So if you loved your brother dearly and everybody else knew this, you would feel less guilt if he died while you were on a hiking trip together with a group of other people?
Thinking back to how the cliff ledge where he’d been standing suddenly began to collapse, and everyone else had simply stood there, frozen, and you instantly lunged towards him, and actually managed to just just brush his finger tips… but by that time you had fallen over the edge yourself.
Then WHUMPH! an out-jutting tree broke your fall, knocking the wind out of you like the fist of a god. You hung there, bent double, bleeding and bruised, unable to draw even the shallowest breath, and could do nothing but watch in the slow motion vision of the adrenalin rush, as your twin brother and best friend in all the world fell… and struck a sharp outcropping with a sickening wet crack… and tumbled… and fell again… and hit… and rolled… and fell again… and...
Well, I’m not sure, but I think I’d feel guilty after that. “Auto-flagellation” indeed; Constant thoughts of ‘If only I’d been a little faster!’, even though everyone who saw the event says, ‘A little faster? You can’t beat yourself up for not being super-human!’
Unfortunately I have no such brother myself, so I guess I can’t be sure.
My own little brother, by contrast… well, he has been diagnosed as psychotic, I’m pretty sure it would be correct to say that he hates me, and I can’t honestly deny that I feel he’s pretty worthless as a human being.
I don’t want him to die (I don’t want anyone to die), but if we were ever in a situation together, alone, where I had to decide whether to let him die or take a great risk to my own safety in exchange for a small chance of saving him… the choice is obvious.
And I wouldn’t feel guilty about it, I don’t think. A little sad and angry at the unfairness and cruelty of the world, but no more than I do when I think about some distant newspaper tragedy.
The one thing that caught my eye in your scenario is the stipulation that, in the case of your actual brother, there are no other people present. Is this because you would be made somehow to feel guilt if there were witnesses or because the presence of others who also failed to save your brother somehow mitigates the guilt? It is an interesting situation given the dynamic between your brother and yourself but the witness factor is what intrigues me.
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Oh, and actually, I already do feel that I did miss an opportunity to save him. If I had been more mature myself while we were growing up, I could have been an awesome big brother. Preventing him from ever getting near being as lost as he is now probably would have been possible through behavioral means, I mean
But of course I couldn’t teach him not to be an idiot, because I hadn’t learned yet myself, because nobody had thought to teach me in any deliberately optimized way, and I had to learn it from a long streak of experiences that just happened through good luck to be sequenced in an order that stopped me from getting hopelessly lost myself. Which took a long time.
But I don’t feel guilty for not being lucky enough to have an environment that would have taught me the level of maturity I would have needed to save him, soon enough that I could have done so.
I feel sad, remembering the little boy that was me carrying the little boy that was him through the forest on my shoulders, and knowing that only one of those little boys was lucky enough to become a man who is at least trying to be a nice person and a positive force in the world.
And I feel a great need to figure out how to stop future repeats of tragedies like this (which I feel is quite possible), and I wish I could figure out how to recover this one (which by contrast I feel will probably stay beyond my powers for a very long time).
I feel sad, but I don’t feel guilty. Is this maybe just because this is one situation where I have succeeded in feeling rationally?
I know my mom definitely has suffered a lot of self-flagellation over this. Is that difference just because she is a mother whereas I am merely a brother? Or does the fact that she is not an aspiring rationalist also have something to do with it, I wonder?
Thanks, although I had just found the answer myself on the FAQ page when I saw the little red ‘you got a reply’ envelope come on. Would have found it sooner, but of course this is ‘less wrong of the many interesting links’, and if you aint focused, you will be distracted.
How I missed seeing the “help” button in the first place though, I don’t have any excuse for. :P
Well, yes, you’re right of course. There are lots of different factors at work there. What I’m wondering is, does rationality seem likely to be one of them?
That’s a horribly uncontrolled situation for actually answering the question, but that’s the context in which I thought of it.
Actually, if aspiring rationalists should be better at not feeling ‘undeserved guilt’, and guilt serves the ‘purpose’ Yvain is saying it might, that could be another defecting by accident situation, couldn’t it?
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Rationality can often allow us to overcome otherwise debilitating emotional responses. I think a non-rationalist in the same situation who let their psychopathic brother die … they would probably feel a lot of guilt. A LOT of guilt. Finally, evolution isn’t always fine-tuned, especially in social contexts. Guilt simply may not be a fine-tuned enough emotion to make you feel pain directly proportional to the odds of you being suspected for a crime; it’s more likely that you feel guilt differently in different classes of situations rather than in different levels of the same scenario.
So if you loved your brother dearly and everybody else knew this, you would feel less guilt if he died while you were on a hiking trip together with a group of other people?
Thinking back to how the cliff ledge where he’d been standing suddenly began to collapse, and everyone else had simply stood there, frozen, and you instantly lunged towards him, and actually managed to just just brush his finger tips… but by that time you had fallen over the edge yourself.
