America's Invisible Graveyard: Understanding the Moral Implications of Western sanctions

While I think the post itself is written in a way that's uncharitable towards proponents of sanctions, if the only argument for them was the "collective guilt/responsibility" argument you give here, I would have to say that sanctions are indeed both ineffective and immoral.

Western leaders have said again and again that they believe this is the war of the regime currently in control of the Russian government, and not of the Russian people. Boris Johnson went on television to say to the Russian people "I believe this war is not in your name" in Russian. That's flatly inconsistent with the idea that they bear some "partial responsibility" for failing to stand up to Putin's regime (what are they even supposed to do?)

The post is correct about one thing: sanctions have a very poor empirical record of affecting regime change. Japan didn't undergo regime change because of US sanctions on it leading up to the Pacific War. Saddam wasn't toppled as a result of the crippling sanctions placed on Iraq throughout the 1990s. The regime in Iran is still as strong as ever, and shows no signs of being toppled by a popular revolution triggered by Western sanctions on the country. In contrast, I can't think of a single example in which sanctions led to regime change in a country. Maybe this is my lack of imagination - can you think of such a case?

Better arguments have been offered in favor of sanctions. For example, the Biden administration said that one of the primary purposes of the sanctions they have placed on Russia is to hurt the Russian economy in order to undercut Russia's ability to project hard power, and sanctions can indeed be successful at doing this.

Maybe it's just me, but I find this language of "collective responsibility" to be repugnant. You're responsible for something if you could have taken actions which had a substantial influence over whether it happened or not. Ordinary people simply don't have any such influence over the actions of their government. It's true they have the power to affect change if they can coordinate their actions, but it's hardly reasonable to blame individual players in a game with millions of players for getting stuck in a bad equilibrium that they can't climb out of. If we applied these same moral standards to ourselves, all of us would be condemned without an exception.

What we should think of is how to provide the right kind of stimulus from the outside to change the situation, not cast blame at people for doing what's best for themselves, their family and their friends.

Sanctions will not work this way, period.

It is obvious if you think about it for a while.

1. Sanctions have been the main official justification for Putin's prolonged rule and his mistakes. They were the fuel and the proofs for his "The World Is Against Us" rhetorics. Now they enabled him to introduce some interesting laws, like 15 years of corrective labor colony for "spreading fakes about the special operation of liberating Ukraine from the Nazis"

2. People whose well-being has been affected by the war will not protest. It is always better to be poor than to serve 15 years of corrective labor colony. Period. And just in case, life in Russia is still much better than life in Ukraine, at least because war is on the Ukrainian territory.

3. There still were and probably will be people who protest and protested, not because of the money interests you've described but because of their genuine repulsion towards the war, especially this war. Well, many of them got or will get their punishments. Also, they'll be a good picture for a TV report on a Russian channel called "The Enemy is brainwashing our nation, this is exactly why we must focus on searching for traitors and disposing of them." That's how it all will end.

4. Nobody will start an armed protest on the same reason why there've been almost no slightly armed protests in Russia for the recent decades. In 1917 a revolution led to the establishment of a totalitarian state, nobody wants that to repeat.

This is the reason why those sanctions aren't capable of giving a start to a revolution. If they do provoke something inside the target country, that's the unrest towards those stupid Westerners who interfere in things they don't understand.

Sanctions might have an effect, though. If they manage to completely destabilise the Russian economy. But the costs for the whole world might be huge. In any case, that's to be left for another speculation

And for god's sake, I'm not saying that sanctions should not be taken. Apart from sending weapons, sanctions are the only way the West can help Ukraine without actually deploying their troops. That's the reason for the sanctions, I suppose.

This is my question as well; sanctions may well be a humanitarian catastrophe, but so is a naked war of aggression.  My intuitive sense is that criticizing sanctions here, without suggesting an alternative, is insufficient for LW.

I don't think the "sanctions must have specific offramps" is a good argument against a naked war of aggression, unless you contend that Russia's transparently bad-faith casus belli is legitimate.  It seems like "sanctions will end, if you withdraw all troops from Ukraine" is a likely end-state result of peace negotiations, so making the subtext obvious is of little moral relevance.  Putin is not stupid.  

There's also the complex question of moral culpability/collective punishment (as Jonnston mentions).  I know that the 17,000 anti-tank Javelin missiles the U.S. has sent to Ukraine (NYT, paywall, sorry) will be used to kill Russian soldiers.  Should I oppose that step because many of the soldiers killed are conscripts?  Suppose all of them are conscripts and would be conscientious objectors except that there is no such objection allowed under Russian law; suppose commissars await behind the front lines to kill deserters.  Must I not destroy an invader's war materiel because arguably innocent people, who happen to be required to carry rifles, will die?  Should my moral calculus be affected by the other side's imposition of rules that force me to make difficult moral calculations about people who might be my friends otherwise?  Has war ever not done this?  Christmas Truce, anyone?

