The real disagreement isn’t over “what generates the most economic growth” but over “what is best for the poor” (even if we ignore the people who simply don’t want to help the poor, and they do exist). After all, the poor want social support now, not a better economy in a hundred years’ time. Deciding that you know what’s best for them better than they do is an ethical matter.
So these two positions differ ethically in that the poor support one but not the other? I guess espousing bizarre ethical views is one way to make your point :-). Perhaps you can explain this better. I take it this doesn’t apply to social policy, like abortion and gay marriage?
But in many others, anyone at all could be sold or born into slavery, and slaves could be freed and become citizens, thus there was no room for looking down on slaves in general (well, not any more than on poor but free people).
Thus the “brutal” qualifier in the original comment. The practice of slavery in general might be an ethical difference between cultures, I’ll grant. Though it is worth noting that such societies considered compassion toward slaves to be virtuous and cruelty a vice.
A lot of people are advocating a position that women are not allowed to abort, ever. Or perhaps only to save their own lives. To me that’s no better than advocating the free eating of unwanted newborn babies.
This looks like information relevant to the question of universal human ethics but it isn’t.
I think for almost all possible human behavior that is long-term beneficial to the humans engaging in it, there is or was a society in recorded history where it was normative. Do you have counterexamples?
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.
So these two positions differ ethically in that the poor support one but not the other?
Yes, and the reason this is relevant is because the positions are about things to be done to the poor.
You said:
Some people support unrestrained capitalism because they think it provides the most economic growth which is better for the poor.
There is a factual disagreement about how to best help the poor. The poor themselves generally support one of the two options: social support. They may, factually, be wrong. There is then a further decision: do we help them in the way we think best, or do we help them in the way they think best? This is a tradeoff between helping them financially, and making them feel good in various ways (by listening to them and doing as they ask). This tradeoff requires an ethical decision.
I take it this doesn’t apply to social policy, like abortion and gay marriage?
It does apply, and in much the same way (inasfar as these issues are similar to wealth redistribution policy).
For instance, there are two possible reasons to support giving women abortion rights. One is to make their lives better in various ways—place them in greater control of their lives, let them choose non-child-rearing lives reliably, let them plan ahead, let them solve medical issues with pregnancy. This relies in part on facts, and disagreements about it are partly factual disagreements: what will make women happiest, what will place them in control of their lives, etc.
The other possible reason is simply: the women want abortion rights, so they should have them—even if having these rights is bad for them by some measure. They should have the freedom and the responsibility. (Personally, I espouse this reasoning and I also don’t think it’s bad for them somehow). This is ethical reasoning, and disagreements about it are ethical, not factual.
The practice of slavery in general might be an ethical difference between cultures, I’ll grant. Though it is worth noting that such societies considered compassion toward slaves to be virtuous and cruelty a vice.
I think this compassion on the part of society-at-large tends to be more a matter of signalling than of practice.
A lot of people are advocating a position that women are not allowed to abort, ever. Or perhaps only to save their own lives. To me that’s no better than advocating the free eating of unwanted newborn babies.
This looks like information relevant to the question of universal human ethics but it isn’t.
Er, why not? It’s an example of an ethical disagreement among different people.
I think for almost all possible human behavior that is long-term beneficial to the humans engaging in it, there is or was a society in recorded history where it was normative. Do you have counterexamples?
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.
It’s true that every behaviour which occurs, is evolutionarily beneficial. But I’m suggesting that the opposite is also true: every behaviour that is possible (doesn’t require a brilliant insight to invent), and that is evolutionarily beneficial, is practiced.
If indeed there is a universal human ethics, which humans obey, I’d expect some beneficial behaviours to nevertheless be shunned because they are unethical. Otherwise your entire ethics comes down to, “do whatever is in your own interest”.
Are we breaking some rule if this discussion gets a little political?
Yes, and the reason this is relevant is because the positions are about things to be done to the poor.
OK. But they’re also about things to be done to the rich.
The poor themselves generally support one of the two options: social support. They may, factually, be wrong. There is then a further decision: do we help them in the way we think best, or do we help them in the way they think best?
This is a such a dismal way of looking at the issue from my perspective. Once you decide that the policy should just be whatever some group wants it to be you throw any chance for deliberation or real debate out the window. I realize such things are rare in the present American political landscape but turning interest group politics into an ethical principle is too much for me.
This is a tradeoff between helping them financially, and making them feel good in various ways (by listening to them and doing as they ask). This tradeoff requires an ethical decision.
I read this as “this is a trade-off between helping them financially, and patronizing them” :-).
The other possible reason is simply: the women want abortion rights, so they should have them—even if having these rights is bad for them by some measure.
If most women opposed abortion rights (as they do in many Catholic countries) you would be fine prohibiting it? Even for the dissenting minority? Saying people should be able to have abortions, even if it is bad for them makes sense to me. Saying some arbitrarily defined group should be able to define abortion policy, (regardless) if it is bad for them, does not.
Also, almost all policies involve coercing someone for the the benefit of someone else. How do you decide which group gets to decide policy?
I think this compassion on the part of society-at-large tends to be more a matter of signalling than of practice.
Maybe, though I don’t know if we have the evidence to determine that. But they’re signaling because they want people to think they are ethical. There being some kind of universal human ethics and most people being secretly unethical is a totally coherent description of the world.
Er, why not? It’s an example of an ethical disagreement among different people
What I meant was that the fact that you think something ethically controversial is as bad as something ethically uncontroversial doesn’t tell us anything. Also, I know I used it as an example first but the abortion debate likely involves factual disagreements for many people (if not you).
If indeed there is a universal human ethics, which humans obey, I’d expect some beneficial behaviours to nevertheless be shunned because they are unethical. Otherwise your entire ethics comes down to, “do whatever is in your own interest”.
But ethics are product of biological and cultural evolution! Empathy was probably an evolutionary accident (our instincts for caring for offspring got hijacked). If there is a universal moral grammar I don’t know the evolutionary reason, but surely there is one. The cultural aspects likely helped groups and helped individuals within groups survive. In general ethics are socially beneficial norms (social benefits aren’t the evolutionary cause for compassion but they are the cause for thinking of compassion as a virtue).
So it isn’t “do what is in your own interest” but “do whatever is in your group’s interest”. I think there there are individually beneficial behaviors that I suspect have never been normative. In-group murder? In-group theft? That said I don’t know what you mean by “your entire ethics comes down to”. The causal story for ethics probably does come down to “things that were in your group’s interest” but that doesn’t mean you can just follow that principle and turn out ethical.
