I’m not sure I follow that reasoning, and therefore I don’t yet trust it. My reconstruction: Suppose the Optimal Decision Algorithm recommends you lie to another person who you believe is rational, i.e. who you believe is following that algorithm. Then it wouldn’t actually achieve its purpose (of fooling the other person) because they would expect you to be lying because that’s what they would do in your place (because they are following the same algorithm and know you are too?) … I guess that works, yeah? Interesting! Not sure if it’s going to generalize far though.
Yes, exactly. To me it makes perfect sense that an Optimal Decision Algorithm would follow a rule like this, though it’s not obvious that it captures everything that the other two statements (the Formula of Humanity and the Kingdom of Ends) capture, and it’s also not clear to me that it was the interpretation Kant had in mind.
Btw, I can’t take credit for this—I came across it in Christine Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends, specifically the essay on the Formula of Universal Law, which you can find here (pdf) if you’re interested.
Thanks!
I’m not sure I follow that reasoning, and therefore I don’t yet trust it. My reconstruction: Suppose the Optimal Decision Algorithm recommends you lie to another person who you believe is rational, i.e. who you believe is following that algorithm. Then it wouldn’t actually achieve its purpose (of fooling the other person) because they would expect you to be lying because that’s what they would do in your place (because they are following the same algorithm and know you are too?) … I guess that works, yeah? Interesting! Not sure if it’s going to generalize far though.
Yes, exactly. To me it makes perfect sense that an Optimal Decision Algorithm would follow a rule like this, though it’s not obvious that it captures everything that the other two statements (the Formula of Humanity and the Kingdom of Ends) capture, and it’s also not clear to me that it was the interpretation Kant had in mind.
Btw, I can’t take credit for this—I came across it in Christine Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends, specifically the essay on the Formula of Universal Law, which you can find here (pdf) if you’re interested.