Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, if you’re a rich Western man who can move out at a moment’s notice, then yes, sure—literally everything caters to your comfort and convenience. If you’re a migrant worker, run afoul of Saudi gender norms, or are otherwise in a marginalized and powerless group… it’s hell. And a scary perspective for the 1st World’s transhuman future, too.
Such flippant and callous observations from a position of great relative privliege is what gave traction to the “Glibertarian” label, y’know. Both for the sake of LW epistemic standards and to avoid sounding like an entitled aristocrat, please think before commenting.
I’m not even particularly pissed off about this one comment, it all just adds up when you… observe the persistence of certain ideological trends on the internet.
Here’s some more links about how such glittering Cities Upon A Hill really function:
There’s a disarming frankness to the way [Lindsay] recounts the poverty of Kenyan flower growers, simply in order to urge us to carry on buying their posies. His vision for the future of the African continent in the Age of the Aerotropolis seems to be as a vast latifundium sown with GM wheat. Equally brazen is his aside that Apple engineers refer to the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen – where the world’s iPhones and most of its iPads, iPods, Playstations, Nintendos and Kindles are assembled – as ‘Mordor’. Why the evil kingdom in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? ‘At its peak,’ Lindsay writes, ‘some 320,000 workers toiled on its assembly lines and slept in its dormitories.’ A rash of suicides among its workers is part of the reason for Foxconn’s relocation to the still poorer and more immiserated interior of the Heavenly People’s Republic.
We might choose to see this as the frownie face that Kasarda’s smiley face tries to mask: an inverted curve where the greatest misery adds to a product’s value in the middle of its global traverse, while the greatest pleasure is accrued by innovators and consumers at either winsome end. Perhaps the frowniest spot on the face of the earth is the despotic principality of Dubai, where Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision coincides perfectly with Kasarda’s: this is an entire statelet conceived of as an aerotropolis – or, at least, as a transpark with attached office space and buy-to-flip real estate. On a trip to Dubai, Lindsay is typically disarming about the labour camps in the desert where the indentured workers sweat and half-starve; after all, he points out, they’re making better money than they would back home in Kerala, or Baluchistan, so that’s OK. He has read – and cites in his notes – the Human Rights Watch 2006 report Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates, but notwithstanding his admission that Dubai is ‘all dark side’ he remains … upbeat.
Lindsay even takes a walk in Dubai, and although he doesn’t tell us what distance he covered, my impression is he went only a few blocks. I, too, took a walk in Dubai a couple of years ago, but mine was a two-day traverse from the airport, clear across this great city of unbecoming and into the fringes of the Empty Quarter. Lindsay is told that ‘nobody walks in Dubai,’ but this should be modified: nobody white walks in Dubai. Everywhere I went – along the baking sidewalks of Sheikh Zayed Road, through the dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families for three, five, even ten years, and ekeing out an existence on $10 a day or less. When they weren’t too intimidated to talk to me, they had nothing positive to say about their situation: their faces were wreathed in frowns. My response to this Xanadu – powered by jet fuel and misted by the evaporation of desalinated water – was to stop flying altogether: I no longer wished to pick up any airmiles that contributed to such a future. Perhaps if frenetic flyers like Kasarda and Lindsay ever dared attempt a sustained hike through the wastelands of the postmodern ugliness they enthuse about, they might take a different view.
Her’es a quote from Wikipedia about those Foxconn suicides:
The suicide rate at Foxconn during the suicide spate remained lower than that of the general Chinese population[8] as well as all 50 states in the United States.[9] Additionally the Foxconn deaths may have been a product of economic conditions external to the company.
I was pretty sure this had been debunked before, but the story keeps getting spread around for ideological reasons.
I’d also point out that just because a geek calls something Mordor doesn’t mean he literally thinks it’s as bad as Mordor. All it means is that he thinks it’s worse than his current living conditions, which only amounts to “people in the US are better off than people in China”. IBM and Microsoft get called the Evil Empire all the time, without killing anyone.
I was pretty sure this had been debunked before, but the story keeps getting spread around for ideological reasons.
I’m pretty sure that thousands upon thousands of stories like this—where the “normal” functioning of global capitalism is inseparable from some brutal social repression, delegitimizing the ruling narrative that economic “efficiency” and ethics/human decency should be separate magisteria—have never made it to the Western press, or only made a tiny splash. For ideological reasons.
...By depicting Chinese workers as Others – as abject subalterns or competitive antagonists – this tableau wildly miscasts the reality of labor in today’s China. Far from triumphant victors, Chinese workers are facing the same brutal competitive pressures as workers in the West, often at the hands of the same capitalists. More importantly, it is hardly their stoicism that distinguishes them from us.
Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.
I’m pretty sure that thousands upon thousands of stories like this—where the “normal” functioning of global capitalism is inseparable from some brutal social repression, delegitimizing the ruling narrative that economic “efficiency” and ethics/human decency should be separate magisteria—have never made it to the Western press, or only made a tiny splash. For ideological reasons.
I agree with your point, in general—I don’t think imperialism, economic or otherwise, is often all that great for indigenous populations—but in this specific assertion, I think you’re falling prey to the hostile media effect. I’ve seen coverage of Foxconn suicides in some pretty doggoned mainstream western media.
You accuse me of judging the country from the perspective of a privileged white person, but you’re the one comparing it to countries a privileged white person would deem acceptable, rather than to the countries which it started off most similarly to. If you want to judge the efficacy of a dictator, you judge the changes that took place, and those -changes- have been quite good.
No. It’s not -better- than the West, it’s not even as -good- as the West—shit, just look at their sanitation issues. But look at how far it has come, and how much it has achieved, and for all its human rights issues -how much better it is at preserving human rights than most of the surrounding nations-. The culture there is -not- conducive to human rights; its next door neighbors are sentencing people to jail or death for the crime of apostasy.
While you’re attacking me for defending dictators, incidentally, I’m also a fan of Pinochet. He was an asshole who engaged in war crimes and gross violations of human rights—but he turned Chile from a country where those crimes were standard into a country where he could step down and be charged by the government he created with those crimes.
For what they had to work with, and what they achieved, I am immense fans of both Pinochet and the Al Maktoum family. Shrug If you want to call me a glibertarian for that, well, go ahead. Personally I think such a perspective is merely ignorance.
Pinochet. He was an asshole who engaged in war crimes and gross violations of human rights but he turned Chile from a country where those crimes were standard into a country where he could step down and be charged by the government he created with those crimes.
Ermm...so he stared doing bad things, then he stopped, and that makes him good? Those crimes weren’t standard
before he was in power, and he had to stop because of a shift in policy by the US, not by his own volition. And he managed to evade punishment for his crimes. So why is he so great again?
The culture there is -not- conducive to human rights; its next door neighbors are sentencing people to jail or death for the crime of apostasy.
Oh? Culture? I wonder what you’d say about German or Japanese “culture” circa 1945, and the historical trends of their respect for human rights. (Especially the treatment of different ethnic groups.)
Or, conversely, about Afghanistan in the 1960s. Certainly Afghanistan started out with more disadvantages than Saudi Arabia, and no oil wealth. Yet the cultural changes there were not rolled back even under the communist regime—the emancipation of women, rural education, etc went on like in other Soviet client states. It took the American-armed, American-sponsored fundamentalist thugs to turn the clock back to misery and domination.
I find OW’s comparison of Chilean culture with that of its neighbors really perplexing, as Chile is vastly different from most of South America. For example, it’s a massive outlier on the CPI map.
The culture comparison was between Dubai and its neighbors; I only brought Chile up because I figured I might as well go all-in on the “Supporting asshole dictators who I figure managed to do more good than bad” front.
Well… as I just tried to point out, your knowledge of both South American politics and the comparative cultural dynamics of traditionally “authoritarian” societies, Middle Eastern or otherwise, is as pathetic as your alarming lack of moral inhibitions and your cavalier attitude to weighing unspeakable acts on very simplistic scales of vulgar total utilitarianism.
Good. My entire point is that such discussions—or, at least, certain “rationalist” arguments in them—must be suppressed outright. Certain political opinions must remain out of bounds. Trawling through so much of this on the internet, I wonder more and more whether Marcuse might’ve been right about “repressive tolerance”.
I strongly disagree with this statement, but truly hope that people continue to engage with it rather than downvote it—we actually need to have this conversation and understand that there actually are pros and cons, so that we can accurately weigh them.
My own objections to the idea of “repressive tolerance” is that humans aren’t very good at managing it responsibly—the decision of who to repress is just as much of a Hard Problem as the decision of who gets to make the decisions (in fact, they’re functionally equivalent at timescales of greater than a few months).
This is a concept that we need to perform research and experiment on, NOT a concept that we need to be implementing at this stage in our social development.
If you want to start deploying such weapons, suppressing people outright, it’s by no means certain you’ll win. The underlying argument of Marcuse’ piece, the thing he uses to secure necessity, is that propaganda works. If you start giving people the power to shut up those they disagree with, what makes you think they’ll come down on your side? People taught not to think, and to go with the populist pull all their lives, are not suddenly going to choose wisely and in the interests of, as M rather ironically put it considering your antipathy for utilitarians, ‘Freeing the Damned of the Earth.’
Well, personally, I don’t see a need to engage in further ethical debate in you. Personally, I wish you’d be unable to scrub theseimages from your mind for a week or two. That you’d imagine the faces of your family on them, perhaps. “Detached” and “objective” debate has its limits when we’re talking about the human consequences of some things while staying in guaranteed safety from them.
[TRIGGER WARNING: TORTURE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE]
For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured.” Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.
...
One of the first things Ms De Witt heard from a cell after her arrest was a man being beaten to death in the yard outside. She said: “They were beating him with what seemed like long chains. I can still hear the noise it made, and then the crying of the young man, eventually it stopped. I saw him later. His whole body was swollen. It was red and blue, and you could not recognise his face. His name was Cedomil Lauzic.”
