Tag Archives: Morality

Space vs. Time Allies

By Robin Hanson · June 7, 2011 11:30 pm · Comments (10)

Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:

  • Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
  • Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct.

Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. (more)

Our distant ancestors struggled against nature and other species, but competed most directly for mates and resources with others in their species, especially others in the same generation. More distant generations, like grandparents or grandkids, tended more to be allies in their efforts to promote their genes and culture. Because of this, Katja and I suggested, humans evolved intuitions that see time-stretched civilizations as more full of comforting allies, and hence more worthy, than space-stretched civilizations.

Modern economies, however, differ in many important ways from the forager bands where these intuitions evolved. So let us compare the relative promise of time-stretched versus space-stretched modern economies with similar total numbers of people.

  • Scale Economies – Spatially large civilizations can specialize more in the production of goods and services, and take advantages of economies of scale, to get more of everything. Temporally large civilizations, in contrast, can only take advantage of scale economies for extremely durable goods like music. This issue favors spatial stretching.
  • Dependence Fragility – The more that the parts of a civilization depend on one another, the more that damage to one part can put the whole at risk. In a time stretched civilization a very bad outcome for any one generation risks the destruction of all future generations. It is a long chain of dependence that is only as strong as its weakest link. In contrast, a space stretched civilization allows for more redundant and parallel dependence paths. It can be more like a net that holds even when many of its strands are broken. This issue favors spatial stretching.
  • Innovation – A finite speed of light imposes delays on how fast innovations developed in one part of a spatially separated civilization can be used elsewhere.  [Added 8a: parallel innovation attempts also make info delays.] The more that a civilization is time-stretched, as opposed to space-stretched, the smaller are such delays. Our civilization is now compact enough that such delays are only a minor issue. This will also cease to be an issue when innovation has ended, i.e., when we have basically discovered all that is worth knowing. This issue favors time-stretching, but only during a (perhaps short) innovation era and only for very spatially stretched civilizations.

Overall, for similar numbers of total people, modestly spatially-stretched civilizations seem more promising. Thus in contrast to our evolved intuition that temporal associates are our allies while spatial associates are our rivals, spatial associates seem to actually be more useful, and hence are more naturally our allies. Beware relying on ancient evolved intuitions.

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Is Time Us, Space Them?

By Robin Hanson · June 6, 2011 9:15 pm · Comments (49)

(This post co-authored by Robin Hanson and Katja Grace.)

In the Battlestar Galactica TV series, religious rituals often repeated the phrase, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” It was apparently comforting to imagine being part of a grand cycle of time. It seems less comforting to say “Similar conflicts happen out there now in distant galaxies.” Why?

Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:

  • Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
  • Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct.

Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. It is “sustainable,” and in “harmony” with its environment. The space-stretched civilization, in contrast, seems “aggressively” expanding and risks being an obese “repugnant conclusion” scenario. Why?

Finally, consider that people who think they are smart are often jealous to hear a contemporary described as “very smart,” but are much happier to praise the genius of a Newton, Einstein, etc. We are far less jealous of richer descendants than of richer contemporaries. And there is far more sibling rivalry than rivalry with grandparents or grandkids. Why?

There seems an obvious evolutionary reason – sibling rivalry makes a lot more evolutionary sense. We compete genetically with siblings and contemporaries far more than with grandparents or grandkids. It seems that humans naturally evolved to see their distant descendants and ancestors as allies, while seeing their contemporaries more as competitors. So a time-stretched world seems choc-full of allies, while a space-stretched one seems instead full of potential rivals, making the first world seem far more comforting.

Having identified a common human instinct about what to admire, and a plausible evolutionary origin for it, we now face the hard question: do we embrace this instinct as revealing a deep moral truth, or do we reject it as a morally irrelevant accident of our origins? The two of us (Robin and Katja) are inclined more to reject it, but your mileage may vary.

(This is cross-posted at Meteuphoric.)

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Conscription Is Slavery

By Robin Hanson · May 16, 2011 10:20 am · Comments (83)

Bryan Caplan:

Slavery is involuntary servitude; conscription is involuntary military servitude; therefore not only is conscription slavery; it’s a particularly heinous form of slavery that often ends in maiming and death. Yet most people disagree – and so did the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1918. … I think I finally figured out what most people are thinking. Namely: They implicitly regard slavery not as mere involuntary servitude, but as low-status involuntary servitude. … conscripts have high status – and therefore can’t be slaves.