Then WHUMPH! an out-jutting tree broke your fall, knocking the wind out of you like the fist of a god. You hung there, bent double, bleeding and bruised, unable to draw even the shallowest breath, and could do nothing but watch in the slow motion vision of the adrenalin rush, as your twin brother and best friend in all the world fell… and struck a sharp outcropping with a sickening wet crack… and tumbled… and fell again… and hit… and rolled… and fell again… and...
Well, I’m not sure, but I think I’d feel guilty after that. “Auto-flagellation” indeed; Constant thoughts of ‘If only I’d been a little faster!’, even though everyone who saw the event says, ‘A little faster? You can’t beat yourself up for not being super-human!’
Unfortunately I have no such brother myself, so I guess I can’t be sure.
My own little brother, by contrast… well, he has been diagnosed as psychotic, I’m pretty sure it would be correct to say that he hates me, and I can’t honestly deny that I feel he’s pretty worthless as a human being.
I don’t want him to die (I don’t want anyone to die), but if we were ever in a situation together, alone, where I had to decide whether to let him die or take a great risk to my own safety in exchange for a small chance of saving him… the choice is obvious.
And I wouldn’t feel guilty about it, I don’t think. A little sad and angry at the unfairness and cruelty of the world, but no more than I do when I think about some distant newspaper tragedy.
What do you think?
The one thing that caught my eye in your scenario is the stipulation that, in the case of your actual brother, there are no other people present. Is this because you would be made somehow to feel guilt if there were witnesses or because the presence of others who also failed to save your brother somehow mitigates the guilt? It is an interesting situation given the dynamic between your brother and yourself but the witness factor is what intrigues me.
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Oh, and actually, I already do feel that I did miss an opportunity to save him. If I had been more mature myself while we were growing up, I could have been an awesome big brother. Preventing him from ever getting near being as lost as he is now probably would have been possible through behavioral means, I mean
But of course I couldn’t teach him not to be an idiot, because I hadn’t learned yet myself, because nobody had thought to teach me in any deliberately optimized way, and I had to learn it from a long streak of experiences that just happened through good luck to be sequenced in an order that stopped me from getting hopelessly lost myself. Which took a long time.
But I don’t feel guilty for not being lucky enough to have an environment that would have taught me the level of maturity I would have needed to save him, soon enough that I could have done so.
I feel sad, remembering the little boy that was me carrying the little boy that was him through the forest on my shoulders, and knowing that only one of those little boys was lucky enough to become a man who is at least trying to be a nice person and a positive force in the world.
And I feel a great need to figure out how to stop future repeats of tragedies like this (which I feel is quite possible), and I wish I could figure out how to recover this one (which by contrast I feel will probably stay beyond my powers for a very long time).
I feel sad, but I don’t feel guilty. Is this maybe just because this is one situation where I have succeeded in feeling rationally?
I know my mom definitely has suffered a lot of self-flagellation over this. Is that difference just because she is a mother whereas I am merely a brother? Or does the fact that she is not an aspiring rationalist also have something to do with it, I wonder?
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Thanks, although I had just found the answer myself on the FAQ page when I saw the little red ‘you got a reply’ envelope come on. Would have found it sooner, but of course this is ‘less wrong of the many interesting links’, and if you aint focused, you will be distracted.
How I missed seeing the “help” button in the first place though, I don’t have any excuse for. :P
You are not the first!
Part of it could be that she was an adult when things were going wrong with your brother.
Well, yes, you’re right of course. There are lots of different factors at work there. What I’m wondering is, does rationality seem likely to be one of them?
That’s a horribly uncontrolled situation for actually answering the question, but that’s the context in which I thought of it.
Actually, if aspiring rationalists should be better at not feeling ‘undeserved guilt’, and guilt serves the ‘purpose’ Yvain is saying it might, that could be another defecting by accident situation, couldn’t it?
No, I would feel the same if there were witnesses to my failure to risk myself to save my actual bad-blood-brother in such a hypothetical situation. I just stipulated the ‘no witnesses’ to contrast with the first situation fully.
I’m just saying: “okay, here’s a hypothetical situation where none of the reasons proposed in this article for the existence of guilt apply, and yet I’d expect to feel great guilt. By contrast, here’s a situation where they all apply but I wouldn’t expect to feel guilt.”
The question is, do you other people feel my expectations are wrong? Would you expect differently for yourselves? How do you think most people would [expect to feel/actually feel if such a thing happened]? Do you think I’m mistaken about how my hypothetical situations relate to the arguments in this article? Etc
Rationality can often allow us to overcome otherwise debilitating emotional responses. I think a non-rationalist in the same situation who let their psychopathic brother die … they would probably feel a lot of guilt. A LOT of guilt. Finally, evolution isn’t always fine-tuned, especially in social contexts. Guilt simply may not be a fine-tuned enough emotion to make you feel pain directly proportional to the odds of you being suspected for a crime; it’s more likely that you feel guilt differently in different classes of situations rather than in different levels of the same scenario.