Ok, this is quite a detailed response and I appreciate the thought that went into writing it. However, from my perspective, it raises more questions than it answers. For example, you say things like this:
…the photographer is allowed to look at you without permission … If one of the passersby had a photographic memory, that wouldn’t change the fact that they could look at you … You do not have a right to prohibit someone from photographing you and publishing a photo of you unless something else is going on...
But why not ? I’m not asking this just to be a contrarian. For example, many people believe that all of us have a fundamental right to privacy; this would imply that you do, in fact, have the right to “prohibit someone from photographing you and publishing a photo of you”. Presumably you disagree, but on what basis ?
Furthermore, you say that you
…might even pursue someone who did this to me via legal routes, which—I hope obviously—are separate from ethical condemnation.
I don’t see how that works. If you believe that a person has a right to photograph you and publish the photo without your permission; and yet you are launching a legal challenge against him for doing so; then are you not engaging in an immoral attack ? Sure, it’s not a physical attack, but it’s an attack nonetheless, and previously you stated (assuming I understood you correctly) that attacks on people who have violated no rights are immoral.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the description of why I do disagree?
If you believe that a person has a right to photograph you and publish the photo without your permission
No. This isn’t how the right is framed. They don’t have a right to do it; no one must behave in a way to protect their ability to do so; I don’t have to stand still so they can get a clear shot, I don’t have to go out in public, if I happen to own a news outlet I don’t have to give them a platform, if I acquire a device that makes me look like a smudge of static to nearby cameras I can carry it around without this being morally problematic. (Perhaps unless I’m under some sort of agreement to be visible to security cameras, or something like that.) I just don’t have the right to not be photographed. Remember that rights are overwhelmingly negative. The fact that someone commits no wrong by doing X does not imply that others commit a wrong by making X inconvenient or impossible.
(You’re also being kind of overbroad in understanding my use of the word “attack”, which was intended broadly, but not so broadly as to include “seeking legal recompense in response to an upsetting, by stipulation illegal, behavior which does not happen to constitute a violation of any intrinsic moral rights”.)
Can you tell me where I lost you in the description of why I do disagree?
You state that “you do not have a right to prohibit someone from photographing you”, but I don’t understand where this rule comes from. You expand on it in your explanation that follows, but again, I don’t fully understand your reasoning. You say:
Remember that rights are overwhelmingly negative. The fact that someone commits no wrong by doing X does not imply that others commit a wrong by making X inconvenient or impossible.
That makes sense to me, in that your rule is consistent with the rest of your system. I may even agree that it’s a good idea from a consequentialist point of view. However, I still do not understand where the rule comes from. Is photographing you qualitatively different from murdering you (which would presumably be immoral), and if so, why ? Come to think of it, why are all rights negative ?
You’re also being kind of overbroad in understanding my use of the word “attack”, which was intended broadly, but not so broadly as to include “seeking legal recompense in response to an upsetting, by stipulation illegal, behavior which does not happen to constitute a violation of any intrinsic moral rights”.
I may have misunderstood your goals. In launching a legal challenge, what do you hope to accomplish in terms of “recompense” ? Are you seeking to extract a fine from the photographer, or perhaps to restrict his freedom in some way, or both ?
Let’s say that you seek a fine, and you succeed. How is that different, morally speaking, from breaking into his house and stealing the money ? In one case you use a lockpick; in the other one you use a lawyer; but in the end you still deprive the photographer of some of his money. Why does one action count as an attack, and the other does not ?
Now that I think of it, perhaps you would consider neither action to be an attack ? Once again, I’m not entirely sure I understand your position.
Come to think of it, why are all rights negative ?
Are all rights negative? What about, say, the right to life, or the right to -not-starving-to-death?
Many people seem pretty jazzed about the idea of a “right to marriage” or a “right to insert-euphemism-for-abortion-here”, based largely on the fact that our (as in, their and my) tribe considers the policies these imply applause lights. I have no idea what Alicorn thinks of this, though.
I’m fine with that kind of right existing in the legal sense and encourage all the ones you listed. I don’t think anyone has a fundamental moral obligation to feed you or perform abortions for you or conduct a marriage ceremony for you, though you can often get them to agree to it anyway, empirically, with the use of money.
If I may, I’m curious on what basis you consider those rights a good idea? Is it just a whim? Are you worried real rights might be violated?
I’m not usually in favour of calling all these various things “rights”, since it rather confuses things—as you’re probably aware—but I must admit the “right to not-starving-to-death” sounds important.
Are you saying you would be OK with letting people starve to death? Or am I misunderstanding?
I think those rights-in-the-legal-sense are good for political and social reasons. Basically, I think they’re prudent.
I don’t think I am doing something wrong, right now, by having liquid savings while there exist charities that feed the hungry, some of whom are sufficiently food-insecure for that to make a difference to their survival. I bite the bullet if the starving person happens to be nearby: this doesn’t affect their rights, and only rights have a claim on my moral obligations. I might choose to feed a starving person. I will support political policy that seems like it will get more starving people fed. I will tend to find myself emotionally distraught on contemplating that people are starving, so I’d resent the “OK with it” description. Also, when I have children, they will have positive claims on me and I will be morally obligated to see to it that they are fed. Other than that? I don’t think we have to feed each other. It’s super-erogatory.
I think those rights-in-the-legal-sense are good for political and social reasons.
I see. And what are those reasons?
I don’t think I am doing something wrong, right now, by having liquid savings while there exist charities
Yeah, that’s a common problem with consequentialists. Obviously, we have various instincts about this and it’s both hard and dangerous to ignore them.
I bite the bullet if the starving person happens to be nearby: this doesn’t affect their rights, and only rights have a claim on my moral obligations.
I’m actually somewhat pleased to hear that, because it’s not the first time a deontologist has told me that. I was too speechless to respond, and they changed their mind before I could find out more.
I might choose to feed a starving person. I will support political policy that seems like it will get more starving people fed. I will tend to find myself emotionally distraught on contemplating that people are starving, so I’d resent the “OK with it” description.
Ah, here we go. That’s good!
You do realize that sort of thing is usually part of what’s referred to by “morality”? So leaving it out seems … incomplete.
Postscript:
I’m not sure, but it may be that there’s something causing some confusion, by the way. I’ve seen it happen before in similar discussions.
There seem to be two functions people use “morality” for—judging people, and judging actions.
Consequentialists, or at least standard-lesswrong-utilitarian-consequentialists, resolve this by not judging people, except in order to predict them—and even then, “good” or “bad” tend to be counterproductive labels for people, epistemically.
Instead, they focus entirely on judging their actions—asking, which of my options is the correct one?
But I gather you (like a lot of people) do judge people—if someone violates your moral code, that makes them an acceptable casualty in defending the rights of innocents. (Although you’re not a total virtue ethicist, who only judges people, not actions; the polar opposite of LW standard.)
I’m not really going anywhere with this, it just seems possibly relevant to the discussion at hand.
I think those rights-in-the-legal-sense are good for political and social reasons.
I see. And what are those reasons?
I’m gonna decline to discuss politics on this platform. If you really want to talk politics with me we can do it somewhere else, I guess.
I would tend to describe myself as judging actions and not people directly, though I think you can produce an assessment of a person that is based on their moral behavior and not go too far wrong given how humans work.
Oh! Oh, OK. Sorry, I just assumed those were so vague as to avoid mindkilling. Of course we shouldn’t derail this into a political debate.
I would tend to describe myself as judging actions and not people directly
In fairness, you’re clearly smart enough to disregard all the obvious mistakes where we make prisons as awful as possible (or, more likely, just resist making them better) because we Hate Criminals.
This is a more abstract idea, and much more limited. I’m not criticising it (here). Just noting that I’ve seen it cause confusion in the past, if left unnoticed.
Actually, what the heck, while I’m here I may as well criticize slightly.
This is little more than my first thought on reviewing what I think I understand as your moral system.
It’s discovered Hitler’s brain was saved all those years ago. Given a giant robot body by mad scientists, he is rapidly re-elected and repurposes the police force into stormtroopers for rounding up Jews.
You, being reasonably ethical, have some Jews hidden in your house. Since the stormtroopers have violated relevant rights (actually, they could be new on the job, but you can just tell they’re thinging about it—good enough), so their relevant right not to be lied to is waived and you tell them “no Jews hidden here!” quite cheerfully before shutting the door.
However, naturally, they know Baye’s theorem and they’ve read some of your writings, so they know you’re allowed to lie and your words aren’t evidence either way—although silence would be. So they devise a Cunning Plan.
They go around next door and talk to Mrs. Biddy, a sweet old lady who is, sadly, unaware of the recent political shift. She was always told to respect police officers and she’s not going to stop now at her age. The white-haired old grandmother comes around to repeat the question the nice men asked her to.
She’s at the door, with the two stormtroopers standing behind her grinning. What do you do?
I mean, obviously, you betray the Jews and they get dragged off to a concentration camp somewhere. Can’t lie to the innocent old lady, can’t stay silent because that’s strong Bayesian evidence too.
But you’re reasonably intelligent, you must have considered an isomorphic case when constructing this system, right? Casualties in a Just War or something? Two people manipulated into attacking the other while dressed as bears (“so the bear wont see you coming”)? Do you bite this bullet? Have I gone insane from lack of sleep? I’m going to bed.
Why are all these hypothetical people so well-versed in one oddball deontologist’s opinions? If they’re that well-read they probably know I’m half Jewish and drag me off without asking me anything.
Mrs. Biddy sounds culpably ignorant to me, anyway.
You may or may not have gone insane from lack of sleep.
In fairness, you’re clearly smart enough to disregard all the obvious mistakes where we make prisons as awful as possible (or, more likely, just resist making them better) because we Hate Criminals.
Um, the purpose of prisons is to punish criminals, so yes, prisons should be awful, not necessarily “as awful as possible”, but for sufficiently serious crimes quite possibly.
EDIT: Wait, you mean “punish” in the consequentialist sense of punishing defection, right?
Yes, but this does not imply that the current level of awfulness is optimal. It certainly does not mean we should increase the awfulness beyond the optimal level.
