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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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You always knew something was off, but chalked it up to having a slightly different moral code to everyone else. You figured you were just unusually utilitarian and well, every society can use some deontologists

Having read that, gosh isn't it great that there are utilitarians out there to save the world from us crazy deontologists?

Come on. In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target. Maybe be clearer on what you mean, because even if it feels like it, online arguing is not the Battle of the Somme.

The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.

Other way around, surely?

The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.

I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.

It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics. As a practical point about the noisy bits of the pro-immigration lobby, this is mostly correct - hence language like "What kind of country does this?" The person of hair colour supports generous immigration policies because she/they is kind, anti-racist, not a xenophobe, sympathetic to the oppressed, tolerant, cosmopolitan, etc. and a person who is those things is the type of person who supports generous immigration policies.

The effective bits of the pro-immigration lobby are doing consequentialism - Bill Gates supports generous immigration policies because he believes that the types of immigration enabled by liberal immigration policies are good for the immigrants and (on net, applying Kaldor-Hicks aggregation of gains and losses to individual host country citizens) good for host countries.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics.

Virtue signaling surely, unless right populists are criticizing the Aristotelian basis of pro-immigration policies.

For virtue signalling to be useful, you have to believe in virtue ethics in the first place. Dishonest deontologists engage in casuistry to explain why they haven't committed a wrong. Dishonest utilitarians exaggerate the benefits of their actions and minimise the costs. Dishonest virtue ethicists signal virtues they don't possess.

Hmmm. I think you're on to something. I think we need to distinguish between utilitarianism done well, and done poorly. I agree it's easy to do poorly - I think that's part of why we love rules so much - they're easier to follow than trying to come up with a good strategy from scratch for every situation. I guess my claim is that, in the presence of enough adversarial intelligence or optimization, following even pretty good rules won't protect you, because the adversary will find the edge cases they can exploit. At that point you have to adjust your rules, and I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim that doesn't work either, if your environment is adversarial, because the difference between your model of the expected consequences of your actions and the actual realized consequences of your actions can be exploited. This doesn't even require an adversary that is generally more intelligent than you, just an adversary that notes a specific blind spot you have (see how humans can beat the wildly superhuman Go engine KataGo by exploiting a very specific blind spot it has in its world model).

Okay, well I include some degree of adaptation in my definition of "very intelligent". In fact, adaptation is the main advantage that consequentialists have over deontologists.

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