[SEQ RERUN] Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)

Today’s post, Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans) was originally published on 14 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There may be consequentialist reasons for why humans should not reason in an explicitly consequentialist way. We are running on corrupted hardware, and it may seem to us that something benefits others when it does not.


Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Why Does Power Corrupt?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.