But if someone proposes that the current level is too high (whether on consequentialist or legal grounds), one of the arguments they will encounter is “you want to help rapists and murderers?! Why? Those bastards deserve it.”
(The consequentialist argument for, say, the current state of US prisons is of course undercut by the existence of other countries with much less awful prisons.)
The consequentialist argument for, say, the current state of US prisons is of course undercut by the existence of other countries with much less awful prisons.
If you want to look at optimal awfulness, there is a much better way to test, look at the crime rate. The currant crime rate is extremely high by historic standards. Furthermore, the recent drop from its peak in the 1970′s has accomplished by basically turning major cities into Orwellian surveillance states. I think increasing the awfulness of prisons would be a better solution, at the very least in puts the burden on the criminals rather than the innocent.
That really isn’t a good argument for the current state of US prisons, is it? Clearly, even openly allowing institutional rape has failed to help; yet other, less harsh countries have not seen soaring crime rates by comparison.
I’ve seen studies suggesting that certainty of punishment is much more important for determining behavior than the extremity of it—it’s more a question of a strong justice system, a respect for authority (or fear, one might say), than people performing expected utility calculation in their heads.
It is known that lots of people enjoy inflicting pain on the helpless. Anyone who punishes prisoners because they enjoy doing so is in a conflict of interest, at least if he has any discretion in how to carry out the punishment.
I don’t know if it’s more so because comparing degrees here is hard, but I would say that we should not hire prison guards who enjoy punishing prisoners and have discretion in doing so.
You can rephrase “punishing criminals” in terms of quasi-consequentialist decision theory as deterrent/counter-factual crime prevention. Al the other reasons I’ve heard are little more than rationalizations by people who want to punish/deter criminals but feel icky about the word “punishment”.
What possible reasons there could plausibly be for jailing people, and what actually in fact motivates most people to support jailing people, are not the same thing.
Some possibilities for the former include:
Retribution (i.e., punishing criminals because they deserve it)
Closure/satisfaction for the victim(s), or for family/friends of the victims(s).
Deterrence, i.e. protecting society from counterfactual future crimes we expect other people to otherwise perpetrate.
Protecting society from counterfactual future crimes we expect this same criminal to otherwise perpetrate.
Rehabilitation.
… (other things I am not thinking of at the moment)
None of those things are the same as any of the others. Some fit the rather imprecise term “punishment” closely (1, 2), others not so closely (3, 4), still others not at all (5).
I would argue that (1) and (2) are in fact the same thing just formulated at different meta-levels, and that (3) and (4) are the quasi-consequentialist decision theory “translations” of (1) and (2). Rehabilitation (5) is what I called a fake reason, as can be seen by the fact that the people promoting it are remarkably uninterested in whether their rehabilitation methods actually work.
(3) and (4) are the quasi-consequentialist decision theory “translations” of (1) and (2)
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this. Are you suggestions that people who advocate (3) and (4) as actual justifications for having prisons do not have those things as their true, internal motivations, but are only claiming them for persuasion purposes, and actually (1) and/or (2) are their real reasons? Or are you saying something else?
Rehabilitation (5) is what I called a fake reason as can be seen by the fact that the people promoting it are remarkably uninterested in whether their rehabilitation methods actually work.
That may well be, but that doesn’t make it not an actual good reason to have prisons.
Your comment which prompted me to start this subthread spoke about what should be the case. If you say “this-and-such are the actual motivations people have for advocating/supporting the existance of prisons”, fine and well. But when you talk about what should happen or what should exist, then people’s actual internal motivations for advocating what should happen/exist don’t enter into it.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this. Are you suggestions that people who advocate (3) and (4) as actual justifications for having prisons do not have those things as their true, internal motivations, but are only claiming them for persuasion purposes, and actually (1) and/or (2) are their real reasons? Or are you saying something else?
Something else, see my reply to hen. For where I go into more detail about this.
But when you talk about what should happen or what should exist, then people’s actual internal motivations for advocating what should happen/exist don’t enter into it.
See hen’s comment for the problem I have with rehabilitation.
With respect, both hen’s comment and your reply read to me like nonsense. I can neither make sense of what either of you are saying, nor, to the degree that I can, see any reason why you would claim the things you seem to be claiming. Of course, I could merely be misunderstanding your points.
However, I think we have now gone on a tangent far removed from anything resembling the original topic, and so I will refrain from continuing this subthread. (I’ll read any responses you make, though.)
I think Eugine_Nier might be trying to say that the reason we evolved the emotions of anger and thirst for vengeance is because being known to be vengeful (even irrationally so) is itself a good deterrent. And possibly that this therefore makes these the same thing. But I’m not sure about that because that seems to me like a straightforward case of mixing up adaptation executors and fitness maximizers.
To see what I mean by the dignity of moral agents think of a criminal as a moral agent, rather then a defective object to be fixed. The idea of rehabilitation should acquires a certain Orwellian/totalitarian aura, i.e., this is the kind of thing the Ministry of Love does.
As for my statement about deterrence and retribution, I believe we’re having that discussion here.
A datapoint: I think the purpose of prisons is the institutional expression of anger, and insofar as they do this, they are an expression of respect for the criminal as a moral agent. In fact, I think that the use of prisons as a deterrent or to modify behavior is downright evil: you’re not allowed to put people in a box and not let them out just to change the way they act, and especially not to communicate something to other people.
(For the record, it looks like you may not be a consequentialist, but it seems worth asking.)
I think that the use of prisons as a deterrent or to modify behavior is downright evil: you’re not allowed to put people in a box and not let them out just to change the way they act, and especially not to communicate something to other people.
Um … why not? I mean, when we all agree it’s a good idea, there are reasonable safeguards in place, we’ve checked it really does reduce rapes, murders, thefts, brutal beatings … why not?
I think the purpose of prisons is the institutional expression of anger, and insofar as they do this, they are an expression of respect for the criminal as a moral agent.
Is it OK to lock someone in a box because you’re angry? Isn’t that, in fact, evil? Does it become OK if you “respect” them (I’m not sure what this refers to, I admit.)
I more-or-less agree with your world view, with the caveat that I would interpret contrafactual crime prevention as anger translated into decision theory language (it helps to think about the reason we evolved the emotion of anger). Deterrent as applied to other people is a version of the contrafactual crime prevention where we restrict our thinking to other people in this event branch as opposed to all event branches.
I bite the bullet if the starving person happens to be nearby: this doesn’t affect their rights, and only rights have a claim on my moral obligations.
I’m actually somewhat pleased to hear that, because it’s not the first time a deontologist has told me that.
To a VNM consequentialist in every situation there is a unique “best action”, my contrast for a deontologist or virtue ethicist their morality doesn’t specify a single action to take. Thus you are allowed (and possibly encouraged) to help the starving man, but aren’t required to.
Well, since Alicorn’s system does not take account of that, this is in any case biting a bullet for you as well.
[With that acknowledged, I am curious about those intuitions of yours. Is this about punishing defection? The standard “well, if they’re a Bad Person, they deserve what’s coming to them”? Or more “it’s their own fault, they made their bed let them lie in it, why should we be responsible for their foolishness”, that sort of thing?]
Well, since Alicorn’s system does not take account of that
As you may have noticed, I’m not Alicorn.
Is this about punishing defection? The standard “well, if they’re a Bad Person, they deserve what’s coming to them”? Or more “it’s their own fault, they made their bed let them lie in it, why should we be responsible for their foolishness”, that sort of thing?
Both, also I have some more examples, that could fall under one or both depending on how one defines “defection” and “foolishness”. If someone decided that they’d rather not work and rely on my charity to get food, they won’t be getting my charity. Also if CronoDAS comes by my house begging for food, the answer is no.
Another example, is that my response to the famous train dilemma depends on what the people were doing on the track. If they were say picking up pennies, I’m letting them get run over.
Well, since Alicorn’s system does not take account of that
As you may have noticed, I’m not Alicorn.
Well … yeah. Because you’re replying to something I said to Alicorn.
Both, also I have some more examples, that could fall under one or both depending on how one defines “defection” and “foolishness”. If someone decided that they’d rather not work and rely on my charity to get food, they won’t be getting my charity. Also if CronoDAS comes by my house begging for food, the answer is no.
Is this for game-theoretic reasons, or more of a virtue-ethics “lazy people don’t deserve food” thing?
Another example, is that my response to the famous train dilemma depends on what the people were doing on the track. If they were say picking up pennies, I’m letting them get run over.
Are we killing people for stupidity now? I mean, I guess if the numbers were equal, the group drawn from the general population is a better bet to save than the group selected for “plays on train tracks”—but I don’t think that’s what you meant.
Wait, is this a signalling thing? Y’know, sophisticated despair at the foolish masses? If it is, there’s no need to reply to this part; I’ll drop it.
Another example, is that my response to the famous train dilemma depends on what the people were doing on the track. If they were say picking up pennies, I’m letting them get run over.
Are we killing people for stupidity now?
Did you take click on my link? “Picking up pennies on railroad tracks/in front of a steam roller” is a well known metaphor for taking certain types of risks in economic circles.
However, to answer your question: no, I (normally) won’t kill someone for his stupidity, but I see no reason to save them, and certainly no reason to kill other people to save them.
why don’t you care about the suffering and death of someone “stupid”
Why should I?
Would you prefer that others care about your suffering and death, if something happened such that you became (temporarily or permanently) “stupid”?
If they chose to take that kind of risk, they are responsible for its consequences.
In many cases, people are not aware of the risks they are taking; in many other cases, people may not have less-risky alternatives. Should they still be entirely responsible for their consequences? Because that seems to lean towards “just-world hypothesis” thinking, and if that’s where this is going, we may want to just go there and be done with it.
Would you like to be the innocent bystander sacrificed to save an idiot from the consequences of his own stupidity.
Me in particular, or people in general? Because there is a particular class of idiot that most people would GLADLY be sacrificed to save; they’re called “children”.
