Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture

What is sometimes called "the 1000 Sadists problem" is a classic "problem" in utilitarianism; this post is another version of it.

Here's another version, which apparently comes from this guy's homework:

Suppose that the International Society of Sadists is holding its convention in Philadelphia and in order to keep things from getting boring the entertainment committee is considering staging the event it knows would make the group the happiest, randomly selecting someone off the street and then torturing that person before the whole convention. One member of the group, however, is taking Phil. 203 this term and in order to make sure that such an act would be morally okay insists that the committee consult what a moral philosopher would say about it. In Smart's essay on utilitarianism they read that "the only reason for performing an action A rather than an alternative action B is that doing A will make mankind (or, perhaps, all sentient beings) happier than will doing B." (Smart, p. 30) This reassures them since they reason that the unhappiness which will be felt by the victim (and perhaps his or her friends and relatives) will be far outweighed by the happiness felt by the large crowd of sadists, especially since the whole thing will be kept strictly secret (as of course the whole convention has to be every year anyway). So they conclude that the best, indeed morally right, thing to do is go ahead and torture this person, and set off to do it.

Write a short paper in which you explain and critically evaluate what a defender of utilitarianism, for instance Smart’s version of act utilitarianism, could say about this example. Have the sadists misunderstood utilitarianism? Or will a defender of this view just have to accept the sadists' conclusion (and if so, what, if anything, does that say about the theory itself)?

(shrug) Sure, I'll bite this bullet.

Yes, if enough people are made to suffer sufficiently by virtue of my existence, and there's no way to alleviate that suffering other than my extermination, then I endorse my extermination.
To do otherwise would be unjustifiably selfish.

Which is not to say I would necessarily exterminate myself, if I had sufficiently high confidence that this was the case... I don't always do what I endorse.

And if it's not me but some other individual or group X that has that property in that hypothetical scenario, I endorse X's extermination as well.

And, sure, if you label the group in an emotionally charged way (e.g., "Nazis exterminating Jews" as you do here), I'll feel a strong emotional aversion to that conclusion (as I do here).

Well, this can easily become a costly signalling issue when the obvious (from the torture-over-speck-supporter's perspective) comment would read "it is rational for the Nazis to exterminate the Jews". I would certainly not like to explain having written such a comment to most people. Claiming that torture is preferable to dust specks in some settings is comparably harmless.

Given this, you probably shouldn't expect honest responses from a lot of commenters.

if you are a specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to [harm Jews]

The use of "specker" to denote people who prefer torture to specks can be confusing.

This probably would have been better if you'd made it Venusians and Neptunians or something.

It is just a logical conclusion from "dust specks". You can/must do horrible things to a small minority, if a large majority members benefit a little from that.

Another part of the Sequence I reject.

Imagine if humanity survives for the next billion years, expands to populate the entire galaxy, has a magnificent (peaceful, complex) civilization, and is almost uniformly miserable because it consists of multiple fundamentally incompatible subgroups. Nearly everyone is essentially undergoing constant torture, because of a strange, unfixable psychological quirk that creates a powerful aversion to certain other types of people (who are all around them).

If the only alternative to that dystopian future (besides human extinction) is to exterminate some subgroup of humanity, then that creates a dilemma: torture vs. genocide. My inclination is that near-universal misery is worse than extinction, and extinction is worse than genocide.

And that seems to be where this hypothetical is headed, if you keep applying "least convenient possible world" and ruling out all of the preferable potential alternatives (like separating the groups, or manipulating either group's genes/brains/noses to stop the aversive feelings). If you keep tailoring a hypothetical so that the only options are mass suffering, genocide, and human extinction, then the conclusion is bound to be pretty repugnant. None of those bullets are particularly appetizing but you'll have to chew on one of them. Which bullet to bite depends on the specifics; as the degree of misery among the aversion-sufferers gets reduced from torture-levels towards insignificance at some point my preference ordering will flip.

This looks like an extension of Yvain's post on offense vs. harm-minimization, with Jews replacing salmon and unchangeable Nazis replacing electrode-implanted Brits.

The consequentialist argument, in both cases, is that if a large group of people are suffering, even if that suffering is based on some weird and unreasonable-seeming aversion, then indefinitely maintaining the status quo in which that large group of people continues to suffer is not a good option. Depending how you construct your hypothetical scenario, and how eager your audience is to play along, you can rule out all of the alternative courses of action except for ones that seem wrong.

The assumption "their terminal values are fixed to hate group X" is something akin to "this group is not human, but aliens with an arbitrary set of values that happen to mostly coincide with traditional human values, but with one exception." Which is not terribly different from "These alien race enjoys creativity and cleverness and love and other human values... but also eats babies."