Ms De Witt was put through the ritual of electric shocks, beatings and sexual degradation. “One day I was tortured from 11 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon with electric shocks. Near the end I could not breathe and my heart stopped. They massaged my heart, and they stopped hurting me for that day. But it began again the next morning,” she said.
[END TW]
Ain’t enough dust specks on this Earth for some things. Intellectual acquiescence with certain ideas should not, I believe, be a matter of relaxed and pleasant debate—no more so than the implementation of them was for their victims.
P.S.: name ONE person tortured or violently repressed by the Allende government. That’s right, zero. Allende wouldn’t suspend the constitution and the legal norms even in the face of an enemy with no such qualms.
Harmer shows that Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience. He had an ‘unbending commitment to constitutional government’ and refused in the face of an ‘externally funded’ opposition ‘to take a different non-democratic or violent road’. He invoked history to insist that democracy and socialism were compatible, yet he knew that Chile’s experience was exceptional. During the two decades before his election, military coups had overthrown governments in 12 countries: Cuba in 1952; Guatemala and Paraguay in 1954; Argentina and Peru in 1962; Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and again Guatemala in 1963; Brazil and Bolivia in 1964; and Argentina once more in 1966. Many of these coups were encouraged and sanctioned by Washington and involved subverting exactly the kind of civil-society pluralism – of the press, political parties and unions – that Allende promoted. So he was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and respected Castro, especially after he survived the CIA’s Bay of Pigs exploit in 1961. And when Allende won the presidency, he relied on Cuban advisers for personal security and intelligence operations.
But Cuba’s turn to one-party authoritarianism only deepened Allende’s faith in the durability of Chilean democracy. Socialism could be won, he insisted, through procedures and institutions – the ballot, the legislature, the courts and the media – that historically had been dominated by those classes most opposed to it. Castro warned him that the military wouldn’t abide by the constitution. Until at least early 1973 Allende believed otherwise. His revolution would not be confronted with the choice that had been forced on Castro: suspend democracy or perish. But by mid-1973, events were escaping Allende’s command. On 11 September he took his own life, probably with a gun Castro gave him as a gift. The left in the years after the coup developed its own critique of Allende: that, as the crisis hurtled toward its conclusion, he proved indecisive, failing to arm his supporters and train resistance militias, failing to shut down congress and failing to defend the revolution the way Castro defended his. Harmer presents these as conscious decisions, stemming from Allende’s insistence that neither one-party rule nor civil war was an acceptable alternative to defeat.
Multiheaded, you’re taking the disutility of each torture caused by Pinochet and using their sum to declare his actions as a net evil. OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.
You, however, appear to be looking at his actions, declaring them evil, and citing Allende as evidence that Pinochet’s ruthlessness was unnecessary. This could be the foundation of a good argument, perhaps, but it’s not made clear and is instead obscured behind an appeal to emotions, declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.
OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.
He doesn’t actually make that statement anywhere that I can see.
declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.
I disagree that he has done anything of the sort. What’s he even comparing Pinochet to? The obvious candidate is a peacefully elected president after the end of Allende’s term, which suggests someone from UP or the Christian Democrats, and it’s hard to imagine such a government sponsoring systemic torture against dissidents.
In any case, I think claims of “rational” (which Multiheaded hasn’t made anyway) needs to stay far, far away from this thread.
To head off an interpretation argument, that’s a fair rephrasing of my position. I wouldn’t use the word “utility,” but the basic moral premise is the same: As bad as Pinochet was, I think he was one of the best options the country had at the time.
Yes. It’s worth at least the prevention of the torture of fifty thousand.
Guerrilla warfare against the new government began the same month as the coup—the very next day, in point of fact. At that point I think civil war was inevitable. (And yes, the coup itself was inevitable. Even the judiciary supported it. This might have something to do with the fact that their insistence on following the law resulted in Allende’s administration effectively calling the justices of the nation capitalist lapdogs. Yes, I paraphrase.)
The population of Chile was 10 million. There were fewer than 30,000 political prisoners, and around 5,000 deaths (including military and guerrilla forces killed in combat). And yes, a lot of those political prisoners were tortured.
There were other major conflicts in the area in the same era.
Somewhere north of 10,000 died in Argentina in this time frame in the “Dirty War.”
The civil war in El Salvador cost around 75,000 lives, out of a population of somewhere south of 5 million people.
The civil war in Guatemala cost somewhere north of 150,000 lives, out of a population of around 4 million people.
Nicaragua faced -two- civil wars, for a combined death toll of at least 40,000, out of a population of around 3 million people.
I could keep going.
Pinochet was an asshole. But if the other conflicts in the region in the era are any indication, his administration, as oppressive as it was, did save the country from a far more costly conflict. In general the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally—such as Argentina and Chile—suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn’t or couldn’t, such as Nicaragua. (Guatemala initially didn’t, but turned far more brutal later.) More, his administration concluded itself peacefully, democratically, and without substantive corruption, which also ran against the norm (for comparison, see, for example, Bolivia). (Note that there -was- corruption -during- his administration. My point there is that he didn’t try to corrupt the new government as it formed, and indeed appears to have done a very good job of passing the torch.)
Yes. I think the man did more good than evil. It’s a well-considered position and not one I entered into lightly. This doesn’t mean the torture of thousands of people doesn’t matter; they do. Rather, it means that the lives of tens of thousands of people who -didn’t- die matter also.
It’s really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn’t been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country’s government more recently.
More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up—with the exception of Argentina—are not in the same reference class. In the 1970′s Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile’s.
El Salvador’s troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala’s number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile’s economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.
Argentina’s policies were very similar to Chile’s; they, like Pinochet’s Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you’re wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.
(Note that I’m not particularly a fan of Argentina’s series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)
the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally—such as Argentina and Chile—suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn’t or couldn’t, such as Nicaragua.
And what about, um, you know, the logic of MY side in all this? The logic of the Left? Wherever third-world revolutionaries have turned to all the things they’re accused of doing, their rationale has always been to prevent the deaths and misery that were going on without any overt civil war, through the “normal” functioning of divided societies. So how is this different from Maoists claiming that, as under Mao’s rule life expectancy in China doubled, history has absolved him of everything?
Mark Twain wrote quite glowingly:
the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal-wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
The question is, can we at all justify throwing away the moral injunctions of our civilization by arguing from some clever total-utilitarian counterfactuals, with the track records of such approaches being what it is? I think no, and I think that if you’d say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.
I think no, and I think that if you’d say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with his position here, I think this is an unfair standard to set.
No. But I still would. And I’d let them take it all out on me. I’d hate to live in a world where anything less could be expected of me. Some things ought not to be easy to live with.
Moreover, if we insist that good, moral* people think about making decisions in this way, this leads to more of the decisions being made by evil, immoral people.
Given the way real-world humans behave, incentives work as a blunt instrument. You can’t incentivize only rational decisions without incentivizing irrational decisions that are somewhat similar in form. Incentivizing the 90% chance of saving 500 over the 100% chance of saving 400 would make the right choice more likely in that specific situation, but would also incentivize wrong choices (for instance, taking a 10% chance of 500 people dying in order to implement something that you are really certain would have good effects, when that certainty is unwarranted). You can’t change human psychology to make the incentive work only on rational choices, so we’re overall better off without the incentive.
From the outside view, a randomly picked choice to kill or hurt a large number of people, when made by actual humans, will turn out all wrong and unjustifiable in retrospect, say, 90% of the time. If we’re talking about torture as opposed to just killing enemies, it’s literally only there to create a lasting climate of terror and alienation (in the society being “reshaped” and “reformed”) while giving an outlet to the kind of psychopaths who end up running the repressive machine. So it would make sense to have a very very strong prior against this kind of thing, AKA moral injunction.
Again, if we’re considering counterfactuals along great timespans, we ARE considering counterfactuals along great timespans. Equally. If the counterfactual to a world where Pinochet didn’t take power is a long and bloody civil war, the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets. (Whom we also just served with a much more widely accepted excuse for their horrific acts.)
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements. Would you rather have “Thou shalt not kill”, or “Thou shalt not kill unless thou sees a really good reason to and it’s totally for the greater good”?
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements.
As a rule, which is to say as a rule with exceptions. Rules are generally needed because it is not generally possible to accurately figure out consequences. But sometimes it is, in which case it is OK to suspend the rule. As a rule.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking of. But, as a meta-meta-rule, no-one should generally be the judge in one’s own case, i.e. to simply assert that it’s OK to suspend some particular rules for some particular act just because one has predicted some particular consequences.
There’s the problem of enforcement mechanisms, of course.
the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets.
If someone approves of Pinochet, this is unlikely to be a convincing argument to them. Especially if they view warlord types as inevitably occurring during social evolution or something like that.
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements.
You’ve not argued for this, most of us can imagine situations under which it’s acceptable to kill but we still have a reasonably strong disinclination to avoid killing people.
You walk into the lobby of a hotel during a major political convention. There’s a gun laying on the table next to you, apparently left by the only other occupant of the lobby, who hasn’t noticed you—a guy who is now assembling a gun from a backpack and readying magazines; he’s muttering rather loudly to himself about how many bullets he can put into a senator who is giving a keynote speech this afternoon. “Thou shalt not kill” or “Greater good”?
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
Could you have at least thought of a scenario that would deserve a response?
Because for this one to even be a dilemma, you’d have to assume that I’m some mute, non-English speaking killer android who can’t: 1) take the gun from the table and tell the guy to turn around, hands in the air, etc; 2) run outside and yell “TERRORISTS!”; 3) hit a fire alarm on the wall; 4) shoot him in the leg...
And anyways, to be even a remote parallel with Allende, this story would need to have two guys arguing and one pushing away the gun that the other offers him, launching into a tirade about how he’s a pacifist/a Christian/whatever, and would never resort to crime even to oppose tyranny. Then he pushes the other one out of the door, throws the gun after him, turns to you and tries to hand you a protest flyer. (But no, even this doesn’t quite get it across.)