Just as an aside, lots of women go ahead and get abortions even if they assent to statements to the effect that it shouldn’t be allowed. Which preference are you more inclined to respect?
I don’t think that’s necessarily hypocrisy. A reformed drug addict may say that he believes drugs should be illegal and then later relapse. That doesn’t necessarily mean his revealed preference for taking drugs overrides his stated opinion that they should be illegal. He may support prohibition because he doesn’t trust his own ability to resist a short term temptation that he believes is not in his own long term best interests. Similarly it would not be inconsistent for a woman to believe that abortions should be illegal because they are bad (by some criteria) but too tempting for women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Believing that they themselves will not be able to resist that temptation if they become pregnant is if anything an argument in favor of making abortion illegal.
For the record I don’t believe abortion or drugs should be illegal but I don’t think it is necessarily inconsistent for a woman to believe abortion should be illegal and still get one.
It’s not necessarily hypocrisy, but it leaves us with two sets of preferences for a single population, and a judgement call on which is the right one to follow. The argument you’re making is sound on its face, but as far as abortion goes neither of us buy it—we take the revealed preference more seriously than the overt one, and the fact that this is even sometimes the right call makes the plan to give groups what they say they want rather than what we think will maximise utility quite a lot less appealing.
This is a very interesting line of argument. How much of it do you think is due to this:
Many of these women live in cultures and social circles/families where publicly supporting abortion rights is very damaging socially. Even in relaxed conditions, disagreeing with one’s family and friends on an issue that evokes such strong emotions is hard. The women tend to conform unless they have a strong personal opinion to the contrary, and once they conform on the signalling level, they may eventually come to believe themselves that they are against abortion.
If their social environment changes, or they move into a new one, they may change or “reveal” their new pro-abortion-rights opinion very quickly & dramatically.
And however frequent cases like this may be, we also tend to over-estimate their incidence, because we believe ourselves that abortion rights are really good for women, and that the women are the “good” underdogs in this story.
I wouldn’t quite say that I take the revealed preference more seriously than the overt one. I’m prepared to accept that there may be people who genuinely believe that abortion is morally wrong and also genuinely believe that other people (and possibly they themselves) will succumb to temptation and have an abortion if it is legal and available even if they believe it is wrong. We generally accept the reality of akrasia here, this seems like a very similar phenomenon: the belief that people can’t be trusted to do what is morally right when faced with an unwanted pregnancy and so need to make a Ulysses pact in advance to bind themselves against temptation.
The reason this argument doesn’t hold water for me is because I don’t think it is right that people who believe abortion is morally wrong should be able to prevent others who don’t share that belief from having abortions. If an ‘opt-in’ anti-abortion law was proposed where you voluntarily committed to being jailed for having an abortion in advance of needing one I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
In reality I don’t know what percentage of women with anti-abortion beliefs use this kind of reasoning. I have heard it explicitly from people who have taken drugs in the past and still support prohibition however.
Note the image in the banner of “Overcoming Bias”...
I would be against an opt-in anti-abortion law, since unlike with akrasia I see no reason to prefer the earlier preference over the later one in this instance.
In reality I don’t know what percentage of women with anti-abortion beliefs use this kind of reasoning.
I used to be friends with someone who was an anti-abortion activist, and who likes thinking about the logic behind such decisions. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never thought about it from that angle. I think I still have a good email address for her, if you’d like me to ask her what she thinks of the idea.
I got an email back from her. Tl;dr version: Nope, that’s definitely not how she was thinking about it. (Perhaps noteworthy: She rarely communicates via email, so she’s out of her element here. It is possible to evoke saner discussion from her in realtime.)
As far as the comment from the blogger on that website, it sounds to me that they have a very bland argument. First, most women who are against abortion have had abortions and know the harm caused to the child, but also the harm that happens to them. Second, there are plenty of pro-life women who have had “unplanned” pregnancies and continue to have the child. Can you imagine the conversation with your child that goes like this-, “You are so lucky! You came when I wanted you! I chose not to abort you! Isn’t that GREAT!?” I can’t even imagine saying that to someone. We are against abortion because it is intrinsically wrong to take the life of an unborn baby. There have been many people that lived through botched up abortions and couldn’t understand why no one wanted them. They are unwanted because they are, unplanned, or they are “messed up”(which is inaccurate most times). Can you imagine growing up being “lucky”?
this blogger also implies that we as humans have no self control. It implies that we have no way to make the right decision. Anyone who is pro-life, never becomes pro-choice. It is always the other way around. Our motivation to being pro-life is that there is an innocent life at stake. Well, there are two innocent lives at stake. The mother is also at risk. People forget about that part. The information given to women who get abortions is not complete. If a woman has a miscarriage, and has to have the remains removed from her body, they go to the hospital, they are put to sleep, and a trained OBGYN or doctor is used to perform a Dilation and Cutterage or D&C. This is a one day procedure and normal hospital cost for this is about 20,000 dollars. So tell me why a procedure at an abortion mill can cost between 400-900 dollars and normally the girls are not put to sleep. One of the worst things is hemorrhaging after the procedure. In a hospital, if you leave and you pass out right outside the door (or anywhere) because of that, the hospital will take you back in, the abortion mill won’t even call an ambulance. There are tons of other things that can happen that the abortion mill will not take responsibility for. Putting that aside, the topic also takes away from the fact that the whole reason we are pro-life is for life. Thats it. Plain and simple. It is not about us, it is about innocent lives being lied to and lives being taken. I wish that people who are pro choice would explain what it is that they are choosing. The more we continue with the advances of technology, the more scientists are finding that human life is very much there when conception occurs. The pro choice people say that there is no life until a certain time. Technology is proving otherwise. My simple thing has always been, if there is no life, then what are they killing?
Email sent. I’ll quote the relevant bit here, in case it turns out to affect her reply. (I did link to the conversation but I’m not sure she’ll follow the link.)
I am writing for a more interesting reason than just to keep in touch, though. One of the places I’ve been spending my time at online is a rationalist forum, and a few of the members were discussing abortion law. One of them suggested that the main reason that women who believe abortion is wrong support anti-abortion laws is that having such a law in place would reduce the temptation they’d feel if they had an unwanted pregnancy, as opposed to supporting such a law primarily to take rights away from others who may not share their beliefs. That didn’t sound to me like what you’ve talked about, but it has some interesting implications (it might be easier for you guys to get a law passed where women could voluntarily sign up to have abortion illegal for themselves, kind of like the laws that let gambling addicts sign up to not be allowed into casinos). What do you think?
