- Consequentialism -- The results (preferably ALL the results) define the goodness of the action. (Officer: "Are there any jews in this house?" "No"). Note: This category includes both egoist approaches and utilitarian approaches. The only difference is which goal.
- Deontology -- Whether you followed the rules defines the goodness of the action (Don't push the fat guy in front of a train, even to save 5 others, who would have been killed)
- Virtue-ethics -- Actions are relevant to goodness only insofar as they explain what kind of person you are. (The question isn't whether you won or lost the battle...it's whether you were courageous).
It is also important to call out the distinction between two other questions in ethics:
- How do people actually respond ethically? -- This is Jon Haidt's stuff that I like so much. If you look at how people actually respond ethically, you'd do pretty well to model on 6 axes...harm/care, justice/fairness, purity/sanctity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and liberty/freedom. I'd argue that most of the rest of the rest of ethical disputes come when these axes push in different directions. For instance, sometimes/often fairness/justice pushes against ingroup/loyalty.
- How would be better for people to respond? What ethical system would be net-best for folks. I'm personally a huge fan of David Schmidtz here.
My current thought on the meta-side is that ethics is very simply evolution's way of dodging our conscious mind's feebleness, and building in effective long term strategy. Game theory says that tit-for-two-tats is the appropriate strategy in indefinite duration iterative games with noise (What we really see). Turns out vampire bats play tit-for-two-tats or something very close as well. Justice/fairness and harm/care are awful close to a built-in over-ride for our short-term thinking grey muscles to say--"Yo, Bozo, Be nice"...it's better in the long run.
Similarly, in single-play game theory, it's most effective to defect. Hence...one needs a different strategy for dealing with outgroup folks that one won't be playing with forever. Purity/Sanctity Ingroup/Loyalty and Authority/Respect are about defining the boundaries between ingroup and outgroup.
Finally...intra-group competition may be the single biggest driving factor in top food-chain pack-predator evolution (humans)...and so preserving space for the self to act is essential, which should lead to a built-in liberty/freedom issue.
Summary: Evolution built ethics to make human beings play smart long-term game theory instead of playing stupid short-term game theory, which is all the power their little grey noodles have in them. IF you think you're smarter than evolution...you can screw yourself and several others pretty badly by testing the proposition and finding out you're wrong. Otherwise... behave ethically.
Aside: It seems as if the human ethical position is highly sensitive to power. When in a position of power, folks' ethical opinions change dramatically. This fits my hypothesis positing a game-theoretic evolutionary substitute for the natural human lack of long-term thinking.
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I see the three basic approaches to ethics as running together: good rules will have the good consequences which will bestow the highest virtue.
The problem is of future prediction. Example: is saving the snail darter ethical in the long run? Will preserving that ecosystem 'as is' be of long term benefit, or are we foolishly withholding resources from humankind?
Our metrics are inconclusive on many issues. Thus the disagreements.
"IF you think you're smarter than evolution...you can screw yourself and several others pretty badly by testing the proposition and finding out you're wrong. Otherwise... behave ethically."
Are you claiming that it's in your best interest to behave ethically anyway, so there are no real dilemmas about whether to be selfish or ethical? That makes me feel warm and fuzzy and therefore I distrust it :) Nothing in a materialist universe is that perfect.
After all, that claim doesn't apply if ethical intuition is broken, whether because it runs off the rails at the extremes or because the environment has changed so that evolved intuitions aren't adaptive.
Simple example for case 1 is martyrdom. If you can self-modify so that you won't be a martyr for a cause (especially since most of your loyalty is about signaling group affiliation anyway) then that's a selfishly beneficial thing to do.
Simple example for case 2 is that payoffs will change as society becomes larger, more mobile, and more anonymous. If people move around a lot, your reputation matters little. Your prisoner's dilemma will have fewer iterations on average. So it pays to play more selfishly and spend less effort punishing defectors. If we're evolved to live in mostly static Dunbar sized groups, our intuition would be biased to be too prosocial for the modern environment.
If ethics is "nothing but" evolved social hacks, we should in turn have a pretty low barrier to hacking (disregarding) ethics. And by my above reasoning, there's some pretty low-hanging fruit to be picked by being strategically "unethical."
And by my above reasoning, there's some pretty low-hanging fruit to be picked by being strategically "unethical."
Hmmm. Is psychopathy an evolutionary successful plan in today's environment?
