I think it's helpful to look at a problem from different angles or perspectives. So rather than adopting or discarding these various philosophical approaches to morality it might be more helpful to be informed by all these approaches when judging the rightness or wrongness of an action and then apply some common sense and human intuition in coming to a decision.

It's fairly common in mathematics to have two or more equivalent systems in which you can analyze problems. You don't gain anything logically by working in one or another but depending on the problem it might be easier to see how to proceed from one angle rather than the other.

For example, you can prove that 1/2 + i*sqrt(3/4) is a cube root of -1 algebraically by just multiplying the terms out laboriously. Or you can notice that this is the complex number with modulus 1 and angle 60 degrees. Geometrically, you know that multiplying complex numbers amount to multiplying their moduli and adding their angles. So looking at it geometrically the proof is obvious.


PairTheBoard

My default is that non-moral factors like survival can outweigh moral considerations. So while we might both torture the villian to find the nuke, I wouldn't claim I was morally justified in doing so.

It become semantics at some point. We could say that that at extremes morality breaks down, or we could, as I prefer, witter on about the inability to comb hairy balls.

The hairy ball point is that it may be immoral to torture but it would also be immoral to let a a billion people die a slow horrible death. In these extreme, hairy ball scenarios, you are not deciding whether to be moral or not because all choices are immoral. The mistake some people make is in thinking you can comb a hairy ball.

[worth noting that hairy ball problems occur in non extreme situations as well. Those who think any non-trivial set of principles can be followed 100% are fundamentally misguided]

The huge common mistake is the other way around. I am very certain of this, and I hope that I can convince you to agree with me because it is a relatively simple but quite important truth to get right.

If I say that it is true that "it is never right to lie", and then you tell me "what if you are hiding jews from the nazis, and the nazis knock on your door, and ask you if you are hiding any jews?"

I have two options.
1) Stick with my position that it is never right to lie, thus letting the jews be murdered.
2) Accept the evidence that has been presented to me and accept the fact that my original position, namely, that is is never right to lie, was incorrect.

The fact proposed, that "It is never right to lie" has been shown to be erroneous. I dont care if you change it to be <exception>, <outlier>, <etc>, I really dont give a damn, it doesn't change the fact that what was proposed above has been shown to be wrong, and the only way it was shown to be wrong was by an extreme case, and that was all that was needed. If you change it to be something else, we will look at it again, but we are not talking now about something else, we are talking now about what was proposed and nothing else. The process can be repeated many times, but it cannot be changed half way thru the process.

As you can see, the fact that it did not hold in an extreme case means that it does not hold in any case*. In programming, if you have a function that you say will never return null, but it in fact returns null in some situations, then you have broken your contract and your code needs to be changed. If your code makes it to production and you knew about this ahead of time... *** help you. It doesn't matter that your code "works in most situations" and if that is your excuse when asked -- if you appeal to the fact that in most situations your code works just fine -- youre done for.

It could be noted that in programming, when you give your code off to a tester and tell them that it works just fine, the first thing they do is go for the extreme case. The first thing they check isn't "well, what if the contents of the file are formatted mostly correctly but there's an extra 'e' at the end?" its "what if the file doesn't exist?" "what if the user puts "rm -rf /" in the file?" etc. And when they go for these extreme cases and those cases fail, they dont say "well, it works for most cases, so lets ship it" ... they send it back to you. When you make your changes and think that it is good, the process starts all over again. This is a practice that works, and it works very well. The practice of saying "the fact that it doesn't work in extreme cases doesn't mean its not good code" would not work anywhere.

* edit: by this I mean it was shown to be wrong. A broken clock is right at least once a day, but that doesn't mean you can use it to tell time. The fact that it can get things right sometimes is not a reflection of its working state. It actually might be wrong to say "it doesn't work in any case" because of course, the case where the broken clock is stuck on 12 and its noon is an example of a working case. What should probably be said is that because it doesn't work in the extreme case, we know that it has > 0 flaws, and cannot be fully true. If it is not fully and completely true, we cannot use it for deductive logic and deduce things from it, because it would be impossible to know if our deduced facts are true when the thing we are deducing from has been shown to be, in > 0 cases, untrue. And the whole value of the statement is for its deductive value. We dont care about knowing if it is never correct to lie because of some abstract value of knowing it -- we care about it because if it is true we can deduce from it what actions we should or should not make in our life.

