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.
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”?