22 KiB
[Q] Is Egalitarianism reasonable?
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5r8tkd/q_is_egalitarianism_reasonable/
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Score: 0
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Created: 2017-01-31T15:29:55
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+7] (an hour later)
If you don't take it axiomatic that people are equally valuable on some level, then why do you care that the medical genius will save billions of future lives while your relative won't? You haven't even established that 1,000,000,000 > 1. If you don't think you have any reason to care about the anonymous pauper, why do you condescend to care about the many anonymous paupers whose fate is dependent on that of their princess?
The importance of a person varies, but that importance is measured in persons, so there's clearly some unit of importance fundamental to persons. You gesture vaguely at the variation in importance, and use this as an excuse to dull your capacity to care about people at all (as the vast majority of people you interact with, if not all of them, will be more like the "street rat" than the billionaire's daughter). Whether you are doing so intentionally or not - and I suspect you are - you are arguing in favor of evil, using (necessarily) irrational arguments.
u/None [+0] (a day later)
I fundamentally do not believe in"evil".
I believe all people have a worth. An intrinsic worth, a baseline worth that does not go below a certain level.
For this belief, I agree with fundamental human rights.
But Wikipedia's definition of egalitarianism, I disagree.
I measure people's worth not in terms of other peoples, but in terms of potential utility.
If I had to save one group of people over another, I'll calculate the effective potential utility of both groups, and save the more useful group.
Your last statement may be wrong. You don't know me, and I daresay you may be wrong. I'm 18, and my parents belong to the upper middle-class where I live. Many people would consider us rich.
I rarely interact with street rats(considering I'm in a university) and live in a sheltered neighbourhood(Estate) with people in the same social class.
I believe I'll have ample opportunity to interact with the latter group as I climb up the social ladder. I doubt I'll interact with the lesser group in future, especially as I disdain incompetence, scorn mediocrity and do not even consider myself with people below a certain intelligence threshold.
Snobbish and elitist? I know, and I do not care.
I believe conventional morality is a hindrance to a leader, I plan to be one in future, and am currently working on restructuring my beliefs and worldview into one as efficient as possible.
I should be able to make the "right" decisions in future. Even if it involves sacrificing human life.
u/lordlaneus [+8] (44 minutes later)
I feel like that's a shallow implementation of egalitarianism. People having equal rights and status doesn't mean that each person has an equal effect on the world. You still need to consider utilitarianism in your moral calculations.
u/None [-1] (51 minutes later)
Giving equal rights and status, when they don't have equal effect, is to me simply irrational.
That's the problem.
Look at my saving lives argument.
u/lordlaneus [+4] (56 minutes later)
Imagine this: Person A is a brilliant scientist one the verge of curing cancer, and person B is a mass murderer. You have to choose which one to save, and which to let die. I agree that A should be saved. However not because they have a higher status or more rights, but because I'm also considering the lives of millions of cancer patients, and thousands of potential murder victims, who all also require equal consideration.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I wouldn't grant them more rights, per se. However, one person has higher utility.
If I was a leader, I'll always save the group with higher utility. I think that is rational.
How will you decide how to save one group over another.
u/lordlaneus [+2] (a day later)
I'm not disputing that, but equal moral consideration is not the same thing as equal utility. I'm contending that egalitarianism is important for calculating a person's utility. Without egalitarianism you could have a utility functions that values the well being of one gender over the other, other or gives preference to a certain race.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
All men are equal(to some extent, more or less) under the law.
I agree with that notion.
There are some universal base rights that should be available to everyone, and some laws which should apply to all people.
u/None [+4] (an hour later)
[removed]
u/None [+1] (a day later)
How would you decide which group to save between two groups A and B of known number.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
[removed]
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Hmmm.
I just choose whichever group has the highest potential utility to our organisation.
I see your answer as quite complex, the skills people have may be able to save differing amount of lives. In differing scenarios.
I don't even assume we know the exact future.
Just that we can estimate potential utility.
How would you decide who to save without an oracle.
u/Trips-Over-Tail [+4] Death of Crabs (2 hours later)
I hear this often from people criticising rationality by aping an irrational version in their head, but not often from people who are themselves aspiring to rationality. Think it through.
For starters, what is the purpose of this excercise? you say that the "right" ten people may by some standard be more valuable than the "wrong" ten million people, but what value do those ten have without the ten million? Is not the value contribution of the uncommonly brilliant most commonly measured by the benefit that it brings to the many? The skill may be valuable, but only in the right context, and those people bring that context. If you value the context less than the skill then you are missing the point of the skill!
It is possible that this disagreement is a values dissonance rather than an issue of rationality, though hints in your OP suggest that it is not. I'll cover mine anyway: I want to increase and potentially maximise the health, happiness, safety, prosperity, and fulfillment of the greatest number of people possible, and ideally everybody. These are the values I begin with. Rationality is the tool to get there, to reason a path and find the best course of action.
