Some people think that any value, if it is the only value, naturally tries to consume all available resources. Even if you explicitly make a satisficing, non-maximizing value (e.g. “make 1000 paperclips”, not just “make paperclips”), a rational agent pursuing that value may consume infinite resources making more paperclips just in case it’s somehow wrong about already having made 1000 of them, or in case some of the ones it has made are destroyed.
On this view, all values need to be able to trade off one another (which implies a common quantitative utility measurement). Even if it seems obvious that the chance you’re wrong about having made 1000 paperclips is very small, and you shouldn’t invest more resources in that instead of working on your next value, this needs to be explicit and quantified.
In this case, since all values inherently conflict with one another, all decisions (between actions that would serve different values) are moral decisions in your terms. I think this is a good intuition pump for why some people think all actions and all decisions are necessarily moral.
Ingenious. However, I can easily get round it by adding the rider that morality as concerned with conflicts between individuals. As stated, that is glib, but it can be motivated. Conflicts between individuals, in the absence of rules about how to distribute resources) are destructive, leading to waste of resources. (yes, I can predict the importance of various kinds of “fairness” to morality”). Conflicts within individuals much less so. Conflicts aren’t a problem because they are conflicts, they are a problem because of their possible consequences.
I’m not sure what you mean by conflict between individuals.
If you mean actual conflict like arguing or fighting, then choosing between donating to save five hungry people in Africa vs. two hungry people in South America isn’t a moral choice if nobody can observe your online purchases (let alone counterfactual ones) and develop a conflict with you. Someone who secretly invents a way cure for cancer doesn’t have moral reasons to cure others because they don’t know he can and are not in conflict with him.
If you mean conflict between individuals’ own values, where each hungry person wants you to save them, then every single decision is moral because there are always people who’d prefer you give them your money instead of doing anything else with it, and there are probably people who want you dead as a member of a nationality, ethnicity or religion. Apart from the unpleasant implications of this variant of utilitarianism, you didn’t want to label all decisions as moral.
I am not taking charity to be a central example of ethics.
Charity, societal improvement,etc are not centrally ethical, because the dimension of obligation is missing. It is obligatory to refrain from murder, but supererogatory to give to charity. Charity is not completely divorced
from ethics, because gaining better outcomes is the obvious flipside
of avoiding worse outcomes, but it does not have every component that
which is centrally ethical.
Not all value is morally relevant. Some preferences can be satisfied without impacting anybody else, preferences for flavours of ice cream being the classic example, and these are morally irrelevant. On the other had, my preference for loud music is likely to impinge on my neighbour’s preference for a good nights sleep: those preferences have a potential for conflict.
Charity and altrusim are part of ethics, but not central to ethics. A peaceful and prosperous society is in a position to consider how best to allocate its spare resources (and utiliariansim is helpful here, without being a full theory of ethics), but peace and prosperity are themselves the outcome a functioning ethics, not things that can be taken for granted. Someone who treats charity as the outstanding issue in ethics is, as it were, looking at
the visible 10% of the iceberg while ignoring the 90% that supports it.
If you mean conflict between individuals’ own values,
I mean destructive conflict.
Consider two stone age tribes. When a hunter of tribe A returns with a
deer, everyone falls on it, trying to grab as much as possible, and end up fighting and killing each other. When the same thing happens in tribe b, they apportion the kill in an orderly fashion according to
a predefined rule. All other things being equal, tribe B will do better
than tribe A: they are in possession of a useful piece of social technology.
Some people think that any value, if it is the only value, naturally tries to consume all available resources. Even if you explicitly make a satisficing, non-maximizing value (e.g. “make 1000 paperclips”, not just “make paperclips”), a rational agent pursuing that value may consume infinite resources making more paperclips just in case it’s somehow wrong about already having made 1000 of them, or in case some of the ones it has made are destroyed.
On this view, all values need to be able to trade off one another (which implies a common quantitative utility measurement). Even if it seems obvious that the chance you’re wrong about having made 1000 paperclips is very small, and you shouldn’t invest more resources in that instead of working on your next value, this needs to be explicit and quantified.
In this case, since all values inherently conflict with one another, all decisions (between actions that would serve different values) are moral decisions in your terms. I think this is a good intuition pump for why some people think all actions and all decisions are necessarily moral.
Ingenious. However, I can easily get round it by adding the rider that morality as concerned with conflicts between individuals. As stated, that is glib, but it can be motivated. Conflicts between individuals, in the absence of rules about how to distribute resources) are destructive, leading to waste of resources. (yes, I can predict the importance of various kinds of “fairness” to morality”). Conflicts within individuals much less so. Conflicts aren’t a problem because they are conflicts, they are a problem because of their possible consequences.
I’m not sure what you mean by conflict between individuals.
If you mean actual conflict like arguing or fighting, then choosing between donating to save five hungry people in Africa vs. two hungry people in South America isn’t a moral choice if nobody can observe your online purchases (let alone counterfactual ones) and develop a conflict with you. Someone who secretly invents a way cure for cancer doesn’t have moral reasons to cure others because they don’t know he can and are not in conflict with him.
If you mean conflict between individuals’ own values, where each hungry person wants you to save them, then every single decision is moral because there are always people who’d prefer you give them your money instead of doing anything else with it, and there are probably people who want you dead as a member of a nationality, ethnicity or religion. Apart from the unpleasant implications of this variant of utilitarianism, you didn’t want to label all decisions as moral.
I am not taking charity to be a central example of ethics.
Charity, societal improvement,etc are not centrally ethical, because the dimension of obligation is missing. It is obligatory to refrain from murder, but supererogatory to give to charity. Charity is not completely divorced from ethics, because gaining better outcomes is the obvious flipside of avoiding worse outcomes, but it does not have every component that which is centrally ethical.
Not all value is morally relevant. Some preferences can be satisfied without impacting anybody else, preferences for flavours of ice cream being the classic example, and these are morally irrelevant. On the other had, my preference for loud music is likely to impinge on my neighbour’s preference for a good nights sleep: those preferences have a potential for conflict.
Charity and altrusim are part of ethics, but not central to ethics. A peaceful and prosperous society is in a position to consider how best to allocate its spare resources (and utiliariansim is helpful here, without being a full theory of ethics), but peace and prosperity are themselves the outcome a functioning ethics, not things that can be taken for granted. Someone who treats charity as the outstanding issue in ethics is, as it were, looking at the visible 10% of the iceberg while ignoring the 90% that supports it.
I mean destructive conflict.
Consider two stone age tribes. When a hunter of tribe A returns with a deer, everyone falls on it, trying to grab as much as possible, and end up fighting and killing each other. When the same thing happens in tribe b, they apportion the kill in an orderly fashion according to a predefined rule. All other things being equal, tribe B will do better than tribe A: they are in possession of a useful piece of social technology.
Thank you, your point is well taken.