Discussion of human morality only makes sense when you're talking about humans. Yes, arbitrary groups X and Y may, left to their own devices, find it rational to do all kinds of things we find heinous, but then you're moving away from morality and into straight up game theory.

Isn't it ODD that in a world of Nazis and Jews, me who is neither is being asked to make this decision? If I were a Nazi, I'm sure what my decision is going to be. If I were a Jew, I'm sure what my decision is going to be.

Actually, now that I think about it, this will be a huge problem if and when humanity, in need of new persons to speak to, decides to uplift animals. It is an important question to ask.

It is always rational for the quasi-Nazis to kill the quasi-Jews, from the Nazi perspective. It's just not always rational for me to kill the Jews - just because someone else wants something, doesn't mean I care.

But if I care about other people in any concrete way, you could modify the problem only slightly in order to have the Nazis suffer in some way I care about because of their hatred of the Jews. In which case, unless my utility is bounded, there is indeed some very large number that corresponds to when it's higher-utility to kill the Jews than to do nothing.

Of course, there are third options that are better, and most of them are even easier than murder, meaning that any agent like me isn't actually going to kill any Jews, they'll have e.g. lied about doing so long before.

One of many utilitarian conundrums that are simply not my problem, not being a utilitarian.

If you do happen to think that there is a source of morality beyond human beings... and I hear from quite a lot of people who are happy to rhapsodize on how Their-Favorite-Morality is built into the very fabric of the universe... then what if that morality tells you to kill people?

If you believe that there is any kind of stone tablet in the fabric of the universe, in the nature of reality, in the structure of logic—anywhere you care to put it—then what if you get a chance to read that stone tablet, and it turns out to say "Pain Is Good"? What then?

Maybe you should hope that morality isn't written into the structure of the universe. What if the structure of the universe says to do something horrible?

And if an external objective morality does say that the universe should occupy some horrifying state... let's not even ask what you're going to do about that. No, instead I ask: What would you have wished for the external objective morality to be instead? What's the best news you could have gotten, reading that stone tablet?

Go ahead. Indulge your fantasy. Would you want the stone tablet to say people should die of old age, or that people should live as long as they wanted? If you could write the stone tablet yourself, what would it say?

Maybe you should just do that?

I mean... if an external objective morality tells you to kill people, why should you even listen?

• The Moral Void, Eliezer Yudkowsky

I suspect what you mean by desire utilitarianism is what wikipedia calls preference utilitarianism, which I believe is the standard term.

Of course I wouldn't exterminate the Jews! I'm a good human being, and good human beings would never endorse a heinous action like that. Those filthy Nazis can just suck it up, nobody cares about their suffering anyway.

The mistake here is in saying that satisfying the preferences of other agents is always good in proportion to the number of agents whose preference is satisfied. While there have been serious attempts to build moral theories with that as a premise, I consider them failures, and reject this premise. Satisfying the preferences of others is only usually good, with exceptions for preferences that I strongly disendorse, independent of the tradeoffs between the preferences of different people. Also, the value of satisfying the same preference in many people grows sub-linearly with the number of people.

Hm.

I suppose, if LW is to be consistent, comments on negatively voted posts should incur the same karma penalty that comments on negatively voted comments do.

How important is the shape of the noses to the jewish people?

Consider a jew is injured in an accident and the best reconstruction that is present restores the nose to a nazi shape and not a jew one. How would his family react? How different will be his ability to achieve his life's goals and his sense of himself?

How would a nazi react to such a jew?

If the aspect of the Jews that the Nazis have to change is something integral to their worldview, then a repugnant conclusion becomes sort of inevitable.

Till then, pull on the rope sideways. Try to save as many people as possible.

First, I'm going to call them 'N' and 'J', because I just don't like the idea of this comment being taken out of context and appearing to refer to the real things.

Does there exist a relative proportion of N to J where extermination is superior to the status quo, under your assumptions? In theory yes. In reality, it's so big that you run into a number of practical problems first. I'm going to run through as many places where this falls down in practice as I can, even if others have mentioned some.

• The assumption that if you leave J fixed and increase N, that the level of annoyance per person in N stays constant. Exactly how annoyed can you be by someone you've never even met? Once N becomes large enough, you haven't met one, your friends haven't met one, no one you know has met one, and how do you really know whether they actually exist or not? As the size of N increases, in practice the average cost of J decreases, and it could well hit a bound. You could probably construct things in a way where that wouldn't happen, but it's at least not a straightforward matter of just blindly increasing N.
• It's a false dichotomy. Even given the assumptions you state, there's all manner of other solutions to the problem than extermination. The existance and likely superiority of these solutions is part of our dislike of the proposal.
• The assumption that they're unable to change their opinion is unrealistic.
• The assumption that they hate one particular group but don't then just go on to hate another group when the first one is gone is unrealistic.
• The whole analogy is horribly misleading because of all the associations that it brings in. Pretty much all of the assumptions required to make the theoretical situation your constructing actually work do not hold for the example you give.

