rowyn | Ethics and Consequences

Ethics and Consequences

One of the kind of quirky things that I believe is that what is ethically right is also what promotes good in the long term for all involved parties. I don't mean "this is how I define what is ethically correct"; I think of "promotion of welfare" as the logical consequence of ethical behavior. The key quirk here is the "all". Some examples:

* Treating women and men as equals is in the best interests of men.
* Slave-holders are harmed by the ownership of slaves.
* Race-based oppression damages the oppressor.

And so forth. I don't think that the institution of slavery is only bad for the people enslaved or even "does enough damage to certain classes that on average humanity is better off without it". I mean it is bad for absolutely everyone including the people who appear to gain from it. This is counterintuitive, because it looks like a good deal for slave-owners, who get the benefit of the slave's labor at "no cost". Of course, "no cost" is wrong: there is the cost of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the slave (dead slaves do not produce labor). And the cost of insuring the slave remains at work, whether this is by imprisonment, guards, social conditioning, societal reinforcement, or whatever: it is not free, even if the costs are hidden to the individual slaveowner. The slave-owner will realize some short-term gain from using slaves. But if one set up two societies, identical except that one was free and one had slaves, I think that the free society would do better across every class of people in the long run; in the very long run, the poorest 10% in a free society would be weatlhier than the richest 10% in a slave-holding one.

I'm not sure this is demonstrably true in any unambiguous way. I'm pretty sure that you can make a case that some moral evils were the "best practice for success" in a given era. But I still have this feeling like the course of human history is lurching unevenly towards a better world, one with more freedom for all not just because freedom is a good thing (which it is!) but also because that's what works. That the tinpot dictators who think they can win by making everyone else lose are just wrong. Life is not a zero-sum game.

And it's an uneven, unsteady progress towards freedom because it's so counterintuitive, because the obvious thing is that if I take something from you then I have gained and you have lost, when in fact we have both lost: the benefits of what I might have made if I had not been spending my energy taking from you, or what you might have made if you did not redirect your energy towards defending from me. But bit by bit, as a race, we're figuring it out.

I think.

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Two observations -- First, it is not necessarily bad for the slaveholder if he or she is immersed in a culture that sees nothing wrong with the practice. (A terrible state of affairs in my opinion.) At least there are no attacks of conscience, except for an unusually enlightened person.

Second, there is such a culture in North Africa (and elsewhere) that supports slave practices now. That isn't the only problem, or the only difference, but it is a substantial one.

There's a wrinkle in the "all" bit -- few things work for absolutely everyone. So if something works for 90%, is that good enough? How about 99%? In economics, this is a common dilemma.

And there are many who think there should not be a "poorest 10%" -- that everyone should have exactly the same thing. "Imagine no possessions -- I wonder if you can?" he asked. I can -- and it's an unpleasant notion indeed. And in that world, the people become possessions of the state. But they will be doing it for the good of all, so "the world will live as one."

The question remains: "One what?" One miserable wretch, I'd think.

===|==============/ Level Head

My belief is that the slave-holding class would generate more wealth in the long term without slaves. That even on a purely objective and material basis, the slaves generate more costs and fewer benefits than free men would. In the short term this may not be the case, and it's not obvious that it's the case in the long term, because so much of the cost is invisible. (You don't see the wealth you're not generating while you're busy oppressing other humans, and that those oppressed people aren't making.) That it's not just a moral and ethical mistake, but an economic one.

"All" may be a little too absolute. Maybe not, if taken over the very very long term (millenia!) Bottom 10% vs upper 10% is probably fairer than worst vs best.

I remember you talking about this being the case with southern slaveholders, but that's something like Delight's example of monsters in cities. It was a particularly oppressive example of slavery and particularly oppressive X is usually not the most effective kind of X.

I do think the society as a whole would be wealthier if everyone is free no matter how you swing it, but not necessarily the specific people in charge.