Are we breaking some rule if this discussion gets a little political?
Only if it gets political in the sense of “politics, the mind-killer” :-)
Yes, and the reason this is relevant is because the positions are about things to be done to the poor.
OK. But they’re also about things to be done to the rich.
Certainly, and the rich’s opinion and interests should be consulted as well. I wasn’t talking about what the best policy is, anyway; I was just analyzing the position of those rich (or rather non-poor) who you said want to help the poor by improving the economy.
This is a such a dismal way of looking at the issue from my perspective. Once you decide that the policy should just be whatever some group wants it to be you throw any chance for deliberation or real debate out the window.
If your goal is ultimately to please that group, then why not? This isn’t a debate about working together with another group to achieve a common goal or to compromise on something. This is a debate on how best to help another group. “Making them happy” and “doing whatever they want” (to the extent of the resources we agree to commit) is a valid answer, even if many people won’t agree.
The fact that you don’t agree is what I was pointing out—that legitimate ethical disputes exist. I don’t even really want to argue for this particular policy—I haven’t thought it through very deeply; it was just an example of a disagreement. But I do believe it’s reasonable enough to at least be considered.
If most women opposed abortion rights (as they do in many Catholic countries) you would be fine prohibiting it? Even for the dissenting minority?
No I would not be fine with that. I’m not fine with any individual prohibiting abortion for another individual. Any women who are against abortions are free not to have abortions themselves, and everyone else should be free to have abortions if they wish. Note that my argument didn’t rely on majority opinion or on using the class of “all women”. The freedom to have abortions is a personal freedom, not a group freedom.
Also, almost all policies involve coercing someone for the the benefit of someone else. How do you decide which group gets to decide policy?
Many policies involve no coercion. Or at least some of the policy options involve no coercion.
For instance, allowing abortions to everyone involves no coercion. Unless you consider “knowing other people get abortions and not being able to stop them” a coerced state.
I never said that personal freedom and responsibility can solve all ethical issues. Sometimes all policy options are tradeoffs in coercion, and there isn’t aways a “right” option. That only reinforces my point that many ethical disputes exist and there is no universal human ethics.
I think this compassion on the part of society-at-large tends to be more a matter of signalling than of practice.
Maybe, though I don’t know if we have the evidence to determine that. But they’re signaling because they want people to think they are ethical. There being some kind of universal human ethics and most people being secretly unethical is a totally coherent description of the world.
I think there’s even more variation in the signaling—in the stories that people tell one another—than in the practice. For one thing, the practice is constrained to be mostly evolutionarily beneficial, but the storytelling can be completely divorced from reality.
Case in point: in many times and places religion has been a big part of the “publically signalled” ethics. Religions, of course, often contradict one another on behavioural guidelines, but more than that, they often contradict what is possible in practice. Imagine a world where the scriptures of (some verisons of) Christianity really held sway: sex is sinful, money and property are sinful, taking interest in this world is sinful, trying to change the world for the better is sinful, science and questioning authority are sinful...
I do not believe all humans, let alone all evolved intelligences, would independently derive an ethics that says changing the world, studying nature, and reproducing are all wrong.
the abortion debate likely involves factual disagreements for many people
What kind of disagreements? About what god wants? Or about what’s best for women? Or about what our terminal values “should” be?
But ethics are product of biological and cultural evolution!
If they are solely the product of evolution, then there can’t be a universal human ethics among different cultures. Did I misunderstand something about your argument?
But ethics are product of biological and cultural evolution!
If they are solely the product of evolution, then there can’t be a universal human ethics among different cultures. Did I misunderstand something about your argument?
But ethics are product of biological and cultural evolution!
If they are solely the product of evolution, then there can’t be a universal human ethics among different cultures.
I have no idea why this would be true. Convergent evolution.. Also, there can be cultural evolution in the absence of more than one culture. Some ethical principle might have evolved when humanity was all one culture (if there ever was such a point, I guess I find that unlikely).
Lets back up. Human ethics basically consists of five values. Different cultures at different times emphasize some values more than others. Genuine ethical disagreements tend to be about which of these values should take precedence in a given situation. As a human I don’t think there is a “true answer” in these debates. Some of these questions might have truth values for American liberals (and I can answer for those), but they don’t for all of humanity.
Now
I do not believe all humans, let alone all evolved intelligences, would independently derive an ethics that says changing the world, studying nature, and reproducing are all wrong.
That ethics is basically the purity value being (in my mind) way over emphasized. Now in modern, Western societies large segments hardly care about purity at all. I’m one of those people and I suspect a lot of people here are. But this is a very new development and it is very likely that we still have some remnants of the purity value left (think about our ‘epistemic hygiene’ rhetoric!) . But yes, compared to most of human history modern liberals are quite revolutionary. It is possible that not all of those values are universal among evolved, intelligent, social beings (though it seems to me they might be).
The other things:
the abortion debate likely involves factual disagreements for many people
What kind of disagreements? About what god wants? Or about what’s best for women? Or about what our terminal values “should” be?
I meant the first two. Also, facts about personhood, when life begins, the existence of souls etc. There may also be a value disagreement.
Many policies involve no coercion. Or at least some of the policy options involve no coercion. For instance, allowing abortions to everyone involves no coercion. Unless you consider “knowing other people get abortions and not being able to stop them” a coerced state.
Of course that is a coerced state. :-) Not being able to do something under threat of state action is textbook coercion. This is why libertarians who think they can justify their position just by appealing to a single principle of non-coercion are kidding themselves. They obviously need something else to tell them which kinds of coercion are justified.
If your goal is ultimately to please that group, then why not? This isn’t a debate about working together with another group to achieve a common goal or to compromise on something. This is a debate on how best to help another group.
So there isn’t some special, terminal value that is “letting these people decide”, rather there are different ways to please people and some disagreements are about that? But I’m not sure the question of what is the best way to please a group of people isn’t a question of fact. Either poor people would rather be listened to than have more money or vice versa. There is a fact of the matter about this question.
