“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
The interesting part is the phrase “which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays.” If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
Not if it’s actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn’t feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.
Right idea, not a great example. People used to have lots more kids then now, most dying in childhood. Majority of women of childbearing age (gay or straight) were married and having children as often as their body allowed, so promiscuity would not have changed much. Maybe a minor correction for male infertility and sexual boredom in a standard marriage.
You seem to have rather a different idea of what I meant by “2012 standards”. Even now we do not really approve of married people sleeping around. We do, however, approve of people not getting married until age 25 or 30 or so, but sleeping with whoever they like before that. Try that pattern without contraception.
We do, however, approve of people not getting married until age 25 or 30 or so, but sleeping with whoever they like before that.
You might. I don’t. This is most probably a cultural difference. There are people in the world to day who see nothing wrong with having multiple wives, given the ability to support them (example: Jacob Zuma)
Strong norms against promiscuity out of wedlock still made sense though, since having lots of children without a committed partner to help care for them would usually have been impractical.
We’re talking about morality that is based around technology. There is no technological advance that allows us to not criminalize homosexuality now where we couldn’t have in the past.
I didn’t specify promiscuous homosexuality. Monogamously inclined gay people are as protected from STDs as anyone else at a comparable tech level—maybe more so among lesbians.
Neither did I, but would rather refrain from explaining in detail why I didn’t assume promiscuity.
It’s really annoying that you jumped to that conclusion, though. Further, I’m confused why the existence of some minority of a minority of the population that doesn’t satisfy the ancestor’s hypothetical matters.
Homosexuality was common/accepted/expected in many societies without leading to any negative consequences, so technology is not an enabler of morality here.
How do you envision living by this model now working? That is, suppose I were to embrace the notion that having enough resources to live a comfortable life (where money can stand in as a proxy for other resources) is something everyone ought to be guaranteed. What ought I do differently than I’m currently doing?
What ought I do differently than I’m currently doing?
I would like to staple that question to the forehead of every political commentator who makes a living writing columns in far mode. What is it you would like us to do? If you don’t have a good answer, why are you talking? Argh.
If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
Not if the morality you anticipate coming into favour is something you disagree with. If it’s something you agree with, it’s already yours, and predicting it is just a way of avoiding arguing for it.
If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners’ Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had “a basic human right to have enough money without having to work”, situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things—for example how much of the working people’s money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one’s basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop—the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their “basic human right income”, the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation… imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can’t find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working and being able to spend their time in other ways.
I don’t think we’re even close to that point. I can imagine societies in a hundred years that are at that point (I have no idea whether they’ll happen or not), but it would be foolish for them to condemn our lack of such a system now since we don’t have the ability to support it, just as it would be foolish for us to condemn people in earlier and less well-off times for not having welfare systems as encompassing as ours.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles. The poorest societies cannot afford the “full unemployment” discussed in the quote, and neither can even the richest of modern societies right now (they could certainly come closer than the present, but I don’t think any modern economy could survive the implementation of such a system in the present).
I do agree, however, about it being a solid goal, at least for basic amenities.
Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles.
To avoid having slaves, the poorest society could decide to kill all war captives, and to let starve to death all people unable to pay their debts. Yes, this would avoid legal discrimination. Is it therefore a morally preferable solution?
Since when has the institution of slavery been a charitable one? Historically, slave-owners have payed immense costs, directly and indirectly, for the privilege of owning slaves, and done so knowingly and willingly. It is human nature to derive pleasure from holding power over others.
I’m not sure about those direct costs. According to my references, a male slave in 10th-century Scandinavia cost about as much as a horse, a female slave about two-thirds as much; that’s a pretty good chunk of change but it doesn’t seem obviously out of line with the value of labor after externalities. I don’t have figures offhand for any other slaveholding cultures, but the impression I get is that the pure exercise of power was not the main determinant of value in most, if not all, of them,
I seem to recall someone arguing that, in combat between iron age tribes, it was basically a choice between massacre and slavery—if you did neither, they would wreck revenge upon your tribe further down the line.
This wouldn’t be charity, as I guess the winners did benefit from having a source of labour that didn’t need to be compensated at the market rate, but it would be a case where slavery was beneficial to the victims.
(I think Carlyle was wrong about other supposed cases of slavery proving beneficial for the victims)
One could argue that happened in Ancient Rome, with prisoners fo war as the main source of slaves. Also they/their descendants arguably benefited in the long term from being part of the larger more sophisticated culture, if they survived that long.
In poor societies that permit slavery, a man might be willing to sell himself into slavery. He gets food and lodging, possibly for his family as well as himself; his new purchaser gets a whole lot of labour. There’s a certain loss of status, but a person might well be willing to live with that in order to avoid starvation.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles.
Elections can take quite a bit of resources to run when you have a large voting population...
No, politicians can afford to spend lots of money on them. The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
IAWYC, but the claims that most of the economic costs of elections are in political spending, and most of the costs of actually running elections are in voting machines are both probably wrong. (Public data is terrible, so I’m crudely extrapolating all of this from local to national levels.)
The opportunity costs of voting alone dwarf spending on election campaigns. Assuming that all states have the same share of GDP, that people who don’t a full-state holiday to vote take an hour off to vote, that people work 260 days a year and 8 hours a day, and that nobody in the holiday states do work, then we get:
Political spending: 5.3 billion USD
Opportunity costs of elections: 15 trillion USD (US GDP) (9/50 (states with voting holidays) 1⁄260 (percentage of work-time lost) + 41⁄50 (states without holidays) 1⁄601⁄8 (percentage of work-time lost)) ≈ 16 billion USD
Extrapolating from New York City figures, election machines cost ~1.9 billion nationwide. (50 million for a population ~38 times smaller than the total US population.) and extrapolating Oakland County’s 650,000 USD cost across the US’s 3143 counties, direct costs are just over 2 billion USD. (This is for a single election; however, some states have had as many as 5 elections in a single year. The cost of the voting machines can be amortized over multiple elections in multiple years.)
(If you add together the opportunity costs for holding one general and one non-general election a year (no state holidays; around ~7 billion USD), plus the costs of actually running them, plus half the cost of the campaign money, the total cost/election seems to be around 30 billion USD, or ~0.002% of the US’s GDP.)
Correction accepted. Still seems like something a poor society could afford, though, since labor and opportunity would also cost less. I understand that lots of poor societies do.
The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
What? If anything I’d assume them to be more expensive before computers were introduced. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something).
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
“Low electoral costs, approximately $1 to $3 per elector, tend to manifest in countries with longer electoral experience”
. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something
That’s a somewhat confusing comment. If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
Is that that little? I think many fewer people would vote if they had to pay $3 out of their own pocket in order to do so.
If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
A law compelling people to do stuff would be very unpopular, unless they get adequate compensation. Not paying them much would just mean they would feign illness or something. (If they didn’t select people by lot, the people doing that would be the ones applying for that job, who would presumably like it more than the rest of the population and hence be willing to do that for less.)
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working
Well, yes. Almost tautologically so, I should think. The tricky part is working out when humans are better off.
If you are a bayesian, you should think about how much evidence your imagination constitutes.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person gains little or no total productivity by working over 8 hour per day. Imagine, moreover, that in this civilization, working 10 hours a day doubles your risk of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in this civilization. Finally, imagine that, in this civilization, a common way for workers to signal their dedication to their jobs is by staying at work long hours, regardless of the harm it does both to their company and themselves.
In this civilization, a law preventing individuals from working over 8 hours per day is a tremendous social good.
Work hour skepticism leaves out the question of the cost of mistakes. It’s one thing to have a higher proportion of defective widgets on an assembly line (though even that can matter, especially if you want a reputation for high quality products), another if the serious injury rate goes up, and a third if you end up with the Exxon Valdez.
the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work
You mean “incentives to fully report your income”, right? ;-) (There are countries where a sizeable fraction of the economy is underground. I come from one.)
how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex?
The same they give today. Students not interested in studying mostly just cheat.
Well, if your society isn’t rich enough, you just do what you can. (And a lot of work really isn’t all that important; would it be that big of a disaster if your local store carried fewer kinds of cosmetics, or if your local restaurant had trouble hiring waiters?)
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it “could” be worse merely answers the question “can I justify holding this belief” rather than the question “what belief should I hold”. The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously… or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.
Prisoners’ dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.
The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.
I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.
As I wrote, it depends on many things. I can imagine a situation where this would work; I can also imagine a situation where it would not. As I also wrote, I can imagine such system functioning well if people who don’t work get enough money to survive, but people who do work get significantly more.
Data point: In Slovakia many uneducated people don’t work, because it wouldn’t make economical sense for them. Their wage, minus traveling expenses, would be only a little more, in some cases even less than their welfare. What’s the point of spending 8 hours in work if in result you have less money? They cannot get higher wages, because they are uneducated and unskilled; and in Slovakia even educated people get relatively little money. The welfare cannot be lowered, because the voters on the left would not allow it. The social pressure stops working if too many people in the same town are doing this; they provide moral support for each other. We have villages where unemployment is over 80% and people have already accommodated to this; after a decade of such life, even if you offer them a work with a decent wage, they will not take it, because it would mean walking away from their social circle.
This would not happen in a sane society, but it does happen in the real life. Other European countries seem to fare better in this aspect, but I can imagine the same thing happening there in a generation or two. A generation ago most people would probably not predict this situation in Slovakia.
I also can’t imagine the social pressure to work on the “generation Facebook”. If someone spends most of their day on Facebook or playing online multiplayer games, who exactly is going to socially press them? Their friends? Most of them live the same way. Their parents? The conflict between generations is not the same thing as peer pressure. And the “money without work is a basic human right” meme also does not help.
