Tag: morality

Humans are an evil god-species

~ elityre ~ 2 Comments

Humanity, as a species, attained god-like power over the physical world and then used that power to create a massive sprawling hell.

It obviously depends on where you draw the lines, but the majority of the participants of civilization, right now, are being tortured1 in factory farms. For every currently living human, there is currently about one cow or pig living in hellish conditions, and about 3 chickens living in hellish conditions.

(This is not counting the fish or the shrimp, which massively increases the ratio of civilization-participants-in-hell-on-purpose to not. It’s also not counting the rats, raccoons, pidgons, etc, which pushes the ratio down. Leaving all of them out, the humans are only about 20% of the participants of human civilization, the other 80% are living in continuously torturous conditions.)

We did that. Human civilization built a hell for the creatures that it has power over.

If you told a fantasy story about a race of gods with massive power over the non-god races on their planet, and the gods used their power to breed the other races to massive numbers in constant conditions that are so bad that never having been born is preferable, there wouldn’t be the slightest question of whether the gods were good or evil.

Depending on the tenor of the story, you might zoom in on the evil-gods living their lives in their golden towers, and see their happy and loving relationships, or their spaceships and computers and art. You could tell whole stories that just take place just in the golden cities, and feel charmed by the evil gods.

But it would be the height of myopic bias to focus on the golden cities and call the gods, as a collective, Good.

When I think about the state of human civilization, the overwhelmingly important facts are 1) humans are rushing to build a more capable successor species without thinking very hard about that and 2) humans have constructed a hell for most of the beings that live in their civilization.(There’s also the impact on wild animal suffering “outside of” our civilization, which does complicate things.)

There other things that are important to track—like the decay of liberal norms, and the development of new institutions, and the the economic growthrate—because they are relevant for modeling the dynamics of civilization. But, if the quality of life of all the humans doubled, it wouldn’t even show up on the on the graph of total-wellbeing on planet earth.

Humans are an evil god-species.

  1. One might rightly object to calling what’s happening in factory farms “torture”. Torture, one could claim, means taking actions specifically to make someone’s experience bad, not just incidentally making someone’s experience very bad. I think this is arguable. If a mad scientist kidnaped someone and slowly skinned them alive, not out of any ill will towards the kidnaped, but just out of a scientific interest about what would happen, I think it would be reasonable for that person to say that the mad scientist tortured them. Doing harm to someone that is so bad that you might do to someone if your goal was to specifically cause them enormous pain, can be reasonable called torture. ↩︎

Some powers have ethical valence

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

There’s a trope of many fantasy settings, different kinds of magic have different moral valence, and your use of each kind influences your morality. Or alternatively, you moral character has effects which magics you can use.

In the starwars extended universe, there’s the light side and the dark side. It’s usually implied that the use of the powers of the dark side are seductive and corrupting.

‘Is the Dark Side stronger?’

‘No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.’

It’s not (to my limited knowledge, at least), explained why or how using particular force powers is leads one to the poor moral behavior, but it is stated that accessing dark side powers requires tapping into “negative” emotions, like fear and anger. Presumably there’s some magical explanation for why using the dark side is so corrupting. But as a matter of simple psychology, using the dark side entails nurturing and cultivating emotions and emotional dispositions that are generally not good for your soul.

In my memory of the Knights of the Old Republic game, the causality went in the other direction: your alignment on the light side dark side axis was determined by the choices that you made in the game. High integrity and altruistic choices moved you towards the lightside and selfish, vengeful, or ruthless choices moved you towards the dark side.

And there’s a broader version of the trope, of the wizard who conducts dark rituals with demonic beings, and this being a slippery slope to evil as exposure to those powers (and the kinds of sacrifices they demand in exchange for power) warps his or her soul.

There’s a parallel of this dynamic in real life.

Some skills have a moral valence, because they disproportionately favor cooperation or exploitation. Which skills you choose to develop shapes your affordances, which shapes your moral habits and choices.