By convergent evolution, some cultures can evolve the same ethics. Even many cultures. But a universal ethics implies that all cultures, no matter how diverse in ever other way, and including cultures which might have existed but didn’t, would evolve the same ethics (or rather, would preserve the same ethics without evolving it further). This is extremely unlikely, and would require a much stronger explanation than the general idea of convergent evolution.
Anyway, my position is that different cultures in fact have different ethics with little in common between the extremes, so no explanation is needed.
Human ethics basically consists of five values. Different cultures at different times emphasize some values more than others. Genuine ethical disagreements tend to be about which of these values should take precedence in a given situation.
This is an interesting model. I don’t remember encountering it before.
I believe you agree with me here, but just to make sure I read your words correctly: the commonality of these five values (if true) does not in itself imply a commonality of ethics. There is no ethics until all the decisions about tradeoffs and priorities between the values are made.
That ethics is basically the purity value being (in my mind) way over emphasized.
In many non-Christian traditions, sex is pure and sacred. People may need to purify themselves for or before sex, and the act of sex itself can serve religious purposes (think “temple whores”, for instance). This is pretty much the opposite of Christian tradition.
The value of purity, and the feelings it inspires, may well be universal among humans. But the decision to what it applies—what is considered pure and what is filthy—is almost arbitrary. I suspect the same is true for most or all of the other five values—although there may be some constants—which only reinforces my conviction that there is no universal ethics.
It is possible that not all of those values are universal among evolved, intelligent, social beings (though it seems to me they might be).
It scarcely seems possible to me that any of these values are universal. A few quick thought-experiments, designed purely to demonstrate the feasibility of lacking these values in a sentient species:
Harm/care: some human sub-cultures have little enough of this value (e.g., groups of young males running free with no higher authority). Plus, a lot of our nurturant behaviour stems from raising children who are helpless for many years (later transferred to raising pets). If human children needed little to no care (like r-selected species), and if almost all human interactions took place between mostly self-dependant and independent individuals, then I think we might plausibly have vastly less empathy and “gentleness”.
Fairness/reciprocity: some human societies have little of this, instead running on pure power hierarchies. A chief doesn’t need to be visibly just if he’s visibly powerful, self-interested and rewards his followers in hierarchical order.
Ingroup/loyalty: I’m not sure about this one. It may be that there are evolutionary social dynamics that tend to lead to it (game theory-like).
I speculate that ingroup loyalty might not exist, or might be weaker, in a species that didn’t have war and similar competition between individuals. The reason we have such competition is that a male who wins can reproduce a lot more than average. But consider a species that’s asexual, or where a male cannot physiologically mate more than once, or more than once a year, or with lifelong partner imprinting like in some birds. Then the biggest competition that can exist between individuals is for the amount of resources one individual and his kin can use. Ingroup dynamics could still form, but they’d be much weaker, I think; they would not be useful except in times of severe lack of food and similar resources.
Authority/respect: this is described in terms of social hierarchies, and there can certainly be intelligent social species that have no real hierarchies. Suppose there’s little competition between individuals, as above, so no-one has a big incentive to become chief (it’s enough to become relatively high status; no need to be first). And suppose there’s little needed for coordinated action with a central decision-maker (no war, and people live in small enough groups that can coordinate efficiently). Or maybe these aliens are just much better at communication and coordination and can do it without taking orders. In such a scenario, I see no reason for a hierarchy to form.
Of course in any particular matter there can be a hierarchy of skill or knowledge. And if someone is consistently on top in a lot of such hierarchies, they can gain authority and respect. Or if someone is just consistently smarter than someone else, there can be authority and respect between individuals. I don’t count these as examples; I take this value to mean the human game of status for status’ sake.
Purity/sanctity: as I said above, even in humans the concept of purity is disconnected from what a particular culture considers to be pure...
Of course that is a coerced state. :-) Not being able to do something under threat of state action is textbook coercion.
That’s a good point, but the choice is still assymetrical. If we allow people to interfere in each other’s lives like this (i.e. the state doesn’t coerce them to not interfere), than many people will attempt to interfere in the same thing at cross purposes. As a result, 1) we don’t know what way of life will win out, and it may well be unethical; 2) a lot of people will coerce one another, which is no better than when the state does it.
If we’re setting state policy, then we can either enforce some one ethical system on everyone, or we can let everyone rule themselves, but we still have to interfere to prevent people from coercing one another, otherwise there’ll be chaos, not freedom. Different ethical systems will lead to any of these three systems (imposing ethics, freedom, and state-less chaos). But any system that enforces one ethics must do so explicitly; it’s very unlikely to come up as an instrumental goal of ethics A to enforce a conflicting ethics B.
In this way, enforcing individual freedom and non-interference can be seen as qualitatively different from enforcing any given ethics and way of life, even though it still involves a form of coercion.
Either poor people would rather be listened to than have more money or vice versa. There is a fact of the matter about this question.
Yes, and as we said earlier, they almost always prefer being listened to. (When someone tells you “I want X”, and you ask him “so do you want X or Y, really?” he’ll usually respond “X” again.) What’s more, if you value their self-reporting of their happiness, then giving them what they want is the best way to make them feel happier in the short term. If you try something else, like giving them money, or giving their descendants money, then even if in the very long term they’ll be happier and admit it, they will reliably be unhappy in the short term due to not getting what they asked for and because you behaved condenscendingly towards them (by saying you know what’s best for them better than they do).
For some people “helping everyone get what they want == freedom and responsibility for everyone” is a terminal value. For others, “making everyone happy” is a terminal value, but giving people what they want still becomes an instrumental value for the above reason.
But a universal ethics implies that all cultures, no matter how diverse in ever other way, and including cultures which might have existed but didn’t, would evolve the same ethics (or rather, would preserve the same ethics without evolving it further). This is extremely unlikely, and would require a much stronger explanation than the general idea of convergent evolution.
Once you have a task that needs to be accomplished there are often only so many ways of accomplishing it. For example, there are only so many ways to turn sound into useful data the brain can use. Thus I suspect just about all functioning ears will have things in common- something that amplifies vibrations and something that medium can vibrate etc. That said I think you’re probably right that given enough cultures and species with divergent enough histories I’d probably discover some pretty alien moralities. That said there might not be many social and intelligent species out there. Given that, it seems plausible that there is some universal morality in that there are no social and intelligent exceptions. Universality doesn’t mean necessity. (I’m going to let your points about different evolutionary histories leading to different values go unresponded to. They’re good points though and I think the probability of really inhuman moralities existing is higher than I thought before).
