> Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (...). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.

It seems you are trying to say something along the lines of:

A. In cases where an individual has the freedom to make decisions (i.e. not coerced or manipulated)

B. The individual bears moral responsibility for the consequences of those decisions

To what degree did I convey what you were hoping to convey?

This is an flawed argument for at least two reasons:

1. The consequences flow from many people's actions. Figuring out credit and blame is a hard project in philosophy, even theoretically. In practice, it can often be impossible.

2. Humans have imperfect abilities to predict consequences

Point A does not always hold -- not even most of the time. Individual conscious awareness and volitional control is limited. We are largely driven by subconscious and non-volitional parts of our brains. Not to mention by environmental constraints.

I think A and B convey it pretty well.

I'm not sure I understand your criticism. In this case, who else but the individuals decided to go on the expedition? Where is the lack of freedom? And what is the relevance of 2? Are you saying people are not responsible for their actions because they don't have perfect prediction power? Doesn't it follow that no-one is responsible for anything?

Regarding your last two questions: I don’t care for the binary framing. By framing these prescriptive questions as a matter of degree, we can get a lot further. I’d ask it this way:

To what degree is it reasonable to hold people to prescriptive standards when their:

- conscious awareness is imperfect

- volitional ability is imperfect

- rationality is constrained

You seem to be suggesting that once coercion and some other caveats are ruled out, the only/main decision under moral consideration is the “very last one” where the person climbs into the underwater craft? (This kind of claim would be very common.)

This is not positive (objective) claim. In order to make such a claim, you have to make a value judgment.

I don’t think it’s particularly useful to point at the last obviously that went sideways and put all the blame on it. That doesn’t allow for a good post mortem. A large set of actions have bearing here, and they tend to be connected.

Many people here on HN know how to reason under uncertainty wrt debugging or attack trees. That same level of rigor needs to be used when analyzing human behavior and ethics. Judgmentalism often gets in the way.

I respect the detail you give your answers, but I feel like they are avoiding the essence of the questions I posed.

I didn’t mean to frame them as a binary, I interpreted your premises as binary and just wanted to better understand them.

You say it’s a matter of degree, but I fail to see to what degree you think the individual is ‘responsible.’ You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’ In the same way I think we should allow people’s ‘brain and body’ to put themselves in harms way if it doesn’t predictably harm anyone else, thus we essentially hold them ‘responsible.’ I don’t think this is ‘judgementalism’ but rather just the best way to approach a complex situation (as you have shown). I cannot see any good alternatives.

At some point all this complexity needs to be discarded and we need to make a decision either way. We could write tomes about how complex this all is, but it doesn’t change the simplicity of how those intangible arguments become a tangible policy.

Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t. The complexity is fun to unpack but doesn’t fundamentally matter to what our behaviour is. In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions. It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.

Sorry if I didn’t answer your questions, I’ll try again. There’s a chance that I’m not answering the questions in a way you like because I frame the questions differently.

> You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’

I suppose we need to unpack various meaning(s) of “responsible” then.

To clarify, I don’t hold a person ‘responsible’ in the way most people do; e.g. many people will suggest someone deserves a punishment because they had the freedom to do otherwise. I reject the idea that people have conscious free will. The universe just unfolds; individual decisions flow from the laws of the universe.

To clarify my argument: incarceration is just when the other options don’t work; i.e. the consequences are undesirable.

So, for example, if it were possible to take a dangerous person and guarantee that they would not be in an environment or situation where they would be a danger again, I don’t see the point of judging or punishing them based solely on some (mistaken) notion that they could’ve done anything differently.

That said, punishment may be just to the extent that it dissuades future lawbreaking.

Yes, there are consequences to one’s actions, especially in a society that strives for mutual respect and the rule of law. I think this is what you mean by ‘responsibility’?

I don’t care for how many people use ‘responsibility’.

(1) Too often such a meaning is so skewed towards individualism that it almost by definition rules out exploring collective action or systematic failures.

(2) It is easy to find the last proximate thing that “went wrong” and hold the person who did it “responsible”. But what about the more significant factors?

In so many cases, I think people expect people to be ‘responsible’ in ways that defy statistics. If you look at the number of times that drunk people get behind the wheel, it is clear that we can’t rely on individual responsibility to get the job done. Hence social movements for designated drivers, rules for people who serve alcohol, and more.

Judgmentalism is tricky to pin down. I try to distinguish an assessment from a judgment; an assessment is about facts whereas a judgment is about values. So when I talk about judgmentalism, I’m talking about this tendency of people to look at other people’s mistakes, and say/think “they should have known better and acted differently”.

I think I understand your perspective. Just to check: what is your stance on seatbelt laws and why?

I think it is in society’s interest to dissuade people from doing idiotic things. Of course, there is value in individual freedom too.

How often do completely victimless crimes occur?. The person who doesn’t wear their seatbelt ends up going to the hospital. That requires money and resources. Due to insurance and/or public funding, that person is not going to pay the full cost of that visit. Even if they paid the full cost, it still would have an effect on other people wanting to use the service around the same time.

> In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions.

Except that society likes having people around that are, well, alive, unmaimed, etc. for many reasons — for intrinsic value and also to contribute to society.