As for me, personally, that depends on the calculus. Am I saving one idiot, or ten? Are they merely idiotic in this circumstance, or idiotic in general (i.e., in most situations a normal human being might reasonably find themselves in)? Are we talking about a well-medicated version of me with a good chance of contributing meaningfully to society, or a cynical, hopeless, clinically depressed version of me that would gladly take ANY reason to die? Because I think at this point, we’re talking about weighted values, and I quite imagine that there’s a certain number of certain kinds of idiots that I would absolutely consider more worth saving than certain versions of myself, if I was doing the calculus honestly.
And if I’m not doing the calculus honestly, then I’m an idiot.
People do not choose to be children. People do choose to be careless or to refuse to learn. Idiocy that is caused by carelessness or refusal to learn is therefore the person’s fault.
In the unlikely case of someone who has, for instance, been infected by nanobots that force his brain to act carelessly, I would of course not hold him to blame.
In the unlikely case of someone who has, for instance, been infected by nanobots that force his brain to act carelessly, I would of course not hold him to blame.
As opposed to, say, just a reduced capacity for impulse control or learning? Or an ingrained aversion to thinking before acting?
I don’t give children a free pass. If an adult is sufficiently incompetent, I wouldn’t blame him, either.
However, I would not classify an adult as sufficiently incompetent for these purposes unless his impulse control is so bad that he can’t safely live on his own. (There is no inconsistency between this and considering children incompetent, since children cannot safely live on their own either.)
In the example given, I think if people are incompetent enough to risk themselves physical injury or death for the sake of picking up pennies, that’s pretty good evidence that they can’t safely live on their own without supervision.
If they managed to survive long enough to get to the railroad track to pick up the pennies, they’re probably able to live on their own without supervision unless there was an extreme stroke of luck involved (such as having been released from custody fifteen minutes ago).
My feelings about governments are complicated by the guarantee-of-exit thing I mentioned elsethread, but with that understood, I’m not opposed on any level to systematic taxation. If a government were rounding people up to work in agriculture or soup kitchens or what have you against their will, that would be wrong.
No; there doesn’t have to be a society that wants you, or for that matter one that is agreeable to your preferences.
is taxation a violation of people’s rights? If not, why not?
I don’t think so. I think failing to provide guarantee-of-exit is a failing on the part of various governments and it does make some things they do less defensible, but I’m not opposed to taxes. Part of it is actually that it’s not a person collecting taxes.
I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of taxes are not collected in the tax-collector-based way depicted in the Disney version of “Robin Hood”. I do object when force comes to be involved. (I don’t have any suggestions on what to do about it. Something being wrong doesn’t, actually, stop anyone from doing it.)
They’re not collected in the tax-collector-based way because there’s no need to—there’s enough of a threat of force to get people to comply. If it’s a credible threat, the government would use force on non-compliers, presumably thus violating their rights. As you said, something being wrong doesn’t stop anyone from doing it—but it does license you to say that they shouldn’t do it, and it licenses the victims to resist.
Okay. Elsewhere in thread when I was walking through the photography example, I said that if there were a right to not be photographed but it were generally known that the customs were different for public figures, becoming a public figure on purpose might constitute consent. This is why I think guaranteed exit is so important—if it were in place, you could move to whatever country had the taxation setup you could best tolerate if they’d have you, and that would be that.
Even without guaranteed exit, countries can have a price of admission, though. (Sort of like even if there is no universal healthcare, your doctor can charge, and even if there is no food bank, so can the grocery store.)
I really doubt that anyone is waiting for me to license them to tax dodge or pick fights with cops.
This assumes that staying implies consent, which is a questionable assumption. It presupposes that the State has the right to do whatever it wants on its territory as long as it lets people leave (even if the only other state in the world is even more authoritarian). For example, if half of the world were ruled by North Korea and the other half by China, would you say that China’s policies were morally justified because people would be free to leave and move to North Korea?
I really doubt that anyone is waiting for me to license them to tax dodge or pick fights with cops.
No, but they may like morality to license them to avoid taxes or resist cops. (Although I do like the image of someone thinking, “Damn, taxes suck, if only that person who wrote that Twilight fanific said I don’t have to pay them.”)
This assumes that staying implies consent, which is a questionable assumption.
No kidding it’s questionable, hence my thing about guaranteed exit. But likewise the various agents of the government do not necessarily consent to freeloading. If the Red Cross puts out juice and cookies for blood donors, and you are not a donor, and you take some, you are stealing even if there is nowhere else for you to get food.
It presupposes that the State has the right to do whatever it wants on its territory as long as it lets people leave (even if the only other state in the world is even more authoritarian).
No, it does not imply that. They can’t do things suddenly, in particular (because then that particular aspect of the interaction hasn’t been consented to). Consent is also revocable at any time even if standing permission is granted. They also have to stick to contextual relevance in attempting to enforce laws. (Also, a government that was operating under Alicorn Morality couldn’t lie, which I think all by itself would shake some things up.)
For example, if half of the world were ruled by North Korea and the other half by China, would you say that China’s policies were morally justified because people would be free to leave and move to North Korea?
I am unqualified to have an opinion on the details of the political situations in most countries. If I just read this as “Bad Country With Guarantee of Exit” and “Worse Country With Guarantee of Exit”, well, that sounds like a pretty lousy situation to be in, but nothing about this situation means the countries involved have to “charge less” or require different standards of behavior from their citizens.
Imagine that the world is divided between Fascistia and Communistan. One day, the Duce of Fascistia announces that in a year, all the wealth of the residents of Fascistia will be confiscated to build statues of Mussolini, but before then, they’re perfectly free to take their stuff and move to Communistan. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of Communistan announces that he’ll happily accept all new immigrants, but warns that in a year, all the wealth of residents of Communistan will be confiscated to build statues of Lenin. In this case, the change is not sudden (if you consider this sudden, change “in a year” to “in ten years”) and it doesn’t prevent either country’s residents from leaving. Is this a rights violation?
Or consider another scenario. One day you’re checking your mail and find a letter from famed thief Arsene Lupin, informing you that in a year he will be breaking into your house to steal a recent painting you’ve acquired. M. Lupin happens to read LessWrong from time to time, so he’s read your writings on morality. He writes that you are free to leave your house and take your possessions with you, thwarting him. Nevertheless, you don’t leave. In doing so, have you consented to the painting being stolen?
Assuming the residents of Fascistia and Communistan have no wherewithal to create separate states (including by declaring subregions independent and declining to accept further services from the parent countries, thereby ending the transactional relationship; forming seasteads; flying to the Moon; etc.) it sure looks like they are in a pickle, unless they manage to use this year to become sculptor suppliers, or attempt to convince the leaders in question to change their minds. This is sort of like my version of the utility monster—sure, in real life, there are large numbers of diverse people and institutions you could choose to interact with, but what if your choices were Bad and Also Bad?! - and I have to bite the bullet here. (I do think it’s probably hard to construct a situation where nobody is, for whatever reason, capable of declaring independence, but if you cut off that route...)
I don’t consent to interact with M. Lupin or allow him into my house on any level. We are not in a transactional relationship of some kind that would imply this.
This is sort of like my version of the utility monster—sure, in real life, there are large numbers of diverse people and institutions you could choose to interact with, but what if your choices were Bad and Also Bad?! - and I have to bite the bullet here.
This seems a strange place to bite the bullet. Why can the state seize property (with ample warning) but M. Lupin can’t? The state is made of people, and if no person is permitted to seize it, then the state isn’t either. Alternatively, if the state is permitted to seize it, then some person must be as well, so it seems that people would then be allowed to make demands that entitle them to to your stuff.
I don’t consent to interact with M. Lupin or allow him into my house on any level. We are not in a transactional relationship of some kind that would imply this.
Why is this different from the state? Is it because it provides services? Would this be any different if M. Lupin broke into your house every day to do your laundry, without your consent, and then claimed that he had a right to the painting as payment for his services?
The services thing is key, but so is consent (of some kind, with guaranteed exit, etc etc caveat caveat). I don’t consent to M. Lupin coming into my house even to do my laundry, you can’t throw a book through somebody’s open window and demand ten dollars for it, if I make a batch of cookies I cannot charge my neighbors for the smell. If the people of Communistan declare independence of Provinceland, and Communistan officials commence visiting Provinceland without permission continuing to maintain the roads even if Provincelanders wish they would go away, then Communistan is conducting a (bizarre) invasion, not a consensual transaction.
How many people does it take to secede? Would it be permissible for California to secede from the US? What about the Bay Area—would it be morally permissible for it to be its own country? What about a small suburb? One house? Can I unilaterally secede, then claim that tax collectors/cops are invading my country of Blacktransylvania?
I don’t have a minimum number in mind, although you’d certainly need a fair number for this to be advisable. I will bemusedly support your solo efforts at secession if that is meaningful to you, provided that the land you’re trying to secede with belongs to you or someone amenable to the project.
Thank you for explaining your position. It’s surprisingly radical, if your last sentence is to be taken literally. I have one last question. Assume a few of my neighbors and I secede, and say that tax collectors are unwelcome. May we then amend our permission to say that tax collectors are welcome, but only if they’re collecting up to X amount of taxes, where X is the amount needed to fund [list of US government services we support], in return for receiving those services?
Assume a few of my neighbors and I secede, and say that tax collectors are unwelcome. May we then amend our permission to say that tax collectors are welcome, but only if they’re collecting up to X amount of taxes, where X is the amount needed to fund [list of US government services we support], in return for receiving those services?
I don’t see why not, but the United States is not obliged to offer the services a la carte.
What do you mean “comes from”? The rule in question fails to exist; it doesn’t have to come from anywhere, it just has to not be. Do you think that it does be?
Is photographing you qualitatively different from murdering you (which would presumably be immoral), and if so, why ?
Someone photographing you has a different intention from someone murdering you. (If the photographer believed that taking a picture of you would, say, steal your soul, then I would hold them responsible for this bad behavior even though they are factually mistaken.)
Come to think of it, why are all rights negative ?
I don’t think literally all rights are negative. Positive rights are generally acquired when someone makes you a promise, or brings you into existence on purpose. (I think children have a lot of claim on their parents barring unusual circumstances.). But nothing has happened to create a positive obligation between you and a random photographer.
