(urth) altruism (slight thread necromancy)

[maru]

I realize our debate on altruism and ethics is a bit dead, and pointless
but I saw this on a another list and it seems pretty relevant to our 
discussions
so I'm forwarding it. Makes for interesting reading, anyway.

~Maru

> From http://sl4.org/wiki/DialogueOnFriendliness
> (Eliezer-2003 era, partially superceded by CollectiveVolition)
>
> Cathryn: All right. Suppose I wished for the genie to grab an ice 
> cream cone from a little girl and give it to me. Now it might be a 
> really delicious and satisfying ice cream cone, but it would still be 
> wrong to take the ice cream cone away from the little girl. Isn't your 
> definition of satisfaction fundamentally selfish?
>
> Dennis: I'll say! *I* should get the ice cream cone.
>
> Bernard: Well, of course, the so-called altruist is also really 
> selfish. It's just that the altruist is made happy by other people's 
> happiness, so he tries to make other people happy in order to increase 
> his own happiness.
>
> Cathryn: That sounds like a silly definition. It sounds like a bunch 
> of philosophers trying to get rid of the inconvenient square peg of 
> altruism by stuffing it into an ill-fitting round hole. That is just 
> not how altruism actually works in real people, Bernard.
>
> Autrey: I wouldn't dismiss the thought entirely. The philosopher 
> Raymond Smullyan once asked: "Is altruism sacrificing your own 
> happiness for the happiness of others, or gaining your happiness 
> through the happiness of others?" I think that's a penetrating question.
>
> Eileen: I would say that altruism is making choices so as to maximize 
> the expected happiness of others. My favorite definition of altruism 
> is one I found in a glossary of Zen: "Altruistic behavior: An act done 
> without any intent for personal gain in any form. Altruism requires 
> that there is no want for material, physical, spiritual, or egoistic 
> gain."
>
> Cathryn: No *spiritual* gain?
>
> Eileen: That's right.
>
> Bernard: That sounds like Zen, all right - self-contradictory, 
> inherently impossible of realization. Different people are made happy 
> by different things, but everyone does what makes them happy. If the 
> altruist were not made happy by the thought of helping others, he 
> wouldn't do it.
>
> Autrey: I may be made happy by the thought of helping others. That 
> doesn't mean it's the reason I help others.
>
> Cathryn: Yes, how would you account for someone who sacrifices her 
> life to save someone else's? She can't possibly anticipate being happy 
> once she's dead.
>
> Autrey: Some people do.
>
> Cathryn: I don't. And yet there are still things I would give my life 
> for. I think. You can't ever be sure until you face the crunch.
>
> Eileen: There you go, Cathryn. There's your counterexample.
>
> Cathryn: Huh?
>
> Eileen: If your wish is to sacrifice your life so that someone else 
> may live, you can't say "Yes, I'm satisfied" afterward.
>
> Autrey: If you have a genie on hand, you really should be able to 
> think of a better solution than that.
>
> Eileen: Perhaps. Regardless, it demonstrates at least one hole in that 
> definition of volition.
>
> Bernard: It is not a hole in the definition. It is never rational to 
> sacrifice your life for something, precisely because you will not be 
> around to experience the satisfaction you anticipate. A genie should 
> not fulfill irrational wishes.
>
> Autrey: Cathryn knows very well that she cannot feel anything after 
> she dies, and yet there are still things she would die for, as would 
> I. We are not being tricked into that decision, we are making the 
> choice in full awareness of its consequences. To quote Tyrone Pow, "An 
> atheist giving his life for something is a profound gesture." Where is 
> the untrue thing that we must believe in order to make that decision? 
> Where is the inherent irrationality? We do not make that choice in 
> anticipation of feeling satisfied. We make it because some things are 
> more important to us than feeling satisfaction.
>
> Bernard: Like what?
>
> Cathryn: Like ten other people living to fulfill their own wishes. All 
> sentients have the same intrinsic value. If I die, and never get to 
> experience any satisfaction, that's more than made up for by ten other 
> people living to experience their own satisfactions.