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults. #3 might just bring more targets to him. And #4 has a pretty high chance of being fatal—femoral artery and all. (Also, a leg is -hard- to shoot. I take it you’ve never shot a gun before. In that case, you have no business shooting the gun at anything but his center of mass.)
I’m not drawing a parallel with Allende, never mind that your parallel whitewashes Allende’s history (Allende would be the senator, or rather president, in this parallel, and there’d be a -crowd- of guys with guns in the lobby, guns and grenades and body armor and aerial support in case they need to bomb the hotel just to be sure, and they wouldn’t be crazy so much as enacting the last-ditch and reluctant wishes of the judiciary after the president has repeatedly broken the constitution and ignored the Supreme Court’s orders, and so on and so forth). I’m taking this to the root of our disagreement—about whether or not consequences should be considered in moral theory.
I’m not a utilitarian, incidentally. I’m somewhere between a deontologist and a virtue ethicist. (Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.) If you don’t think consequences matter, you need some new rules in your deontology.
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults.
“Not willing to kill him as a first resort” isn’t the same thing as “not willing to kill him”. Holding a gun on a criminal rather than immediately shooting him doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him, it means that I’m not willing to kill him if he just sits there and waits for the police to arrive. It doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him if he ignores me and continues aiming at the senator, nor does it mean that I’m not willing to have the police kill him if they try to arrest him and he doesn’t cooperate.
Since the rule under consideration is “Thou shallt not kill” and the person I’m arguing with is arguing that “moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements”, the issue isn’t “Not willing to kill him as a first resort” so much as not willing to kill him, period.
If you’re -willing- to kill him, pointing the gun at him and telling him to halt might actually be a good move. It’s the one I would likely take. If he doesn’t stop, however, and you’re unwilling to kill him, you’ve sacrificed any other alternatives in doing so. Essentially it’s a statement that you’re willing to let some number of people be killed (on average) in order to satisfy your morality.
As is said here on decision theory, you should never be in a position of wishing your morality were different.
Fair point. But “moral injunctions must be blanket statements” doesn’t imply “Any blanket statement is a workable moral injunction.” And I’m not sure if you recognize that Multihead is not required by consistency-of-argument to assert “Any blanket statement is workable.”
The example under discussion is a great example—“Don’t kill” is a unworkable rule given any significant amount of conflict at all. By contrast, the original Hebrew of the commandments translates better as “Don’t murder” which is both a blanket statement and incredibly nuanced at the same time.
To the extent that Multihead argues that the blanket statement rule requires endorsement of “Don’t kill,” then I think you are right and he is wrong. But if that is his actual position, I don’t think he is defending the most defensible variation of that family of arguments.
The point is that murder != killing because there are some killings that aren’t murder (i.e. are not wrongful).
Describing that distinction can’t really be done briefly (e.g. what is and is not self-defense). But one doesn’t need to describe the distinction to notice that the distinction exists.
Yes, but just because it’s tautological doesn’t mean it’s necessarily psychologically compelling. I can easily imagine a human for whom “don’t kill someone you shouldn’t kill” does a much worse job of deterring them from killing someone they shouldn’t kill than “don’t murder” does. If my goal is to deter such humans from killing people they shouldn’t kill, “don’t murder” is much more effective at achieving my goal.
You might think the injunction ‘don’t murder’, is really just a way of saying ‘there is such a thing as murder, which is to say, killing immorally or illegally’ or ‘we have a law about killing’.
Considering people have brought up killing people when sanctioned by a democratic government with appropriate checks and balances, perhaps it refers to “unlawful killing”? Where “lawful” requires democracy or maybe some other supposedly superhumanly ethical authority.
(Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.)
Really? I had assumed you were a utilitarian from your … well, probably because you were the one shutting up and multiplying in this argument, to be honest.
I must say, I’m curious; what arguments persuade you to avoid utilitarianism in favour of virtue ethics?
“Utility”, more or less. Utilitarianism is entirely theoretical; I don’t see an actual application for it in my day-to-day life. The closest I could get would be “Well, if I actually put the work into doing the calculations, this is probably what I’d do”—and given that I know what I’d want to do anyways, the “If I actually put the work into it” part seems irrelevant.
Utilitarianism is also kind of one-dimensional; sure, you could construct a multidimensional utilitarian ethics system, but you lose out on any of the potential benefits of a hierarchical value system. Virtue ethics promotes a multidimensional approach to ethics, which is more intuitive to me, and more explicitly acknowledges the subjectiveness not only of valuation, but also of trade-offs.
He described himself as an “immense fan” of Pinochet. Smells like approval. Don’t ask me why a virtue ethicist would be an immense fan of Pinochet, though. Even if it is true that his regime represented a net utility gain over most plausible counterfactuals, it’s hard to argue that the man himself was virtuous in any ordinary sense. He was a slime.
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.
“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
That rule literally makes sense only because of scope insensitivity or similar bias. There’s no reason to expect a rationalist to adopt it within a community of rationality.
In other words, maybe instrumentally useful, not terminal value.
VALIS help me, this whole… conversation just feels so surreal to me somehow.
That’s a statement primarily about yourself, only secondarily about the conversation.
Can you please cool it down with attempting to use outrage as an argument? There’s all the rest of the internet if we want to see that, LessWrong is one place where outrage-as-argument should not fly.
I don’t see the grandparent as an attempt at argument at all. Elsewhere, I see Multiheaded expressing arguments with outrage, but this is substantially different from using outrage as an argument. I agree with you that the latter shouldn’t fly on LW, but I have nothing against the former.
In the real world, you are probably right. In the least convenient possible world, torture is an effective interrogation technique and ticking-time-bombs are realistic scenarios, not ridiculous movie plot devices.
In short, I don’t need to be a deontologist to think the overthrow of Allende was a net negative. Please don’t act like the arguments against overthrowing Allende are arguments in favor of bright line rules. If for no other reason than you are creating the perception that deotologist never consider consequence. Which is a stupid position that no deotologists should accept.
If for no other reason than you are creating the perception that deotologist never consider consequence. Which is a stupid position that no deotologists should accept.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I am legally and morally innocent of the crime. Yes, I wanted to kill John. Yes, I pointed the gun at him. Yes, I pulled the trigger. Yes, John is dead. But we are all deontologists, and thus we don’t think about consequences when we do moral reasoning—so you must find me not guilty of murdering John.
Because that argument is stupid, and I don’t think a deontoligist needs to accept it.
Kant would say something like this: “You treated the victim as a means to your end, killing him because you wanted to. You very likely also broke my other version of the categorical imperative (since I expect you wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone shot other people whenever they wanted to). It’s consistent with the categorical imperative to send folks like you to prison, since I’d prefer to live in a world like that than one where murderers go free. Guilty as charged!”
As you say, the defendant is guilty of causing the victim’s death for his own benefit.
Moral reasoning without causation just makes no sense. How do we have a coherent discussion of causation without some reference to consequences?
Edit: In other words, consequentialists say “you should always consider consequences,” while I take Kant to say that one should sometimes consider consequences, and sometimes not.
Well, a Straw-man Kantian might conceivably argue that it was the intent to kill that was really wrong, not the killing itself. Mr Straw Kant might conceivably impose almost the same sentence for attempted murder as for actual murder, though he’d want to think carefully about whether he’d really want to live in a world where that was the usual sentence.
However, leaving aside the straw stuffing, yes all real Kantians (and other deontologists) do think about the consequences of actions. Mostly about the consequences if lots of people performed the same actions.
In other words, consequentialists say “you should always consider consequences,” while I take Kant to say that one should sometimes consider consequences, and sometimes not.
Kant, and deontologists are deontologists because they take the intention (or something like it) to be what determines the moral value of an action. In some sense, a Kantian would always think about the consequences of the action, but just wouldn’t take the consequences to determine the moral value of an action. So for example, if I leap into a river to save a drowning baby, then Kant is going to say that my act is to be morally evaluated independently of whether or not I managed (despite my best efforts) to save the drowning baby. I’m not morally responsible for an overly swift current, after all.
However, Kant would say that understanding my intention means understanding what I was trying to bring about: you can’t evaluate my action’s intentions without understanding the consequences I sought. What doesn’t matter to the deontologist is the actual consequence.
Consequentialists and deontologists don’t really differ much in this. Consequentialists, after all, have to draw certain boundaries around ‘consequences’, having to do with what the agent can be called a cause of, as an agent. If I take my ailing brother to the hospital, only to be hit by a meteor on the way, I didn’t therefore act badly, even though he’d have lived through the day had I left him at home. Finally, consequentialists will evaluate courses of action based on expected utility, if only because actual utility is unavailable prior to the action. No consequentialist will say that moral judgements can only be made after the fact.
Well, whenever you say something like “this system of deciding whether an action is right or wrong is flawed; here is a better system,” this doesn’t make sense unless the two systems differ somehow. But then, the meta level can be collapsed to “these acts (which the former system considered right) are actually wrong; these other acts (which the former system considered wrong) are right.” Sounds like a moral judgement to me (or possibly a family of infinitely many moral judgements).
Systems can differ in their “outputs”—the sets of acts which they label “right” or “wrong”—or in their implementation, or both. If system A is contradictory, and system B isn’t, then system B is better. And that’s not a moral judgement.
They do seem to converge. Kant himself laid down a sort of hardcore deonotology in the Groundwork, and then spent the rest of his career sort of regressing toward the mean on all kinds of issues.
Yes, the conversation with drnickbone below is how my response would have gone as well, and you’re right in that sometimes consequences matter to Deontologists and sometimes they don’t. I also think we’ve had this conversation before, because I remember that example. :D
In the real world, you are probably right. In the least convenient possible world, torture is an effective interrogation technique and ticking-time-bombs are realistic scenarios, not ridiculous movie plot devices.
Yes, but so what? You’re asking here whether social rules that have been optimised for the real world will behave well in highly inconvenient possible worlds where torture is actually effective, and ticking nuclear-time-bombs are a routine hazard. And no, they probably won’t work very well in such worlds. Does that somehow make them the wrong rules in the real world?
