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.
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.
...
...
...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.