When the guards don't show up one day, and the fence is de-energized, there is a lag time before the inmates flee. Are we in those times, what with our dwindling social shaming, our non-enforcement of borders, open marriage laws, etc?
RSF,
3/4 times I agree they line up together. The interesting points for ethics geeks are the times when they don't.
Future prediction is something that we should all now know that we suck at. But I think that if you look closely, the snail darter-type disagreements have very little to do with prediction....rather they seem to be about ingroup stuff, and facts seem largely irrelevant.
CF,
My claim is that MOST of the time, evolution is smarter than you about your long term interests.
Even more importantly, I expect that (given you've got a people-brain) you'll overestimate your likely success rate on beating evolutions dictates... and mostly do stuff that screws you.
Do I believe that there are potential prudent predator situations? Sure. But you shouldn't bet that you'll run into one...and your odds of thinking you're in a Prudent Predator circumstance, but being wrong are much higher than your chances of actually being in one.
Case 2 is the big issue here. More anonymity makes for a weird situation...but that doesn't imply that anonymous predatory behavior is better than a connected social life.
Further...reputation effects seem to be coming back with a vengeance. Facebook/G+/Yelp will leak into the real world of individuals rather quickly. Which means you might even ought to start considering tit-for-three-tats as a standard play.
RSF,
Psychopathy seems to have lower cost in the city-world of today than it had historically. Better than being an upstanding citizen? I doubt it.
Non-shaming, open marriage, the new institution of borders failing...this is a loss for the folks who used to be able to control everyone else. I like all 3. I've never been able to conform well.
We are in agreement then on the qualitative sense that ethics is an imperfect guide to action. Our disagreement is quantitative - how much and how often it pays to deviate. My view (that there are areas where you can systematically win) is based on the proliferation of seemingly effective pro-aggression programs, such as the Game folks and the "self-confidence" movement in general. I'm curious how you derived your estimation of successful ethics-hacking as "more likely than not to fail."
Keep in mind that we *are* wired for, ie, strategic infidelity, and our ancestors who were more faithful than average now had been weeded out of the gene pool. Is that bundle of instincts "ethical" as well?
Interesting point re: social networking as norms enforcement. I suspect that the equilibrium will still be significantly more anonymous than hunter-gatherer tribes. I also suspect that since culture evolves so slowly, the little bit of pro-aggression culture shift is nowhere near a complete adaptation to the modern equilibrium. A fully adapted culture "should" be closer to Youtube comments than we would like to imagine.
G+ vs. Youtube, let the race begin!
let the race begin!
I'm wondering who wins. I'm not betting on Aretae et al. It seems the close knit in-groups, e.g. Pakistanis, Mormons, Amish, Chinese, Hasidim, Barrio Mexicans, etc. have the upper hand demographically. The wide open free marketers get used and tossed.
Borders, and not the book store, are the future.
Borders might be a nice defense if you've already got a tightly integrated, iterated prisoner's dilemma-playing community. But they're not much use once you've already started down the path - as in the modern US. Internal cultural change - a long hard slog - is the only way out.
RSF,
FWIW, I think the Amish have already lost. The kids are facebooked in.
Mormons are winning...but through friendliness, and bringing more folks into the ingroup, regardless race, iq, etc.
Japan or America in the long run?
I say Japan.
RSF,
A future prediction we can call a dispute? Japan is a mess, and looks likely to continue to be a mess. Next 30-40 years, Japan is all old-people, none of whom work...and 1 working youth per 1 old fart on Social security equivalent. They're royally screwed.
USA...far far better, regardless the IQ of the folks coming in, or their ethnicity...the fact is we will have folks working, forestalling the retirees to workers catastrophe.
In the long term, I'm a singulitarian...and in 100 years, I think predictions from here are ALL wrong.
Classroom 2111: "Why was Aretae so wrong about Japan? Because their demographics and cultural unity allowed the innovation that came up with robots that kicked America's lawn mower brigades by a factor of 1728."
As per my other post yesterday... prediction is hard. Most folks are wrong most of the time. I hear your prediction, and my prediction differs substantially. Most likely, the future will find a way to make both of us wrong. But for sure, at least one of us will be.
Classroom 2050:
"Why has Japan consistently failed to produce the innovation that has been expected of it. Because their cultural unity turns out to have been a weakness, and they simply couldn't accept the core cyborgization that superseded the apparent, but failed robot revolution...and in the absence of any population under 50, they teetered into perpetual decline"
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