Tag Archives: Morality

Efficient Isn’t Moral

By Robin Hanson · March 15, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (22)

Efficiency isn’t morality, and it is a serious confusion to think it should be. Let me try again to explain.  I said:

Economic welfare cares not about giving people experiences but about satisfying their preferences. … If we do something a dead person would have wanted, that counts as a benefit.

Adam Ozimek responded:

But we care about satisfying people’s preferences because, unlike the dead, they can know that those preferences being satisfied. … If were going to count the preferences of the non-existent, then it would seem that the number one priority of all society would be to bring as many of them as possible from non-existence into existence. The easiest way to do this is to mandate pregnancy. … If we care about satisfying the preferences of the dead even though they won’t know their preferences are satisfied, does that mean we should not be concerned with whether or not living people know when their preferences are satisfied?

Adam reminds us of Tyler’s position:

Dead people don’t count in the social welfare function. (If they did, how many of them would prefer non-democratic or racist outcomes?  And would we count that?  We shouldn’t and we don’t.)

When our distant ancestors sat around debating if to change locations, expel a troublemaker, or attack neighbors, they were often ambiguous about whether they were choosing what they wanted or what was moral; they preferred to pretend these were the same.  We similarly prefer ambiguity when we argue policy today.

So it is important to clarify: As an analysis tool, economic efficiency is designed and well-suited to finding win-win deals that [added: tend to] get us all more of what we want. It is not well-suited to achieving moral outcomes, except when morality happens to coincide with getting people what they want.  Otherwise, win-win deals will predictably not achieve morality when many involved do not want to be moral.

Many of us want things we will never experience directly; we want our children to prosper after we are gone, for example. This is especially true of our moral wants; we want our donations to Africa to actually help real Africans. So we are understandably wary of deal-making frameworks which explicitly suggest that they seek only to achieve the appearance, not the substance, of our wants.  So yes, a deal-finding analysis tool should definitely count unseen wants!  Furthermore, observers concerned that deals might neglect morals should be especially eager for our deals to achieve unseen wants.

Frameworks for finding win-win deals should also try to include as many things as possible that can have wants and participate in deals.  This includes racists, pedophiles, slaves-owners, robots, animals, distant past and future folk, and future folk who may or may not end up existing.  Yes many may be morally offended if racists get what they want, but that offense counts in what other folks want, and therefore enough offense will ensure that win-win deals will not give racists much of what they want.

Limits on contract may distort prices and interfere with the ability of efficiency analysis to help us find useful win-win deals.  But that is a good reason to enforce more kinds of deals, not to try to distort efficiency for a task to which it is poorly suited: choosing moral acts.

Added: Bryan Caplan responds.

Tagged as: ,

Fairness in Love And War

By Robin Hanson · February 22, 2010 6:40 am · Comments (21)

The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.  John Lyly, Euphues, 1578.

All’s fair in love and war, we hear at a tender age.  Though this is tempered by schoolboy concepts of fair play and never hit a man when he’s down.  Fair play is reasonable if you don’t mean to win at any cost and the other guy doesn’t mean to kill you, but all that goes by the board in any genuine confrontation. more

Does ethics describe key ultimate wants, or only minor wants, and social norms and signals which instrumentally help us achieve key wants?  Consider the saying “All is fair in love and war.”  It is often quoted, and rarely does a listener respond “Not it’s not.”  Yet folks also often complain loudly about unfairness.  Taken together, these suggest that for most, fairness is largely instrumental.

Those who embrace this saying suggest that a threat of military defeat, and perhaps extermination, would overwhelm most other considerations.  Similarly, they suggest that the threat of not attracting a hoped-for mate also overwhelms most other considerations.

Setting love alongside war as a similar reason to ignore fairness is quite telling.  Wars have often ended extremely, with total victory or total defeat.  But if you don’t attract a particular desired lover, you might well attract a lover nearly as good.  Those who equate the harm of getting their second favorite mate, vs. their favorite mate, with the harm of losing vs. winning a war, seem to say that mate quality is overwhelming important.  Little matters nearly as much – certainly not fairness (or racism).

Tagged as: , ,

Smart Sincere Syndrome

By Robin Hanson · December 30, 2009 9:10 am · Comments (34)

Humans are built to be hypocritical, i.e., to give lip service and soft thought to high ideals, while mostly acting to achieve low practical personal ends.  We manage this disconnect both by being stupid, and so not noticing our hypocrisy, and by being insincere, and so caring less when we notice.

