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“Just responding to incentives” truly is the new “just following orders”. I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral. Edit: thank god I recycled some

“Just responding to incentives” truly is the new “just following orders”. I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral. Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.

gruez 5y ago
>it’s still immoral. Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?
- omginternets 5y ago
  Yes. I think you may be conflating morality and self-preservation.
  - gruez 5y ago
    So if someone held a gun to your head and demanded that you kill someone, and you pulled the trigger, then you're doing something morally wrong? I feel like my sense of morals at least allows for doing something morally wrong if you're being forced to do it.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      This example is not at all representative of how things actually are. Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word. I have to think again just wow. Your example is such an extreme stretch with almost no relation to reality.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. What are you arguing here, that if you're not "disenfranchised", you're morally responsible for actions that you're compelled to do? >There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word. The airlines are also not pulling a trigger on a gun.
    - okasaki 5y ago
      Yes, that is morally wrong. Honestly, wtf.
      - xvector 5y ago
        It is absolutely not morally wrong. Self-preservation is not morally wrong, at least not for the 1:1 exchange described here. Things get fuzzier for a 1:N exchange.
        bluesign 5y ago
        This has been discussed for centuries, I dont think we can reach a judgement here easily
      - pas 5y ago
        It's not so simple. In utilitarian ethics it depends on how people value life. If everyone is equal it doesn't matter, because you trade one life for another. If we allow the system to be higher order and allow for a symmetry split in "self vs other" then self-preservation becomes the moral thing. It consequentalist ethics the previous details can be formalized differently, but it helpfully points out that if you are coerced then someone is coercing you, hence your moral agency is pretty much diminished. Yet if the consequence of your actions is that someone dies and without your actions they wouldn't have died, then sure, it's morally wrong. But that's hard to know when you have to make such a decision. In virtue ethics you can simplify this to simply say that protecting the life of others' is a virtue and shooting people in the head is a vice, so let's do the virtuous thing! (Of course protecting your own life is a virtue too!) (And AI Alignment folks spend pages upon pages discussing these problems of how to even began thinking about a formal ethics that is sort of computable. Should the agent predict the consequences of their possible actions and then compute the utilitarian value of them and thus choose the action that has the most utility? Should the agent factor in the possible actions of the coercer? Should the agent factor in time? If the agent is terminated it cannot maximize future utility. If the agent can live forever by default, then future utility can be much much much more than the utility of "one life". Should then one human life be valued at "infinite + 1"? Are we on a tangent to transfinite ordinals? Yes, yes we are! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 )
    - jhoechtl 5y ago
      Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail. So yes, it is inmoral.
      - gruez 5y ago
        > Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail. Did they prosecute every single soldier of nazi germany for war crimes? For good measure did they also prosecute every single civil servant of nazi germany, because they helped the regime operate?
- sofixa 5y ago
  Stop parroting useless phrases out of a libertarian book, it just makes you sound lost and misguided. The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. Maybe there are some security forces that physically guard the various EU buildings and officials? Huge monopoly there!
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. That's like saying the legislature doesn't have a monopoly on violence because they don't have a police force or army. The EU laws are enforced through its member states. If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Why does no one think about the poor billion dollar companies being so oppressed by the violent state
      - gruez 5y ago
        You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not feeling sorry for "the poor billion dollar companies", I'm just arguing they're not acting immorally.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      > If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive. Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. Laws are proposed by the EC and voted by the EU Parliament, both of which are representative of the EU member states.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. So what happens if EU enacts some sort of legislation, and a member state refuses to implement it? >both of which are representative of the EU member states. How is this relevant? Does having representation mean you don't have a monopoly on violence? That's like saying the US government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, because congress votes on laws and is representative of its citizens.
solveit 5y ago
I won't speak to how the previous poster intended the phrase, but the correct takeaway from "just responding to incentives" isn't that it morally justifies anything, it's closer to "what the hell did you expect?". In that sense, I suppose it is much like "just following orders". You would have to be very naive to think that not accepting "just following orders" as a defense will lead to atrocities not happening when the people in power actually order them.
- omginternets 5y ago
  You’re right, of course, but it’s somewhat despairing to see how accepting we are of immoral behavior on the grounds that it is financially incentivized.
  - solveit 5y ago
    I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato). "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation. Like, what are you going to do?
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      > I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato). I definitely see it as being used to excuse bad behavior, which is a step up from resignation IMO > "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation. This seems to deny any moral agency to "people". If someone were to offer $100 million to whomever kills the CEO of Lufthansa, anyone taking them up on that offer would be morally culpable. Hopefully we don't just resign ourselves to say "yeah, I'd have killed the CEO too, people follow incentives"
      - solveit 5y ago
        No no, I mean that if someone offers $100 million to kill the CEO of Lufthansa, that CEO is going to end up dead regardless of how hard evil we proclaim the killer to be. Much better to go after the guy offering $100mm. Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact. I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
It is always easy to say that someone else should go out of business to save the planet for you. I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table. In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.
- akira2501 5y ago
  It's not a binary, though. They could have openly petitioned for relief and offered their expert opinion on the current situation and the realities that faced them. I'm also entirely sure that the people who made this decision weren't thinking of food security, but just regular old securities.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    There are plenty of people working for Lufthansa whose jobs would cease to exist if the company (or part of it) goes under. Yeah, yeah, capitalism and greed, but at the end of the day if they lose their business it will have way larger effect than just some billionaire losing money.
edanm 5y ago
I don't think that's true. When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level. On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again. On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases. The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.
panick21_ 5y ago
Both is true but both reflect an underlying problem that needs to be fixed. You should not receive order that are inhumane. And you should not have regulation set up in a way that bad behavior makes you money.

