I would also argue against the claim religious institutions are “devoid of moral truths”. I think this is mostly coming from secularist propaganda. In fact these institutions are still some of the most charitable, generous institutions that provide humanitarian aid all over the world. Their centuries-old systems are relatively effective at rooting out evil-doing in their ranks.
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
When spiritual teachers were asked about creating AI versions of themselves, they were not interested, and one company had to change their whole business model to creating sales bots instead. (Real story. I won’t reveal which company.)
I’m sad about all the corruption in religious institutions, still. It’s there. Hatred against gay people and controlling women’s bodies. The crusades. The jihads. Using coercive shame to keep people down. OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
But our modern world has become nihilistic, amoral, and vastly more okay with killing large numbers of living beings, ecosystems, habitats, the atmosphere, etc. Pat ourselves on the back for civil rights, yes. Celebrate this. But who’s really devoid of moral truths here? When we are the ones casually destroying the planet and even openly willing to take 10%+ chances at total extinction to build an AGI? The Christians and the Buddhists and even the jihadists aren’t behind this.
OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
The Mediaeval Christian church’s power-seeking and hypocrisy precedes the Black Death.
Charlemagne led campaigns against the Saxon pagans in the late 8th century, to convert them by force, with the blessing of the papacy.
Medieval popes very regularly got into power-conflicts with Medieval kings.[1]
Church leaders got into into conflicts with each other, often declaring each other illegitimate. [2]
The papacy ordered the first Crusade in 1095.
Admittedly it does seem like like there might have been an uptick in Church hypocrisy around the 1300s (I’m thinking of the schism (which results in a period where there are three people claiming to be Pope for decades), Pope Alexander VI’s many illegitimate kids, and the whole indulgences thing.)
But overall, the church does not look like a beacon of ethics to me. It’s looks like just about what I would expect: an institution of considerable power, lead by people who defending and expanding their power, with various spiritual narratives pasted on top. (Indeed, it doesn’t look like most popes were particularly selected for their spiritual aptitude or insight at all, compared to their political savvy.)
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
I think this is an unfair comparison. Religions, while still non-trivial entities, have been waning in power since the 1500s. They do less harm in these particular ways 1) because they’re less powerful and so have less big effects overall, and 2) because they now select primairly for leadership that’s motivated by signaling moral superiority rather than motivated by desire for power or wealth.
(In the same way that the US government is less capable than it was in the 1950s, because many of the competent people who would have gone into public service can now get an exponentially better deal in tech and finance.)
I agree that most religions are not making war the way powerful nations do. But I don’t buy that that’s because they’re more ethical. They don’t have the wealth and resources of the superpowers any more. They can’t make war, even if they wanted to.
But that wasn’t always the case. When regions were more powerful, they did in fact instigate wars to defend their interests.
Islam, uniquely of western religions, still holds this kind of sway, and...notably, religious leaders do order guerrilla war and terrorist acts.
Catholicism never would have collected the intelligence necessary to invent a nuke. Their worldview was not compatible with science. It was an inferior organizing principle. (“inferior” meaning less capable of coordinating a collective intelligence needed to build nukes.)
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
But it’s a straightforward comparison.
Medieval “dark” ages = almost no technological progress, very little risk of blowing up the planet in any way; relatively, not inspiring, but still—kudos for keeping us from hurtling toward extinction, and at this point, we’re fine with rewarding this even though it’s such a “low bar”
Today = massive, exponential technological progress, nuclear war could already take us all out, but we have a number of other x-risks to worry about. And we’re so identified with science and tech that we aren’t willing to stop, even as we admit OUT LOUD that it could cause extinction-level catastrophe. This is worse than the Crusades by a long shot. We’re not talking about sending children to war. We’re talking about the end of children. Just no more children. This is worse than suicide cults that claim we go to heaven as long as we commit suicide. We don’t even think what we’re doing will necessarily result in heaven, and we do it anyway. We have no evidence we can upload consciousnesses at all. Or end aging and death. Or build a friendly AI. At least the Catholics were convinced a very good thing would happen by sending kids to war. We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
I agree that religions mostly don’t cause x-risk, because (for the most part) they’re not sufficiently good at organizing intellectual endeavor. (There might be exceptions to that generalization, and they can coopt the technological products of other organizational systems.)