Multiheaded’s argument style is that OrphanWilde is obviously wrong. I think OrphanWilde is wrong, but I disapprove of debate style that asserts his wrongness is obvious, when I think the historical facts are more ambiguous.
Incidentally, I -also- regard the overthrow of Allende, as it happened, was a net negative. I think the situation would have been better if the coup didn’t happen. But I don’t think Pinochet was responsible for the coup; I think he simply took charge of it (see, for example, contemporary judicial opinions of the coup). That is, given the political situation in Chile, I regard the coup as inevitable, with or without Pinochet; examining what happened in other countries (such as Argentina, whose junta was a series of deaths and coups—I have no idea how Argentina stayed as stable as it did through that mess), Pinochet made things better, rather than worse.
If you blame Pinochet for the coup, yes, I expect Pinochet did more harm than good. That’s an extremely simplistic view of the situation in Chile, however. (Indeed, senior military officials involved in the matter suggested, contrary to the initial public story, that Pinochet was actually a reluctant participant in the coup.)
As far as I can tell, that’s only true if you take the entire Cold War context as a given. If the US wasn’t actively trying to constrain Allende’s freedom to act, is the coup still inevitable? (Since we are reaching the end of my knowledge of Chilean politics, I don’t know the answer to that question).
Presumably, Pinochet thought the repression was necessary for government stability. If Pinochet (or someone similar) had been able to take power without a coup, is the repression necessary for government stability?
More generally, I’m skeptical about the able to draw lessons about right behavior and right governance by looking only at the internals of countries that we already know has significant external interventions on how to govern.
More generally, I’m skeptical about the able to draw lessons about right behavior and right governance by looking only at the internals of countries that we already know has significant external interventions on how to govern.
Strongly agree. it takes some Chutzpah to condemn “Pinochet caused the coup” as naive, whilst ignoring external influences.
I hate to agree with you, but I do, in some ways. It’s all fine and dandy to talk about Pinochet being good for Chile, but if he thought so, he should have been doing a fair chunk of the executions and tortures himself.
Alas, I have no reason to think Pinochet would have treated this like a deterrent. Except that he would likely have thought it a waste of his time because he had more important things to do.
Alas, I have no reason to think Pinochet would have treated this like a deterrent. Except that he would likely have thought it a waste of his time because he had more important things to do.
Um, I take it that shminux meant OW and not Pinochet by “him”? Grammar confusion?
No, I meant Pinochet. It would have been a good way for him to gauge his resolve in staying the course and avoiding the wetware bugs if he had committed to performing at least one tenth of the executions with his own hand. Also applies to other dictators.
...well, this went downhill pretty quick. Seriously, your view of human behavior and psychology appears to be rather unconventional.
By the way. Were you aware that Nazi Germany’s switch from Einsatzgruppen to gas chambers as the preferred instrument of genocide was caused at least partly by Himmler visiting a mass execution by the SS in Belarus, becoming all sick at the sight of prisoners being gunned down, and immediately issuing a policy memo calling for a more “humane”, “clean” and automated method of mass slaughter? Historians confirm the veracity of this episode. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler#The_Holocaust)
This is the mirror image of the thought experiment of Gandhi and the murder pill. Gandhi (hypothetically) would not take the pill that would remove his repugnance to murder. Himmler (actually) refused the pill that would weaken his resolve to exterminate the Jews.
On a more trivial level, it is standard advice, here and elsewhere, to avoid distractions when trying to get work done, and, if it helps, using artificial blocks on one’s internet access to facilitate this. Is this also a reprehensible attempt to avoid “gauging one’s resolve in staying the course”? Or a sensible way of achieving one’s purposes?
Of course, we would like Himmler to have turned against the extermination project, so it is easy to say that he should have done the wet work himself, because that might have led to the result that we prefer. But that is idle talk. Himmler was in charge and organised things according to his aims, not ours, and he took steps to eliminate what he regarded as a useless distraction from the task. His fault was in undertaking the task at all.
I guess you are confirming what I was saying. The out like the one you describe should not be available. If Himmler was giving extermination orders, he should have participated in executions personally, not just giving orders. This is a pretty high threshold for most “normal” people, not psychopaths.
Of all fictional treatments of this question, the one that stood out to me the most is the one in Three Worlds Collide because of its restraint from turning a psychological question into a moral question.
“Once upon a time,” said the Kiritsugu, “there were people who dropped a U-235 fission bomb, on a place called Hiroshima. They killed perhaps seventy thousand people, and ended a war. And if the good and decent officer who pressed that button had needed to walk up to a man, a woman, a child, and slit their throats one at a time, he would have broken long before he killed seventy thousand people.”
“But pressing a button is different,” the Kiritsugu said. “You don’t see the results, then. Stabbing someone with a knife has an impact on you. The first time, anyway. Shooting someone with a gun is easier. Being a few meters further away makes a surprising difference. Only needing to pull a trigger changes it a lot. As for pressing a button on a spaceship—that’s the easiest of all. Then the part about ‘fifteen billion’ just gets flushed away. And more importantly—you think it was the right thing to do. The noble, the moral, the honorable thing to do. For the safety of your tribe. You’re proud of it—”
“Are you saying,” the Lord Pilot said, “that it was not the right thing to do?”
“No,” the Kiritsugu said. “I’m saying that, right or wrong, the belief is all it takes.”
If Himmler was giving extermination orders, he should have participated in executions personally, not just giving orders.
Bean’s style of leadership was similar to the above expectation—I assumed your opinion had been influenced by the book, and want to confirm or correct my perception.
Oh. now I remember the musings about it. No, I was simply agreeing with Multiheaded’s link to the Game of Thrones. It’s not a counter-intuitive idea, really. If you to do something that can be reasonably construed as evil, you better do it yourself to test your resolve and experience the negative impact first hand. Anyway, I thought I was clear in my replies to Multiheaded, but apparently not. Eh, who cares.
It’s not a counter-intuitive idea, really. If you to do something that can be reasonably construed as evil, you better do it yourself to test your resolve and experience the negative impact first hand.
That’s an appealing enough system, intuitively—but it also implies that the system’s selecting for amorality, provided that relatively amoral actions are sometimes adaptive in the ordinary course of rulership. I have no idea whether or not this would erode away the gains from making scope more salient, but to run with the Game of Thrones metaphor it would be a shame if you were trying to select for people like Ned Stark and ended up in a local minimum at Ramsey Bolton.
...Wow. Faith in the common decency of average LW user suddenly resurging! Seriously, thank you, dude.
You know I’ve clashed with you over this before, I’ve more or less written you off as impossible to persuade on this issue (not as in “inhuman monster”, more like “committed ideological enemy”)… and yet you try to share at least part of my moral sentiment here. I am grateful.
Something feels wrong about the comparison Mark Twain made. I’ll try to explain by an example:
When my country was officially a socialist country, we didn’t have mobile phones. Shortly after the regime changed, mobile phones were invented, and now everyone has them. -- Yet I don’t consider this an evidence that somehow socialism and mobile phones are opposed. It simply happened. In a counterfactual universe, my country would be socialist today and have mobile phones, too. If I try to make an argument about how socialism relates to the mobile phones, it is not fair to compare past and present. It would be fair only to compare the present and the counterfactual present… assuming such comparison can be made. (For example, I could argue that in the counterfactual universe people in my country probably have less mobile phones, because central planning would probably decide that a smaller number of mobile phones is enough. But of course someone could argue they have more and better mobile phones, because of, uhm, something. Or that having less mobile phones, and perhaps more of something else, is better.)
Similarly, to morally evaluate a revolution, we should not compare it with the past, but with the counterfactual universe where the revolution did not happen. Yeah, it might be impossible. That does not make comparison with the past a correct one—only as much as the past is reliable as a model of the counterfactual present.
Because, if we take comparing with past as our moral guide, here is my advice for all wannabe dictators: -- Make your revolution just after a significant invention in agriculture or medicine! Then, assuming you are competent enough, all the people you killed will be balanced by the people saved by the improved agriculture or medicine. And the history will consider you the benefactor of humankind. (And a promoter of modern technology.)
Of course that’s an example why comparing with past can be misleading. Talking about dictators who kill people and forcefully introduce agricultural or medical improvements which wouldn’t have otherwise happened, that would be a different topic. (But only if you make sure the improvements did not happen in the counterfactual universe.)
The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn’t have been tortured if Pinochet hadn’t been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.
Why don’t you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn’t been dictator? (Note: I don’t seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you’re capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)
(Note: I don’t seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you’re capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)
The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn’t have been tortured if Pinochet hadn’t been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.
Then how the fuck does it not nullify your counterfactual that they would’ve been tortured? I can back up my claims with historical evidence about the lawful and peaceful character of Allende’s government—as well as the enormous support and protection given to Pinochet and his ilk by the US, without which he would’ve been way less likely to succeed. You just assert the opposite, that the US-backed dictators and their pet psychopaths were: 1) the only solution to violence and strife in the region, and 2) not at all a major contributing factor to said strife and violence. I say it’s bullshit and shameless propaganda.
Why don’t you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn’t been dictator?
I’m really quite confident that many of the survivors brought that up over and over again—in interviews and when testifying after Pinochet’s belated arrest and trial.
What, do you think that me, hypothetically, telling a victim/their family: “I looked you up, and I’m so sorry for what happened to you, I wish Pinochet never got his hands on anyone”… is somehow as fucked up as what you could possibly tell them, if Omega forced us both to explain ourselves to them?
(Note: I don’t seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you’re capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)
Yep, I admit there’s two arguments. My secondary line of attack is that there was nothing “necessary” about the things Pinochet did, and that in regards to the rule of law and sustainable democracy he wrecked what Allende was trying to create.
