A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He know that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely though so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such a way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depature with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship, but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.
An interesting quote. It essentially puts forward the “reasonable person” legal theory. But that’s not what’s interesting about it.
The shipowner is pronounced “verily guilty” solely on the basis of his thought processes. He had doubts, he extinguished them, and that’s what makes him guilty. We don’t know whether the ship was actually seaworthy—only that the shipowner had doubts. If he were an optimistic fellow and never even had these doubts in the first place, would he still be guilty? We don’t know what happened to the ship—only that it disappeared. If the ship met a hurricane that no vessel of that era could survive, would the shipowner still be guilty? And, flipping the scenario, if solely by improbable luck the wreck of the ship did arrive unscathed to its destination, would the shipowner still be guilty?
I realize your questions may be rhetorical, but I’m going to attempt an answer anyways, because it illustrates a point:
The morality of the shipowner’s actions do not depend on the realized outcomes: It can only depend on his prior beliefs about the probability of the outcomes, and on the utility function that he uses to evaluate them. If we insisted on making morality conditional on the future, causality is broken: It will be impossible for any ethical agent to make use of such ethics as a decision theory.
The problem here is that the Shipowner’s “sincerely held beliefs” are not identical to his genuine extrapolated prior. It is not stated in the text, but I think he is able to convince himself about “the soundness of the ship” only by ignoring degrees of belief: If he was a proper Bayesian, he would have realized that having “doubts” and not updating your beliefs is not logically consistent
In any decision theory that is usable by agents making decisions in real time, the morality of his action is determined either at the time he allowed the ship to sail, or at the time he allowed his prior to get corrupted. I personally believe the latter. This quotation illustrates why I see rationality as a moral obligation, even when it feels like a memetic plague.
The morality of the shipowner’s actions do not depend on the realized outcomes: It can only depend on his prior beliefs about the probability of the outcomes, and on the utility function that he uses to evaluate them.
I am not sure—I see your point, but completely ignoring the actual outcome seems iffy to me. There are, of course, many different ways of judging morality and, empirically, a lot of them do care about realized outcomes.
The problem here is that the Shipowner’s “sincerely held beliefs” are not identical to his genuine extrapolated prior.
I don’t know what a “genuine extrapolated prior” is.
I see rationality as a moral obligation
Well, behaving according to the “reasonable person” standard is a legal obligation :-)
completely ignoring the actual outcome seems iffy to me
That’s because we live in a world where people’s inner states are not apparent, perhaps not even to themselves. So we revert to (a) what would a reasonable person believe, (b) what actually happened. The latter is unfortunate in that it condemns many who are merely morally unlucky and acquits many who are merely morally lucky, but that’s life. The actual bad outcomes serve as “blameable moments”. What can I say—it’s not great, but better than speculating on other people’s psychological states.
In a world where mental states could be subpoenaed, Clifford would have both a correct and an actionable theory of the ethics of belief; as it is I think it correct but not entirely actionable.
I don’t know what a “genuine extrapolated prior” is.
That which would be arrived at by a reasonable person (not necessarily a Bayesian calculator, but somebody not actually self-deceptive) updating on the same evidence.
A related issue is sincerity; Clifford says the shipowner is sincere in his beliefs, but I tend to think in such cases there is usually a belief/alief mismatch.
I love this passage from Clifford and I can’t believe it wasn’t posted here before. By the way, William James mounted a critique of Clifford’s views in an address you can read here; I encourage you to do so as James presents some cases that are interesting to think about if you (like me) largely agree with Clifford.
In a world where mental states could be subpoenaed, Clifford would have both a correct and an actionable theory
That’s not self-evident to me. First, in this particular case as you yourself note, “Clifford says the shipowner is sincere in his belief”. Second, in general, what are you going to do about, basically, stupid people who quite sincerely do not anticipate the consequences of their actions?
That which would be arrived at by a reasonable person … updating on the same evidence.
