Several years ago I had a conversation with someone that helped them predict other people’s behavior much better thereafter: most people are not consequentialists, and are not trying to be, they mostly do what is customary for them in each situation for the relevant part of their culture or social group.
Your discussion in the post seems premised on the idea that people are trying to reason about consequences in specific cases at all, and I don’t think that’s usually true. Yes, very few rules are truly absolute, which is why most people balk at Kant’s discussion of telling a murderer where his friend is, or why the seal of the confessional in Catholicism and spousal privilege in US law are considered exceptional. But an illusion of absoluteness is a polite social fiction that helps most people trust that exceptions are at least sufficiently rare that the other party would be very hesitant to break them, and probably socially sanctioned even for validly breaking them. There’s a reason “no one likes a tattletale” has survived as a maxim, too.
That said, if I ever manage to live in a community where most people are even trying to take consequentialists arguments seriously, I’m likely to agree with the case you’ve laid out here. There’s a whole list of examples in my head that would signify that change to me, but I’m not holding my breath.
Your framing of the illusion of absolute rules as “polite social fictions” is quite brilliant, because I think that’s what Scott Alexander probably wanted to convey. It comes to mind that such social fictions may be required for people to trust in institutions, and strong institutions are generally credited as a core factor for social progress. Take for example the police—it is an extremely useful social fiction that “the police is your friend and helper”, as they say in German, even though they often aren’t, particularly not to marginalized social groups. Upholding this fiction ensures that most people respect the police, report crimes when they occur, and physical attacks by non-criminals against the police are comparatively rare in most countries. At the same time, I think it is incredibly dangerous to prohibit public discussion of police misconduct. Yes, it may destroy the social fiction of the well-meaning police—but shouldn’t people be made aware of instances of police misconduct, so that they can properly adjust their priors? Rationally speaking, doesn’t the police deserve to be treated with a degree of suspicion proportional to their probability of misconduct?
Your point that most people aren’t consequentialists is probably right. But treating them as non-consequentialists, prohibiting discussions and purposefully upholding social fictions inevitably puts you on a slippery slope, where you’re incentivized to keep discussions under wraps because it might “upset the people”—a slope any rationally-minded policymaker should be aware of.
Several years ago I had a conversation with someone that helped them predict other people’s behavior much better thereafter: most people are not consequentialists, and are not trying to be, they mostly do what is customary for them in each situation for the relevant part of their culture or social group.
Your discussion in the post seems premised on the idea that people are trying to reason about consequences in specific cases at all, and I don’t think that’s usually true. Yes, very few rules are truly absolute, which is why most people balk at Kant’s discussion of telling a murderer where his friend is, or why the seal of the confessional in Catholicism and spousal privilege in US law are considered exceptional. But an illusion of absoluteness is a polite social fiction that helps most people trust that exceptions are at least sufficiently rare that the other party would be very hesitant to break them, and probably socially sanctioned even for validly breaking them. There’s a reason “no one likes a tattletale” has survived as a maxim, too.
That said, if I ever manage to live in a community where most people are even trying to take consequentialists arguments seriously, I’m likely to agree with the case you’ve laid out here. There’s a whole list of examples in my head that would signify that change to me, but I’m not holding my breath.
Your framing of the illusion of absolute rules as “polite social fictions” is quite brilliant, because I think that’s what Scott Alexander probably wanted to convey. It comes to mind that such social fictions may be required for people to trust in institutions, and strong institutions are generally credited as a core factor for social progress. Take for example the police—it is an extremely useful social fiction that “the police is your friend and helper”, as they say in German, even though they often aren’t, particularly not to marginalized social groups. Upholding this fiction ensures that most people respect the police, report crimes when they occur, and physical attacks by non-criminals against the police are comparatively rare in most countries. At the same time, I think it is incredibly dangerous to prohibit public discussion of police misconduct. Yes, it may destroy the social fiction of the well-meaning police—but shouldn’t people be made aware of instances of police misconduct, so that they can properly adjust their priors? Rationally speaking, doesn’t the police deserve to be treated with a degree of suspicion proportional to their probability of misconduct?
Your point that most people aren’t consequentialists is probably right. But treating them as non-consequentialists, prohibiting discussions and purposefully upholding social fictions inevitably puts you on a slippery slope, where you’re incentivized to keep discussions under wraps because it might “upset the people”—a slope any rationally-minded policymaker should be aware of.