I believe you agree with me here, but just to make sure I read your words correctly: the commonality of these five values (if true) does not in itself imply a commonality of ethics. There is no ethics until all the decisions about tradeoffs and priorities between the values are made.
No no. Sorry if this wasn’t clear. Like I said, I don’t think humans agree on prioritizing these values. People in the United States don’t even agree on prioritizing these values to some extent. The commonality of these five values is a commonality of ethics—it doesn’t imply identical, complete ethical codes for everyone but I don’t think we all have identical codes, just enough in common that it makes sense to speak of a human morality.
Harm/care: some human sub-cultures have little enough of this value (e.g., groups of young males running free with no higher authority).
Can you do a better job specifying what kinds of sub-cultures you mean?
Fairness/reciprocity: some human societies have little of this, instead running on pure power hierarchies. A chief doesn’t need to be visibly just if he’s visibly powerful, self-interested and rewards his followers in hierarchical order.
Yeah, there are places that value authority a lot more than fairness. Is there no conception of fairness for those of equal status? If outsiders came and oppressed them would they not experience that as injustice? This is difficult to discuss without having more data.
In many non-Christian traditions, sex is pure and sacred. People may need to purify themselves for or before sex, and the act of sex itself can serve religious purposes (think “temple whores”, for instance). This is pretty much the opposite of Christian tradition.
Cite?
The value of purity, and the feelings it inspires, may well be universal among humans. But the decision to what it applies—what is considered pure and what is filthy—is almost arbitrary. I suspect the same is true for most or all of the other five values—although there may be some constants—which only reinforces my conviction that there is no universal ethics.
There might be some variation in the way some of the values are implemented but I hardly think what is considered filthy is arbitrary. There are widely divergent cultures which consider the same things pure and filthy (i.e. feces). This is true of the other values too. The fact that these same five things make up everyones ethical code strikes me as a really big commonality, one that we can feel pretty good about. It isn’t a deep truth about the universe but the fact that I can condemn something and have the backing of more or less the entire human race is significant. The fact that anywhere I go I can argue with an appeal to one of these values and people won’t look at me like I’m a monster is remarkable. And insofar as this is the case I think we can meaningfully speak of a human ethics- it is the ethics that I appeal to by appealing these values.
Are you familiar with the the trolley cases? If you ask whether switching the tracks is permissible you get large majorities saying yes. But if you ask whether pushing the fat guy onto the tracks is permissible you get large majorities saying no. What is interesting is that these responses are universal, there is zero cultural variation. Interestingly, there is a gender difference, not in whether or not you think one or the other is permissible but in that men come up with complicated rationalizations and moral theories for giving different answers and women tend to not know why they answered the way they did (and say self-degradating things to that effect).
If we’re setting state policy, then we can either enforce some one ethical system on everyone, or we can let everyone rule themselves, but we still have to interfere to prevent people from coercing one another, otherwise there’ll be chaos, not freedom.
Interfering to prevent people from coercing one another is still enforcing an ethical system. The state still needs to make normative judgments about what constitutes justified or unjustified coercion. You have a cool car but won’t let me use it, you are coercing me by preventing me from riding in your cool car. But if I take the car then I’ve coerced you—kept you from riding in it, kept you from accessing the fruits of your labor, etc. If someone yells at you in public you can’t avoid hearing them. If someone rapes you you can’t avoid having sex with them. If your neighbor has a gun he is violating your right to not have to worry about being shot. If you take his gun then he has lost his right to own a gun. All of these things are coercive. I’m just saying there needs to be some independent standard for justified coercion and that standard is going to be whatever your ethics is.
I apologize for not replying and providing the citations needed. I’ve had unforeseen difficulties in finding the time, and now I’m going abroad for a week with no net access. When I come back I hope to make time to participate in LW regularly again and will also reply here.
You’re ignoring the tradeoff between helping the current poor and future poor. The current poor would naturally favor the former, but I don’t think that’s an argument for it over the latter.
Class is fairly heritable. To the extent to which we think people ought to make decisions for their descendants, it may make sense to let current poor make decisions that affect the future poor.
If that’s the only issue, we could choose whatever policy helps the most and then compensate current folks by borrowing. Economic growth will be lower and future folks will be poorer, but the policy will be efficient.
As an aside, we don’t really know how wealthy future folks will be. If a Singularity is imminent, it’s probably efficient to liquidate a lot of capital and help current folks more.
I think for almost all possible human behavior that is long-term beneficial to the humans engaging in it, there is or was a society in recorded history where it was normative. Do you have counterexamples?
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.
So these two positions differ ethically in that the poor support one but not the other? I guess espousing bizarre ethical views is one way to make your point :-). Perhaps you can explain this better. I take it this doesn’t apply to social policy, like abortion and gay marriage?
Thus the “brutal” qualifier in the original comment. The practice of slavery in general might be an ethical difference between cultures, I’ll grant. Though it is worth noting that such societies considered compassion toward slaves to be virtuous and cruelty a vice.
This looks like information relevant to the question of universal human ethics but it isn’t.
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.
Yes, and the reason this is relevant is because the positions are about things to be done to the poor.
You said:
There is a factual disagreement about how to best help the poor. The poor themselves generally support one of the two options: social support. They may, factually, be wrong. There is then a further decision: do we help them in the way we think best, or do we help them in the way they think best? This is a tradeoff between helping them financially, and making them feel good in various ways (by listening to them and doing as they ask). This tradeoff requires an ethical decision.
It does apply, and in much the same way (inasfar as these issues are similar to wealth redistribution policy).
For instance, there are two possible reasons to support giving women abortion rights. One is to make their lives better in various ways—place them in greater control of their lives, let them choose non-child-rearing lives reliably, let them plan ahead, let them solve medical issues with pregnancy. This relies in part on facts, and disagreements about it are partly factual disagreements: what will make women happiest, what will place them in control of their lives, etc.
The other possible reason is simply: the women want abortion rights, so they should have them—even if having these rights is bad for them by some measure. They should have the freedom and the responsibility. (Personally, I espouse this reasoning and I also don’t think it’s bad for them somehow). This is ethical reasoning, and disagreements about it are ethical, not factual.
I think this compassion on the part of society-at-large tends to be more a matter of signalling than of practice.
Er, why not? It’s an example of an ethical disagreement among different people.
It’s true that every behaviour which occurs, is evolutionarily beneficial. But I’m suggesting that the opposite is also true: every behaviour that is possible (doesn’t require a brilliant insight to invent), and that is evolutionarily beneficial, is practiced.