I think Clifford was wrong to say the shipowner was sincere in his belief. In the situation he describes, the belief is insincere—indeed such situations define what I think “insincere belief” ought to mean.
what are you going to do about, basically, stupid people who quite sincerely do not anticipate the consequences of their actions?
Good question. Ought implies can, so in extreme cases I’d consider that to diminish their culpability. For less extreme cases—heh, I had never thought about it before, but I think the “reasonable man” standard is implicitly IQ-normalized. :)
I think the “reasonable man” standard is implicitly IQ-normalized. :)
While that may be so, the Clifford approach relying on the subpoenaed mental states relies on mental states and not on any external standard (including the one called “resonable person”).
That’s because we live in a world where… it’s not great, but better than speculating on other people’s psychological states.
I wanted to put something like this idea into my own response to Lumifer, but I couldn’t find the words. Thanks for expressing the idea so clearly and concisely.
The shipowner is pronounced “verily guilty” solely on the basis of his thought processes.
Part of the scenario is that the ship is in fact not seaworthy, and went down on account of it. Part is that the shipowner knew it was not safe and suppressed his doubts. These are the actus reus and the mens rea that are generally required for there to be a crime. These are legal concepts, but I think they can reasonably be applied to ethics as well. Intentions and consequences both matter.
if solely by improbable luck the wreck of the ship did arrive unscathed to its destination, would the shipowner still be guilty?
If the emigrants do not die, he is not guilty of their deaths. He is still morally at fault for sending to sea a ship he knew was unseaworthy. His inaction in reckless disregard for their lives can quite reasonably be judged a crime.
Part of the scenario is that the ship is in fact not seaworthy, and went down on account of it.
That is just not true. The author of the quote certainly knew how to say “the ship was not seaworthy” and “the ship sank because it was not seaworthy”. The author said no such things.
Part is that the shipowner knew it was not safe and suppressed his doubts. These are the actus reus and the mens rea that are generally required for there to be a crime.
You are mistaken. Suppressing your own doubts is not actus reus—you need an action in physical reality. And, legally, there is a LOT of difference between an act and an omission, failing to act.
The author of the quote certainly knew how to say “the ship was not seaworthy” and “the ship sank because it was not seaworthy”. The author said no such things.
The author said:
He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs...
and more, which you have already read. This is clear enough to me.
Suppressing your own doubts is not actus reus—you need an action in physical reality.
In this case, an inaction.
And, legally, there is a LOT of difference between an act and an omission, failing to act.
In general there is, but not when the person has a duty to perform an action, knows it is required, knows the consequences of not doing it, and does not. That is the situation presented.
He had doubts, he extinguished them, and that’s what makes him guilty.
This is not the whole story. In the quote
He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.
you’re paying too much heed to the final clause and not enough to the clause that precedes it. The shipowner had doubts that, we are to understand, were reasonable on the available information. The key to the shipowner’s… I prefer not to use the word “guilt”, with its connotations of legal or celestial judgment—let us say, blameworthiness, is that he allowed the way he desired the world to be to influence his assessment of the actual state of the world.
In your “optimistic fellow” scenario, the shipowner would be as blameworthy, but in that case, the blame would attach to his failure to give serious consideration to the doubts that had been expressed to him.
And going beyond what is in the passage, in my view, he would be equally blameworthy if the ship had survived the voyage! Shitty decision-making is shitty-decision-making, regardless of outcome. (This is part of why I avoided the word “guilt”—too outcome-dependent.)
The next passage confirms that this is the author’s interpretation as well:
Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out.
And clearly what he is guilty of (or if you prefer, blameworthy) is rationalizing away doubts that he was obligated to act on. Given the evidence available to him, he should have believed the ship might sink, and he should have acted on that belief (either to collect more information which might change it, or to fix the ship). Even if he’d gotten lucky, he would have acted in a way that, had he been updating on evidence reasonably, he would have believed would lead to the deaths of innocents.
