Possibly you’re using technical jargon here. When non-LessWrong-reading humans talk about one person imposing their values on everyone else, they would generally consider it immoral. Are we in agreement here?
Now, I could understand your starement (“No it’s not”) in either of two ways: Either you believe they’re mistaken about whether the action is immoral, or you are using a different (technical jargon) sense of the words involved. Which is it?
My guess is that you’re using a technical sense of “values”, which includes something like the various clauses enumerated in EY’s description of CEV: “volition is what we wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together, …”.
If by “values” you include those things that you don’t think you value now but you would value if you had more knowledge of them, or would be persuaded to value by a peer if you hadn’t conquered the world and therefore eliminated all of your peers, then perhaps I can see what you’re trying to say.
By talking about “imposing your own values” without all of the additional extrapolated volition clauses, you’re committing an error of moral overconfidence—something which has caused vast amounts of unpleasantness throughout human history.
When non-LessWrong-reading humans talk about one person imposing their values on everyone else, they would generally consider it immoral. Are we in agreement here?
Not at all. The morality of imposing my values on you depends entirely on what you were doing, or were going to do, before I forced you to behave nicely.
You may have misread that, and answered a different question, something like “Is it moral?”. The quote actually is asking “Do non-LessWrong-reading humans generally consider it moral?”.
Random examples: was the U.S. acting morally when it entered WW2 against the Nazis, and imposed their values across Western Europe and in Japan? Is the average government acting morally when it forcefully collects taxes, enforcing its wealth-redistribution values? Or when it enforces most kinds of laws?
I think most people by far (to answer your question about non-LW-readers) support some value-imposing policies. Very few people are really pure personal-liberty non-interventionists. The morality of the act depends on the behavior being imposed, and on the default behavior that exists without such imposition.
It remains to stipulate that the government has a single person at its head who imposes his or her values on everyone else. Some governments do run this way, some others approximate it.
Edit: What you may have meant to say, is that the average non-LW-reading person, when hearing the phrase “one human imposing their values on everyone else”, will imagine some very evil and undesirable values, and conclude that the action is immoral. I agree with that—it’s all a matter of framing.
Of course, I’m talking about values as they should be, with moral mistakes filtered out, not as humans realistically enact them, especially when the situation creates systematic distortions, as is the case with granting absolute power.
Posts referring to necessary background for this discussion:
Possibly you’re using technical jargon here. When non-LessWrong-reading humans talk about one person imposing their values on everyone else, they would generally consider it immoral. Are we in agreement here?
Now, I could understand your starement (“No it’s not”) in either of two ways: Either you believe they’re mistaken about whether the action is immoral, or you are using a different (technical jargon) sense of the words involved. Which is it?
My guess is that you’re using a technical sense of “values”, which includes something like the various clauses enumerated in EY’s description of CEV: “volition is what we wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together, …”.
If by “values” you include those things that you don’t think you value now but you would value if you had more knowledge of them, or would be persuaded to value by a peer if you hadn’t conquered the world and therefore eliminated all of your peers, then perhaps I can see what you’re trying to say.
By talking about “imposing your own values” without all of the additional extrapolated volition clauses, you’re committing an error of moral overconfidence—something which has caused vast amounts of unpleasantness throughout human history.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
Not at all. The morality of imposing my values on you depends entirely on what you were doing, or were going to do, before I forced you to behave nicely.
You may have misread that, and answered a different question, something like “Is it moral?”. The quote actually is asking “Do non-LessWrong-reading humans generally consider it moral?”.
I answered the right quote.
Random examples: was the U.S. acting morally when it entered WW2 against the Nazis, and imposed their values across Western Europe and in Japan? Is the average government acting morally when it forcefully collects taxes, enforcing its wealth-redistribution values? Or when it enforces most kinds of laws?
I think most people by far (to answer your question about non-LW-readers) support some value-imposing policies. Very few people are really pure personal-liberty non-interventionists. The morality of the act depends on the behavior being imposed, and on the default behavior that exists without such imposition.
It remains to stipulate that the government has a single person at its head who imposes his or her values on everyone else. Some governments do run this way, some others approximate it.
Edit: What you may have meant to say, is that the average non-LW-reading person, when hearing the phrase “one human imposing their values on everyone else”, will imagine some very evil and undesirable values, and conclude that the action is immoral. I agree with that—it’s all a matter of framing.
Of course, I’m talking about values as they should be, with moral mistakes filtered out, not as humans realistically enact them, especially when the situation creates systematic distortions, as is the case with granting absolute power.
Posts referring to necessary background for this discussion:
Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)
Not Taking Over the World