But my primary line is that some “rational” arguments should be simply censored when their advocates don’t even bother with hypotheticals but point to the unspeakable experiences of real victims and then dismiss them as a fair price for some dubious greater good. This is a behavior and an attitude that our society needs to suppress, I believe, because it’s predictive of other self-centered, remorseless, power-blind attitudes—and we’re better off with fully general ethical injunctions against such. Not tolerating even the beginning steps of some potentially devastating paths is important enough to outweigh perfect epistemic detachment and pretensions to impartiality.
Christian moralism in its 19th century form—once a popular source for such injunctions—is rightly considered obsolete/bankrupt, but, like Orwell, I think our civilization needs a replacement for it. Or else our descendants might be the ones screaming “Why did it have to be rats?!” one day.
ZERO compromise. Not for the sake of politeness, not for the sake of pure reason, not a single more step to hell.
Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just … damn.
Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren’t going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I’m not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience’s rationality, I’m inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.
Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I’ve just been karmassasinated and so I’ll put it here instead.
Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.
As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it’s justified—I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!
I’m well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it’s even easier when you’re relying on outrage rather than rationality.
Finally, it’s interesting that you claim it’s OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that’s covered in applause lights. Isn’t truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn’t break just because the expected utility is so high?
So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost.
Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?
Maybe someday, if we manage to raise the sanity waterline enough, and if everyone who tries it doesn’t get denounced as giving aid an comfort to the Enemy for even considering the idea.
EDIT: Possible example:
You should never, ever murder an innocent person who’s helped you, even if it’s the right thing to do; because it’s far more likely that you’ve made a mistake, than that murdering an innocent person who helped you is the right thing to do.
Sound reasonable?
During World War II, it became necessary to destroy Germany’s supply of deuterium, a neutron moderator, in order to block their attempts to achieve a fission chain reaction. Their supply of deuterium was coming at this point from a captured facility in Norway. A shipment of heavy water was on board a Norwegian ferry ship, the SF Hydro. Knut Haukelid and three others had slipped on board the ferry in order to sabotage it, when the saboteurs were discovered by the ferry watchman. Haukelid told him that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman immediately agreed to overlook their presence. Haukelid “considered warning their benefactor but decided that might endanger the mission and only thanked him and shook his hand.” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.) So the civilian ferry Hydro sank in the deepest part of the lake, with eighteen dead and twenty-nine survivors. Some of the Norwegian rescuers felt that the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this attitude did not prevail, and four Germans were rescued. And that was, effectively, the end of the Nazi atomic weapons program.
Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly,terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.
Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it’s only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good—but still, wouldn’t you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to “manipulate” you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through “emotional” appeals.
“You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can’t occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings.”
Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content.
What the fuck? Causing unnecessary psychological damage to anyone reading this page—even more so just for the sake of some stupid political point—is not acceptable. Downvoted.
I’m not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.
I don’t care who has what bullshit political opinions here. No-one gave you the authority to emotionally traumatize the readers of this site “for the greater good”. Especially when you could have even just added a trigger warning to the top of your post and it would not have diminished your argument in the slightest. Frankly, if you’re going to be a dick you don’t need to be here.
Dubai and to a lesser extent Abu Dhabi?
Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, if you’re a rich Western man who can move out at a moment’s notice, then yes, sure—literally everything caters to your comfort and convenience. If you’re a migrant worker, run afoul of Saudi gender norms, or are otherwise in a marginalized and powerless group… it’s hell. And a scary perspective for the 1st World’s transhuman future, too.
Such flippant and callous observations from a position of great relative privliege is what gave traction to the “Glibertarian” label, y’know. Both for the sake of LW epistemic standards and to avoid sounding like an entitled aristocrat, please think before commenting.
I’m not even particularly pissed off about this one comment, it all just adds up when you… observe the persistence of certain ideological trends on the internet.
Here’s some more links about how such glittering Cities Upon A Hill really function:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-exploitation-of-immigrant-workers-in-the-middle-east/
And here’s Will Self dissecting a book that self-consciously chooses to sing paeans to this neofeudal/corporate-fascist model:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/will-self/the-frowniest-spot-on-earth
Her’es a quote from Wikipedia about those Foxconn suicides:
I was pretty sure this had been debunked before, but the story keeps getting spread around for ideological reasons.
I’d also point out that just because a geek calls something Mordor doesn’t mean he literally thinks it’s as bad as Mordor. All it means is that he thinks it’s worse than his current living conditions, which only amounts to “people in the US are better off than people in China”. IBM and Microsoft get called the Evil Empire all the time, without killing anyone.
I’m pretty sure that thousands upon thousands of stories like this—where the “normal” functioning of global capitalism is inseparable from some brutal social repression, delegitimizing the ruling narrative that economic “efficiency” and ethics/human decency should be separate magisteria—have never made it to the Western press, or only made a tiny splash. For ideological reasons.
Here’s a more thorough account of China specifically:
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/
I agree with your point, in general—I don’t think imperialism, economic or otherwise, is often all that great for indigenous populations—but in this specific assertion, I think you’re falling prey to the hostile media effect. I’ve seen coverage of Foxconn suicides in some pretty doggoned mainstream western media.
Downvoted for the initial flip out. You can present all the same evidence just as convincingly without it.
Ah, but the initial flip out was so satisfying.
Why do you find it satisfying when someone can be pushed into an irrational state?
Why do you consider anger an irrational state?
You accuse me of judging the country from the perspective of a privileged white person, but you’re the one comparing it to countries a privileged white person would deem acceptable, rather than to the countries which it started off most similarly to. If you want to judge the efficacy of a dictator, you judge the changes that took place, and those -changes- have been quite good.
No. It’s not -better- than the West, it’s not even as -good- as the West—shit, just look at their sanitation issues. But look at how far it has come, and how much it has achieved, and for all its human rights issues -how much better it is at preserving human rights than most of the surrounding nations-. The culture there is -not- conducive to human rights; its next door neighbors are sentencing people to jail or death for the crime of apostasy.
While you’re attacking me for defending dictators, incidentally, I’m also a fan of Pinochet. He was an asshole who engaged in war crimes and gross violations of human rights—but he turned Chile from a country where those crimes were standard into a country where he could step down and be charged by the government he created with those crimes.
For what they had to work with, and what they achieved, I am immense fans of both Pinochet and the Al Maktoum family. Shrug If you want to call me a glibertarian for that, well, go ahead. Personally I think such a perspective is merely ignorance.
Ermm...so he stared doing bad things, then he stopped, and that makes him good? Those crimes weren’t standard before he was in power, and he had to stop because of a shift in policy by the US, not by his own volition. And he managed to evade punishment for his crimes. So why is he so great again?
We have a tendency to forget the crimes of revolutionary forces while remembering the crimes of those they are revolting against.
The descendants of the comment you’re responding to elaborate a little bit more on why I regard him as more good than evil.
Oh? Culture? I wonder what you’d say about German or Japanese “culture” circa 1945, and the historical trends of their respect for human rights. (Especially the treatment of different ethnic groups.)
Or, conversely, about Afghanistan in the 1960s. Certainly Afghanistan started out with more disadvantages than Saudi Arabia, and no oil wealth. Yet the cultural changes there were not rolled back even under the communist regime—the emancipation of women, rural education, etc went on like in other Soviet client states. It took the American-armed, American-sponsored fundamentalist thugs to turn the clock back to misery and domination.
I find OW’s comparison of Chilean culture with that of its neighbors really perplexing, as Chile is vastly different from most of South America. For example, it’s a massive outlier on the CPI map.
The culture comparison was between Dubai and its neighbors; I only brought Chile up because I figured I might as well go all-in on the “Supporting asshole dictators who I figure managed to do more good than bad” front.
Well… as I just tried to point out, your knowledge of both South American politics and the comparative cultural dynamics of traditionally “authoritarian” societies, Middle Eastern or otherwise, is as pathetic as your alarming lack of moral inhibitions and your cavalier attitude to weighing unspeakable acts on very simplistic scales of vulgar total utilitarianism.
I don’t think this is a productive avenue for this discussion to go down.
Good. My entire point is that such discussions—or, at least, certain “rationalist” arguments in them—must be suppressed outright. Certain political opinions must remain out of bounds. Trawling through so much of this on the internet, I wonder more and more whether Marcuse might’ve been right about “repressive tolerance”.
I strongly disagree with this statement, but truly hope that people continue to engage with it rather than downvote it—we actually need to have this conversation and understand that there actually are pros and cons, so that we can accurately weigh them.
My own objections to the idea of “repressive tolerance” is that humans aren’t very good at managing it responsibly—the decision of who to repress is just as much of a Hard Problem as the decision of who gets to make the decisions (in fact, they’re functionally equivalent at timescales of greater than a few months).
This is a concept that we need to perform research and experiment on, NOT a concept that we need to be implementing at this stage in our social development.
If you want to start deploying such weapons, suppressing people outright, it’s by no means certain you’ll win. The underlying argument of Marcuse’ piece, the thing he uses to secure necessity, is that propaganda works. If you start giving people the power to shut up those they disagree with, what makes you think they’ll come down on your side? People taught not to think, and to go with the populist pull all their lives, are not suddenly going to choose wisely and in the interests of, as M rather ironically put it considering your antipathy for utilitarians, ‘Freeing the Damned of the Earth.’
For some reason, (old)lesswrongers end up optimizing to reactionary themes. I wonder why, if is just signaling or a serious thing.
Do you know how this came to be? I could imagine a Pinochet supporter claiming credit for this.
Well, personally, I don’t see a need to engage in further ethical debate in you. Personally, I wish you’d be unable to scrub these images from your mind for a week or two. That you’d imagine the faces of your family on them, perhaps. “Detached” and “objective” debate has its limits when we’re talking about the human consequences of some things while staying in guaranteed safety from them.
[TRIGGER WARNING: TORTURE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE]
...
[END TW]
Ain’t enough dust specks on this Earth for some things. Intellectual acquiescence with certain ideas should not, I believe, be a matter of relaxed and pleasant debate—no more so than the implementation of them was for their victims.