The Ethics of Belief is an argument that it is a moral obligation to seek accuracy in beliefs, to be uncertain when the evidence does not justify certainty, to avoid rationalization, and to help other people in the same endeavor. One of his key points is that ‘real’ beliefs are necessarily entangled with reality. I am actually surprised he isn’t quoted here more.
The key to the shipowner’s… blameworthiness, is that he allowed the way he desired the world to be to influence his assessment of the actual state of the world.
Pretty much everyone does that almost all the time. So, is everyone blameworthy?
Of course, if everyone is blameworthy then no one is.
I would say that I don’t do that, but then I’d pretty obviously be allowing the way I desire the world to be to influence my assessment of that actual state of the world. I’ll make a weaker claim—when I’m engaging conscious effort in trying to figure out how the world is and I notice myself doing it, I try to stop. Less Wrong, not Absolute Perfection.
Pretty much everyone does that almost all the time. So, is everyone blameworthy?
Of course, if everyone is blameworthy then no one is.
That’s a pretty good example of the Fallacy of Gray right there.
I would say that I don’t do that, but then I’d pretty obviously be allowing the way I desire the world to be to influence my assessment of that actual state of the world.
How do you know?
Especially since falsely holding that belief would be an example.
Lumifer wrote, “Pretty much everyone does that almost all the time.” I just figured that given what we know of heuristics and biases, there exists a charitable interpretation of the assertion that makes it true. Since the meat of the matter was about deliberate subversion of a clear-eyed assessment of the evidence, I didn’t want to get into the weeds of exactly what Lumifer meant.
It’s not quite clear to me that the judgments being made here are solely about the owner’s thought processes, though I agree that facts about behavior and thought processes are intermingled in this narrative in such a way as to make it unclear what conclusions are based on which facts.
Still… the owner had doubts suggested about the ship’s seaworthiness, we’re told, and this presumably is a fact about events in the world. The generally agreed-upon credibility of the sources of those suggestions is presumably also something that could be investigated without access to the owner’s thoughts. Further, we can confirm that the owner didn’t overhaul the ship, for example, nor retain the services of trained inspectors to determine the ship’s seaworthiness (or, at least, we have no evidence that he did so, in situations where evidence would be expected if he had).
All of those are facts about behavior. Are those behaviors sufficient to hold the owner liable for the death of the sailors? Perhaps not; perhaps without the benefit of narrative omniscience we’d give the owner the benefit of the doubt. But… so what? In this case, we are being given additional data. In this case we know the owner’s thought process, through the miracle of narrative.
You seem to be trying to suggest, through implication and leading questions, that using that additional information in making a judgment in this case is dangerous… perhaps because we might then be tempted to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew the owner’s thoughts, which we don’t.
And, well, I agree that to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew someone’s thoughts is problematic… though sometimes not doing so is also problematic.
Anyway, to answer your question: given the data provided above I consider the shipowner negligent, regardless of whether the ship arrived safely at its destination, or whether it was destroyed by some force no ship could survive.
In absence of applicable regulations I think the veil of ignorance of sorts can help here. Would the shipowner make the same decision were he or his family one of the emigrants? What if it was some precious irreplaceable cargo on it? What if it was regular cargo but not fully insured? If the decision without the veil is significantly difference from the one with, then one can consider him “verily guilty”, without worrying about his thoughts overmuch.
Well, yes, I agree, but I’m not sure how that helps.
We’re now replacing facts about his thoughts (which the story provides us) with speculations about what he might have done in various possible worlds (which seem reasonably easy to infer, either from what we’re told about his thoughts, or from our experience with human nature, but are hardly directly observable).
I don’t think they are pure speculations. This is not the shipowner’s first launch, so the speculations over possible worlds can be approximated by observations over past decisions.
But I guess I’m still in the same place: this narrative is telling us the shipowner’s thoughts. I’m judging the shipowner accordingly.