In launching a legal challenge, what do you hope to accomplish in terms of “recompense” ? Are you seeking to extract a fine from the photographer, or perhaps to restrict his freedom in some way, or both ?
I don’t actually know any jurisdiction’s laws about publishing nonconsensual photographs. What I’d be looking for would probably depend on what I could reasonably expect to succeed at getting. This entire endeavor has left the moral sphere as long as I don’t violate the photographer or anyone else’s rights. My goal would probably be to discourage non-consensual photography of me and in general, as it’s kind of a dick move, and to compensate myself (perhaps with money, since it’s nicely fungible) for the unpleasantness of having been nonconsensually photographed. If I do not, in so doing, violate any rights, I can seek whatever is available, no problem.
Let’s say that you seek a fine, and you succeed. How is that different, morally speaking, from breaking into his house and stealing the money ? In one case you use a lockpick; in the other one you use a lawyer; but in the end you still deprive the photographer of some of his money. Why does one action count as an attack, and the other does not ?
This entire thing is actually complicated by the fact that I think political entities should guarantee an opportunity of exit—that if you can’t live with your society’s set of rules you should be shown out to any other place that will have you. Without that, there’s definitely some tension on my moral system where it interacts with the law. If we had proper guarantee of exit, the photographer being around me at all constitutes agreement to live by applicable shared rules, which in this hypothetical include not nonconsenusally photographing each other (I don’t know if that’s a real rule, but supposing it is) and also not breaking into each other’s houses and also producing fines when legally obliged to do so. In the absence of guarantee of exit it’s complicated and annoying. This also gets really stupid around intellectual property laws, actually, if you really want to put the squeeze on my system. I’m just gonna say here that any system will stop working as nicely when people aren’t cooperating with it.
I don’t think I’d characterize burglary as “attack”, but I already listed “stealing” separately in that shortlist of things.
What do you mean “comes from”? The rule in question fails to exist; it doesn’t have to come from anywhere, it just has to not be. Do you think that it does be?
I… am not sure what that paragraph means at all. In more detail, my question is twofold:
What are deontological rules in general, and rights in particular ? Are they, for example, laws of nature such as gravity or electromagnetism; are they heuristics (and if so, heuristics for what); or are they something else ?
How do we know which deontological rules we should follow in general; and which rights people have specifically ? For example, you mentioned earlier that people do not have a right to not be photographed. How do you know this ?
Positive rights are generally acquired when someone makes you a promise...
Once again, how do you know this ?
I don’t think I’d characterize burglary as “attack”, but I already listed “stealing” separately in that shortlist of things.
Fair enough; I was using “attack” in the general sense, meaning “an action whose purpose is to diminish an actor’s well-being in some way”.
That said, I’m not sure I understand your model of how the legal system interacts with morality. At one point, you said that the legal system is ethically neutral; I interpreted this to mean that you see the legal system as a tool, similar to a knife or a lockpick. Thus, when you said that you’d wield the legal system as a weapon against the photographer (or, more specifically, his money), I questioned the difference between doing that and wielding a lockpick to accomplish the same end. But now I’m beginning to suspect that my assumption was wrong, and that you see the legal system differently from a tool—is that right ?
I was using “attack” in the general sense, meaning “an action whose purpose is to diminish an actor’s well-being in some way”.
Depending on how you define “purpose”, burglary still might not qualify. The purpose of a burglary isn’t to harm its victims, it’s to acquire their valuables; harm is a side effect.
Good point; in this case, the fact that the victims lose said valuables is merely a side effect of how physical reality works.
Perhaps a better definition would be something like, “an action at least one of whose unavoidable and easily predictable effects includes the diminishing of another actor’s well-being”.
Rights are a characteristic of personhood. Personhood emerges out of general intelligence and maybe other factors that I don’t fully understand. Rights are that which it is wrong to violate; they are neither laws of physics nor heuristic approximations of anything. They are their own thing. I do think they are necessary-given-personhood.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the detailed description of what my process to determine that people don’t have that right was? I wrote down the whole thing as best I could.
Positive rights are generally acquired when someone makes you a promise...
Once again, how do you know this ?
Promises are the sort of thing that generates positive rights because that’s what “promise” means. If it doesn’t do that, it’s something other than a promise. (At least formally. You could have other definitions for the same word. The particular sense in which I use “promise” is this thing, though.)
At one point, you said that the legal system is ethically neutral
I think if I were you I’d be really careful with my paraphrasing. I’m not going to object to this one in particular, but it brought me up short.
you see the legal system differently from a tool—is that right ?
The legal system is many things; it definitely works as a tool for problems like collective action, coordination problems, deterrence of disrupting the social order, and more. I’m not sure what you’re reading into the word “tool” so I’m not sure whether I want to claim to see it exclusively as a tool or not.
I want to ask “why”, because I don’t fully understand this answer, but I fear that I must ask the more difficult question first: what do you mean by “personhood” ? I know it can be a tricky question, but I don’t think I’ll be able to figure out your position, otherwise. However, this next line gave me pause, as well:
Rights are that which it is wrong to violate; they are neither laws of physics nor heuristic approximations of anything.
Since I am not a deontologist (as far as I know, at least) I read this as saying: “rights are sets of rules that describe actions which any person (pending Alicorn’s definition of personhood) must avoid at all costs”. Is that what “wrong to violate” means ?
Can you tell me where I lost you in the detailed description of what my process to determine that people don’t have that right was?
I’m having trouble with the “process” part. From my perspective, whenever I ask you, “how do you know whether a person has the right X”, you either list a bunch of additional rights that would be violated if people didn’t have the right X; or derive right X from other rights, whose origin I don’t fully understand, either. Clearly I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what it is.
I do acknowledge that your system of rights makes a sort of sense; but the only way I know of interpreting this system is to look at it and ask, “will these rules, if implemented, result in a world that is better, or at least as good as, the world we live in now ?” That is, from my perspective, the rules are instrumental but not terminal values. As far as I understand, deontologists treat rights as terminal values—is that correct ?
I think if I were you I’d be really careful with my paraphrasing.
I did not want to make it sound like I’m putting words in your mouth. Whenever I say something like, “you, Alicorn, believe X”; I only mean something like, “to the best of my understanding, which may be incorrect or incomplete, Alicorn believes X, please correct me if this is not so”.
I’m not sure what you’re reading into the word “tool”
By “tool”, I mean something like, “a non-sapient entity which a sapient agent may use in order to more easily accomplish a limited set of tasks”. For example, a hammer is a tool for driving nails into wood (or other materials). The “grep” command is a tool for searching text files. The civil legal system could be seen as a tool for extracting damages from parties who wronged you in some way.
I believe (and you might disagree) that most tools (arguably, all tools, though weapons are a borderline case) are morally neutral. A hammer is neither good nor evil; it’s just a hammer. I can use it to build shelter for a homeless man, thus performing a good act; or I could use it to smash that man’s skull, thus performing an evil act; but it is the act (and possibly the person performing it) who is good or evil, not the hammer.
I don’t have a really thorough account of personhood. It includes but is not limited to paradigmatic adult humans.
Since I am not a deontologist (as far as I know, at least) I read this as saying: “rights are sets of rules that describe actions which any person (pending Alicorn’s definition of personhood) must avoid at all costs”. Is that what “wrong to violate” means ?
I definitely wouldn’t have chosen that phrasing, but it doesn’t seem obviously wrong?
I’m having trouble with the “process” part. From my perspective, whenever I ask you, “how do you know whether a person has the right X”, you either list a bunch of additional rights that would be violated if people didn’t have the right X; or derive right X from other rights, whose origin I don’t fully understand, either. Clearly I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what it is.
I’m not sure where you want me to ground this. Where do you ground your morality?
As far as I understand, deontologists treat rights as terminal values—is that correct ?
I wouldn’t choose the word “value”, but they definitely are non-instrumental in nature.
I will tentatively classify the legal system as a tool in this sense, albeit a tool for doing some very abstract things like “solve coordination problems”.
I don’t have a really thorough account of personhood. It includes but is not limited to paradigmatic adult humans.
So how do you know that rights “naturally fall out of” personhood, if you don’t really know what personhood even is ?
“rights are sets of rules that describe actions which any person must avoid at all costs”
I definitely wouldn’t have chosen that phrasing, but it doesn’t seem obviously wrong?
Ok, so in this case my problem is with the prescriptive nature of rights. What does “must avoid” mean in this case ? I personally can think of only three (well, maybe 2.5) reasons why an action must be executed or avoided:
The action will lead to some highly undesirable consequences. For example, jumping off of very high places must be avoided at all costs, because doing so will result in your death.
The preference or aversion to the action is hardwired into the person (via genetics, in case of humans). For example, most humans—even newborn ones—will instinctively attempt to stay away from ledges.
The action is part of the laws of nature that act upon all physical objects. For example, humans on Earth can’t help but fall down, should they find themselves in mid-air with no support. The same is true of rocks.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think any of these points adequately describe deontological rules. Point #1 is conditional: if your death becomes highly desirable, you may find jumping off a cliff to be a reasonable action to take. Points #2 and #3 are more descriptive than prescriptive. Regarding #2, yes we are wired to avoid ledges, but we are also wired to desire fatty foods, and in the modern world some of us must fight that compulsion every day or face highly undesirable consequences. Point #3, of course, is entirely descriptive; yes, objects fall down, but what you do with that knowledge is up to you.
Note also that there is a clear strategy for learning about reasons #1, 2, and 3: we look at the evidence and attempt to adjust our belief based on it. Again, I don’t understand how we can learn about deontological rules at all.
I’m not sure where you want me to ground this. Where do you ground your morality?
I have some sort of a utility function which is hardwired into my personality. Lacking perfect introspection, I can’t determine what it is exactly, but based on available evidence I’m reasonably sure that it includes things like “seek pleasure, avoid pain” and “increase the pleasure and reduce the pain of other people in your tribe”. Based on this, I can evaluate the fitness of each action and act (or choose not to act) to maximize fitness.