You may well be right, especially with the smallest fraction at the top. Eg, if you have 0.1% benefiting from a system that hurts 99.9%, that 0.1% may be getting the best possible deal for themselves. If it's 10% vs 90%, the top 10% might not be doing as well as they could in a better society, though.

If it's 10% vs 90%, the top 10% might not be doing as well as they could in a better society, though.

Indeed. Would you rather be part of the top 10% in America -- where this would not give you the power of life and death over the bottom 10% -- or in the Sudan, where it would?

And there's the matter of one's future. Would you rather be a wealthy American in 1900, or a wealthy Russian in 1900? Which one would be more likely to survive the next 50 years?

Okay. Now imagine a world with no possessions *and* no state. That was, like, another verse of the same song. n.n

I think it's self evident that people would need to change to be able to live in that sort of world, though. Actual humans as they exist erect a state and start owning things.

Or a very different sort of world. I always thought the MUCKs were a good sort of blueprint for a world where possessions and state would be irrelevant. :) (Yes, even MUCKs have possessions and governments, but it's easy to imagine how a world like that could function without them.)

Perhaps living in a global dictatorship -- a world with no separate (legal) nation-states -- would make one feel better about living in personal misery. But humans are pretty resilient; we'd survive for long enough to put things right, I expect.

A global government is not the real problem -- but the undoing of the experiment of having people live in a free and open society ... that's a deal-breaker for me.

You're given a ration of bread to eat. You manage to trade some "extra" bread for a different food you prefer, and save it up a bit. That food winds up being valuable to someone else, and suddenly you have a business.

And must be put to death by the Lennon/Lenin's "global no-state" because now you have possessions, and are accumulating wealth by serving the needs and desires of others.

I think it's self evident that people would need to change to be able to live in that sort of world, though.

Oh, yes. We are not well-equipped by evolution to be merely functional units of a superorganism -- through the human hive royalty would like the arrangement. They always do.

===|==============/ Level Head

You're completely missing the point.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could see rainbows every day?"

"No, that would be horrible. The excessive precipitation would drown the world and reduce the forests and fields to mosquito-bearing swamps that would spread malaria and everyone would die in agony. Why do you want everyone to die in agony?!"

Well, I'm not trying to be argumentative. Living in peace would be a great thing. But living without the legal ability to own or acquire possessions doesn't strike me as pleasant.

The fact that Lennon's song includes the outlawing of separate nation-states doesn't change the individual's situation much, except for eliminating any place else to go. And communist countries have always striven hard to remove those choices anyway.

Premise 1: You are not allowed to have possessions. (It would have to be this way -- Man has accumulated possessions even before writing was developed to document them -- it is a natural notion shared by many creatures, including any that include the concept of "territory.")

Premise 2: Competing nation-states are outlawed. (This must be a law, as otherwise any group could declare their area a nation. And some, even if collectively insane, will want to.)

Result: Everyone is happy, there's no greed or hunger (one must be outlawed, and the other perhaps given rations such that there can be no "official" hunger). China's quite good still at "official" versions of reality, as was the Soviet Union.

I am not making the connection between the premises and the result. Many people are made happy by "doing their own thing" -- but the song (and the various Communist Party platforms) call for no one to "own things" anymore, making doing something that doesn't support the State a bit tricky.

And there would be a State -- because if creating a global State were outlawed, who could enforce that law? Instead, only the creation of a second State would be prevented.

John Lennon did a lot of great music. I even enjoy this piece -- simple and melodic and soothing -- as long as I don't track on the words.

===|==============/ Level Head

You keep specifying 'separate nation states' but that's not the point.

You're supposed to imagine a world with 'no countries', not 'no competing countries'. Zero is not equal to one. If you can't imagine a world where people didn't set up a country to enforce laws, or where people had to be forced not to own things by some authority, then you're not imagining the thing you're being asked to imagine.

I agree that it's implausible that humans as they exist today could live in that sort of society. They would wreck it in just the ways you said.

But the people who sang all the hippie songs really did hate the government *a lot* -- in particular, the government telling them what they could do. They're the left-wing version of libertarians.

