The house elves seem to be a bit of a shout out to the Ameglian Major Cow. In that case a mind was wire-headed to enjoy something that was pretty clearly bad for it. Arthur had a problem with this, but they argued that if you were going to eat a Cow, it was more moral to wire it to enjoy being eaten.
If you accept that doing chores is just on a continuum with being tortured or eaten, which EY might, then the question is the same as whether it’s Evil to wirehead someone into enjoying being tortured or eaten.
Edit: For clarity, I don’t think I agree with the claim that creating them is “Evil,” but I think I understand why EY would make a character who makes statements like that.
I’m not sure if doing chores in and of itself can be viewed as on a continuum with being tortured, for the purposes of this exercise. Being forced to do chores is considered bad for two reasons (as far as I know): Most people find doing chores to be intrinsically not enjoyable, and most people have other goals that they’d prefer to spend their time pursuing. Being tortured matches at least the first part of that description, and usually matches the second part as well. But for house elves, doing chores is not intrinsically not enjoyable, and it appears that they generally don’t have other significant goals to pursue—and this is their native state; if you create a house elf from nothing, rather than modifying another creature to be house-elf-like, there’s no ‘rewiring’ involved at all. (And the OP made a point of specifying that that’s the case, since it is obviously problematic to rewire a creature in a way that’s opposed to its values.)
It may be useful to also consider the case of masochistic people, for whom things like being whipped are enjoyable: Given that some people seem to just naturally be that way—it’s not caused by trauma or anything, in most cases, unless I’ve really missed something in my research—is it somehow problematic that they exist?
My lower brain agrees with you. My upper brain asks if this is just a trolley problem that puts a high moral value on non-intervention.
Scenario A:
Option 1: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy doing chores.
Option 2: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy human desires.
Scenario B:
Option 1: Take existing house elves with human desires, wire them to enjoy doing chores.
Option 2: Leave existing house elves with human desires alone
Is there a non-trolley explanation for why it is immoral to rewire a normal elf, but not immoral to create a new race that is hard-wired for chores? On the trolley questions I was fine with even pushing a supervisor on the tracks, but I couldn’t agree with harvesting a healthy victim for multiple organs.
The problem with rewiring someone against their will has to do with the second issue I mentioned, not the first one—changing their preferences and their utility function. If you’re creating something from scratch, I don’t see how that can be an issue without arbitrarily privileging some set of values as ‘correct’ - if you’re creating something from scratch, there are no pre-existing values for the new values to be in conflict with. (The first issue doesn’t seem to raise the same problems: I think I would consider it okay, or at least ‘questionable’ rather than ‘clearly bad’, to re-wire someone to enjoy doing things that they would be doing anyway to achieve their own goals, if you were sufficiently sure that you actually understood their goals; however, I don’t think that humans can be sufficiently sure of other humans’ goals for that.)
It’s not clear to me how you’re mapping this problem to the trolley problem. This is probably because I have some personal stuff going on and am not in very good cognitive shape, but regardless of the cause, if you want to talk about it in those terms I’d appreciate a clearer explanation.
It’s not clear to me how you’re mapping this problem to the trolley problem.
To me the Trolley problem is largely about how much you’re willing to only look at end-states. In the trolley problem you have two scenarios with two options, leaving you with identical end states. Same goes for the House Elf problem, assuming that it is in the wizard’s power to create more human-like desires.
The main difference between the cases that I see in the Trolley problems are “to what extent is the person you’re killing already in danger?” Being already on a track is pretty inherently dangerous. Being on a bridge in a mine isn’t as dangerous. Wandering into a hospital with healthy organs isn’t inherently dangerous at all.
Suppose the house elves were created just wanting to do chores. Would it be moral to leave them like that if you could make them more human? What if they had once been more human and you were now “reverting” them?
Ah-ha. Okay. I hadn’t thought of the trolley problem in those terms before. It’s not very relevant to how I’m thinking, though; I’m thinking in terms of what actions are acceptable from a given starting point, not what end states are acceptable.
As to house elves: I don’t consider humanike values to be intrinsically better than other values in the relevant sense—I disagree with Clippy about the ideal state of the world, and am likely to come into conflict with em in relevant cases, but if the world were arranged in such a way that beings with clippylike values could exist without being in conflict with beings with other values, I would have no objection to said being existing, and that’s basically the case with house elves. (And I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong for Clippy to exist, just problematic enough that there are reasonable objections.)
I would consider causing house elves to have humanlike values equally problematic as causing humans to have house-elf-like values, regardless of whether the house elves were human to begin with, assuming that house elves are satisfied with their values and do not actively want to have humanlike values. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
But if the creatures enjoy their situation and manage to self replicate or are immortal isn’t the use of their labour more like a form of parasitism on the species?
One could argue parasitism is wrong but the act of creating them vunreable for parasitism seems neutral as long as they are capable of survival despite it.
I can also understand that many people would mind their descendants being modified in such a fashion, perhaps their dis-utility is enough to offset the utility of their modified descendants.
However I think the tipping point starts way before “not a single line of derived code”:
However how true is this of distant descendants that only share passing resemblance? I think a helpful reminder of scale might be our own self domestication.