I think they say, "let's ship it, let the users beta test it, and patch it later".


PairTheBoard

Well, that doesn't happen in finance analytics where I work.

Either a) Covert it to default logic i.e. It's wrong to lie except when we can demonstrate that it's correct.

Or b) Accept breakdown in extremes i.e It's immoral to lie but morality breaks down in extreme situations

or c) Hairy ball i.e It's wrong to lie and it's wrong not to deceive nazis. Sometimes it's not a choice between moral and immoral but a choice between two immoral actions.

BTW default logics come from the world of programming. The problem we are discussing is a fundamental property of logic, not a problem of morality. Yes we can demonstrate that 'never lie' is wrong (as are all such simplistic claims) but the alternative is something non-monotonic i.e a principle from which you cannot deduce when it's right to lie or not.

Below I am talking about you:

I'm not concerned with ethics so much right now with you as I am with your statement earlier about extremes, and I would like to see if I could get you to change your mind about it.

Now, I will not be talking about you, but instead about my stereotypical and prejudice views of a simple-minded person:

I think the problem is that when simple-minded people hear "if its not good for an extreme case, its not good for any case in particular" is that they think they have lost their moral compass, and that they would not know what to do without it. All they have to do is think to themselves "okay, well ****, its not true that it is never moral to lie. Still, it could very well be true that most of the time, excluding extreme circumstances, its not moral to lie." This, of course, is a simple solution which gains immunity from that most basic of tests called the extreme scenario. The fact that they are incapable of coming up with such a statement leaves them with no choice but to attack the tool of their perceived attacker, and make statements about the futility of the extreme scenario. At least, this is my perception of a simple-minded person, and I think it is the way my grandfather thought most of the time.

When people like this start teaching ethics, even non simple-minded people are lead to believe that extreme cases are futile, which imo, is a bad belief to be propagated.

When a general principle is being discussed, I think what happens a lot is someone will strawman it as an absolute and then refute it with an extreme example. This is especially tedious when the extreme example implicitly smears the proponent of the general principle.


PairTheBoard

I think the problem you're identifying is that even the children know 'you must never lie' is deeply flawed and some will react by rejecting the authority spouting this flawed nonsense. That's why imo it's important to teach thinking rather than just tell. Where we perhaps disagree if if you think there is a set of simple rules that don't have this problem.

We all (those who think) go trough the stage of considering extreme cases. it's definitely a useful stage although ~no-one get's the important moral lesson from it. That important lesson is that a key part of moral behavior is about minimising these cases from occurring in the first place.

I'm considering children as the simple minded people and I'd agree with that. It's not at all what default logic says. Default logic says it's good for all cases unless you have a particualr explanation as to why it isn't. Note that this is true even if there is a good reason to lie that you don't know yet (that's the non-monotonic bit). This btw is much closer to how our brains work in real life than the usual deductive idea.

edit: just wanted to add that it's not always extreme cases where simple rules break down. 'Did they suffer?' is a very common question of the recently bereaved. If they probably suffered horribly but you can get away with lying then it's a very good thing to do.

Truth is, little lies are the lubricant that keep society going. Watch any movie where a character can read minds. An interesting quote from an actress; "I want a man who will love me when I'm at my very worst. I can't be acting every minute of every day."


PairTheBoard

I understand what you are saying, but you are not commenting on the following quote:

And more precisely, the fact that I argued the exact opposite of what was said in that quote.

We may have a slight misunderstanding. What I was saying was that people commonly want to reject a prescriptive rule as wrong because it fails at extremes in a way that suggests it should be replaced by a better prescriptive rules that don't fail. This endeavour is misguided as it's the very notion of prescriptive rules that fails.

I'm not sure if we agree about that or not. Also I'm not saying that as part of our intellectual development we don't need to consider extreme cases. At some point though, we can recognise that the existence of problematic extreme cases are not an argument against other cases.