Really, I think the key is that -- imagine if these concepts had never been invented. People would still have 'their things' that they tend to use, and 'their territory' that they mostly stayed on, and people would probably respect that since stability helps make things comfortable and presumably everyone wants to be nice to each other by default, but they wouldn't have any special *right* to the things or veto power over their use.

And if no one had ever invented the concept of authority... that one's a bit harder. I'm not sure I can imagine it really. x.x A precondition would be a complete inability to hurt other people, for one thing.

Rather, a lack of need to hurt someone else. Essentially, we are asked to imagine ourselves as angelic beings, without a prime authority figure to lead us, aside from perhaps group consensus.

We'd need to be a hivemind to achieve this.

I think it'd work with a hypothetical race that was incapable of being harmed or controlled by any external force, had no physical needs, and could freely create any material objects. Humanity with sufficiently advanced technology might come close to this (for example, impenetrable personal force fields and matter creation / transportation similiar to that shown in Star Trek, freely available to anyone.)

I would be quite surprised if we get to anything remotely like this state of being in my lifetime. :)

Now imagine a world with no possessions *and* no state. That was, like, another verse of the same song.

My vision of this would be the war of all against all, until some emerged dominant.

Actual humans as they exist erect a state and start owning things.

Ownership precedes the state.

Are you sure? I thought humanity's basic unit of ad-hoc organization was into tribes where everything (including the people) was owned collectively by the tribe. Once people feel safe enough, they start adding on luxuries like personal possessions and freedom of choice.

I think -- I'm not sure -- that it's varied. In some cases you got ownership with no real governance and in some you get tribes with a structure but no individual ownership. You could probably argue that collective ownership is still ownership, in the sense of "this tribe will stop other tribes from taking their stuff".

I suppose the concept of "this is mine" is more fundamental than government, in another sense: a solitary predator will defend their kill and territory, even though they don't have any kind of social order.

First, it is not necessarily bad for the slaveholder if he or she is immersed in a culture that sees nothing wrong with the practice.

It may be very bad for the slaveholder's whole culture, though.

And there are many who think there should not be a "poorest 10%" -- that everyone should have exactly the same thing. "Imagine no possessions -- I wonder if you can?" he asked. I can -- and it's an unpleasant notion indeed. And in that world, the people become possessions of the state. But they will be doing it for the good of all, so "the world will live as one."

The question remains: "One what?" One miserable wretch, I'd think.

One absolute dictator, whether he chooses to call himself Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or just Fidel Castro.

Your logic makes sense to me, and I love the optimism inherent in it. :-)

I am a terribly optimistic person at heart. :)

The position you take is optimistic, but the science of economics shows us that there is an underlying principal of "external costs." Bad behavior is typically rewarded because the costs incurred are overwhelmingly external.

For the ethical "karma" you describe to be true, there must be a set of internal costs that offset the benefits reaped from bad behavior.

My religious beliefs include a working set of these costs, but they're hard to fit into a balance sheet. This is why I believe that the only way we're going to make certain kinds of bad behavior go away is with moral codes that assign value to certain immeasurable intangibles. And those codes must be voluntarily adopted -- they cannot be imposed from above, or we're inviting a new set of bad behaviors.

I think there are internal economic costs. In the comment below this one,

jordan179 makes a nice brief argument on that point -- basically, the deleterious social effects ultimately translate into negative economic effects for the master class (as well as the slave).

Which is not to say that I disagree with you about the value of moral codes! I think morality is a vitally important way of reinforcing the good behavior and avoiding bad behavior. Even if I'm right that the long-term economic consequences for bad behavior are also bad, it's still (a) a tenuous connection that's hard to perceive and (b) so long-term that a lot of people would not care anyway.

But I think the negative economic impact is one of the reasons that the general meme of Western culture has been pretty successful. It's not just right: it also works. Which I think is pretty clever of God, actually. :)

Slavery is an extreme example, and I won't for a moment challenge the idea that the external costs mount and become internal costs very quickly.