Comments there give many reasons conscription is not slavery:

  • “The key difference is the idea of … `servitude for the public benefit’.”
  • “Cannot sell its conscripted soldiers … conscription offers pay.”
  • “Slavery as an institution appears to cause a lot more social harm than limited conscription powers.”
  • “People hate slavery because it is malicious and exploitative.”
  • “Conscripted soldiers are not owned by a private person. This is the same reason that we don’t consider taxes theft”
  • “Conscripts still have civil rights, slaves did not. Conscripts were paid, slaves were not. Conscripts could own property, especially real property,and wait for it, conscripts could VOTE.”
  • “If the ‘slaves’ could neither be bought nor sold, then they would just be serfs.”
  • “Slavery … is a permanent condition and [conscription] is not. One can apply to anyone, the other only to a specific cohort.”
  • “The connotation attached to conscription and slavery evokes different emotions … positive for conscription and negative for slavery.”

Consider that “comfort women,” forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese military during World War II, are often called “sex slaves.” Would they not be slaves they were paid, served only for a limited time, could own property and vote, could not be bought or sold, and were seen by the Japanese public as serving their benefit and evoking positive emotions? Would such conditions also imply comfort women were not “raped”?

It is hard to believe that one must argue this point. OF COURSE conscripts are slaves. Conscription may be a good form of slavery – I for one do not accept a moral axiom that slavery must always be bad. But surely it is slavery. And Bryan is probably right – we don’t call conscripts slaves, but do call comfort women slaves, because the first is high status and the second low.

Added 10a: On reflection, the main effect here is probably that many people take “slavery is bad” to be part of the definition of slavery. So therefore by definition anything good cannot be slavery. For what other words do we take value to be part of the definition? Democracy? Rape?

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Philosophy of Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · May 5, 2011 4:40 pm · Comments (25)

Apparently some philosophers have developed philosophies of hypocrisy, to justify their not following the moral rules they advocate for others. They tried to keep quiet about it:

[Famous philosopher of ethics Henry] Sidgwick was the son of an Anglican clergeyman. Along with many eminent Victorians he could not accept revealed religion. Unlike most of them Sidgwick acted on this doubts and in 1869 resigned from his Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, which required Fellows to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglican doctrine. … Later Sidgwick became a professor and resumed his Fellowship. …

All of Sidgwick’s close friends were male, most of them gay or bisexual for much of their live.  … Commenting on the friends he had made already, ‘Some are women to me, and to some I am a woman.’ … Sidgwick was celebrated in his lifetime for his integrity, but that did not prevent him engaging in Victorian hypocrisy where sexual desire – in himself or his friends – was concerned. Instead his reputation for honesty made the practice of deception easier for him. …

He had long argued the necessity for an ‘esoteric morality’ – a code of conduct that would sacntion the practice of secrecy and deception for strictly ethical reasons. When, towards the end of The Methods of Ethics, he discusses the rules of ordinary morality, he is clear that these rules must be adhered to faithfully by ordinary people. But Utilitarian morality might give a special freedom from ordinary rules to special kinds of people:

on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do, and privately to recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice or example. … Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric.

(pp.22,57,58, John Gray, The Immortalization Commission, 2011)

The homo hypocritus hypothesis suggests that people will often find themselves having strong intuitions that it is moral for them to quietly evade the usual rules, while still advocating such rules for others.  When could such intuitions offer strong support for the claim that such hypocrisy is in fact moral?

Added 2a: The issue here isn’t whether lies might ever be moral, such as with the proverbial lie to save Jews from the Nazis.  The issue here is examples such that of Sidgwick’s socially-convenient lies on sex and religion, which gained him social support and prestige. What fraction of moral philosophers privately support that type of hypocrisy? How could we know?

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Super-Watch Dilemna

By Robin Hanson · May 2, 2011 12:50 pm · Comments (53)

There are (at least) two ways to implement a (Star Trek style) transporter:

  1. A space-time wormhole takes you “directly” from here to there, or
  2. We scan you, send the info, make a new copy at the other end, and destroy the original.

Some people care greatly about transporter type; they’d pay to use type #1, but pay greatly to avoid using type #2.  But regardless of the morality of a type #2 transporter, I’m pretty confident that if cheap type #2 transporters were available, but not type #1, many people would use them often, and prefer to think of them as benign, i.e., as if they were type #1.  Humans are pretty flexible about their morality when large economics gains are on offer.

A similar relation applies to two types of super-watches.  Super-watches have one button.  When you are wearing a super-watch, and push it’s button, you turn it on.  Soon after, a person appears next you who looks and thinks just like you and who shares all your memories.  This person is free to walk away, as are you.  The second time you push the super-watch button, it turns off.  And you dissapear.  The second button push is also triggered automatically a given duration after the first push, or if you are about to be harmed by something.  Super-watches with longer durations cost more.