It could work in a country where the difference between average wage (even for a less educated and less skilled people) is much more than one needs to survive. But it can work long-term only if the amount of “basic human right money” does not grow faster than the average wage. -- OK, finally here is something that can be measured: what is the relative increase in wages vs welfares in western European countries in recent decades; optionally, extrapolate these numbers to estimate how long the system can survive.
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of “free money” welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the “detached from work” principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.
I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in terms of evidence or reasoned probability estimates over narrative/untested model. I’m taking a hint from feedback that I likely still communicated this poorly, and will revise my approach in future.
Back on the topic of taking these ideas as principles, perhaps more practical near-term goals which provide a subset of the guarantee, like detaching availability of resources basic survival from the availability of work, might be more probably achievable. There are a wider range of options available for implementing these ideas, and of incentives/disincentives to avoid long-term use. An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food. My rough estimate is that it seems likely that something in this space could be designed to operate sustainably with only the technology we have now.
On the side, relating to generation Facebook, my model of the typical 16-22 year old today would predict that they’d like to be able to buy an iPad, go to movies, afford alcohol, drive a nice car, go on holidays, and eventually get most of the same goals previous generations sought, and that their friends will also want these things. At younger ages, I agree that parental pressure wouldn’t be typically classified as “peer pressure”, but I still think it likely to provide significant incentive to do school work; the parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations. My model is only based on my personal experience, so mostly this is an example of anecdotal data leading to different untested models.
An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food.
I have heard this idea proposed, and many people object against it saying that it would take away the dignity of those people. In other words, some people seem to think that “basic human rights” include not just things necessary for survival, but also some luxury and perhaps some status items (which then obviously stop being status items, if everyone has them).
parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations.
In theory, yes. However, as a former teacher I have seen parents completely fail at this.
Data point: A mother came to school and asked me to tell her 16 year old daughter, my student, to not spend all her free time at internet. I did not understand WTF she wanted. She explained to me that as a computer science teacher her daughter will probably regard me an authority about computers, so if I ask her to not use the computer all day long, she wil respect me. This was her last hope, because as a mother she could not convince her daughter to go away from the computer.
To me this seemed completely insane. First, the teachers in given school were never treated as authorities on anything; they were usually treated like shit both by students and school administration (a month later I left that school). Second, as a teacher I have zero influence on what my students do outside school, she as a mother is there; she has many possible ways to stop her daughter from interneting… for instance to forcibly turn off the computer, or just hide the computer somewhere while her daughter is at school. But she should have started doing something before her daughter turned 16. If she does not know that, she is clearly unqualified to have children; but there is no law against that.
OK, this was an extreme example, but during my 4-years teaching carreer I have seen or heard from colleagues about many really fucked up parents; and those people were middle and higher social class. This leads me to very pesimistic views, not shared by people who don’t have the same experience and are more free to rationalize this away. I think that if you need parents to do something non-trivial, you should expect at least 20% of population to fail at that. Let’s suppose that in each generation 20% of parents fail to pressure their children to work, in a world where work is not necessary for decent living. What happens in 5 generations?
My model is only based on my personal experience
Personal experience can give different amounts of evidence. If the experience is “me, my family, and people I willingly associate with”, that one is most biased. When you have some kind of job where you interact with people you didn’t choose, that one is a bit better—it is still biased by your personal evaluation, geography, perhaps social class… but at least you are more exposed to people you would otherwise avoid. (For example I usually avoid impolite people from dysfunctional families. As a teacher, they are just there and I have to deal with them. Then I notice that they exist and are actually pretty frequent. When I go outside of the school, they again disappear somehow.)
Of course, I would still prefer having a statistic; I am just not sure if there are available statistics on how many parents completely fail at different tasks, such as not letting their children spend all free time with a computer.
That’s more technically problematic; how could non-human animals vote in the existing kinds of elections? Human intermediaries would have to decide what was best for the non-humans they represented. Different human political factions would support different positions as being best for the non-humans, and fight over that.
(This of course doesn’t apply to future possible non-human sentients like AI, uploads, uplifted animals, modified humans, etc.)
In Jasay’s terminology, the first is a liberty (a relation between a person and an act) and the rest are rights {relations between two or more persons (at least one rightholder and one obligor) and an act}. I find this distnction useful for thinking more clearly about these kinds of topics. Your mileage may vary.
I was actually referring to the the third being what I might call an anti-liberty, i.e., you aren’t allowed to work more than eight-hours a day, and the fact that is most definitely not enforced nor widely considered a human right.
How is that different from pointing out that you’re not allowed to sell yourself into slavery (not even partially, as in signing a contract to work for ten years and not being able to legally break it), or that you’re not allowed to sell your vote?
I thought eight-hours workdays were about employers not being allowed to demand that employees work more than eight hours a day; I didn’t know you weren’t technically allowed to do that at all even if you’re OK with it.
You are allowed to work more than eight hours per day. It’s just that in many industries, employers must pay you overtime if you do so.
Even if employers were prohibited from using “willingness to work more than 8 hours per day” as a condition for employment, long workdays would probably soon become the norm.
Thus a more feasible way to limit workdays is to constrain employees rather than employers.
To see why, assume that without any restrictions on workday length, workers supply more than 8 hours. Let’s say, without loss of generality, that they supply 10. (In other words, the equilibrium quantity supplied is ten.)
If employers can’t demand the equilibrium quantity, but they’re still willing to pay to get it, then employees will have the incentive to supply it. In their competition for jobs (finding them and keeping them), employees will be supply labor up until the equilibrium quantity, regardless of whether the bosses demand it.
Working more looks good. Everyone knows that; you don’t need your boss to tell you. So if there’s competition for your spot or for a spot that you want, it would serve you well to work more.
So if your goal is to prevent ten-hour days, you’d better stop people from supplying them.
At least, this makes sense to me. But I’m no microeconomist. Perhaps we have one on LW who can state this more clearly (or who can correct any mistakes I’ve made).
See Lochner v. New York. Within the last five years there was a French strike (riot? don’t remember exactly) over a law that would limit the workweek of bakers, which would have the impact of driving small bakeries out of business, since they would need to employ (and pay benefits on) 2 bakers rather than just 1. Perhaps a French LWer remembers more details?
It would be very hard to distinguish when people were doing it because they wanted to, and when employers were demanding it. Maybe some employees are working that extra time, but one isn’t. The one that isn’t happens to be fired later on, for unrelated reasons. How do you determine that worker’s unwillingness to work extra hours is not one of the reasons they were fired? Whether it is or not, that happening will likely encourage workers to go beyond the eight hours, because the last one that didn’t got fired, and a relationship will be drawn whether there is one or not.
It’s not like you can fire employees on a whim: the “unrelated reasons” have to be substantial ones, and it’s not clear you can find ones for any employee you want to fire. (Otherwise, you could use such a mechanism to de facto compel your employees to do pretty much anything you want.)
Also, even if you somehow did manage to de facto demand workers to work ten hours a day, if you have to pay hours beyond the eighth as overtime (with a hourly wage substantially higher than the regular one), then it’s cheaper for you to hire ten people eight hours a day each than eight people ten hours a day.
If we have four people on a life boat and food for three, morality must provide a mechanism for deciding who gets the food. Suppose that decision is made, then Omega magically provides sufficient food for all—morality hasn’t changed, only the decision that morality calls for.
Technological advancement has certainly caused moral change (consider society after introduction of the Pill). But having more resources does not, in itself, change what we think is right, only what we can actually achieve.
If we have four people on a life boat and food for three, morality must provide a mechanism for deciding who gets the food.
That’s an interesting claim. Are you saying that true moral dilemmas (i.e. a situation where there is no right answer) are impossible? If so, how would you argue for that?
I think they are impossible. Morality can say “no option is right” all it wants, but we still must pick an option, unless the universe segfaults and time freezes upon encountering a dilemma. Whichever decision procedure we use to make that choice (flip a coin?) can count as part of morality.
I take it for granted that faced with a dilemma we must do something, so long as doing nothing counts as doing something. But the question is whether or not there is always a morally right answer. In cases where there isn’t, I suppose we can just pick randomly, but that doesn’t mean we’ve therefore made the right moral decision.
Are we ever damned if we do, and damned if we don’t?
When someone is in a situation like that, they lower their standard for “morally right” and try again. Functional societies avoid putting people in those situations because it’s hard to raise that standard back to it’s previous level.
Right, but choosing the lesser of two evils is simple enough. That’s not the kind of dilemma I’m talking about. I’m asking whether or not there are wholly undecidable moral problems. Choosing between one evil and a lesser evil is no more difficult than choosing between an evil and a good.
But if you’re saying that in any hypothetical choice, we could always find something significant and decisive, then this is good evidence for the impossibility of moral dilemmas.
Suppose we define a “moral dilemma for system X” as a situation in which, under system X, all possible actions are forbidden.
Consider the systems that say “Actions that maximize this (unbounded) utility function are permissible, all others are forbidden.” Then the situation “Name a positive integer, and you get that much utility” is a moral dilemma for those systems; there is no utility maximizing action, so all actions are forbidden and the system cracks. It doesn’t help much if we require the utility function to be bounded; it’s still vulnerable to situations like “Name a real number less than 30, and you get that much utility” because there isn’t a largest real number less than 30. The only way to get around this kind of attack by restricting the utility function is by requiring the range of the function to be a finite set. For example, if you’re a C++ program, your utility might be represented by a 32 bit unsigned integer, so when asked “How much utility do you want” you just answer “2^32 − 1” and when asked “How much utility less than 30.5 do you want” you just answer “30”.
That is an awesome example. I’m absolutely serious about stealing that from you (with your permission).