I agree that the x-risk is an overriding concern, in terms of practical consequences. If any given person does tons of good things, and also contributes to x-risk, its easy for the x-risk contribution to swamp everything else in their overall impact.
But yeah, I object to calling a person or an institution more ethical because they are / it is too weak to do (comparatively) much harm.
I care about identifying which people and institutions are more ethical so that 1) I can learn from them ethics from them 2) so that I can defer to them.
If a person or institution avoids causing harm because they’re weak, they’re mostly not very helpful to learn from (they can’t help me figure out how to wield power ethically, at least) and defering to them or otherwise empowering them is actively harmful because doing so removes the feature that was keeping them (relatively) harmless.
A person who is dispositionally a bully, but who is physically weak, but who would immediately start acting like a bully if he were bigger, or if he had more social power, is not ethical on account of his not bullying people. An AGI that is “aligned”, until it is much more powerful than the rest of the world, is not aligned. A church that does (relatively) less harm unless and until it is powerful enough to command armies or nukes, is likewise not very trustworthy.
To reason well in these domains, I need a concept of ethics that can be discussed independently of power. And therefore I need to be able to evaluate ethics independently of actualharm caused.
Not just “how much harm does this institution do?” but “how much harm would it do, in other circumstances?”. I might want to ask “how does this person or institution behave, if given different levels or different kinds of power over the world?”
Given that criterion.
The Catholic Church causes less overall harm than OpenAI. (I think, as always it’s hard to evaluate.)
It causes less overall harm than the US government.
It’s unclear to me if it causes more or less harm than Coca-cola.
Harm-caused is certainly relevant evidence about the ethics of an institution, but not most of the question.
Considering the comparison with the US government:
The US government seems to me to be overall more robust to the stresses imposed by power, than the Catholic Church.
I think the organizations are probably about equally trustworthy in terms of how much you can rely on them to follow their agreements when you don’t have particular power to enforce those agreements?
I think they’re about equally likely to cover up the illegal or immoral actions of their members?
I would prefer that the US government and the Catholic hierarchy to have their current relative distributions of power rather than to have them reversed. I don’t think that the world would get better if the Catholic hierarchy was a the leading world superpower, instead of the US.
As a shorthand for that, I might say that the US government, while not ethical by any means, is more ethical than the the Catholic Church.
There is a bit of an out here where people or institutions that do less harm because they are less powerful, and which are less powerful by their own choice, might indeed be ethically superior. They might be safe to give more power to, because they would not accept the power granted, and they might be worth learning from.
I would be interested in examples of religious institutions declining power granted to them.
From my read of history, the Catholic Hierarchy has never done this?
We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
Absolutely. I definitely think there’s something awful about being willing to risk the future, and even more awful about being willing to risk the future for no particular ideal.
I’d probably agree that that’s worse than Catholicism. Catholicism seems unlikely to metastasize into an actively ominicidal worldview to me. Though I think if it were more powerful and relevant, and it’s incentives were somewhat different, it would totally risk omnicide in a holy war against heresy (extrapolating from the long history of Christian holy wars causing great destruction, short of omnicide, because omnicide wasn’t technologically on the table yet.)
But, I don’t know who you’re referring to when you say “we”. It sounds like something like “moderns” or “post-enlightenment societies” or maybe “cultures based on ‘scientific materialism’”?
I mostly reject those charges. Mostly it looks to me like there are a small number (~10,000 to 100,000) of people who are willing to risk all the children, unilaterally, while most people broadly oppose that, to the extent that they’re informed about it.
Almost everyone does oppose the destruction of all life (though by their revealed preferences, almost everyone is fine with subsidising factory farming).
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
I mean, it’s obviously hard for me to say definitively if I have a cultural blindspot.
But, FYI, while I would say that intelligence is “a good”, I am unlikely to call it a “virtue” or a “high good” (which connotes a moral good, as opposed to eg an economic good).