Here are the two ways to make super-watches:

  1. Time Machine + Memory Wipe: The second time you push the button you enter a time machine that brings you back to soon after the moment you first pushed the button,  displaced by a few feet.  It also erases all memories you might have acquired since the first time you pushed the button.  And no, you can’t bring anything else with you in the time machine.
  2. Limited Time Copier:  When you turn on the watch it makes an exact copy of you and puts that copy a few feet away.  When you turn the watch off, or it automatically turns off, you are destroyed.

Now these two ways to implement super-watches produce pretty much the same set of experiences and observable features.  So either you do not care much about  how super-watches are made, or you care a lot about things no one experiences or sees.  As with transporters, I’m pretty confident that if type #2 super-watches were much cheaper than type #1, and offered great economic gains, many more people would use them, and find a way to frame them so they didn’t seem so bad.

Most people don’t see cruelty or morality problems with using time machines, and most people are also pretty comfortable with taking a drug that erases their recent memories.  Many people even like the idea of getting so drunk at a party that they won’t remember what they did the next day.  Yet some people say that while you aren’t obligated to create people, if you do create people you are obligated to give them a good life.  So creating a copy who might only live for a day or a year, and then be destroyed, would be mean, cruel and immoral.  But holding all these views together requires that you care very much about how super-watches are implemented.  Do you?

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Responsibility Is Near

By Robin Hanson · March 18, 2011 3:45 pm · Comments (14)

We are more willing to let folks off the hook because “my atoms or my brain made me do it” in far than near mode:

A deterministic universe [is one] in which “Every decision is completely caused by what happened before the decision—given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does.” … One group of participants was asked whether it is possible for anyone to be morally responsible for their actions in such a universe. These participants tended to say that it is not possible to be morally responsible in that universe. That question about moral responsibility is, of course, pitched at an abstract level.

Another group of participants was presented instead with a concrete case of a man who killed his family. That provoked a much different response. When presented with a concrete case of man performing a reprehensible action, people tended to say that the man was fully morally responsible for his actions, even when set in a deterministic universe. Indeed, concrete cases of bad behavior lead people to attribute responsibility, even when the action is caused by a neurological disorder. …

People are pulled in different directions because different mental mechanisms are implicated in different conditions. (more)

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I Hurt Her So You Pay

By Robin Hanson · March 8, 2011 12:00 pm · Comments (13)

You might hope that folks who tend more to feel guilty when they hurt others would then try to compensate those victims, at their personal expense, and thus would have an incentive to avoid hurting folks. Not so!  Yes guilty folks compensate victims, but not at their personal expense.

A psych study asked people to think of someone they felt guilty toward, or made them imagine feeling guilty toward someone (e.g., slacking off on a joint project, or being careless with something borrowed). Researchers then had these guilty folks divide up money between themselves, the victim, and a third party (e.g., a deserving charity or random person). Compared to controlled conditions, such people give more money to the victim, but at the expense of the third party, not themselves. When they consider such donation behavior in other people, it is not morally exemplary.

Quotes:

In a typical dictator game, one person decides how to divide a sum of money (or other resources) among oneself and another person without the other having any influence on the division of the resources. In our experiments, participants decided how to divide resources among themselves, the victim, and another person (the nonvictim), without the victim or the nonvictim having any influence on the division. … In all experiments we [found] that, compared with a control condition, participants in guilt conditions … offer more resources to the victim and fewer resources to other social partners without changing the amount of resources for themselves. In addition, Experiments 1– 4 systematically rule out alternative explanations of the effect and reveal conditions under which the effect is observed.

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Non-Evil Firms

By Robin Hanson · January 29, 2011 8:15 am · Comments (26)

Are corporations intrinsically evil because they must by law only maximize profits? I don’t think so, but if you do, you might prefer to do business with a benefit corporation whose goals you respect. By law, a benefit firm must first try to achieve its declared goals:

Fifteen benefit corporations have been created in the three months since new [Maryland] legislation, signed into law in April, took effect. … At its core, benefit corporations blend the altruism of nonprofits with the business sensibilities of for-profit companies. These hybrid entities pay taxes and can have shareholders, without the risk of being sued for not maximizing profits. Companies can consider the needs of customers, workers, the community or environment and be well within their legal right.