Obviously, in practice, I don’t apply this reasoning explicitly to every action; just like you don’t apply the full Bayesian reasoning machinery to every rustling noise that you hear from the bushes. It would take too long, and by the time you figure out P(tiger | rustling), you’d be tiger-food. Still, that’s merely an optimization strategy, which is reducible to the underlying reasoning.
So how do you know that rights “naturally fall out of” personhood, if you don’t really know what personhood even is ?
I’m starting to get concerned that you have some intractable requirements for completeness of a philosophical theory before one can say anything about it at all. Do you think your ethics would withstand a concerted hammering like this? Do you know how to compare utility between agents? What are your feelings on population ethics? How do you deal with logical uncertainty and Pascal’s muggings in complex Omega-related thought experiments? I’m not planning to make you solve these peripheral problems before allowing you to say that you endorse actions that have the best consequences over their alternatives (or whatever framing you prefer).
What does “must avoid” mean in this case ?
It means “if you don’t avoid it, you will be doing something wrong”. That’s all. Your guesses are wrong. Did you read Deontology for Consequentialists?
Do you think your ethics would withstand a concerted hammering like this?
I wasn’t trying to Gish Gallop you if that’s what you’re implying. That said, I think you are underestimating the inferential distance here. When you say, “rights naturally fall out of personhood”, I literally have no idea what that means. As you saw from my previous comments, I tried to stay away from defining personhood as long as possible, but I’m not sure I can continue to do that if your only answer to “what are rights” is something like “an integral part of personhood”.
It means “if you don’t avoid it, you will be doing something wrong”. That’s all.
Pretty much the only possible ways I can translate the word “wrong” are a). “will lead to highly undesirable consequences”, and b). “is physically impossible”. You ask,
Did you read Deontology for Consequentialists?
Yes I did, and I failed to fully understand it, as well. As I said before, I agree with most (or possibly all) of the rights you listed in your comments, as well as in your article; I just don’t understand what process you used to come up with those rights. For example, I agree with you that “killing people is wrong” is a good rule; what I don’t understand is why you think so, or why you think that “photographing people without permission is wrong” is not a good rule. Your article, as far as I can tell, does not address this.
Pretty much the only possible ways I can translate the word “wrong” are a). “will lead to highly undesirable consequences”, and b). “is physically impossible”.
Treat “acting in a way that violates a right” as “undesirable consequences”—that is, negative utility—and everything else as neutral or positive utility (but not positive enough to outweigh rights violations).
“Wrong” here is, essentially, “carrying negative utility”—not instrumentally, terminally.
Disclaimer: I am not a deontologist, and I’m certainly not Alicorn.
Pretty much the only possible ways I can translate the word “wrong” are a). “will lead to highly undesirable consequences”, and b). “is physically impossible”.
Well, I’m out of ideas for bridging the gap. Sorry.
Ok, this is quite a detailed response and I appreciate the thought that went into writing it. However, from my perspective, it raises more questions than it answers. For example, you say things like this:
But why not ? I’m not asking this just to be a contrarian. For example, many people believe that all of us have a fundamental right to privacy; this would imply that you do, in fact, have the right to “prohibit someone from photographing you and publishing a photo of you”. Presumably you disagree, but on what basis ?
Furthermore, you say that you
I don’t see how that works. If you believe that a person has a right to photograph you and publish the photo without your permission; and yet you are launching a legal challenge against him for doing so; then are you not engaging in an immoral attack ? Sure, it’s not a physical attack, but it’s an attack nonetheless, and previously you stated (assuming I understood you correctly) that attacks on people who have violated no rights are immoral.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the description of why I do disagree?
No. This isn’t how the right is framed. They don’t have a right to do it; no one must behave in a way to protect their ability to do so; I don’t have to stand still so they can get a clear shot, I don’t have to go out in public, if I happen to own a news outlet I don’t have to give them a platform, if I acquire a device that makes me look like a smudge of static to nearby cameras I can carry it around without this being morally problematic. (Perhaps unless I’m under some sort of agreement to be visible to security cameras, or something like that.) I just don’t have the right to not be photographed. Remember that rights are overwhelmingly negative. The fact that someone commits no wrong by doing X does not imply that others commit a wrong by making X inconvenient or impossible.
(You’re also being kind of overbroad in understanding my use of the word “attack”, which was intended broadly, but not so broadly as to include “seeking legal recompense in response to an upsetting, by stipulation illegal, behavior which does not happen to constitute a violation of any intrinsic moral rights”.)
You state that “you do not have a right to prohibit someone from photographing you”, but I don’t understand where this rule comes from. You expand on it in your explanation that follows, but again, I don’t fully understand your reasoning. You say:
That makes sense to me, in that your rule is consistent with the rest of your system. I may even agree that it’s a good idea from a consequentialist point of view. However, I still do not understand where the rule comes from. Is photographing you qualitatively different from murdering you (which would presumably be immoral), and if so, why ? Come to think of it, why are all rights negative ?
I may have misunderstood your goals. In launching a legal challenge, what do you hope to accomplish in terms of “recompense” ? Are you seeking to extract a fine from the photographer, or perhaps to restrict his freedom in some way, or both ?
Let’s say that you seek a fine, and you succeed. How is that different, morally speaking, from breaking into his house and stealing the money ? In one case you use a lockpick; in the other one you use a lawyer; but in the end you still deprive the photographer of some of his money. Why does one action count as an attack, and the other does not ?
Now that I think of it, perhaps you would consider neither action to be an attack ? Once again, I’m not entirely sure I understand your position.
Are all rights negative? What about, say, the right to life, or the right to -not-starving-to-death?
Many people seem pretty jazzed about the idea of a “right to marriage” or a “right to insert-euphemism-for-abortion-here”, based largely on the fact that our (as in, their and my) tribe considers the policies these imply applause lights. I have no idea what Alicorn thinks of this, though.
I’m fine with that kind of right existing in the legal sense and encourage all the ones you listed. I don’t think anyone has a fundamental moral obligation to feed you or perform abortions for you or conduct a marriage ceremony for you, though you can often get them to agree to it anyway, empirically, with the use of money.
If I may, I’m curious on what basis you consider those rights a good idea? Is it just a whim? Are you worried real rights might be violated?
I’m not usually in favour of calling all these various things “rights”, since it rather confuses things—as you’re probably aware—but I must admit the “right to not-starving-to-death” sounds important.
Are you saying you would be OK with letting people starve to death? Or am I misunderstanding?
I think those rights-in-the-legal-sense are good for political and social reasons. Basically, I think they’re prudent.
I don’t think I am doing something wrong, right now, by having liquid savings while there exist charities that feed the hungry, some of whom are sufficiently food-insecure for that to make a difference to their survival. I bite the bullet if the starving person happens to be nearby: this doesn’t affect their rights, and only rights have a claim on my moral obligations. I might choose to feed a starving person. I will support political policy that seems like it will get more starving people fed. I will tend to find myself emotionally distraught on contemplating that people are starving, so I’d resent the “OK with it” description. Also, when I have children, they will have positive claims on me and I will be morally obligated to see to it that they are fed. Other than that? I don’t think we have to feed each other. It’s super-erogatory.
I see. And what are those reasons?
Yeah, that’s a common problem with consequentialists. Obviously, we have various instincts about this and it’s both hard and dangerous to ignore them.
I’m actually somewhat pleased to hear that, because it’s not the first time a deontologist has told me that. I was too speechless to respond, and they changed their mind before I could find out more.
Ah, here we go. That’s good!
You do realize that sort of thing is usually part of what’s referred to by “morality”? So leaving it out seems … incomplete.
Postscript:
I’m not sure, but it may be that there’s something causing some confusion, by the way. I’ve seen it happen before in similar discussions.
There seem to be two functions people use “morality” for—judging people, and judging actions.
Consequentialists, or at least standard-lesswrong-utilitarian-consequentialists, resolve this by not judging people, except in order to predict them—and even then, “good” or “bad” tend to be counterproductive labels for people, epistemically.
Instead, they focus entirely on judging their actions—asking, which of my options is the correct one?
But I gather you (like a lot of people) do judge people—if someone violates your moral code, that makes them an acceptable casualty in defending the rights of innocents. (Although you’re not a total virtue ethicist, who only judges people, not actions; the polar opposite of LW standard.)
I’m not really going anywhere with this, it just seems possibly relevant to the discussion at hand.
I’m gonna decline to discuss politics on this platform. If you really want to talk politics with me we can do it somewhere else, I guess.
I would tend to describe myself as judging actions and not people directly, though I think you can produce an assessment of a person that is based on their moral behavior and not go too far wrong given how humans work.
Oh! Oh, OK. Sorry, I just assumed those were so vague as to avoid mindkilling. Of course we shouldn’t derail this into a political debate.
In fairness, you’re clearly smart enough to disregard all the obvious mistakes where we make prisons as awful as possible (or, more likely, just resist making them better) because we Hate Criminals.
This is a more abstract idea, and much more limited. I’m not criticising it (here). Just noting that I’ve seen it cause confusion in the past, if left unnoticed.
Actually, what the heck, while I’m here I may as well criticize slightly.
This is little more than my first thought on reviewing what I think I understand as your moral system.
It’s discovered Hitler’s brain was saved all those years ago. Given a giant robot body by mad scientists, he is rapidly re-elected and repurposes the police force into stormtroopers for rounding up Jews.
You, being reasonably ethical, have some Jews hidden in your house. Since the stormtroopers have violated relevant rights (actually, they could be new on the job, but you can just tell they’re thinging about it—good enough), so their relevant right not to be lied to is waived and you tell them “no Jews hidden here!” quite cheerfully before shutting the door.
However, naturally, they know Baye’s theorem and they’ve read some of your writings, so they know you’re allowed to lie and your words aren’t evidence either way—although silence would be. So they devise a Cunning Plan.
They go around next door and talk to Mrs. Biddy, a sweet old lady who is, sadly, unaware of the recent political shift. She was always told to respect police officers and she’s not going to stop now at her age. The white-haired old grandmother comes around to repeat the question the nice men asked her to.
She’s at the door, with the two stormtroopers standing behind her grinning. What do you do?