Intelligence is a force multiplier. More intelligent agents are more capable. They do a better job of doing whatever it is that they do.
And yeah, it’s pretty obvious to me that “intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet”. Humans might destroy the biosphere, specifically by dint of their collective intelligence. No other species is even remotely in the running to do that, except for the AIs we’re rushing forward to create. If you remove the intelligence and you don’t get the omnicide.
I think you mean something more specific here. Not just that destroying all life is a big action, and so is only possible with a big force multiplier, but that intelligence is the motivating factor, or actively obscures moral truth, or something.
What do you mean here?
and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
Yeah, I don’t buy this, for the reasons outlined above.
If you’re less destructive because you’re weak, you don’t get “moral points”. You get “moral points” based on how you behave, relative to the options and incentives presented to you.
I would also argue against the claim religious institutions are “devoid of moral truths”. I think this is mostly coming from secularist propaganda. In fact these institutions are still some of the most charitable, generous institutions that provide humanitarian aid all over the world. Their centuries-old systems are relatively effective at rooting out evil-doing in their ranks.
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
When spiritual teachers were asked about creating AI versions of themselves, they were not interested, and one company had to change their whole business model to creating sales bots instead. (Real story. I won’t reveal which company.)
I’m sad about all the corruption in religious institutions, still. It’s there. Hatred against gay people and controlling women’s bodies. The crusades. The jihads. Using coercive shame to keep people down. OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
But our modern world has become nihilistic, amoral, and vastly more okay with killing large numbers of living beings, ecosystems, habitats, the atmosphere, etc. Pat ourselves on the back for civil rights, yes. Celebrate this. But who’s really devoid of moral truths here? When we are the ones casually destroying the planet and even openly willing to take 10%+ chances at total extinction to build an AGI? The Christians and the Buddhists and even the jihadists aren’t behind this.
The Mediaeval Christian church’s power-seeking and hypocrisy precedes the Black Death.
Charlemagne led campaigns against the Saxon pagans in the late 8th century, to convert them by force, with the blessing of the papacy.
Medieval popes very regularly got into power-conflicts with Medieval kings.[1]
Church leaders got into into conflicts with each other, often declaring each other illegitimate. [2]
The papacy ordered the first Crusade in 1095.
Admittedly it does seem like like there might have been an uptick in Church hypocrisy around the 1300s (I’m thinking of the schism (which results in a period where there are three people claiming to be Pope for decades), Pope Alexander VI’s many illegitimate kids, and the whole indulgences thing.)
But overall, the church does not look like a beacon of ethics to me. It’s looks like just about what I would expect: an institution of considerable power, lead by people who defending and expanding their power, with various spiritual narratives pasted on top. (Indeed, it doesn’t look like most popes were particularly selected for their spiritual aptitude or insight at all, compared to their political savvy.)
I think this is an unfair comparison. Religions, while still non-trivial entities, have been waning in power since the 1500s. They do less harm in these particular ways 1) because they’re less powerful and so have less big effects overall, and 2) because they now select primairly for leadership that’s motivated by signaling moral superiority rather than motivated by desire for power or wealth.
(In the same way that the US government is less capable than it was in the 1950s, because many of the competent people who would have gone into public service can now get an exponentially better deal in tech and finance.)
I agree that most religions are not making war the way powerful nations do. But I don’t buy that that’s because they’re more ethical. They don’t have the wealth and resources of the superpowers any more. They can’t make war, even if they wanted to.
But that wasn’t always the case. When regions were more powerful, they did in fact instigate wars to defend their interests.
Islam, uniquely of western religions, still holds this kind of sway, and...notably, religious leaders do order guerrilla war and terrorist acts.
Claude lists:
Pope Gregory VII vs. Henry IV (Investiture Controversy, 1075-1122):
This was one of the most famous conflicts between papal and royal authority.
Gregory VII asserted the pope’s right to appoint church officials, challenging Henry IV’s traditional role.
Henry attempted to depose Gregory, who in turn excommunicated Henry.
Henry famously performed penance at Canossa in 1077 to lift his excommunication.
