Deontological agents are the most predictable because they can tell you their moral rules, and if they aren't too complicated, you can "compute" them yourself if you're wondering what they are about to do. Consequentialists aren't predictable unless you know them so well that you can forecast all of their utility calculations, value judgements, and mistakes. Being able to predict someone's behaviors makes them a lot more trustworthy.
Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
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Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#12The main study which prompted this article is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210311... Abstract: > Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust “deontological” agents who reject harming one person to save many others than “consequentialist” agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral i…
TL;DR
People like you if you wouldn't sacrifice them for the benefit of the group.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#13Update to het. male dating best practices: Be tall, confident, and deontological.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#14Update to het. male dating best practices: Be tall, confident, and deontological .
if you tell girls that you are deontological they will think you have money, because, you know, those dentists are expensive
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#15It comes down to trust. You trust those who are in your group, and whom you believe will consistently act in the interests of your group.
Consequentialists are distrusted because they deliberately choose to disregard social group weighting and circles of loyalty in their moral decisions.
That's not to say that all consequentialist actions are disliked; only those that come at significant cost to your group (of any size - even 2).
The article says that people like a consequentialist political leader, but that's not entirely correct. They like a political leader who is consequentialist for entirely "in-group" decisions. The moment he prioritizes outside peoples welfare at a high cost to his own, no matter how much objective "good" it brings, he'll soon find himself out of office. A leader who is too deontologist with his in-group decisions will be seen as corrupt for helping out his cronies.
In fact, this whole "consequentialist vs deontologist" kind of misses the point. Deontologists ARE consequentialists for entirely in-group decisions, and that's how social creatures like it, and how evolution would have shaped social animals.
Trump's appeal comes in a large part due to his motto: "America First", even if it's at the cost of everything else.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#16They are probably not a utilitarian. They are probably suffering distorted deontology of an anti-self sort.
Pure consequentialism is computationally implausible. There are seven and a half billion humans. How can you consider them equally? How could you even have enough knowledge to try? I think that people who try to be consequentialist are emulating it and generally poorly.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#17They are probably not a utilitarian. They are probably suffering distorted deontology of an anti-self sort. Pure consequentialism is computationally implausible . There are seven and a half billion humans. How can you consider them equally? How could you even have enough knowledge to try? I think that people who try to be consequentialist are emulating it and generally poorly.
You can't know exactly what is best, but you can act to the best of your knowledge. Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you shouldn't do it as well as possible.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#18The main study which prompted this article is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210311... Abstract: > Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust “deontological” agents who reject harming one person to save many others than “consequentialist” agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral i…
No mention of culture in the article, and apparently the Mechanical Turk population isn't actually that large[0], seems like this is likely to be a pretty WEIRD[1] result.
The WEIRD paper actually references evidence that altruistic behaviour is punished in some cultures (Figure 4), so to do a study of something similar without a good handle on the cultural background of the participants seems pretty trash.
The do have the nicest open science solution I've ever seen though, with very pretty Rweave (or some other notebook) renderings easily available: https://osf.io/xecdt/
[0]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/psychologists-grow-i... [1]: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#19Update to het. male dating best practices: Be tall, confident, and deontological .
if you tell girls that you are deontological they will think you have money, because, you know, those dentists are expensive
Hypergamy don't care about definitions but says that she liked what you suggested there.
Re: Altruism Isn’t Always Attractive
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those who have studied Philosophical Ethics in High School or Undergrad, you'll probably be familiar with the term "deontological" (lit. 'derived from god') but are perhaps not used to the term "consequentialist" or "consequentialism". Per the study, "consequentialism" is Utilitarianism, which may be more familiar to you. > "...said to be making a “consequentialist” (or “utilitarian”) judgment in line with conseq…
Strictly, there are other forms of consequentialism besides utilitarianism, though utilitarianism is perhaps the most familiar. Consequentialism means (duh) judging your morality based on the consequences of your actions. Utilitarianism means making that judgment in terms of some quantifiable "utility" or "value". But there are other ways to make that judgment, including applying intuition or even applying some kind…
>The utilitarian framework is so broad that it can be extended to cover all of this, and to cover deontology for that matter ("utility is defined as following the rules of X ethical framework").
But for it to be utilitarianism you have to apply this universally. So making someone follow the ethical framework is just as good as following it yourself (something deontologists generally disagree with). The utilitarian calculus had to give actions that make other people follow the ethical framework a negative utility in such a way that you will always come out only following the ethical framework for yourself.