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Bentham's Mugging (2022)

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Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#61

Post by uoaei »

ameliaquining wrote: post #19
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #15

Bentham brought up a good point: > Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes. I don’t understand how it was logically defeated with escalation as in the story. Would it be wrong for a Utilitarian to continue arguing against this precedent, saying that the decision to be mugged removes overall Utility because now anyone who can b…

No, the mugger getting the money counts as negative. "Now, as an Act Utilitarian, I would happily part with ten pounds if I were convinced that you would bring more utility to the world with that money than I would. The trouble is I know I would put the money to good use myself – whereas you, I surmise, would not."

No, it doesn't. People having money is Good under utilitarianism because they can utilize it no matter which person it is.

Utilitarianism does not benefit from covert insertions of specific moral carve-outs. Surmisal does not impact outcomes only predictions of outcomes. It is not appropriate to make judgments based on surmisal because utilitarianism can only ever look backward at effects to justify actions post-hoc. This is the primary flaw with utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#62

Post by sigilis »

jefftk wrote: post #45
hamishrayner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mugger is a Deontologist in this scenario and therefore does not lie. If the utilitarian couldn't trust the mugger's promises, the whole scenario would fall apart as they couldn't trust the mugger's promise to cut off their finger.

How does the utilitarian know this? Any morality needs to take into account our uncertainty about claims other people make.

The mugger has a lapel pin denoting himself as a deontological agent. Lapel pins in these fantasies cannot be forged, I guess.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#63

Post by jefftk »

sigilis wrote: post #62
jefftk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the utilitarian know this? Any morality needs to take into account our uncertainty about claims other people make.

The mugger has a lapel pin denoting himself as a deontological agent. Lapel pins in these fantasies cannot be forged, I guess.

If we're assuming unforgeable moral-method pins I don't think we should expect intuitions generated in this sort of thought experiment to be a good guide to what we should actually think or do.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#65

Post by erostrate »

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility.

More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing a fancy theory that fails catastrophically in the real world [1]

[1] https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruis...

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#66

Post by tim333 »

erostrate wrote: post #65

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing…

I'm not sure that SBF being a crook shows that effective altruism failed.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#67

Post by Smaug123 »

erostrate wrote: post #65

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will be vulnerable to adversarial inputs. A blunt and basic theory (common sense) is sufficient to cover all practical situations and will prevent you from looking very dumb by endorsing…

SBF did have a very unusual discounting policy, namely "no discounting", in fairness. I'm not aware of anyone other than SBF who bites the "keep double-or-nothing a 51% probability gamble forever, for infinite expected utility and probability 1 of going bust" bullet in favour of keeping going forever. (SBF espoused this policy in March 2022, if I recall correctly, on Conversations with Tyler.)

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#68

Post by throwaway101223 »

tylerhou wrote: post #50
throwaway101223 wrote: post #27

> Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds. How is this clear? This is one of the things I find strange about academic philosophy. For all the claims about trying to get at a more rigorous understanding of knowledge, the foundation at the end of the day seems to just be human intuition. You read about something like the Chinese Room or Mary’s…

Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences. Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocen…

> It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger.

Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it.

It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#69

Post by Micaiah_Chang »

tylerhou wrote: post #49
Micaiah_Chang wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the point of the GP comment is exactly this, if Bentham becomes an agent that goes for C, he also explicitly discourages the mugger from being an agent that would cut off their fingers for a couple of bucks. Notice that what Bentham is altering is their strategy and not their utility. If they could spend 10 dollars to treat gangrene and save the fingers, they would do it. It's not clear many other morality syste…

> if Bentham becomes an agent that goes for C, he also explicitly discourages the mugger How is this different from saying that if Bentham decides to not adhere to utilitarianism, he is no longer vulnerable to such a mugging? If Bentham always responds C, even when actually confronted with such a scenario (the mugger was not deterred by Bentham's claim), then Bentham is not a utilitarianist. In other words, the GP is…

My wording is wrong, because it sounds like I'm saying that Bentham is adopting the policy ad hoc. A better way to state this is that Bentham starts out as an agent that does not give into brinksmanship type games, because a world where brinksmanship type games exist is a substantially worse world than ones where they don't (because net-negative situations will end up happening, it takes effort to set up brinksmanship and good actions do not benefit more from brinksmanship). It's different because by adopting C, Bentham prevents the mugger from mugging, which is a better world than one where the mugger goes on mugging. I don't see any contradiction in utilitarianism here.

If the world where the thought experiment is not true and "mugging" is net positive, calling it mugging then is disingenuous, that's just more optimally allocating resources and is more equivalent to the conversation "hi bentham i have a cool plan for 10 dollars let me tell you what it is" "okay i have heard your plan and i think it's a good idea here's 10 bucks"

Except that you are putting the words "mugging" and implying violence so that people view the interaction as more absurd than it actually is.

Re: Bentham's Mugging (2022)

#70

Post by tylerhou »

throwaway101223 wrote: post #68
tylerhou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences. Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocen…

> It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it. It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give t…

The point is, to a utilitarian, it’s a finger, because part of the setup is that the “mugger” won’t use their finger for bad things in the future.

Maybe not part of this specific dialogue, where the mugger repeatedly asks for rhetorical reasons. But in a case where there is only a single instance of a mugging, the assumption is that the mugger will only mug once.

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