feotakahari

Thinking about that Libertarian I argued with who said stealing is inherently immoral even if you’re starving, but also said he would steal food if he was starving. Pressured, he eventually said someone else starving is “a you problem.”

Shit, it’s fucking virtue ethics. “Morality is about being the kind of person who embodies virtues. If you spank someone, you’re not embodying virtue.” Fuck you and the ancient Greek chariot you rode in on.

Kirsten Wright is what I like to call a bank account Utilitarian. She “deposits” good done in the world, and “withdraws” bad, and as long as the good outweighs the bad, she isn’t ethically bankrupt. Maybe she could do a little less bad if she cared more, but the bad is still hers to withdraw because the good covers it. (And sometimes she takes out a loan—“this will all be worth it in the end.”)

Story on Not Always Right about a person who advised a stranger which over-the-counter allergy meds to take. Lots of people saying it was a bad thing because you don’t know if you’ll recommend something that will hurt them.

What if you don’t recommend anything at all, and they coincidentally buy something that hurts them? Are you more or less responsible?

There’s a story I like where a lifeboat is sinking because too many people are on it. One person organizes two others to throw people off until it stabilizes. Then, after the boat is stabilized, the two others find a guy who hid at the bottom of the boat, and they throw him off even though they don’t need to, because they like throwing people off. The one who initially organized this is charged with murder, and he doesn’t contest the charge, but he receives a lesser sentence compared to the other two.

The organizer’s actions are a trolley problem, but the court’s decision is also a trolley problem. Do you let this man go, because he wanted to prevent at least some deaths? Or do you punish him, in the hopes that fear of unavoidable punishment will prevent people from killing needlessly like the other two did? The court judges him for doing the same thing it does every day, and that’s why it can’t judge him too harshly.

I’ve been thinking about thathopeyetlives. I think we’re equally strident about the same things, just in opposite directions.

I’m not going to get into too much detail about Hope, because I think he can do that more accurately himself. But my impression is that he thinks the purpose of humanity is to serve ideals. There’s a repeated pattern where someone tells him his ideals are hurting people, and he’s disgusted that they would think that’s a valid reason to abandon ideals.

I think the purpose of ideals is to serve humanity. On our own, it’s easy for us to help ourselves and our friends, but harder for us to help people we don’t know. There are many ways to help people, but there are recurring patterns to be aware of, and we can codify these patterns as ideals, like the Golden Rule or the cardinal virtues.

There’s a Terry Pratchett quote about how lives are more valuable than causes, because you can find a new cause, but you only get one life. I don’t know if he actually meant anyone to agree with the character who says it, but I do believe that life should buy life. Take suicide bombing—are your people really going to live longer or better because you’re killing yourself? Or are you just benefiting some old man in a cave who likes having power over you?

It’s not as simple as “never die for anything.” If other people are suffering or dying, there’s value in standing up. But I think it’s about the people themselves, not about something as vague as an ideal.

(Note that there’s a degree of asymmetry here. I support Hope’s desire to follow his own principles, so long as that doesn’t trample on other people. Hope opposes any values other than his own.)

Reposting from a Tumblr conversation: https://feotakahari.tumblr.com/post/184919985235/it-would-be-amusing-to-have-an-ethical-system-that

Honestly, I think Utilitarianism isn’t marketable enough to be successful. There are a lot of things that people want, ranging from the promise of Heaven to an excuse for xenophobia, that Utilitarianism doesn’t provide. In that sense, it would probably provide more utility for me to promote liberal Christianity, since liberal Christians tend to support a lot of the same actions and political premises I support.

But I don’t think I’m some higher intelligence that’s qualified to judge who’s “smart enough” to be a Utilitarian. If I believe in Utilitarianism, I feel like it’s most appropriate for me to make at least a token effort to tell others about it. Any individual person is capable of surprising me by finding value in what I’m saying, just as I found value in it.