I mean, obviously, you betray the Jews and they get dragged off to a concentration camp somewhere. Can’t lie to the innocent old lady, can’t stay silent because that’s strong Bayesian evidence too.
But you’re reasonably intelligent, you must have considered an isomorphic case when constructing this system, right? Casualties in a Just War or something? Two people manipulated into attacking the other while dressed as bears (“so the bear wont see you coming”)? Do you bite this bullet? Have I gone insane from lack of sleep? I’m going to bed.
Why are all these hypothetical people so well-versed in one oddball deontologist’s opinions? If they’re that well-read they probably know I’m half Jewish and drag me off without asking me anything.
Mrs. Biddy sounds culpably ignorant to me, anyway.
You may or may not have gone insane from lack of sleep.
Um, the purpose of prisons is to punish criminals, so yes, prisons should be awful, not necessarily “as awful as possible”, but for sufficiently serious crimes quite possibly.
EDIT: Wait, you mean “punish” in the consequentialist sense of punishing defection, right?
Yes, but this does not imply that the current level of awfulness is optimal. It certainly does not mean we should increase the awfulness beyond the optimal level.
But if someone proposes that the current level is too high (whether on consequentialist or legal grounds), one of the arguments they will encounter is “you want to help rapists and murderers?! Why? Those bastards deserve it.”
(The consequentialist argument for, say, the current state of US prisons is of course undercut by the existence of other countries with much less awful prisons.)
If you want to look at optimal awfulness, there is a much better way to test, look at the crime rate. The currant crime rate is extremely high by historic standards. Furthermore, the recent drop from its peak in the 1970′s has accomplished by basically turning major cities into Orwellian surveillance states. I think increasing the awfulness of prisons would be a better solution, at the very least in puts the burden on the criminals rather than the innocent.
That really isn’t a good argument for the current state of US prisons, is it? Clearly, even openly allowing institutional rape has failed to help; yet other, less harsh countries have not seen soaring crime rates by comparison.
I’ve seen studies suggesting that certainty of punishment is much more important for determining behavior than the extremity of it—it’s more a question of a strong justice system, a respect for authority (or fear, one might say), than people performing expected utility calculation in their heads.
Personally I’m in favor of corporal punishment, cheaper than prisons and you don’t have the problem of long term prisoners getting used to it.
It is known that lots of people enjoy inflicting pain on the helpless. Anyone who punishes prisoners because they enjoy doing so is in a conflict of interest, at least if he has any discretion in how to carry out the punishment.
Also, it’s possible to take that effect into account when deciding punishment.
More so than existing prison guards?
I don’t know if it’s more so because comparing degrees here is hard, but I would say that we should not hire prison guards who enjoy punishing prisoners and have discretion in doing so.
That is one possible purpose to have prisons, but not the only one.
You can rephrase “punishing criminals” in terms of quasi-consequentialist decision theory as deterrent/counter-factual crime prevention. Al the other reasons I’ve heard are little more than rationalizations by people who want to punish/deter criminals but feel icky about the word “punishment”.
What possible reasons there could plausibly be for jailing people, and what actually in fact motivates most people to support jailing people, are not the same thing.
Some possibilities for the former include:
Retribution (i.e., punishing criminals because they deserve it)
Closure/satisfaction for the victim(s), or for family/friends of the victims(s).
Deterrence, i.e. protecting society from counterfactual future crimes we expect other people to otherwise perpetrate.
Protecting society from counterfactual future crimes we expect this same criminal to otherwise perpetrate.
Rehabilitation.
… (other things I am not thinking of at the moment)
None of those things are the same as any of the others. Some fit the rather imprecise term “punishment” closely (1, 2), others not so closely (3, 4), still others not at all (5).
I would argue that (1) and (2) are in fact the same thing just formulated at different meta-levels, and that (3) and (4) are the quasi-consequentialist decision theory “translations” of (1) and (2). Rehabilitation (5) is what I called a fake reason, as can be seen by the fact that the people promoting it are remarkably uninterested in whether their rehabilitation methods actually work.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this. Are you suggestions that people who advocate (3) and (4) as actual justifications for having prisons do not have those things as their true, internal motivations, but are only claiming them for persuasion purposes, and actually (1) and/or (2) are their real reasons? Or are you saying something else?
That may well be, but that doesn’t make it not an actual good reason to have prisons.
Your comment which prompted me to start this subthread spoke about what should be the case. If you say “this-and-such are the actual motivations people have for advocating/supporting the existance of prisons”, fine and well. But when you talk about what should happen or what should exist, then people’s actual internal motivations for advocating what should happen/exist don’t enter into it.
Something else, see my reply to hen. For where I go into more detail about this.
See hen’s comment for the problem I have with rehabilitation.
With respect, both hen’s comment and your reply read to me like nonsense. I can neither make sense of what either of you are saying, nor, to the degree that I can, see any reason why you would claim the things you seem to be claiming. Of course, I could merely be misunderstanding your points.
However, I think we have now gone on a tangent far removed from anything resembling the original topic, and so I will refrain from continuing this subthread. (I’ll read any responses you make, though.)
I think Eugine_Nier might be trying to say that the reason we evolved the emotions of anger and thirst for vengeance is because being known to be vengeful (even irrationally so) is itself a good deterrent. And possibly that this therefore makes these the same thing. But I’m not sure about that because that seems to me like a straightforward case of mixing up adaptation executors and fitness maximizers.
You mean hen’s comment about the dignity of moral agents, or my statement about how deterrence is the quasi-consequentialist translation retribution?
Both, I’m afraid.
To see what I mean by the dignity of moral agents think of a criminal as a moral agent, rather then a defective object to be fixed. The idea of rehabilitation should acquires a certain Orwellian/totalitarian aura, i.e., this is the kind of thing the Ministry of Love does.
As for my statement about deterrence and retribution, I believe we’re having that discussion here.
A datapoint: I think the purpose of prisons is the institutional expression of anger, and insofar as they do this, they are an expression of respect for the criminal as a moral agent. In fact, I think that the use of prisons as a deterrent or to modify behavior is downright evil: you’re not allowed to put people in a box and not let them out just to change the way they act, and especially not to communicate something to other people.
(For the record, it looks like you may not be a consequentialist, but it seems worth asking.)
Um … why not? I mean, when we all agree it’s a good idea, there are reasonable safeguards in place, we’ve checked it really does reduce rapes, murders, thefts, brutal beatings … why not?
Is it OK to lock someone in a box because you’re angry? Isn’t that, in fact, evil? Does it become OK if you “respect” them (I’m not sure what this refers to, I admit.)
I should probably mention that hen has answered me via PM, and they are, in fact, basing this on consequentialist (more or less) concerns.
I more-or-less agree with your world view, with the caveat that I would interpret contrafactual crime prevention as anger translated into decision theory language (it helps to think about the reason we evolved the emotion of anger). Deterrent as applied to other people is a version of the contrafactual crime prevention where we restrict our thinking to other people in this event branch as opposed to all event branches.
To a VNM consequentialist in every situation there is a unique “best action”, my contrast for a deontologist or virtue ethicist their morality doesn’t specify a single action to take. Thus you are allowed (and possibly encouraged) to help the starving man, but aren’t required to.
And? I should hope anyone reading this thread has already figured that out—from all the times it was mentioned.
Is there some sort of implication of this I’m too stupid to see?
That it doesn’t require bullet biting to say that you are not moral obligated to help the starving person.
How so? It’s an unpleasant thing to say, and conflicts with our raw intuition on the matter. It sounds evil. That’s all biting a bullet is.
Remember, it’s sometimes correct to bite bullets.
What do you mean our intuition on the matter? My intuition says that at least it depends on how the man came to be starving.
Well, since Alicorn’s system does not take account of that, this is in any case biting a bullet for you as well.
[With that acknowledged, I am curious about those intuitions of yours. Is this about punishing defection? The standard “well, if they’re a Bad Person, they deserve what’s coming to them”? Or more “it’s their own fault, they made their bed let them lie in it, why should we be responsible for their foolishness”, that sort of thing?]
As you may have noticed, I’m not Alicorn.
Both, also I have some more examples, that could fall under one or both depending on how one defines “defection” and “foolishness”. If someone decided that they’d rather not work and rely on my charity to get food, they won’t be getting my charity. Also if CronoDAS comes by my house begging for food, the answer is no.
Another example, is that my response to the famous train dilemma depends on what the people were doing on the track. If they were say picking up pennies, I’m letting them get run over.
Well … yeah. Because you’re replying to something I said to Alicorn.
Is this for game-theoretic reasons, or more of a virtue-ethics “lazy people don’t deserve food” thing?
Are we killing people for stupidity now? I mean, I guess if the numbers were equal, the group drawn from the general population is a better bet to save than the group selected for “plays on train tracks”—but I don’t think that’s what you meant.
Wait, is this a signalling thing? Y’know, sophisticated despair at the foolish masses? If it is, there’s no need to reply to this part; I’ll drop it.
Did you take click on my link? “Picking up pennies on railroad tracks/in front of a steam roller” is a well known metaphor for taking certain types of risks in economic circles.
However, to answer your question: no, I (normally) won’t kill someone for his stupidity, but I see no reason to save them, and certainly no reason to kill other people to save them.
Yes, I clicked the link.
OK, that’s a little scary (or would be, anyway). Um … why don’t you care about the suffering and death of someone “stupid” (or risk-taking)?
What I find scary is that you appear to be willing to sacrifice innocent bystanders to save stupid people from their own stupidity.
Why should I?
If they chose to take that kind of risk, they are responsible for its consequences.
Would you prefer that others care about your suffering and death, if something happened such that you became (temporarily or permanently) “stupid”?
In many cases, people are not aware of the risks they are taking; in many other cases, people may not have less-risky alternatives. Should they still be entirely responsible for their consequences? Because that seems to lean towards “just-world hypothesis” thinking, and if that’s where this is going, we may want to just go there and be done with it.
Would you like to be the innocent bystander sacrificed to save an idiot from the consequences of his own stupidity.
Me in particular, or people in general? Because there is a particular class of idiot that most people would GLADLY be sacrificed to save; they’re called “children”.