Do you think this presents a serious problem for utilitarian ethics? It seems like it should, though I guess this situation doesn’t come up all that often.
ETA: Here’s a thought on a reply. Given restrictions like time and knowledge of the names of large numbers, isn’t there in fact a largest number you can name? Something like Graham’s number won’t work (way too small) because you can always add one to it. But trans-finite numbers aren’t made larger by adding one. And likewise with the largest real number under thirty, maybe you can use a function to specify the number? Or if not, just say ’29.999....′ and just say nine as many times as you can before the time runs out (or until you calculate that the utility benefit reaches equilibrium with the costs of saying ‘nine’ over and over for a long time).
That is an awesome example. I’m absolutely serious about stealing that from you (with your permission).
Sure, be my guest.
Do you think this presents a serious problem for utilitarian ethics? It seems like it should, though I guess this situation doesn’t come up all that often.
Honestly, I don’t know. Infinities are already a problem, anyway.
Would you say that there are true practical dilemmas? Is there ever a situation where, knowing everything you could know about a decision, there isn’t a better choice?
If I know there isn’t a better choice, I just follow my decision. Duh. (Having to choose between losing $500 and losing $490 is equivalent to losing $500 and then having to choose between gaining nothing and gaining $10: yes, the loss will sadden me, but that had better have no effect on my decision, and if it does it’s because of emotional hang-ups I’d rather not have. And replacing dollars with utilons wouldn’t change much.)
Depends on what you mean by “undecidable”. There may be situations in which it’s hard in practice to decide whether it’s better to do A or to do B, sure, but in principle either A is better, B is better, or the choice doesn’t matter.
So, for example, suppose a situation where a (true) moral system demands both A and B, yet in this situation A and B are incomposssible. Or it forbids both A and B, yet in this situation doing neither is impossible. Those examples have a pretty deontological air to them...could we come up with examples of such dilemmas within consequentialism?
could we come up with examples of such dilemmas within consequentialism?
Well, the consequentialist version of a situation that demands A and B is one in which A and B provide equally positive expected consequences and no other option provides consequences that are as good. If A and B are incompossible, I suppose we can call this a moral dilemma if we like.
And, sure, consequentialism provides no tools for choosing between A and B, it merely endorses (A OR B). Which makes it undecidable using just consequentialism.
There are a number of mechanisms for resolving the dilemma that are compatible with a consequentialist perspective, though (e.g., picking one at random).
So, for example, suppose a situation where a (true) moral system demands both A and B, yet in this situation A and B are incomposssible. Or it forbids both A and B, yet in this situation doing neither is impossible.
Then, either the demand/forbiddance is not absolute or the moral system is broken.
How are you defining morality? If we use a shorthand definition that morality is a system that guides proper human action, then any “true moral dilemmas” would be a critique of whatever moral system failed to provide an answer, not proof that “true moral dilemmas” existed.
We have to make some choice. If a moral system stops giving us any useful guidance when faced with sufficiently difficult problems, that simply indicates a problem with the moral system.
ETA: For example, if I have completely strict sense of ethics based upon deontology, I may feel an absolute prohibition on lying and an absolute prohibition on allowing humans to die. That would create an moral dilemma for that system in the classical case of Nazis seeking Jews that I’m hiding in my house. So I’d have to switch to a different ethical system. If I switched to a system of deontology with a value hierarchy, I could conclude that human life has a higher value than telling the truth to governmental authorities under the circumstances and then decide to lie, solving the dilemma.
I strongly suspect that all true moral dilemmas are artifacts of the limitations of distinct moral systems, not morality per se. Since I am skeptical of moral realism, that is all the more the case; if morality can’t tell us how to act, it’s literally useless. We have to have some process for deciding on our actions.
I’m not: I anticipate that your answer to my question will vary on the basis of what you understand morality to be.
If we use a shorthand definition that morality is a system that guides proper human action, then any “true moral dilemmas” would be a critique of whatever moral system failed to provide an answer, not proof that “true moral dilemmas” existed.
Would it? It doesn’t follow from that definition that dilemmas are impossible. This:
I strongly suspect that all true moral dilemmas are artifacts of the limitations of distinct moral systems, not morality per se.
I’m really confused about the point of this discussion.
The simple answer is: either a moral system cares whether you do action A or action B, preferring one to the other, or it doesn’t. If it does, then the answer to the dilemma is that you should do the action your moral system prefers. If it doesn’t, then you can do either one.
Obviously this simple answer isn’t good enough for you, but why not?
The tricky task is to distinguish between those 3 cases—and to find general rules which can do this in every situation in a unique way, and represent your concept of morality at the same time.
Well, yes, finding a simple description of morality is hard. But you seem to be asking if there’s a possibility that it’s in principle impossible to distinguish between these 3 cases for some situation—and this is what you call a “true moral dilemma”—and I don’t see how the idea of that is coherent.
Most dilemmas are situations where similar-looking moral guidelines lead to different decisions, or situations where common moral rules are inconsistent or not well-defined. In those cases, it is hard to decide whether the moral system prefers one action or the other, or does not care.
It seems to me to omit a (maybe impossible?) possibility: for example that a moral system cares about whether you do A or B in the sense that it forbids both A and B, and yet ~(A v B) is impossible. My question was just whether or not cases like these were possible, and why or why not.
I admit that I hadn’t thought of moral systems as forbidding options, only as ranking them, in which case that doesn’t come up.
If your morality does have absolute rules like that, there isn’t any reason why those rules wouldn’t come in conflict. But even then, I wouldn’t say “this is a true moral dilemma” so much as “the moral system is self-contradictory”. Not that this is a great help to someone who does discover this about themselves.
Ideally, though, you’d only have one truly absolute rule, and a ranking between the rules, Laws of Robotics style.
But even then, I wouldn’t say “this is a true moral dilemma” so much as “the moral system is self-contradictory”.
So, Kant for example thought that such moral conflicts were impossible, and he would have agreed with you that no moral theory can be both true, and allow for moral conflicts. But it’s not obvious to me that the inference from ‘allows for moral conflict’ to ‘is a false moral theory’ is valid. I don’t have some axe to grind here, I was just curious if anyone had an argument defending that move (or attacking it for that matter).
I don’t think that it means it’s a false moral theory, just an incompletely defined one. In cases where it doesn’t tell you what to do (or, equivalently, tells you that both options are wrong), it’s useless, and a moral theory that did tell you what to do in those cases would be better.
But unless you get into self-referencing moral problems, no. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I suspect that you can find ones among decisions that affect your decision algorithm and decisions where your decision-making algorithm affects the possible outcomes. Probably like Newcomb’s problem, only twistier.
I would make the more limited claim that the existence of irreconcilable moral conflicts is evidence for moral anti-realism.
In short, if you have a decision process (aka moral system) that can’t resolve a particular problem that is strictly within its scope, you don’t really have a moral system.
Which makes figuring out what we mean by moral change / moral progress incredibly difficult.
In short, if you have a decision process (aka moral system) that can’t resolve a particular problem that is strictly within its scope, you don’t really have a moral system.
This seems to be to be a rephrasing and clarifying of your original claim, which I read as saying something like ‘no true moral theory can allow moral conflicts’. But it’s not yet an argument for this claim.
I’m suddenly concerned that we’re arguing over a definition. It’s very possible to construct a decision procedure that tells one how to decide some, but not all moral questions. It might be that this is the best a moral decision procedure can do. Is it clearer to avoid using the label “moral system” for such a decision procedure?
This is a distraction from my main point, which was that asserting our morality changes when our economic resources change is an atypical way of using the label “morality.”
Is it clearer to avoid using the label “moral system” for such a decision procedure?
No, but if I understand what you’ve said, a true moral theory can allow for moral conflict, just because there are moral questions it cannot decide (the fact that you called them ‘moral questions’ leads me to think you think that these questions are moral ones even if a true moral theory can’t decide them).
This is a distraction from my main point, which was that asserting our morality changes when our economic resources change is an atypical way of using the label “morality.”
You’re certainly right, this isn’t relevant to your main point. I was just interested in what I took to be the claim that moral conflicts (i.e. moral problems that are undecidable in a true moral theory) are impossible:
If we have four people on a life boat and food for three, morality must provide a mechanism for deciding who gets the food.
This is a distraction from you main point in at least one other sense: this claim is orthogonal to the claim that morality is not relative to economic conditions.
If we have four people on a life boat and food for three, morality must provide a mechanism for deciding who gets the food. This is a distraction from you main point in at least one other sense: this claim is orthogonal to the claim that morality is not relative to economic conditions.
Yes, you correct that this was not an argument, simply my attempt to gesture at what I meant by the label “morality.” The general issue is that human societies are not rigorous about the use of the label morality. I like my usage because I think it is neutral and specific in meta-ethical disputes like the one we are having. For example, moral realists must determine whether they think “incomplete” moral systems can exist.
But beyond that, I should bow out, because I’m an anti-realist and this debate is between schools of moral realists.
Rephrasing the original question: if we can anticipate the guiding principles underlying the morality of the future, ought we apply those principles to our current circumstances to make decisions, supposing they are different?
Though you seem to be implicitly assuming that the guiding principles don’t change, merely the decisions, and those changed decisions are due to the closest implementable approximation of our guiding principles varying over time based on economic change. (Did I understand that right?)
Pretty much. Though it feels totally different from the inside. Athens could not have thrived without slave labor, and so you find folks arguing that slavery is moral, not just necessary. Since you can’t say “Action A is immoral but economically necessary, so we shall A” you instead say “Action A is moral, here are some great arguments to that effect!”
And when we have enough money, we can even invent new things to be upset about, like vegetable rights.
On your view, is there any attempt at internal coherence?