This is heavily inspired by posts by @loving-not-heyting​, so I’m crossposting it to Tumblr to see her response.

One of the many reasons I’m a Utilitarian: I fundamentally do not trust any moral code that allows you to make up new rules on the spot.

A common argument against Utilitarianism is that it overcomplicates things. A Utilitarian who says that lying is wrong has to come up with an argument for why lying reduces net utility. Someone else can just say that lying is wrong, because they already know that lying is wrong. Why go to so much effort to get the same answer?

Rather than address this issue, I’d like to bring up a different one: a person who uses an old flag to clean a toilet. (This example comes from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.) My experience with deontologists is that they’ve got a lot of separate, seemingly unrelated moral rules already, and they’re not afraid to add new ones. They may have a rule that disrespecting symbols is wrong, or that lacking in patriotism is wrong, but if they don’t have one, and they’re sufficiently perturbed by this idea, they’ll just make up a rule that using a flag to clean a toilet is wrong. But Utilitarians, who aren’t allowed to make up new rules, have to justify how using a flag to clean a toilet reduces net utility. If they can’t come up with an argument, they have no choice but to say that it’s perfectly okay.

I could say that I’m afraid the ability to create new moral rules will be used to create a rule that being gay is wrong. This is true, but it’s not the whole picture. I’m afraid of a rule that being weird is wrong. You think BDSM is icky? Make up a rule that BDSM is morally wrong! You think someone else’s religion is strange and frightening? Make up a rule that their religion is morally wrong! It’s a bully’s view of the world, where the person who can be targeted should be targeted, and whatever punishment you enact upon them is just putting them in their proper place.

(Also benefiting from this argument: Kantian ethics, some forms of care ethics, and divine command theory, as long as God isn’t coming down to personally tell you that all the things you don’t like are heretical. Also opposed by this argument: virtue ethics, because the ability to say that some action you don’t like is inherently against a particular virtue is the philosophical equivalent of conjuring an anvil directly above your opponent’s head.)

When a story is written to promote a way of living, there’s a very specific formula to how it will go. The protagonist encounters problems, adopts the way of living, and the problems go away because their way of living fixes everything. There’s often another character who follows an inferior way of living, trying and failing to solve the same problem, and they’ll either die or change their minds upon seeing the protagonist succeed. There are a few wrinkles in the formula–the protagonist dies saving everyone, the protagonist loses his love interest because his way of life matters more to him than love–but by and large, any story about how to be a good person and live a good life can be summed up in this way.

As a Utilitarian, I naturally have a grudge about how this tends to play out. It’s the tragic villains who tend to espouse Utilitarian values, doing something horrible because every alternative they see is worse. The heroes are the ones who refuse to accept this, then pull off a solution that saves everyone, because the person writing the story made there be a solution that saves everyone. If the Utilitarian was right, and there weren’t any other choices, then by stopping him, the heroes would be responsible for something horrible, and we can’t have that, now can we?

Of course, I can’t claim the rules work any differently for moral relativist heroes. I once read a truly vile book called The Soprano Sorceress where the protagonist murders her way onto the throne, kills thousands of civilians to stay in power, and justifies it all as being for the greater good. Apart from all the bodies she piles up, it basically works out like she planned. You can’t have your hero killing people if there was any better solution to the problem. You can’t, unless you’re Orson Scott Card and you’re writing Ender’s Game.

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 I once tried to read about a guy called Gilbert Ryle who called himself a logical positivist. The only part I managed to understand was that you’re a logical positivist if you’d be willing to undergo surgery with a paralytic drug, a drug that prevents you from forming memories, and no anesthetic. You'd still feel all the pain, but no one would ever be able to prove it, and no future version of yourself or others would show any sign of having seen or experienced it, so by Ryle's standard, it never happened.

I think that’s the principle the American death penalty runs under. No one cares if the dying experience horrible pain. It's just about whether they demonstrate physical signs of pain before they expire, because that might call into question the morality of killing people.