scrape_r_rational/data/cache/5r8tkd.md

[Q] Is Egalitarianism reasonable?

Post:

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Comments:

• u/LiteralHeadCannon:

  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/lordlaneus:

  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/appropriate-username:

  Even if all you said is true, there is no metric that can without fail determine how many lives an individual can save. A genius can spend his time and money devising clever ways to evade bans in runescape and an idiot's help to someone in power can afford them time to do something revolutionary -- or maybe the idiot himself can have a perspective on something that would lead to something revolutionary. Future scientific developments could lead to enhancements to bring mentally disabled people up to an average person's level of intelligence.
  
  Once you *do* have such a metric, you can probably utilize it to make a great life for everyone since it probably involves seeing the future in some unerring way.
  
  Egalitarianism (or eagle-librarianism, a name someone used that I liked) is reasonable because it's practical.
  

• u/Trips-Over-Tail:

  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:

  This kind of discussion might be better suited for the [live chat](https://discord.gg/5sutD3W).
  

• u/Chronophilia:

  >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:

    > 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/blak8:

  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/zarraha:

  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/callmebrotherg:

  How the hell in keeping with the rules of the subreddit? 
  
  Also, you're doing a pretty good job of mischaracterizing egalitarianism in general.
  

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