Suppose Putin believes that sanctions would be the West's only plausible option here (other than total capitulation to a naked war of aggression) and invades anyway.  Putin is forcing me to calculate the human cost of sanctioning Russia versus the human cost of not doing anything.  Is my moral calculus affected by this?  Maybe I should ask some Ukrainians if they think they should have value in my moral calculus, as the nation of non-aggressors?  

Godwin's Law: Suppose it was 1943 and I knew the Holocaust was happening.  Would I be justified in imposing similar sanctions on Nazi Germany?  If not, would I be justified in declaring actual war?  Is war more defensible than sanctions?  What if I know that my army will commit some war crimes no matter how hard I train it out of them?

Or, would not sanctioning Russia here be tantamount to appeasement, which, I note, we also have evidence to believe is not effective?

I agree with OP's position re the sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, by the way.  Both situations have been disastrously handled. I think we've mishandled North Korea as well, but sanctions are only a piece of that.

The thesis in the original post was that sanctions do not work for achieving their aims. If that's in fact the case, then "don't impose sanctions" seems like a superior alternative.

The post suggests two: sanctions should have been precommitted to have any deterrence effect (this seems obviously true), and sanctions should have a clear stop condition to encourage de-escalation.

I support lifting SWIFT sanctions immediately if Russia reverts to status quo ante bellum (that is, Crimea is still annexed and Donbas is under Minsk agreements), but if that is not politically feasible, any stop condition would be better than the current situation. For example, a stop condition could be territorial integrity of Ukraine as of Budapest memorandum, that is, returning Crimea and Donbas to Ukraine control.

Strongly downvoted for falling into the same trap as the OP, only worse. The OP has a bunch of really good points about sanctions not working generally and being poorly structured in this specific case. You have some excellent posts and comments, but this one does not meet your own epistemic standards.

After this post of yours, I did notice a disturbing characteristic set of symptoms. In another comment, Bezzy finds a number more, including that there is no question about alternatives at the end of the post, which seems to encourage us to just do nothing, setting a precedent of unpunished war in Europe. This also makes me want to ask, how is the situation with bots on lesswrong in general, including specifically Russian ones? Before that, I had the impression that here you can discuss things constructively without them, unlike the dominance of bots in other places. On the other hand, I think the general idea of ​​the effectiveness of sanctions is worth discussing. And I'm concerned about the style in which you yourself write, and the answers to you too, it seems to be becoming too politic-mind-killing.

I believe ebrodey’s post fails to meet the epistemic standards we expect of writing here on Less Wrong.

The OP makes vastly more sense than at least half of all the posts you’ve ever made to Less Wrong.

Is the OP true? Do I agree with it? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s perfectly coherent, and makes several fairly clearly stated points.

Downvoted for manifestly untrue accusations of low epistemic quality; upgraded to strong downvote for blatant hypocrisy.

I understand that perspective and will try and due better to work within LW's guidelines. Thanks for the feedback. I think the first sentence was justified given the humanitarian costs associated with the sanctions. 

I’d be willing to bet against this claim, assuming by “mouthpiece for Russian propaganda” you mean something more similar to “spends multiple hours a day parroting the party line online” and not just “is mildly sympathetic to Putin.”

An appeal to cold, calculating rationality, a tug at heartstrings, a call for outrage (literally), some classic whataboutism and shoddily constructed cover a la "I as an American patriot" (who even talks like that). This post really has it all.

They may well be, but fake claiming ought to be done more carefully and less loudly.

I upvoted and strongly-downvoted the OP and lsusr respectively, for the same reason as shminux: lsusr's comments were clearly far more mind-killed than the OP, jumping immediately to vilifying the OP in emotional terms and accusing them of being a foreign operative without even trying to address the contents of the post. Not that the OP is great in this regard either, but responding to a politicized post with an even more politicized outburst is not a good norm to set.

I strongly upvoted the OP after seeing it being in the negative for no good reason. I think you would do well to chill instead of going on a crusade against it. You could try to refute its main points, which I will conveniently summarize for you here, since apparently the summary in the OP wasn't good enough:

• Sanctions don't work (the only counter-example I can think of is South Africa and even that is iffy).
• Sanctions hurt general population disproportionately (well, that's hard to refute, but give it a go).
•  That it is intended as a potentially inept deterrent of China taking over Taiwan.
• Sanctions have not been structured to incentivize Putin to deescalate.

I hope you will dedicate one of your thoughtful and original posts to this topic... Once you chill a bit.

I only looked at aggregate patterns and didn't see who voted on the post, but in-aggregate the patterns looked pretty organic to me. Mostly a bunch of strong-votes on both sides with relatively high weights, which you can't easily achieve with sockpuppets, so my guess is this post is just controversial.