Good point. My first objection is the same as prase’s, my second is that a government that depends on popular support shouldn’t enforce policies that creep out the citizens (either because they’d lose the next election in a landslide to a party with different values or decision theory, or because in a Parfit’s Hitchhiker way, if it were clear they would do such things then they’d have lost the previous election).
My third is that the creepiness here comes from our very real (and very understandable in consequentialist terms) fear of allowing the government too much power over citizens’ life and death. If instead you asked, should we make it legal for people to voluntarily off themselves when by so doing they can save several other lives, and should we make it an honorable thing to do, then I’m not nearly as disturbed by the idea. (There are myriad variations to try out, but generally whenever it gets creepy I can identify some sort of awful incentive structure being set up.)
I probably shouldn’t have said “government”. We get the same issues if the doctor just wanders around town, spots a genetically compatible person with his Super-Doctor-Vision, and kills them at their house. Or really through any means other than waiting for compatible donors to show up at the hospital.
This doesn’t fix the problem; it only changes the location. Giving your national medical association the power of citizens’ life and death is almost as bad as giving it to the government.
People won’t be afraid in hospitals, instead they’ll be afraid in their homes. They will have an incentive to try to hide from anyone who might be a doctor, or to kill them preemptively.
This policy would be a declaration of war between doctors and citizens. I can’t see the consequences going well.
Then I have an “easy” patch: let the entity that does the spotting and killing be incorruptible and infallible. Like, an AI, an army of robots, or something. With that, I don’t see any obvious flaw beyond the fact that, with this level of technology, there are very probably better alternatives than transplantation. But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
Compare with the comment I saw somewhere with this dilemma:
(a) Let the aliens that happen to visit us cure cancer, except for 1 random patient out of 100, that they will let die, then eat.
(b) Just let the aliens go, never to be heard of again.
Then I have an “easy” patch: let the entity that does the spotting and killing be incorruptible and infallible. Like, an AI, an army of robots, or something. With that, I don’t see any obvious flaw beyond the fact that, with this level of technology, there are very probably better alternatives than transplantation. But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
I suspect that the space of killer organ-transplanting AIs programmed by humans has far many more negative outcomes than positive ones. Even if we stipulate that the AI is incorruptible and infallible, there are still potential negative consequences:
People still have an incentive to sabotage their own health and to not get tested (see wedrifid’s argument)
People would live in fear of getting randomly killed, even if the chance was small
Allowing an AI to be built that can kill people might be a bad precedent
Allowing the practice of killing innocent people might be a bad precedent
You could get rid of the self-sabotage and fear if you make the AI a secret. But a world where people can make secret AIs to kill innocents without any kind of consent or vote still seems like a bad place.
But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
Part of the reason it’s creepy is because, just like a police state, the outcome is probably going to be bad in the vast majority of cases.
(a) Let the aliens that happen to visit us cure cancer, except for 1 random patient out of 100, that they will let die, then eat.
This is an interesting case. My initial reaction was to let the aliens care cancer and eat 1⁄100 cancer patients (after they died). Yet as I thought about it more, and why people might find the scenario creepy, I became more and more worried.
In a one-shot negotiation, it would make sense on consequentialist grounds to accept their deal. The 1% of patients that the aliens eat won’t have a change in outcome: they would have died of cancer anyway. Yet, as usual with these thought experiments designed to test consequentialism, the answer changes when you consider the full range of possible consequences.
This question hinges on why the aliens want to eat humans. If the aliens had some good reason why they need to eat humans to cure them, then that might be OK (like ingesting cancerous humans will let them figure out how to stop all the different types of cancer). Yet there are many ways that allowing aliens to get their hands on human specimens might be a bad idea. Maybe they could clone us, or engineer pathogens.
Then there is the aspect of aliens eating human bodies. That’s creepy for a good reason. Letting aliens gain a taste for human flesh might be a bad idea. It might be a Schelling Point that we shouldn’t let them cross.
For a consequentialist to accept the aliens deal, there must be strong evidence for most of the following:
This is a one-shot deal
The aliens will leave after and never be seen again
Letting aliens access human specimens won’t have other negative consequences down the line
Letting aliens eat human bodies won’t tempt them to want to eat more human bodies, which could lead to other negative consequences
The aliens will follow through on their side of the deal
The aliens aren’t lying, wrong, or confused about anything, and we understand their psychology well enough to judge the above
The amount of evidence necessary to establish these conditions would be astronomical, and it would take probably decades of cooperation with these particular aliens.
Likewise, the burden of evidence for showing that killer doctors and killer doctorbot AIs provide a net benefit is also astronomically high. In the absence of that evidence being provided, it’s hard for a consequentialist to not get creeped out by the plausibility of negative outcomes.
If I was reading the thought experiment correctly, the aliens are only allowed to let people die and then eat them. So the aliens wouldn’t be causing any patients to die who wouldn’t have died anyway. If the aliens were allowed to eat humans before they died, then that would change the whole example and make consequentialists even more pessimistic.
Compare with the comment I saw somewhere with this dilemma:
(a) Let the aliens that happen to visit us cure cancer, except for 1 random patient out of 100, that they will let die, then eat.
(b) Just let the aliens go, never to be heard of again.
Let die? As in wait until they die by natural(ish) causes then eat the corpse? This sounds like a no-brainer. (Cryonicists might have some concerns about the meaning of death, however. Hopefully the patients agree that they are dead at the time!)
Just in case you humans decide on this method, I volunteer to be the incorruptable and infallible machine.
