My actual situations are too complicated and I don’t feel comfortable discussing them on the internet. So here’s a fictional situation with real dilemmas.
Suppose I have a friend who is using drugs to self-destructive levels. This friend is no longer able to keep a job, and I’ve been giving him couch-space. With high probability, if I were to apply pressure, I could decrease his drug use. One axiomization says I should consider how happy he will be with an outcome, and I believe he’ll be happier once he’s sober and capable of taking care of himself. Another axiomization says I should consider how much he wants a course of action, and I believe he’ll be angry at my trying to run his life.
As a further twist, he consistently says different things depending on which drugs he’s on. One axiomization defines a person such that each drug-cocktail-personality is a separate person whose desires have moral weight. Another axiomization defines a person such that my friend is one person, but the drugs are making it difficult for him to express his desires—the desires with moral weight are the ones he would have if he were sober (and it’s up to me to deduce them from the evidence available).
My response to this situation depends on how he’s getting money for drugs given that he no longer has a job and also on how much of a hassle it is for you to give him couch-space. If you don’t have the right to run his life, he doesn’t have the right to interfere in yours (by taking up your couch, asking you for drug money, etc.).
I am deeply uncomfortable with the drug-cocktail-personalities-as-separate-people approach; it seems too easily hackable to be a good foundation for a moral theory. It’s susceptible to a variant of the utility monster, namely a person who takes a huge variety of drug cocktails and consequently has a huge collection of separate people in his head. A potentially more realistic variant of this strategy might be to start a cult and to claim moral weight for your cult’s preferences once it grows large enough…
(Not that I have any particular cult in mind while saying this. Hail Xenu.)
Edit: I suppose your actual question is how the content of this post is relevant to answering such questions. I don’t think it is, directly. Based on the subsequent post about nonstandard models of Peano arithmetic, I think Eliezer is suggesting an analogy between the question of what is true about the natural numbers and the question of what is moral. To address either question one first has to logically pinpoint “the natural numbers” and “morality” respectively, and this post is about doing the latter. Then one has to prove statements about the things that have been logically pointed to, which is a difficult and separate question, but at least an unambiguously meaningful one once the logical pinpointing has taken place.
The two contrasts you’ve set up (happiness vs. desire-satisfaction, and temporal-person-slices vs. unique-rationalized-person-idealization) aren’t completely independent. For instance, if you accept weighting all the temporal slices of the person equally, then you can weight all their desires or happinesses against each other; whereas if you take the ‘idealized rational transformation of my friend’ route, you can disregard essentially all of his empirical desires and pleasures, depending on just how you go about the idealization process. There are three criteria to keep in mind here:
Does your ethical system attend to how reality actually breaks down? Can we find a relatively natural and well-defined notion of ‘personal identity over time’ that solves this problem? If not, then that obviously strengthens the case for treating the fundamental locus of moral concern as a person-relativized-to-a-time, rather than as a person-extended-over-a-lifetime.
Does your ethical system admit of a satisfying reflective equilibrium? Do your values end up in tension with themselves, or underdetermining what the right choice is? If so, you may have taken a wrong turn.
Are these your core axiomatizations, or are they just heuristics for approximating the right utility-maximizing rule? If the latter, then the right question isn’t Which Is The One True Heuristic, but rather which heuristics have the most severe and frequent biases. For instance, the idealized-self approach has some advantages (e.g., it lets us disregard the preferences of brainwashed people in favor of their unbrainwashed selves), but it also has huge risks by virtue of its less empirical character. See Berlin’s discussion of the rational self.
Another axiomization defines a person such that my friend is one person, but the drugs are making it difficult for him to express his desires
I think that is simply factually wrong, meaning, it’s a false statement about your friends brain.
One axiomization says I should consider how happy he will be with an outcome, and I believe he’ll be happier once he’s sober and capable of taking care of himself. Another axiomization says I should consider how much he wants a course of action, and I believe he’ll be angry at my trying to run his life.