For example, given an X such that X is equally practical (economically) in an Athenian and post-Athenian economy, and where both Athenians and moderns would agree that X is more “consistent with” slavery than non-slavery, would you expect Athenians to endorse X and moderns to reject it, or would you expect other (non-economic) factors, perhaps random noise, to predominate? (Or some third option?)
I can’t think of a concrete example that doesn’t introduce derailing specifics. Let me try a different question that gets at something similar: do you think that all choices a society makes that it describes as “moral” are economic choices in the sense you describe here, or just that some of them are?
Edit: whoops! got TimS and thomblake confused.
Um.
Unfortunately, that changes nothing of consequence: I still can’t think of a concrete example that doesn’t derail. But my followup question is not actually directed to Tim. Or, rather, ought not have been.
Probably a good counterexample would be the right for certain groups to work any job they’re qualified for, for example women or people with disabilities. Generally, those changes were profitable and would have been at any time society accepted it.
I don’t understand the position you are arguing and I really want to. Either illusion of transparency or I’m an idiot. And TheOtherDave appears to understand you. :(
I’m not really arguing for a position—the grandparent was a counterexample to the general principle I had proposed upthread, since the change was both good and an immediate economic benefit, and it took a very long time to be adopted.
(nods) Yup, that’s one example I was considering, but discarded as too potentially noisy.
But, OK, now that we’re here… if we can agree for the sake of comity that giving women the civil right to work any job would have been economically practical for Athenians, and that they nevertheless didn’t do so, presumably due to some other non-economic factors… I guess my question is, would you find it inconsistent, in that case, to find Athenians arguing that doing so would be immoral?
What is progress with respect to either? Could you possibly mean that moral states—the moral conditions of a society—follow from the economic state—the condition and system of economy. I do find it hard to see a clear, unbiased definition of moral or economic progress.
Moral progress is a trend or change for the better in the morality of members of a society. For example, when the United States went from widespread acceptance of slavery to widespread rejection of slavery, that was moral progress on most views of morality.
Economic progress is a trend or change that results in increased wealth for a society.
In general, widespread acceptance of a moral principle, like our views on slavery, animal rights, vegetable rights, and universal minimum income, only comes after we can afford it.
I think he’s trying to say that having resources is a prerequisite to spending them on moral things like universal pay, so we need to pursue wealth if we want to pursue morality. Technically, economic progress is more of a prerequisite to moral progress than a sufficient cause though, as economic progress can also result in bad moral outcomes depending on what we do with our wealth.
What is moral progress? - Is having a society with a vast disparity between rich and poor where the poor support the rich through the resource of their labor considered morally progressed from a more egalitarian tribal state? Is the progress of the empire to a point of collapse and the start of some new empire considered moral progress?
What is economic progress? - Is having a society with a vast disparity between rich and poor where the poor support the rich through the resource of their labor considered morally progressed from the primitive hunter-gatherer society where everyone had more free time considered economic progress? Is the progress of the empire to a point where the disparity in wealth incites revolution or causes collapse considered economic progress?
The points you raise are not responsive to the points that either he or I made.
If it increases total aggregate utility. Tribes were small, there weren’t very many people. I’m also not sure how happy most tribes were. Additionally, bad moral societies might be necessary to transition to awesome ones.
You conflate moral and economic progress in your second paragraph.
A financial system which collapses probably isn’t too healthy. It still might have improved things overall through its pre-collapse operations though.
My first reaction is to want to say that economic progress is an increase in purchasing power. However, purchasing power is measured with reference to the utility of goods. That would be fine as a solution, except that those definitions would mean that it would be literally impossible for an increase in economic progress to be bad on utilitarian grounds. That’s not what “economic progress” is generally taken to mean, so I won’t use that definition.
Instead, I’ll say that economic progress is an increase in the ability to produce goods, whether those goods are good or bad. This increase can be either numerical or qualitative, I don’t care. Now, it might not be possible to quantify this precisely, but that’s not necessary to determine that economic progress occurs. Clearly, we are now farther economically progressed than we were in the Dark Ages.
Moral progress would be measured depending on the moral theory you’re utilizing. I would use a broad sort of egoism, personally, but most people here would use utilitarianism.
With an egoist framework, you could keep track of how happy or sad you were directly. You could also measure the prevalence of factors that tend to make you happy and then subtract the prevalence of factors that tend to make you sad (while weighting for relative amounts of happiness and sadness, of course), in order to get a more objective account of your own happiness.
With a utilitarian framework, you would measure the prevalence of things that tend to make all people happy, and then subtract the prevalence of things that tend to make all people sad. If there was an increase in the number of happy people, then that would mean moral progress in the eyes of a utilitarian.
You make no argument. You merely ask a question. If you have a general counterargument or want to refute the specifics of any of my points, feel free. So far, you haven’t done anything like that. Also, although it might not be possible to quantify economic or moral progress precisely, we can probably do it well enough for most practical purposes. I don’t understand the purpose of the points you’re trying to raise here.
I think he’s trying to say …. we need to pursue wealth if we want to pursue morality. …. economic progress can also result in bad moral outcomes depending on what we do with our wealth.
You do not like the questions, the Socratic? Ok, I asserted the basis of the argument and the point of the questions:
A clear, unbiased definition of moral or economic progress does not exist.
You present models for deciding both. There exists models where economic progress varies inversely with moral progress, such as possible outcomes from the utilitarian perspective that are covered in ethics 101 at most colleges, and the manifest reality of a system where economic progress has been used for justifying an abundance of atrocities. There also exist models in either category which define progress in entirely different directions and so any statement of progress is inherently biased.
There is a link between economic states/systems and moral conditions, and it appeared that the author of the statement: “Moral progress proceeds from economic progress.” may have been oversimplifying the issue to a point of of making it unintelligible.
You mentioned wealth which implies an inherent bias also. I can personally assert a different version of wealth which excludes much of what most people consider wealth. If most people think wealth includes assets like cash or gold which I see as having an immoral nature and so their idea of accumulating wealth is immoral in my pov. (I do not include a lengthy moral case, but rather assert such a case exists). So if you see progress and wealth as interrelated then I would ask for a definition of wealth?
You also assert that economic progress is an increased ability to produce goods. I assert that there are many modes of production of which the current industrial mode finds value in quantity, as you state is the measure. Two biases arise:
1 - The bias inherent to the mode: quantity is not the only measure of progress. Competing values include quality in aesthetics, ergonomics, environmental impact, functionality, modular in use (consider open source values). I do not think having more stuff is a sign of economic progress and I am not alone in finding that the measure you have asserted says nothing of “progress”—you of course argue differently and thus we can say one measure or another of progress may differ and are thus inherently biased.
2- What mode of production is more progressed? I do not think industrialization is progress. I see many flaws in the results. Too much damage from that mode imho. I am not here to argue that position but rather to assert it exists.
Is my point about the bias inherent in describing progress clear, or do you think that there exists some definition we all agree upon as to what progress in any area is?
You say that economic production and moral progress aren’t the same. I have already said the same thing; I have already said that increased economic production might lead to morally wrong outcomes depending on how those products end up being used.
You can assert a different definition of wealth if you want, sure. I don’t understand what argument this is supposed to be responsive to. There’s a common understanding of wealth and just because different people define wealth differently, that wouldn’t invalidate my point. Having resources is key to investing them, investing resources is key to doing moral things.
You say that quantity isn’t the sole realm of value. I think that’s true. But if you take the quantity of goods and multiply them by the quality of goods (that is, the utility of the goods, like I mentioned before) then that is a sufficient definition of total economic value.
The mode of production that is most progressed is the one which produces the most.
If we had eight-hour workdays a century ago, we wouldn’t have been able to support the standard of living expected a century ago. I’m not sure we could have even supported living. The same applies to full unemployment. We may someday reach a point where we are productive enough that we can accomplish all we need when we just do it for fun, but if we try that now, we’ll all starve.
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford’s productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.
The quote seemed to imply we didn’t have them a century ago. Just use two centuries or however long.
My point is that we didn’t stop working as long because we realized it was a good idea. We did because it became a good idea. What we consider normal now is something we could not have instituted a century ago, and attempting to institute now what what will be normal a century from now would be a bad idea.
So, accepting the premise that the ability to support “full unemployment” (aka, people working for reasons other than money) is something that increases over time, and it can’t be supported until the point is reached where it can be supported… how would we recognize when that point has been reached?
If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
The question is, can we? Does anyone happen to have any empirical data about how good, for example, Greco-Romans were at predicting the moral views of the Middle Ages?
Additionally, is merely sounding “like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century” really a strong enough justification for us to radically alter our political and economic systems? If I had to guess, I’d predict that Kreider already believes divorcing income from work to be a good idea, for reasons that may or may not be rational, and is merely appealing to futurism to justify his bottom line.
-- Tim Kreider
The interesting part is the phrase “which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays.” If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
Not if it’s actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn’t feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.
Lack of technology was not the reason condoms weren’t as widely available in 1912.
Right idea, not a great example. People used to have lots more kids then now, most dying in childhood. Majority of women of childbearing age (gay or straight) were married and having children as often as their body allowed, so promiscuity would not have changed much. Maybe a minor correction for male infertility and sexual boredom in a standard marriage.
You seem to have rather a different idea of what I meant by “2012 standards”. Even now we do not really approve of married people sleeping around. We do, however, approve of people not getting married until age 25 or 30 or so, but sleeping with whoever they like before that. Try that pattern without contraception.
You might. I don’t. This is most probably a cultural difference. There are people in the world to day who see nothing wrong with having multiple wives, given the ability to support them (example: Jacob Zuma)
Strong norms against promiscuity out of wedlock still made sense though, since having lots of children without a committed partner to help care for them would usually have been impractical.
