The rules say we have to use consequentialism, but...

nuclearspaceheater

Anonymous asked:

The rules say we have to use consequentialism, but good people are deontologists, and virtue ethics is what actually works.

esoteric-hoxhaism answered:

bwuh

mitigatedchaos

I don’t think it’s quite so clear cut, but… Consequentialism isn’t safe to put in the hands of just anyone.

Source: esoteric-hoxhaism ethics

More you might like

ranma-official

mitigatedchaos

@ranma-official: It’s actually great because it would look like you don’t ever get angry about anything

But then no one knows what happens when you get angry, so you can’t leverage it as a threat. Your only two options are to do nothing or delete your enemies, depending on just how deep your deletion goes.

It works as a plot twist for the story, however. The real reason the superheroes always win despite super powers being so arbitrary is because the Dark Suit removes anything that could truly defeat them from existence.

superhero ethics

thathopeyetlives

mitigatedchaos

@thathopeyetlives-theuntaggable

Abortion actually *could be* pretty fatal. Nobody actually knows what happens to the unbaptized infants, though few people believe that they go to the Bad Place.

I’ve always wondered about much more complicated questions of soul mechanics which, as far as I’m aware, are both unanswered and unintuitive:

New clones from existing tissue.
Forks that somehow make one person into two people.
Uplifted animals.
Heavily genetically-modified humans.
Reverted gametes later recombined.

Source: apprenticebard mitigated future scifi ethics

Anonymous asked:

What you call "time travel ethics" is more like "acausal ethics", people intuitively grasp the acausal negotiations that underlie our ethical systems.

In this case, I disagree. This represents a potential recommitment to bad policy on the grounds that you or your ancestors (who are not you) did it before. I’d say it’s more similar to a sunk cost fallacy than an acausal negotiation.

That’s why I gave an example of a 16 year old girl having a kid. This is, clearly and obviously, a bad policy.

And if you’re reading this, you probably either agree abortion should be legal (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument), xor you probably agree that mass migration isn’t such a great idea (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument).

anons asks philo

sadoeconomist

argumate

so what are we all getting mad about next

alkthash

The ethics of cloning woolly mammoths?

argumate

how else are we gonna get juicy mammoth burgers??

sadoeconomist

Does someone not want woolly mammoths cloned? I cannot begin to imagine a halfway decent argument against that

mitigatedchaos

It won’t be feasible to synthesize the necessary gut bacteria and socialization, and it isn’t clear what habitat they’d survive in currently, if anywhere. It may be difficult to get enough of a population going to ensure a stable breeding population, and the cost to get the 1,000 or maybe 10,000 mammoths that may take would be prohibitive for most entities that might consider doing it.

There, halfway decent.

Source: argumate

It’s not Time Travel Ethics

Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen. And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen. And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.

A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),

“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16! After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”

Is this a good idea? I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.

No, it is not a good idea. In fact, this argument does not make sense…

unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.

However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.

This applies to abortion regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.

This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.

philo flagpost politics culturepol

argumate

So I’m stuck wondering about the superintelligent paperclip factory doomsday scenario

startup-punk

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically a theoritical end of the world, in which self aware AI happens in a paperclip factory. The machine, without hard coded ethics, hits on a runaway recursive-self improvement loop, transforms the planet into the most efficient paperclip factory in history, exterminating humanity in the process - to use the iron in our blood for more paperclips.

And I can’t help but think that we’ve already created a self-aware machine without hard coded ethics that’s optimizing for a fundamentally anti-human goal: and it’s capitalism.

Capitalism is the software running on industrial hardware, and it is maintained by wetware (humans). The only goal of it is maximizing profit, for which it needs constant growth. Everything else is a marginal benefit of it - say, innovation. And the problems are increasingly acknowledged as not bugs but features of the system: that it can produce well enough, but it doesn’t care about distributing well enough, because loss is acceptably within the margins (or it’s calculated as not-yet-realized profit).

And it’s fascinating how the AI skepticism / doomsday scenarios come so close to self-awareness, but by some perverted twist of thought we’re not collectively realizing that we’re already there. Time has stopped, we’re in an endless loop of self-destruction, and the wetware is screaming in horror, unable to articulate properly its unfreedom, as the machine has stomped out the thoughts and language and power necessary to do so.

Until now.

argumate

people rediscover the capitalism was the paperclip maximizer all along! idea every couple of months, then life goes on

mitigatedchaos

I mean, wasn’t that essentially what the Communists were thinking, before they went and got millions of people killed trying to replace it?

Source: startup-punk politics uncharitable

collapsedsquid

I wish that “It’s a moral imperative to enact libertarian policies even if they result in mass starvation“ got people even a quarter as mad as “Punching Nazis is good.“

But apparently endorsing mass death makes you an interesting person to ask economics and ethics questions to as long as you do it in the right way.

mitigatedchaos

Brah, I argue with Right Libertarians pretty often, and even accused a man in a “Taxes Are Theft” shirt of being an enemy of humanity due to automation once.

politics uncharitable