On the object level, the three levels you described are extremely important:
harming the ingroup
harming the outgroup (who you may benefit from trading with)
harming powerless people who don’t have the ability to trade or collaborate with you
I’m basically never talking about the third thing when I talk about morality or anything like that, because I don’t think we’ve done a decent job at the first thing. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how well we’ve done the first thing, and I think that in practice utilitarian ethical discourse tends to raise the message length of making that distinction, by implicitly denying that there’s an outgroup.
I don’t think ingroups should be arbitrary affiliation groups. Or, more precisely, “ingroups are arbitrary affiliation groups” is one natural supergroup which I think is doing a lot of harm, and there are other natural supergroups following different strategies, of which “righteousness/justice” is one that I think is especially important. But pretending there’s no outgroup is worse than honestly trying to treat foreigners decently as foreigners who can’t be counted on to trust us with arbitrary power or share our preferences or standards.
Sometimes we should be thinking about what internal norms to coordinate around (which is part of how the ingroup is defined), and sometimes we should be thinking about conflicts with other perspectives or strategies (how we treat outgroups). The Humility Argument for Honesty and Against Neglectedness Considerations are examples of an idea about what kinds of norms constitute a beneficial-to-many supergroup, while Should Effective Altruism be at war with North Korea? was an attempt to raise the visibility of the existence of outgroups, so we could think strategically about them.
I’m basically never talking about the third thing when I talk about morality or anything like that, because I don’t think we’ve done a decent job at the first thing.
Wait, why do you think these have to be done in order?
Some beliefs of mine, I assume different from Ben’s but I think still relevant to this question are:
At the very least, your ability to accomplish anything re: helping the outgroup or helping the powerless is dependent on having spare resources to do so.
There are many clusters of actions which might locally benefit the ingroup and leave the outgroup or powerless in the cold, but which then enable future generations of ingroup more ability to take useful actions to help them. i.e. if you’re a tribe in the wilderness, I much rather you invent capitalism and build supermarkets than that you try to help the poor. The helping of the poor is nice but barely matters in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t personally think you need to halt *all* helping of the powerless until you’ve solidified your treatment of the ingroup/outgroup. But I could imagine future me changing my mind about that.
A major suspicion/confusion I have here is that the two frames:
“Help the ingroup, so that the ingroup eventually has the bandwidth and slack to help the outgroup and the powerless”, and
“Help the ingroup, because it’s convenient and they’re the ingroup”
Look very similar.
Or, alternately: Optimizing even for the welfare of the ingroup, vs the longterm production power of the ingroup are fairly different things. For example, say that income inequality leads to less welfare (because what people really care about is relative status). But, capitalism longterm yields way more resources, using mechanisms that specifically depend on income inequality.
An argument someone once made to me [I’m not sure if the actual facts here check out but the thought experiment was sufficient to change my outlook] was “look, 100 years ago Mexico made choices that optimized for more equality at the expense of 1% economic growth. Trading 1% economic growth for a lot of equality might sound like a good trade, but it means that 100 years later people in Mexico are literally dying to try to get into the US.”
(This fits into the ingroup/outgroup/powerless schema if you think of the “trade 1% growth for equality” as a choice that elites (rich/wealthy/well-connected/intelligentsia] might make, as a pseudo-ingroup, in order to help the less fortunate in their own country, which are a pseudo-relative-outgroup)
Attention is scarce and there are lots of optimization processes going on, so if you think the future is big relative to the present, interventions that increase the optimization power serving your values are going to outperform direct interventions. This doesn’t imply that we should just do infinite meta, but it does imply that the value of direct object-level improvements will nearly always be via how they affect different optimizing processes.
A lot of this makes sense. Some of it feels like I haven’t quite understood the frame you’re using (and unfortunately can’t specify further which parts those are because it’s a bit confusing)
One thing that seems relevant: My preference to “declare staghunts first and get explicit buy in before trying to do anything cooperatively-challenging” feels quite related to “ambiguity over who is in the ingroup causes problems” thing.
