think about all the crimes you didn’t commit today. Why didn’t you commit them?
If your answer is something other than “fear of being caught and punished,” [...]
If your answer is something other than that and other than “being considered or treated as a bad person by others despite absence of legal proceedings”, then I would be very interested in hearing about it.
It doesn’t happen every day, but I often have the urge to commit petty theft (technically a crime, but probably not worth prosecuting) under circumstances in which my expectation value of punishment (including extralegal punishment such as you suggest) is well below my expectation value of the item that I might steal. Nevertheless, I almost always resist the urge, because I know that my theft will hurt somebody else (which effectively reduces the value of the item to me, since I should also include its value to others).
I evolved to care more about myself than about other people, but reason allows me to (partially) overcome this; it doesn’t reinforce it.
But once I do, I can notice my selfishness and work to overcome it.
But why do you work to overcome it? You’ve said it’s not due to evolution or to rational reasons, but if it’s due to e.g. social conditioning, why would you use your reason to assist this conditioning?
I can think of reasons to do so—although I am not sure they are weighty enough—but I’m interested in other people’s reasons, so I don’t want to reveal my own as yet.
Because I care about other people. I expect that social conditioning, especially from my parents, has led me to care about other people, although internal exercises in empathy also seem to have played a role. But it doesn’t matter where that comes from (any more than it matters where my selfish impulses come from); what matters is that I consider other people to have the same moral worth as I have.
Looking over this conversation, I think that I haven’t been very clear. Your comments, especially this one, seem to take as an assumption that all rational people (or maybe, in context, only rational criminals, or even rational Death Eaters) value what happens to their future selves and nothing else. (Maybe I’m reading them wrong.) Some people do, but most people (even most criminals, even most Death Eaters) don’t; they care about other people (although most people aren’t altruists either).
I think that this is some of what TheOtherDave was getting at here. And it is certainly the reason why I myself don’t commit petty thefts all the time, and why I feel bad when I do commit petty theft: because I care about other people too. Almost all of the people that I know are in a similar position, so I’m surprised that you would find it interesting that we don’t commit crimes, even when we can get away with them (completely, not just legally). That’s the point of my original response to you.
(Actually, I do commit some crimes that I get away with, and without regret, because criminal law and I don’t agree about morality. That’s also important in the original context, but I didn’t address it since I don’t actually want the penal system to be effective in deterring such crimes.)
(Also, I’m not really an altruist either, but I still feel that I should be: I’m a meta-altruist, perhaps, but I’m still figuring out what that means and how I can be an altruist in practice. I probably shouldn’t have brought up altruism; it’s enough that I care about the people in my immediate vicinity, since they’re the people that I have the opportunity to get away with crimes against.)
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
I suspect this is true of most days, and of pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, so I’m not sure what’s so interesting about it.
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
Well that’s given; I meant other than crimes you don’t want to commit in the first place.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
A heuristic, a learned behavior. As a rationalist I see value in getting rid of misapplied heuristics of that kind. It would puzzle me if this wasn’t the default approach (of rationalists, at least). Granted, most of the social conditioning is hard or impossible or dangerous to remove...
Your answer sums up to “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
Well, you were the one who said “if you have any reason other than X or Y then I’d be very interested to hear it” where X and Y don’t cover the “standard answer”, so it hardly seems reasonable for you to complain that the standard answer isn’t interesting.
(I also think it’s highly debatable whether those internalized social prohibitions are best described as “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. You’ve certainly given no reason to think that they are.)
If your answer is something other than that and other than “being considered or treated as a bad person by others despite absence of legal proceedings”, then I would be very interested in hearing about it.
Altruism?
It doesn’t happen every day, but I often have the urge to commit petty theft (technically a crime, but probably not worth prosecuting) under circumstances in which my expectation value of punishment (including extralegal punishment such as you suggest) is well below my expectation value of the item that I might steal. Nevertheless, I almost always resist the urge, because I know that my theft will hurt somebody else (which effectively reduces the value of the item to me, since I should also include its value to others).
I evolved to care more about myself than about other people, but reason allows me to (partially) overcome this; it doesn’t reinforce it.
And what is your rational reason to care about other people?
It’s the same as your rational reason not to: none at all.
But once I do, I can notice my selfishness and work to overcome it.
But why do you work to overcome it? You’ve said it’s not due to evolution or to rational reasons, but if it’s due to e.g. social conditioning, why would you use your reason to assist this conditioning?
I can think of reasons to do so—although I am not sure they are weighty enough—but I’m interested in other people’s reasons, so I don’t want to reveal my own as yet.
Because I care about other people. I expect that social conditioning, especially from my parents, has led me to care about other people, although internal exercises in empathy also seem to have played a role. But it doesn’t matter where that comes from (any more than it matters where my selfish impulses come from); what matters is that I consider other people to have the same moral worth as I have.
Looking over this conversation, I think that I haven’t been very clear. Your comments, especially this one, seem to take as an assumption that all rational people (or maybe, in context, only rational criminals, or even rational Death Eaters) value what happens to their future selves and nothing else. (Maybe I’m reading them wrong.) Some people do, but most people (even most criminals, even most Death Eaters) don’t; they care about other people (although most people aren’t altruists either).
I think that this is some of what TheOtherDave was getting at here. And it is certainly the reason why I myself don’t commit petty thefts all the time, and why I feel bad when I do commit petty theft: because I care about other people too. Almost all of the people that I know are in a similar position, so I’m surprised that you would find it interesting that we don’t commit crimes, even when we can get away with them (completely, not just legally). That’s the point of my original response to you.
(Actually, I do commit some crimes that I get away with, and without regret, because criminal law and I don’t agree about morality. That’s also important in the original context, but I didn’t address it since I don’t actually want the penal system to be effective in deterring such crimes.)
(Also, I’m not really an altruist either, but I still feel that I should be: I’m a meta-altruist, perhaps, but I’m still figuring out what that means and how I can be an altruist in practice. I probably shouldn’t have brought up altruism; it’s enough that I care about the people in my immediate vicinity, since they’re the people that I have the opportunity to get away with crimes against.)
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
I suspect this is true of most days, and of pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, so I’m not sure what’s so interesting about it.
Well that’s given; I meant other than crimes you don’t want to commit in the first place.
A heuristic, a learned behavior. As a rationalist I see value in getting rid of misapplied heuristics of that kind. It would puzzle me if this wasn’t the default approach (of rationalists, at least). Granted, most of the social conditioning is hard or impossible or dangerous to remove...
Your answer sums up to “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
Well, you were the one who said “if you have any reason other than X or Y then I’d be very interested to hear it” where X and Y don’t cover the “standard answer”, so it hardly seems reasonable for you to complain that the standard answer isn’t interesting.
(I also think it’s highly debatable whether those internalized social prohibitions are best described as “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. You’ve certainly given no reason to think that they are.)