I’m about to make a naked assertion with nothing to back it up, just to put it out there.
The purpose of morality is to prevent such an arguement from even ever occurring. If the morale engine of society is working correctly, then all it’s members will have a desire for everyone to get an equally sized portion of the pie (in this example). If there is a Zaire who believes he should get 1⁄2 of the pie, then there was a malfunction when morality was being programmed into him. This malfunction will lead to conflict.
View it like you would view programming a friendly AI. The purpose is to program the AI with desires that will motivate it to help humanity, and to have a strong aversion to destroying humanity. If this goal is not reached, there was a failure by the programmers. I think it’s been said on this blog that if you create an AI without having made it friendly you’ve already lost and the game is over. It’s not quite as drastic if you fail with humans, but the principle is the same. If a friendly Human Intelligence is not programmed with the desires that will help to keep humanity thriving then there was a failure by it’s programmers(parents/society/teachers/whoever).
Why is it that human morality is this confusing and mysterious realm that no one seems to be able to fathom when AI morality is straight-forward? Is it just that humans can easily see the goal of one (an AI that desires to help rather than hurt humanity) and for some reason can’t see the goal of another (a human that desires to help rather than hurt humanity)?
Zaire’s argument is that some people actually need more of “the pie” than others. Equal portions aren’t necessarily fair, in that situation.
For example: would it be fair if every person on the globe got an equal portion of diabetic insulin?
No, obviously not. We disproportionately give insulin to diabetics. Because that is more fair than to distribute it equally amongst all people (regardless of their health situation).
The disagreement here is between two perfectly understandable concepts of fairness. Both of them make sense in different ways. I see no easy solution to this myself.
I’d lay a high likelihood that you have quite a few more advantages than the kind of person I’m thinking of.
You probably have your fair number of disadvantages too, but you’ve (through being lucky enough to have good health, intelligence, time and/or money for education and maybe good friends/family for support) been able to overcome those “on your own” (except for the aforementioned support)… which means you are categorically not the kind of person I’m thinking of when I am talking about people that need more support than others.
Some people need extra, and those people do try to pay for their extra.. but even so… some of them will still not be able to, due to circumstances that isn’t their fault.
At least in some cases, yes. I don’t agree with the “every sentient mind has value” view that’s so common around here; sentient minds are remarkably easy to create, using the reproduction method. Dividing a share of resources to every human according to their needs rewards producing as many children of possible, and not caring if they’re a net drain on resources. I would prefer to reward a K-selection strategy, rather than an r-selection strategy.
The various advantages you list aren’t simply a matter of chance; they’re things I have because my parents earned the right to have children who live.
I’m not sure I agree with this. It takes quite a lot of resources (time, energy etc) to create sentient minds at present… certainly to bring them to any reasonable state of maturity. After which, the people that put that time and effort in quite often get very attached to that new sentient mind—even if that mind is not a net-productive citizen.
The strategy that you choose to follow in how to divide up resources to sentient minds may be based on what you perceive to be their net-productivity… and maybe you feel a strong need to push your ideas on others as “oughts” that you think they should follow (eg that people ought to earn every resource themselves)… but it’s pretty clear that other people are following other strategies than your preferred one.
as a counter-example, a very large number of people (not including myself here) follow that old adage of “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” which is just about the exact opposite of your own.
[I’ve written two different responses to your comment. This one is more true to my state of mind when I wrote the comment you replied to.]
Consider this: a man gets a woman pregnant, the man leaves. The woman carries the child to birth, hands it over to an adoption agency. Raising the child to maturity is now someone else’s problem, but it has those parents’ genes. I do not want this to be a viable strategy. If some people choose this strategy, that only makes it more important to stop letting them cheat.
It’s a lot of resources from the perspective of a single person, but I was thinking at a slightly larger scale. By “easy”, I mean that manageable groups of people can do it repeatedly and be confident of success. Really, the fact that sentient minds can be valued in terms of resources at all is sufficient for my argument. (That value can then be ignored when assessing productivity, as it’s a sunk cost.)
You seem to be looking in the wrong place with your “that people ought to earn every resource themselves” example—my opinion is that the people who have resources should not give those resources to people who won’t make good use of them. That the people who lack resources will then have to earn them if they’re to survive is an unavoidable consequence of that (and is my real goal here), but those aren’t the people that I think ought to be changing things.
