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Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).
At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,
Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?
In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,
Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.
Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?
I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.
Utilitarianism doesn't just lead to insane antisocial results in bizzare edge cases, it leads to insane antisocial results in real life. You see it with SBF and FTX, you see it with the shrimp welfare people, and you see it here.
There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract. There may be contengent reasons to care about their suffering (i.e. family members of impulsive low IQ prisoners who themselves are capable of agreeing to and following the social contract), but this is distinct from the utilitarian framing.
You can't blame this on utilitarianism, almost every ethical system yields insane results if you try to take it seriously as direct truth instead of just treating it as a grab bag of heuristics. Like, most people would find your second paragraph permitting causing extreme suffering to mentally disabled people without living relatives insane (I don't find it insane personally). You're objecting to 'similarly-weighted universalism among humans', and replacing it with 'universalism among people who can agree to the social contract'. You can easily have a utilitarianism among people who can agree to a social contract, or utilitarianism focused on the health of society. You can also have a deontology that cares deeply the suffering of people who don't agree to the social contract.
The way scott's comment calls out our society's choice to "create" these people also hints at another solution, one he's named more explicitly in the past - choose, instead, to not create them. (Or, if you prefer, use genetic enhancement to "create the same person, but with better genes", but I don't think there's a moral difference between gene-editing a sperm and an egg before fusing them and discarding that sperm/egg and instead using different sperm/eggs)
Well. I think utilitarianism has its weaknesses. One thing to mention here is that you have to actually put a value to every good in view. Shooting everyone who shoplifts baby formula from Walmart will stop that crime, but you’d have to balance it with other goods — justice, humaneness, aesthetic values (pretty sure nobody wants to step over corpses to go shopping), and so on. I’m not even entirely clear how you’d determine whether a given individual was permanently unable to live by the social contract. Perhaps some can actually be rehabilitated,
I’m much more impressed by deontology which simply declares that certain things are simply off limits, and certain things are absolutely required to be a moral society. I don’t think things like collective responsibility or arbitrary detention or punishment make much sense. At the same time I don’t think a moral society would refuse to punish based on a misplaced compassion. That would quite clearly create unsafe and produce more people willing to commit a crime.
I'm not impressed by deontology because those declarations have to come from somewhere, and in practice they either come from explicit utilitarian-ish cost-benefit math done by some philosopher or elite in the past, or from cultural selection on random views where the selection is, also, doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis on what gets selected for. (Well, generally a mix of both)
No, traditional they come from divine revelation and religious precepts.
I'm claiming that historically, materially, the reason the divine revelations / religious precepts are what they are are the above - the religious elites actually did think a lot about what the right precepts are, and precepts and revelations were selected across cultures and generations for working and propagating
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