Not if they were gay.
Then they’d just be dead, or imprisoned.
We’re talking about morality that is based around technology. There is no technological advance that allows us to not criminalize homosexuality now where we couldn’t have in the past.
Naming three:
Condoms.
Widespread circumcision.
Antibiotics.
What?
Didn’t the Jews have that back in the years BC? It’s sort of cultural, but it’s been around for a while in some cultures...
Condoms may be older than you think.
I didn’t specify promiscuous homosexuality. Monogamously inclined gay people are as protected from STDs as anyone else at a comparable tech level—maybe more so among lesbians.
Neither did I, but would rather refrain from explaining in detail why I didn’t assume promiscuity.
It’s really annoying that you jumped to that conclusion, though. Further, I’m confused why the existence of some minority of a minority of the population that doesn’t satisfy the ancestor’s hypothetical matters.
Homosexuality was common/accepted/expected in many societies without leading to any negative consequences, so technology is not an enabler of morality here.
Homosexuality has certainly been present in many societies.
However, your link does not state, nor even suggest, that it did not lead to any negative consequences.
How do you envision living by this model now working?
That is, suppose I were to embrace the notion that having enough resources to live a comfortable life (where money can stand in as a proxy for other resources) is something everyone ought to be guaranteed.
What ought I do differently than I’m currently doing?
I would like to staple that question to the forehead of every political commentator who makes a living writing columns in far mode. What is it you would like us to do? If you don’t have a good answer, why are you talking? Argh.
Not if the morality you anticipate coming into favour is something you disagree with. If it’s something you agree with, it’s already yours, and predicting it is just a way of avoiding arguing for it.
If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners’ Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had “a basic human right to have enough money without having to work”, situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things—for example how much of the working people’s money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one’s basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop—the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their “basic human right income”, the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation… imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can’t find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working and being able to spend their time in other ways. I don’t think we’re even close to that point. I can imagine societies in a hundred years that are at that point (I have no idea whether they’ll happen or not), but it would be foolish for them to condemn our lack of such a system now since we don’t have the ability to support it, just as it would be foolish for us to condemn people in earlier and less well-off times for not having welfare systems as encompassing as ours.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles. The poorest societies cannot afford the “full unemployment” discussed in the quote, and neither can even the richest of modern societies right now (they could certainly come closer than the present, but I don’t think any modern economy could survive the implementation of such a system in the present).
I do agree, however, about it being a solid goal, at least for basic amenities.
To avoid having slaves, the poorest society could decide to kill all war captives, and to let starve to death all people unable to pay their debts. Yes, this would avoid legal discrimination. Is it therefore a morally preferable solution?
Since when has the institution of slavery been a charitable one? Historically, slave-owners have payed immense costs, directly and indirectly, for the privilege of owning slaves, and done so knowingly and willingly. It is human nature to derive pleasure from holding power over others.
I’m not sure about those direct costs. According to my references, a male slave in 10th-century Scandinavia cost about as much as a horse, a female slave about two-thirds as much; that’s a pretty good chunk of change but it doesn’t seem obviously out of line with the value of labor after externalities. I don’t have figures offhand for any other slaveholding cultures, but the impression I get is that the pure exercise of power was not the main determinant of value in most, if not all, of them,
I seem to recall someone arguing that, in combat between iron age tribes, it was basically a choice between massacre and slavery—if you did neither, they would wreck revenge upon your tribe further down the line.
This wouldn’t be charity, as I guess the winners did benefit from having a source of labour that didn’t need to be compensated at the market rate, but it would be a case where slavery was beneficial to the victims.
(I think Carlyle was wrong about other supposed cases of slavery proving beneficial for the victims)
One could argue that happened in Ancient Rome, with prisoners fo war as the main source of slaves. Also they/their descendants arguably benefited in the long term from being part of the larger more sophisticated culture, if they survived that long.
In poor societies that permit slavery, a man might be willing to sell himself into slavery. He gets food and lodging, possibly for his family as well as himself; his new purchaser gets a whole lot of labour. There’s a certain loss of status, but a person might well be willing to live with that in order to avoid starvation.
Elections can take quite a bit of resources to run when you have a large voting population...
No, politicians can afford to spend lots of money on them. The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
IAWYC, but the claims that most of the economic costs of elections are in political spending, and most of the costs of actually running elections are in voting machines are both probably wrong. (Public data is terrible, so I’m crudely extrapolating all of this from local to national levels.)
The opportunity costs of voting alone dwarf spending on election campaigns. Assuming that all states have the same share of GDP, that people who don’t a full-state holiday to vote take an hour off to vote, that people work 260 days a year and 8 hours a day, and that nobody in the holiday states do work, then we get:
Political spending: 5.3 billion USD Opportunity costs of elections: 15 trillion USD (US GDP) (9/50 (states with voting holidays) 1⁄260 (percentage of work-time lost) + 41⁄50 (states without holidays) 1⁄60 1⁄8 (percentage of work-time lost)) ≈ 16 billion USD
Extrapolating from New York City figures, election machines cost ~1.9 billion nationwide. (50 million for a population ~38 times smaller than the total US population.) and extrapolating Oakland County’s 650,000 USD cost across the US’s 3143 counties, direct costs are just over 2 billion USD. (This is for a single election; however, some states have had as many as 5 elections in a single year. The cost of the voting machines can be amortized over multiple elections in multiple years.)
(If you add together the opportunity costs for holding one general and one non-general election a year (no state holidays; around ~7 billion USD), plus the costs of actually running them, plus half the cost of the campaign money, the total cost/election seems to be around 30 billion USD, or ~0.002% of the US’s GDP.)
Correction accepted. Still seems like something a poor society could afford, though, since labor and opportunity would also cost less. I understand that lots of poor societies do.
What? If anything I’d assume them to be more expensive before computers were introduced. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something).
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/core/crb/crb03
“Low electoral costs, approximately $1 to $3 per elector, tend to manifest in countries with longer electoral experience”
That’s a somewhat confusing comment. If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
Is that that little? I think many fewer people would vote if they had to pay $3 out of their own pocket in order to do so.
A law compelling people to do stuff would be very unpopular, unless they get adequate compensation. Not paying them much would just mean they would feign illness or something. (If they didn’t select people by lot, the people doing that would be the ones applying for that job, who would presumably like it more than the rest of the population and hence be willing to do that for less.)
Well perhaps fewer people would vote if they had to pay a single cent out of their own pocket—would that mean that 0.01$ isn’t little either?
How much are these Italian ballot-counters being paid? Can we quantify this?
IIRC, something like €150 per election. I’ll look for the actual figure.
Why so? Usually when people can’t refuse to do a job, they’re paid little, not a lot.
Like jury duty. Yeah. Why would it be different in Greece?
In the UK, the counters are volunteers.
Well, yes. Almost tautologically so, I should think.
The tricky part is working out when humans are better off.
If you are a bayesian, you should think about how much evidence your imagination constitutes.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person gains little or no total productivity by working over 8 hour per day. Imagine, moreover, that in this civilization, working 10 hours a day doubles your risk of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in this civilization. Finally, imagine that, in this civilization, a common way for workers to signal their dedication to their jobs is by staying at work long hours, regardless of the harm it does both to their company and themselves.
In this civilization, a law preventing individuals from working over 8 hours per day is a tremendous social good.
Work hour skepticism leaves out the question of the cost of mistakes. It’s one thing to have a higher proportion of defective widgets on an assembly line (though even that can matter, especially if you want a reputation for high quality products), another if the serious injury rate goes up, and a third if you end up with the Exxon Valdez.
You mean “incentives to fully report your income”, right? ;-) (There are countries where a sizeable fraction of the economy is underground. I come from one.)
The same they give today. Students not interested in studying mostly just cheat.
Well, if your society isn’t rich enough, you just do what you can. (And a lot of work really isn’t all that important; would it be that big of a disaster if your local store carried fewer kinds of cosmetics, or if your local restaurant had trouble hiring waiters?)
See also.
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it “could” be worse merely answers the question “can I justify holding this belief” rather than the question “what belief should I hold”. The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously… or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.
Prisoners’ dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.
The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.
I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.
As I wrote, it depends on many things. I can imagine a situation where this would work; I can also imagine a situation where it would not. As I also wrote, I can imagine such system functioning well if people who don’t work get enough money to survive, but people who do work get significantly more.
Data point: In Slovakia many uneducated people don’t work, because it wouldn’t make economical sense for them. Their wage, minus traveling expenses, would be only a little more, in some cases even less than their welfare. What’s the point of spending 8 hours in work if in result you have less money? They cannot get higher wages, because they are uneducated and unskilled; and in Slovakia even educated people get relatively little money. The welfare cannot be lowered, because the voters on the left would not allow it. The social pressure stops working if too many people in the same town are doing this; they provide moral support for each other. We have villages where unemployment is over 80% and people have already accommodated to this; after a decade of such life, even if you offer them a work with a decent wage, they will not take it, because it would mean walking away from their social circle.
This would not happen in a sane society, but it does happen in the real life. Other European countries seem to fare better in this aspect, but I can imagine the same thing happening there in a generation or two. A generation ago most people would probably not predict this situation in Slovakia.
I also can’t imagine the social pressure to work on the “generation Facebook”. If someone spends most of their day on Facebook or playing online multiplayer games, who exactly is going to socially press them? Their friends? Most of them live the same way. Their parents? The conflict between generations is not the same thing as peer pressure. And the “money without work is a basic human right” meme also does not help.
It could work in a country where the difference between average wage (even for a less educated and less skilled people) is much more than one needs to survive. But it can work long-term only if the amount of “basic human right money” does not grow faster than the average wage. -- OK, finally here is something that can be measured: what is the relative increase in wages vs welfares in western European countries in recent decades; optionally, extrapolate these numbers to estimate how long the system can survive.
