My main thrust here is that “Is a bystander as morally responsible as a murderer?” is a wrong question. You’re always secretly asking another question when you ask that question, and the answer often doesn’t have the word ‘responsibility’ anywhere in it.
You might also consider that you simply lack a moral modality that other people have. It is the right question for them, but no more meaningful to you than color is to a blind person.
I wonder if you actually lack the moral modality for responsibility, or are merely analyzing based on your ideological meta ethical beliefs. I wonder if a lot of people lack that modality.
Responsibility, duty, rights—they all create a space between my preferred outcome and the outcome of your action where I will refrain from coercion, retaliation, threats, or even disapproval. That’s the space where freedom and autonomy lives.
When Jonathan Haidt first created his moral foundations, he didn’t have a dimension for autonomy. It had to be pointed out to him. I find it disturbing to contemplate people lacking that modality. It’s looking into the eyes of a person, and seeing Clippy starting back at me.
Wow, okay, so I am not talking about a situation where you can do whatever the hell you want, and I’m not proposing any sort of position that makes you start coercing and threatening people, or taking away people’s rights. You are lumping a lot more stuff in. I’m really only talking about how people make causal inferences, and how these result in different feelings like sadness, anger, and guilt. The reason it’s good to feel guilty is because it gives you a signal that you are the causal origin of a negative outcome. But then people try to reconcile their scope insensitivity with their causal inference mechanism, and if they discredit their intuitions about scope and locality, then that causal inference mechanism gives you a huge dose of ‘you are the causal origin of a negative outcome’ signal. That’s the ‘repugnant conclusion’. The other decision is to discredit your intuition about the causal inference mechanism: say that anyone who focuses on outcomes is obviously missing some larger point about morality, because there’s no way that we’re all bad people. I’m saying, when you know what guilt actually is, and what it’s for, you can stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we’re doing successfully half of the time. You don’t need to care about the guilt because the system that delivers it was never designed to make inferences of that scope. If anything, the level of guilt people feel when they believe that they should be utilitarians is an underestimate, because of the scope insensitivity! Recognizing your feelings as sources of information about what you actually want, instead of constantly, implicitly using them as value judgments about ‘you’ due to a lack of understanding, is totally different from saying that you can do anything you want, and that guilt is an illusion.
The reason it’s good to feel guilty is because it gives you a signal that you are the causal origin of a negative outcome.
Why are you assuming that the signal is correct?
I tend to think of guilt as pain feedback for breaking internalised norms. A lot of these norms are social or socially created. That does not make them automatically “right”.
Take a sincere Catholic girl who slept with some guy and is now feeling very very guilty about that. Is it good for her to feel guilty? What that guild “actually is, and what it’s for”? What should she do if she wants to “stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we’re doing successfully half of the time”?
Damn, I had considered using the word ‘useful’, but I used ‘good’ instead, so that I could avoid flak from the other guy! Of course signals can be ‘incorrect’, in a sense.
I admit that I didn’t consider this the sort of advice that sincere Catholic girls with really conservative beliefs about sexuality would read. I am assuming a certain level of background knowledge here. If I have made an error in that regard, then I bear responsibility for it. (Heh.)
Not even. I’m assuming that her ontology for anything but the most immediate, important, tangible things would be practically useless. You can generate and possess an accurate world-model with a botched morality, but you’re very unlikely to commit the moral action if the values are spot on but the world-model and its generator are botched. You should begin with ontology and epistemology and then move on to ethics.
Ironically, I actually talked about not feeling guilty, as opposed to feeling guilty, in the article above. But that probably wouldn’t be helpful for someone like that either, even if it seems like it superficially would be in your thought experiment.
I’m assuming that her ontology for anything but the most immediate, important, tangible things would be practically useless.
In which sense useless? She’s a contemporary, educated girl, she can navigate this world perfectly well and you probably won’t disagree with her about much in the descriptive sphere. What you would disagree about is the normative sphere, but that doesn’t have to do much with ontology. Why do you assume that her “world-model” is botched? There are plenty of very bright religious people.
I’m really only talking about how people make causal inferences, and how these result in different feelings like sadness, anger, and guilt.
And I’m still noting that you seem to lack cognizance of the responsibility modality. Causality is a part of responsibility, but does not determine it. Getting out of bed in the morning may causally lead to you getting hit by a bus, or someone else getting hit by a bus, but that doesn’t make you morally responsible for the accident.
Again, I wonder if you don’t get it at all, and simply lack a moral modality I have.
People clearly get this idea to varying degrees. People often still feel guilty when they are part of a causal chain, even when they “know” they were not responsible. Seeing how that tendency distributes across Haidt’s distributions of moral foundations would be really interesting.
As for our emotions and moral intuitions, I agree that one should realize one’s essential freedom in how we respond to them. They are all data. We can choose.
For the rest of your post, I’m not a utilitarian and wasn’t really interested in commenting on your apparent attempt to ameliorate guilt in utilitarians.
is totally different from saying that you can do anything you want
You can do anything you can do.
and that guilt is an illusion.