As for what strategies people actually follow, I think most people do what I’m saying they should do, on an individual level. Most people protect their resources, and share them only with those who they expect to be able to return the favor. On the group level, though, people lose track of how much things actually cost, and support things like welfare that help people regardless of whether they’re worth the cost of keeping alive.
“whether they’re worth the cost of keeping alive.”
and this highlights the differences in our views.
our point of difference is in this whole basis of using practical “worth” as The way of deciding whether or not a person should live/die.
I can get trying to minimise the birth of new people that are net-negative contributors to the world… but from my perspective, once they are born—it’s worth putting some effort into supporting them.
Why? because it’s not their fault they were born the way they are, and they should not be punished because of that. They need help to get along.
Sometimes—the situation that put them in their needy state occurred after they were born—and again is still not their fault.
Another example to point out why I feel your view is unfair to people:
Imagine somebody who has worked all their lives in an industry that has given amazing amounts of benefit to the world.. but has only just now become obsolete. That person is now unemployed and, due to being near retirement age, unemployable. It’s an industry in which they were never really paid very well, and their savings don’t add up to enough to cover their ongoing living costs for very long.
Eventually, there will come a time when the savings run out and this person dies of starvation without our help.
I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I’d rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).
I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I’d rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).
I think this shows the underlying problem. You would also rather have all your tax money go to give a cute little puppy more food than it will ever need, simply because war is a terrible alternative.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing you can do with your money, or even anywhere near that standard. And neither is, one could argue, giving money to an obsolete person in a country where the cost of living is very high comparative to other countries in the world.
If I were magically put in charge of distributing the next year’s federal budget—I would still allocate resources to domestic welfare (supporting others that, through no fault of their own, have fallen on times of hardship), even though a larger portion went to foreign aid.
I’ve just made the unpleasant discovery that being downvoted to −4 makes it impossible to reply to those who replied to me (or to edit my comment). I’ll state for the record that I disagree with that policy… and proceed to shut up.
When someone is born who is a net-negative contributor to the world… it was their parents’ doing. They carry their parents’ genes; it’s a very appropriate punishment for their parents’ misdeed to let the child die. It comes very close to being a direct reversal of the original mistake, in fact.
It does sometimes happen that someone otherwise capable of being productive is accidentally stripped of their resources, and ideally they should get some help to get back on their feet—this seems like an ideal use case for a loan. In general, someone will have to make the call that they’re worth saving, and I do grant that some people in dire straits are worth saving.
In your example of the old man, it appears to me that he was cheated earlier in life; you postulate that he actually produced a very great benefit to others, and it seems to me that he deserves to have a very great amount of money to show for it. Without government support, he might still have friends to fall back on… if not, then this is clearly a case where welfare does some good, but it doesn’t come close to reversing the injustice here. I see the benefit of welfare in this case as mostly accidental, and would prefer that something more targeted be done to repay him, while recognizing his actual contribution.
I just took a brief look at current U.S. welfare law, and it looks like there are some provisions in there to exclude the most obvious cases of people who don’t deserve support (able-bodied people who aren’t even trying to be productive).
it’s a very appropriate punishment for their parents’ misdeed to let the child die
Doesn’t it strike you that that’s not very fair to the child?
For that matter, it’s not remotely fair to the parents either; productivity is not solely determined by parents’ genes plus upbringing, still less by what the parents can know about their genes plus upbringing. Consider, for instance, the following scenarios. In all of them, by “net positive contribution” I mean “net positive economic contribution”, which I’m pretty sure is what you have in mind by that phrase.
Two intelligent and hardworking people have a child. The child loses the genetic lottery and ends up much less intelligent than average, or suffers from some condition that greatly reduces her capacity for work. (Perhaps both parents had a very harmful recessive gene, but didn’t know it.) She is not able to make a “net positive contribution” to the world.
Two highly productive people have a child. Between the child’s conception and adulthood, society changes (e.g., because of technological innovation) in such a way that the sort of work that made the parents highly productive is no longer viable; maybe machines can do it so much better that no one will employ humans to do it. It turns out that the parents were decidedly sub-average in other ways, and the child is too. He is not able to make a “net positive contribution” to the world.