Now human characteristics vary quite a bit, and so some folks are both unusually smart and unusually conscientious about their ideals.  More than most people, these folks notice their hypocrisy, and try to avoid it.  And since far ideals tend toward incoherence and impracticality, this has led smart sincere folks to invent a wide range of “ideologies” to substitute for their jumbled intuitions, with matching actions that range far from the norm.

The chance to show sincerity and smarts via our ideals makes it more important that one’s far ideals fit with a coherent and well-thought out ideology, than to be accurate relative to some external standard.  So humans are relatively unconcerned to discover they have wildly divergent ideologies; they accept that they disagree.  While a middle average opinion might be more accurate on average, it would less sparkle with the shine of clear clever sincere thought.  In addition, divergence lets folks show loyalty to particular groups.

This smart sincere syndrome less afflicted our distant ancestors because fuzzy far feelings rarely lead to clear inescapable conclusions.  While far mode is good for creative thinking, it usually leaves plausible excuses for rejecting conclusions that one does not like.  But the more recent invention of near-mode-based math/logical style analysis, applicable to far abstract problems, has made it easier for humans to notice and avoid inconsistencies.  So today, the smart sincere syndrome especially afflicts many folks with high math ability.

Now a modest dose of smart sincerity, limited by time, topic or temperament, is a good sign, as it indicates the positive qualities of intelligence and conscientiousness, qualities most any organization can put to good use.  So everyone wants to seem ideological to some degree.  And even a large dose of smart sincerity, if bundled with complements such as beauty, stamina, or charisma, can bring success as a “movement” or spiritual leader.  But without such complements, an overdose of smart sincerity tends toward evolutionary failure, typically achieving less success relative to ability.

Today, a common solution to this dilemma is libertarian axiomatics, a simple coherent ideology supporting most, but hardly all, ordinary practical actions.  Another common solution is to embrace a particular successful person, profession, or institution as the key to achieving global ideals; full loyalty and support of such a thing may, if reciprocated, help one achieve standard measures of success.

However, pity the simply smart sincere, who try make sense of their inherited incoherent impractical far ideals, via more coherent if idiosyncratic ideologies, that encourage unusual, and usually unadaptive, behavior.  Stories told of their dramatic bids for ideal consistency may be their main legacy from this our dream-time era.

Added 17Jan: Rob Wiblin says terrorists fit this pattern.

Tagged as: ,

Ho Hum Nuclear Winter

By Robin Hanson · December 20, 2009 8:30 pm · Comments (42)

From the January Scientific American:

Twenty-five years ago international teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could produce a “nuclear winter.” … killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. … International discussion about this prediction … forced the leaders of the two superpowers to confront the possibility that their arms race endangered not just themselves but the entire human race. Countries large and small demanded disarmament. Nuclear winter became an important factor in ending the nuclear arms race. … Gorbachev observed, “the knowledge of [nuclear winter] was a great stimulus … to act.”

Why discuss this topic now that the cold war has ended? Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe.  New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped … would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. … Not only were the ideas of the 1980s correct but the effects would last for at least 10 years, much longer than previously thought. …

More than 20 million people in the two countries could die from the blasts, fires and radioactivity. … A nuclear war could trigger declines in yield nearly everywhere at once. … Around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or between other regional nuclear powers.

Furthermore:

The effects of a war involving the entire current global nuclear arsenal … [include] a global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C (Fig. 2).  … Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.

So, the first news about nuclear winter was shocking enough to induce cold war adversaries to agree to big cuts.  Today we know the situation is even worse – not only is nuclear winter easier than we thought to trigger, but more nations now have big enough arsenals to trigger it.  Yet today there is far less international discussion or momentum to prevent such disaster.  Why the difference?

Perhaps what triggered Western citizen interest last time was not so much that disaster loomed, but that disaster seemed attributable to our moral failings – to our being too belligerent.  This time, we don’t feel so belligerent to Russia, and other wars seems like someone else’s fault.  Perhaps we care less about anticipating and avoiding disasters, and more about avoiding moral blame for whatever does happen.

