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This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
On the object level, the three levels you described are extremely important:
harming the ingroup
harming the outgroup (who you may benefit from trading with)
harming powerless people who don't have the ability to trade or collaborate with you
I'm basically never talking about the third thing when I talk about morality or anything like that, because I don't think we've done a decent job at the first thing. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about how well we've done the first thing, and I think that in practice utilitarian ethical discourse tends to raise the message length of making that distinction, by implicitly denying that there's an outgroup.
I don't think ingroups should be arbitrary affiliation groups. Or, more precisely, "ingroups are arbitrary affiliation groups" is one natural supergroup which I think is doing a lot of harm, and there are other natural supergroups following different strategies, of which "righteousness/justice" is one that I think is especially important. But pretending there's no outgroup is worse than honestly trying to treat foreigners decently as foreigners who can't be counted on to trust us with arbitrary power or share our preferences or standards.
Sometimes we should be thinking about what internal norms to coordinate around (which is part of how the ingroup is defined), and sometimes we should be thinking about conflicts with other perspectives or strategies (how we treat outgroups). The Humility Argument for Honesty and Against Neglectedness Considerations are examples of an idea about what kinds of norms constitute a beneficial-to-many supergroup, while Should Effective Altruism be at war with North Korea? was an attempt to raise the visibility of the existence of outgroups, so we could think strategically about them.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.