It said he was tested (tempted) in all ways. Hell isn't a test or temptation, I don't think it counts.

/me reads wikipedia article

Huh. By the sound of it, they take the stance that violence against non-violence is a flat-out unjustifiable act, regardless of the consequences.

But on those grounds, can't you say the trolley is a violent enemy that must be stopped, so violent acts are justifiable? You certainly can't expect to cause violence only to the enemy, especially if you consider psychological violence to be violence (and why wouldn't it be? Torture is torture.). By causing violence only to the enemy, you may be causing psychological violence to any who happen to in the blast radius / capable of witnessing your violence, thus you are causing violence to them.

So it's a moral goal for a flawless world with no-one else in it. Of course, if the whole world were like this, then pushing someone in front of the trolley would be justifiable, because they would have not been justified in not throwing themselves in front of such a violent enemy, if they were aware and able to do so.

I don't buy it. Ideals are worthless if they can only exist in an impossible world.

Put like that, I agree - I had a different meaning of "rule-consequentialist" in mind than you, apparently. (I'm not too familiar with the vocabulary of such discussions, sorry!) Thanks for clarifying.

Oh I agree. The moment you go on a killing rampage to rescue your daughter from the cartels, you justify other people taking action against you to protect themselves. The thing is, there needs to be someone that resigns their rights and does the right (so to speak) thing. Someone needs to keep the terrorists at bay. Someone needs to protect the citizens from the gangs. Morally objectionable? Maybe. In the eyes of a few. In the eyes of the rest, these people are heroes.

Germans (or at least Nazis) would, at the time, have considered it to be entirely worth it. I believe that the intended context was that the dignitary was a member of the same organization/country as the people trying to rescue him/her, while the enemy combatants would be from a group opposed to that country. Your response, on the other hand, seems to suppose the existence of a third party (the dignitary, enemy combatants, and in addition a group which dislikes the dignitary and knows that he's a horrible person).

De-ontological ethics are hierarchically ordered. If one must choose between a lesser and greater good, one must choose the greater good. But, that doesn't make the action ontologically right.

I.e. stealing qua stealing is always wrong, but it is right to steal to feed a starving family, if stealing is necessary. However, stealing is still wrong.

Sure. But you have to sacrifice someone's rights, don't you? By not enslaving those 10 people, you're sacrificing the rights of those 100 people. And while that doesn't mean that you're ever safe, it does guarantee that you have the highest chance of being safe.

Ultimately consequentialism requires you to adopt some set of moral axioms that define what ends are good. If you adopt zero such axioms, then you're back at nihilism. Once you have your minimal set of axioms, you then reason about consequences of the action to try to figure out its likely effects on net utility.

Most consequentialists adopt a "golden rule" sort of axiom about minimising suffering. An alternate formulation is about maximising agents' preferences. Generally people's intuitions about morality are broadly similar, so the challenge is to handle the corner cases most efficiently. But the basic moral relativism problems don't occur for consequentialists.

It's difficult to arrive at a plausible set of moral axioms that are going to lead you to positions such as "homosexuality is unethical", "might is right", or "slavery is ethically neutral". Very few consequentialists arrive at these positions, as far as I'm aware. Some consequentialists do end up back at what are essentially deontoligical positions, however, by re-deriving them consequentially. They argue that it's ineffective to try to reason ethically on a case-by-case basis. I think this is an empirical question about what is practical for most humans.

I do not understand how that follows. It's entirely possible to imagine a world in which a god/God judges you by the results of your actions instead of your intentions. (E.g. a woman may have been raped, but pre-marital sex still condemns her to Hell; or, perhaps less unfairly, you're not "saved through faith alone" but rather judged by how many people you've positively affected.)

In my opinion this hypothetical God that judges actions based on their consequences simply allows you to derive a consequentialist position in a deontological framework.

In consequentialism, you adopt some set of moral axioms, and say "this is how I'm going to define what worlds are good and bad, and I'm going to judge actions according to the worlds they are likely to create". This deontological version is instead saying, "I'm going to imagine there's a god, who reasons morally as follows...", and then saying the god reasons consequentially.

I think this derivation path does get you away from the "moral relativism" that's at the bedrock of a consequentialist position --- you've got to adopt some axioms. But it only does this by imagineering this "god" that behaves in an arbitrary way. All this is doing is pretending that the axiom you desire is a property of the universe you inhabit, rather than a property of you.