Pope Innocent III vs. King John of England (1205-1213):
Dispute arose over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Innocent placed England under an interdict and excommunicated John.
John eventually submitted, accepting England as a papal fief and paying tribute.
Pope Boniface VIII vs. Philip IV of France (1296-1303):
Conflict over taxation of clergy and papal authority.
Boniface issued the bull “Unam Sanctam” asserting papal supremacy.
Philip’s agents attacked Boniface (the “Outrage of Anagni”), leading to the pope’s death shortly after.
Pope Alexander III vs. Frederick Barbarossa (1159-1177):
Long-standing dispute over papal authority and control of northern Italy.
Frederick supported a series of antipopes against Alexander.
The conflict ended with the Peace of Venice, where Frederick acknowledged Alexander as pope.
Pope Urban II vs. William II of England (1088-1099):
Conflict over church appointments and authority in England.
William refused to acknowledge Urban as pope for several years.
[There was at least one more. This is a sample.]
Again, Claude lists:
Hippolytus of Rome (217-235 AD):
Considered one of the earliest antipopes.
He opposed Pope Callixtus I and subsequent popes, setting himself up as a rival bishop of Rome.
Novatian (251-258 AD):
Declared himself pope in opposition to Pope Cornelius.
This schism was based on disagreements over how to treat Christians who had lapsed during persecution.
Arian Schism (4th century):
While not strictly a papal schism, this theological dispute led to rival bishops in many cities, each declaring the other illegitimate.
Laurentian Schism (498-506 AD):
After the death of Pope Anastasius II, both Symmachus and Laurentius were elected pope by rival factions.
This led to a period of conflict until Symmachus was finally recognized as the legitimate pope.
Cadaver Synod (897 AD):
Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed and put on trial.
He declared Formosus’s papacy illegitimate and his acts invalid.
Investiture Controversy (late 11th—early 12th century):
While not a direct antipapacy, this conflict between the papacy and secular rulers led to periods where rival popes were appointed.
For instance, Henry IV of Germany appointed Clement III as antipope against Pope Gregory VII.
Anacletan Schism (1130-1138):
Both Innocent II and Anacletus II claimed to be the rightful pope, dividing Europe’s loyalty.
Catholicism never would have collected the intelligence necessary to invent a nuke. Their worldview was not compatible with science. It was an inferior organizing principle. (“inferior” meaning less capable of coordinating a collective intelligence needed to build nukes.)
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
But it’s a straightforward comparison.
Medieval “dark” ages = almost no technological progress, very little risk of blowing up the planet in any way; relatively, not inspiring, but still—kudos for keeping us from hurtling toward extinction, and at this point, we’re fine with rewarding this even though it’s such a “low bar”
Today = massive, exponential technological progress, nuclear war could already take us all out, but we have a number of other x-risks to worry about. And we’re so identified with science and tech that we aren’t willing to stop, even as we admit OUT LOUD that it could cause extinction-level catastrophe. This is worse than the Crusades by a long shot. We’re not talking about sending children to war. We’re talking about the end of children. Just no more children. This is worse than suicide cults that claim we go to heaven as long as we commit suicide. We don’t even think what we’re doing will necessarily result in heaven, and we do it anyway. We have no evidence we can upload consciousnesses at all. Or end aging and death. Or build a friendly AI. At least the Catholics were convinced a very good thing would happen by sending kids to war. We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
I agree that religions mostly don’t cause x-risk, because (for the most part) they’re not sufficiently good at organizing intellectual endeavor. (There might be exceptions to that generalization, and they can coopt the technological products of other organizational systems.)
I agree that the x-risk is an overriding concern, in terms of practical consequences. If any given person does tons of good things, and also contributes to x-risk, its easy for the x-risk contribution to swamp everything else in their overall impact.
But yeah, I object to calling a person or an institution more ethical because they are / it is too weak to do (comparatively) much harm.
I care about identifying which people and institutions are more ethical so that 1) I can learn from them ethics from them 2) so that I can defer to them.
If a person or institution avoids causing harm because they’re weak, they’re mostly not very helpful to learn from (they can’t help me figure out how to wield power ethically, at least) and defering to them or otherwise empowering them is actively harmful because doing so removes the feature that was keeping them (relatively) harmless.
