Soulless morality

First, I agree with the main thrust of your argument: that our current morality is riddled to the core with things derived from supernatural beliefs, and we're going to have to rebuild it from the ground up. And that we need to stop using "life" as a primitive unit.

But I disagree with you about your specific example. I don't think those of us who want to donate money to poor countries are trying to create more human lives, or even save more human lives - see Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. We're trying to alleviate suffering.

If the best way to alleviate suffering is to buy condoms for starving Africans to prevent the birth of another generation of starving Africans, I am all for this even though it decreases the number of Africans. If the best way to alleviate suffering is to try to improve the African economy through programs like microfinance, I am all for this even though it holds the number of Africans constant. If the best way to alleviate suffering is by curing malaria, I am all for this even though it increases the number of Africans - as long as the total amount of suffering including those new Africans is less than it was before.

I draw a sharp distinction between about twenty different meanings of the word "value". Value on instrumental grounds is one of them. When I say that drug addicts are less valuable than other people, I probably mean they're less useful to society. That doesn't mean it's morally more okay to torture a drug addict than it is to torture Bill Gates (except insofar as torturing Bill Gates would disrupt his various societally useful activities). But there are a whole lot of values that aren't value to society - even someone who's valueless to society may well have a lot of value to himself.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're proposing, but I'll argue against it anyway - I reject a "multiplier" theory of value. That is, if Person A is twice as good a person as Person B (more intelligent, prettier, whatever) then that doesn't mean that torturing Person B is twice as acceptable as torturing Person A. A unit of suffering is a unit of suffering. Person A deserves credit for all the great things he does, but that doesn't change the ethical calculus. The exception is that it's better to kill an unhappy person than a happy person, because it's a better change to the joy/suffering balance. You still can't go around killing unhappy people willy-nilly though because of precedent reasons.

Although I value rationality, I have to admit that I value it mostly as an instrumental value. Although I value it as a terminal value a little, I don't think it has quite as much power for me as the joy vs. suffering value. I can't think of any non-trivial amount of torture I would inflict on Person A that would be justified if it caused Person B to read a book on Bayesian statistics. That's why I'd prefer to spend my money on starving people in Africa than anything else. It seems like the cheapest way to alleviate the most suffering, and alleviating suffering is top priority in my ethical system right now (I include in this really indirect ways to help people in Africa, like the Singularity Institute).

My comment isn't as clear as I think it should be, but I'm not even sure to what degree we disagree so I won't fret too much about it (I might just be rounding you off to the nearest cliche, as one person put it). One thing, though: you do accept that even if you value education more than saving starving Africans, John Maxwell's argument still holds, right? You just need to donate all that money to educational charities. The argument holds as long as there's something, anything, you value more than your own convenience.

Question: am I the only person who (unless I considered immortality likely) would vastly, VASTLY prefer a death sentence to twenty years in prison?

You shouldn't be mixing "rational agents win" with "rational societies lose". If you one-box on Newcomb's Problem (as motivated by "rational agents win") then you probably cooperate on the Prisoner's Dilemma with similar agents; these are widely regarded as almost the same problem.

What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality?

It was an instrumental value of saving lives in the first place... he said untruthfully; but still, you see the point.

But society teaches the opposite: that mere life has a tremendous value, and anything you do with your life has negligible additional value. That's why it's controversial to execute criminals, but not controversial to lock them up in a bare room for 20 years.

What if the criminals you execute might otherwise stand a decent chance of living forever?

Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable. Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable. You can't have it both ways.

I disagree with a lot of this, but finally upvoted just for that one argument.

Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

To which I would respond "Okay, but is that necessarily a good thing?"

Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong. If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access. If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally. If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation. Not doing so is immoral. You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

I think many of the reasons I disagree with your post as a whole have kernels in this paragraph.

If I spend 10% of my life on the web, it doesn't necessarily mean I value going on the web at least by 1/10th of my life. I think the truth is closer to "10% of my time awake, I was bored and happened to have a computer with internet access nearby". If you offered someone the deal "we will extend your life by 10%, but you may never access the web again"... well, I wouldn't accept the deal, but I'm sure there exists people who would; people who have spent 10% of their lives on the web.

And just because I spend 10% of my time on the web doesn't mean I value lives that go on the web more than lives which don't. This argument is as much of a non-sequitur as saying "People who spend 10% of the their time masturbating value lives involving masturbation more than lives that don't".

