Harmful people often lack explicit malicious intent.
I was having a discussion with ChatGPT where it also claimed to believe the same thing as this. I asked it to explain why it thinks this. It’s reasoning was that well-intentioned people often make mistakes, and that malign actors do not always succeed in their aims. I’ll say!
I disagree completely with the idea that well-intentioned people can actually cause any harm, but even if you presume that they could, it isn’t clear to me how malign actors being unable to succeed in their aims is enough to balance out the consequences such that more negativity falls on the well-intentioned. Perhaps the unsuccess of malign actors is due to correctly narrowing our focus onto them only?
Also, in my experience, I think if we follow the advice to focus on effects only, that if we were well-intentioned about doing this, we’d end up focusing on only the truly malign actors anyway. “Deploying defenses” against honest mistake-making just doesn’t intuitively result in actions that don’t seem a bit cartoonishly ironically villainous.
A version of this tends to happen with rather unintelligent or incompent people placed in positions of power over other people, who can unintentionally harm people without having any intention to harm them.
Probably the best example here is the Great Chinese Famine, and the Holodomor to a lesser extent. One of the major problems was that the leadership had set severely unrealistic goals because they didn’t know enough and combined with incompetence, caused catastrophes on the scale of millions to tens of millions of lives.
I was having a discussion with ChatGPT where it also claimed to believe the same thing as this. I asked it to explain why it thinks this. It’s reasoning was that well-intentioned people often make mistakes, and that malign actors do not always succeed in their aims. I’ll say!
I disagree completely with the idea that well-intentioned people can actually cause any harm, but even if you presume that they could, it isn’t clear to me how malign actors being unable to succeed in their aims is enough to balance out the consequences such that more negativity falls on the well-intentioned. Perhaps the unsuccess of malign actors is due to correctly narrowing our focus onto them only?
Also, in my experience, I think if we follow the advice to focus on effects only, that if we were well-intentioned about doing this, we’d end up focusing on only the truly malign actors anyway. “Deploying defenses” against honest mistake-making just doesn’t intuitively result in actions that don’t seem a bit cartoonishly ironically villainous.
A version of this tends to happen with rather unintelligent or incompent people placed in positions of power over other people, who can unintentionally harm people without having any intention to harm them.
Probably the best example here is the Great Chinese Famine, and the Holodomor to a lesser extent. One of the major problems was that the leadership had set severely unrealistic goals because they didn’t know enough and combined with incompetence, caused catastrophes on the scale of millions to tens of millions of lives.