Metacontrarian Metaethics

FWIW, I would take the 1 in 3^^^^^3 chance of torture over a single dust speck*, but I would give 3^^^^^3 people a dust speck each than subject one person to torture, because the world with the dust specks looks nicer to me than the world with the torture. (I find fairness to be aesthetically pleasant.)

* Though since I feel like being pedantic, the - irrational - momentary anxiety of rolling the torture die would be a worse feeling than a dust speck, which in practice would make the dust speck the better choice.

We have eyelashes, blink a lot, have reflex actions to shield our eyes, and will quickly stop all activity around us because "I got something in my eye."

And 1-in-3^^^^^3 odds are so trivial as to never happen within the lifetime of this universe or many such universes, so I think it is indeed scope insensitivity.

1 in 3^^^^^3 is a really, really, really, really, really, really accurate specification of 0.

and I don't think this is just insensitivity to the scope of 3^^^^^3.

Nope, unless they have an arbitrary discontinuity in their valuation of harm it's really just scope insensitivy, 3^^^^^3 is that big. Quibbling about a few orders of magnitude of their caring about dust specks ("dust specks" just means the smallest harm they care about at all) and torture is a waste of time, they could consider torture a billion times worse than they do and it wouldn't change anything.

It's another matter to volunteer to be dust-specked to save someone from torture, the personal satisfaction from having done so might very well outweigh the inconvenience. But if you choose for them and they never learn about it they don't get that satisfaction.

And yet we don't give Pascal's mugger the 10 bucks.

Given a choice between getting a dust speck in the eye with probability 1 or a 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance of being tortured, I suspect the vast majority of individuals will actually opt for the dust speck, and I don't think this is just insensitivity to the scope of 3^^^^^3.

I think it is. Imagine that the same trade is offered you a trillion times. Or imagine that it's automatically offered or rejected (unconsciously by default, but you have the ability to change the default) every second of your life.

After spending a week getting a dust speck in the eye every single second, I think you'll do the math and opt to be choosing the 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance of torture instead.

...You're right, that was pretty sloppy. I felt vaguely justified in doing so since I often think about meta-ethics implied by or represented in first-order ethics (not that the levels are easily distinguishable in the first place in practice) and thus sort of made a point of not distinguishing them carefully. In hindsight that was dumb and especially dumb to to fail to acknowledge.

Have you come up with a better scenario for the trolley problem?

The one I currently like the best is:

• Trolley: You're a surgeon, you have a dying patient in your care, he needs five full litres of healthy blood to survive the operation; fortunately, you have exactly five liters available. You've just opened him up when five more emergency patients arrive, each of whom could survive with just one litre.

• Fat man: There is no dying surgery patient, but the same five new emergencies have just arrived and you have no blood reserves at all. What you do have is a healthy but unconscious patient, with five litres of good blood in his veins.

It's still not perfect though, because the role of doctors has deep cultural roots (Hyppocratic oath and so on), so the idea of a doctor doing harm to a patient feels repugnant and blasphemous, and since a patient feels like he is "entrusting" himself to a surgeon there's also an overtone of betrayal. Modern hospitals, huge and anonymous, have only partially deleted such feelings (and they try their best not to).

That's what makes heroism so poignant in real life. If you have to shoot an innocent but firmly believe it'll save the world, you'll probably brood a little (especially if there's also a cost to you), but mostly you'll get massive fuzzies. (I've never shot an innocent, but defending a cause you think is just is... more pleasant than it should be.) If you have to shoot an innocent and you expect it won't save the world but on average it's worth it anyway, it gnaws at you.

Ha. I like Steve's version better though, since you can assume away all the environmental uncertainty leaving just indexical uncertainty (the distinction doesn't really exist but bear with me), and yet people still can't just go "LCPW!", because this version is both way less convenient and more probable. I bet it'd still annoy the hell out of a real philosopher, though.