A benefit corporation, for instance, could choose to buy from local vendors at a higher cost to reduce its carbon footprint, much as the Big Bad Woof does. The company, as a part of the incorporation, is required to file an annual report on contributions to the goals set forth in the charter and submit to an audit by an independent third party. … There are no tax breaks or procurement incentives for benefit corporations in Maryland, but the classification offers a competitive advantage … A 2010 Cone study … [found] 61 percent of consumers surveyed had purchased a product because of the company’s long-term commitment to a cause or issue. …

Shortly after Maryland passed the benefit corporation legislation last year, Vermont got in on the act. Several other states, including New York and California, are considering similar bills. New York is one of 31 states with a “corporate constituency statute,” which allows for the consideration of non-financial interests but lacks the full protection of the new law. (more)

As Mr. Burns would say, “Excellent.”

So if benefit firms became more common, would people still habitually think them evil?  Would it matter much?

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Norms Beat Empathy

By Robin Hanson · October 21, 2010 8:00 am · Comments (35)

Consider two bus-seat scenarios.

In the first scenario, a bus (or train) has seats, but sometimes not enough, so that many have to stand. Imagine that this bus sells (single-use) elite cards, so that folks without elite cards must surrender their seat to elite cardholders if no other seats are available. Imagine also that you saw that someone nearby had dropped a card, and instead of returning it to them you kept it for yourself. You expect that if you had asked aloud if anyone dropped a card, the right person would have identified themselves. But you took it instead so that you could sit when the bus was crowded. Now consider: how bad would you feel about this?

Got it?  Ok, now consider a second scenario, where bus seating is a free for all – first to grab a seat gets it. Imagine that as you and a big crowd get on a bus you rush to grab a seat before someone else takes it.  Now consider: how bad would you feel about this?

My guess is that you probably felt a lot less bad on this second scenario. But the consequences of your act is pretty similar – in both cases you gain a seat at the expense of someone else. Yes, the fact that someone paid for their card suggests a higher than average value for sitting, but this isn’t a really strong clue about their value; many other considerations are relevant.  So the amount of hurt you expect to have caused shouldn’t be that different.

Your feeling much less bad when law and norms let you grab a seat suggests that you mainly feel bad about violating laws and norms – your concern about the people involved is secondary. If asked why it is bad to steal you might express sympathy with the sad victim, but that’s not really why you feel bad about stealing.

For a similar comparison, consider trying to seduce a married person or a unmarried person. Many people think the first act is immorality of the worse sort, while the second act is quite respectable. But in both cases the person seduced becomes less available to other partners, and in both cases your gain is someone else’s loss. Yes the fact that they chose to get married is a clue about the value they gain from each other, but it isn’t a strong clue; it might be overcome by other considerations.  Many folks could reasonably convince themselves they are a better match for the seducee than their competitors.

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Meaning of Meaning of Life

By Robin Hanson · September 7, 2010 1:10 pm · Comments (21)

Rewatching Monty Python’s Meaning of Life led me to wonder: what exactly do most people mean by “the meaning of life?” Now first, it seems to me people mainly want to know the meaning of their life; they consider life in general mostly for hints on that. So consider some sample answers to “what is the meaning of my life?”

  1. God has a plan for my life, so if I follow it my life has meaning.
  2. I am King George’s personal assistant; my life is to serve him.
  3. I am the custodian of this forrest, and will protect and nurture it.
  4. My children are my life; all I want is for them to thrive.
  5. I am a native american, and fight to regain what has been taken from us.
  6. In the historical battle between tyrants and freedom-lovers, I fight for freedom.
  7. I do scientific research, to push back our frontiers of knowledge.
  8. I am a good musician and love music.

It seems what people want is a satisfying story about their place in the universe. Since characters are the most important elements of a story, the main “place” that matters to people is their social place – who they relate to and how. People feel they understand their place when they have a story saying how they can relate well to important social entities.

Central to any social relation is whether the related person supports or opposes you in your conflicts. In fact, it seems enough to give your life meaning to just know who are your main natural allies and enemies among the important actors around, and what you can do to keep your allies supporting you, to give you high enough status.

For example, if there is a great powerful God, it seems enough to know what he wants you to do to keep him on your side. If you are a lowly servant but have the King for an ally, little else matters but pleasing him. (Unless you had higher status ambitions.)  If you have committed yourself to certain strong relations, like a spouse or kids, then it may be enough to know how to keep them on your side. If your relations shift more often, you might instead focus on general features of your natural allies, such as gender, personality, ethnicity, or some grand shared far value. For example, knowing you are good at and love music may ensure the support of music lovers, “your people,” wherever you go.

People think their life has less meaning when enough aspects of it are determined by “impersonal” forces that refuse to take social sides.  For example, a death caused by an enemy’s plan, or an allies failure to help, or by the dead person’s trying to help his allies, has far more meaning that a death caused by simple physics.

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