That being said, if we insist on instead judging a similar case where we lack that knowledge… yeah, I dunno. What conclusion would you arrive at from a Rawlsian analysis and does it differ from a common-sense imputation of motive? I mean, in general, “someone credibly suggested the ship might be unseaworthy and Sam took no steps to investigate that possibility” sounds like negligence to me even in the absence of Rawlsian analysis.
You seem to be trying to suggest, through implication and leading questions, that using that additional information in making a judgment in this case is dangerous
No, I’m just struck by how the issue of guilt here turns on mental processes inside someone’s mind and not at all on what actually happened in physical reality.
given the data provided above I consider the shipowner negligent … Do you disagree?
Keep in mind that this parable was written specifically to make you come to this conclusion :-)
But yes, I disagree. I consider the data above to be insufficient to come to any conclusions about negligence.
I’m just struck by how the issue of guilt here turns on mental processes inside someone’s mind and not at all on what actually happened in physical reality.
Mental processes inside someone’s mind actually happen in physical reality.
Just kidding; I know that’s not what you mean. My actual reply is that it seems manifestly obvious that a person in some set of circumstances that demand action can make decisions that careful and deliberate consideration would judge to be the best, or close to the best, possible in prior expectation under those circumstances, and yet the final outcome could be terrible. Conversely, that person might make decisions that that careful and deliberate consideration would judge to be terrible and foolish in prior expectation, and yet through uncontrollable happenstance the final outcome could be tolerable.
I’m just struck by how the issue of guilt here turns on mental processes inside someone’s mind and not at all on what actually happened in physical reality.
So, I disagreed with this claim the first time you made it, since the grounds cited combine both facts about the shipowners thoughts and facts about physical reality (which I listed). You evidently find that objection so uncompelling as to not even be worth addressing, but I don’t understand why. If you chose to unpack your reasons, I’d be interested.
But, again: even if it’s true, so what? If we have access to the mental processes inside someone’s mind, as we do in this example, why shouldn’t we use that data in determining guilt?
I read the story as asserting three facts about the physical reality: the ship was old, the ship was not overhauled, the ship sank in the middle of the ocean. I don’t think these facts lead to the conclusion of negligence.
If we have access to the mental processes inside someone’s mind
But we don’t. We’re talking about the world in which we live. I would presume that the morality in the world of telepaths would be quite different. Don’t do this.
If we have access to the mental processes inside someone’s mind
But we don’t.
When judging this story, we do. We know what was going on in this shipowner’s mind, because the story tells us.
I’m not generalizing. I’m making a claim about my judgment of this specific case, based on the facts we’re given about it, which include facts about the shipowner’s thoughts.
What’s wrong with that?
As I said initially… I can see arguing that if we allow ourselves to judge this (fictional) situation based on the facts presented, we might then be tempted to judge other (importantly different) situations as if we knew analogous facts, when we don’t. And I agree that doing so would be silly.
But to ignore the data we’re given in this case because in a similar real-world situation we wouldn’t have that data seems equally silly.
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He know that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely though so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such a way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depature with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship, but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.
W.J. Clifford, the Ethics of Belief
An interesting quote. It essentially puts forward the “reasonable person” legal theory. But that’s not what’s interesting about it.
The shipowner is pronounced “verily guilty” solely on the basis of his thought processes. He had doubts, he extinguished them, and that’s what makes him guilty. We don’t know whether the ship was actually seaworthy—only that the shipowner had doubts. If he were an optimistic fellow and never even had these doubts in the first place, would he still be guilty? We don’t know what happened to the ship—only that it disappeared. If the ship met a hurricane that no vessel of that era could survive, would the shipowner still be guilty? And, flipping the scenario, if solely by improbable luck the wreck of the ship did arrive unscathed to its destination, would the shipowner still be guilty?
