From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 15:33:29 MDT
hal@finney.org (Hal Finney) writes:
>The problem is that Pareto-optimality is too weak a condition. There are
>too many states that are Pareto-optimal but which don't satisfy our
>instincts about altruism. For example, a state where one guy has
>everything and everyone else has nothing could be Pareto-optimal.
>There's no way to improve anyone's state without taking something from
>the guy who has all the goods. But this won't sound like a very good
>world to most altruists.
I think one problem with this analysis is that you are demanding too
much from an ethical system. I expect an ethical system to describe an
optimal set of agreements to enable cooperation between beings that can
benefit from cooperation. Hypothesizing a situation in which the beings
would refuse to cooperate simply implies that you've described a situation
where ethics are irrelevant. Why should I care what an ethical system
advocates under circumstances where evolutionary pressures suggest the
ethical system will probably be ignored?
If economists actually stuck to Pareto-optimality, they wouldn't be
able to say nearly as much as they actually do (see page 25 of Friedman's
Law's Order). They need to optimize something that doesn't require
unanimous consent for each change, such as efficiency. This distinction
can be made relatively unimportant if people can agree on rules for
compensating anyone who claims to be victimized by a change that does
not qualify as a Pareto improvement.
Rejecting the utilitarian worldview and replacing it with a contractarian
system may also deal with the complaints about dealing with spatial infinities.
The contractarian can feel free to ignore any beings which he will never
be able to communicate with in his lifetime. (What about the possibility
that my life expectancy is infinite and will be able to communicate with
an infinite number of beings? I'm not sure, but I suspect that it won't
matter much if I ignore the welfare of infinitely distant beings for a
few centuries while I think about that problem.)
I reject both averagism and totalism because there's no reason to think
evolutionary pressures would have selected for either.
Averagism implies that it is wrong to have children under circumstances
where some people clearly want to have children and where they have strong
evolutionary pressures to maintain those desires. I don't want to fight
evolution (at least not until we have the tools to win at a low cost).
Totalism comes closer to being consistent with evolved desires, but it
appears to go a bit too far. In evolutionarily recent times, having an
extra child without being able to devote resources in excess of some
threshold to that child reduced the mother's evolutionary fitness by
risking the mother's life for an inadequate chance of raising the child
to maturity. That threshold appears to produce happiness that is well
above the threshold that a true totalist would require.
So I expect my desires will most likely be satisfied by an ethical
system that looks a lot like totalism, but only creates new life if
that life is expected to meet some (as yet poorly defined) threshold
of happiness that is higher than what a true totalist would require.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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