Would you say that these children deserve to die because of their parents’ misdeeds in having them? This seems to me an absolutely untenable position; it requires you to hold
that having an economically unproductive child is a crime deserving terrible punishment
that this applies even if you had no good reason to think your child would be economically unproductive
that the fact that this punishment involves the death penalty for the child is not a problem
all of which seem absurd.
A world run the way you seem to prefer would not be one I would want to live in.
my opinion is that the people who have resources should not give those resources to people who won’t make good use of them.
When widely applied, this principle tends to lead to trouble. It’s a very small intuitive step from this to “people who aren’t making good use of their own resources should have them taken away and given to someone who will make better use of them” and that is, in turn, a very small step away from “resources shouldn’t be wasted on anyone too elderly to be employed”.
Now, I’m not saying that’s where you’re going with this. It’s just that that’s close enough to what you said that it’s probably something you’d want to specifically avoid.
It’s a very small intuitive step from this to “people who aren’t making good use of their own resources should have them taken away and given to someone who will make better use of them”
That step doesn’t look small to me, specifically because it leaps over the rather large concept of property.
We pretty much do this already (outside of a few nations like New Zealand), and it doesn’t lead to trouble at all, although some people complain about it (although if they recognized exactly what was going on, the number of people complaining about it would probably rise dramatically).
Property taxes rise with land values, which are proportional to the value of resources. If you’re not making good use of your resources, you can’t cover property taxes, and you have to sell the property. The only people who will buy it are those who think they can make sufficient use of the resources to cover the sale price, in addition to property taxes going forward.
Not quite. Imposing some cost to own certain things is not the same as “should have them taken away”.
Yes, I understand that you can construct a continuous spectrum from a small fee to “it’s cheaper for you to give it away rather than pay the tax”, but I feel that in practice the distance is great.
I’m about to make a naked assertion with nothing to back it up, just to put it out there.
The purpose of morality is to prevent such an arguement from even ever occurring. If the morale engine of society is working correctly, then all it’s members will have a desire for everyone to get an equally sized portion of the pie (in this example). If there is a Zaire who believes he should get 1⁄2 of the pie, then there was a malfunction when morality was being programmed into him. This malfunction will lead to conflict.
View it like you would view programming a friendly AI. The purpose is to program the AI with desires that will motivate it to help humanity, and to have a strong aversion to destroying humanity. If this goal is not reached, there was a failure by the programmers. I think it’s been said on this blog that if you create an AI without having made it friendly you’ve already lost and the game is over. It’s not quite as drastic if you fail with humans, but the principle is the same. If a friendly Human Intelligence is not programmed with the desires that will help to keep humanity thriving then there was a failure by it’s programmers(parents/society/teachers/whoever).
Why is it that human morality is this confusing and mysterious realm that no one seems to be able to fathom when AI morality is straight-forward? Is it just that humans can easily see the goal of one (an AI that desires to help rather than hurt humanity) and for some reason can’t see the goal of another (a human that desires to help rather than hurt humanity)?
I think it’s more complex than that.
Zaire’s argument is that some people actually need more of “the pie” than others. Equal portions aren’t necessarily fair, in that situation.
For example: would it be fair if every person on the globe got an equal portion of diabetic insulin? No, obviously not. We disproportionately give insulin to diabetics. Because that is more fair than to distribute it equally amongst all people (regardless of their health situation).
The disagreement here is between two perfectly understandable concepts of fairness. Both of them make sense in different ways. I see no easy solution to this myself.
Diabetics pay for their insulin. If someone needs more resources than others do, they need to earn those extra resources in some way.
I’d lay a high likelihood that you have quite a few more advantages than the kind of person I’m thinking of. You probably have your fair number of disadvantages too, but you’ve (through being lucky enough to have good health, intelligence, time and/or money for education and maybe good friends/family for support) been able to overcome those “on your own” (except for the aforementioned support)… which means you are categorically not the kind of person I’m thinking of when I am talking about people that need more support than others.
Some people need extra, and those people do try to pay for their extra.. but even so… some of them will still not be able to, due to circumstances that isn’t their fault.