A person who is dispositionally a bully, but who is physically weak, but who would immediately start acting like a bully if he were bigger, or if he had more social power, is not ethical on account of his not bullying people. An AGI that is “aligned”, until it is much more powerful than the rest of the world, is not aligned. A church that does (relatively) less harm unless and until it is powerful enough to command armies or nukes, is likewise not very trustworthy.
To reason well in these domains, I need a concept of ethics that can be discussed independently of power. And therefore I need to be able to evaluate ethics independently of actual harm caused.
Not just “how much harm does this institution do?” but “how much harm would it do, in other circumstances?”. I might want to ask “how does this person or institution behave, if given different levels or different kinds of power over the world?”
Given that criterion.
The Catholic Church causes less overall harm than OpenAI. (I think, as always it’s hard to evaluate.)
It causes less overall harm than the US government.
It’s unclear to me if it causes more or less harm than Coca-cola.
Harm-caused is certainly relevant evidence about the ethics of an institution, but not most of the question.
Considering the comparison with the US government:
The US government seems to me to be overall more robust to the stresses imposed by power, than the Catholic Church.
I think the organizations are probably about equally trustworthy in terms of how much you can rely on them to follow their agreements when you don’t have particular power to enforce those agreements?
I think they’re about equally likely to cover up the illegal or immoral actions of their members?
I would prefer that the US government and the Catholic hierarchy to have their current relative distributions of power rather than to have them reversed. I don’t think that the world would get better if the Catholic hierarchy was a the leading world superpower, instead of the US.
As a shorthand for that, I might say that the US government, while not ethical by any means, is more ethical than the the Catholic Church.
There is a bit of an out here where people or institutions that do less harm because they are less powerful, and which are less powerful by their own choice, might indeed be ethically superior. They might be safe to give more power to, because they would not accept the power granted, and they might be worth learning from.
I would be interested in examples of religious institutions declining power granted to them.
From my read of history, the Catholic Hierarchy has never done this?
Absolutely. I definitely think there’s something awful about being willing to risk the future, and even more awful about being willing to risk the future for no particular ideal.
I’d probably agree that that’s worse than Catholicism. Catholicism seems unlikely to metastasize into an actively ominicidal worldview to me. Though I think if it were more powerful and relevant, and it’s incentives were somewhat different, it would totally risk omnicide in a holy war against heresy (extrapolating from the long history of Christian holy wars causing great destruction, short of omnicide, because omnicide wasn’t technologically on the table yet.)
But, I don’t know who you’re referring to when you say “we”. It sounds like something like “moderns” or “post-enlightenment societies” or maybe “cultures based on ‘scientific materialism’”?
I mostly reject those charges. Mostly it looks to me like there are a small number (~10,000 to 100,000) of people who are willing to risk all the children, unilaterally, while most people broadly oppose that, to the extent that they’re informed about it.
Almost everyone does oppose the destruction of all life (though by their revealed preferences, almost everyone is fine with subsidising factory farming).
I mean, it’s obviously hard for me to say definitively if I have a cultural blindspot.
But, FYI, while I would say that intelligence is “a good”, I am unlikely to call it a “virtue” or a “high good” (which connotes a moral good, as opposed to eg an economic good).
Intelligence is a force multiplier. More intelligent agents are more capable. They do a better job of doing whatever it is that they do.
And yeah, it’s pretty obvious to me that “intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet”. Humans might destroy the biosphere, specifically by dint of their collective intelligence. No other species is even remotely in the running to do that, except for the AIs we’re rushing forward to create. If you remove the intelligence and you don’t get the omnicide.
I think you mean something more specific here. Not just that destroying all life is a big action, and so is only possible with a big force multiplier, but that intelligence is the motivating factor, or actively obscures moral truth, or something.
What do you mean here?
Yeah, I don’t buy this, for the reasons outlined above.
If you’re less destructive because you’re weak, you don’t get “moral points”. You get “moral points” based on how you behave, relative to the options and incentives presented to you.