As for the first bullet point, it basically goes like this: If what you are about to do isn’t something you could will to be a universal law—if you wouldn’t want other rational agents to behave similarly—then it’s probably not what the Optimal Decision Algorithm would recommend you do, because an app that recommended you do this would either recommend that others in similar situations behave similarly (and thus lose market share to apps that recommended more pro-social behavior, the equivalent of cooperate-cooperate instead of defect-defect) or it would make an exception for you and tell everyone else to cooperate while you defect (and thus predictably screw people over, and lose customers and then eventually be outcompeted also.)
I think it’s even simpler than that, if you take the Formula of Universal Law to be a test of practical contradiction, e.g. whether action X could be the universal method of achieving purpose Y. Then it’s really obvious why a central planner could not recommend action X—because it would not achieve purpose Y. For example, recommending lying doesn’t work as, if it were a universal method, no one would trust anyone, so it would be useless.
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.
This is really terrific!
I think it’s even simpler than that, if you take the Formula of Universal Law to be a test of practical contradiction, e.g. whether action X could be the universal method of achieving purpose Y. Then it’s really obvious why a central planner could not recommend action X—because it would not achieve purpose Y. For example, recommending lying doesn’t work as, if it were a universal method, no one would trust anyone, so it would be useless.
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.