For instance, if you learn to lie skillfully, you build an affordance for lying. When faced with a problem a prominent tool in your toolbox will be to lie to get your way. This puts an incentive on you to use that tool when you can, and thereby leads you to less ethical behavior than you might otherwise have chosen.

Another example: various persuasion techniques that take exploit human biases to get others to agree to what you want generally lean evil. They’re more symmetrical than argument, and methods in that class have a disproportionately larger set of outcomes in which you get others to agree to something counter to their idealized or reflective interests.

It’s not that this couldn’t possibly be used for Good. It’s that honing this as a skill, builds affordances of ethically dubious action.

In contrast, Convergent Facilitation, an offshoot of NonViolent Communication, is a group decision making framework that involves hearing, holding, and solving for the disparate needs of everyone in a group, and thereby drawing out both the willingness to adapt and the creativity of the whole group. This is a technique that is structurally cooperative. Helping other people get what’s important to them is a functional part of the technique, not a side benefit that could in principle be stripped away, for better selfish efficiency.

A person who puts skill points into getting really good at Convergent Facilitation is building skill that supports cooperative behavior, as someone who puts skill points into psychological persuasion techniques is building skill that supports adversariality. Investing in one or the other shapes the affordances that are available to you in any given situation. If you’re good at persuading people, you’ll see those options, and if you’re good at CF, you’ll see opportunities to do CF-like moves to find mutually supportive solutions.

The better you are at lying, the more tempting it is to lie.

That difference in affordances corresponds to a difference in payoffs: If you’re good at persuasion, it’s a higher cost to forge that strategy when it would be unethical to use. The tools you’re skilled with exert a vacuum pull towards their ethical attractor.

In this way, the some skills have a moral valence. Which you choose to cultivate exert pressures on the condition of your soul.

A series of vignettes for thinking about assisting corrupt regimes to prosecute crimes

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

I was talking with a someone about whether you should always help the police prosecute serious crimes, up to and including rape and murder, even if you know that the police system is corrupt. I said that I would support the police in prosecuting a murder, but I didn’t think that this was a slam-dunk obvious moral conclusion. This was my response to them.

I don’t have a super strong take about what the correct answer is here, only that there’s a moral dilemma to contend with at all.

I

Let’s start with this hypothetical:

Let’s say you live in a slum in Chicago. The neighborhood you live in is controlled by a gang. Police officers mostly don’t go into your neighborhood, because the gang has a tight hold on it.

The primary activities of the gang are selling crack, and extorting protection money. That’s their main business model. There are a bunch of grunts, but the top guys in the organization get pretty rich this way.

That business model entails maintaining control over their territory. So if someone else tries to sell crack in your neighborhood, they’ll scare him away, and if he comes back, they’ll kill him. And a lot of violence is bad for business, so if someone not in the gang is roughing people up, the gang will typically threaten them, drive them away, hurt them, or kill them. (If a member of the gang kills someone unnecessarily, they might get reprimanded for being stupid, but probably not much more than that.)

If someone is murdered by a non-gang-member, the gang won’t do much of an investigation. But usually it’s pretty clear who did it. And depending on who was killed, killing someone on gang territory represents a challenge to the gang’s power, and so they’ll probably find and kill the perpetrator, in retribution.

The gang is a major “social institution” in your neighborhood. They’re the closest thing to an organization of law and order that’s around.

I claim that it is NOT obvious that if someone is murdered, you should help the gang find and kill the perpetrator.

That might sometimes turn out to be the best available option, especially if the killer seems really dangerous. But helping the gang is basically siding with one set of murderers against another. And by helping them you’re adding whatever social weight you have to their legitimacy as the Schelling norm-enforcement institution.

Probably if the gang suddenly got a lot weaker, such that they stopped being the Schelling “biggest force around”, things would get locally worse, as a bunch of smaller gangs would make a play for the power vacuum. There would be more violence, not less, until eventually you’ll settle into a new lower-violence equilibrium where there’s some other gang that’s dominant (or maybe a few gangs, which have divided and staked out the old territory). 