I’m not sure I have a comprehensive theory about the morality protecting people from themselves. But e.g. we know that humans are susceptible to alcoholism, so we try some things. I don’t think anyone thinks it is ethical to just let someone drink themselves to death — at least not until all other feasible options have been exhausted. Defining feasibility is not obvious. At some point we might say that the alcoholic’s life is not worth saving given the treatment cost.

> It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.

Loaded language again.

This is obvious but narrow. I grant that we don’t have unlimited money to do everything that we might want. But that has no bearing on what we should do with the money we have.

So I would ask you specify a principle that guides you.

When it comes to ethics, many thinkers define one or more or the following: principles, objectives, or ideal future states.

Most sensible ethical systems care about human flourishing and reducing human suffering. To those ends, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with getting help from a friend or a government. Whether or not social programs make sense is a calculation not a statement of first principles.

I think I understand you now, and your position sounds sort of utilitarian / consequentialist? You don’t believe in free will so you don’t want to ‘blame’ or assume the individual is ‘responsible’ in any actionable way.

I agree with seatbelt laws since it is simple to regulate, doesn’t change driving very much and saves a huge number of lives and resources. Most people don’t understand how dangerous driving truly is.

There are a lot of differences between that and the minisub situation. One is scale, this doesn’t harm many people; another is relative danger, submarining is an incredibly dangerous activity (even naval vessels have major accidents). I think the main reason I don’t like suggestions to heavily regulate exploration is that it would basically prevent the activity occurring. We could ban all extreme sports and save many lives, but at what cost? I value the joy and excitement these things bring people, even with the massive danger.

Apologies for the loaded language, it probably doesn’t help the discussion. Sometimes I just can’t help myself (but I’m not responsible :P). Thanks for the interesting discussion.

> Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t.

You can apply binary categorization if you want, but that’s not what’s happening with the human body acting in the universe. Human actions have many degrees of freedom.

As one example, consider a cop deciding on how to respond to a vehicle stop. There are conservatively dozens of ways in which his response might vary. Does he call in for backup? How does he characterize the situation? How does approach the vehicle? What does he say to the driver? Does he place a hand on his gun? Does he draw a weapon?

As another example, consider a manager breaking some bad news to her employee. The possibilities for the human interaction are vast.

Why is it important to you to frame human actions or risk-taking as binary? Is it necessary for your argument? I struggle to see how.

But I’m also struggling to make sense of the moral philosophy you are outlining.

Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.

And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.

> Aren’t all those things binary? The cop either (calls/doesn’t call) for backup. He says x or doesn’t say x (and says y or doesn’t say y). The whole spectrum is just a superposition of binary decisions.

We can label these actions in many ways, such as analog or discrete.

To revisit my earlier question: Does it matter to your philosophy how we label them? Why?

I guess it doesn’t matter, but it is the simplest way to look at the situation and so most useful. I would say it’s the most accurate for your consequentialist approach: certain binary actions lead to certain binary consequences.

In this case the binary action is getting in the sub or not. The outcome is dying or not. There is no analogue aspect of either. You can’t half enter a submarine or half die.

Decomposing things down to a binary is fundamentally how things work. We can analyse things to death and add our own mental/idealistic layers of continuity (like probabilities of outcomes or degrees of truthiness of statements), but the decisions that come from the analysis are always binary.

> And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.

Which kind of moral relativism? There is quite a big difference between the various flavors...

> Descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this.

> Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong.

> Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist.

> Said concepts of the different intellectual movements involve considerable nuance and aren't absolute descriptions.

Quotes from Wikipedia [1], even though I prefer the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2] for more detailed explanations.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/#ForArg

I don’t see much practical difference between the different flavours. I think you can judge morals only from the perspective of within a moral system. Thus tolerating other moral systems or not is arbitrarily determined by the moral system you choose.

It sounds like you are the ‘deepest’ kind of moral relativist. You are technically correct that to apply a set of morals you have to use a set of morals. This tautological reasoning of course is obvious, but this reasoning does not get at the key parts of these different kinds of moral relativism.

There are practical differences such as: I prefer not to travel to geographic regions where a sizable number of people think it’s OK to harm me or treat me less than their in-group. I think you would agree. (?)

I’m not simply speaking of general chaos that you might find in a war zone; I’m speaking of cultural and ethical norms that are predictably harmful or constrain my ethical set of freedoms.

For such a preference, we can ask: How we assess this preference we have to avoid particular moral systems? To what degree does the following apply: We are acting rationally to protect ourselves? does our preference also reveal our actual morality here?

What about when such a choice cannot be made in a vacuum? It is one thing say that you’re a (particular kind of) moral relativist, but if you had to make a choice between supporting one moral system and another, what would you do?

Philosophers such a Robert Kane use logic along the lines of ”you have to choose” to argue against the deeper senses of moral relativism.

Thanks for discussing. I think they were probably better forums for us to unpack these ideas. I think we disagreed enough to make it interesting and are clear enough to make discussion possible. LMW if the subject area or another, would be something that you would like to unpack further. I’m prototyping some discussion tooling.

So I agree we should tolerate other systems where possible (since none are right or wrong). But our moral system might require us to NOT tolerate aspects of other systems. Therefore we can tolerate them up to a point. We don’t not tolerate them because they are objectively wrong, but because they are wrong from the POV of our own arbitrary moral system.

I’m interested in the discussion UI. For a while I’ve been thinking about how to turn discussions like this into knowledge graphs to make it easy for others to follow and contribute. If you’d like we could set up accounts on one of the philosophy forums to discuss this?