And I can easily give lives different values, while remaining self consistent and rational. Perhaps I'm selfish and I value my life more than any one else's lives. If the king had gave me the choice of either I die, or one other person dies, then I'd choose for the other person to die. If it was me against two other people, I'd probably still choose myself, though I'd feel guiltier about it. When it becomes ten is when I really start to hesitate, and when it becomes a million, I guess I really have to give up and allow myself to die.

Unless, of course, the world is already suffering through an overpopulation crisis, in which case by allowing those million to die, I could claim to be acting in the greater good of the world.

I was with you right up to the last three paragraphs, and again feel like we might need to taboo "rational" and "rationalist".

Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable. Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable.

Nitpicking: I don't think this is a good way of framing the issue. "Society" doesn't tell you to do anything. There are societal structures in place that reward certain actions, but you are not told to do anything one way or another. I only mention this because you are not the first to do so.

As far as your ethics are concerned, you are assuming that a rationalist will be able to deduce the best possible action at the outset of his life, instead of experimenting with various strategies and updating your beliefs. In a probabilistic environment, reward matching is the best strategy.

I find your African aid example jarring, and my back of the envelope calculations suggest it is backwards.

Many aid organisations exist that focus their spending on funding education directly, or improving educational infrastructure. Educated children are more likely to escape peasant-hood, and more likely to ensure that their own children are educated. It seems probable to me that the potential net rationality (measured in rations or some such unit) produced from small donations is positive. Assuming we want to maximize humanity's mean rationality score, this may be an example of comparative advantage at work.

The net value of an extra $50 in my pocket on friday is negative, it will probably be spent on beer, takeaway, maybe a new game I can waste time playing. I already spent all day reading papers and writing code, the chance of me spending that $50 to level up my rationality again is negligible compared to the chance of my $50 hangover cutting into my Saturday morning research time. The net value (in rations) of posting that $50 to Plan or some such organisation to spend it providing primary school education to girls who have a non-zero probability of going on to become biotech researchers is positive.

I'd even be inclined to suggest that the value of a potential small-r rationalist in an intellecutally backward country is higher than a small time fraction of a rationalist in an educated society. You get to decide which of Africa or the States is intellectually more backward...

ac

On part of your article, and maybe not to its point, yet - Nope, I believe in the value of human life as an absolute and a minimal starting point, independently of its economical or hedonistic or whatnot value, above which you may be free to add further value for reason X or Y, because I'm scared as hell that if I'm not efficient enough, my value on the market (or any other way of assessing my value) will drop, possibly low enough to do me in finally.

Not for any other reason than to assure the safety of my own human person. Being human is being fragile, and we live a precarious life. We need to be protected, and to have some sort of value in and by ourselves. I also extend that idea to others because at this point it doesn't cost me anything significant to do so, and because if I don't, then there's less incentive for others humans to extend it towards me. Also, genuine intellectual honesty and fairness, I don't see why the absolute value of another human life should be any less than mine.

This doesn't mean that on a personal, relative level, I don't value mine more anyway. I expect the other guy to value his as well, though, so once again I both expect to have to cooperate, and also, to empathize with someone who's like me, because I simply can't help it once I realize how it feels to be in the other's shoes.

In philosophy there is an objection to utilitarianism called the Repugnant Conclusion, which goes something like this:

"For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living."

I don't think the conclusion is repugnant. The reason it appears repugnant is because of some verbal slight of hand that's going on: when we think of lives that are "barely worth living", the lives we actually think of are those that aren't worth living (for example, an extremely depressed person who will spend the rest of their life in a padded cell.) The reason we do this is because, as you explain, people make the mistake of putting a huge value on life itself.

Rationality is a win for the rational agent. But in many prisoners-dilemma and tragedy-of-the-commons scenarios, having rational agents is not a win for society.

It's not just social dilemmas that can favor "irrational" morality; an imperfect consequentialist agent may do better according to its own values by adopting non-consequentialist ethics. I question that this is actually "irrational", per my interpretation of "rational agents win".

If you decide to be a fanatic, you should tell other people to do so, too.

What if I believe that an individual's utility-maximizing level of fanaticism is proportional to their reasoning ability (or something similar), and that my reasoning ability is much higher than average?

I think that giving aid to Africa just makes us "feel better." While, say, bed nets may not make us feel warm and fuzzy, they may be what Africa needs. The proper action may be to give emotive stories on every person saved by bed nets.