The house elves seem to be a bit of a shout out to the Ameglian Major Cow. In that case a mind was wire-headed to enjoy something that was pretty clearly bad for it. Arthur had a problem with this, but they argued that if you were going to eat a Cow, it was more moral to wire it to enjoy being eaten.
If you accept that doing chores is just on a continuum with being tortured or eaten, which EY might, then the question is the same as whether it’s Evil to wirehead someone into enjoying being tortured or eaten.
Edit: For clarity, I don’t think I agree with the claim that creating them is “Evil,” but I think I understand why EY would make a character who makes statements like that.
I’m not sure if doing chores in and of itself can be viewed as on a continuum with being tortured, for the purposes of this exercise. Being forced to do chores is considered bad for two reasons (as far as I know): Most people find doing chores to be intrinsically not enjoyable, and most people have other goals that they’d prefer to spend their time pursuing. Being tortured matches at least the first part of that description, and usually matches the second part as well. But for house elves, doing chores is not intrinsically not enjoyable, and it appears that they generally don’t have other significant goals to pursue—and this is their native state; if you create a house elf from nothing, rather than modifying another creature to be house-elf-like, there’s no ‘rewiring’ involved at all. (And the OP made a point of specifying that that’s the case, since it is obviously problematic to rewire a creature in a way that’s opposed to its values.)
It may be useful to also consider the case of masochistic people, for whom things like being whipped are enjoyable: Given that some people seem to just naturally be that way—it’s not caused by trauma or anything, in most cases, unless I’ve really missed something in my research—is it somehow problematic that they exist?
My lower brain agrees with you. My upper brain asks if this is just a trolley problem that puts a high moral value on non-intervention.
Scenario A: Option 1: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy doing chores. Option 2: Create house elves out of nothingness, wire them to enjoy human desires.
Scenario B: Option 1: Take existing house elves with human desires, wire them to enjoy doing chores. Option 2: Leave existing house elves with human desires alone
Is there a non-trolley explanation for why it is immoral to rewire a normal elf, but not immoral to create a new race that is hard-wired for chores? On the trolley questions I was fine with even pushing a supervisor on the tracks, but I couldn’t agree with harvesting a healthy victim for multiple organs.
The problem with rewiring someone against their will has to do with the second issue I mentioned, not the first one—changing their preferences and their utility function. If you’re creating something from scratch, I don’t see how that can be an issue without arbitrarily privileging some set of values as ‘correct’ - if you’re creating something from scratch, there are no pre-existing values for the new values to be in conflict with. (The first issue doesn’t seem to raise the same problems: I think I would consider it okay, or at least ‘questionable’ rather than ‘clearly bad’, to re-wire someone to enjoy doing things that they would be doing anyway to achieve their own goals, if you were sufficiently sure that you actually understood their goals; however, I don’t think that humans can be sufficiently sure of other humans’ goals for that.)
It’s not clear to me how you’re mapping this problem to the trolley problem. This is probably because I have some personal stuff going on and am not in very good cognitive shape, but regardless of the cause, if you want to talk about it in those terms I’d appreciate a clearer explanation.
To me the Trolley problem is largely about how much you’re willing to only look at end-states. In the trolley problem you have two scenarios with two options, leaving you with identical end states. Same goes for the House Elf problem, assuming that it is in the wizard’s power to create more human-like desires.
The main difference between the cases that I see in the Trolley problems are “to what extent is the person you’re killing already in danger?” Being already on a track is pretty inherently dangerous. Being on a bridge in a mine isn’t as dangerous. Wandering into a hospital with healthy organs isn’t inherently dangerous at all.
Suppose the house elves were created just wanting to do chores. Would it be moral to leave them like that if you could make them more human? What if they had once been more human and you were now “reverting” them?
Ah-ha. Okay. I hadn’t thought of the trolley problem in those terms before. It’s not very relevant to how I’m thinking, though; I’m thinking in terms of what actions are acceptable from a given starting point, not what end states are acceptable.
As to house elves: I don’t consider humanike values to be intrinsically better than other values in the relevant sense—I disagree with Clippy about the ideal state of the world, and am likely to come into conflict with em in relevant cases, but if the world were arranged in such a way that beings with clippylike values could exist without being in conflict with beings with other values, I would have no objection to said being existing, and that’s basically the case with house elves. (And I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong for Clippy to exist, just problematic enough that there are reasonable objections.)
I would consider causing house elves to have humanlike values equally problematic as causing humans to have house-elf-like values, regardless of whether the house elves were human to begin with, assuming that house elves are satisfied with their values and do not actively want to have humanlike values. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
But if the creatures enjoy their situation and manage to self replicate or are immortal isn’t the use of their labour more like a form of parasitism on the species?
One could argue parasitism is wrong but the act of creating them vunreable for parasitism seems neutral as long as they are capable of survival despite it.
Instead of creating them from scratch, would it be immoral to take a species that hated chores and wirehead them to enjoy chores?
I think it is. I mentioned this possiblity here:
However I think the tipping point starts way before “not a single line of derived code”: