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The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

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Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#51

Post by xg15 »

> In 2010, New York randomly chose homeless applicants to participate in its Homebase program, and tracked those who were not allowed into the program as a control group. The program was helping as many people as it could, the only change was explicitly labeling a number of people it wasn’t helping as a “control group”.

You could also interpret this in a different way: The experiment did some good, but at the same time established a ceiling after which doing even more good would run contrary to the experiment's interests.

E.g., if some miracle happened and the city council suddenly had the means to include every homeless person into the program, this would actually be highly problematic for the program, because now they'd be lacking a control group. So by running the program, the council may help some homeless people, but at the same time it has an active interest that the other homeless are not helped.

I think this is the difference in general this article glosses over. It's not about doing a little good vs doing a lot of good, it's about not wanting to do more than a certain amount of good, even if you could.

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#52

Post by feet »

mike_hock wrote: post #35
fedeb95 wrote: post #32

I somewhat share this view, which I now learn is called Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (don't know if by the author or academically). Let me clarify my differences: interacting with a problem should be worded like "creating the definition of a problem". This changes things because saying things, as I view the world, is an action like any other. But my conclusions from this are the opposite of what the author asc…

When you give a bum $20, is anyone gonna say you're a bad person for not giving him $100? No. But when you exploit people's dire situations for profit or to push your agenda and give them slightly better than death in return, you're not only providing a net benefit to the problem, you're also displacing and delaying any real solutions because the problem is now masked just enough that it can continue to be ignored. Y…

>exploit people's dire situations for profit

Unfortunately, here you literally describe the concept on which capitalism is based

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#53

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

In times of war it becomes very difficult to find basic goods such as food items, or hygiene supplies. Some people will get out of their way to collect such goods and make them available to the general population. Clearly, those goods must be sold at a very high markup, to cover not only the expense of buying them but also the personal risk of the merchant to procure and sell them.

Clearly it's more beneficial for the community to have basic goods available, at a high price, than to not have any!

And yet, such enterprise that is clearly beneficial to the community is stigmatised as "black market".

Discuss?

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#54

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

GuB-42 wrote: post #13

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game. Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly…

>> So it show that we are not completely rational and selfish here.

Sure we are. "Give me half the money, or you get none". That's a perfectly rational plan to force the other party to maximise your reward.

The risk is that the second player gets nothing, sure, but that's the ideal of profitable financial strategies, no? You take risks, you maximise your gains.

Me? I'd ask for 99.9999% and watch the first player squirm and sweat. Come on chap, show me how you rationally maximise your gains!

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#55

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #30
GuB-42 wrote: post #13

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game. Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly…

> In theory, the first player only needs to split $999999/$1. $1 is better than nothing for the second player, so if he was perfectly selfish and rational, he would accept the offer. An important point is that this is only true if there can only be one offer and no chance of re-negotiation. Player 2 knows that their cooperation has value, and has negotiating power because of it.

The point is that the seond player has negotiation power whether they get a chance to make a counter-offer, or not.

The first player must try to guess what the second player will consider a fair split, otherwise they (the first player) get nothing.

In that sense the rational thing is to offer half the money, which is really the fairest possible split. Anything less risks the second player flipping the bird and watching the first player lose a fortune, at the cost of $1 to themselves (the second player, and in the case of the proposed as "rational" choice).

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#56

Post by cheese_goddess »

BurningFrog wrote: post #21
jetpackjoe wrote: post #4

What this article really misses is that if you exploit someone at slight better conditions than they were previously being exploited, you are still exploiting them, and morally responsible for that.

The word "exploit" is thrown around a lot. AFAIKT it only means that other people are having an interaction that the speaker finds repulsive. This makes "exploitation" in the eye of the beholder, and not something that can be objectively measured or discussed.

Here's a wikipedia article on Trafficking Children:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_of_children

Have fun trying to adhere to moral relativism while reading it.

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#57

Post by TapamN »

GuB-42 wrote: post #13

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game. Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly…

The reason no one would accept the 999999/1 split is because it is a terrible choice from an evolutionary perspective.

You're getting pretty much nothing while your genetic competitor gets a huge advantage. This is not rational. Natural selection would cause the genome of people who accept this split to be less likely to survive.

Accepting only even splits helps select for cooperation. If your neighbors are more likely to work with, share, and help you and your children, your DNA will be more likely to survive.

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#58

Post by mordae »

GuB-42 wrote: post #13

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game. Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly…

Splitting in any other way than 50:50 would change the power dynamic. The richer would have some leverage over the poor one.

The poor one would would obviously see this as unfair.

I suggest retrying the experiment with non-divisible outcomes. For example couches, TVs and so on.

You have to control for starvation though. Don't go asking millenials to sign off on someone else getting their own house or similar outcomes they have been primed to envy.

I would be mildly interested in the results then.

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#59

Post by zosima »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #53

In times of war it becomes very difficult to find basic goods such as food items, or hygiene supplies. Some people will get out of their way to collect such goods and make them available to the general population. Clearly, those goods must be sold at a very high markup, to cover not only the expense of buying them but also the personal risk of the merchant to procure and sell them. Clearly it's more beneficial for th…

One reason, is that the lack of necessities in times of crisis is often due to hoarding. And these people selling at inflated prices are, perhaps, the worst hoarders.

Second, they may have goods that can mean the difference between life and death. And they choose to use that situation for turning a huge profit. There isn't really anything commendable in that.

Re: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

#60

Post by xyzzyz »

GuB-42 wrote: post #13

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game. Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly…

In “The Secret of Our Success”, Joseph Heinrich mentions his research on ultimatum game, where he found that this attitude of rejecting unfair splits is not culturally uniform: for example, western people are much more likely to reject it than some South American natives that he studied.
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