Life, as such, is valueless.

Every person's life has value to that person (we can reasonably assume - or he would commit suicide, either actively or passively).

I have long believed that the rational value of a person's life to other people is the contribution that person makes to the welfare of the others - either directly to friends and family or to society (through paid work) to strangers. I stress paid work, since there is no way to judge whether someone's unpaid actions is a net contribution or not - at least if someone is willing to pay for something it is a benefit to that person.

Part of the problem you discuss is a confusion between a person's self-valuation and his value to others.

What you describe is similar to my own position. I made a short note of it in the "closet survey" thread: I don't think any life has inherent value. However, there's another problem with morality I want to draw attention to, and that's the idea that people could somehow straightforwardly accumulate value by increasing virtue or reducing vice.

I find utilitarian ethical notions such as "alleviating suffering", "increasing happiness" and even "increasing rationality" incoherent. These aren't things you can pour into a bucket. Pain and happiness are not cumulative. Experiencing 40 years of uninterrupted happiness will not lead to Nirvana and will most likely not be particularly different, at the end of the 40 years, from having experienced a mixed life. (The degree to which suffering does have a lasting effect is probably due to long-term consequences to health and behavior rather than the accumulation of the negative experiences themselves.)

To me, what is accumulated has to be a something that is genuinely cumulative, which I believe can only be the gross empirical knowledge of human society as a whole (I think it can be argued that science is the only truly cumulative human activity; everything else is fad). Everybody who is contributing to the advancement of knowledge, whether directly or indirectly, has value. Their value would be a function of how important they are to a society focused on the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Everybody else has negative value. (I don't believe it's possible to be neutral; human beings require a lot of resources to merely exist.)

We have a death-penalty debate in the US, which has consequences for less than 100 people per year. We have a few hundred thousand people serving sentences of 20 years and up, but no debate about it. That shows that most Americans place a huge value on life itself, and almost no value on what happens to that life.

Another reason might be the possibility of judicial errors. You can release a locked-up convict and compensate him somehow, but you can't resurrect a dead convict.

Edit: my comments below this line are irrelevant to the point of this discussion, please disregard them.

Killing enemy soldiers is allowable; killing enemy civilians is not.

One can't win a war without killing enemy soldiers, but one can win a war without killing enemy civilians (modern wars tend to somewhat blur the line between combatants and civilians). Also, killing civilians motivates enemy soldiers and stimulates the spontaneous formation of militia.

Killing enemy soldiers is allowable; torturing them is not.

Torturing enemy soldiers doesn't help you win a war and may motivate enemy soldiers to fight to the death, or to torture your own soldiers in return (let alone PR disasters that may arise out of this).

Losing a pilot is not acceptable; losing a $360,000,000 plane is.

Not sure what plane are you talking about. Also, the total costs of training a pilot may well be in the millions. When you officially devalue the pilot life, you're sending a message to other pilots which will tend to avoid dangerous missions, or just drop the career. (Also, unmanned flight will make the problem obsolete).

My personal position: any life is valuable. Murder is not acceptable.

Arguments about ethics here, and in the discussion below, seem focused and peripheral relative to a bigger question: is there any guarantee, a priori, that perfect rationality would result in something that I (and you) would consider ethical? Is there some argument that there is a rational solution and it will be acceptable? My head goes in circles when I think about how rationality must lead to the truth so it must be acceptable but then I read the comments below and I think, "how can humans be trusted on this, individual by individual?".

Perhaps there's a post written on this already ...?

Here in pandemic world, it's insane. I value healthy time (life). NOBODY should value "lives saved" / "deaths prevented" because everyone is doomed to die. You can't save a life. You can only postpone a death, and (possibly) allow for more healthy time. I don't value unhealthy time. Once health is gone, I wish for a swift death, for myself and everyone else (except the shitheads).

To mask or not to mask -- pretty obvious, you pick your units of what you value, for me, healthy time, and then estimate the costs vs benefits. Obviously, we all think masking isn't "worth" the costs in not-pandemics, and most of us think masking is "worth" the costs in pandemics. So, why doesn't everyone just show their work? How are you estimating the costs and benefits of masking?

First, we can disagree about what is valuable. Then, we can disagree about the estimates. But we (rational people) CAN'T disagree about what to do. If the costs are bigger than the benefits, DON'T MASK. If the benefits are bigger than the costs, MASK.