Many huge problems loom on a century or so timescale, but the only one that penetrates our public consciousness is global warming.  I suspect that is because people see it as attributable to a moral failing of theirs, something like greed, gluttony, or insensitivity to nature.  If global warming were just as serious a problem, but caused by an inhuman geological process, I suspect it would get a lot less attention.

If you want the West to attend to a looming future disaster, it seems you must blame it on their current immorality.  The disaster I fear most is an unanticipated em transition; how can we blame that on a current moral failing?  Imprudence is a moral failing of sorts, but alas it ranks low as a dreamtime concern.

Tagged as: , ,

Shoo Libertarian Knights

By Robin Hanson · December 20, 2009 7:50 am · Comments (62)

Dear libertarian knight seeking to win honor via comment battles with heathen blogger dragons:

I range pretty widely in topics here at Overcoming Bias, and sometimes I consider government policies.  Sometimes I even consider policies that, gasp, violate your favorite libertarian moral axiom, something like no one must ever affect anyone without a notarized consent form.  At which point many of you feel an apparently overwhelming urge to comment on this crucial fact (often smugly).  As if this were some sort of news.

Its not, so please don’t.  I know about your favorite axiom, and I usually notice when something violates it.  I get that you are really really convinced by it, more so than of anything ever.  But listen: I’ve heard that argument and I’m not moved.   Your position is so predictable that I can easily anticipate your response.  I have usually anticipated it, and rejected it.  Liberty is a fine heuristic, but efficiency is more what I want, so I’m willing to consider sometimes violating your liberty axiom.  Like you I am wary of big government, but because of bad consequences that often follow, not a liberty axiom violation.

We get it that you disagree, but when you just declare that fact again (and again and again), intelligent readers, well aware of the existence of libertarian axiomatists, learn only of your continued willingness to impose costs on unwilling others, to signal your continued devotion to your cause (which supposedly relates to preventing imposing costs on unwilling others).

So please, save your breath.  If there must be one post here at OB where you repeat your concerns yet again, thinking we just haven’t heard them enough, about my considering violations of your liberty axiom, please, just make it this one post, and leave the rest be.

Now back to our regularly scheduled wild speculations. …

Tagged as: ,

“Oughts” Are Derived From “Is”

By Robin Hanson · December 12, 2009 12:35 am · Comments (62)

I tire of hearing folks repeat “you cannot derive `ought’ from `is’,” because there is an important sense in which most attempts to derive “ought” are built on “is.”  Let me explain.

An argument for an “ought” is typically built on some set of more basic “obvious” claims that the speaker assumes their audience will accept without argument. Many of those claims have their own supporting arguments somewhere else, but those arguments are also be built on further obvious claims.

Eventually we end up with with a set of basic supporting claims that seem obvious, but which don’t have much in the way of explicit arguments supporting them.  Yes, almost always one of these obvious but not explicitly argued claims is of the “ought” type. So in this sense every “ought” is derived from other “oughts.”

However, a key implicit argument sits behind these obvious unargued supporting claims, namely that those claims seem right. That is, we typically assume that we should believe an “obvious” claim because our subconscious/intuition recommends that we believe such a claim.

Now in order for it to make sense to believe an “ought” claim that seems right to our intuition, we have to at least believe that our intuition tends on average to be right about similar sorts of claims. There is no point in believing our intuition on some topic if it has no consistent relation to the truth there.

But the claim that one’s intuition about a particular “ought” claim correlates with truth on that “ought” claim is itself an “is” claim.  Yes that claim about the reliability of our intuition is itself also mainly supported by noting that this reliability claim seems right to our intuition, but I’m not complaining about that.

I’m instead pointing out that most every attempt to derive an “ought” is based ultimately on “is” claims about the reliability of our intuitions about such more basic “ought” claims.  If we can’t find a coherent way to integrate these “is” claims with the rest of our network of reasonable “is” claims, then we can’t argue coherently for such “ought” claims at all.

(This same argument applies to “wow” claims on beauty; yes every “wow” claim appears derived from other unargued “wows” but the support for those “wows” are key “is” claims on the reliability of our “wow” intuitions.)

