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This is: Asymmetric Justice, published by Zvi on the LessWrong.
Related and required reading in life (ANOIEAEIB): The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
Epistemic Status: Trying to be minimally judgmental
Spoiler Alert: Contains minor mostly harmless spoiler for The Good Place, which is the best show currently on television.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (in parallel with the similarly named one in physics) is as follows:
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.
I don’t say this often, but seriously, read the whole thing.
I do not subscribe to this interpretation.
I believe that the majority of people effectively endorse this interpretation. I do not think they endorse it consciously or explicitly. But they act as if it is true.
Another aspect of this same phenomenon is how most people view justice.
Almost everyone agrees justice is a sacred value. That it is good and super important. Justice is one of the few universally agreed upon goals of government. Justice is one of the eight virtues of the avatar. Justice is up there with truth and the American way. No justice, no peace.
But what is justice? Or rather, to avoid going too deeply into an infinitely complex philosophical debate millenniums or eons old, how do most people instinctively model justice in broad terms?
In a conversation last night, this was offered to me (I am probably paraphrasing due to bad memory, but it’s functionally what was said), and seems common: Justice is giving appropriate punishment to those who have taken bad action.
I asked whether, in this person’s model, the actions needed to be bad in order to be relevant to justice. This prompted pondering, after which the reply was that yes, that was how their model worked.
I then asked whether rewarding a good action counted as justice, or failing to do so counted as injustice, using the example of saving someone’s life going unrewarded.
We can consider three point-based justice systems.
In the asymmetric system, when bad action is taken, bad action points are accumulated. Justice punishes in proportion to those points to the extent possible. Each action is assigned a non-negative point total.
In the symmetric system, when any action is taken, good or bad, points are accumulated. This can be and often is zero, is negative for bad action, positive for good action. Justice consists of punishing negative point totals and rewarding positive point totals.
In what we will call the Good Place system (Spoiler Alert for Season 1), when any action is taken, good or bad, points are accumulated as in the symmetric system. But there’s a catch (which is where the spoiler comes in). If you take actions with good consequences, you only get those points if your motive was to do good. When a character attempts to score points by holding open doors for people, they fail to score any points because they are gaming the system. Gaming the system isn’t allowed.
Thus, if one takes action even under the best of motives, one fails to capture much of the gains from such action. Second or higher order benefits, or surprising benefits, that are real but unintended, will mostly not get captured.
The opposite is not true of actions with bad consequences. You lose points for bad actions whether or not you intended to be bad. It is your responsibility to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
When (Spoiler Alert fo...
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