If indeed there is a universal human ethics, which humans obey, I’d expect some beneficial behaviours to nevertheless be shunned because they are unethical. Otherwise your entire ethics comes down to, “do whatever is in your own interest”.
Are we breaking some rule if this discussion gets a little political?
OK. But they’re also about things to be done to the rich.
This is a such a dismal way of looking at the issue from my perspective. Once you decide that the policy should just be whatever some group wants it to be you throw any chance for deliberation or real debate out the window. I realize such things are rare in the present American political landscape but turning interest group politics into an ethical principle is too much for me.
I read this as “this is a trade-off between helping them financially, and patronizing them” :-).
If most women opposed abortion rights (as they do in many Catholic countries) you would be fine prohibiting it? Even for the dissenting minority? Saying people should be able to have abortions, even if it is bad for them makes sense to me. Saying some arbitrarily defined group should be able to define abortion policy, (regardless) if it is bad for them, does not.
Also, almost all policies involve coercing someone for the the benefit of someone else. How do you decide which group gets to decide policy?
Maybe, though I don’t know if we have the evidence to determine that. But they’re signaling because they want people to think they are ethical. There being some kind of universal human ethics and most people being secretly unethical is a totally coherent description of the world.
What I meant was that the fact that you think something ethically controversial is as bad as something ethically uncontroversial doesn’t tell us anything. Also, I know I used it as an example first but the abortion debate likely involves factual disagreements for many people (if not you).
But ethics are product of biological and cultural evolution! Empathy was probably an evolutionary accident (our instincts for caring for offspring got hijacked). If there is a universal moral grammar I don’t know the evolutionary reason, but surely there is one. The cultural aspects likely helped groups and helped individuals within groups survive. In general ethics are socially beneficial norms (social benefits aren’t the evolutionary cause for compassion but they are the cause for thinking of compassion as a virtue).
So it isn’t “do what is in your own interest” but “do whatever is in your group’s interest”. I think there there are individually beneficial behaviors that I suspect have never been normative. In-group murder? In-group theft? That said I don’t know what you mean by “your entire ethics comes down to”. The causal story for ethics probably does come down to “things that were in your group’s interest” but that doesn’t mean you can just follow that principle and turn out ethical.
Just as an aside, lots of women go ahead and get abortions even if they assent to statements to the effect that it shouldn’t be allowed. Which preference are you more inclined to respect?
I don’t think that’s necessarily hypocrisy. A reformed drug addict may say that he believes drugs should be illegal and then later relapse. That doesn’t necessarily mean his revealed preference for taking drugs overrides his stated opinion that they should be illegal. He may support prohibition because he doesn’t trust his own ability to resist a short term temptation that he believes is not in his own long term best interests. Similarly it would not be inconsistent for a woman to believe that abortions should be illegal because they are bad (by some criteria) but too tempting for women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Believing that they themselves will not be able to resist that temptation if they become pregnant is if anything an argument in favor of making abortion illegal.
For the record I don’t believe abortion or drugs should be illegal but I don’t think it is necessarily inconsistent for a woman to believe abortion should be illegal and still get one.
It’s not necessarily hypocrisy, but it leaves us with two sets of preferences for a single population, and a judgement call on which is the right one to follow. The argument you’re making is sound on its face, but as far as abortion goes neither of us buy it—we take the revealed preference more seriously than the overt one, and the fact that this is even sometimes the right call makes the plan to give groups what they say they want rather than what we think will maximise utility quite a lot less appealing.
This is a very interesting line of argument. How much of it do you think is due to this:
Many of these women live in cultures and social circles/families where publicly supporting abortion rights is very damaging socially. Even in relaxed conditions, disagreeing with one’s family and friends on an issue that evokes such strong emotions is hard. The women tend to conform unless they have a strong personal opinion to the contrary, and once they conform on the signalling level, they may eventually come to believe themselves that they are against abortion.
If their social environment changes, or they move into a new one, they may change or “reveal” their new pro-abortion-rights opinion very quickly & dramatically.
And however frequent cases like this may be, we also tend to over-estimate their incidence, because we believe ourselves that abortion rights are really good for women, and that the women are the “good” underdogs in this story.
I wouldn’t quite say that I take the revealed preference more seriously than the overt one. I’m prepared to accept that there may be people who genuinely believe that abortion is morally wrong and also genuinely believe that other people (and possibly they themselves) will succumb to temptation and have an abortion if it is legal and available even if they believe it is wrong. We generally accept the reality of akrasia here, this seems like a very similar phenomenon: the belief that people can’t be trusted to do what is morally right when faced with an unwanted pregnancy and so need to make a Ulysses pact in advance to bind themselves against temptation.
The reason this argument doesn’t hold water for me is because I don’t think it is right that people who believe abortion is morally wrong should be able to prevent others who don’t share that belief from having abortions. If an ‘opt-in’ anti-abortion law was proposed where you voluntarily committed to being jailed for having an abortion in advance of needing one I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
In reality I don’t know what percentage of women with anti-abortion beliefs use this kind of reasoning. I have heard it explicitly from people who have taken drugs in the past and still support prohibition however.
Note the image in the banner of “Overcoming Bias”...
I would be against an opt-in anti-abortion law, since unlike with akrasia I see no reason to prefer the earlier preference over the later one in this instance.
I used to be friends with someone who was an anti-abortion activist, and who likes thinking about the logic behind such decisions. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never thought about it from that angle. I think I still have a good email address for her, if you’d like me to ask her what she thinks of the idea.
I’d be curious to know if anti-abortion activists think about it in those terms.
I got an email back from her. Tl;dr version: Nope, that’s definitely not how she was thinking about it. (Perhaps noteworthy: She rarely communicates via email, so she’s out of her element here. It is possible to evoke saner discussion from her in realtime.)
Email sent. I’ll quote the relevant bit here, in case it turns out to affect her reply. (I did link to the conversation but I’m not sure she’ll follow the link.)
Only if it gets political in the sense of “politics, the mind-killer” :-)
Certainly, and the rich’s opinion and interests should be consulted as well. I wasn’t talking about what the best policy is, anyway; I was just analyzing the position of those rich (or rather non-poor) who you said want to help the poor by improving the economy.
