What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that’s a very different matter). I don’t think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it. But We should not place an injunction upon even considering the possibility and working out its implications; I think that this much is pretty clear. That is the route to religious-level delusion.
I would be the first to emphasize that thinking of people as manipulable physical systems and acting to naively maximize your own goals based upon that conceptualization is a path to disaster much of the time.
I should have made clear that I am advocating thinking about the possibility and working out its implications quite carefully, and then perhaps adopting a new decision procedure as the result of this meta-analysis.
For example, one way this could work is as follows: you consider (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, do a utilitarian analysis and then work out a decision procedure for your social interactions based upon this analysis. In the spirit of Toby Ord’s consequentialism and decision procedures, this decision procedure might not involve considering (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, but might instead involve re-wiring your own brain to reconceptualize (wo)men as people again, but people who stand in a different relation to you than before you did the utilitarian meta-analysis. In the particular case of pick-up, this “different relation to you” is “they have lower status than me” and “they really like me!” and “Human sexual interaction is a positive sum game!”
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it.
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can’t observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn’t think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow “acting” on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).
What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that’s a very different matter). I don’t think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it. But We should not place an injunction upon even considering the possibility and working out its implications; I think that this much is pretty clear. That is the route to religious-level delusion.
I would be the first to emphasize that thinking of people as manipulable physical systems and acting to naively maximize your own goals based upon that conceptualization is a path to disaster much of the time.
I should have made clear that I am advocating thinking about the possibility and working out its implications quite carefully, and then perhaps adopting a new decision procedure as the result of this meta-analysis.
For example, one way this could work is as follows: you consider (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, do a utilitarian analysis and then work out a decision procedure for your social interactions based upon this analysis. In the spirit of Toby Ord’s consequentialism and decision procedures, this decision procedure might not involve considering (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, but might instead involve re-wiring your own brain to reconceptualize (wo)men as people again, but people who stand in a different relation to you than before you did the utilitarian meta-analysis. In the particular case of pick-up, this “different relation to you” is “they have lower status than me” and “they really like me!” and “Human sexual interaction is a positive sum game!”
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can’t observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn’t think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow “acting” on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).