No, I'm talking about the general principal. I'm not convinced that ALL cases of ethical behavior are supported by cost/benefit analysis. At least not on balance sheets here in the mortal realm.

True -- it's not fair to generalize down from an extreme example to a less-extreme one. And a single example of bad behavior may never have a negative consequence for a given perpetrator, making causality hard to prove. Even though I believe in the principle, it's more an article of faith than something I can prove. :)

I agree with you wholeheartedly. The general principle here is that the extension of trade is a positive-sum game, while the application of force is at best a zero-sum (and usually a negative-sum) game (force is zero-sum if the weaker side surrenders without a fight, negative-sum if he must be vanquished in combat).

Employment is a positive-sum game which operates by Comparative Advantage. The employer is better served by spending his money to hire employees and his time to supervise them than he would be by doing all the work himself; the employees are better served by spending their time working for the employer to make money than they would be by trying to work for themselves. Both sides wind up richer and happier than they were before they agreed to work together.

Slavery is at most weakly positive-sum: given a good master and relatively happy slaves, it can be productive, though on the average it is less productive than free employment. It can easily become zero-sum or even negative-sum, if the slaves resist, flee or possibly even revolt. Italy in the early 1st century BC, or Haiti in the early 19th century AD, demonstrates just how horribly negative-sum it can become.

The damage which slavery does to the slaves is obvious: their lives are consumed working for the purposes of their masters, and they have no independent dignity which the master cannot strip from them at whim. To take one obvious example, in Rome a slave was sexually available to the master whenever he or she desired, with no resistance tolerated either in custom or law; despite the moderating Christianity it was almost that bad in practice in the Old South. To take another example, in both societies a slave family could be separated at the master's whim: it might even be done without his permission if the master became bankrupt.

The damage done to those in the master class are less direct and obvious, but they are still present. The masters are inevitably corrupted by the possession of theoretically absolute power over other human beings: they become increasingly arrogant, violent and coarse. The social status of any type of labor performed by slaves is degraded, and consequently less likely to be made more efficient by invention and investment (this is the flaw that doomed the CSA economy in the American Civil War). Any group which is successfully enslaved is despised by the master class: this can lead to trouble should they encounter similar groups who are not weak and vulnerable; also, the cultural innovations of that group are despised (think of the Roman rejection of the Celtic mechanical harvesters).

Slavery hurts both slave and master, even though the master may be puffing up his chest at his own inflated sense of importnace -- in fact, because he does so.

Yes! Yes, this is exactly what I mean. Even when slavery is "working well", it's still not as effective free employment, and still not as rewarding for the slave-master as it is for the employer in the long term, even if the slave-master looks like he's getting a good deal in the short term.

While I agree with your observations, I tend to disagree with the direction of humanity. Sadly I'm all too convinced that we're working more toward an end akin to Idiocracy, rather than a society like Star Trek. =P

I agree, and I think that this is also backwards applicable also. Meaning that you can *determine* what is most moral by what system and method produces the best mean distributed quality of life. I should mention that "mean distributed quality of life" is a term that I just made up, and that the truly miserable are *hard* to average out. If your culture has signifacant starvation, then you are failing.

In the slavery example, it is the case that essentially every culture that endorses slavery has had rather high rates of masters being killed by slaves in uprisings etcetera. Weighs pretty solidly on the "con" side of that practical equation.

Oddly though at the origin, slavery was a *humanitarian* institution, it was put in place so that the victors in a war could allow some percentage of the vanquished to live. If tribe X goes to war with tribe Y, then when the war is over, there will be the women, children, and defeated warriors of the defeated tribe, if you leave them behind, many times they seek revenge. Taking them as slaves allows tribe X to gain economic advantage and also allows them to not kill innocents. Obviously that goes wonky in a hurry, because the temptation then gets to be to go to war *for slaves*.

Decent examples of humanitarian (and less humanitarian) slavery can be found looking at the practices of the native american tribes.

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Ethics and Consequences

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