As for me, personally, that depends on the calculus. Am I saving one idiot, or ten? Are they merely idiotic in this circumstance, or idiotic in general (i.e., in most situations a normal human being might reasonably find themselves in)? Are we talking about a well-medicated version of me with a good chance of contributing meaningfully to society, or a cynical, hopeless, clinically depressed version of me that would gladly take ANY reason to die? Because I think at this point, we’re talking about weighted values, and I quite imagine that there’s a certain number of certain kinds of idiots that I would absolutely consider more worth saving than certain versions of myself, if I was doing the calculus honestly.
And if I’m not doing the calculus honestly, then I’m an idiot.
I think that here, “idiot” refers to idiocy for which the person is to blame. Children are not generally to blame for being idiots.
Can you describe the mechanism by which children are not to blame for their stupidity, but other beings are?
People do not choose to be children. People do choose to be careless or to refuse to learn. Idiocy that is caused by carelessness or refusal to learn is therefore the person’s fault.
In the unlikely case of someone who has, for instance, been infected by nanobots that force his brain to act carelessly, I would of course not hold him to blame.
As opposed to, say, just a reduced capacity for impulse control or learning? Or an ingrained aversion to thinking before acting?
EDIT: Heh. Actually… It looks like your specific example is more plausible than I thought.
Put more bluntly: are there some classes of people which are less a product of their environments and biologies than others?
(And I’m not merely saying this from the perspective of “why do you hold idiots accountable”; I’m also asking “why do children get a free pass?”)
I don’t give children a free pass. If an adult is sufficiently incompetent, I wouldn’t blame him, either.
However, I would not classify an adult as sufficiently incompetent for these purposes unless his impulse control is so bad that he can’t safely live on his own. (There is no inconsistency between this and considering children incompetent, since children cannot safely live on their own either.)
In the example given, I think if people are incompetent enough to risk themselves physical injury or death for the sake of picking up pennies, that’s pretty good evidence that they can’t safely live on their own without supervision.
If they managed to survive long enough to get to the railroad track to pick up the pennies, they’re probably able to live on their own without supervision unless there was an extreme stroke of luck involved (such as having been released from custody fifteen minutes ago).
They don’t quite choose to live in places with lots of lead, more omega-6 than omega-3 fats, and little lithium either, for that matter.
Would the government not be violating rights (rights-not-in-the-legal-sense) if it forces people to feed those whom they don’t want to feed?
My feelings about governments are complicated by the guarantee-of-exit thing I mentioned elsethread, but with that understood, I’m not opposed on any level to systematic taxation. If a government were rounding people up to work in agriculture or soup kitchens or what have you against their will, that would be wrong.
In the absence of guarantee-of-exit (and guarantee-of-entrance-into-something else?), is taxation a violation of people’s rights? If not, why not?
No; there doesn’t have to be a society that wants you, or for that matter one that is agreeable to your preferences.
I don’t think so. I think failing to provide guarantee-of-exit is a failing on the part of various governments and it does make some things they do less defensible, but I’m not opposed to taxes. Part of it is actually that it’s not a person collecting taxes.
I’m confused. It’s not a person collecting taxes? Are tax collectors, cops (if it comes to force), etc, not people?
I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of taxes are not collected in the tax-collector-based way depicted in the Disney version of “Robin Hood”. I do object when force comes to be involved. (I don’t have any suggestions on what to do about it. Something being wrong doesn’t, actually, stop anyone from doing it.)
They’re not collected in the tax-collector-based way because there’s no need to—there’s enough of a threat of force to get people to comply. If it’s a credible threat, the government would use force on non-compliers, presumably thus violating their rights. As you said, something being wrong doesn’t stop anyone from doing it—but it does license you to say that they shouldn’t do it, and it licenses the victims to resist.
Okay. Elsewhere in thread when I was walking through the photography example, I said that if there were a right to not be photographed but it were generally known that the customs were different for public figures, becoming a public figure on purpose might constitute consent. This is why I think guaranteed exit is so important—if it were in place, you could move to whatever country had the taxation setup you could best tolerate if they’d have you, and that would be that.
Even without guaranteed exit, countries can have a price of admission, though. (Sort of like even if there is no universal healthcare, your doctor can charge, and even if there is no food bank, so can the grocery store.)
I really doubt that anyone is waiting for me to license them to tax dodge or pick fights with cops.
This assumes that staying implies consent, which is a questionable assumption. It presupposes that the State has the right to do whatever it wants on its territory as long as it lets people leave (even if the only other state in the world is even more authoritarian). For example, if half of the world were ruled by North Korea and the other half by China, would you say that China’s policies were morally justified because people would be free to leave and move to North Korea?
No, but they may like morality to license them to avoid taxes or resist cops. (Although I do like the image of someone thinking, “Damn, taxes suck, if only that person who wrote that Twilight fanific said I don’t have to pay them.”)
No kidding it’s questionable, hence my thing about guaranteed exit. But likewise the various agents of the government do not necessarily consent to freeloading. If the Red Cross puts out juice and cookies for blood donors, and you are not a donor, and you take some, you are stealing even if there is nowhere else for you to get food.
No, it does not imply that. They can’t do things suddenly, in particular (because then that particular aspect of the interaction hasn’t been consented to). Consent is also revocable at any time even if standing permission is granted. They also have to stick to contextual relevance in attempting to enforce laws. (Also, a government that was operating under Alicorn Morality couldn’t lie, which I think all by itself would shake some things up.)
I am unqualified to have an opinion on the details of the political situations in most countries. If I just read this as “Bad Country With Guarantee of Exit” and “Worse Country With Guarantee of Exit”, well, that sounds like a pretty lousy situation to be in, but nothing about this situation means the countries involved have to “charge less” or require different standards of behavior from their citizens.
Imagine that the world is divided between Fascistia and Communistan. One day, the Duce of Fascistia announces that in a year, all the wealth of the residents of Fascistia will be confiscated to build statues of Mussolini, but before then, they’re perfectly free to take their stuff and move to Communistan. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of Communistan announces that he’ll happily accept all new immigrants, but warns that in a year, all the wealth of residents of Communistan will be confiscated to build statues of Lenin. In this case, the change is not sudden (if you consider this sudden, change “in a year” to “in ten years”) and it doesn’t prevent either country’s residents from leaving. Is this a rights violation?
Or consider another scenario. One day you’re checking your mail and find a letter from famed thief Arsene Lupin, informing you that in a year he will be breaking into your house to steal a recent painting you’ve acquired. M. Lupin happens to read LessWrong from time to time, so he’s read your writings on morality. He writes that you are free to leave your house and take your possessions with you, thwarting him. Nevertheless, you don’t leave. In doing so, have you consented to the painting being stolen?
I am entertained by your examples.
Assuming the residents of Fascistia and Communistan have no wherewithal to create separate states (including by declaring subregions independent and declining to accept further services from the parent countries, thereby ending the transactional relationship; forming seasteads; flying to the Moon; etc.) it sure looks like they are in a pickle, unless they manage to use this year to become sculptor suppliers, or attempt to convince the leaders in question to change their minds. This is sort of like my version of the utility monster—sure, in real life, there are large numbers of diverse people and institutions you could choose to interact with, but what if your choices were Bad and Also Bad?! - and I have to bite the bullet here. (I do think it’s probably hard to construct a situation where nobody is, for whatever reason, capable of declaring independence, but if you cut off that route...)
I don’t consent to interact with M. Lupin or allow him into my house on any level. We are not in a transactional relationship of some kind that would imply this.
This seems a strange place to bite the bullet. Why can the state seize property (with ample warning) but M. Lupin can’t? The state is made of people, and if no person is permitted to seize it, then the state isn’t either. Alternatively, if the state is permitted to seize it, then some person must be as well, so it seems that people would then be allowed to make demands that entitle them to to your stuff.
Why is this different from the state? Is it because it provides services? Would this be any different if M. Lupin broke into your house every day to do your laundry, without your consent, and then claimed that he had a right to the painting as payment for his services?
The services thing is key, but so is consent (of some kind, with guaranteed exit, etc etc caveat caveat). I don’t consent to M. Lupin coming into my house even to do my laundry, you can’t throw a book through somebody’s open window and demand ten dollars for it, if I make a batch of cookies I cannot charge my neighbors for the smell. If the people of Communistan declare independence of Provinceland, and Communistan officials commence visiting Provinceland without permission continuing to maintain the roads even if Provincelanders wish they would go away, then Communistan is conducting a (bizarre) invasion, not a consensual transaction.
How many people does it take to secede? Would it be permissible for California to secede from the US? What about the Bay Area—would it be morally permissible for it to be its own country? What about a small suburb? One house? Can I unilaterally secede, then claim that tax collectors/cops are invading my country of Blacktransylvania?
I don’t have a minimum number in mind, although you’d certainly need a fair number for this to be advisable. I will bemusedly support your solo efforts at secession if that is meaningful to you, provided that the land you’re trying to secede with belongs to you or someone amenable to the project.
Thank you for explaining your position. It’s surprisingly radical, if your last sentence is to be taken literally. I have one last question. Assume a few of my neighbors and I secede, and say that tax collectors are unwelcome. May we then amend our permission to say that tax collectors are welcome, but only if they’re collecting up to X amount of taxes, where X is the amount needed to fund [list of US government services we support], in return for receiving those services?
I don’t see why not, but the United States is not obliged to offer the services a la carte.
What do you mean “comes from”? The rule in question fails to exist; it doesn’t have to come from anywhere, it just has to not be. Do you think that it does be?
Someone photographing you has a different intention from someone murdering you. (If the photographer believed that taking a picture of you would, say, steal your soul, then I would hold them responsible for this bad behavior even though they are factually mistaken.)
I don’t think literally all rights are negative. Positive rights are generally acquired when someone makes you a promise, or brings you into existence on purpose. (I think children have a lot of claim on their parents barring unusual circumstances.). But nothing has happened to create a positive obligation between you and a random photographer.