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of “free money” welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the “detached from work” principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.
I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in terms of evidence or reasoned probability estimates over narrative/untested model. I’m taking a hint from feedback that I likely still communicated this poorly, and will revise my approach in future.
Back on the topic of taking these ideas as principles, perhaps more practical near-term goals which provide a subset of the guarantee, like detaching availability of resources basic survival from the availability of work, might be more probably achievable. There are a wider range of options available for implementing these ideas, and of incentives/disincentives to avoid long-term use. An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food. My rough estimate is that it seems likely that something in this space could be designed to operate sustainably with only the technology we have now.
On the side, relating to generation Facebook, my model of the typical 16-22 year old today would predict that they’d like to be able to buy an iPad, go to movies, afford alcohol, drive a nice car, go on holidays, and eventually get most of the same goals previous generations sought, and that their friends will also want these things. At younger ages, I agree that parental pressure wouldn’t be typically classified as “peer pressure”, but I still think it likely to provide significant incentive to do school work; the parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations. My model is only based on my personal experience, so mostly this is an example of anecdotal data leading to different untested models.
I have heard this idea proposed, and many people object against it saying that it would take away the dignity of those people. In other words, some people seem to think that “basic human rights” include not just things necessary for survival, but also some luxury and perhaps some status items (which then obviously stop being status items, if everyone has them).
In theory, yes. However, as a former teacher I have seen parents completely fail at this.
Data point: A mother came to school and asked me to tell her 16 year old daughter, my student, to not spend all her free time at internet. I did not understand WTF she wanted. She explained to me that as a computer science teacher her daughter will probably regard me an authority about computers, so if I ask her to not use the computer all day long, she wil respect me. This was her last hope, because as a mother she could not convince her daughter to go away from the computer.
To me this seemed completely insane. First, the teachers in given school were never treated as authorities on anything; they were usually treated like shit both by students and school administration (a month later I left that school). Second, as a teacher I have zero influence on what my students do outside school, she as a mother is there; she has many possible ways to stop her daughter from interneting… for instance to forcibly turn off the computer, or just hide the computer somewhere while her daughter is at school. But she should have started doing something before her daughter turned 16. If she does not know that, she is clearly unqualified to have children; but there is no law against that.
OK, this was an extreme example, but during my 4-years teaching carreer I have seen or heard from colleagues about many really fucked up parents; and those people were middle and higher social class. This leads me to very pesimistic views, not shared by people who don’t have the same experience and are more free to rationalize this away. I think that if you need parents to do something non-trivial, you should expect at least 20% of population to fail at that. Let’s suppose that in each generation 20% of parents fail to pressure their children to work, in a world where work is not necessary for decent living. What happens in 5 generations?
Personal experience can give different amounts of evidence. If the experience is “me, my family, and people I willingly associate with”, that one is most biased. When you have some kind of job where you interact with people you didn’t choose, that one is a bit better—it is still biased by your personal evaluation, geography, perhaps social class… but at least you are more exposed to people you would otherwise avoid. (For example I usually avoid impolite people from dysfunctional families. As a teacher, they are just there and I have to deal with them. Then I notice that they exist and are actually pretty frequent. When I go outside of the school, they again disappear somehow.)
Of course, I would still prefer having a statistic; I am just not sure if there are available statistics on how many parents completely fail at different tasks, such as not letting their children spend all free time with a computer.
One of these things is not like the others.
Yes, no state has ever implemented truly universal suffrage (among minors).
Or non-humans.
That’s more technically problematic; how could non-human animals vote in the existing kinds of elections? Human intermediaries would have to decide what was best for the non-humans they represented. Different human political factions would support different positions as being best for the non-humans, and fight over that.
(This of course doesn’t apply to future possible non-human sentients like AI, uploads, uplifted animals, modified humans, etc.)
Lead them into the voting booth, see which lever they press.
The same is true of some minors. (Though, of course, not all.)
In Jasay’s terminology, the first is a liberty (a relation between a person and an act) and the rest are rights {relations between two or more persons (at least one rightholder and one obligor) and an act}. I find this distnction useful for thinking more clearly about these kinds of topics. Your mileage may vary.
I was actually referring to the the third being what I might call an anti-liberty, i.e., you aren’t allowed to work more than eight-hours a day, and the fact that is most definitely not enforced nor widely considered a human right.
How is that different from pointing out that you’re not allowed to sell yourself into slavery (not even partially, as in signing a contract to work for ten years and not being able to legally break it), or that you’re not allowed to sell your vote?
I’d say each of the three can be said to be unlike the others:
abolition falls under Liberty
universal suffrage falls under Equality
eight-hour workdays falls under Solidarity
So “all of these things are not like the others”.
I thought eight-hours workdays were about employers not being allowed to demand that employees work more than eight hours a day; I didn’t know you weren’t technically allowed to do that at all even if you’re OK with it.
You are allowed to work more than eight hours per day. It’s just that in many industries, employers must pay you overtime if you do so.
Even if employers were prohibited from using “willingness to work more than 8 hours per day” as a condition for employment, long workdays would probably soon become the norm.
Thus a more feasible way to limit workdays is to constrain employees rather than employers.
To see why, assume that without any restrictions on workday length, workers supply more than 8 hours. Let’s say, without loss of generality, that they supply 10. (In other words, the equilibrium quantity supplied is ten.)
If employers can’t demand the equilibrium quantity, but they’re still willing to pay to get it, then employees will have the incentive to supply it. In their competition for jobs (finding them and keeping them), employees will be supply labor up until the equilibrium quantity, regardless of whether the bosses demand it.
Working more looks good. Everyone knows that; you don’t need your boss to tell you. So if there’s competition for your spot or for a spot that you want, it would serve you well to work more.
So if your goal is to prevent ten-hour days, you’d better stop people from supplying them.
At least, this makes sense to me. But I’m no microeconomist. Perhaps we have one on LW who can state this more clearly (or who can correct any mistakes I’ve made).
See Lochner v. New York. Within the last five years there was a French strike (riot? don’t remember exactly) over a law that would limit the workweek of bakers, which would have the impact of driving small bakeries out of business, since they would need to employ (and pay benefits on) 2 bakers rather than just 1. Perhaps a French LWer remembers more details?
It would be very hard to distinguish when people were doing it because they wanted to, and when employers were demanding it. Maybe some employees are working that extra time, but one isn’t. The one that isn’t happens to be fired later on, for unrelated reasons. How do you determine that worker’s unwillingness to work extra hours is not one of the reasons they were fired? Whether it is or not, that happening will likely encourage workers to go beyond the eight hours, because the last one that didn’t got fired, and a relationship will be drawn whether there is one or not.
It’s not like you can fire employees on a whim: the “unrelated reasons” have to be substantial ones, and it’s not clear you can find ones for any employee you want to fire. (Otherwise, you could use such a mechanism to de facto compel your employees to do pretty much anything you want.)
Also, even if you somehow did manage to de facto demand workers to work ten hours a day, if you have to pay hours beyond the eighth as overtime (with a hourly wage substantially higher than the regular one), then it’s cheaper for you to hire ten people eight hours a day each than eight people ten hours a day.
Under American law, you basically can fire an employee “on a whim” as long as it isn’t a prohibited reason.
Only if they can’t get another job.
That assumption isn’t that far-fetched. Also, the same applies to doing that to compel them to work extra time (or am I missing something?).
If we can afford it.
Moral progress proceeds from economic progress.
Morality is contextual.
If we have four people on a life boat and food for three, morality must provide a mechanism for deciding who gets the food. Suppose that decision is made, then Omega magically provides sufficient food for all—morality hasn’t changed, only the decision that morality calls for.
Technological advancement has certainly caused moral change (consider society after introduction of the Pill). But having more resources does not, in itself, change what we think is right, only what we can actually achieve.
That’s an interesting claim. Are you saying that true moral dilemmas (i.e. a situation where there is no right answer) are impossible? If so, how would you argue for that?
I think they are impossible. Morality can say “no option is right” all it wants, but we still must pick an option, unless the universe segfaults and time freezes upon encountering a dilemma. Whichever decision procedure we use to make that choice (flip a coin?) can count as part of morality.
I take it for granted that faced with a dilemma we must do something, so long as doing nothing counts as doing something. But the question is whether or not there is always a morally right answer. In cases where there isn’t, I suppose we can just pick randomly, but that doesn’t mean we’ve therefore made the right moral decision.
Are we ever damned if we do, and damned if we don’t?
When someone is in a situation like that, they lower their standard for “morally right” and try again. Functional societies avoid putting people in those situations because it’s hard to raise that standard back to it’s previous level.
Well, if all available options are indeed morally wrong, we can still try to see if any are less wrong than others.
Right, but choosing the lesser of two evils is simple enough. That’s not the kind of dilemma I’m talking about. I’m asking whether or not there are wholly undecidable moral problems. Choosing between one evil and a lesser evil is no more difficult than choosing between an evil and a good.
But if you’re saying that in any hypothetical choice, we could always find something significant and decisive, then this is good evidence for the impossibility of moral dilemmas.
It’s hard to say, really.
Suppose we define a “moral dilemma for system X” as a situation in which, under system X, all possible actions are forbidden.
