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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2765 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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Morality has nothing to do with game theory

I disagree pretty strongly with that -- I think that "Bob is a moral person" and "people who are affected by Bob's actions generally would have been worse off if Bob's actions didn't affect them" are, if not quite synonymous, at least rhyming. The golden rule works pretty alright in simple cases without resorting to game theory, but I think game theory can definitely help in terms of setting up incentives such that people are not punished for doing the moral thing / incentivized to do the immoral thing, and that properly setting up such incentives is itself a moral good.

To be clear, there's morality, which is sort of the end goal ideal state we're working towards, and there's game theory/policy, which is how we get to that ideal state.

Penalizing murder may reduce murder, or may increase it for some reason, but either way has very little to no bearing on whether murder is immoral.

Punishing intent happens to work, and if it didn't then I'd probably agree that we shouldn't punish intent, but either way I do think intent is one ingredient of morality.

Game theory can help people be moral, sure, but it can't actually define morality.

I think the relationship between game theory and morality is more like the one between physics and engineering. You can't look at physics alone to decide what you want to build, but if you try to do novel engineering without understanding the underlying physics you're going to have a bad time. Likewise, game theory doesn't tell you what is moral and immoral, but if you try to make some galaxy-brained moral framework, and you don’t ay attention to how your moral framework plays out when multiple people are involved, you're also going to have a bad time.

Though in both cases, if you stick to common-sense stuff that's worked out in the past in situations like yours, you'll probably do just fine.

Yeah, I like that comparison more.

You say consequentialism is self-evidently wrong, and then you define morality as “the end goal ideal state we're working towards”? And you say you support punishing intent because “it works” — ie because of it’s consequences.

It seems to me you agree with the underlying framework of consequentialism, you just insist that the label “morality” apply simultaneously to both states and actions, whereas Utilitarians throw a InvalidTypeError for the latter.

If you agree that morality is the end state we want to achieve, how can you apply the same word to apply to actions and not have it be about achieving that state?

I agree that consequences matter, but don't believe they're the only thing that matter, so I disagree with consequentialism. That was the whole point of my original comment.

Pretty much all deontologists, virtue ethicists, etc. will agree that good governance is important. Very few will assert that consequences are entirely irrelevant to morality.

“the end goal ideal state we're working towards” was poorly worded. I just meant to gesture vaguely towards morality and terminal values.

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