negative-value. But their precision-recall balance is -way- different than a criminal investigation or personal decision of retribution would have.
Transit systems should ban non-payers, not to punish them, but to save the expense and hassle of trying to monitor them, and to prevent the waste of resources in having more people in the system who aren’t contributing. (IMO, first, ban anyone who reduces value by acting badly on a bus or train, even if they paid).
Likewise for infrastructure—the first goal is not justice, or even fairness. It’s protecting the infrastructure itself. If someone is harming your mission, exclude them. At some scale, if the infrastructure is an effective monopoly and is necessary for life, then the simpler exclusion mechanisms become infeasible, and more legible/coercive mechanisms (law enforcement) comes into play.
This is one reason to prefer that infrastructure is distributed and no single piece is critical and irreplaceable for people who won’t cooperate with the complex of expected behaviors in that community. It makes it possible to exclude people, and they can find other places where they fit better (or if they piss off EVERYBODY, then maybe it’s ok they don’t get many services).
Yes, this. That part of the OP reads to me like
fraud / fare-dodging makes you a bad person
⇒ banks/transit agencies/Amazon ban you because you’re a bad person
… which is appropriate in this case because they have good info + specialization in evaluating that type of badness
but that’s not what’s going on at all; the entities in question aren’t trying to evaluate someone’s overall character or enforce norms for social benefit.
Banning someone to protect infrastructure just doesn’t extend to banning someone because they abuse their family, it doesn’t create a question of where to draw the line.
It seems to me like the OP tacitly assumes (& is confused by) something like ‘all punishment/enforcement-like actions should be justified in terms of universal morality, not particular responsibilities and interests’.
Don’t you need to monitor the ban if you ban them? That sounds to me like hassle as well.
How exactly do they become infeasible? The fact that someone can’t live when excluded doesn’t prevent you from excluding them. And since the goal takes priority over justice or fairness, you wouldn’t care that they can’t live.
That sounds like punishing people who fail to buy ticket with an inability to buy tickets? That seem like a strange choice to me.
Why do you believe that Amazon is unusually skilled or experienced with it? Louis Rossmann’s investigation of fuses that Amazon sells suggests that Amazon is quite willing to sell fraudulent fuses and doesn’t really do something about it. Fraudulent fuses are especially bad for Amazon to sell because they are products that are safety critical. Houses might burn down because of Amazon selling the fraudulent products.
Recent whistleblowing from Meta suggests that 10% of their ad revenue (or 25% of their profits) used to be fraud according to their own estimates. That leaves the question of how many percent of revenue of Facebook would need to be about defrauding customers to be on the level of SBF.
For Facebook the situation seems to be, “The fine we have to pay for facilitating the fraud of our customers are much lower then the profit we make so we do it.”
For Amazon it’s less clear to me why they aren’t doing more about fraud. It seems more of a matter of just not really caring. It isn’t really the job of anyone with power at Amazon to reduce fraud and many people have their KPI’s that they have to reach that are about other priorities.
It’s unclear to me why you think that SBF meets the threshold of being evil in the sense of “prefers bad outcomes, and is working to make them happen”. I think he was certainly wrong is using customer funds but I don’t think he was in any way intending to get into a situation where he can’t return the funds. To me that doesn’t look like sadism but more like narcissism.
This seems like a very complicated question, the sort of thing where you’d need to write a book just to cover the special cases. For example, some people may have oaths, professional ethics, or ancient traditions requiring them to help even the worst people:
Public defenders are expected to defend even obviously evil people, who still have a right to competent legal representation.
Some versions of medical ethics require providing emergency aid without discrimination.
Maritime tradition requires aiding “those in peril on the sea”, if such can be done so safely. This is backed up by maritime law in some countries. This may even include people whose ships you just sank, if you can safely make them prisoners of war.
At the opposite end, there are things like selling equipment or software to countries or companies under nuclear sanctions, where the law will be very unhappy. Known terrorists likely fall into a similar category, where providing many common services may put you at legal risk.
Then there are other questions:
Would you refuse common services to masked, anonymous government agents that you believe are committing crimes?
The TTRPG question: Will your good-aligned party work with a Lawful Evil villain to avoid a terrible fate? There have been some real-world analogs to this question, too.
How do your answers to all these questions change if your legal system isn’t particularly effective?
Like I said, this feels like you could write a book.
Sometimes, working with evildoers entails providing them with access to victims that they otherwise wouldn’t get their hands on. (This is pretty bad. Being a Ghislaine Maxwell is not a lot better than being a Jeffrey Epstein.)
Sometimes it comes to involve defending the evildoers against criticism; casting doubt on true warnings that others give about the evildoers’ conduct; or providing reputational cover for them.
If the evildoers are really clever, they may find a way to describe criticism or warnings as “abuse of the infrastructure” and try to get their critics banned under the principle expressed in your conclusion.