Consider the systems that say “Actions that maximize this (unbounded) utility function are permissible, all others are forbidden.” Then the situation “Name a positive integer, and you get that much utility” is a moral dilemma for those systems; there is no utility maximizing action, so all actions are forbidden and the system cracks. It doesn’t help much if we require the utility function to be bounded; it’s still vulnerable to situations like “Name a real number less than 30, and you get that much utility” because there isn’t a largest real number less than 30. The only way to get around this kind of attack by restricting the utility function is by requiring the range of the function to be a finite set. For example, if you’re a C++ program, your utility might be represented by a 32 bit unsigned integer, so when asked “How much utility do you want” you just answer “2^32 − 1” and when asked “How much utility less than 30.5 do you want” you just answer “30”.
(Ugh, that paragraph was a mess...)
That is an awesome example. I’m absolutely serious about stealing that from you (with your permission).
Do you think this presents a serious problem for utilitarian ethics? It seems like it should, though I guess this situation doesn’t come up all that often.
ETA: Here’s a thought on a reply. Given restrictions like time and knowledge of the names of large numbers, isn’t there in fact a largest number you can name? Something like Graham’s number won’t work (way too small) because you can always add one to it. But trans-finite numbers aren’t made larger by adding one. And likewise with the largest real number under thirty, maybe you can use a function to specify the number? Or if not, just say ’29.999....′ and just say nine as many times as you can before the time runs out (or until you calculate that the utility benefit reaches equilibrium with the costs of saying ‘nine’ over and over for a long time).
Transfinite cardinals aren’t, but transfinite ordinals are. And anyway transfinite cardinals can be made larger by exponentiating them.
Good point. What do you think of Chrono’s dilemma?
“Twenty-nine point nine nine nine nine …” until the effort of saying “nine” again becomes less than the corresponding utility difference. ;-)
Sure, be my guest.
Honestly, I don’t know. Infinities are already a problem, anyway.
My view is that a more meaningful question than ‘is this choice good or bad’ is ‘is this choice better or worse than other choices I could make’.
Would you say that there are true practical dilemmas? Is there ever a situation where, knowing everything you could know about a decision, there isn’t a better choice?
If I know there isn’t a better choice, I just follow my decision. Duh. (Having to choose between losing $500 and losing $490 is equivalent to losing $500 and then having to choose between gaining nothing and gaining $10: yes, the loss will sadden me, but that had better have no effect on my decision, and if it does it’s because of emotional hang-ups I’d rather not have. And replacing dollars with utilons wouldn’t change much.)
So you’re saying that there are no true moral dilemmas (no undecidable moral problems)?
Depends on what you mean by “undecidable”. There may be situations in which it’s hard in practice to decide whether it’s better to do A or to do B, sure, but in principle either A is better, B is better, or the choice doesn’t matter.
So, for example, suppose a situation where a (true) moral system demands both A and B, yet in this situation A and B are incomposssible. Or it forbids both A and B, yet in this situation doing neither is impossible. Those examples have a pretty deontological air to them...could we come up with examples of such dilemmas within consequentialism?
Well, the consequentialist version of a situation that demands A and B is one in which A and B provide equally positive expected consequences and no other option provides consequences that are as good. If A and B are incompossible, I suppose we can call this a moral dilemma if we like.
And, sure, consequentialism provides no tools for choosing between A and B, it merely endorses (A OR B). Which makes it undecidable using just consequentialism.
There are a number of mechanisms for resolving the dilemma that are compatible with a consequentialist perspective, though (e.g., picking one at random).
Thanks, that was helpful. I’d been having a hard time coming up with a consequentialist example.
Then, either the demand/forbiddance is not absolute or the moral system is broken.
How are you defining morality? If we use a shorthand definition that morality is a system that guides proper human action, then any “true moral dilemmas” would be a critique of whatever moral system failed to provide an answer, not proof that “true moral dilemmas” existed.
We have to make some choice. If a moral system stops giving us any useful guidance when faced with sufficiently difficult problems, that simply indicates a problem with the moral system.
ETA: For example, if I have completely strict sense of ethics based upon deontology, I may feel an absolute prohibition on lying and an absolute prohibition on allowing humans to die. That would create an moral dilemma for that system in the classical case of Nazis seeking Jews that I’m hiding in my house. So I’d have to switch to a different ethical system. If I switched to a system of deontology with a value hierarchy, I could conclude that human life has a higher value than telling the truth to governmental authorities under the circumstances and then decide to lie, solving the dilemma.
I strongly suspect that all true moral dilemmas are artifacts of the limitations of distinct moral systems, not morality per se. Since I am skeptical of moral realism, that is all the more the case; if morality can’t tell us how to act, it’s literally useless. We have to have some process for deciding on our actions.
I’m not: I anticipate that your answer to my question will vary on the basis of what you understand morality to be.
Would it? It doesn’t follow from that definition that dilemmas are impossible. This:
Is the claim I’m asking for an argument for.
I’m really confused about the point of this discussion.
The simple answer is: either a moral system cares whether you do action A or action B, preferring one to the other, or it doesn’t. If it does, then the answer to the dilemma is that you should do the action your moral system prefers. If it doesn’t, then you can do either one.
Obviously this simple answer isn’t good enough for you, but why not?
The tricky task is to distinguish between those 3 cases—and to find general rules which can do this in every situation in a unique way, and represent your concept of morality at the same time.
If you can do this, publish it.
Well, yes, finding a simple description of morality is hard. But you seem to be asking if there’s a possibility that it’s in principle impossible to distinguish between these 3 cases for some situation—and this is what you call a “true moral dilemma”—and I don’t see how the idea of that is coherent.
I did not call anything “true moral dilemma”.
Most dilemmas are situations where similar-looking moral guidelines lead to different decisions, or situations where common moral rules are inconsistent or not well-defined. In those cases, it is hard to decide whether the moral system prefers one action or the other, or does not care.
It seems to me to omit a (maybe impossible?) possibility: for example that a moral system cares about whether you do A or B in the sense that it forbids both A and B, and yet ~(A v B) is impossible. My question was just whether or not cases like these were possible, and why or why not.
I admit that I hadn’t thought of moral systems as forbidding options, only as ranking them, in which case that doesn’t come up.
If your morality does have absolute rules like that, there isn’t any reason why those rules wouldn’t come in conflict. But even then, I wouldn’t say “this is a true moral dilemma” so much as “the moral system is self-contradictory”. Not that this is a great help to someone who does discover this about themselves.
Ideally, though, you’d only have one truly absolute rule, and a ranking between the rules, Laws of Robotics style.
So, Kant for example thought that such moral conflicts were impossible, and he would have agreed with you that no moral theory can be both true, and allow for moral conflicts. But it’s not obvious to me that the inference from ‘allows for moral conflict’ to ‘is a false moral theory’ is valid. I don’t have some axe to grind here, I was just curious if anyone had an argument defending that move (or attacking it for that matter).
I don’t think that it means it’s a false moral theory, just an incompletely defined one. In cases where it doesn’t tell you what to do (or, equivalently, tells you that both options are wrong), it’s useless, and a moral theory that did tell you what to do in those cases would be better.
That one thing a couple years ago qualifies.
But unless you get into self-referencing moral problems, no. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I suspect that you can find ones among decisions that affect your decision algorithm and decisions where your decision-making algorithm affects the possible outcomes. Probably like Newcomb’s problem, only twistier.
(Warning: this may be basilisk territory.)
(Double-post, sorry)
There are plenty of situations where two choices are equally good or equally bad. This is called “indifference”, not “dilemma”.
Those aren’t the situations I’m talking about.
I would make the more limited claim that the existence of irreconcilable moral conflicts is evidence for moral anti-realism.
In short, if you have a decision process (aka moral system) that can’t resolve a particular problem that is strictly within its scope, you don’t really have a moral system.
Which makes figuring out what we mean by moral change / moral progress incredibly difficult.
This seems to be to be a rephrasing and clarifying of your original claim, which I read as saying something like ‘no true moral theory can allow moral conflicts’. But it’s not yet an argument for this claim.
I’m suddenly concerned that we’re arguing over a definition. It’s very possible to construct a decision procedure that tells one how to decide some, but not all moral questions. It might be that this is the best a moral decision procedure can do. Is it clearer to avoid using the label “moral system” for such a decision procedure?
This is a distraction from my main point, which was that asserting our morality changes when our economic resources change is an atypical way of using the label “morality.”
No, but if I understand what you’ve said, a true moral theory can allow for moral conflict, just because there are moral questions it cannot decide (the fact that you called them ‘moral questions’ leads me to think you think that these questions are moral ones even if a true moral theory can’t decide them).
You’re certainly right, this isn’t relevant to your main point. I was just interested in what I took to be the claim that moral conflicts (i.e. moral problems that are undecidable in a true moral theory) are impossible:
This is a distraction from you main point in at least one other sense: this claim is orthogonal to the claim that morality is not relative to economic conditions.
Yes, you correct that this was not an argument, simply my attempt to gesture at what I meant by the label “morality.” The general issue is that human societies are not rigorous about the use of the label morality. I like my usage because I think it is neutral and specific in meta-ethical disputes like the one we are having. For example, moral realists must determine whether they think “incomplete” moral systems can exist.
But beyond that, I should bow out, because I’m an anti-realist and this debate is between schools of moral realists.
Rephrasing the original question: if we can anticipate the guiding principles underlying the morality of the future, ought we apply those principles to our current circumstances to make decisions, supposing they are different?
Though you seem to be implicitly assuming that the guiding principles don’t change, merely the decisions, and those changed decisions are due to the closest implementable approximation of our guiding principles varying over time based on economic change. (Did I understand that right?)
Pretty much. Though it feels totally different from the inside. Athens could not have thrived without slave labor, and so you find folks arguing that slavery is moral, not just necessary. Since you can’t say “Action A is immoral but economically necessary, so we shall A” you instead say “Action A is moral, here are some great arguments to that effect!”
And when we have enough money, we can even invent new things to be upset about, like vegetable rights.
(nods) Got it.
