Is it the author’s opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed?
It had been, but...
Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don’t enjoy such work to do it.
Though there’s logic to this argument, pretty much everything else about the way house elves were made is evil. They’re created, or conditioned to brutally torture themselves if they even think they’ve displeased their masters or broken a rule. They have no labor rights and can be mistreated at will, to the point that mistreatment is built in as a product feature.
We can only imagine what sort of miserable Dickensian conditions they live in when they’re not at work. They’re forced to wear ragged, salvaged sacks, as giving them clothes = firing them, i.e. denying them the work and subservient position they’re designed to want. This is a needless cruelty on top of everything else. Heck, if I were an aristocrat wizard with house elves, I’d want mine to go around in elegant livery, as a demonstration of how magnificent my Estate is. But I couldn’t do that, because the poor little creatures were made (modified?) by a sadist.
Heck, if I were an aristocrat wizard with house elves, I’d want mine to go around in elegant livery, as a demonstration of how magnificent my Estate is. But I couldn’t do that
You could get them elegantly embroidered little dishtowels clipped into place with stylized sugar tongs made of silver.
You can’t give them clothes, but no one said anything about not giving them ARMOR. Give them fine spider silk armor, it will be indistinguishable from silk.
True. You have persuaded me back to my original position. Whoever made house elves was disgusting. It could have been done right (complementary intelligent species that enjoys doing a lot of necessary things we don’t, while still having rich lives of their own), but it wasn’t.
This is pointing at a general problem in sf—problems are needed to move the plot along, so some development which might have good or mixed results is burdened with other features that make it obviously bad.
The usual handling of longevity and immortality in sf is an example, but so is the [spoiler] included with the cosmetic surgery in Westerfeld’s Uglies or an AI in a novel called B.E.A.S.T. which was challenged by throwing a series of deadly attacks at it—it becomes violent and we have a story, but what would happen with a better treated AI would be more interesting.
How would you say this relates to the ethics of creating an FAI? In some ways house elves were created for a similar reason that we would create an FAI. Would it be something about ‘consciousness’ that separates the two constructions ethically? If so, I wonder whether creating a ‘helper’ agent that in some sense is conscious and ‘enjoys’ what it does is better or worse than creating a raw optimised agent that we wouldn’t consider conscious.
It occurs to me that what a house elf considers fun is not all that much different from the perspective of all of value-space from what we might consider fun.
It had been, but...
...is a powerful argument I had never considered.
Though there’s logic to this argument, pretty much everything else about the way house elves were made is evil. They’re created, or conditioned to brutally torture themselves if they even think they’ve displeased their masters or broken a rule. They have no labor rights and can be mistreated at will, to the point that mistreatment is built in as a product feature.
We can only imagine what sort of miserable Dickensian conditions they live in when they’re not at work. They’re forced to wear ragged, salvaged sacks, as giving them clothes = firing them, i.e. denying them the work and subservient position they’re designed to want. This is a needless cruelty on top of everything else. Heck, if I were an aristocrat wizard with house elves, I’d want mine to go around in elegant livery, as a demonstration of how magnificent my Estate is. But I couldn’t do that, because the poor little creatures were made (modified?) by a sadist.
You could get them elegantly embroidered little dishtowels clipped into place with stylized sugar tongs made of silver.
Hogwarts elves in canon do wear something very much like that.
You can’t give them clothes, but no one said anything about not giving them ARMOR. Give them fine spider silk armor, it will be indistinguishable from silk.
True. You have persuaded me back to my original position. Whoever made house elves was disgusting. It could have been done right (complementary intelligent species that enjoys doing a lot of necessary things we don’t, while still having rich lives of their own), but it wasn’t.
This is pointing at a general problem in sf—problems are needed to move the plot along, so some development which might have good or mixed results is burdened with other features that make it obviously bad.
The usual handling of longevity and immortality in sf is an example, but so is the [spoiler] included with the cosmetic surgery in Westerfeld’s Uglies or an AI in a novel called B.E.A.S.T. which was challenged by throwing a series of deadly attacks at it—it becomes violent and we have a story, but what would happen with a better treated AI would be more interesting.
Do you think it would be evil to create house elves that honestly enjoy their jobs and situations?
How would you say this relates to the ethics of creating an FAI? In some ways house elves were created for a similar reason that we would create an FAI. Would it be something about ‘consciousness’ that separates the two constructions ethically? If so, I wonder whether creating a ‘helper’ agent that in some sense is conscious and ‘enjoys’ what it does is better or worse than creating a raw optimised agent that we wouldn’t consider conscious.
It occurs to me that what a house elf considers fun is not all that much different from the perspective of all of value-space from what we might consider fun.