Fake Charity Nerd Girl

There’s this classic thought experiment that people use to argue against utilitarianism. You’re a doctor with five patients about to die for want of different organs, when you get one patient who’s in no danger of dying but is a match for all five of them. You can harvest his organs (which will kill him) and no one will ever know. Killing him seems correct under utilitarianism, but is it really the right thing to do?

I’ve heard two utilitarian responses to the thought experiment. One is that killing the guy is the right thing to do, and our moral intuitions, not designed for weird edge cases such as this, are leading us astray. The other is that killing the guy is wrong, because you’re contributing to a precedent of killing random people whenever they come to the hospital and that outweighs the four lives you’re saving.

But with this and this floating around my head recently I’ve settled on a third solution. I think that killing him does increase utility. But if everyone made the utility-increasing choice, then the world would be a worse place. It’s the altruistic version of the prisoner’s dilemma.

[snip]

The issue as I see it is that if you establish a precedent of nearly healthy people going to hospitals and being killed against their will as donations then you would discourage people with tolerable illnesses from ever seeking medical attention for fear of losing their lives.

The obvious solution to this is to keep an organ compatibility list of everyone in the country, and when you require organs to save a few lives with high probability of success you can quickly contact them for volunteers to see if any suicidal people close enough to help wish to volunteer - If nobody replies then you pick one at random and send a hit squad to collect them.

Best of both worlds :p

Or we could, y’know - Cease some of the crazy restrictions on biomedical research and advance plans for synthesizing human organs.

Haha yes, there are in fact many less drastic ways to get more organs. Like opt-out organ donation. Or organ markets. Or taking them from dead people. If none of those solve the problem fully I like your random hit squad idea, though ^_^

Only a bioethicist could prefer a world in which we have 1,000 altruists per annum and over 6,500 excess deaths over one in which we have no altruists and no excess deaths.

Things I just realized: a lot of the philosophy we’ve been doing in my class this quarter is based on the assumption that people don’t want to maximize their expected utility, they want to maximize their minimum possible utility over all outcomes. 

Like on the one hand, now Rawlsian philosophy makes sense. On the other hand, this just seems empirically false? Like, if that were true, wouldn’t that mean that no one would take any risk ever?

Thank you thank you thank you!

I am a big fan of prospect theory for this: the actual Rawlsian position is obviously false when you go to an extreme, but he is tapping into an intuition that we are more afraid of catastrophic events. Prospect theory integrates this in a sensible way.

[…] Those 16,000 lives are unlikely to all be the same ones lost in an alternate world without robot cars. When we say autonomous cars can slash fatality rates by half, we really mean that they can save a net total of 16,000 lives a year: for example, saving 20,000 people but still being implicated in 4,000 new deaths. There’s something troubling about that, as is usually the case when there’s a sacrifice or “trading” of lives.”

—

- “The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Is Far Murkier Than You Think”, Wired

sometimes I forget how objectively terrible the field of moral philosophy is

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(via yxoque)

That article strikes me as a really poorly written version of this article. The argument as I understand it is that, while less people overall would die, it’s not just different people who would be killed, but a specific class of people would become more likely to be killed.

(via nextworldover)

Wow! It seems…. a little too generous to ascribe that stance to the Wired article, but that’s a much more interesting position and more worth discussing. […]

On one of his recent posts, Scott Alexander backed away a bit from steelmanning¹, in response to the comment

James A. Donald (external link)

Please, no more steelmanning.

Person A says something that Person B finds strange and unreasonable, something that makes no sense given the rest of Person B’s worldview. So, Person B, “charitably” invents a somewhat similar position that makes sense given person B’s worldview Which worldview person A massively disagrees with, and is indeed violently insulted by.

Whenever I see the word, I assume, usually correctly, that you are about to demonize your opponents with some version of their argument that only makes sense, only is steel, given that everything that they believe is wrong, everything you believe is correct, and they are evil and stupid.

And even if you have the best of intentions, and I doubt your intentions are as pure as you think, you are going to wind up inadvertently doing that.

This comment seemed a bit off to me, and with this example I see why. If you work under a moral system where the correct answer to the trolley problem is “don’t kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people”², then this does look like perverting an argument to some version that only makes sense if everything you believe³ is wrong.

On the other hand, for people who think the answer to the trolley problem is “do kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people” this steelmanned argument is important, interesting, novel, and potentially true where the previous argument seemed pretty clearly false⁴.

And I don’t think the point of steelmanning is to present someone else’s points the way that person would most like them presented. I think the point is to make the argument as strong as you can. And that’s very likely going to be by making it match your own belief framework⁵.

James A Donald is probably right that this doesn’t quite maximize charity. The person whose argument you’re rewriting will likely think it worse⁶. If you are valuing charity above all else⁷, this will likely fail. In most cases just republishing the other person’s argument will be more charitable.

But if you value being correct above all else⁸, I think steelmanning is a pretty good idea

I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:

1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)

2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)

These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.

And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.