P.S.: name ONE person tortured or violently repressed by the Allende government. That’s right, zero. Allende wouldn’t suspend the constitution and the legal norms even in the face of an enemy with no such qualms.
Multiheaded, you’re taking the disutility of each torture caused by Pinochet and using their sum to declare his actions as a net evil. OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.
You, however, appear to be looking at his actions, declaring them evil, and citing Allende as evidence that Pinochet’s ruthlessness was unnecessary. This could be the foundation of a good argument, perhaps, but it’s not made clear and is instead obscured behind an appeal to emotions, declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.
He doesn’t actually make that statement anywhere that I can see.
I disagree that he has done anything of the sort. What’s he even comparing Pinochet to? The obvious candidate is a peacefully elected president after the end of Allende’s term, which suggests someone from UP or the Christian Democrats, and it’s hard to imagine such a government sponsoring systemic torture against dissidents.
In any case, I think claims of “rational” (which Multiheaded hasn’t made anyway) needs to stay far, far away from this thread.
To head off an interpretation argument, that’s a fair rephrasing of my position. I wouldn’t use the word “utility,” but the basic moral premise is the same: As bad as Pinochet was, I think he was one of the best options the country had at the time.
It’s sill odd to be a “huge fan” of someone you can only defend as the lesser of two evils.
On the bright side, we now know how little the torture of over twenty-five thousand is worth to you.
Yes. It’s worth at least the prevention of the torture of fifty thousand.
Guerrilla warfare against the new government began the same month as the coup—the very next day, in point of fact. At that point I think civil war was inevitable. (And yes, the coup itself was inevitable. Even the judiciary supported it. This might have something to do with the fact that their insistence on following the law resulted in Allende’s administration effectively calling the justices of the nation capitalist lapdogs. Yes, I paraphrase.)
The population of Chile was 10 million. There were fewer than 30,000 political prisoners, and around 5,000 deaths (including military and guerrilla forces killed in combat). And yes, a lot of those political prisoners were tortured.
There were other major conflicts in the area in the same era.
Somewhere north of 10,000 died in Argentina in this time frame in the “Dirty War.”
The civil war in El Salvador cost around 75,000 lives, out of a population of somewhere south of 5 million people.
The civil war in Guatemala cost somewhere north of 150,000 lives, out of a population of around 4 million people.
Nicaragua faced -two- civil wars, for a combined death toll of at least 40,000, out of a population of around 3 million people.
I could keep going.
Pinochet was an asshole. But if the other conflicts in the region in the era are any indication, his administration, as oppressive as it was, did save the country from a far more costly conflict. In general the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally—such as Argentina and Chile—suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn’t or couldn’t, such as Nicaragua. (Guatemala initially didn’t, but turned far more brutal later.) More, his administration concluded itself peacefully, democratically, and without substantive corruption, which also ran against the norm (for comparison, see, for example, Bolivia). (Note that there -was- corruption -during- his administration. My point there is that he didn’t try to corrupt the new government as it formed, and indeed appears to have done a very good job of passing the torch.)
Yes. I think the man did more good than evil. It’s a well-considered position and not one I entered into lightly. This doesn’t mean the torture of thousands of people doesn’t matter; they do. Rather, it means that the lives of tens of thousands of people who -didn’t- die matter also.
It’s really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn’t been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country’s government more recently.
Cf. Twilight Struggle (which is an amazing game, btw).
More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up—with the exception of Argentina—are not in the same reference class. In the 1970′s Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile’s.
El Salvador’s troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala’s number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile’s economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.
Argentina’s policies were very similar to Chile’s; they, like Pinochet’s Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you’re wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.
(Note that I’m not particularly a fan of Argentina’s series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)
Nothing in my previous comment says this. Yawn.
And what about, um, you know, the logic of MY side in all this? The logic of the Left? Wherever third-world revolutionaries have turned to all the things they’re accused of doing, their rationale has always been to prevent the deaths and misery that were going on without any overt civil war, through the “normal” functioning of divided societies. So how is this different from Maoists claiming that, as under Mao’s rule life expectancy in China doubled, history has absolved him of everything?
Mark Twain wrote quite glowingly:
The question is, can we at all justify throwing away the moral injunctions of our civilization by arguing from some clever total-utilitarian counterfactuals, with the track records of such approaches being what it is? I think no, and I think that if you’d say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with his position here, I think this is an unfair standard to set.
If you chose a 90% chance of saving 500 people over a 100% chance of saving 400, got unlucky, and those 500 died, how forgiving do you think their families would be? Do you think it would be easy to face them?
I don’t think this sort of moral lever is very useful for separating good choices from bad ones.
No. But I still would. And I’d let them take it all out on me. I’d hate to live in a world where anything less could be expected of me. Some things ought not to be easy to live with.
“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
If we make the right choice as or more difficult to live with than wrong ones, we’re not doing a very good job incentivizing people to take it.
Moreover, if we insist that good, moral* people think about making decisions in this way, this leads to more of the decisions being made by evil, immoral people.
*for all values of “good” and “moral”.
Given the way real-world humans behave, incentives work as a blunt instrument. You can’t incentivize only rational decisions without incentivizing irrational decisions that are somewhat similar in form. Incentivizing the 90% chance of saving 500 over the 100% chance of saving 400 would make the right choice more likely in that specific situation, but would also incentivize wrong choices (for instance, taking a 10% chance of 500 people dying in order to implement something that you are really certain would have good effects, when that certainty is unwarranted). You can’t change human psychology to make the incentive work only on rational choices, so we’re overall better off without the incentive.
From the outside view, a randomly picked choice to kill or hurt a large number of people, when made by actual humans, will turn out all wrong and unjustifiable in retrospect, say, 90% of the time. If we’re talking about torture as opposed to just killing enemies, it’s literally only there to create a lasting climate of terror and alienation (in the society being “reshaped” and “reformed”) while giving an outlet to the kind of psychopaths who end up running the repressive machine. So it would make sense to have a very very strong prior against this kind of thing, AKA moral injunction.
Again, if we’re considering counterfactuals along great timespans, we ARE considering counterfactuals along great timespans. Equally. If the counterfactual to a world where Pinochet didn’t take power is a long and bloody civil war, the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets. (Whom we also just served with a much more widely accepted excuse for their horrific acts.)
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements. Would you rather have “Thou shalt not kill”, or “Thou shalt not kill unless thou sees a really good reason to and it’s totally for the greater good”?
As a rule, which is to say as a rule with exceptions. Rules are generally needed because it is not generally possible to accurately figure out consequences. But sometimes it is, in which case it is OK to suspend the rule. As a rule.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking of. But, as a meta-meta-rule, no-one should generally be the judge in one’s own case, i.e. to simply assert that it’s OK to suspend some particular rules for some particular act just because one has predicted some particular consequences.
There’s the problem of enforcement mechanisms, of course.
If someone approves of Pinochet, this is unlikely to be a convincing argument to them. Especially if they view warlord types as inevitably occurring during social evolution or something like that.
You’ve not argued for this, most of us can imagine situations under which it’s acceptable to kill but we still have a reasonably strong disinclination to avoid killing people.
You walk into the lobby of a hotel during a major political convention. There’s a gun laying on the table next to you, apparently left by the only other occupant of the lobby, who hasn’t noticed you—a guy who is now assembling a gun from a backpack and readying magazines; he’s muttering rather loudly to himself about how many bullets he can put into a senator who is giving a keynote speech this afternoon. “Thou shalt not kill” or “Greater good”?
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
Could you have at least thought of a scenario that would deserve a response?
Because for this one to even be a dilemma, you’d have to assume that I’m some mute, non-English speaking killer android who can’t: 1) take the gun from the table and tell the guy to turn around, hands in the air, etc; 2) run outside and yell “TERRORISTS!”; 3) hit a fire alarm on the wall; 4) shoot him in the leg...
And anyways, to be even a remote parallel with Allende, this story would need to have two guys arguing and one pushing away the gun that the other offers him, launching into a tirade about how he’s a pacifist/a Christian/whatever, and would never resort to crime even to oppose tyranny. Then he pushes the other one out of the door, throws the gun after him, turns to you and tries to hand you a protest flyer. (But no, even this doesn’t quite get it across.)
Shooting people in the leg is difficult because they’re small targets that move quickly. Aiming for the torso is much more reliable.
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults. #3 might just bring more targets to him. And #4 has a pretty high chance of being fatal—femoral artery and all. (Also, a leg is -hard- to shoot. I take it you’ve never shot a gun before. In that case, you have no business shooting the gun at anything but his center of mass.)
I’m not drawing a parallel with Allende, never mind that your parallel whitewashes Allende’s history (Allende would be the senator, or rather president, in this parallel, and there’d be a -crowd- of guys with guns in the lobby, guns and grenades and body armor and aerial support in case they need to bomb the hotel just to be sure, and they wouldn’t be crazy so much as enacting the last-ditch and reluctant wishes of the judiciary after the president has repeatedly broken the constitution and ignored the Supreme Court’s orders, and so on and so forth). I’m taking this to the root of our disagreement—about whether or not consequences should be considered in moral theory.
I’m not a utilitarian, incidentally. I’m somewhere between a deontologist and a virtue ethicist. (Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.) If you don’t think consequences matter, you need some new rules in your deontology.
“Not willing to kill him as a first resort” isn’t the same thing as “not willing to kill him”. Holding a gun on a criminal rather than immediately shooting him doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him, it means that I’m not willing to kill him if he just sits there and waits for the police to arrive. It doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him if he ignores me and continues aiming at the senator, nor does it mean that I’m not willing to have the police kill him if they try to arrest him and he doesn’t cooperate.
Since the rule under consideration is “Thou shallt not kill” and the person I’m arguing with is arguing that “moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements”, the issue isn’t “Not willing to kill him as a first resort” so much as not willing to kill him, period.
