Straightforward “strategic ignorance” (avoiding to learn things on purpose to avoid related obligations) seems like an obvious moral failure. The practical problem is that once we start judging people for strategic ignorance, it may motivate them to make their strategy indirect. If you can be blamed for not taking a swimming class that your school provided, it motivates you to choose a school that does not provide swimming classes. Or vote for a government that removes swimming classes from schools, because then it’s no longer your fault.
This posits a sort of moral obligation to maximally extend your capacity to help others or take care of yourself in a sustainable way.
Yes. Unfortunately, I have only heard this idea in some form from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Jordan Peterson. It seems to be outside the social Overton window.
I suppose the reason is that, socially, we need a definition of “ethics” such that most people kinda reach it. Otherwise we don’t get the peer pressure… and might actually get peer pressure against.
Seems like we have two different things here—what is the right thing to do, and what is the optimal social norm to promote—and the relation between them is complicated. It feels it would be nice if these two could be the same thing. Promoting the thing that is the right thing to do, sounds like the right thing to do. But that only works if people already agree, or if there is a cult-like situation that can make them agree (to the degree that they become the enforcers of the norm in private; otherwise you just get two competing moralities). In reality, outside of cults, you don’t get an agreement on anything.
Another option is to choose the optimal social norm (the thing that realistically can be approved of by the majority) and pretend that this is the right thing to do. I think that’s how it works in practice. The problem is what to do about those parts of “doing the right thing” that don’t fit into the “optimal norm that can be socially enforced”? If you openly admit that the social norm is actually not the right thing to do, you undermine the social norm. An alternative is to adopt a (logically inconsistent, if you look too closely) position that something things are “good”, but some things are “beyond-good”—good if you choose to do them, but if you refuse to do them, it doesn’t make you bad.
So, using the traditional language, saving the drowning child is an obligation for swimmers; and learning to swim is supererogatory. Until it happens that most of the people in your society learn to swim, and then you can switch and make learning to swim an obligation.
I used the word obligation because it felt too hard to find a better one, but I don’t like it, even for saving children in shallow ponds. In my mind, obligations are for things you signed up for. In our imperfect world I also feel okay using it for things you got signed up for and benefit from (e.g. I never agreed to be born in the US as a citizen, but I sure do benefit from it, so taxes are an obligation). In my world obligations are always to a specific entity, not general demands.
I think that for some people, rescuing drowning children is an obligation to society, similar to taxes. Something feels wrong about that to me, although I’d think very badly of someone who could have trivially saved a child and chose not to.
A key point for me is that people are allowed to be shitty. This right doesn’t make them not-shitty or free them from the consequences of being shitty, but it is an affordance available to everyone. Not being shitty requires a high average on erogatory actions, plus some number of supererogatory ones.
How many supererogatory actions? The easiest way to define this is relative to capacity, but that seems toxic to me, like people to don’t have a right to their own gains. It also seems likely to drive lots of people crazy with guilt. I don’t know what the right answer is.
TBH I’ve been really surprised at my reaction to “~obligation to maximal growth”. I would have predicted it would feel constraining and toxic, but it feels freeing and empowering, like I’ve been given a more chances to help people at no cost to me. I feel more powerful. I also feel more permission to give up on what is currently too hard, since sacrificing myself for one short term goal hurts my long term obligation.
Maybe the key is that this is a better way to think achieve goals I already had. It’s not a good frame for deciding what one’s goals should be.
Straightforward “strategic ignorance” (avoiding to learn things on purpose to avoid related obligations) seems like an obvious moral failure. The practical problem is that once we start judging people for strategic ignorance, it may motivate them to make their strategy indirect. If you can be blamed for not taking a swimming class that your school provided, it motivates you to choose a school that does not provide swimming classes. Or vote for a government that removes swimming classes from schools, because then it’s no longer your fault.
Yes. Unfortunately, I have only heard this idea in some form from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Jordan Peterson. It seems to be outside the social Overton window.
I suppose the reason is that, socially, we need a definition of “ethics” such that most people kinda reach it. Otherwise we don’t get the peer pressure… and might actually get peer pressure against.
Seems like we have two different things here—what is the right thing to do, and what is the optimal social norm to promote—and the relation between them is complicated. It feels it would be nice if these two could be the same thing. Promoting the thing that is the right thing to do, sounds like the right thing to do. But that only works if people already agree, or if there is a cult-like situation that can make them agree (to the degree that they become the enforcers of the norm in private; otherwise you just get two competing moralities). In reality, outside of cults, you don’t get an agreement on anything.
Another option is to choose the optimal social norm (the thing that realistically can be approved of by the majority) and pretend that this is the right thing to do. I think that’s how it works in practice. The problem is what to do about those parts of “doing the right thing” that don’t fit into the “optimal norm that can be socially enforced”? If you openly admit that the social norm is actually not the right thing to do, you undermine the social norm. An alternative is to adopt a (logically inconsistent, if you look too closely) position that something things are “good”, but some things are “beyond-good”—good if you choose to do them, but if you refuse to do them, it doesn’t make you bad.
So, using the traditional language, saving the drowning child is an obligation for swimmers; and learning to swim is supererogatory. Until it happens that most of the people in your society learn to swim, and then you can switch and make learning to swim an obligation.
I used the word obligation because it felt too hard to find a better one, but I don’t like it, even for saving children in shallow ponds. In my mind, obligations are for things you signed up for. In our imperfect world I also feel okay using it for things you got signed up for and benefit from (e.g. I never agreed to be born in the US as a citizen, but I sure do benefit from it, so taxes are an obligation). In my world obligations are always to a specific entity, not general demands.
I think that for some people, rescuing drowning children is an obligation to society, similar to taxes. Something feels wrong about that to me, although I’d think very badly of someone who could have trivially saved a child and chose not to.
A key point for me is that people are allowed to be shitty. This right doesn’t make them not-shitty or free them from the consequences of being shitty, but it is an affordance available to everyone. Not being shitty requires a high average on erogatory actions, plus some number of supererogatory ones.
How many supererogatory actions? The easiest way to define this is relative to capacity, but that seems toxic to me, like people to don’t have a right to their own gains. It also seems likely to drive lots of people crazy with guilt. I don’t know what the right answer is.
TBH I’ve been really surprised at my reaction to “~obligation to maximal growth”. I would have predicted it would feel constraining and toxic, but it feels freeing and empowering, like I’ve been given a more chances to help people at no cost to me. I feel more powerful. I also feel more permission to give up on what is currently too hard, since sacrificing myself for one short term goal hurts my long term obligation.
Maybe the key is that this is a better way to think achieve goals I already had. It’s not a good frame for deciding what one’s goals should be.