Do you condemn to death?
At least in some cases, yes. I don’t agree with the “every sentient mind has value” view that’s so common around here; sentient minds are remarkably easy to create, using the reproduction method. Dividing a share of resources to every human according to their needs rewards producing as many children of possible, and not caring if they’re a net drain on resources. I would prefer to reward a K-selection strategy, rather than an r-selection strategy.
The various advantages you list aren’t simply a matter of chance; they’re things I have because my parents earned the right to have children who live.
“sentient minds are remarkably easy to create”
I’m not sure I agree with this. It takes quite a lot of resources (time, energy etc) to create sentient minds at present… certainly to bring them to any reasonable state of maturity. After which, the people that put that time and effort in quite often get very attached to that new sentient mind—even if that mind is not a net-productive citizen.
The strategy that you choose to follow in how to divide up resources to sentient minds may be based on what you perceive to be their net-productivity… and maybe you feel a strong need to push your ideas on others as “oughts” that you think they should follow (eg that people ought to earn every resource themselves)… but it’s pretty clear that other people are following other strategies than your preferred one.
as a counter-example, a very large number of people (not including myself here) follow that old adage of “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” which is just about the exact opposite of your own.
[I’ve written two different responses to your comment. This one is more true to my state of mind when I wrote the comment you replied to.]
Consider this: a man gets a woman pregnant, the man leaves. The woman carries the child to birth, hands it over to an adoption agency. Raising the child to maturity is now someone else’s problem, but it has those parents’ genes. I do not want this to be a viable strategy. If some people choose this strategy, that only makes it more important to stop letting them cheat.
It’s a lot of resources from the perspective of a single person, but I was thinking at a slightly larger scale. By “easy”, I mean that manageable groups of people can do it repeatedly and be confident of success. Really, the fact that sentient minds can be valued in terms of resources at all is sufficient for my argument. (That value can then be ignored when assessing productivity, as it’s a sunk cost.)
You seem to be looking in the wrong place with your “that people ought to earn every resource themselves” example—my opinion is that the people who have resources should not give those resources to people who won’t make good use of them. That the people who lack resources will then have to earn them if they’re to survive is an unavoidable consequence of that (and is my real goal here), but those aren’t the people that I think ought to be changing things.
As for what strategies people actually follow, I think most people do what I’m saying they should do, on an individual level. Most people protect their resources, and share them only with those who they expect to be able to return the favor. On the group level, though, people lose track of how much things actually cost, and support things like welfare that help people regardless of whether they’re worth the cost of keeping alive.
“whether they’re worth the cost of keeping alive.” and this highlights the differences in our views.
our point of difference is in this whole basis of using practical “worth” as The way of deciding whether or not a person should live/die.
I can get trying to minimise the birth of new people that are net-negative contributors to the world… but from my perspective, once they are born—it’s worth putting some effort into supporting them.
Why? because it’s not their fault they were born the way they are, and they should not be punished because of that. They need help to get along.
Sometimes—the situation that put them in their needy state occurred after they were born—and again is still not their fault.
Another example to point out why I feel your view is unfair to people: Imagine somebody who has worked all their lives in an industry that has given amazing amounts of benefit to the world.. but has only just now become obsolete. That person is now unemployed and, due to being near retirement age, unemployable. It’s an industry in which they were never really paid very well, and their savings don’t add up to enough to cover their ongoing living costs for very long.
Eventually, there will come a time when the savings run out and this person dies of starvation without our help.
I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I’d rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).
I think this shows the underlying problem. You would also rather have all your tax money go to give a cute little puppy more food than it will ever need, simply because war is a terrible alternative.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing you can do with your money, or even anywhere near that standard. And neither is, one could argue, giving money to an obsolete person in a country where the cost of living is very high comparative to other countries in the world.
If I were magically put in charge of distributing the next year’s federal budget—I would still allocate resources to domestic welfare (supporting others that, through no fault of their own, have fallen on times of hardship), even though a larger portion went to foreign aid.
I’ve just made the unpleasant discovery that being downvoted to −4 makes it impossible to reply to those who replied to me (or to edit my comment). I’ll state for the record that I disagree with that policy… and proceed to shut up.