Reading minds is largely a different problem. Sometimes omission is lying but generally we can say nothing without lying even if we are thinking it. We can also perfectly morally refuse to answer questions a lot of the time.

Sometimes lying doesn't seem very nice.

I don't have a proof, but I will make a scowling sort of face if you lie in such a way that I don't like.

There. I've solved your argument.

I'm not narrowing my scope to prescriptive rules, I'm talking about any statement that claims to be true for some set of situations, and is later shown to fail for an extreme situation. This could be "lying is always wrong" or it could be "all swans are white" or it could be "never walk bare footed thru water when there are live wires around."

I am not reading into this in any way. I'm not saying that the world is a good place because of prescriptive rules, or that ethics is misguided, or anything like that -- that scope is way too huge for me to even begin to discuss. All I am saying is that your comment earlier was wrong, and it was perfectly wrong, that it couldn't have been any more wrong than it was, and I have been trying my damnedest to argue for why that is the case ever since.

edit -- misread

I think of a general principle more as a rule of thumb than as a rule.


PairTheBoard

I agree. That is why I don't always obey gravity.

You can be arrested for that.


PairTheBoard

I'm not quite sure what it we are disagreeing about so vehemently.

I'm usually happy to discuss extreme cases and edge cases - they are interesting in themselves although it tends to get repetitive as you get older. But I'm always going to point out the fallacy of thinking it informs us about the non-extreme/edge cases. They do help us understand the rule and where it breaks down.

Commonly I try to introduce people to the idea of default logic and hairy balls. As well as The Republic of course.

This:

If it breaks down at extreme cases, it is not good for any case, it just happens that the fact that it is erroneous is not obvious when it overlaps the mundane. The only time it is useful are the times when we dont need it (I shouldn't have killed my neighbor when he called me a jerk), and the times when we need it the most are the times when it is shown to us to be of no value (should I have killed 1 innocent person to save the lives of 5 questionably innocent people?).

I think I am going to give up on this if by now you are unsure of what we are disagreeing about. Maybe I should practice my communication skills.

or maybe my communication skills.

I've addressed this but it does seem we disagree. The failure in extreme cases in no way implies it's not good for any case. If the vast majority of cases are mundane then it's good for the vast majority of cases.

But I'm still not sure this is a substantive disagreement. It's not as if we are disagreeing about the morality of lying in specific cases and we both agree, unless I'm mistaken, that the simple rule 'never lie' doesn't cover all cases

When you make a statement such as "never lie" but then later are forced to agree "okay, most of the time, never lie" then you cannot continue to say that the first statement, "never lie" is correct. The only thing to call it in light of this new evidence is incorrect, or better yet, wrong.

If it is wrong but happens to "fit" in some cases, is it of any value? We have already established that it is wrong. If we can easily come up with statement that fits all the previous "normal" examples fine but in addition to this, has thus far been immune to refutation via extreme cases, as in our "most of the time, never lie" example, what is the use of holding on to the original "never lie" statement?

The current tesla model S has a defect where if you go over 100mph it explodes. There is a newer model, the S+, which can do everything the model S can do, save for the fact that it doesn't explode when it passes 100mph. You are telling me there is no value in discovering the 100mph explosion defect, and there is also no value in correcting it.

In this analogy, the tesla model S = "never lie"
the defect of exploding when it goes over 100mph = "what if you are lying to hide jews from nazis?"
the tesla model S+ = "never lie unless you are trying to hide jews from nazis"

Sure, some could argue that the model S is still a fine car. I would argue that, assuming the upgrade from S to S+ is instant, painless, and free, there is absolutely no reason to be driving around in a model S.

I’ve never lied to Chez* about the Importance of Beer. I would lie if Chez was hiding in my home and some slimy Limey, obviously wishing him harm, knocked on my door wanting to know His location. I may even lie if the police show up, depending on the alleged crime**.

*or any other SMP’er.

**And the amount of protection money he paid.

The evidence of a three-legged dog doesn't render "every dog is a quadruped" wrong or incorrect.