Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

February 18th, 2022

edited 2022-02-18 · open in Roam
  • draft of my thoughts on ethics / morality / moral realism
    • initial premises:
      • people have things they care about
      • some of these are the same between people, some are different
      • some of these values are readily positively-correlated (eg we'd all benefit from living on a planet with less atmospheric CO₂ or pollution) and some are essentially negatively correlated (eg I'd like to eat this whole sandwich and you would too)
      • people can be confused about what they want, on many different levels of abstraction / PCT hierarchy
      • people can be better or worse at caring for what they care about
      • societies can be more or less good at allowing people to care themselves and each other / more or less developed
      • some aspects of societal development & effectiveness are contextual; some are essentially universal
    • other thoughts:
    • A) any kind of "wrong" has to indicate "wrong for whom" and "by what values"
    • B) any commentary on some behavior or strategy being "wrong" is meaningless without a viable alternative—which is perhaps a different sense of morality being relative!
      • people often overestimate the degree to which the alternatives they have in mind would actually be available to them or others in the precise moment when it matters
      • or they don't realize that their proposed alternative actually also has a lot of other issues
      • or they don't even think of an alternative, they just have a sort of categorical "that is wrong, you should never do it"
        • (relatedly, a lot of ethical dilemmas are double binds and the actual leverage is in not getting in the situation in the first place)
      • or they have a naive view of how behavior change works, because part of viability is about how one might go about learning how to do something different, and Change doesn't just happen
    • C) all behaviors necessarily make sense in whatever terms they're actually performed in, otherwise people would be doing some different apparently-senseless thing.
      • thus if it results in some problem, it's because there's some other factor not being incorporated into the decision-making process, which could be due to:
        • them not knowing about it at all (eg if you didn't know a disease was contagious via some medium or didn't know you were sick or whatever)
        • them having their awareness narrowed so as not to account for it (eg being fixated on playing a video game and missing caring about something else)
        • them projecting something about another situation in such a way that they can't respond sanely to the current situation (eg someone has an emotional flashback to kindergarten when talking with their boss)
        • them not knowing or remembering that something is a problem for someone else (eg I make pizza for someone that is vegan, celiac & lactose intolerant 🍕)
        • them not seeing a way to meet multiple conflicting demands (eg a parent trying to not coerce their kid, but also being under some constraint of their own life that means they have to make a decision at a certain pace)
        • conflict that causes some compromised halfway output that satisfies neither higher-level desiderata (eg someone trying to be polite and honest at the same time and ending up achieving neither)
    • D) justification/blame-&-punishment/reward-based systems inevitably result in goodharting because people orient towards how to seem like they're doing moral things rather than orienting from a caring way of being. this is true even if the punishment is internal/guilt-based like "you'll be punished in hell" since people will still manage to come up with internal justifications for why what they're doing is actually totally okay or even good
    • E) psychopaths/sociopaths exist; it's unclear what to do about that but punishment doesn't work for them either (seemingly even less so than for most people)