It’s not impossible, you’d just need to pay 5 karma per reply.
...you’d need to have 5 karma to pay, first. You should be able to pick that up by making positive, helpful contributions to discussion on this site.
It’s quite possible, only requiring payment in your own karma points. If you’re karma-broke, well....
Seeing as how what I was saying was basically “let the poor starve”, this ending seems strangely appropriate.
When someone is born who is a net-negative contributor to the world… it was their parents’ doing. They carry their parents’ genes; it’s a very appropriate punishment for their parents’ misdeed to let the child die. It comes very close to being a direct reversal of the original mistake, in fact.
It does sometimes happen that someone otherwise capable of being productive is accidentally stripped of their resources, and ideally they should get some help to get back on their feet—this seems like an ideal use case for a loan. In general, someone will have to make the call that they’re worth saving, and I do grant that some people in dire straits are worth saving.
In your example of the old man, it appears to me that he was cheated earlier in life; you postulate that he actually produced a very great benefit to others, and it seems to me that he deserves to have a very great amount of money to show for it. Without government support, he might still have friends to fall back on… if not, then this is clearly a case where welfare does some good, but it doesn’t come close to reversing the injustice here. I see the benefit of welfare in this case as mostly accidental, and would prefer that something more targeted be done to repay him, while recognizing his actual contribution.
I just took a brief look at current U.S. welfare law, and it looks like there are some provisions in there to exclude the most obvious cases of people who don’t deserve support (able-bodied people who aren’t even trying to be productive).
Doesn’t it strike you that that’s not very fair to the child?
For that matter, it’s not remotely fair to the parents either; productivity is not solely determined by parents’ genes plus upbringing, still less by what the parents can know about their genes plus upbringing. Consider, for instance, the following scenarios. In all of them, by “net positive contribution” I mean “net positive economic contribution”, which I’m pretty sure is what you have in mind by that phrase.
Two intelligent and hardworking people have a child. The child loses the genetic lottery and ends up much less intelligent than average, or suffers from some condition that greatly reduces her capacity for work. (Perhaps both parents had a very harmful recessive gene, but didn’t know it.) She is not able to make a “net positive contribution” to the world.
Two highly productive people have a child. Between the child’s conception and adulthood, society changes (e.g., because of technological innovation) in such a way that the sort of work that made the parents highly productive is no longer viable; maybe machines can do it so much better that no one will employ humans to do it. It turns out that the parents were decidedly sub-average in other ways, and the child is too. He is not able to make a “net positive contribution” to the world.
Would you say that these children deserve to die because of their parents’ misdeeds in having them? This seems to me an absolutely untenable position; it requires you to hold
that having an economically unproductive child is a crime deserving terrible punishment
that this applies even if you had no good reason to think your child would be economically unproductive
that the fact that this punishment involves the death penalty for the child is not a problem
all of which seem absurd.
A world run the way you seem to prefer would not be one I would want to live in.
How do you define this? I can name a number of people throughout history who would have used heuristics here that I vehemently disagree with...
When widely applied, this principle tends to lead to trouble. It’s a very small intuitive step from this to “people who aren’t making good use of their own resources should have them taken away and given to someone who will make better use of them” and that is, in turn, a very small step away from “resources shouldn’t be wasted on anyone too elderly to be employed”.
Now, I’m not saying that’s where you’re going with this. It’s just that that’s close enough to what you said that it’s probably something you’d want to specifically avoid.
That step doesn’t look small to me, specifically because it leaps over the rather large concept of property.
We pretty much do this already (outside of a few nations like New Zealand), and it doesn’t lead to trouble at all, although some people complain about it (although if they recognized exactly what was going on, the number of people complaining about it would probably rise dramatically).
Property taxes rise with land values, which are proportional to the value of resources. If you’re not making good use of your resources, you can’t cover property taxes, and you have to sell the property. The only people who will buy it are those who think they can make sufficient use of the resources to cover the sale price, in addition to property taxes going forward.
Not quite. Imposing some cost to own certain things is not the same as “should have them taken away”.
Yes, I understand that you can construct a continuous spectrum from a small fee to “it’s cheaper for you to give it away rather than pay the tax”, but I feel that in practice the distance is great.