Oh, wait, I already did offer something like that, and you humans invented contorted rationalizations about how you wouldn’t trust me, because I’d just use that power to impregnate female humans or something.
Good point. My first objection is the same as prase’s, my second is that a government that depends on popular support shouldn’t enforce policies that creep out the citizens (either because they’d lose the next election in a landslide to a party with different values or decision theory, or because in a Parfit’s Hitchhiker way, if it were clear they would do such things then they’d have lost the previous election).
My third is that the creepiness here comes from our very real (and very understandable in consequentialist terms) fear of allowing the government too much power over citizens’ life and death. If instead you asked, should we make it legal for people to voluntarily off themselves when by so doing they can save several other lives, and should we make it an honorable thing to do, then I’m not nearly as disturbed by the idea. (There are myriad variations to try out, but generally whenever it gets creepy I can identify some sort of awful incentive structure being set up.)
I probably shouldn’t have said “government”. We get the same issues if the doctor just wanders around town, spots a genetically compatible person with his Super-Doctor-Vision, and kills them at their house. Or really through any means other than waiting for compatible donors to show up at the hospital.
Your point five is well taken, though.
This doesn’t fix the problem; it only changes the location. Giving your national medical association the power of citizens’ life and death is almost as bad as giving it to the government.
People won’t be afraid in hospitals, instead they’ll be afraid in their homes. They will have an incentive to try to hide from anyone who might be a doctor, or to kill them preemptively.
This policy would be a declaration of war between doctors and citizens. I can’t see the consequences going well.
Then I have an “easy” patch: let the entity that does the spotting and killing be incorruptible and infallible. Like, an AI, an army of robots, or something. With that, I don’t see any obvious flaw beyond the fact that, with this level of technology, there are very probably better alternatives than transplantation. But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
Compare with the comment I saw somewhere with this dilemma:
(a) Let the aliens that happen to visit us cure cancer, except for 1 random patient out of 100, that they will let die, then eat.
(b) Just let the aliens go, never to be heard of again.
I suspect that the space of killer organ-transplanting AIs programmed by humans has far many more negative outcomes than positive ones. Even if we stipulate that the AI is incorruptible and infallible, there are still potential negative consequences:
People still have an incentive to sabotage their own health and to not get tested (see wedrifid’s argument)
People would live in fear of getting randomly killed, even if the chance was small
Allowing an AI to be built that can kill people might be a bad precedent
Allowing the practice of killing innocent people might be a bad precedent
You could get rid of the self-sabotage and fear if you make the AI a secret. But a world where people can make secret AIs to kill innocents without any kind of consent or vote still seems like a bad place.
Part of the reason it’s creepy is because, just like a police state, the outcome is probably going to be bad in the vast majority of cases.
This is an interesting case. My initial reaction was to let the aliens care cancer and eat 1⁄100 cancer patients (after they died). Yet as I thought about it more, and why people might find the scenario creepy, I became more and more worried.
In a one-shot negotiation, it would make sense on consequentialist grounds to accept their deal. The 1% of patients that the aliens eat won’t have a change in outcome: they would have died of cancer anyway. Yet, as usual with these thought experiments designed to test consequentialism, the answer changes when you consider the full range of possible consequences.
This question hinges on why the aliens want to eat humans. If the aliens had some good reason why they need to eat humans to cure them, then that might be OK (like ingesting cancerous humans will let them figure out how to stop all the different types of cancer). Yet there are many ways that allowing aliens to get their hands on human specimens might be a bad idea. Maybe they could clone us, or engineer pathogens.
Then there is the aspect of aliens eating human bodies. That’s creepy for a good reason. Letting aliens gain a taste for human flesh might be a bad idea. It might be a Schelling Point that we shouldn’t let them cross.
For a consequentialist to accept the aliens deal, there must be strong evidence for most of the following:
This is a one-shot deal
The aliens will leave after and never be seen again
Letting aliens access human specimens won’t have other negative consequences down the line
Letting aliens eat human bodies won’t tempt them to want to eat more human bodies, which could lead to other negative consequences
The aliens will follow through on their side of the deal
The aliens aren’t lying, wrong, or confused about anything, and we understand their psychology well enough to judge the above
The amount of evidence necessary to establish these conditions would be astronomical, and it would take probably decades of cooperation with these particular aliens.
Likewise, the burden of evidence for showing that killer doctors and killer doctorbot AIs provide a net benefit is also astronomically high. In the absence of that evidence being provided, it’s hard for a consequentialist to not get creeped out by the plausibility of negative outcomes.
Plenty of people survive cancer. The specific cancer patients the aliens eat might have lived if not for the aliens.
If I was reading the thought experiment correctly, the aliens are only allowed to let people die and then eat them. So the aliens wouldn’t be causing any patients to die who wouldn’t have died anyway. If the aliens were allowed to eat humans before they died, then that would change the whole example and make consequentialists even more pessimistic.
It wasn’t specified that they died of cancer, but yeah, my misreading, thanks.
Let die? As in wait until they die by natural(ish) causes then eat the corpse? This sounds like a no-brainer. (Cryonicists might have some concerns about the meaning of death, however. Hopefully the patients agree that they are dead at the time!)
Just in case you humans decide on this method, I volunteer to be the incorruptable and infallible machine.
Oh, wait, I already did offer something like that, and you humans invented contorted rationalizations about how you wouldn’t trust me, because I’d just use that power to impregnate female humans or something.