I realize your questions may be rhetorical, but I’m going to attempt an answer anyways, because it illustrates a point:
The morality of the shipowner’s actions do not depend on the realized outcomes: It can only depend on his prior beliefs about the probability of the outcomes, and on the utility function that he uses to evaluate them. If we insisted on making morality conditional on the future, causality is broken: It will be impossible for any ethical agent to make use of such ethics as a decision theory.
The problem here is that the Shipowner’s “sincerely held beliefs” are not identical to his genuine extrapolated prior. It is not stated in the text, but I think he is able to convince himself about “the soundness of the ship” only by ignoring degrees of belief: If he was a proper Bayesian, he would have realized that having “doubts” and not updating your beliefs is not logically consistent
In any decision theory that is usable by agents making decisions in real time, the morality of his action is determined either at the time he allowed the ship to sail, or at the time he allowed his prior to get corrupted. I personally believe the latter. This quotation illustrates why I see rationality as a moral obligation, even when it feels like a memetic plague.
I am not sure—I see your point, but completely ignoring the actual outcome seems iffy to me. There are, of course, many different ways of judging morality and, empirically, a lot of them do care about realized outcomes.
I don’t know what a “genuine extrapolated prior” is.
Well, behaving according to the “reasonable person” standard is a legal obligation :-)
That’s because we live in a world where people’s inner states are not apparent, perhaps not even to themselves. So we revert to (a) what would a reasonable person believe, (b) what actually happened. The latter is unfortunate in that it condemns many who are merely morally unlucky and acquits many who are merely morally lucky, but that’s life. The actual bad outcomes serve as “blameable moments”. What can I say—it’s not great, but better than speculating on other people’s psychological states.
In a world where mental states could be subpoenaed, Clifford would have both a correct and an actionable theory of the ethics of belief; as it is I think it correct but not entirely actionable.
That which would be arrived at by a reasonable person (not necessarily a Bayesian calculator, but somebody not actually self-deceptive) updating on the same evidence.
A related issue is sincerity; Clifford says the shipowner is sincere in his beliefs, but I tend to think in such cases there is usually a belief/alief mismatch.
I love this passage from Clifford and I can’t believe it wasn’t posted here before. By the way, William James mounted a critique of Clifford’s views in an address you can read here; I encourage you to do so as James presents some cases that are interesting to think about if you (like me) largely agree with Clifford.
That’s not self-evident to me. First, in this particular case as you yourself note, “Clifford says the shipowner is sincere in his belief”. Second, in general, what are you going to do about, basically, stupid people who quite sincerely do not anticipate the consequences of their actions?
That would be a posterior, not a prior.
I think Clifford was wrong to say the shipowner was sincere in his belief. In the situation he describes, the belief is insincere—indeed such situations define what I think “insincere belief” ought to mean.
Good question. Ought implies can, so in extreme cases I’d consider that to diminish their culpability. For less extreme cases—heh, I had never thought about it before, but I think the “reasonable man” standard is implicitly IQ-normalized. :)
Sure.
This is called fighting the hypothetical.
While that may be so, the Clifford approach relying on the subpoenaed mental states relies on mental states and not on any external standard (including the one called “resonable person”).
I wanted to put something like this idea into my own response to Lumifer, but I couldn’t find the words. Thanks for expressing the idea so clearly and concisely.
Part of the scenario is that the ship is in fact not seaworthy, and went down on account of it. Part is that the shipowner knew it was not safe and suppressed his doubts. These are the actus reus and the mens rea that are generally required for there to be a crime. These are legal concepts, but I think they can reasonably be applied to ethics as well. Intentions and consequences both matter.
If the emigrants do not die, he is not guilty of their deaths. He is still morally at fault for sending to sea a ship he knew was unseaworthy. His inaction in reckless disregard for their lives can quite reasonably be judged a crime.
That is just not true. The author of the quote certainly knew how to say “the ship was not seaworthy” and “the ship sank because it was not seaworthy”. The author said no such things.
