Nick Bostrom has a good paper on Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, which argues that under most reasonable ethical systems that aren’t completely selfish or very parochial, our philanthropic activities ought to be devoted primarily toward preventing disasters that would cause the extinction of intelligent life.
Some people who haven’t thought about the Fermi Paradox carefully may overestimate the probability that most of the universe is already occupied by intelligent life. Very high estimates for that probability would invalidate Bostrom’s conclusion, but I haven’t found any plausible arguments that would justify that high a probability.
I don’t want to completely dismiss Malthusian objections that life in the distant future will be barely worth living, but the risk of a Malthusian future would need to be well above 50 percent to substantially alter the optimal focus of philanthropy, and the strongest Malthusian arguments that I can imagine leave much more uncertainty than that. (If I thought I could alter the probability of a Malthusian future, maybe I should devote effort to that. But I don’t currently know where to start).
Thus the conclusion seems like it ought to be too obvious to need repeating, but it’s far enough from our normal experiences that most of us tend to pay inadequate attention to it. So I’m mentioning it in order to remind people (including myself) of the need to devote more of our time to thinking about risks such as those associated with AI or asteroid impacts.
ethics
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Jeff Hummel recently gave an interesting talk on the subject of how the law should treat a contract that involves one person becoming enslaved to another. The title made the talk sound like a quaint subject of little importance to present day politics, and I attended because Hummel has a reputation for being interesting, not due to the title of the talk. But his arguments were designed to apply not just to the status that was outlawed by the 13th amendment, but also to military service (not just the draft, but any type where the soldier can’t quit at will) and marriage.
Hummel argues that instead of asking whether slavery ought to be illegal, we should ask what a legal system ought to do when presented with a dispute between two people over enforcement of a contract requiring slavery.
Some simplistic notions of contracts assume that valid contracts should always be honored and enforced at all costs, but the term efficient breach describes exceptions to that rule (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject, I recommend David Friedman’s book Law’s Order as valuable background to this post).
In the distant past, people who failed to fulfill contracts and had insufficient assets to compensate were often put in debtors prisons. That was generally abolished around the time that traditional slavery was abolished, and replaced with a more forgiving bankruptcy procedure. Hummel suggests that this wasn’t a random coincidence, and that a slave breaching his promise to his master ought to be treated like most other breaches of contracts. If bankruptcy is the appropriate worst case result of a breach of contract, then the same reasoning ought to imply that bankruptcy is the worst result a legal system should impose on a person who reneges on a promise to be a slave.
Hummel noted that the change from debtors prisons to bankruptcy happened around the time that the industrial revolution took off, and suggested that we should wonder whether the timing implies that we became wealthy enough that we could afford to abolish debtors prisons, and/or whether the change helped to cause the industrial revolution. Neither he nor I have a good argument for or against those possibilities.
If this rule were applied to military service, unpopular wars would become harder to fight, as many more soldiers would quit the military. As far as I can tell, peer pressure kept soldiers fighting in any war I think they ought to have fought, so I think this would be a clear improvement.
The talk ended with some disagreement between Hummel and some audience members about what should happen if people want to have a legal system that provides harsher penalties for breach of contract (assume for simplicity that they’re forming a new country in order to do this). Hummel disapproved of this, but it wasn’t clear whether he was doing more than just predicting nobody would want this. I think he should have once again rephrased the question in terms of what existing legal systems should do about such a new legal system. Military/police action to stop the new legal system seems excessive. Social pressure for it to change seems desirable. It was unclear whether anyone there had an opinion about intermediate responses such as economic boycotts, or whether the apparent disagreement was just posturing.
Robin Hanson writes in a post on Intuition Error and Heritage:
Unless you can see a reason to have expected to be born into a culture or species with more accurate than average intuitions, you must expect your cultural or species specific intuitions to be random, and so not worth endorsing.
Deciding whether an intuition is species specific and no more likely than random to be right seems a bit hard, due to the current shortage of species whose cultures address many of the disputes humans have.
The ideas in this quote follow logically from other essays of Robin’s that I’ve read, but phrasing them this way makes them seem superficially hard to reconcile with arguments by Hayek that we should respect the knowledge contained in culture.
Part of this apparent conflict seems to be due to the Hayek’s emphasis on intuitions for which there is some unobvious and inconclusive evidence that supports the cultural intuitions. Hayek wasn’t directing his argument to a random culture, but rather to a culture for which there was some evidence of better than random results, and it would make less sense to apply his arguments to, say, North Korean society. For many other intuitions that Hayek cared about, the number of cultures which agree with the intuition may be large enough to constitute evidence in support of the intuition.
Some intuitions may be appropriate for a culture even though they were no better than random when first adopted. Driving on the right side of the road is a simple example. The arguments given in favor of a judicial bias toward stare decisis suggest this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Some of this apparent conflict may be due the importance of treating interrelated practices together. For instance, laws against extramarital sex might be valuable in societies where people depend heavily on marital fidelity but not in societies where a divorced person can support herself comfortably. A naive application of Robin’s rule might lead the former society to decide such a law is arbitrary, when a Hayekian might wonder if it is better to first analyze whether to treat the two practices as a unit which should only be altered together.
I’m uncertain whether these considerations fully reconcile the two views, or whether Hayek’s arguments need more caveats.
Robin Hanson has another interesting paper on human attitudes toward truth and on how they might be improved.
See also some related threads on the extropy-chat list here and here.
One issue that Robin raises involves disputes between us and future generations over how much we ought to constrain our descendants to be similar to us. He is correct that some of this disagreement results from what he calls “moral arrogance” (i.e. at least one group of people overestimating their ability to know what is best). But even if we and our descendants were objective about analyzing the costs and benefits of the alternatives, I would expect some disagreement to remain, because different generations will want to maximize the interests of different groups of beings. Conflicting interests between two groups that exist at the same time can in principle be resolved by one group paying the other to change it’s position. But when one group exists only in the future, and its existence is partly dependent on which policy is adopted now, it’s difficult to see how such disagreements could be resolved in a way that all could agree upon.