If you’re -willing- to kill him, pointing the gun at him and telling him to halt might actually be a good move. It’s the one I would likely take. If he doesn’t stop, however, and you’re unwilling to kill him, you’ve sacrificed any other alternatives in doing so. Essentially it’s a statement that you’re willing to let some number of people be killed (on average) in order to satisfy your morality.
As is said here on decision theory, you should never be in a position of wishing your morality were different.
Fair point. But “moral injunctions must be blanket statements” doesn’t imply “Any blanket statement is a workable moral injunction.” And I’m not sure if you recognize that Multihead is not required by consistency-of-argument to assert “Any blanket statement is workable.”
The example under discussion is a great example—“Don’t kill” is a unworkable rule given any significant amount of conflict at all. By contrast, the original Hebrew of the commandments translates better as “Don’t murder” which is both a blanket statement and incredibly nuanced at the same time.
To the extent that Multihead argues that the blanket statement rule requires endorsement of “Don’t kill,” then I think you are right and he is wrong. But if that is his actual position, I don’t think he is defending the most defensible variation of that family of arguments.
Taboo murder. If it means ‘kill someone you shouldn’t kill’, then it’s tautological that you shouldn’t murder.
:-)
The point is that murder != killing because there are some killings that aren’t murder (i.e. are not wrongful).
Describing that distinction can’t really be done briefly (e.g. what is and is not self-defense). But one doesn’t need to describe the distinction to notice that the distinction exists.
Yes, but just because it’s tautological doesn’t mean it’s necessarily psychologically compelling. I can easily imagine a human for whom “don’t kill someone you shouldn’t kill” does a much worse job of deterring them from killing someone they shouldn’t kill than “don’t murder” does. If my goal is to deter such humans from killing people they shouldn’t kill, “don’t murder” is much more effective at achieving my goal.
:-)
You might think the injunction ‘don’t murder’, is really just a way of saying ‘there is such a thing as murder, which is to say, killing immorally or illegally’ or ‘we have a law about killing’.
Considering people have brought up killing people when sanctioned by a democratic government with appropriate checks and balances, perhaps it refers to “unlawful killing”? Where “lawful” requires democracy or maybe some other supposedly superhumanly ethical authority.
Not necessarily—it depends on how convincing your bluff is to the other guy.
I would say, rathert, that it depends on how convincing you’re justified in expecting your bluff to be to them.
Really? I had assumed you were a utilitarian from your … well, probably because you were the one shutting up and multiplying in this argument, to be honest.
I must say, I’m curious; what arguments persuade you to avoid utilitarianism in favour of virtue ethics?
“Utility”, more or less. Utilitarianism is entirely theoretical; I don’t see an actual application for it in my day-to-day life. The closest I could get would be “Well, if I actually put the work into doing the calculations, this is probably what I’d do”—and given that I know what I’d want to do anyways, the “If I actually put the work into it” part seems irrelevant.
Utilitarianism is also kind of one-dimensional; sure, you could construct a multidimensional utilitarian ethics system, but you lose out on any of the potential benefits of a hierarchical value system. Virtue ethics promotes a multidimensional approach to ethics, which is more intuitive to me, and more explicitly acknowledges the subjectiveness not only of valuation, but also of trade-offs.
Well, technically OrphanWilde merely said that Pinochet increased utility on net, he didn’t way he approved of him.
He described himself as an “immense fan” of Pinochet. Smells like approval. Don’t ask me why a virtue ethicist would be an immense fan of Pinochet, though. Even if it is true that his regime represented a net utility gain over most plausible counterfactuals, it’s hard to argue that the man himself was virtuous in any ordinary sense. He was a slime.
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
I’m not Jiro, but I think the best answer involves creating a scale of intensity of a conflict, and then drawing a line such that rational debate is never an intense enough conflict to justify violence. (by definition of rational debate).
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.
I would want them to alert hotel security and/or call the police.
Why does the guy need to assemble a second gun if he already had one, and how do you make one out of a backpack?
He needs to have a second gun ready so that he can get as many shots off as possible before having to reload.
He isn’t assembling the gun out of a backpack, but from a backpack: specifically, from gun parts which are inside the backpack.
Apparently at least one of my questions was a stupid question, but thank you anyway.
That rule literally makes sense only because of scope insensitivity or similar bias. There’s no reason to expect a rationalist to adopt it within a community of rationality.
In other words, maybe instrumentally useful, not terminal value.
VALIS help me, this whole… conversation just feels so surreal to me somehow.
That’s a statement primarily about yourself, only secondarily about the conversation.
Can you please cool it down with attempting to use outrage as an argument? There’s all the rest of the internet if we want to see that, LessWrong is one place where outrage-as-argument should not fly.
I don’t see the grandparent as an attempt at argument at all. Elsewhere, I see Multiheaded expressing arguments with outrage, but this is substantially different from using outrage as an argument. I agree with you that the latter shouldn’t fly on LW, but I have nothing against the former.
Presumably when we’re talking about killing and torturing people, the context cannot be a “community of rationality”.
I’m not sure that follows. “Rationality” isn’t a generic applause light. It doesn’t mean ‘nice’.
In the real world, you are probably right. In the least convenient possible world, torture is an effective interrogation technique and ticking-time-bombs are realistic scenarios, not ridiculous movie plot devices.
In short, I don’t need to be a deontologist to think the overthrow of Allende was a net negative. Please don’t act like the arguments against overthrowing Allende are arguments in favor of bright line rules. If for no other reason than you are creating the perception that deotologist never consider consequence. Which is a stupid position that no deotologists should accept.
Someone should have told Kant that.
Kant thinks this argument should work?
Because that argument is stupid, and I don’t think a deontoligist needs to accept it.
Only if “pointing the gun at people and pulling the trigger” is replaced with an applause light.
???
Kant would say something like this: “You treated the victim as a means to your end, killing him because you wanted to. You very likely also broke my other version of the categorical imperative (since I expect you wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone shot other people whenever they wanted to). It’s consistent with the categorical imperative to send folks like you to prison, since I’d prefer to live in a world like that than one where murderers go free. Guilty as charged!”
As you say, the defendant is guilty of causing the victim’s death for his own benefit.
Moral reasoning without causation just makes no sense. How do we have a coherent discussion of causation without some reference to consequences?
Edit: In other words, consequentialists say “you should always consider consequences,” while I take Kant to say that one should sometimes consider consequences, and sometimes not.
Well, a Straw-man Kantian might conceivably argue that it was the intent to kill that was really wrong, not the killing itself. Mr Straw Kant might conceivably impose almost the same sentence for attempted murder as for actual murder, though he’d want to think carefully about whether he’d really want to live in a world where that was the usual sentence.
However, leaving aside the straw stuffing, yes all real Kantians (and other deontologists) do think about the consequences of actions. Mostly about the consequences if lots of people performed the same actions.
Kant, and deontologists are deontologists because they take the intention (or something like it) to be what determines the moral value of an action. In some sense, a Kantian would always think about the consequences of the action, but just wouldn’t take the consequences to determine the moral value of an action. So for example, if I leap into a river to save a drowning baby, then Kant is going to say that my act is to be morally evaluated independently of whether or not I managed (despite my best efforts) to save the drowning baby. I’m not morally responsible for an overly swift current, after all.
However, Kant would say that understanding my intention means understanding what I was trying to bring about: you can’t evaluate my action’s intentions without understanding the consequences I sought. What doesn’t matter to the deontologist is the actual consequence.
Consequentialists and deontologists don’t really differ much in this. Consequentialists, after all, have to draw certain boundaries around ‘consequences’, having to do with what the agent can be called a cause of, as an agent. If I take my ailing brother to the hospital, only to be hit by a meteor on the way, I didn’t therefore act badly, even though he’d have lived through the day had I left him at home. Finally, consequentialists will evaluate courses of action based on expected utility, if only because actual utility is unavailable prior to the action. No consequentialist will say that moral judgements can only be made after the fact.
To put it another way, the more you fix the problems in C-ism, the more it looks like D-ology and vice versa.
The convergence is probably due to (and converging to) whatever we use to judge, in both cases, that what we’re doing is “fixing the problems”.
I don’t see why that should itself be a moral judgement, if that is what you were getting at?
Well, whenever you say something like “this system of deciding whether an action is right or wrong is flawed; here is a better system,” this doesn’t make sense unless the two systems differ somehow. But then, the meta level can be collapsed to “these acts (which the former system considered right) are actually wrong; these other acts (which the former system considered wrong) are right.” Sounds like a moral judgement to me (or possibly a family of infinitely many moral judgements).
Systems can differ in their “outputs”—the sets of acts which they label “right” or “wrong”—or in their implementation, or both. If system A is contradictory, and system B isn’t, then system B is better. And that’s not a moral judgement.
They do seem to converge. Kant himself laid down a sort of hardcore deonotology in the Groundwork, and then spent the rest of his career sort of regressing toward the mean on all kinds of issues.
Yes, the conversation with drnickbone below is how my response would have gone as well, and you’re right in that sometimes consequences matter to Deontologists and sometimes they don’t. I also think we’ve had this conversation before, because I remember that example. :D
Yes, but so what? You’re asking here whether social rules that have been optimised for the real world will behave well in highly inconvenient possible worlds where torture is actually effective, and ticking nuclear-time-bombs are a routine hazard. And no, they probably won’t work very well in such worlds. Does that somehow make them the wrong rules in the real world?
Multiheaded’s argument style is that OrphanWilde is obviously wrong. I think OrphanWilde is wrong, but I disapprove of debate style that asserts his wrongness is obvious, when I think the historical facts are more ambiguous.
Incidentally, I -also- regard the overthrow of Allende, as it happened, was a net negative. I think the situation would have been better if the coup didn’t happen. But I don’t think Pinochet was responsible for the coup; I think he simply took charge of it (see, for example, contemporary judicial opinions of the coup). That is, given the political situation in Chile, I regard the coup as inevitable, with or without Pinochet; examining what happened in other countries (such as Argentina, whose junta was a series of deaths and coups—I have no idea how Argentina stayed as stable as it did through that mess), Pinochet made things better, rather than worse.