You are mistaken. Suppressing your own doubts is not actus reus—you need an action in physical reality. And, legally, there is a LOT of difference between an act and an omission, failing to act.
The author said:
and more, which you have already read. This is clear enough to me.
In this case, an inaction.
In general there is, but not when the person has a duty to perform an action, knows it is required, knows the consequences of not doing it, and does not. That is the situation presented.
This is not the whole story. In the quote
you’re paying too much heed to the final clause and not enough to the clause that precedes it. The shipowner had doubts that, we are to understand, were reasonable on the available information. The key to the shipowner’s… I prefer not to use the word “guilt”, with its connotations of legal or celestial judgment—let us say, blameworthiness, is that he allowed the way he desired the world to be to influence his assessment of the actual state of the world.
In your “optimistic fellow” scenario, the shipowner would be as blameworthy, but in that case, the blame would attach to his failure to give serious consideration to the doubts that had been expressed to him.
And going beyond what is in the passage, in my view, he would be equally blameworthy if the ship had survived the voyage! Shitty decision-making is shitty-decision-making, regardless of outcome. (This is part of why I avoided the word “guilt”—too outcome-dependent.)
The next passage confirms that this is the author’s interpretation as well:
And clearly what he is guilty of (or if you prefer, blameworthy) is rationalizing away doubts that he was obligated to act on. Given the evidence available to him, he should have believed the ship might sink, and he should have acted on that belief (either to collect more information which might change it, or to fix the ship). Even if he’d gotten lucky, he would have acted in a way that, had he been updating on evidence reasonably, he would have believed would lead to the deaths of innocents.
The Ethics of Belief is an argument that it is a moral obligation to seek accuracy in beliefs, to be uncertain when the evidence does not justify certainty, to avoid rationalization, and to help other people in the same endeavor. One of his key points is that ‘real’ beliefs are necessarily entangled with reality. I am actually surprised he isn’t quoted here more.
Pretty much everyone does that almost all the time. So, is everyone blameworthy?
Of course, if everyone is blameworthy then no one is.
I would say that I don’t do that, but then I’d pretty obviously be allowing the way I desire the world to be to influence my assessment of that actual state of the world. I’ll make a weaker claim—when I’m engaging conscious effort in trying to figure out how the world is and I notice myself doing it, I try to stop. Less Wrong, not Absolute Perfection.
That’s a pretty good example of the Fallacy of Gray right there.
How do you know?
Especially since falsely holding that belief would be an example.
Lumifer wrote, “Pretty much everyone does that almost all the time.” I just figured that given what we know of heuristics and biases, there exists a charitable interpretation of the assertion that makes it true. Since the meat of the matter was about deliberate subversion of a clear-eyed assessment of the evidence, I didn’t want to get into the weeds of exactly what Lumifer meant.
It’s not quite clear to me that the judgments being made here are solely about the owner’s thought processes, though I agree that facts about behavior and thought processes are intermingled in this narrative in such a way as to make it unclear what conclusions are based on which facts.
Still… the owner had doubts suggested about the ship’s seaworthiness, we’re told, and this presumably is a fact about events in the world. The generally agreed-upon credibility of the sources of those suggestions is presumably also something that could be investigated without access to the owner’s thoughts. Further, we can confirm that the owner didn’t overhaul the ship, for example, nor retain the services of trained inspectors to determine the ship’s seaworthiness (or, at least, we have no evidence that he did so, in situations where evidence would be expected if he had).
All of those are facts about behavior. Are those behaviors sufficient to hold the owner liable for the death of the sailors? Perhaps not; perhaps without the benefit of narrative omniscience we’d give the owner the benefit of the doubt. But… so what? In this case, we are being given additional data. In this case we know the owner’s thought process, through the miracle of narrative.