If your goal is ultimately to please that group, then why not? This isn’t a debate about working together with another group to achieve a common goal or to compromise on something. This is a debate on how best to help another group. “Making them happy” and “doing whatever they want” (to the extent of the resources we agree to commit) is a valid answer, even if many people won’t agree.
The fact that you don’t agree is what I was pointing out—that legitimate ethical disputes exist. I don’t even really want to argue for this particular policy—I haven’t thought it through very deeply; it was just an example of a disagreement. But I do believe it’s reasonable enough to at least be considered.
No I would not be fine with that. I’m not fine with any individual prohibiting abortion for another individual. Any women who are against abortions are free not to have abortions themselves, and everyone else should be free to have abortions if they wish. Note that my argument didn’t rely on majority opinion or on using the class of “all women”. The freedom to have abortions is a personal freedom, not a group freedom.
Many policies involve no coercion. Or at least some of the policy options involve no coercion.
For instance, allowing abortions to everyone involves no coercion. Unless you consider “knowing other people get abortions and not being able to stop them” a coerced state.
I never said that personal freedom and responsibility can solve all ethical issues. Sometimes all policy options are tradeoffs in coercion, and there isn’t aways a “right” option. That only reinforces my point that many ethical disputes exist and there is no universal human ethics.
I think there’s even more variation in the signaling—in the stories that people tell one another—than in the practice. For one thing, the practice is constrained to be mostly evolutionarily beneficial, but the storytelling can be completely divorced from reality.
Case in point: in many times and places religion has been a big part of the “publically signalled” ethics. Religions, of course, often contradict one another on behavioural guidelines, but more than that, they often contradict what is possible in practice. Imagine a world where the scriptures of (some verisons of) Christianity really held sway: sex is sinful, money and property are sinful, taking interest in this world is sinful, trying to change the world for the better is sinful, science and questioning authority are sinful...
I do not believe all humans, let alone all evolved intelligences, would independently derive an ethics that says changing the world, studying nature, and reproducing are all wrong.
What kind of disagreements? About what god wants? Or about what’s best for women? Or about what our terminal values “should” be?
If they are solely the product of evolution, then there can’t be a universal human ethics among different cultures. Did I misunderstand something about your argument?
If they are solely the product of evolution, then there can’t be a universal human ethics among different cultures. Did I misunderstand something about your argument?
I have no idea why this would be true. Convergent evolution.. Also, there can be cultural evolution in the absence of more than one culture. Some ethical principle might have evolved when humanity was all one culture (if there ever was such a point, I guess I find that unlikely).
Lets back up. Human ethics basically consists of five values. Different cultures at different times emphasize some values more than others. Genuine ethical disagreements tend to be about which of these values should take precedence in a given situation. As a human I don’t think there is a “true answer” in these debates. Some of these questions might have truth values for American liberals (and I can answer for those), but they don’t for all of humanity.
Now
That ethics is basically the purity value being (in my mind) way over emphasized. Now in modern, Western societies large segments hardly care about purity at all. I’m one of those people and I suspect a lot of people here are. But this is a very new development and it is very likely that we still have some remnants of the purity value left (think about our ‘epistemic hygiene’ rhetoric!) . But yes, compared to most of human history modern liberals are quite revolutionary. It is possible that not all of those values are universal among evolved, intelligent, social beings (though it seems to me they might be).
The other things:
I meant the first two. Also, facts about personhood, when life begins, the existence of souls etc. There may also be a value disagreement.
Of course that is a coerced state. :-) Not being able to do something under threat of state action is textbook coercion. This is why libertarians who think they can justify their position just by appealing to a single principle of non-coercion are kidding themselves. They obviously need something else to tell them which kinds of coercion are justified.
So there isn’t some special, terminal value that is “letting these people decide”, rather there are different ways to please people and some disagreements are about that? But I’m not sure the question of what is the best way to please a group of people isn’t a question of fact. Either poor people would rather be listened to than have more money or vice versa. There is a fact of the matter about this question.
By convergent evolution, some cultures can evolve the same ethics. Even many cultures. But a universal ethics implies that all cultures, no matter how diverse in ever other way, and including cultures which might have existed but didn’t, would evolve the same ethics (or rather, would preserve the same ethics without evolving it further). This is extremely unlikely, and would require a much stronger explanation than the general idea of convergent evolution.
Anyway, my position is that different cultures in fact have different ethics with little in common between the extremes, so no explanation is needed.
This is an interesting model. I don’t remember encountering it before.
I believe you agree with me here, but just to make sure I read your words correctly: the commonality of these five values (if true) does not in itself imply a commonality of ethics. There is no ethics until all the decisions about tradeoffs and priorities between the values are made.
In many non-Christian traditions, sex is pure and sacred. People may need to purify themselves for or before sex, and the act of sex itself can serve religious purposes (think “temple whores”, for instance). This is pretty much the opposite of Christian tradition.
The value of purity, and the feelings it inspires, may well be universal among humans. But the decision to what it applies—what is considered pure and what is filthy—is almost arbitrary. I suspect the same is true for most or all of the other five values—although there may be some constants—which only reinforces my conviction that there is no universal ethics.
It scarcely seems possible to me that any of these values are universal. A few quick thought-experiments, designed purely to demonstrate the feasibility of lacking these values in a sentient species:
Harm/care: some human sub-cultures have little enough of this value (e.g., groups of young males running free with no higher authority). Plus, a lot of our nurturant behaviour stems from raising children who are helpless for many years (later transferred to raising pets). If human children needed little to no care (like r-selected species), and if almost all human interactions took place between mostly self-dependant and independent individuals, then I think we might plausibly have vastly less empathy and “gentleness”.
Fairness/reciprocity: some human societies have little of this, instead running on pure power hierarchies. A chief doesn’t need to be visibly just if he’s visibly powerful, self-interested and rewards his followers in hierarchical order.
Ingroup/loyalty: I’m not sure about this one. It may be that there are evolutionary social dynamics that tend to lead to it (game theory-like).
I speculate that ingroup loyalty might not exist, or might be weaker, in a species that didn’t have war and similar competition between individuals. The reason we have such competition is that a male who wins can reproduce a lot more than average. But consider a species that’s asexual, or where a male cannot physiologically mate more than once, or more than once a year, or with lifelong partner imprinting like in some birds. Then the biggest competition that can exist between individuals is for the amount of resources one individual and his kin can use. Ingroup dynamics could still form, but they’d be much weaker, I think; they would not be useful except in times of severe lack of food and similar resources.