Tagged as: ,

Majoritarian Philosophy

By Robin Hanson · December 11, 2009 8:45 am · Comments (39)

Bryan points us to this survey on thirty key philosophy questions.   The survey offers four indicators to estimate philosophical truth:

  1. Most popular opinion of anyone who responded to the survey.
  2. Most popular of responding profs at “99 leading departments of philosophy.”
  3. Most surprisingly popular in #2, which is a Bayesian Truth Serum indicator.
  4. Most popular among responding profs specializing in the question’s topic area.

There’s lots of detail there I hope someone will analyze.  This seems a great chance to exercise majoritarian epistemic principles.

As a first pass, I compared my opinions to indicator #2 and found I can comfortably accept the modal professional opinion on 25 of the 30 topics!  For three of them I was moderately temped to disagree, choosing mental content: internalism, knowledge claims: invariantism, and epistemic justification: internalism.  But on reflection I think I just tend to use the words “think”, “know” and “justify” differently; I’m not sure I substantively disagree.

On only 2 of 30 topics was I strongly tempted to disagree with professionals.  Popular and specialist opinions agree with my choice aesthetic value: subjective, but professionals pick objective, and their opinion is surprisingly popular.  So while I might have an excuse to hold my ground, I guess I can live with the idea that there might be substantial elements in common among the concepts of beauty that would evolve among a wide variety of intelligent species and their descendants.  Could this be what objective beauty means?

Meta-ethics: moral anti-realism also tempted me strongly.  But here all four truth indicators point toward moral realism.  So I guess I should seriously consider changing my mind.  Is it plausible that there is something substantial in common among the moral intuitions that would evolve in a wide range of intelligent species and their descendants?  Am I agreeing if I accept that as moral reality, or does moral realism demand I believe something more?

Yes I’m still a contrarian in many ways, but I really do largely accept professional opinion in fields where I know and largely respect the professionals.  These include physics, analytic philosophy, computer science, and micro-economics.

Tagged as: , ,

Byron vs. Wordsworth

By Robin Hanson · November 22, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (24)

[Lord Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism” in a normative sense – God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever.  It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth.

Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

More here.  Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?

Hat tip to Paul Gowder.

Tagged as: ,

Are You Pro Slavery?

By Robin Hanson · November 19, 2009 4:30 pm · Comments (67)

“Quick, what is your position on life vs. death?  For life and against death, right?  So you would never ever allow anyone to take any action that would lead to a higher chance of death, right?  Like say driving on the freeway instead of staying in bed?  What, you would let someone drive instead of staying in bed?!  You prefer them to die rather than live?  Away you horrible daemon!”

Silly, right?  Yes of course life is usually much better than death, but it is not arbitrarily more important than any other consideration; it does not win in every possible circumstance. But now consider “slavery,” are you for or against that?  Absolutely against? Really? In every possible circumstance?

What about prison, aren’t prisoners slaves?  How about military conscription; aren’t draftees slaves?  How about children having to obey their parents, and go to school to obey teachers?  When you sign a contract, get married, or volunteer for the army, and thereby bind your future self, aren’t you enslaving that future self? Continue Reading "Are You Pro Slavery?" »

Tagged as: , ,

Key Disputed Values

By Robin Hanson · November 17, 2009 12:20 am · Comments (35)

Some like to paint world history as an epic conflict between deeply divergent visions of civilization, which come down to disputes over a few key values.  But if so, just what are those key disputed values?  For many decades, our best data on this key value variation has been the World Value Survey:

The WVS grew out of its eurocentric origins to embrace 42 countries in the 2nd wave, 54 in the 3rd wave and 62 in the 4th wave. … The questionnaires from the most recent waves have consisted of about 250 questions, … with an average in the 4th wave of about 1330 interviews per country and a worldwide total of about 92000 interviews. …

A number of variables were condensed [by factor analysis] into two dimensions of cultural variation (known as “traditional v. secular-rational” and “survival v. self-expression”), and on this basis the world’s countries could be mapped into specific cultural regions. The WVS claims: “These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators”.

Here is a map of the world using those two main value factors:

0valuemap

Note that similar nations are grouped together, with rich nations to the upper right and poor nations to the lower left.  Note also that the main antagonists of the most recent global conflict, the Cold War, are nearly at opposite sides; Russia and its allies are to the upper left while USA and its allies are to the lower right.  Clearly this 2D space represents key value disputes.  But what values exactly? Continue Reading "Key Disputed Values" »

Tagged as: , ,