I don’t actually know any jurisdiction’s laws about publishing nonconsensual photographs. What I’d be looking for would probably depend on what I could reasonably expect to succeed at getting. This entire endeavor has left the moral sphere as long as I don’t violate the photographer or anyone else’s rights. My goal would probably be to discourage non-consensual photography of me and in general, as it’s kind of a dick move, and to compensate myself (perhaps with money, since it’s nicely fungible) for the unpleasantness of having been nonconsensually photographed. If I do not, in so doing, violate any rights, I can seek whatever is available, no problem.
This entire thing is actually complicated by the fact that I think political entities should guarantee an opportunity of exit—that if you can’t live with your society’s set of rules you should be shown out to any other place that will have you. Without that, there’s definitely some tension on my moral system where it interacts with the law. If we had proper guarantee of exit, the photographer being around me at all constitutes agreement to live by applicable shared rules, which in this hypothetical include not nonconsenusally photographing each other (I don’t know if that’s a real rule, but supposing it is) and also not breaking into each other’s houses and also producing fines when legally obliged to do so. In the absence of guarantee of exit it’s complicated and annoying. This also gets really stupid around intellectual property laws, actually, if you really want to put the squeeze on my system. I’m just gonna say here that any system will stop working as nicely when people aren’t cooperating with it.
I don’t think I’d characterize burglary as “attack”, but I already listed “stealing” separately in that shortlist of things.
I… am not sure what that paragraph means at all. In more detail, my question is twofold:
What are deontological rules in general, and rights in particular ? Are they, for example, laws of nature such as gravity or electromagnetism; are they heuristics (and if so, heuristics for what); or are they something else ?
How do we know which deontological rules we should follow in general; and which rights people have specifically ? For example, you mentioned earlier that people do not have a right to not be photographed. How do you know this ?
Once again, how do you know this ?
Fair enough; I was using “attack” in the general sense, meaning “an action whose purpose is to diminish an actor’s well-being in some way”.
That said, I’m not sure I understand your model of how the legal system interacts with morality. At one point, you said that the legal system is ethically neutral; I interpreted this to mean that you see the legal system as a tool, similar to a knife or a lockpick. Thus, when you said that you’d wield the legal system as a weapon against the photographer (or, more specifically, his money), I questioned the difference between doing that and wielding a lockpick to accomplish the same end. But now I’m beginning to suspect that my assumption was wrong, and that you see the legal system differently from a tool—is that right ?
Depending on how you define “purpose”, burglary still might not qualify. The purpose of a burglary isn’t to harm its victims, it’s to acquire their valuables; harm is a side effect.
Good point; in this case, the fact that the victims lose said valuables is merely a side effect of how physical reality works.
Perhaps a better definition would be something like, “an action at least one of whose unavoidable and easily predictable effects includes the diminishing of another actor’s well-being”.
Rights are a characteristic of personhood. Personhood emerges out of general intelligence and maybe other factors that I don’t fully understand. Rights are that which it is wrong to violate; they are neither laws of physics nor heuristic approximations of anything. They are their own thing. I do think they are necessary-given-personhood.
Can you tell me where I lost you in the detailed description of what my process to determine that people don’t have that right was? I wrote down the whole thing as best I could.
Promises are the sort of thing that generates positive rights because that’s what “promise” means. If it doesn’t do that, it’s something other than a promise. (At least formally. You could have other definitions for the same word. The particular sense in which I use “promise” is this thing, though.)
I think if I were you I’d be really careful with my paraphrasing. I’m not going to object to this one in particular, but it brought me up short.
The legal system is many things; it definitely works as a tool for problems like collective action, coordination problems, deterrence of disrupting the social order, and more. I’m not sure what you’re reading into the word “tool” so I’m not sure whether I want to claim to see it exclusively as a tool or not.
I want to ask “why”, because I don’t fully understand this answer, but I fear that I must ask the more difficult question first: what do you mean by “personhood” ? I know it can be a tricky question, but I don’t think I’ll be able to figure out your position, otherwise. However, this next line gave me pause, as well:
Since I am not a deontologist (as far as I know, at least) I read this as saying: “rights are sets of rules that describe actions which any person (pending Alicorn’s definition of personhood) must avoid at all costs”. Is that what “wrong to violate” means ?
I’m having trouble with the “process” part. From my perspective, whenever I ask you, “how do you know whether a person has the right X”, you either list a bunch of additional rights that would be violated if people didn’t have the right X; or derive right X from other rights, whose origin I don’t fully understand, either. Clearly I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what it is.
I do acknowledge that your system of rights makes a sort of sense; but the only way I know of interpreting this system is to look at it and ask, “will these rules, if implemented, result in a world that is better, or at least as good as, the world we live in now ?” That is, from my perspective, the rules are instrumental but not terminal values. As far as I understand, deontologists treat rights as terminal values—is that correct ?
I did not want to make it sound like I’m putting words in your mouth. Whenever I say something like, “you, Alicorn, believe X”; I only mean something like, “to the best of my understanding, which may be incorrect or incomplete, Alicorn believes X, please correct me if this is not so”.
By “tool”, I mean something like, “a non-sapient entity which a sapient agent may use in order to more easily accomplish a limited set of tasks”. For example, a hammer is a tool for driving nails into wood (or other materials). The “grep” command is a tool for searching text files. The civil legal system could be seen as a tool for extracting damages from parties who wronged you in some way.
I believe (and you might disagree) that most tools (arguably, all tools, though weapons are a borderline case) are morally neutral. A hammer is neither good nor evil; it’s just a hammer. I can use it to build shelter for a homeless man, thus performing a good act; or I could use it to smash that man’s skull, thus performing an evil act; but it is the act (and possibly the person performing it) who is good or evil, not the hammer.
I don’t have a really thorough account of personhood. It includes but is not limited to paradigmatic adult humans.
I definitely wouldn’t have chosen that phrasing, but it doesn’t seem obviously wrong?
I’m not sure where you want me to ground this. Where do you ground your morality?
I wouldn’t choose the word “value”, but they definitely are non-instrumental in nature.
I will tentatively classify the legal system as a tool in this sense, albeit a tool for doing some very abstract things like “solve coordination problems”.
So how do you know that rights “naturally fall out of” personhood, if you don’t really know what personhood even is ?
Ok, so in this case my problem is with the prescriptive nature of rights. What does “must avoid” mean in this case ? I personally can think of only three (well, maybe 2.5) reasons why an action must be executed or avoided:
The action will lead to some highly undesirable consequences. For example, jumping off of very high places must be avoided at all costs, because doing so will result in your death.
The preference or aversion to the action is hardwired into the person (via genetics, in case of humans). For example, most humans—even newborn ones—will instinctively attempt to stay away from ledges.
The action is part of the laws of nature that act upon all physical objects. For example, humans on Earth can’t help but fall down, should they find themselves in mid-air with no support. The same is true of rocks.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think any of these points adequately describe deontological rules. Point #1 is conditional: if your death becomes highly desirable, you may find jumping off a cliff to be a reasonable action to take. Points #2 and #3 are more descriptive than prescriptive. Regarding #2, yes we are wired to avoid ledges, but we are also wired to desire fatty foods, and in the modern world some of us must fight that compulsion every day or face highly undesirable consequences. Point #3, of course, is entirely descriptive; yes, objects fall down, but what you do with that knowledge is up to you.
Note also that there is a clear strategy for learning about reasons #1, 2, and 3: we look at the evidence and attempt to adjust our belief based on it. Again, I don’t understand how we can learn about deontological rules at all.
I have some sort of a utility function which is hardwired into my personality. Lacking perfect introspection, I can’t determine what it is exactly, but based on available evidence I’m reasonably sure that it includes things like “seek pleasure, avoid pain” and “increase the pleasure and reduce the pain of other people in your tribe”. Based on this, I can evaluate the fitness of each action and act (or choose not to act) to maximize fitness.
Obviously, in practice, I don’t apply this reasoning explicitly to every action; just like you don’t apply the full Bayesian reasoning machinery to every rustling noise that you hear from the bushes. It would take too long, and by the time you figure out P(tiger | rustling), you’d be tiger-food. Still, that’s merely an optimization strategy, which is reducible to the underlying reasoning.
I’m starting to get concerned that you have some intractable requirements for completeness of a philosophical theory before one can say anything about it at all. Do you think your ethics would withstand a concerted hammering like this? Do you know how to compare utility between agents? What are your feelings on population ethics? How do you deal with logical uncertainty and Pascal’s muggings in complex Omega-related thought experiments? I’m not planning to make you solve these peripheral problems before allowing you to say that you endorse actions that have the best consequences over their alternatives (or whatever framing you prefer).
It means “if you don’t avoid it, you will be doing something wrong”. That’s all. Your guesses are wrong. Did you read Deontology for Consequentialists?
I wasn’t trying to Gish Gallop you if that’s what you’re implying. That said, I think you are underestimating the inferential distance here. When you say, “rights naturally fall out of personhood”, I literally have no idea what that means. As you saw from my previous comments, I tried to stay away from defining personhood as long as possible, but I’m not sure I can continue to do that if your only answer to “what are rights” is something like “an integral part of personhood”.
Pretty much the only possible ways I can translate the word “wrong” are a). “will lead to highly undesirable consequences”, and b). “is physically impossible”. You ask,
Yes I did, and I failed to fully understand it, as well. As I said before, I agree with most (or possibly all) of the rights you listed in your comments, as well as in your article; I just don’t understand what process you used to come up with those rights. For example, I agree with you that “killing people is wrong” is a good rule; what I don’t understand is why you think so, or why you think that “photographing people without permission is wrong” is not a good rule. Your article, as far as I can tell, does not address this.
Treat “acting in a way that violates a right” as “undesirable consequences”—that is, negative utility—and everything else as neutral or positive utility (but not positive enough to outweigh rights violations).
“Wrong” here is, essentially, “carrying negative utility”—not instrumentally, terminally.
Disclaimer: I am not a deontologist, and I’m certainly not Alicorn.
Well, I’m out of ideas for bridging the gap. Sorry.
Fair enough; I appreciate the effort nonetheless.
Ok, now how would you translate “undesirable”?
Where does your utility function come from?