With this much disparity between the theoretical situation and reality, it's no surprise there's an emotional conflict.

If the Nazis have some built-in value that determines that they hate something utterly arbitrary, then why don't we exterminate them?

That can be interpreted a couple of ways.

What if I place 0 value (or negative value (which is probably what I really do, but what I wish I did was to put zero value on it)) on the kind of satisfaction or peace of mind the Nazis get from knowing the Jews are suffering?

Relevant: Could Nazi Germany seeding the first modern anti-tobacco movement have resulted in an overall net gain in public utility till date?

I'm a bit confused with this torture vs. dust specks problem. Is there an additive function for qualia, so that they can be added up and compared? It would be interesting to look at the definition of such a function.

Edit: removed a bad example of qualia comparison.

If the Nazis are unable to change their terminal values, then Good|Nazi has a substantial difference compared to what we mean when we say Good. Nazis might use the same word, or it might translate as "the same." It might even be similar along many dimensions. Good|Jew might be the same as Good (they don't seem substantially different then humans) although this isn't required by the problem, but Good|Nazi ends up being something that I just don't care about in the case where we are talking about exterminating Jews.

There might be other conditions where Good and Good|Nazi overlap, and in those cases I probably would agree that the Nazi should do the Good thing, which would also be to do the Good|Nazi thing. But I don't have any reason to favor Good|Nazi over Good, and so where they differ (the extermination of Jews) I am unmotivated to defend or even to allow the Good|Nazi point of view to have a say in what is going on.

You know... purposely violating Godwin's Law seems to have become an applause light around here, as if we want to demonstrate how super rational we are that we don't succumb to obvious fallacies like Nazi analogies.

One idea that I have been toying since I read Eliezer's various posts on the complexity of value is that the best moral system might not turn out to be about maximizing satisfaction of any and all preferences, regardless of what those preferences are. Rather, it would be about increasing the satisfaction of various complex, positive human values, such as i.e. "Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc." If this is the case then it may well be that horribly malevolent preferences, such as those the Nazis in this thought experiment exhibit, are simply not the sort of preferences that it is morally good to satisfy. Obviously judging which values are "worthy" to be increased is a difficult problem that creates huge moral hazards for whomever is doing the judging, but that is an implementation problem, not a problem with the general principle.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then the reason that preference utilitarianism seems so intuitively persuasive is that since most of our moral reasoning deals with humans, most of the time maximizing whatever a human being prefers is pretty much guaranteed to achieve a great many of those human values. For this reason, "human values utilitarianism" and preference utilitarianism generate the same answers in most real-world scenarios. However, there might be a few values that human beings are theoretically capable of having, but aren't morally good to maximize. I think one of these morally bad preferences is sheer total malevolence, where you hate someone and want to hurt them as an end in itself.

This theory would also explain why people feel that it would be a bad thing if an AI were to kill/sterilize all the human beings in existence and replace them with creatures whose preferences are easier to satisfy. Such action would result in increased preference satisfaction, but they'd be the wrong kind of preferences, they wouldn't be positive human values. (Please note that though I refer to these as "human values," I am not advocating specieism. A nonhuman creature who had similar values would be just as morally significant as a human)

This gets a little more complicated if we change the thought experiment slightly and assume that the Nazi's Jew-hatred is ego-dystonic rather than ego-syntonic. That is, the conscious rational, "approving" part of their brain doesn't want to hurt Jews, but the subconscious "liking" parts of their brains feel incredible pain and psychological distress from knowing that Jews exist. We assume that this part of their brain cannot be changed.

If this is the case then the Nazis are not attempting to satisfy some immoral, malevolent preference. They are simply trying to satisfy the common human preference to not feel psychological pain. Killing the Jews to save the Nazis from such agony would be equivalent to killing a small group of people to save a larger group from being horribly tortured. I don't think the fact that the agent doing the torturing is the Nazis' own subconscious mind, instead of an outside agent, is important.

However, since the Nazis' preference is "I don't want my subconscious to hurt me because it perceives Jews," rather than "I want to make the statement 'all Jews are dead' true" there is an obvious solution to this dilemma. Trick the Nazis into thinking the Jews are dead without actually killing them. That would remove their psychological torment while preserving the lives of the Jews. It would not create the usual moral dilemmas associated with deception because in this variant of the thought experiment the Nazi's preference isn't to kill the Jews, it's to not feel pain from believing Jews exist.

What's more important to you, your desire to prevent genocide or your desire for a simple consistent utility function?

It is taking some effort to not make a sarcastic retort to this. Please refrain from using such absurdly politically-loaded examples in future. It damages the discussion.