Authority/respect: this is described in terms of social hierarchies, and there can certainly be intelligent social species that have no real hierarchies. Suppose there’s little competition between individuals, as above, so no-one has a big incentive to become chief (it’s enough to become relatively high status; no need to be first). And suppose there’s little needed for coordinated action with a central decision-maker (no war, and people live in small enough groups that can coordinate efficiently). Or maybe these aliens are just much better at communication and coordination and can do it without taking orders. In such a scenario, I see no reason for a hierarchy to form.
Of course in any particular matter there can be a hierarchy of skill or knowledge. And if someone is consistently on top in a lot of such hierarchies, they can gain authority and respect. Or if someone is just consistently smarter than someone else, there can be authority and respect between individuals. I don’t count these as examples; I take this value to mean the human game of status for status’ sake.
Purity/sanctity: as I said above, even in humans the concept of purity is disconnected from what a particular culture considers to be pure...
That’s a good point, but the choice is still assymetrical. If we allow people to interfere in each other’s lives like this (i.e. the state doesn’t coerce them to not interfere), than many people will attempt to interfere in the same thing at cross purposes. As a result, 1) we don’t know what way of life will win out, and it may well be unethical; 2) a lot of people will coerce one another, which is no better than when the state does it.
If we’re setting state policy, then we can either enforce some one ethical system on everyone, or we can let everyone rule themselves, but we still have to interfere to prevent people from coercing one another, otherwise there’ll be chaos, not freedom. Different ethical systems will lead to any of these three systems (imposing ethics, freedom, and state-less chaos). But any system that enforces one ethics must do so explicitly; it’s very unlikely to come up as an instrumental goal of ethics A to enforce a conflicting ethics B.
In this way, enforcing individual freedom and non-interference can be seen as qualitatively different from enforcing any given ethics and way of life, even though it still involves a form of coercion.
Yes, and as we said earlier, they almost always prefer being listened to. (When someone tells you “I want X”, and you ask him “so do you want X or Y, really?” he’ll usually respond “X” again.) What’s more, if you value their self-reporting of their happiness, then giving them what they want is the best way to make them feel happier in the short term. If you try something else, like giving them money, or giving their descendants money, then even if in the very long term they’ll be happier and admit it, they will reliably be unhappy in the short term due to not getting what they asked for and because you behaved condenscendingly towards them (by saying you know what’s best for them better than they do).
For some people “helping everyone get what they want == freedom and responsibility for everyone” is a terminal value. For others, “making everyone happy” is a terminal value, but giving people what they want still becomes an instrumental value for the above reason.
Once you have a task that needs to be accomplished there are often only so many ways of accomplishing it. For example, there are only so many ways to turn sound into useful data the brain can use. Thus I suspect just about all functioning ears will have things in common- something that amplifies vibrations and something that medium can vibrate etc. That said I think you’re probably right that given enough cultures and species with divergent enough histories I’d probably discover some pretty alien moralities. That said there might not be many social and intelligent species out there. Given that, it seems plausible that there is some universal morality in that there are no social and intelligent exceptions. Universality doesn’t mean necessity. (I’m going to let your points about different evolutionary histories leading to different values go unresponded to. They’re good points though and I think the probability of really inhuman moralities existing is higher than I thought before).
No no. Sorry if this wasn’t clear. Like I said, I don’t think humans agree on prioritizing these values. People in the United States don’t even agree on prioritizing these values to some extent. The commonality of these five values is a commonality of ethics—it doesn’t imply identical, complete ethical codes for everyone but I don’t think we all have identical codes, just enough in common that it makes sense to speak of a human morality.
Can you do a better job specifying what kinds of sub-cultures you mean?
Yeah, there are places that value authority a lot more than fairness. Is there no conception of fairness for those of equal status? If outsiders came and oppressed them would they not experience that as injustice? This is difficult to discuss without having more data.
Cite?
There might be some variation in the way some of the values are implemented but I hardly think what is considered filthy is arbitrary. There are widely divergent cultures which consider the same things pure and filthy (i.e. feces). This is true of the other values too. The fact that these same five things make up everyones ethical code strikes me as a really big commonality, one that we can feel pretty good about. It isn’t a deep truth about the universe but the fact that I can condemn something and have the backing of more or less the entire human race is significant. The fact that anywhere I go I can argue with an appeal to one of these values and people won’t look at me like I’m a monster is remarkable. And insofar as this is the case I think we can meaningfully speak of a human ethics- it is the ethics that I appeal to by appealing these values.
Are you familiar with the the trolley cases? If you ask whether switching the tracks is permissible you get large majorities saying yes. But if you ask whether pushing the fat guy onto the tracks is permissible you get large majorities saying no. What is interesting is that these responses are universal, there is zero cultural variation. Interestingly, there is a gender difference, not in whether or not you think one or the other is permissible but in that men come up with complicated rationalizations and moral theories for giving different answers and women tend to not know why they answered the way they did (and say self-degradating things to that effect).
Interfering to prevent people from coercing one another is still enforcing an ethical system. The state still needs to make normative judgments about what constitutes justified or unjustified coercion. You have a cool car but won’t let me use it, you are coercing me by preventing me from riding in your cool car. But if I take the car then I’ve coerced you—kept you from riding in it, kept you from accessing the fruits of your labor, etc. If someone yells at you in public you can’t avoid hearing them. If someone rapes you you can’t avoid having sex with them. If your neighbor has a gun he is violating your right to not have to worry about being shot. If you take his gun then he has lost his right to own a gun. All of these things are coercive. I’m just saying there needs to be some independent standard for justified coercion and that standard is going to be whatever your ethics is.
I apologize for not replying and providing the citations needed. I’ve had unforeseen difficulties in finding the time, and now I’m going abroad for a week with no net access. When I come back I hope to make time to participate in LW regularly again and will also reply here.
You’re ignoring the tradeoff between helping the current poor and future poor. The current poor would naturally favor the former, but I don’t think that’s an argument for it over the latter.
Class is fairly heritable. To the extent to which we think people ought to make decisions for their descendants, it may make sense to let current poor make decisions that affect the future poor.
If that’s the only issue, we could choose whatever policy helps the most and then compensate current folks by borrowing. Economic growth will be lower and future folks will be poorer, but the policy will be efficient.
As an aside, we don’t really know how wealthy future folks will be. If a Singularity is imminent, it’s probably efficient to liquidate a lot of capital and help current folks more.
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.