If you blame Pinochet for the coup, yes, I expect Pinochet did more harm than good. That’s an extremely simplistic view of the situation in Chile, however. (Indeed, senior military officials involved in the matter suggested, contrary to the initial public story, that Pinochet was actually a reluctant participant in the coup.)
As far as I can tell, that’s only true if you take the entire Cold War context as a given. If the US wasn’t actively trying to constrain Allende’s freedom to act, is the coup still inevitable? (Since we are reaching the end of my knowledge of Chilean politics, I don’t know the answer to that question).
Presumably, Pinochet thought the repression was necessary for government stability. If Pinochet (or someone similar) had been able to take power without a coup, is the repression necessary for government stability?
More generally, I’m skeptical about the able to draw lessons about right behavior and right governance by looking only at the internals of countries that we already know has significant external interventions on how to govern.
Strongly agree. it takes some Chutzpah to condemn “Pinochet caused the coup” as naive, whilst ignoring external influences.
I hate to agree with you, but I do, in some ways. It’s all fine and dandy to talk about Pinochet being good for Chile, but if he thought so, he should have been doing a fair chunk of the executions and tortures himself.
Alas, I have no reason to think Pinochet would have treated this like a deterrent. Except that he would likely have thought it a waste of his time because he had more important things to do.
Um, I take it that shminux meant OW and not Pinochet by “him”? Grammar confusion?
No, I meant Pinochet. It would have been a good way for him to gauge his resolve in staying the course and avoiding the wetware bugs if he had committed to performing at least one tenth of the executions with his own hand. Also applies to other dictators.
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...well, this went downhill pretty quick. Seriously, your view of human behavior and psychology appears to be rather unconventional.
By the way. Were you aware that Nazi Germany’s switch from Einsatzgruppen to gas chambers as the preferred instrument of genocide was caused at least partly by Himmler visiting a mass execution by the SS in Belarus, becoming all sick at the sight of prisoners being gunned down, and immediately issuing a policy memo calling for a more “humane”, “clean” and automated method of mass slaughter? Historians confirm the veracity of this episode. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler#The_Holocaust)
This is the mirror image of the thought experiment of Gandhi and the murder pill. Gandhi (hypothetically) would not take the pill that would remove his repugnance to murder. Himmler (actually) refused the pill that would weaken his resolve to exterminate the Jews.
On a more trivial level, it is standard advice, here and elsewhere, to avoid distractions when trying to get work done, and, if it helps, using artificial blocks on one’s internet access to facilitate this. Is this also a reprehensible attempt to avoid “gauging one’s resolve in staying the course”? Or a sensible way of achieving one’s purposes?
Of course, we would like Himmler to have turned against the extermination project, so it is easy to say that he should have done the wet work himself, because that might have led to the result that we prefer. But that is idle talk. Himmler was in charge and organised things according to his aims, not ours, and he took steps to eliminate what he regarded as a useless distraction from the task. His fault was in undertaking the task at all.
Well, yes.
I guess you are confirming what I was saying. The out like the one you describe should not be available. If Himmler was giving extermination orders, he should have participated in executions personally, not just giving orders. This is a pretty high threshold for most “normal” people, not psychopaths.
Have you read the Bean Cycle by Orson Scott Card?
Of all fictional treatments of this question, the one that stood out to me the most is the one in Three Worlds Collide because of its restraint from turning a psychological question into a moral question.
And you are asking this why? (Achilles was a psychopath, in case this is your point.)
Bean’s style of leadership was similar to the above expectation—I assumed your opinion had been influenced by the book, and want to confirm or correct my perception.
Oh. now I remember the musings about it. No, I was simply agreeing with Multiheaded’s link to the Game of Thrones. It’s not a counter-intuitive idea, really. If you to do something that can be reasonably construed as evil, you better do it yourself to test your resolve and experience the negative impact first hand. Anyway, I thought I was clear in my replies to Multiheaded, but apparently not. Eh, who cares.
That’s an appealing enough system, intuitively—but it also implies that the system’s selecting for amorality, provided that relatively amoral actions are sometimes adaptive in the ordinary course of rulership. I have no idea whether or not this would erode away the gains from making scope more salient, but to run with the Game of Thrones metaphor it would be a shame if you were trying to select for people like Ned Stark and ended up in a local minimum at Ramsey Bolton.
...Wow. Faith in the common decency of average LW user suddenly resurging! Seriously, thank you, dude.
You know I’ve clashed with you over this before, I’ve more or less written you off as impossible to persuade on this issue (not as in “inhuman monster”, more like “committed ideological enemy”)… and yet you try to share at least part of my moral sentiment here. I am grateful.
Something feels wrong about the comparison Mark Twain made. I’ll try to explain by an example:
When my country was officially a socialist country, we didn’t have mobile phones. Shortly after the regime changed, mobile phones were invented, and now everyone has them. -- Yet I don’t consider this an evidence that somehow socialism and mobile phones are opposed. It simply happened. In a counterfactual universe, my country would be socialist today and have mobile phones, too. If I try to make an argument about how socialism relates to the mobile phones, it is not fair to compare past and present. It would be fair only to compare the present and the counterfactual present… assuming such comparison can be made. (For example, I could argue that in the counterfactual universe people in my country probably have less mobile phones, because central planning would probably decide that a smaller number of mobile phones is enough. But of course someone could argue they have more and better mobile phones, because of, uhm, something. Or that having less mobile phones, and perhaps more of something else, is better.)
Similarly, to morally evaluate a revolution, we should not compare it with the past, but with the counterfactual universe where the revolution did not happen. Yeah, it might be impossible. That does not make comparison with the past a correct one—only as much as the past is reliable as a model of the counterfactual present.
Because, if we take comparing with past as our moral guide, here is my advice for all wannabe dictators: -- Make your revolution just after a significant invention in agriculture or medicine! Then, assuming you are competent enough, all the people you killed will be balanced by the people saved by the improved agriculture or medicine. And the history will consider you the benefactor of humankind. (And a promoter of modern technology.)
Of course that’s an example why comparing with past can be misleading. Talking about dictators who kill people and forcefully introduce agricultural or medical improvements which wouldn’t have otherwise happened, that would be a different topic. (But only if you make sure the improvements did not happen in the counterfactual universe.)
The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn’t have been tortured if Pinochet hadn’t been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.
Why don’t you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn’t been dictator? (Note: I don’t seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you’re capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)
The irony has completely gone off the charts.
Then how the fuck does it not nullify your counterfactual that they would’ve been tortured?
I can back up my claims with historical evidence about the lawful and peaceful character of Allende’s government—as well as the enormous support and protection given to Pinochet and his ilk by the US, without which he would’ve been way less likely to succeed.
You just assert the opposite, that the US-backed dictators and their pet psychopaths were: 1) the only solution to violence and strife in the region, and 2) not at all a major contributing factor to said strife and violence. I say it’s bullshit and shameless propaganda.
I’m really quite confident that many of the survivors brought that up over and over again—in interviews and when testifying after Pinochet’s belated arrest and trial.
What, do you think that me, hypothetically, telling a victim/their family: “I looked you up, and I’m so sorry for what happened to you, I wish Pinochet never got his hands on anyone”… is somehow as fucked up as what you could possibly tell them, if Omega forced us both to explain ourselves to them?
Hey, any Chileans on LW?
Get off the trolley track or be consequentialized.
Get off the guill- …no, I’d rather not go there. But LW has definitely been tempting me as of late.
I love paralepsis!
Yep, I admit there’s two arguments. My secondary line of attack is that there was nothing “necessary” about the things Pinochet did, and that in regards to the rule of law and sustainable democracy he wrecked what Allende was trying to create.
But my primary line is that some “rational” arguments should be simply censored when their advocates don’t even bother with hypotheticals but point to the unspeakable experiences of real victims and then dismiss them as a fair price for some dubious greater good. This is a behavior and an attitude that our society needs to suppress, I believe, because it’s predictive of other self-centered, remorseless, power-blind attitudes—and we’re better off with fully general ethical injunctions against such. Not tolerating even the beginning steps of some potentially devastating paths is important enough to outweigh perfect epistemic detachment and pretensions to impartiality.
Christian moralism in its 19th century form—once a popular source for such injunctions—is rightly considered obsolete/bankrupt, but, like Orwell, I think our civilization needs a replacement for it. Or else our descendants might be the ones screaming “Why did it have to be rats?!” one day.
ZERO compromise. Not for the sake of politeness, not for the sake of pure reason, not a single more step to hell.
I completely agree with you.
Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just … damn.
Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren’t going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I’m not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience’s rationality, I’m inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.
Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I’ve just been karmassasinated and so I’ll put it here instead.
Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.
As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it’s justified—I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!
I’m well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it’s even easier when you’re relying on outrage rather than rationality.
Finally, it’s interesting that you claim it’s OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that’s covered in applause lights. Isn’t truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn’t break just because the expected utility is so high?
Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?
Not yet (to my knowledge.)
Maybe someday, if we manage to raise the sanity waterline enough, and if everyone who tries it doesn’t get denounced as giving aid an comfort to the Enemy for even considering the idea.
EDIT: Possible example:
-Ethical Injuctions
Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly, terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.
Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it’s only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good—but still, wouldn’t you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to “manipulate” you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through “emotional” appeals.
Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?
What the fuck? Causing unnecessary psychological damage to anyone reading this page—even more so just for the sake of some stupid political point—is not acceptable. Downvoted.
I’m not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.
I don’t care who has what bullshit political opinions here. No-one gave you the authority to emotionally traumatize the readers of this site “for the greater good”. Especially when you could have even just added a trigger warning to the top of your post and it would not have diminished your argument in the slightest. Frankly, if you’re going to be a dick you don’t need to be here.
OK, I’m adding a TW, but I’m not going to abridge or rot13 it.
Thank you. That’s a sufficient improvement.