Causality and Ethics

A few days ago, someone on Twitter asked why women are “universally sick and unhealthy and in pain”, and answered himself: “it’s because of what they did in the garden of eden isn’t it”.

Now wait a minute. Because of what they [“ “] did in the Garden of Eden?

Yes, everyone who advocates for Original Sin, understands that the “they” here, the demographic seal, is a rhetorical overextension of the concept of self, to facilitate Alice bearing the blame for the actions of Becky who is only isomorphic to Alice, not identical with Alice. Which sharing of blame - they say - is right and proper because God [ or Nature ] bid it so.

But what about “Because”? Because of what they did? Because of what they did, they are said to suffer.

I’ve never once in my life heard it acknowledged that the “because” in that sentence, is a rhetorical overextension of the epistemic method of assigning mechanistic causality, to cover the moral function of assignation of blame. That could very well just be because I haven’t read Hume, or somebody. I don’t know. But I’ve never once in my life heard it acknowledged. And I can’t imagine somebody defending that part as validly coming from God.

“Because I said so” can’t be made to sound smart coming from anyone.

But the Original Sin meme, the edict to accept the blame for the misbehavior of our forefathers, our distant relatives, our coworkers, our conspecifics, is helped along by how the ritchety human instinct for assigning moral blame works in the first place. We seem to use the same mental tool when attributing moral blame that Yudkowsky points out we use when attributing cause: we chain back until we’ve found someone-or-something who will suffice as a culprit, and then we stop, and we’re satisfied, and we go forward wielding that answer as Truth. “It’s because of phlogiston.” “It’s because of Eve.” [ “The lady down the street is a witch; she did it.” ]

I don’t think it’s just that that procedure, when used to assign moral blame, can misfire as easily as when it’s used to attribute cause.

I think it’s invalid on a moral level, to the extent that if anyone accuses you merely of anything bad having happened because of you, and demands any reparations from you on this sole basis, then in order to maintain your own moral integrity against, not just free-riders on your time and attention, but, centrally, pessimizers of your will and values, you have an in-theory ethical obligation to not hear them out, and to ignore them.

Otherwise you’re just paying Reality to contain your worst ideas of what you or someone else could have done, and be getting away with.

I’m sure it worked reasonably well in groups of 50 people, where you knew the same 50 people from the day you were born until the day you died, and everyone knew everyone else fairly intimately, to pick someone to fearsomely punish every time something went unusually horribly. Hunter-gatherers are fairly egalitarian, and I imagine [ though I don’t know for sure ] that they would notice and be dangerously offended if the elder council was regularly blaming the same few not-too-bad guys, for divine ills like the weather, instead of cycling through the tribespeople with a pretty even hand. So mostly, what resulted from this mechanism of assigning blame, is probably mostly just that people tried to make pretty sure they were not to be seen anywhere near things that were about to go unusually horribly, and occasionally failed - but everyone occasionally failed, so it was only a small embarrassment.

This is not the ancestral environment. Sociologically, we live in the Dreamtime. We hear distant signals. “[Anything that’s made it to your feed on] social media is adversarial examples for humans”. Anything you’ll pay attention to you, will, in the limit, be shown to you and come to command your attention, in this environment - unless you defend yourself. You probably [ who am I to be the final judge? everyone’s different ] need to learn some unnatural cognitive-emotional habits, to defend yourself. Your biggest attack surface is probably this wide-open gaping Quasi-Causal Assignation Of Blame thing. No other human instinct requires so little evidence from your own senses, to command such a high percentage of your available moral response, whether vindinctive or avoidant/guilty. No face of a familiar friend or loved one is required, no beautiful song or sight. You’re simply given a reasonable-sounding argument, and your brain readily draws its own abhorrent conclusions about the offense, and focuses on them until the Offender is Punished - which, painfully, never happens, because he’s been pre-selected by the attention-maximizing algorithm to be functionally unimpeachable - or you’ve been hopelessly framed by the attention-maximizing algorithm, to be functionally un-exonerable.

I’ve heard people describe this - this manifest problem with how social media [ and incidentally, before it, radio ] preys upon guilt and punitiveness specifically - as a sociological problem that is downstream of [something that cashes out to] Callard’s “age of Distant Signals”, but not as a decision-theoretic problem that is contingent on a gaping flaw in how human psychology does guilt and punitiveness.

I may have more to write on this later.

For now, be an unbreakable witness on Reality’s stand. Don’t give in when it accuses you, on the basis of your worst nightmare’s existence, as having caused it - you’re paying it to contain your worst nightmare, and it’s bigger than your ape instincts think it is, and it can, marginally, make that happen. And even if an “is” could get you an “ought” - it’s obviously likelier that your social media feed fabricated your worst nightmare, than that it got the “culprit” “right”, when it picked you.

And if you’re the type of person who’s inclined to use any and all “full moral exoneration” arguments as an excuse to be an asshole to people [ I’ve heard this type of person exists? ] don’t be an asshole to people.