On the object level, the three levels you described are extremely important:
harming the ingroup
harming the outgroup (who you may benefit from trading with)
harming powerless people who don’t have the ability to trade or collaborate with you
I’m basically never talking about the third thing when I talk about morality or anything like that, because I don’t think we’ve done a decent job at the first thing. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how well we’ve done the first thing, and I think that in practice utilitarian ethical discourse tends to raise the message length of making that distinction, by implicitly denying that there’s an outgroup.
I don’t think ingroups should be arbitrary affiliation groups. Or, more precisely, “ingroups are arbitrary affiliation groups” is one natural supergroup which I think is doing a lot of harm, and there are other natural supergroups following different strategies, of which “righteousness/justice” is one that I think is especially important. But pretending there’s no outgroup is worse than honestly trying to treat foreigners decently as foreigners who can’t be counted on to trust us with arbitrary power or share our preferences or standards.
Sometimes we should be thinking about what internal norms to coordinate around (which is part of how the ingroup is defined), and sometimes we should be thinking about conflicts with other perspectives or strategies (how we treat outgroups). The Humility Argument for Honesty and Against Neglectedness Considerations are examples of an idea about what kinds of norms constitute a beneficial-to-many supergroup, while Should Effective Altruism be at war with North Korea? was an attempt to raise the visibility of the existence of outgroups, so we could think strategically about them.
Wait, why do you think these have to be done in order?
Some beliefs of mine, I assume different from Ben’s but I think still relevant to this question are:
At the very least, your ability to accomplish anything re: helping the outgroup or helping the powerless is dependent on having spare resources to do so.
There are many clusters of actions which might locally benefit the ingroup and leave the outgroup or powerless in the cold, but which then enable future generations of ingroup more ability to take useful actions to help them. i.e. if you’re a tribe in the wilderness, I much rather you invent capitalism and build supermarkets than that you try to help the poor. The helping of the poor is nice but barely matters in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t personally think you need to halt *all* helping of the powerless until you’ve solidified your treatment of the ingroup/outgroup. But I could imagine future me changing my mind about that.
A major suspicion/confusion I have here is that the two frames:
“Help the ingroup, so that the ingroup eventually has the bandwidth and slack to help the outgroup and the powerless”, and
“Help the ingroup, because it’s convenient and they’re the ingroup”
Look very similar.
Or, alternately: Optimizing even for the welfare of the ingroup, vs the longterm production power of the ingroup are fairly different things. For example, say that income inequality leads to less welfare (because what people really care about is relative status). But, capitalism longterm yields way more resources, using mechanisms that specifically depend on income inequality.
An argument someone once made to me [I’m not sure if the actual facts here check out but the thought experiment was sufficient to change my outlook] was “look, 100 years ago Mexico made choices that optimized for more equality at the expense of 1% economic growth. Trading 1% economic growth for a lot of equality might sound like a good trade, but it means that 100 years later people in Mexico are literally dying to try to get into the US.”
(This fits into the ingroup/outgroup/powerless schema if you think of the “trade 1% growth for equality” as a choice that elites (rich/wealthy/well-connected/intelligentsia] might make, as a pseudo-ingroup, in order to help the less fortunate in their own country, which are a pseudo-relative-outgroup)
Attention is scarce and there are lots of optimization processes going on, so if you think the future is big relative to the present, interventions that increase the optimization power serving your values are going to outperform direct interventions. This doesn’t imply that we should just do infinite meta, but it does imply that the value of direct object-level improvements will nearly always be via how they affect different optimizing processes.
A lot of this makes sense. Some of it feels like I haven’t quite understood the frame you’re using (and unfortunately can’t specify further which parts those are because it’s a bit confusing)
One thing that seems relevant: My preference to “declare staghunts first and get explicit buy in before trying to do anything cooperatively-challenging” feels quite related to “ambiguity over who is in the ingroup causes problems” thing.