I think it comes down to this: you want your friend sober and happy, but your friends preferences and actions work against those values. The question is what kind of influence on him is allowed.
My actual situations are too complicated and I don’t feel comfortable discussing them on the internet. So here’s a fictional situation with real dilemmas.
Suppose I have a friend who is using drugs to self-destructive levels. This friend is no longer able to keep a job, and I’ve been giving him couch-space. With high probability, if I were to apply pressure, I could decrease his drug use. One axiomization says I should consider how happy he will be with an outcome, and I believe he’ll be happier once he’s sober and capable of taking care of himself. Another axiomization says I should consider how much he wants a course of action, and I believe he’ll be angry at my trying to run his life.
As a further twist, he consistently says different things depending on which drugs he’s on. One axiomization defines a person such that each drug-cocktail-personality is a separate person whose desires have moral weight. Another axiomization defines a person such that my friend is one person, but the drugs are making it difficult for him to express his desires—the desires with moral weight are the ones he would have if he were sober (and it’s up to me to deduce them from the evidence available).
My response to this situation depends on how he’s getting money for drugs given that he no longer has a job and also on how much of a hassle it is for you to give him couch-space. If you don’t have the right to run his life, he doesn’t have the right to interfere in yours (by taking up your couch, asking you for drug money, etc.).
I am deeply uncomfortable with the drug-cocktail-personalities-as-separate-people approach; it seems too easily hackable to be a good foundation for a moral theory. It’s susceptible to a variant of the utility monster, namely a person who takes a huge variety of drug cocktails and consequently has a huge collection of separate people in his head. A potentially more realistic variant of this strategy might be to start a cult and to claim moral weight for your cult’s preferences once it grows large enough…
(Not that I have any particular cult in mind while saying this. Hail Xenu.)
Edit: I suppose your actual question is how the content of this post is relevant to answering such questions. I don’t think it is, directly. Based on the subsequent post about nonstandard models of Peano arithmetic, I think Eliezer is suggesting an analogy between the question of what is true about the natural numbers and the question of what is moral. To address either question one first has to logically pinpoint “the natural numbers” and “morality” respectively, and this post is about doing the latter. Then one has to prove statements about the things that have been logically pointed to, which is a difficult and separate question, but at least an unambiguously meaningful one once the logical pinpointing has taken place.
The two contrasts you’ve set up (happiness vs. desire-satisfaction, and temporal-person-slices vs. unique-rationalized-person-idealization) aren’t completely independent. For instance, if you accept weighting all the temporal slices of the person equally, then you can weight all their desires or happinesses against each other; whereas if you take the ‘idealized rational transformation of my friend’ route, you can disregard essentially all of his empirical desires and pleasures, depending on just how you go about the idealization process. There are three criteria to keep in mind here:
Does your ethical system attend to how reality actually breaks down? Can we find a relatively natural and well-defined notion of ‘personal identity over time’ that solves this problem? If not, then that obviously strengthens the case for treating the fundamental locus of moral concern as a person-relativized-to-a-time, rather than as a person-extended-over-a-lifetime.
Does your ethical system admit of a satisfying reflective equilibrium? Do your values end up in tension with themselves, or underdetermining what the right choice is? If so, you may have taken a wrong turn.
Are these your core axiomatizations, or are they just heuristics for approximating the right utility-maximizing rule? If the latter, then the right question isn’t Which Is The One True Heuristic, but rather which heuristics have the most severe and frequent biases. For instance, the idealized-self approach has some advantages (e.g., it lets us disregard the preferences of brainwashed people in favor of their unbrainwashed selves), but it also has huge risks by virtue of its less empirical character. See Berlin’s discussion of the rational self.
I think that is simply factually wrong, meaning, it’s a false statement about your friends brain.
I think it comes down to this: you want your friend sober and happy, but your friends preferences and actions work against those values. The question is what kind of influence on him is allowed.