The mistakes people often make are either to forget about the big picture (or rather, misidentifying a slightly smaller picture as the big picture) or failing to understand that the big picture is made of little pictures. This means that while their reasoning may make sense on one scale, if they reasoned it through properly they would see that the consequences are either antithetical to their overall mission statement (such as the one I just outlined) or will cause roadblocks down the line that will make further progress even harder, and perhaps impossible.
What even is the purpose of doctors and researchers and brilliant people if their work serves primarily to help those whose lives you value less? Does not your undervaluing of the vast majority of humanity undervalue the work of those who mean to raise up humanity? Of course it does, you are attacking egalitarianism because you undervalue that work. Is that work only valuable if it helps those who are capable of such contributions? That would create a class of elites who act only to help themselves at the expense of the many, who are left behind in ailing conditions and reduced opportunity to improve their situation. It is certainly in conflict with my values. I can see how someone following my values would come to your position if they did not think it through, by treating preferentially those with the ability to help, in the hopes of increasing their effectiveness. But the consequences actually harm progress toward my goals, so I advocate against it.
This is actually the current, real situation, and to make things political, the entire motivation of the Republican party. It leads to social instability and increased suffering. Just watch! That experiment is entering its final stages.
The thing is, there are a lot more people in the world with the ability and drive to improve the state and stability of the world, their home nations, and the people who live there, in realms political, financial, technological, educational, scientific, medical, rational, artistic, and more. The talent, ability and intellect exists in far greater supply than the opportunity make use of it and make that difference. It's not enough to get by on the actions of a few well meaning elites. Larger scale progress cannot be implemented by increasing the power of a privileged and talented few, but by increasing opportunity until we have a talented many. That is the egalitarian model. And it isn't just the work of those with marketable degrees that are valuable. those who work in sanitation are routinely undervalued and underpayed, but would you want to live in a world without them? Municipal sanitation was one of the greatest and most important advances in health and quality of life of the twentieth century! Thank your garbage collectors. They don't need geniuses to do their job, but geniuses sure as hell need garbage collectors to do theirs.
As it is we have a tiny fraction of the world's population trying to ruin the world for their own gain and another tiny fraction of the world who are trying to save it, and everyone else sitting in the middle able to do very little except wait and see what happens, and this is entirely unsustainable and irrational to support.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (27 minutes later)
This kind of discussion might be better suited for the live chat.
u/None [+1] (35 minutes later)
I'll check it out. I'm at a cybercafe now, will join the Discord from my phone.
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (an hour later)
A billionaire's daughter or princess of a kingdom is far more valuable than a street rat of average or below intelligence.
A billionaire's daughter or a princess was born into a position of power. She has done nothing to earn that status - no feat of intellect or skill is required to be born a princess, nor does princesshood confer any gifts or knowledge that cannot be obtained elsewhere.
By your criteria, then - "intelligence, past contributions, current assets, knowledge/skill set, rarity of skill set, relevance of skill set, motivations, etc" - what has a princess done to deserve such value? At least a homeless person has demonstrated the ability to sleep rough without starving or freezing, to stay determined in the face of adversity, and has learned firsthand how society mistreats those it can get away with mistreating. Shouldn't you value her life more highly than a billionaire's daughter?
u/None [+3] (a day later)
A billionaire's daughter or a princess was born into a position of power. She has done nothing to earn that status - no feat of intellect or skill is required to be born a princess, nor does princesshood confer any gifts or knowledge that cannot be obtained elsewhere.
Eehhhhhh, wings and a horn are pretty hard to get together without being a princess.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
Hey, stop reading the removed threads!
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I'm a mod. I have to read the removed thread to see if Automoderator was right to remove it.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
I was teasing. Among the little-known perks of being a mod: you can snark about My Little Pony in hidden threads, and (almost) nobody will know.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
A billionaire or king will likely be able to provide me with sufficient utility for saving his daughter. Regardless of the daughter's own skills, her utility includes how much her family and possible suitors or other concerned parties are willing to pay for her.
Her potential; utility is much greater than a street rat's. I'm assuming that thee street rat has average or below intelligence, and so is not a diamond in the rough.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
Hold on. Are we talking about intrinsic values or extrinsic values here?
A rich philanthropist has higher extrinsic value than a poor man, because of the good that he will go on to do with his life. If we had the option to kill either a random everyman or a doctor who will go on to save five sick people, of course we should choose to spare the doctor. But that doesn't mean that the doctor's life is intrinsically worth more than the everyman's - it means that the doctor plus five sick people is worth more than the everyman.
In and of themselves, human lives are equally valuable.
P.S. Don't say "street rat", and don't assume that homeless people are below average intelligence. It's extremely rude to stereotype people like that.
u/blak8 [+3] (an hour later)
Clearly, this statement is wrong at face-value since humans clearly have differences. The statement has a more complicated political/law meaning.