>
> Bernard: Okay, what you're saying is that other people's happiness is 
> weighted by your goal system the same as your own happiness, so that 
> when ten other people are happy, you experience ten times as much 
> satisfaction as when you yourself are happy. This can make it rational 
> to sacrifice for other people - for example, you donate a thousand 
> dollars to a charity that helps the poor, because the thousand dollars 
> can create ten times as much happiness in that charity as it could 
> create if you spent it on yourself. What can never be rational is 
> sacrificing your life, even to save ten other lives, because you won't 
> get to experience the satisfaction.
>
> Cathryn: What? You're saying that you wouldn't sacrifice your own life 
> even to save the entire human species?
>
> Bernard: (Laughs.) Well, I don't always do the rational thing.
>
> Cathryn: Argh. You deserve to be locked in a cell for a week with Ayn 
> Rand.
>
> Autrey: Bernard, I'm not altruistic because I anticipate feeling 
> satisfaction. The reward is that other people benefit, not that I 
> experience the realization that they benefit. Given that, it is 
> perfectly rational to sacrifice my life to save ten people.
>
> Bernard: But you won't ever know those ten people lived.
>
> Autrey: So what? What I value is not "the fact that Autrey knows ten 
> people lived", what I value is "the fact that ten people lived". I 
> care about the territory, not the map. You know, this reminds me of a 
> conversation I once had with Greg Stock. He thought that drugs would 
> eventually become available that could simulate any feeling of 
> satisfaction, not just simple ecstasy - for example, drugs that 
> simulated the feeling of scientific discovery. He then went on to say 
> that he thought that once this happened, everyone would switch over to 
> taking the drugs, because real scientific discovery wouldn't be able 
> to compare.
>
> Cathryn: Yikes. I wouldn't go near a drug like that with a 
> ten-lightyear pole.
>
> Autrey: That's what I said, too - that I wanted to genuinely help 
> people, not just feel like I was doing so. "No," said Greg Stock, 
> "you'd take them anyway, because no matter how much you helped people, 
> the drugs would still make you feel ten times better."
>
> Cathryn: That assumes I'd take the drugs to begin with, which I 
> wouldn't ever do. I don't want to be addicted. I don't want to be 
> transformed into the person those drugs would make me.
>
> Autrey: The strange thing was that Greg Stock didn't seem to mind the 
> prospect. It sounded like he saw it as a natural development.
>
> Cathryn: So where'd the conversation go after that?
>
> Autrey: I wanted to talk about the difference between psychological 
> egoism and psychological altruism. But it was a bit too much territory 
> to cover in the thirty seconds of time I had available.
>
> Dennis: Psychological egoism and psychological altruism? Eh?
>
> Eileen: The difference between a goal system that optimizes an 
> internal state and a goal system that optimizes an external state.
>
> Cathryn: There's a formal difference?
>
> Eileen: Yes.
>
> Bernard: No.
>
> Cathryn: Interesting.
>
> Autrey: In philosophy, this is known as the egoism debate. It's been 
> going on for a while. I don't really agree with the way the arguments 
> are usually phrased, but I can offer a quick summary anyway. You want 
> one?
>
> Dennis: Yeah.
>
> Autrey: Okay. Psychological egoism is the position that all our 
> ultimate ends are self-directed. That is, we can want external things 
> as means to an end, but all our ultimate ends - all things that we 
> desire in themselves rather than for their consequences - are 
> self-directed in the sense that their propositional content is about 
> our own states.
>
> Eileen: Propositional content? Sounds rather GOFAI-ish.
>
> Autrey: Maybe, but it's the way the standard debate is phrased. 
> Anyway, let's say I want it to be the case that I have a chocolate 
> bar. This desire is purely self-directed, since the propositional 
> content mentions me and no other agent. On the other hand, suppose I 
> want it to be the case that Jennie has a candy bar. This desire is 
> other-directed, since the propositional content mentions another 
> person, Jennie, but not myself. Psychological egoism claims that all 
> our ultimate desires are self-directed; psychological altruism says 
> that at least some of our ultimate desires are other-directed.
