Avoiding Blame By Preventing Life

If morality is basically a package of norms, and if norms are systems for making people behave, then each individual’s main moral priority becomes: to avoid blame. While the norm system may be designed to on average produce good outcomes, when that system breaks then each individual has only weak incentives to fix it. They mainly seek to avoid blame according to the current broken system. In this post I’ll discuss an especially disturbing example, via a series of four hypothetical scenarios.

1. First, imagine we had a tech that could turn ordinary humans into productive zombies. Such zombies can still do most jobs effectively, but they no longer have feelings or an inner life, and from the outside they also seem dead inside, lacking passion, humor, and liveliness. Imagine that someone proposed to use this tech on a substantial fraction of the human population. That is, they propose to zombify those who do jobs that others see as boring, routine, and low status, like collecting garbage, cleaning bedpans, or sweeping floors. As in this scenario living people would be turned into dead zombies, this proposal would probably be widely seen as genocide, and soundly rejected.

2. Second, imagine someone else proposes the following variation: when a new child of a parent seems likely enough to grow up to take such a low status job, this zombie tech is applied very early to the fetus. So no non-zombie humans are killed, they are just prevented from existing. Zombie kids are able to learn and eventually learn to do those low status. Thus technically this is not genocide, though it could be seen as the extermination of a class. And many parents would suffer from losing their chance to raise lively humans. Whoever proposed all this is probably considered evil, and their proposal rejected.

3. Third, imagine combining this proposal with another tech that can reliably induce identical twins. This will allow the creation of extra zombie kids. That is, each birth to low status parents is now of identical twins, one of which is an ordinary kid, and the other is a zombie kid. If parent’s don’t want to raise zombie kids, some other organization will take over that task. So now the parents get to have all their usual lively kids, and the world gains a bunch of extra zombie kids who grow up to do low status jobs. Some may support this proposal, but surely many others will find it creepy. I expect that it would be pretty hard to create a political consensus to support this proposal.

While in the first scenario people were killed, and in the second scenario parents were deprived, this third scenario is designed to take away these problems. But this third proposal still has two remaining problems. First, if we have a choice between creating an empty zombie and a living feeling person who finds their life worth living, this second option seems to result in a better world. Which argues against zombies. Second, if zombies seem like monsters, supporters of this proposal might might be blamed for creating monsters. And as the zombies look a lot like humans, many will see you as a bad person if you seem inclined to or capable of treating them badly. It looks bad to be willing to create a lower class, and to treat them like a disrespected lower class, if that lower class looks a lot like humans. So by supporting this third proposal, you risk being blamed.

4. My fourth and last scenario is designed to split apart these two problems with the third scenario, to make you choose which problem you care more about. Imagine that robots are going to take over most all human jobs, but that we have a choice about which kind of robot they are. We could choose human-like robots, who act lively with passion and humor, and who inside have feelings and an inner life. Or we could choose machine-like robots, who are empty inside and also look empty on the outside, without passion, humor, etc.

If you are focused on creating a better world, you’ll probably prefer the human-like robots, as that which choice results in more creatures who find their lives worth living. But if you are focused on avoiding blame, you’ll probably prefer the machine-like robots, as few will blame you for for that choice. In that choice the creatures you create look so little like humans that few will blame you for creating such creatures, or for treating them badly.

I recently ran a 24 hour poll on Twitter about this choice, a poll to which 700 people responded. Of those who make a choice, 77% picked the machine-like robots:

If some kind of robot is going to replace humans on most jobs, would you prefer it to be 1) empty machine-like robots w/ no feelings or inner life, or 2) lively human-like robots full of passion, & humor? You probably feel guilty mistreating 2, but not 1.

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) November 6, 2018

Maybe my Twitter followers are unusual, but I doubt that a majority of a more representative poll would pick the human-like option. Instead, I think most people prefer the option that avoids personal blame, even if it makes for a worse world.