Still, there’s little doubt that robot cars could make a huge dent in the car-accident fatality rate, which is obviously a good thing — isn’t it?

Still, there’s little doubt that robot cars could make a huge dent in the car-accident fatality rate, which is obviously a good thing — isn’t it?

I also find it weird that everyone is like “ah, yes, the thing we shall base our assessments of moral weight on is the person’s ability to formulate the concept of ‘I’”

like

…even ignoring disability issues that seems like a really weird and specific thing to base your “this being is in my sphere of morality” assessments on

like why is being able to have a self-model and say “I exist” more important than, like, tool use or something

OTOH if you drop that you start getting inconvenient questions like “okay, the vast majority of beings have a strong preference to keep existing, does that mean it’s immoral to kill any being” and then we’re all Jains 

I mean obviously it is bad to kill humans, and it would be really inconvenient if it were bad to kill plants, but I’m not sure where I draw the line between the two

So obviously I don’t think homosexuality is a sin and in that context it’s pretty shitty…

But “love the sinner, hate the sin” seems pretty damn important to me? Like, even leaving aside mistakes and moments of weakness and such and just considering explicit, proudly-held views, I can count on one hand the number of people in my life that I consider to have a completely moral worldview. And most of the rest of them are wrong on things that I consider fundamental and extremely important. And yet, here I am, loving them. People can be valuable even if they do bad, and denying that is an act of injustice toward their good traits and will likely leave you bitter and alone. On the other hand, morality matters and failing to acknowledge (to yourself, at least) the flaws in those around you leaves you at risk of sacrificing your and their good traits to their bad ones, and acknowledged or not the problems cause actual harm to your values.

Basically I’m saying I can’t live without “love the sinner” or “hate the sin”. I genuinely love a lot of people who do and believe things I think are awful. I want them to stop and change their views (though that doesn’t mean I berate them or whatever), and at the same time they are more than just their flaws.

In a sense, this is the definition of unconditional love. On the other hand, can some people not truly be awful to the core? There most likely has been someone so despicable that not one person could find something to love.

If peoples’ value is measured in their actions and impact on the world, people can have a certain amount of value if others love them, since they positively impact the world in that way. On the other hand, they may have huge negative value.

Don’t we all? The negative impact of our lives is huger than we realize. In fact, just by spending one day lazing around on a wooden bench in an air conditioned lobby, our negative effect on the world thrives. By this argument, we have no choice but to “love the sinner, hate the sin” or else we would not be able to stand ourselves, let alone each other.

My stance on this one is formed from the rule I developed to make relationships of all sorts possible, and I find it a useful one: My relationship with someone depends solely on my relationship with that person. That is, in my dealings with person Y, I ignore what they do or how they act towards person X, unless this would impact how I deal with person Y. There are people I like who I don’t have great interactions with, and people I have no reason to like that I have wonderful interactions with. I don’t let my general opinion of the person override my opinion of my relationship with that person.

I don’t believe in not interacting with people because I dislike their views, and I think that people should be able to act on their views, so my only standard of judging a relationship is how I think of that relationship.

Obviously how they behave towards others influences my likelihood of inviting the person to join in group activities, and I try to avoid having two people who have issues with each other being in the same room to the extent that I can help it.

I know that some people see this “not expelling people from my life when I am told that they hurt others” policy as supporting those in power against the powerless. Being judged a bad person for not harming others when my social group, or any member of it, is pushing me to harm someone is the sort of thing I would like to be resistant to.

Like fuzziesandutils is saying, from a consequentialist scalar (and especially from a consequentialist absolute) perspective, everybody is a horrible human being, including myself. So I won’t expel someone from my life just because of a tiny extra marginal bit of hurting someone. And that is assuming that all accusations are true. Someone is openly homophobic? Does less harm to humanity than their stance on effective altruism.

I admit that this rule is somewhat self-interested. I developed it so that I would have a general rule that permitted me to have interesting conversations. But I don’t think that it’s a bad one.

I get that some feel that they are obligated not to be friends with someone who is insufficiently progressive, and doesn’t get social justice issues reflexively right. I get that others feel that they are obligated to not be friends with non-christians who might tempt them from the path. I admit that I have lied by omission about the faith that I was raised with, to get along with people who might have changed their views about our relationship based on irrelevant facts about me. I think that it is a worse world when we try to expel everybody we dislike. Now go forth, and be excellent to each other!

Good response. I agree, although there are certain situations in which it can be taken to dangerous extremes. Hypothetical situation: I am best friends with Hitler. Given what he is doing, it would be my duty as a person to stand in his way, and if I like him as a person, I should still try to prevent him from doing anything.

Is it my duty, or acceptable, for me to kill him? On the one hand, I have unique access as a friend. On the other hand, that is major backstabbing.

I think it is totally reasonable to be friends with Hitler if he’s a good friend to you. But you would also be obligated to kill him. As for backstabbing, I don’t think “kill your best friend only if they’re going to cause large numbers of people to die” will create that much of a slippery slope. But maybe I’m wrong.