Humans often mistakenly think they face trolley problems when they really don't. This has implications for people who believe they face a trolley problem, without directly changing what constitutes a good response by someone who actually faces a trolley problem.

I'm having trouble inferring your point here... The contrast between 'those who are dreaming think they are awake, but those who are awake know they are awake' and "I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings" is always on the edges of every moral calculation, and especially every one that actually matters. (I guess it might sound like I'm suggesting reveling in doubt, but noticing confusion is always so that we can eventually become confused on a higher level and about more important things. Once you notice a confusion, you get to use curiosity!)

If your decision depends on referencing people's hypothetical reflectively endorsed morality, then you are not simply going with your preferences about morality, divorced from the moral systems of the many people in question.

Yeah, so this gets a little tricky because the decision forks depending on whether or not you think most people would themselves care about their future smarter selves' values, or whether you think they don't care but they're wrong for not caring. (The meta levels are really blending here, which is a theme I didn't want to avoid but unfortunately I don't think I came up with an elegant way to acknowledge their importance while keeping the spirit of the post, which is more about noticing confusion and pointing out lots of potential threads of inquiry than it is an analysis, since a real analysis would take a ton of analytic philosophy, I think.)

That you are ignoring people's stated preferences in both calculations (which remember, have the same conclusion) is similarly irrelevant. In the second but not the first you weigh people's reflective morality, so despite other (conspicuous) similarities between the calculations, there was no going back to the original calculation in reaching the second conclusion.

Ah, I was trying to hint at 3 main branches of calculation; perhaps I will add an extra sentence to delineate the second one more. The first is the original "go with whatever my moral intuitions say", the second is "go with whatever everyone's moral intuitions say, magically averaged", and the third is "go with what I think everyone would upon reflection think is right, taking into account their current intuitions as evidence but not as themselves the source of justifiedness". The third and the first are meant to look conspicuously like each other but I didn't mean to mislead folk into thinking the third explicitly used the first calculation. The conspicuous similarity stems from the fact that the actual process you would go through to reach the first and the third positions are probably the same.

The right choice will have some negative consequences, but to say it is partly evil is misleadingly calling attention to an irrelevancy, if it isn't an outright misuse of "evil"

I used some rhetoric, like using the word 'evil' and not rounding 3^^^3+1 to just 3^^^3, to highlight how the people whose fate you're choosing might perceive both the problem and how you're thinking about the problem. It's just... I have a similar reaction when thinking about a human self-righteously proclaiming 'Kill them all, God will know His own.', but I feel like it's useful that a part of me always kicks in and says I'm probably doing the same damn thing in ways that are just less obvious. But maybe it is not useful.

The problem with basing decisions on events with a probability of 1-in-3^^^^^3, is that you're neglecting to take into account all kinds of possibilities with much higher (though still tiny probabilities).

Especially the probability that the means by which you learned of these probabilities is unreliable, which is probably not even very tiny. (How tiny is the probability that you, the reader of this comment, are actually dreaming right now?)

P(X|judged that X has probability p) >= p\*P(judgment was correct)

2 out of 2 comments thus far complaining about this means I have to change it... /sigh. I like the word evil because good/evil and good/bad (depending on context) is how most of the world thinks (at one level of abstraction at least), and in meta-ethics it's not entirely obvious you're allowed to just throw away such value judgments as the results of misguided human adaptations.

I'm confused. All people are always in position to have current preferences better satisfied by having somewhat different preferences, no?

I have no doubt the case you're thinking of meets the criteria for "That is...". One mistake I have made recently is to think my description fit reality because an important scenario fit according to thedescription, as I diligently checked...but so did every other outcome. Perhaps I am oversensitive right now to seeing this mistake around me, perhaps this is a false positive, or a true positive I wouldn't have otherwise spotted, or even a true positive I would have without having experience with that mistake - seeing the flaws in others' arguments is so very much easier than seeing them in one's own. This is particularly true of gaps, which one naturally fills in.

If you could share some examples of when you were put in the position of putting people in the position of moral hazard, that would be great.