Is it the author’s opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed? It would seem that to think that after their creation, they would want to do what they have been designed to do and so would be no more evil than creating an intelligence which would want to bowl and fish all day. 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. Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?
ETA: While this argument works in the abstract and is useful for countering human biases against “slavery” and applies in the particular for the creation of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, house elves have addition features I wasn’t considering which makes their creation morally evil.
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.
I think it’s worth distinguishing creating work-loving entities ex nihilo from modifying existing entities against their will to become work-loving. Canon rather implies the latter; handling the procedure ethically would be tricky, as baseline elves likely would not only resist being value-enslaved, but would want the children they birth and raise to be like themselves.
Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?
That’s certainly canon!Hermione’s problem.
But there is something wrong with House-Elves, at least in canon, even after whatever went into their creation. They enjoy serving humans, fine; I’m with MoR!Harry about that. But (possibly unbeknownst to Harry and Hermione yet) there are House-Elves who are very unhappy with their current situation, such as Dobby (who disliked his master) and Winky (who loved her master but was fired and never recovered from this). It always bothered me that canon!Hermione never outgrew her early phase of S.P.E.W. and never tried to do anything that would actually help them. (However, the Word of God is that she did help them in her adulthood, so that’s all right then.)
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.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy—you don’t have to force anyone to do it. Offer a sufficiently high salary to scrub Hogwarts’ toilet (or just to cast Cleaning Charms on them), and voila, you have free-willed, willing, unmodified house workers.
The meaningful question (at least, to the degree that any moral question can be meaningful) is whether there is any value in that “unmodified” qualifier.
The meaningful question (at least, to the degree that any moral question can be meaningful) is whether there is any value in that “unmodified” qualifier.
It matters precisely to the extent that the premodified entity desires to not be modified and that the premodified entity’s values matter.
That the premodified entity’s values matter seems to have been generally assumed all round in this thread. That the premodified entity desires to not be modified seems an extremely reasonable assumption.
I maintain that house-elves created from scratch are completely different from identical house-elves created by modifying free elves against their will. Lumping the two together will produce non-well-defined moral judgments.
They still don’t enjoy the work, even if they find doing it instrumentally rational. They are forced to do it by circumstances, and in a better world they wouldn’t be.
But in a world with house elves, they are even worse off—they are just unemployed, rather than having the option of taking the job. I doubt more than a trifling amount of the money saved by Hogwarts trickles down to them.
I realise that considering the effect of house elves on the job market goes far outside the scope of this problem in the philosophy of consciousness, and much far outside the scope of the Potterverse; but once you start taking into account the welfare of the hypothetical replacements for house elves, there’s no real way to dodge the question.
For philosophical debates, it’s probably better to stick with the pig that wants to be eaten.
I pointed out that your argument doesn’t contradict Locas’s statement that those who don’t enjoy the work will be forced to do it, and specifically disclaimed that choosing to do the work regardless might well be rational of them (and hence making them better off). Yet in reply you elaborate in what manner this decision can be rational, as if objecting to what I said. I don’t see what you disagree with (besides usage of the word “forced”).
Also:
But in a world with house elves, they are even worse off—they are just unemployed, rather than having the option of taking the job.
They are not unemployed, they choose the next best option available.
I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t make one and would work to prevent one’s creation. On the one hand, death is an intrinsic evil, unlike mere drudgery. On the other hand, I support the right to self terminate.
Have you ever closed an application on your computer? What distinguishes a person from any other computation, and why does that particular distinction carry so much moral weight?
What distinguishes a person from any other computation
A person is reflectively self aware.
and why does that particular distinction carry so much moral weight?
Evolution built me to care about humans, and upon reflection, the values I have include non-humans who have features like being reflectively self aware.
Is that what you would want to want, given the option, or is that a lizard-brain instinct that gets in the way of your ability to evaluate what’s really the right thing to do?
I can still interpret that either way. Do you mean that on reflection you realize that you emotionally desire that, or that on reflection you *decide” that that’s what’s important?
There’s also Hayekian arguments—self-aware agents are apt to accumulate information about their own desires and activities. Systems which allow that information to have an effect seem to be more capable.
Needs multiply. If houses and clothes were self-cleaning and self-repairing, there would be other, high-end tasks that need taking care of, which may not be automatically fun. taking care of the lawn, cooking (for some people and for most meals is not fun).
As your mundane tasks increase due to better technology, it is useful to have someone take them over.
It said something about a person that he tried not to bother house elves. Specifically, it said that he’d been Sorted into Hufflepuff, since, to the best of Harry’s knowledge, Hermione was the only non-Hufflepuff who worried about bothering house elves. (Harry himself thought her qualms rather silly. Whoever had created house elves in the first place had been unspeakably evil, obviously; but that didn’t mean Hermione was doing the right thing now by denying sentient beings the drudgery they had been shaped to enjoy.)