>
> Bernard: If you want Jennie to have a candy bar, it means that you 
> would be happy if Jennie got a candy bar. Your real end is always 
> happiness.
>
> Autrey: That's known as psychological hedonism, which is a special 
> case of psychological egoism. As Sober and Wilson put it, "The 
> hedonist says that the only ultimate desires that people have are 
> attaining pleasure and avoding pain... the salient fact about hedonism 
> is its claim that people are motivational solipsists; the only things 
> they care about ultimately are states of their own consciousness. 
> Although hedonists must be egoists, the reverse isn't true. For 
> example, if people desire their own survival as an end in itself, they 
> may be egoists, but they are not hedonists." Another quote from the 
> same authors: "Avoiding pain is one of our ultimate goals. However, 
> many people realize that being in pain reduces their ability to 
> concentrate, so they may sometimes take an aspirin in part because 
> they want to remove a source of distraction. This shows that the 
> things we want as ends in themselves we may also want for instrumental 
> reasons... When psychological egoism seeks to explain why one person 
> helped another, it isn't enough to show that one of the reasons for 
> helping was self-benefit; this is quite consistent with there being 
> another, purely altruistic, reason that the individual had for 
> helping. Symmetrically, to refute egoism, one need not cite examples 
> of helping in which only other-directed motives play a role. If people 
> sometimes help for both egoistic and altruistic ultimate reasons, then 
> psychological egoism is false."
>
> Dennis: The very notion of altruism is incoherent.
>
> Autrey: That argument is indeed the chief reason why some philosophers 
> espouse psychological hedonism.
>
> Cathryn: Sounds like a lot of silly philosophizing to me. Does it 
> really matter whether I'm considered a "motivational solipsist" or 
> whatever, as long as I actually help people?
>
> Bernard: That's just it! It doesn't make any operational difference - 
> all goal systems operate to maximize their internal satisfaction, no 
> matter what external events cause satisfaction.
>
> Eileen: That's not true; it does make an operational difference. If 
> Autrey values the solipsistic psychological event of knowing he saved 
> ten lives, he will never sacrifice his own life to save ten other 
> lives; if he values those ten lives in themselves, he may. You told 
> him that, remember?
>
> Bernard: Well, I guess Autrey might value the instantaneous happiness 
> of knowing he chose to save ten lives, more than he values all the 
> happiness he might achieve in the rest of his life.
>
> Cathryn: That doesn't sound anything remotely like the way real people 
> think. Square peg, round hole.
>
> Autrey: Do you have anything new to contribute to the debate, Eileen? 
> It's a pretty ancient issue in philosophy.
>
> Eileen: The basic equation for a Bayesian decision system is usually 
> phrased something like D(a) = Sum U(x)P(x|a). This is known as the 
> expected utility equation, and it was derived by von Neumann and 
> Morgenstern in 1944 as a unique constraint on preference orderings for 
> all systems that obey certain consistency axioms -
>
> Dennis: Start over.
>
> Eileen: Okay. Imagine that D(a) stands for the "desirability" of an 
> action A, that U(x) stands for the "utility" of a state of the 
> universe X, and P(x|a) is your assigned "probability" that the state X 
> occurs, given that you take action A. For example, let's say that I 
> show you two spinner wheels, the red spinner and the green spinner. 
> One-third of the red spinner wheel is black, while two-thirds of the 
> green spinner wheel is white. Both spinners have a dial that I'm going 
> to spin around until it settles at random into a red or black area 
> (for the red spinner) or a white or green area (for the green 
> spinner). The red spinner has a one-third chance of turning up black, 
> while the green spinner has a two-thirds chance of turning up white. 
> Let's say that I offer you one of two choices; you can pick the red 
> spinner and get a chocolate ice cream cone if the spinner turns up 
> black, or you can pick the green spinner and get a vanilla ice cream 
> cone if the spinner turns up white.
>
> (And then it gets complicated...)
>
> -- 
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence