Does the LessWrong community have a consensus on the subject of moral accountability, to the same extent that it has a consensus on things like free will and reductionism?
I don’t know if this is a matter of consensus, but I generally see it as a matter of translating from third-person deontology to consequentialism by way of third-person virtue ethics and game theory: rather than work with concepts like “culpability” directly, I ask first whether an act is evidence that someone’s likely to do other bad acts, and how well that risk can be mitigated, and second whether punishing that sort of act would make it rarer by enough to outweigh the cost and damage of punishing.
I don’t know if this is a matter of consensus, but I generally see it as a matter of translating from third-person deontology to consequentialism by way of third-person virtue ethics and game theory: rather than work with concepts like “culpability” directly, I ask first whether an act is evidence that someone’s likely to do other bad acts, and how well that risk can be mitigated, and second whether punishing that sort of act would make it rarer by enough to outweigh the cost and damage of punishing.