> but I find it fairly meaningless

Why? I don't find your hint helpful; I have a pretty good idea what an epistemological state is but no idea what an "ethical state" or "aesthetical state" would be.

The meaning seems perfectly clear to me: human nature, with all its cognitive biases and imperfections of memory and perception and limited thinking speed and imagination and so forth, makes it very unlikely that you will ever really be in the situation of having to choose between definitely-for-certain killing one person and definitely-for-certain letting one die, with definitely-for-certain no other options.

Now, that isn't (as jerf already pointed out) EY's actual argument, it's a hypothetical argument he put in someone's mouth and described as a dodge. He is, I think, endorsing something along the same lines:

It is unlikely that you will ever be in such a situation and, empirically, situations at all like that are very rare. So quite likely, even if you think you are in such a situation the probability that you actually are is low. On the other hand, you're extremely likely to encounter situations where you have the opportunity to harm people while convincing yourself you're doing good overall.

Accordingly, it may very well be that net expected utility is optimized by having you follow principles like "the end justifies the means". Even when it seems to you that you're in an exceptional case where you shouldn't. In other words, consequentialists should sometimes behave like deontologists.

But some hypothetical superintelligence (EY isn't AIUI talking about a perfected future hypothetical self, by the way) might well have a much better ability to tell what situation it's in and what options it has, and much less tendency to be corrupted and self-deceiving in the same ways as we are. If so, it would not be appropriate for it to operate on the principle that the ends don't justify the means -- at least, not if the ultimate goal is to maximize net expected utility. Consequentialist AI-designers might not do best to program their AIs to act like deontologists.

I have no idea what makes you think that EY's aim is to say "look at me, I'm so clever"; for what it's worth, I find his argument clearer and less word-salad-y than yours. (Especially the weird paragraph about Jesus.)

And no, your purported summary is not accurate, for at least the following reasons: (1) EY didn't say anything about hypothetical future versions of himself, and (2) as jerf pointed out EY said in so many words that the "I refuse to answer your question because I couldn't in that epistemological state" response is "a dodge" and that one ought to have better answers to such questions. (Though he does think -- as AIUI you do too -- that this specific question may not deserve a more serious answer.)

The debate has gone on great without me, but the only thing I would point out and verify is that in the context of Elizier's writing, as was pointed out, the "epistemological state" is definitely going to be the assigned probabilities the entity is carrying around internally for Bayesian updates. He may not have spelled that out this time but where the term might be fuzzy in other people's hands I do feel like I know fairly precisely what he means, and where the fuzziness may be isn't relevant to today's debate. (Also, I'm just alluding to the fact that I think I know what it means, this is not itself an explanation, just a labeling.)

Hi gjm11,

I want to impress upon you sincerely that I am not sneering. I do, as I have said (and I stick by it), dislike EY's writing on a stylistic level. I'm not going to hide that. This is partly down to personal taste. I think that style says a hell of a lot about the substance of a person's thought†. Having read countless academic and academic-type essays where people try to mask their lack of knowledge with a hailstorm of jargon and moreover lack the decency to take the time to go through their reasoning in plain and simple language. It really bugs me, EY may not be guilty of it but it sure looks like it to me.

The very first commenter to his essay said swap 'perfect-tech-being' for 'angel' and you get a philosophical debate as old as utilitarianism itself but you're right it is a nice singularity slant on an old problem, and in this way it is novel but we could go through the whole of philosophy of mind, or even philosophy of religion and substitute daemons and angels for super-ais and the claims already made therein would not change much.

Both you and jerf have taken the time to show me the thinking behind the surface and I thank you for that. I will be more generous in future.

Epistemological properly means 'of or relating to a theory of knowledge' so "epistemological state" cannot really mean "state of beliefs and knowledge", as you say "epistemic state" would have been a lot closer to this. I think it is best to avoid words like epistemological unless you happen to be Per Martin-Löf‡ or someone of that calibre because we all fail at wielding such terms judiciously (including me of course) and that's not meant to be snarky!.

Concision! Oh yes please. What are the virtues of philosophical writing? Brevity. Clarity. Humour. A sharp use of metaphor. A Himalayan perspective :)

†http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/chap...

‡check this out for a jaw-dropping walk through the gardens of logic / epistemology http://docenti.lett.unisi.it/files/4/1/1/6/martinlof4.pdf

> (I think he should have said "epistemic" rather than "epistemological".)

Fixed.