I often see people advocate others sacrifice their souls. People often justify lying, political violence, coverups of “your side’s” crimes and misdeeds, or professional misconduct of government officials and journalists, because their cause is sufficiently True and Just. I’m overall skeptical of this entire class of arguments.

This is not because I intrinsically value “clean hands” or seeming good over actual good outcomes. Nor is it because I have a sort of magical thinking common in movies, where things miraculously work out well if you just ignore tradeoffs.

Rather, it’s because I think the empirical consequences of deception, violence, criminal activity, and other norm violations are often (not always) quite bad, and people aren’t smart or wise enough to tell the exceptions apart from the general case, especially when they’re ideologically and emotionally compromised, as is often the case.

Instead, I think it often helps to be interpersonally nice, conduct yourself with honor, and overall be true to your internal and/or society-wide notions of ethics and integrity.

I’m especially skeptical of galaxy-brained positions where to be a hard-nosed consequentialist or whatever, you are supposed to do a specific and concrete Hard Thing (usually involving harming innocents) to achieve some large, underspecified, and far-off positive outcome.

I think it's like those thought experiments about torturing a terrorist (or a terrorist's child) to find the location of the a ticking nuclear bomb under Manhattan where somehow you know the torture would do it.

I mean, sure, if presented that way I'd think it's a good idea but has anybody here checked the literature on the reliability of evidence extracted under torture? Is that really the most effective interrogation technique?

So many people seem eager to rush to sell their souls, without first checking to see if the Devil’s willing to fulfill his end of the bargain.

(x-posted from Substack)