On your view, is there any attempt at internal coherence?
For example, given an X such that X is equally practical (economically) in an Athenian and post-Athenian economy, and where both Athenians and moderns would agree that X is more “consistent with” slavery than non-slavery, would you expect Athenians to endorse X and moderns to reject it, or would you expect other (non-economic) factors, perhaps random noise, to predominate? (Or some third option?)
Or is such an X incoherent in the first place?
Can you give a more concrete example? I don’t understand your question.
I can’t think of a concrete example that doesn’t introduce derailing specifics.
Let me try a different question that gets at something similar: do you think that all choices a society makes that it describes as “moral” are economic choices in the sense you describe here, or just that some of them are?
Edit: whoops! got TimS and thomblake confused. Um. Unfortunately, that changes nothing of consequence: I still can’t think of a concrete example that doesn’t derail. But my followup question is not actually directed to Tim. Or, rather, ought not have been.
Probably a good counterexample would be the right for certain groups to work any job they’re qualified for, for example women or people with disabilities. Generally, those changes were profitable and would have been at any time society accepted it.
I don’t understand the position you are arguing and I really want to. Either illusion of transparency or I’m an idiot. And TheOtherDave appears to understand you. :(
I’m not really arguing for a position—the grandparent was a counterexample to the general principle I had proposed upthread, since the change was both good and an immediate economic benefit, and it took a very long time to be adopted.
(nods) Yup, that’s one example I was considering, but discarded as too potentially noisy.
But, OK, now that we’re here… if we can agree for the sake of comity that giving women the civil right to work any job would have been economically practical for Athenians, and that they nevertheless didn’t do so, presumably due to some other non-economic factors… I guess my question is, would you find it inconsistent, in that case, to find Athenians arguing that doing so would be immoral?
I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure lots of things can stand in the way of moral progress.
What is progress with respect to either? Could you possibly mean that moral states—the moral conditions of a society—follow from the economic state—the condition and system of economy. I do find it hard to see a clear, unbiased definition of moral or economic progress.
Moral progress is a trend or change for the better in the morality of members of a society. For example, when the United States went from widespread acceptance of slavery to widespread rejection of slavery, that was moral progress on most views of morality.
Economic progress is a trend or change that results in increased wealth for a society.
In general, widespread acceptance of a moral principle, like our views on slavery, animal rights, vegetable rights, and universal minimum income, only comes after we can afford it.
I think he’s trying to say that having resources is a prerequisite to spending them on moral things like universal pay, so we need to pursue wealth if we want to pursue morality. Technically, economic progress is more of a prerequisite to moral progress than a sufficient cause though, as economic progress can also result in bad moral outcomes depending on what we do with our wealth.
What is moral progress? - Is having a society with a vast disparity between rich and poor where the poor support the rich through the resource of their labor considered morally progressed from a more egalitarian tribal state? Is the progress of the empire to a point of collapse and the start of some new empire considered moral progress?
What is economic progress? - Is having a society with a vast disparity between rich and poor where the poor support the rich through the resource of their labor considered morally progressed from the primitive hunter-gatherer society where everyone had more free time considered economic progress? Is the progress of the empire to a point where the disparity in wealth incites revolution or causes collapse considered economic progress?
You’re not making arguments.
The points you raise are not responsive to the points that either he or I made.
If it increases total aggregate utility. Tribes were small, there weren’t very many people. I’m also not sure how happy most tribes were. Additionally, bad moral societies might be necessary to transition to awesome ones.
You conflate moral and economic progress in your second paragraph.
A financial system which collapses probably isn’t too healthy. It still might have improved things overall through its pre-collapse operations though.
Universal pay does not even seem possible now.
You do not answer the question and conflate the questions
How is economic progress measured—if you say the aggraegate utility please explain how that is measured.?
How is moral progress measured?
My argument is simple—the measure of either of these is based on poor heuristics.
My first reaction is to want to say that economic progress is an increase in purchasing power. However, purchasing power is measured with reference to the utility of goods. That would be fine as a solution, except that those definitions would mean that it would be literally impossible for an increase in economic progress to be bad on utilitarian grounds. That’s not what “economic progress” is generally taken to mean, so I won’t use that definition.
Instead, I’ll say that economic progress is an increase in the ability to produce goods, whether those goods are good or bad. This increase can be either numerical or qualitative, I don’t care. Now, it might not be possible to quantify this precisely, but that’s not necessary to determine that economic progress occurs. Clearly, we are now farther economically progressed than we were in the Dark Ages.
Moral progress would be measured depending on the moral theory you’re utilizing. I would use a broad sort of egoism, personally, but most people here would use utilitarianism.
With an egoist framework, you could keep track of how happy or sad you were directly. You could also measure the prevalence of factors that tend to make you happy and then subtract the prevalence of factors that tend to make you sad (while weighting for relative amounts of happiness and sadness, of course), in order to get a more objective account of your own happiness.
With a utilitarian framework, you would measure the prevalence of things that tend to make all people happy, and then subtract the prevalence of things that tend to make all people sad. If there was an increase in the number of happy people, then that would mean moral progress in the eyes of a utilitarian.
You make no argument. You merely ask a question. If you have a general counterargument or want to refute the specifics of any of my points, feel free. So far, you haven’t done anything like that. Also, although it might not be possible to quantify economic or moral progress precisely, we can probably do it well enough for most practical purposes. I don’t understand the purpose of the points you’re trying to raise here.
My original post refuted the statement:
You interjected:
You do not like the questions, the Socratic? Ok, I asserted the basis of the argument and the point of the questions:
A clear, unbiased definition of moral or economic progress does not exist.
You present models for deciding both. There exists models where economic progress varies inversely with moral progress, such as possible outcomes from the utilitarian perspective that are covered in ethics 101 at most colleges, and the manifest reality of a system where economic progress has been used for justifying an abundance of atrocities. There also exist models in either category which define progress in entirely different directions and so any statement of progress is inherently biased.
There is a link between economic states/systems and moral conditions, and it appeared that the author of the statement: “Moral progress proceeds from economic progress.” may have been oversimplifying the issue to a point of of making it unintelligible.
You mentioned wealth which implies an inherent bias also. I can personally assert a different version of wealth which excludes much of what most people consider wealth. If most people think wealth includes assets like cash or gold which I see as having an immoral nature and so their idea of accumulating wealth is immoral in my pov. (I do not include a lengthy moral case, but rather assert such a case exists). So if you see progress and wealth as interrelated then I would ask for a definition of wealth?
You also assert that economic progress is an increased ability to produce goods. I assert that there are many modes of production of which the current industrial mode finds value in quantity, as you state is the measure. Two biases arise:
1 - The bias inherent to the mode: quantity is not the only measure of progress. Competing values include quality in aesthetics, ergonomics, environmental impact, functionality, modular in use (consider open source values). I do not think having more stuff is a sign of economic progress and I am not alone in finding that the measure you have asserted says nothing of “progress”—you of course argue differently and thus we can say one measure or another of progress may differ and are thus inherently biased.
2- What mode of production is more progressed? I do not think industrialization is progress. I see many flaws in the results. Too much damage from that mode imho. I am not here to argue that position but rather to assert it exists.
Is my point about the bias inherent in describing progress clear, or do you think that there exists some definition we all agree upon as to what progress in any area is?
You say that economic production and moral progress aren’t the same. I have already said the same thing; I have already said that increased economic production might lead to morally wrong outcomes depending on how those products end up being used.
You can assert a different definition of wealth if you want, sure. I don’t understand what argument this is supposed to be responsive to. There’s a common understanding of wealth and just because different people define wealth differently, that wouldn’t invalidate my point. Having resources is key to investing them, investing resources is key to doing moral things.
You say that quantity isn’t the sole realm of value. I think that’s true. But if you take the quantity of goods and multiply them by the quality of goods (that is, the utility of the goods, like I mentioned before) then that is a sufficient definition of total economic value.
The mode of production that is most progressed is the one which produces the most.
If we had eight-hour workdays a century ago, we wouldn’t have been able to support the standard of living expected a century ago. I’m not sure we could have even supported living. The same applies to full unemployment. We may someday reach a point where we are productive enough that we can accomplish all we need when we just do it for fun, but if we try that now, we’ll all starve.
Is that true? (Technically, a century ago was 1912.)
Wikipedia on the eight-hour day:
The quote seemed to imply we didn’t have them a century ago. Just use two centuries or however long.
My point is that we didn’t stop working as long because we realized it was a good idea. We did because it became a good idea. What we consider normal now is something we could not have instituted a century ago, and attempting to institute now what what will be normal a century from now would be a bad idea.
So, accepting the premise that the ability to support “full unemployment” (aka, people working for reasons other than money) is something that increases over time, and it can’t be supported until the point is reached where it can be supported… how would we recognize when that point has been reached?
The question is, can we? Does anyone happen to have any empirical data about how good, for example, Greco-Romans were at predicting the moral views of the Middle Ages?
Additionally, is merely sounding “like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century” really a strong enough justification for us to radically alter our political and economic systems? If I had to guess, I’d predict that Kreider already believes divorcing income from work to be a good idea, for reasons that may or may not be rational, and is merely appealing to futurism to justify his bottom line.
Are you sure you can. It’s remarkably easy to make retroactive “predictions”, much harder to make actual predictions.
The way to divorce work from income is the ownership. Be an owner!
One way to divorce work from income is to own stuff.
A more popular way is to find someone else who owns stuff, then take their stuff.
That counts as work.
Not if it’s in the form of “Be poor in a country that taxes the rich to give to the poor”.
No, you just need to own enough stuff to pay workers to take even more stuff from others.
The way to divorce income from work is to pay others to do the work for you? Yes, that works.