The second example differs from the first in that while the researcher has some merit, a princess is simply born into a princess. So you are saying the rich are more valuable simply for being rich. A leftist/marxist (the kind who would support egalitarianism) would object to that and point out that the poor does work that sustains society. I think the statement is going from rational to villainous evil.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
A billionaire or king will likely be able to provide me with sufficient utility for saving his daughter. Regardless of the daughter's own skills, her utility includes how much her family and possible suitors or other concerned parties are willing to pay for her.
Her potential; utility is much greater than a street rat's. I'm assuming that thee street rat has average or below intelligence, and so is not a diamond in the rough.
I'm looking at which choice will bring the most utility to my country.
Is that not the rational choice.
I disagree fundamentally with "Evil".
u/zarraha [+3] (2 hours later)
I think egalitarianism translates into rational thought as the idea that all people should have equal weight given to their utility functions.
Utilitarianism is the idea that we should maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of people. While that's difficult to measure precisely, we can still make approximations. Each person has some collection of things they value: health, safety, friendships, fulfillment, love, etc... which is all absorbed into some measurement as a utility function.
Now a naive view of rationality is that a rational person is inherently selfish and only seeks to maximize their own utility. But that can be easily modified by adding some sort of altruism coefficient, where the true utility function of a person is some weighted linear combination of their original function and the utility functions of everyone else. If I am not a psychopath then my actions causing other people to become happy will (usually) make me become happier as a result. Similarly, if I cause someone to suffer then I will (usually) become less happy as a result. Although this effect is usually weaker than if the good or bad things directly happened to me.
Thus an egalitarian view of rationality simply says that the utility function that society/governments ought to maximize should be a weighted linear combination of the utility functions of all people with EQUAL weight applied to each person. However this applies to the actual payoffs, not the processes in the middle. The utility function is the end-goal which all other processes we value exist to serve. So while I might agree as in some of your examples that one person's life might have more value than another, it's only if they are capable of providing more value towards the inherent utility function.
As a contrast to this, a non-egalitarian system is explored (humorously) here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03
Another example would be describing a large class of humans as having zero inherent value (in which case, enslaving them to serve the people who do have value all is a rational response)
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I agree that all humans should have fundamental inviolable rights.
I also agree that all people should be subject more or less to the laws of the land.
My view of utilitarianism, does not look at the utility of the "greatest number of people", but at the utility of the faction I represent.
u/zarraha [+1] (2 days later)
I guess one could split the definition and define something like "global utilitarianism" which gives an equal weight to the utility of all human beings, and something like "national utilitarianism" which gives equal weight to all citizens of a country or faction, and some smaller weight (maybe zero, but not necessarily) to noncitizens.
Egalitarianism specifically is probably compatible with either model. It's more concerned with the idea that the weights do not have people with different weights interacting with each other internal to the system. So something where the U.S. government values U.S. citizens living in the U.S. more than it values Chinese citizens living in China is perfectly fine and still counts as egalitarian, but if the U.S. government decides that U.S. citizens of Chinese descent living in the U.S. deserve fewer rights than other citizens then that's not egalitarian.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
So all feudal systems are not egalitarian?
What about everybody having the fundamental human rights, and some people having more rights?
u/zarraha [+2] (2 days later)
Pretty much. Egalitarianism is a pretty new thing relative to history, the idea that all people should be treated equally instead of only valuing the majority race/class/sex. I suppose you could put egalitarianism on a spectrum and say a system which says all humans have basic rights like life/liberty but only [class A] type of people can vote or have certain jobs would be more egalitarian than a system in which only [class A] people have any rights whatsoever, but less egalitarian than a system where everyone has all of the same rights.
Whether it's "rational" or not depends on whose perspective it is and what values they have. For a self-interested upper class Roman senator, it's entirely rational to keep the system separating citizens from non-citizens because that allows him to benefit from the taxes and control that he gains at the expense of the noncitizens. For a kind-hearted orphanage-runner who wants to help all the poor children it would be rational to oppose such a system (at least in principle, actually rebelling would likely lead to bad outcomes).
u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (3 hours later)
How the hell in keeping with the rules of the subreddit?
Also, you're doing a pretty good job of mischaracterizing egalitarianism in general.
u/None [+1] (5 hours later)
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u/callmebrotherg [+4] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (5 hours later)
This is a subreddit for rational fiction. We do have weekly off-topic threads, but not knowing how this post is inappropriate is like being surprised that somebody's Donald Trump/President Bannon slash fic got removed from /r/EverythingScience.
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u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (10 hours later)
Please read the sidebar - /r/rational is for discussion of rational fiction, not politics.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
This isn't politics, but more philosophy per se.
I thought we may discuss rationality here.
I wonder what "rational" people think about this school of thought.
No actual governments or political system was mentioned.