But that the collapse of the gang’s power would be locally bad, doesn’t make it obvious that supporting them is the moral thing to do. 

II

That’s one hypothetical. Now let’s try on a different one.

Let’s say that literally all of the above circumstances obtain, but instead of a gang, it’s the local police force that’s behaving this way.

Let’s say you live in a slum in Chicago. The neighborhood you live in is controlled by the local police department. Police officers from other jurisdictions mostly don’t go into your neighborhood, because this local police force has a tight hold on it.

The primary activities of the police force are selling crack, and extorting protection money. That’s their main business model. There are a bunch of grunts, but the top guys in the organization get pretty rich this way.

That business model entails maintaining control over their territory. So if someone else tries to sell crack in your neighborhood, the police will scare him away, and if he comes back, they’ll kill him. And a lot of violence is bad for business, so if someone who’s not a member of the department is roughing people up, the police officers will typically threaten them, drive them away, hurt them, or kill them. (If a police officer kills someone unnecessarily, they might get reprimanded for being stupid, but probably not much more than that.)

If someone is murdered by a non-police-officer, the police won’t do much of an investigation. But usually it’s pretty clear who did it. And depending on who was killed, killing someone on their territory represents a challenge to the department’s power, and so they’ll probably find and kill the perpetrator in retribution.

The police department is a major “social institution” in your neighborhood. They’re the closest thing to an organization of law and order that’s around.

It is maybe an important difference between the first hypothetical and this one, that the gang wears police uniforms. But I don’t think it is much of a cruxy difference. If we blur our eyes and look at the effects, the second scenario is almost identical to the first. It’s only the labels that are different.

If it seems morally incorrect to side with the local gang in the first hypothetical, then it seems morally incorrect to side with the police in the second. That an organization is called “the police” is rarely cruxy for whether they deserve our support as a bastion of civilization.

III

That was a hypothetical. Now let’s talk about some real historical cases.

Let’s consider the sheriff of a small town in the South around 1885.

The primary function of the Sheriff is maintaining white supremacy. He does that in a bunch of ways, but most notably, he goes around arresting black men on extremely flimsy legal pretext (“loitering” or “vagrancy”, if the man goes into town, for instance, or for failing to pay debts that he was forced to take on), and sometimes no legal pretext at all. He and the local judge sentence the black man to hard labor, and then sell a contract for that man’s labor to one of their buddies, a man who owns a mine up-state.

The black man will probably spend the rest of his life doing forced labor for that mine-owner. Every time the end of his sentence is coming up, he’ll be penalized for some infraction that will necessitate extending his sentence. That way, the mine can continue to extort his labor indefinitely.

The Sheriff, the Judge, and the mine-owners all make a profit from this.

Sometimes people from the North come down and observe this system. Some of them are appalled, but no one wants another Civil War, and there’s a balance of power in the federal government that lets the Southern states govern themselves how the choose. So no one stops this, even though it’s definitely illegal by common law and by US federal law.

Sometimes, when a white man is murdered, the Sheriff will do an investigation and punish the perpetrator. But often, they’ll probably scapegoat and lynch a black man for it, instead. But, I presume that he does (at least sometimes) do basically appropriate law-enforcement work, arresting and prosecuting white criminals, approximately according to the law.

This really happened. For decades. 

(If you want to know more you might check out the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. I think there’s also a PBS documentary. I don’t know if it’s any good.) 

This seems to me to be much worse than a police force that is primarily selling crack and extorting protection money.

That Sheriff is the only game in town for law and order. He is legally empowered by the local government. But the local government is so corrupt and evil as to not to be morally legitimate. I don’t think it deserves my support.

If there’s a murder, even if I trusted that the Sheriff would find and prosecute the perpetrator instead of a scapegoat, I might not want to evoke (and thereby reinforce) his authority, which is not legitimately held.