You seem to be trying to suggest, through implication and leading questions, that using that additional information in making a judgment in this case is dangerous… perhaps because we might then be tempted to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew the owner’s thoughts, which we don’t.
And, well, I agree that to make judgments in real-world cases as if we knew someone’s thoughts is problematic… though sometimes not doing so is also problematic.
Anyway, to answer your question: given the data provided above I consider the shipowner negligent, regardless of whether the ship arrived safely at its destination, or whether it was destroyed by some force no ship could survive.
Do you disagree?
In absence of applicable regulations I think the veil of ignorance of sorts can help here. Would the shipowner make the same decision were he or his family one of the emigrants? What if it was some precious irreplaceable cargo on it? What if it was regular cargo but not fully insured? If the decision without the veil is significantly difference from the one with, then one can consider him “verily guilty”, without worrying about his thoughts overmuch.
Well, yes, I agree, but I’m not sure how that helps.
We’re now replacing facts about his thoughts (which the story provides us) with speculations about what he might have done in various possible worlds (which seem reasonably easy to infer, either from what we’re told about his thoughts, or from our experience with human nature, but are hardly directly observable).
How does this improve matters?
I don’t think they are pure speculations. This is not the shipowner’s first launch, so the speculations over possible worlds can be approximated by observations over past decisions.
(nods) As I say, reasonably easy to infer.
But I guess I’m still in the same place: this narrative is telling us the shipowner’s thoughts.
I’m judging the shipowner accordingly.
That being said, if we insist on instead judging a similar case where we lack that knowledge… yeah, I dunno. What conclusion would you arrive at from a Rawlsian analysis and does it differ from a common-sense imputation of motive? I mean, in general, “someone credibly suggested the ship might be unseaworthy and Sam took no steps to investigate that possibility” sounds like negligence to me even in the absence of Rawlsian analysis.
No, I’m just struck by how the issue of guilt here turns on mental processes inside someone’s mind and not at all on what actually happened in physical reality.
Keep in mind that this parable was written specifically to make you come to this conclusion :-)
But yes, I disagree. I consider the data above to be insufficient to come to any conclusions about negligence.
Mental processes inside someone’s mind actually happen in physical reality.
Just kidding; I know that’s not what you mean. My actual reply is that it seems manifestly obvious that a person in some set of circumstances that demand action can make decisions that careful and deliberate consideration would judge to be the best, or close to the best, possible in prior expectation under those circumstances, and yet the final outcome could be terrible. Conversely, that person might make decisions that that careful and deliberate consideration would judge to be terrible and foolish in prior expectation, and yet through uncontrollable happenstance the final outcome could be tolerable.
So, I disagreed with this claim the first time you made it, since the grounds cited combine both facts about the shipowners thoughts and facts about physical reality (which I listed). You evidently find that objection so uncompelling as to not even be worth addressing, but I don’t understand why. If you chose to unpack your reasons, I’d be interested.
But, again: even if it’s true, so what? If we have access to the mental processes inside someone’s mind, as we do in this example, why shouldn’t we use that data in determining guilt?
I read the story as asserting three facts about the physical reality: the ship was old, the ship was not overhauled, the ship sank in the middle of the ocean. I don’t think these facts lead to the conclusion of negligence.
But we don’t. We’re talking about the world in which we live. I would presume that the morality in the world of telepaths would be quite different. Don’t do this.
When judging this story, we do.
We know what was going on in this shipowner’s mind, because the story tells us.
I’m not generalizing. I’m making a claim about my judgment of this specific case, based on the facts we’re given about it, which include facts about the shipowner’s thoughts.
What’s wrong with that?
As I said initially… I can see arguing that if we allow ourselves to judge this (fictional) situation based on the facts presented, we might then be tempted to judge other (importantly different) situations as if we knew analogous facts, when we don’t. And I agree that doing so would be silly.
But to ignore the data we’re given in this case because in a similar real-world situation we wouldn’t have that data seems equally silly.