Also, every major democratic political leader lies abundantly to obtain office, as it’s a necessity to actually persuade the voters. So Bill Clinton, Jean Chretien, Winston Churchill should qualify for at least half of your list of villainy.
Have the ones who’ve lied more, done better? In cases where the politician who told more lies won, has that politician gone on to rule well in an absolute sense? Is it actually true that no one who refused to lie (and this is not the same as always telling the whole truth) could win political office? Are the lies expected, and in that sense, less than true betrayals of someone who trusts you? Are there understood Rules of Politics that include lies but not assassinations, which the good politicians abide by, so that they are not really violating the ethics of their tribe? Will the world be so much worse off if sufficiently good people refuse to tell outright lies and are thereby barred from public office; or would we thereby lose a George Washington or Marcus Aurelius or two, and thereby darken history?
American revolutionaries as well ended human lives for the greater good
Police must sometimes kill the guilty. Soldiers must sometimes kill civilians (or if the enemy knows you’re reluctant, that gives them a motive to use civilians as a shield). Spies sometimes have legitimate cause to kill people who helped them, but this has probably been done far more often than it has been justified by a need to end the Nazi nuclear program. I think it’s worth noting that in all such cases, you can write out something like a code of ethics and at least try to have social acceptance of it. Politicians, who lie, may prefer not to discuss the whole thing, but politicians are only a small slice of society. Are there many who transgress even the unwritten rules and end up really implementing the greater good? (And no, there’s no unwritten rule that says you can rob a bank to stop global warming.)
...but if you’re placing yourself under unusual stress, you may need to be stricter than what society will accept from you. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the further I push any art, such as rationality or AI theory, the more I perceive that what society will let you get away with is tremendously too sloppy a standard.
Availability bias… When the winners do something bad, it’s never interpreted as bad after the fact. Firebombing a city to end a war more quickly, taxing a populace to give health care to the less fortunate, intervening in a foreign country’s affairs to stop a genocide: they’re all likely to be interpreted as evidence for “the ends don’t justify the means” when they fail, but glossed over or treated as common sense interventions when they work.
A fair point, and one of the difficult things in reasoning about ethics is the extent to which we can expect historical data to be distorted by moral self-deception as well as more common fogs of war.
I’m not sure you aren’t “making too much stew from one oyster”. I certainly feel a whole lot less ethically inhibited if I’m really, really certain I’m not going to be punished. When I override, it feels very deliberate—“system two” grappling and struggling with “system one”’s casual amorality, and with a significant chance of the override attempt failing.
This entire post is kind of surreal to me, as I’m pretty confident I’ve never felt the emotion described here before… I don’t remember ever wanting to do something that I both felt would be wrong and wouldn’t have consequences otherwise.
I don’t know whether to attribute this to genetic variance, environmental variance, misunderstanding, or a small number of genuine sociopaths among Overcoming Bias readers. Maybe Stephen is referring to “not wanting” in terms of finally deciding to do something he felt was wrong, rather than being tempted by the rewards thereof?
Have the ones who’ve lied more, done better? In cases where the politician who told more lies won, has that politician gone on to rule well in an absolute sense? Is it actually true that no one who refused to lie (and this is not the same as always telling the whole truth) could win political office? Are the lies expected, and in that sense, less than true betrayals of someone who trusts you? Are there understood Rules of Politics that include lies but not assassinations, which the good politicians abide by, so that they are not really violating the ethics of their tribe? Will the world be so much worse off if sufficiently good people refuse to tell outright lies and are thereby barred from public office; or would we thereby lose a George Washington or Marcus Aurelius or two, and thereby darken history?
Police must sometimes kill the guilty. Soldiers must sometimes kill civilians (or if the enemy knows you’re reluctant, that gives them a motive to use civilians as a shield). Spies sometimes have legitimate cause to kill people who helped them, but this has probably been done far more often than it has been justified by a need to end the Nazi nuclear program. I think it’s worth noting that in all such cases, you can write out something like a code of ethics and at least try to have social acceptance of it. Politicians, who lie, may prefer not to discuss the whole thing, but politicians are only a small slice of society. Are there many who transgress even the unwritten rules and end up really implementing the greater good? (And no, there’s no unwritten rule that says you can rob a bank to stop global warming.)
...but if you’re placing yourself under unusual stress, you may need to be stricter than what society will accept from you. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the further I push any art, such as rationality or AI theory, the more I perceive that what society will let you get away with is tremendously too sloppy a standard.
A fair point, and one of the difficult things in reasoning about ethics is the extent to which we can expect historical data to be distorted by moral self-deception as well as more common fogs of war.
I don’t know whether to attribute this to genetic variance, environmental variance, misunderstanding, or a small number of genuine sociopaths among Overcoming Bias readers. Maybe Stephen is referring to “not wanting” in terms of finally deciding to do something he felt was wrong, rather than being tempted by the rewards thereof?