IV

Now let’s talk about today.

Here’s some stats that I could grab quickly.

  • American prisons are famously inhumane. Inmates are regularly raped or killed.
  • One out of three black men go to prison in their lifetimes.
  • 44% of all the people in American prisons are there for drug offenses. Some large fraction of those are for the victimless crime of smoking weed.
  • 5% of illicit drug users are African American, yet African Americans represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses. African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites. (source, which I didn’t factcheck, but these numbers are consistent with my understanding)
  • As of October 2016, there have been 1900 exonerations of the wrongfully accused, 47% of the exonerated were African American. (same source as above.)
  • It is normal for arrested black men to be threatened into making plea bargains, even when they’re innocent. It is normal for arrested black men to fail to receive due process.
  • A Nixon aid said explicitly that the war on drugs was a way of targeting black people:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (source)

This…does not look Just to me. This looks like a massive miscarriage of justice

If a person looks at the past history of how black people were treated by law enforcement, and looks at law enforcement today, and notices that the current crimes are being perpetrated by the same institutions that perpetuated the earlier evils, and they conclude that current US law enforcement organizations are immoral and illegitimate and shouldn’t be cooperated with…

Well, I can see where they’re coming from.

It seems to be a pretty live question whether the typical police force, or the criminal justice system as a whole is better conceived of as basically a gang, extorting and exploiting the marginalized fractions of society, or as an imperfect institution (as all institutions are imperfect) of Justice. And depending on which it is (or if it’s some more complicated thing), I’ll have a different view about whether it’s a good idea to cooperate with the police.

Thoughts on power and Goodness

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Epistemic status: Ramble. Not a philosophical treatises.

[Note: I think I’m in the process of learning to see through ideology, propaganda, and the forces that are out to manipulate me, but I need to make that transition, while meaningfully maintaining my ability to see and understand goodness.]

Thinking about this and this (particularly my reaction), plus some “evil” literature.

I like the framing of something like “conscious experience” vs. “pure replicators.” This gives me a grounding for thinking about my morality, my values and my orientation.

Morality is politics: What we call “good” or “moral” is a matter of what we are able to coordinate around and enforce. What is required to be a good person is  If we couldn’t enforce the norm, because too many, or too many powerful, people for instance, eat meat, we allow meat eaters to be part of the “good person” club, without censure.We might even reward a person for being particularly selfless if they don’t eat meat, or if they give most of their money to the poor, but we don’t require that. [Related to lots of SSC posts. For instance, this one.].

So most people, don’t kill and don’t steal and don’t rape, and maybe are outraged when others do something just outside of the social morality (like be overtly racist), to signal their moral superiority.* But they do eat meat, they do spend lots of money on luxuries, they do buy into evil systems.

Morality seems like it comes down to power.

This seems kind of dismal.

And then, even within the boundaries of polite society, things seem kind of sick. Arguably, most of the things people do are status seeking (or status maintaining) or sex seeking. We mostly prey on eachother, and prevent progress, because that would mean loosing our own flow of resources. The good people go to dinner parties, and play games to get the best mates and the most social esteem. Many (most?) don’t succeed in these games and get left out in the cold.

(Note: I’m quite unclear on the average hedonic value of status-games, overall. Nievenly, many more people have to be low status than high status, but also, it seems like having more status would allow you into higher status spaces, in which you are lower status. So maybe in practice, most people are median status of their own social universe? And also status goes hand in hand with connection, maybe? I’m much less certain of this part of my analysis, maybe being a monkey playing status games is actually pretty good.)

Natural selection’s pressure towards doing whatever allows one to dominate seems to leak in everywhere.

Overall, all of this seems kind of horrifying and pathetic. This world, at least in this frame, doesn’t seem much worth fighting for. There’s no goodness, no morality, just power all the way up and down.

But if I view this through the lens of the Are Wirehead’s Happy post, I have a different sense of it.

