It's impossible to know the totality of outcomes associated with an action and the author's examples are pretty simplistic. What if that glass you dropped and shattered becomes a tool of survival for a person lost in the woods?
Well, speaking of simplistic, not to mention statistically implausible...
2) "Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this" Irellevant, as many do act at many points in life as such beliefs are 100% certainty (a plotting killer believing they will get away with it, for an extreme example). Doesn't matter whether they have a "crystal ball" guarantee of outcome X: their thinking making them see the future as having the same outcome X is enough.
As for (3) I sorta agree.
"MacAskill and others are concerned about what the discount rate should be because it is important for the decisions we make about the world—how much should we care about people who have not been born yet? One might be tempted to think that science could resolve this issue, but alas, it cannot."
Of course it cannot. It's an ethical decision, which rests on personal ethics (not totally unlike personal taste), which are influenced by cultural (society's) ethics.
If we want to think "rationally" about it, it would be based on "what kind of outcome we want for those future persons and how we can best achieve it". But even the choice of outcome would rest on ethics and cultural preferences - or something also non-rational like evolutionary urges.
2) I disagree on 2 counts.
a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large action, and certainly not a single one that involves other conscious beings is ever experienced as certain.
b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals. When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. It is a complete category error to model human actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited) place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an exact fit.
This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a lazy attempt by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.
That's not really important at the personal behavior level (the thing we're discussing, and which the article addresses) though, but more of a pedantic dictinction, isn't it?
We can't even be sure that we'll not die from a sudden heart attack in the next 10 minutes, but we nonetheless act and plan as if we have a 100% certainty that we wont, and we even feel that way (that is, we don't feel as this is an "open thing", we thing we'll live just fine - except those of us who have a related phobia and anxiety).
You drop a bottle on a biking trail. Do you clean it up?
I mean, you likely won't get caught or in trouble if you don't, but you're apt to cause other humans harm by increasing the risk they'll get a flat tire.
You drop a bottle off the edge of a cliff. Do you clean it up?
Most people would not, the time and risk of getting to where the bottle is, is high versus the risk of someone being hurt by it.
I believe you've discounted a huge amount of the probability and calculation our minds do in a subconscious manner. Try to catch a ball in zero gravity for a lesson in our built in assumptions.
____
The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.
To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.
The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.
Incidentally this is exactly Catholic teaching on the human person.
In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional Christian philosophy your judgments are. For example the need for a supernaturally provided moral code that’s comprehensible to us follows from the reality that the human intellect truly is incapable of conceiving the possibility infinite higher order consequences of our actions. Thankfully we have some basic heuristics like don’t kill people for no reason that help us out there.
Edit: child has lost the plot. The point is the limitations of the intellect create a need for a moral science.
I find it not surprising that someone would latch onto a description of non-duality as something curiously “in line” with a particular religion.
What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you saying?
The first two are very clear.
I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however, doesn’t address what would happen if everyone in a community voluntarily had this concern nominally and therefore could allocate responsibility across many.
Sometimes, when people claim a logical implication (if A then B), and people object to them by saying that A doesn't imply B, they will 1) follow with a claim that the objector is claiming that nothing can imply anything else, or 2) follow with a claim that "A doesn't imply B" is equivalent to saying "B doesn't exist."
In these ways, a claim of "all birds fly" responds to a counter-claim of "not all birds fly" with: "so you're saying that there are no birds that fly, then" or even worse "so you're saying that nothing can fly, then." I've even seen "so you're saying that everything except birds can fly, then."
So I have no idea where it is going, but precision in the definitions of "equal" or "egalitarian" used in this context would help me to understand.
The resistance to analysis is often because they use it polymorphically. It will mean one thing in one sentence, a totally different thing in the next, and this will not be acknowledged in any way.
I'm not an arguer about what words mean, for me it's enough that people tell me what they mean by the word so we can have an effective discussion. But the word has to mean something and its definition cannot change within the same context.
So are you playing dumb, or is that really what you think they meant?
And yes literally nobody except children and fools truly believe that people are equal in any material sense. Evidence suggests to me that you are neither a child nor a fool.
Indeed the egalitarian position is so transparently weak that even its erstwhile proponents have abandoned it in favor of “equity,” whatever that means.
It's very simply articulated using concept of 'describing' vs. 'seeing' vs. 'doing'.
It's hard for us to empathize with soldiers fighting wars, or refugees fleeing them - but when someone shows us pictures, or better yet, tells us their authentic story, it becomes visceral, and therefore we give legitimacy to the situation.
If all humans were equal, there would be only one human. That's how equality works
The underlying claim is actually that all humans are of equal value. Yet there's no clear way to map humanity onto the number line. No known evaluation function. Egalitarianism presupposes such a function and then leaves it lying around for bad actors to provide a definition for.
Another set of "philosophical muggings" that use the same trick and drive me nuts that people just accept them are trolley problems.
"Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out. "No, you don't understand, it's a Gedankenexperiment, we're assuming it works out". That's the mugging, that's the con, you just gave them clarivoyance and from there you can be sold any bridge of their choice.
Never accept crystal balls. There are no paradoxes, just realities people don't like.
You really think it’s this, and not that the surgeon doesn’t want to kill people?
1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gaslighting as a mom saying “why your hands don’t want to clean your room”.
2) Crystal ball, aka “if you knew you wouldn’t get caught” or “if you knew a child would get harmed”. These are always bad faith, 100% or the time, no exceptions. Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball. God - literally NO GOD, of ANY faith - has ever made guarantees like this. The only thing this trickery is meant to serve is for the labcoat-flasher to control the imaginary future of the imaginary crystal ball and hold the REAL YOU, the flesh and blood you in the here and now, ON TRIAL for transgressing in his imagination. This is the girlfriend mad you for cheating on her in her dream and demanding you grovel at her feet for an apology.
3) This one is harder, because it sounds good, but it is worth making explicit because it is used against you as a form of control: human egalitarianism. See, nobody actually believes this, not in the here and now among the living 7 billion humans let alone the imaginary descendents for centuries to come. A true and complete belief in this would make you a literal slave, spending every second and every disposable income on sponsoring the mass of present and future humanity unrelated to you. The labcoat-flasher himself doesn’t believe this either, but he hopes you won’t focus on him - no he will start with your well-meaning and generous (if ultimately untrue) professed belief that all humans are equal and will take this benevolence, stretch it “to its logical conclusion” far beyond it was ever meant to go, wrap it up around your throat and CHOKE you with it.
Mendacious to its core, this kind of manipulative gaslighting rhetoric they boldly call “research” is the parochial pastime of labcoat-stupids like this Sangil “Arthur” Lee. It is a step in their vain chase for tenure or funding or some Young Researcher Award (TM). It never has and never will have anything to do with reality or truth.