Re: Whose business is it, anyway?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 20:43:09 MST


Lee Corbin wrote:
> Eliezer wrote
>
>>>Firstly, however, I note that your paragraph mentions nothing about
>>>the law---it's as if we are in some lawless space colonies, and we
>>>are only interested in examining what we *approve* of. But intervention
>>>is often an entirely different matter!
>>
>>The law is an abstraction built up from the approvals and disapprovals of
>>individuals, including approval and disapproval of the particular class of
>>actions known as interventions.
>
> Actually, no. The law for the most part is not built up in
> this way. It arises evolutionarily over the course of a
> civilization's existence.

I apologize for a verbal ambiguity. By "built up" I mean "is an empirical
regularity within" and not "is the causal result of". The law is an
abstraction from and empirical regularity within the approval and
disapproval, of individuals, of certain kinds of interventions, taking
into account that some individuals have more outright empirical power,
including weaponry, than other individuals. The history you cite below
results in a certain pattern of people who believe they should and should
not intervene, and people who won't intervene when others try to
intervene; for example, if a police officer tries to stop a mugging it is
not likely that a crowd of onlookers will react with shock and try to stop
her.

> Often laws will arise that can't
> be easily explained except as "this is how it has always
> been done", or "stupid law, but unfortunately it's rather
> built-in now". Sometimes these laws indeed have outlived
> their purpose, but often they work in a subtle way that is
> not obvious to anyone, even though people will, of course,
> fabricate rationalizations.
>
>>Um... nice recursion there, but you still haven't answered why your own
>>"intervening in this case is none of the law's business" is in any wise
>>more interesting than a libertarian's "intervening in this case is BAD",
>>nor indeed why they are not equivalent viewpoints.
>
> Amazing that we are not communicating better here ;-)
> Now you are specifying that it is a *libertarian's*
> judgment about intervention. Indeed, for a libertarian
> to make such a judgment does happen to coincide a lot
> with what is or is not someone's business. But you
> began by asking how people answer their own question
> when they say "Is it BAD?". Such a question brings
> into immediate play what one approves of and what one
> does not.

So there is a cognitive difference in *which* disapprovals are produced,
but the epistemological stance is the same? (I ask because I had thought
you were arguing that BAD was epistemologically ill-founded but "none of
my business" was not.)

> There are millions of examples where something is none
> of my business, and interference inconceivable, which
> are nonetheless very BAD in my opinion. Abortion and
> infanticide are two such examples, but even such mundane
> cases as adultery and lying come to mind.

So to you adultery is BAD, second-party intervention to stop adultery is
WORSE, and a police officer arresting someone who threatens an adulterer
with a pistol is GOOD?

> It's very easy in most cases to determine whether or
> not something is my affair. It's harder when as a
> legislator---or as a citizen giving advice to legislators
> or propping up memes I favor---to try to draw the correct
> bounds of modularity. For some purposes, the apparent
> modular unit is the family; sometimes it's "woman with
> child" (a sort of family). At other times the efficient
> way to draw boundaries between modules is at the community
> level, e.g., whose business is it if some small town
> somewhere wishes to outlaw prostitution? Only the citizens,
> say I. (I hope that at this point no one says, "Oh yeah?
> What if they decide to suspend habeas corpus or deny
> religious freedom?") <lecture on success of nations
> supporting constitutional rights suppressed for brevity>

Hm... I think you need to separate out your supergoals from your subgoals
here. That's one of *my* least favorite epistemological confusions.

>>>No. How the laws are written, and hence who the police
>>>will side with, cannot be settled by moral argument.
>>>The far less idealistic approach, which has been shown
>>>to be vastly more workable, has been to observe in what
>>>ways successful societies seem to maximize benefit and
>>>prosperity by having enormous regard for individual
>>>citizen legal rights, and enormous regard for private
>>>property. To be sure, as Hayek explains, we need to
>>>be open to new experiments and ideas, however.
>>
>>Maximize benefit and prosperity for what class of entities? If you aren't
>>counting babies and simulations in the tally, then your assessment of what
>>"works" is based on a quite different metric for workingness. I'm sure
>>that if you don't count slaves as people, then slaveowning societies can
>>be shown to maximize benefit and prosperity (for slaveowners) by having
>>enormous regard for "private property".
>
> Good question! Now it so happens that slave-owning societies
> are not competitive, but let's consider a more challenging
> example to my (and maybe your) world-view. In the 1950s, 1960s,
> and 1970s, a lot of great economists, like Samuelson, believed
> that the Soviet economic model was more productive than Western
> capitalism. In retrospect, this seems very foolish, but for
> those of us alive then it appeared plausible. The question then
> could become---say if indeed the Soviet Union had truly begun to
> supersede the West---might we not have to adopt some of their
> totalitarian methods if we want to remain competitive? The answer
> could well have been "yes".

That depends on whether you'd rather keep the light alive in yourself for
as long as you can, even if it's doomed to eventually fade, rather than
blow it out yourself to retain the illusion of being in control.

> But that just makes my point! Non-functioning societies or uncompetitive
> ones aren't admissible to the discussion.
>
> So historically we are brought to this: extreme regard for
> private property and individual legal rights works, and not
> coincidentally provides the said entities of the time with
> maximal benefit and prosperity. But the challenging question
> is about the future, which I know concerns you and should
> concern all of us.

Okay, so we should have extreme regard for the individual legal rights of
babies? Incidentally, I think that while parents having control of
children is often bad, having nonparents or governmental entities
interfering is worse. I don't say that it's none of my business; I say
that my goal of protecting the child is best served by protecting the
child from governers, not protecting the child from parents. It's not a
perfect solution, though. I would - for example - look favorably on
someone who released software that children could use to bypass parental
restrictions on Internet access; I couldn't be on the child's side if I
thought the child was the parent's property. My theory here is that the
child has full sentient rights, that a parent who shares 1/2 the child's
DNA is statistically more likely to protect that child than a governer who
shares none of the child's DNA, and that the child, who shares 1.0 of the
child's DNA, is the best decider of all...

>>>>I am just as much against ownership of a simulation as I would be
>>>>against the claim that you "owned" the proteins making up a sentient
>>>>you claimed was your "slave".
>>>
>>>And one can see how it comes down to a difference in how societies
>>>of equals should function.
>>
>>No, it comes down to a difference in who we consider an "equal".
>
> That's exactly right.
>
> Don't you feel lucky that there is such a clear distinction between
> humans and other primates, and other mammals?

Erm... I do feel somewhat lucky, but I think perhaps for different
reasons. My ethical system says that it might be a bad thing to create
such halfways. But I don't feel lucky because "my ethical system would
break down if it confronted halfways".

> As much as PETA might
> want to award citizenship to numerous other classes of creatures, it's
> not practical. So we allow humans to own other animals (and children,
> up to a point).

Not practical? Only if your metric of moral fitness evaluates only human
fun, which is in fact the very issue being discussed.

> So this is where we are, as we march into the unknown. I'll discuss
> the problem---practical for you, but not for me yet---of simulatees
> in another post.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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