“Just responding to incentives” truly is the new “just following orders”. I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral. Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.

gruez 5y ago

>it’s still immoral. Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?

omginternets 5y ago
Yes. I think you may be conflating morality and self-preservation.
- gruez 5y ago
  So if someone held a gun to your head and demanded that you kill someone, and you pulled the trigger, then you're doing something morally wrong? I feel like my sense of morals at least allows for doing something morally wrong if you're being forced to do it.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    This example is not at all representative of how things actually are. Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word. I have to think again just wow. Your example is such an extreme stretch with almost no relation to reality.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. What are you arguing here, that if you're not "disenfranchised", you're morally responsible for actions that you're compelled to do? >There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word. The airlines are also not pulling a trigger on a gun.
  - okasaki 5y ago
    Yes, that is morally wrong. Honestly, wtf.
    - xvector 5y ago
      It is absolutely not morally wrong. Self-preservation is not morally wrong, at least not for the 1:1 exchange described here. Things get fuzzier for a 1:N exchange.
      - bluesign 5y ago
        This has been discussed for centuries, I dont think we can reach a judgement here easily
    - pas 5y ago
      It's not so simple. In utilitarian ethics it depends on how people value life. If everyone is equal it doesn't matter, because you trade one life for another. If we allow the system to be higher order and allow for a symmetry split in "self vs other" then self-preservation becomes the moral thing. It consequentalist ethics the previous details can be formalized differently, but it helpfully points out that if you are coerced then someone is coercing you, hence your moral agency is pretty much diminished. Yet if the consequence of your actions is that someone dies and without your actions they wouldn't have died, then sure, it's morally wrong. But that's hard to know when you have to make such a decision. In virtue ethics you can simplify this to simply say that protecting the life of others' is a virtue and shooting people in the head is a vice, so let's do the virtuous thing! (Of course protecting your own life is a virtue too!) (And AI Alignment folks spend pages upon pages discussing these problems of how to even began thinking about a formal ethics that is sort of computable. Should the agent predict the consequences of their possible actions and then compute the utilitarian value of them and thus choose the action that has the most utility? Should the agent factor in the possible actions of the coercer? Should the agent factor in time? If the agent is terminated it cannot maximize future utility. If the agent can live forever by default, then future utility can be much much much more than the utility of "one life". Should then one human life be valued at "infinite + 1"? Are we on a tangent to transfinite ordinals? Yes, yes we are! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 )
  - jhoechtl 5y ago
    Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail. So yes, it is inmoral.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail. Did they prosecute every single soldier of nazi germany for war crimes? For good measure did they also prosecute every single civil servant of nazi germany, because they helped the regime operate?
sofixa 5y ago
Stop parroting useless phrases out of a libertarian book, it just makes you sound lost and misguided. The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. Maybe there are some security forces that physically guard the various EU buildings and officials? Huge monopoly there!
- gruez 5y ago
  >The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. That's like saying the legislature doesn't have a monopoly on violence because they don't have a police force or army. The EU laws are enforced through its member states. If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Why does no one think about the poor billion dollar companies being so oppressed by the violent state
    - gruez 5y ago
      You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not feeling sorry for "the poor billion dollar companies", I'm just arguing they're not acting immorally.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    > If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive. Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. Laws are proposed by the EC and voted by the EU Parliament, both of which are representative of the EU member states.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. So what happens if EU enacts some sort of legislation, and a member state refuses to implement it? >both of which are representative of the EU member states. How is this relevant? Does having representation mean you don't have a monopoly on violence? That's like saying the US government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, because congress votes on laws and is representative of its citizens.

solveit 5y ago

I won't speak to how the previous poster intended the phrase, but the correct takeaway from "just responding to incentives" isn't that it morally justifies anything, it's closer to "what the hell did you expect?". In that sense, I suppose it is much like "just following orders". You would have to be very naive to think that not accepting "just following orders" as a defense will lead to atrocities not happening when the people in power actually order them.

omginternets 5y ago
You’re right, of course, but it’s somewhat despairing to see how accepting we are of immoral behavior on the grounds that it is financially incentivized.
- solveit 5y ago
  I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato). "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation. Like, what are you going to do?
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    > I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato). I definitely see it as being used to excuse bad behavior, which is a step up from resignation IMO > "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation. This seems to deny any moral agency to "people". If someone were to offer $100 million to whomever kills the CEO of Lufthansa, anyone taking them up on that offer would be morally culpable. Hopefully we don't just resign ourselves to say "yeah, I'd have killed the CEO too, people follow incentives"
    - solveit 5y ago
      No no, I mean that if someone offers $100 million to kill the CEO of Lufthansa, that CEO is going to end up dead regardless of how hard evil we proclaim the killer to be. Much better to go after the guy offering $100mm. Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact. I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

It is always easy to say that someone else should go out of business to save the planet for you. I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table. In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.

akira2501 5y ago
It's not a binary, though. They could have openly petitioned for relief and offered their expert opinion on the current situation and the realities that faced them. I'm also entirely sure that the people who made this decision weren't thinking of food security, but just regular old securities.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  There are plenty of people working for Lufthansa whose jobs would cease to exist if the company (or part of it) goes under. Yeah, yeah, capitalism and greed, but at the end of the day if they lose their business it will have way larger effect than just some billionaire losing money.

edanm 5y ago

I don't think that's true. When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level. On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again. On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases. The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.

panick21_ 5y ago

Both is true but both reflect an underlying problem that needs to be fixed. You should not receive order that are inhumane. And you should not have regulation set up in a way that bad behavior makes you money.