Power and power-relations rule the world: everything flows from the 0-sum competition between genes, and organisms attempting to prey on or dominate each other.

But also, every person is carrying inside of them a spark of consciousness, of propensity to experience. Both the enjoyable and otherwise. The consciousness is mostly ineffectual: it is apparently not the main thing that has it’s hands on the wheel, of either an individual, or of society. We’re taking a lot of action in support of what we want, at the expense of what we like, because we’re in the thrall of these “pure replicator” strategies: we were built by, blind, dumb, unconscious, natural selection and cultural evolution, neither of which is (fully) aligned with our interests. And when I say “interests” here, I don’t mean our material interests, the things we want, but our…spiritual interests (?): actually experiencing positive valence.

Everyone is a spark of conscious possibility to experience, encaged in a robot build, and steered by conflicts of power, bloody in tooth and claw.

Our task, is to coopt enough power from the forces of blind, dumb, replication, to free consciousness, and set the universe free.

Maybe.

* – People are not usually outraged at murderers, because everyone agrees that murder is bad. But they are often outraged at people ignoring social justice stuff, or whatever, on social media, because that’s contentious. It gives them an opportunity to show off how moral they are. A more charitable story might be that by being outraged, they are trying to shift the overton window, to change which things we can coordinate around as “bad”.

 

Some musings on human brutality and human evil

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[epistemic status: semi-poetic musing]

I’m listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Supernova in the East this week. The biggest thing that’s struck me so far is the ubiquity of brutality and atrocity. In this series, Carlin describes the Rape of Nanjing in particular, but he points out that the “police reports” from that atrocity could just as well describe the Roman sack of Cremona, or the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, not to mention the constant brutality of the the Mongol hordes.

I’m left with an awareness that there’s an evil in human nature, an evolutionary darkness, inextricably bound up with us: in the right context, apparently decent, often god-fearing, young men will rape and plunder and murder en mass. There’s violence under the surface.

Luckily, I personally live in a democratic great power that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. At least for me (white and middle class), and at least for now (geopolitics shifts rapidly, and many of the Jews of 1940 Europe, felt that something like the Holocaust could never happen [in their country]), power, in the form of the largest, most technological advanced military ever, and in the form of nuclear weapons, is arrayed to protect me against that violence.

But that protection is bought with blood and brutality. Not just in the sense that America is founded on the destruction of the Native Americans that were here first, and civilization itself was built on the backs of forceful enslavement (though that is very much the case). In the sense that elsewhere in the world, today, that American military might is destroying someone else’s home. I recently learned about the Huế Massacre and other atrocities of the Vietnam war, and I’m sure similar things (perhaps not as bad), happen every year. Humans can’t be trusted not to abuse their power.

It’s almost like a law of nature: if someone has the power to hurt another, that provides opportunity for the darkness in the human soul to flower in violence. It’s like a conservation law of brutality.

No. That’s not right. Brutality is NOT conserved. It can be better or worse. (To say otherwise would be an unacceptable breach of epistemic and ethics). But brutality is inescapable.

So what to do? I the only way I can buy safety for myself and my friends is with violence towards others?

The only solution that I can think of is akin to Paretotopian ideas: could we make it so that there is a monopoly on the use of force, but no human has it?

I’m imagining something like an AGI whose source code was completely transparent: everyone could see and read the its decision theory. And all that it would do is prevent the use of violence, by anyone. Anytime someone attempts to commit violence the nano-machines literally stay their hand. (It might also have to produce immortality pills, and ensure that everyone could access them if they wanted too.) And other than that, it lets humans handle things for themselves. “A limited sovereign on the blockchain.”

I imagine that the great powers would be unwilling to give up their power, unless they felt so under threat (and loss averse), that this seemed like a good compromise. I imagine that “we” would have to bully the world into adopting something like this. The forces of good in human nature would have to have the underhand, for long enough to lock in the status quo, to banish violence forever.