As I read it, you interpreted guilt as the emotional reaction to being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome. That’s not an illusion. It’s a mistake to think I held it you were saying it was.
You might also consider that you simply lack a moral modality that other people have. It is the right question for them, but no more meaningful to you than color is to a blind person.
I wonder if you actually lack the moral modality for responsibility, or are merely analyzing based on your ideological meta ethical beliefs. I wonder if a lot of people lack that modality.
Responsibility, duty, rights—they all create a space between my preferred outcome and the outcome of your action where I will refrain from coercion, retaliation, threats, or even disapproval. That’s the space where freedom and autonomy lives.
When Jonathan Haidt first created his moral foundations, he didn’t have a dimension for autonomy. It had to be pointed out to him. I find it disturbing to contemplate people lacking that modality. It’s looking into the eyes of a person, and seeing Clippy starting back at me.
Wow, okay, so I am not talking about a situation where you can do whatever the hell you want, and I’m not proposing any sort of position that makes you start coercing and threatening people, or taking away people’s rights. You are lumping a lot more stuff in. I’m really only talking about how people make causal inferences, and how these result in different feelings like sadness, anger, and guilt. The reason it’s good to feel guilty is because it gives you a signal that you are the causal origin of a negative outcome. But then people try to reconcile their scope insensitivity with their causal inference mechanism, and if they discredit their intuitions about scope and locality, then that causal inference mechanism gives you a huge dose of ‘you are the causal origin of a negative outcome’ signal. That’s the ‘repugnant conclusion’. The other decision is to discredit your intuition about the causal inference mechanism: say that anyone who focuses on outcomes is obviously missing some larger point about morality, because there’s no way that we’re all bad people. I’m saying, when you know what guilt actually is, and what it’s for, you can stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we’re doing successfully half of the time. You don’t need to care about the guilt because the system that delivers it was never designed to make inferences of that scope. If anything, the level of guilt people feel when they believe that they should be utilitarians is an underestimate, because of the scope insensitivity! Recognizing your feelings as sources of information about what you actually want, instead of constantly, implicitly using them as value judgments about ‘you’ due to a lack of understanding, is totally different from saying that you can do anything you want, and that guilt is an illusion.
Why are you assuming that the signal is correct?
I tend to think of guilt as pain feedback for breaking internalised norms. A lot of these norms are social or socially created. That does not make them automatically “right”.
Take a sincere Catholic girl who slept with some guy and is now feeling very very guilty about that. Is it good for her to feel guilty? What that guild “actually is, and what it’s for”? What should she do if she wants to “stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we’re doing successfully half of the time”?
Damn, I had considered using the word ‘useful’, but I used ‘good’ instead, so that I could avoid flak from the other guy! Of course signals can be ‘incorrect’, in a sense.
I admit that I didn’t consider this the sort of advice that sincere Catholic girls with really conservative beliefs about sexuality would read. I am assuming a certain level of background knowledge here. If I have made an error in that regard, then I bear responsibility for it. (Heh.)
Knowledge? Our sincere Catholic girl is very knowledgeable. Perhaps you mean that your advice applies only to people with the “correct” moral systems?
Not even. I’m assuming that her ontology for anything but the most immediate, important, tangible things would be practically useless. You can generate and possess an accurate world-model with a botched morality, but you’re very unlikely to commit the moral action if the values are spot on but the world-model and its generator are botched. You should begin with ontology and epistemology and then move on to ethics.
Ironically, I actually talked about not feeling guilty, as opposed to feeling guilty, in the article above. But that probably wouldn’t be helpful for someone like that either, even if it seems like it superficially would be in your thought experiment.
In which sense useless? She’s a contemporary, educated girl, she can navigate this world perfectly well and you probably won’t disagree with her about much in the descriptive sphere. What you would disagree about is the normative sphere, but that doesn’t have to do much with ontology. Why do you assume that her “world-model” is botched? There are plenty of very bright religious people.
And I’m still noting that you seem to lack cognizance of the responsibility modality. Causality is a part of responsibility, but does not determine it. Getting out of bed in the morning may causally lead to you getting hit by a bus, or someone else getting hit by a bus, but that doesn’t make you morally responsible for the accident.
Again, I wonder if you don’t get it at all, and simply lack a moral modality I have.
People clearly get this idea to varying degrees. People often still feel guilty when they are part of a causal chain, even when they “know” they were not responsible. Seeing how that tendency distributes across Haidt’s distributions of moral foundations would be really interesting.
As for our emotions and moral intuitions, I agree that one should realize one’s essential freedom in how we respond to them. They are all data. We can choose.
For the rest of your post, I’m not a utilitarian and wasn’t really interested in commenting on your apparent attempt to ameliorate guilt in utilitarians.
You can do anything you can do.
As I read it, you interpreted guilt as the emotional reaction to being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome. That’s not an illusion. It’s a mistake to think I held it you were saying it was.