Is it the author’s opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed? It would seem that to think that after their creation, they would want to do what they have been designed to do and so would be no more evil than creating an intelligence which would want to bowl and fish all day. 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. Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?
ETA: While this argument works in the abstract and is useful for countering human biases against “slavery” and applies in the particular for the creation of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, house elves have addition features I wasn’t considering which makes their creation morally evil.
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.
I think it’s worth distinguishing creating work-loving entities ex nihilo from modifying existing entities against their will to become work-loving. Canon rather implies the latter; handling the procedure ethically would be tricky, as baseline elves likely would not only resist being value-enslaved, but would want the children they birth and raise to be like themselves.
That’s certainly canon!Hermione’s problem.
But there is something wrong with House-Elves, at least in canon, even after whatever went into their creation. They enjoy serving humans, fine; I’m with MoR!Harry about that. But (possibly unbeknownst to Harry and Hermione yet) there are House-Elves who are very unhappy with their current situation, such as Dobby (who disliked his master) and Winky (who loved her master but was fired and never recovered from this). It always bothered me that canon!Hermione never outgrew her early phase of S.P.E.W. and never tried to do anything that would actually help them. (However, the Word of God is that she did help them in her adulthood, so that’s all right then.)
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.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy—you don’t have to force anyone to do it. Offer a sufficiently high salary to scrub Hogwarts’ toilet (or just to cast Cleaning Charms on them), and voila, you have free-willed, willing, unmodified house workers.
The meaningful question (at least, to the degree that any moral question can be meaningful) is whether there is any value in that “unmodified” qualifier.
It matters precisely to the extent that the premodified entity desires to not be modified and that the premodified entity’s values matter.
That the premodified entity’s values matter seems to have been generally assumed all round in this thread. That the premodified entity desires to not be modified seems an extremely reasonable assumption.
Sorry, I should have used “non-artificial” or something else; I intended to also include the quoted case of house elves having been created ad hoc.
I maintain that house-elves created from scratch are completely different from identical house-elves created by modifying free elves against their will. Lumping the two together will produce non-well-defined moral judgments.
They still don’t enjoy the work, even if they find doing it instrumentally rational. They are forced to do it by circumstances, and in a better world they wouldn’t be.
But in a world with house elves, they are even worse off—they are just unemployed, rather than having the option of taking the job. I doubt more than a trifling amount of the money saved by Hogwarts trickles down to them.
I realise that considering the effect of house elves on the job market goes far outside the scope of this problem in the philosophy of consciousness, and much far outside the scope of the Potterverse; but once you start taking into account the welfare of the hypothetical replacements for house elves, there’s no real way to dodge the question.
For philosophical debates, it’s probably better to stick with the pig that wants to be eaten.
I pointed out that your argument doesn’t contradict Locas’s statement that those who don’t enjoy the work will be forced to do it, and specifically disclaimed that choosing to do the work regardless might well be rational of them (and hence making them better off). Yet in reply you elaborate in what manner this decision can be rational, as if objecting to what I said. I don’t see what you disagree with (besides usage of the word “forced”).
Also:
They are not unemployed, they choose the next best option available.
That.
You’re right. It’s still a strictly worse situation for them, though, since they lose one option and gain nothing.
Is it wrong to make a pig that wants to be eaten?
I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t make one and would work to prevent one’s creation. On the one hand, death is an intrinsic evil, unlike mere drudgery. On the other hand, I support the right to self terminate.
Have you ever closed an application on your computer? What distinguishes a person from any other computation, and why does that particular distinction carry so much moral weight?
A person is reflectively self aware.
Evolution built me to care about humans, and upon reflection, the values I have include non-humans who have features like being reflectively self aware.
Is that what you would want to want, given the option, or is that a lizard-brain instinct that gets in the way of your ability to evaluate what’s really the right thing to do?
I can still interpret that either way. Do you mean that on reflection you realize that you emotionally desire that, or that on reflection you *decide” that that’s what’s important?
There’s also Hayekian arguments—self-aware agents are apt to accumulate information about their own desires and activities. Systems which allow that information to have an effect seem to be more capable.
Or they could’ve just created self cleaning houses, so no one is forced to do work.
Needs multiply. If houses and clothes were self-cleaning and self-repairing, there would be other, high-end tasks that need taking care of, which may not be automatically fun. taking care of the lawn, cooking (for some people and for most meals is not fun).
As your mundane tasks increase due to better technology, it is useful to have someone take them over.
It is very useful to have an AI loyal to you.
Which chapter was Harry discussing the creation of house elves in?
Chaper 42.
Thanks. I do remember my eyes glazing over a bit around about then but that’s a good point I missed.