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Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

If you take the consequentialist point of view ("The suffering you save must exceed the suffering you inflict"), then isn't this trivially ruled out by his own admission that "What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror"? If on top of all the excess suffering caused by the collateral punishment, you add that the entire population lives under constant fear, then it seems difficult to imagine that you are "obviously" compensating for this by saving enough suffering to make it worthwhile. I certainly consider the psychological effect of living under such a system as suffering. This is without even getting into the disproportionate amount of "false positive" suffering from identifying the wrong criminal and punishing the wrong family vs. just punishing one incorrect person.

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Yeah, you can’t just leave out knock-on effects when talking about consequentialism. They’re consequences too.

And of course the end result of all the knock on effects is impossible to compute. At best you can approximate it.

Which leads to two observations:

1, consequentialism is really hard, actually. 2, most other moral systems are really just varying approximations of consequentialism in disguise. "Follow my rules." "Why?" "Because the consequences of not following them would be disastrous!"

This is a good objection. The family punishment scenario must include the massive “background suffering” that is created solely by the policy existing.

And family pinishment is, for valid rwasons, illegal across the democratic world. No idea how people think re-implementing that would be a good idea...

This would mean that turning in your abusive criminal uncle would had his innocent kids and your dad punished, so you will be less likely to do that. And being turned in by family or someone close to you is fairly standard way of being caught.

If I contemplate some criminal act, various unpleasant potential consequences may occur to me, and I may decide against that act "for fear" that those consequences should come to pass. However, "fear" in this sense is rather different from say the fear I feel if I'm held at gunpoint during a robbery. The latter is real suffering in and of itself (as evidenced by the fact that if the "robber" turns out to be friends pulling a prank, one may rightfully be angry at the friend), the former arguably is not "suffering", at least not in any significant, weighty way.

In any case it's possible to generate much clearner counterexamples to consequentialism in the same vein as Kaplan's but without any knock-on societal effects. Imagine a man breaks into a woman's house while she's asleep, and sexually assaults her (1) without her awareness, (2) without causing any physical injury or giving her any disease (3) without her ever discovering that this had taken place. By stipulation, the act made no difference to her, physically or mentally, over her whole life. A consequentialist would be hard put to say why such an act would be wrong, given that it seems to cause no negative consequences, and often need to resort to saying some decidely non-consequentialist-sounding things, for example by making up abstract, symbolic 'consequences' (such as: "the act caused a violation of a moral norm") to yield the intuitively correct result.

> However, "fear" in this sense is rather different from say the fear I feel if I'm held at gunpoint during a robbery. The latter is real suffering in and of itself (as evidenced by the fact that if the "robber" turns out to be friends pulling a prank, one may rightfully be angry at the friend), the former arguably is not "suffering", at least not in any significant, weighty way.

This does not ring true to me at all. Also, the distinction is not really relevant. The both fears are exactly the same - the only difference is that the former one is "deserved" and the latter is "undeserved". But, there is not difference to think the subjective suffering is different.

Second, with family example, the family is in the "held at gunpoint during a robbery" situation. They risk being mistreated, but did not caused it and have no control over the situation. What this rule would do is that the abusive and criminal family members would had even more power within their families and more ability to mistreat family members. Because family members wont be able to turn them in. Once someone committed crime, everyone in the family would need to protect them just out of self interest.

Or a consequentialist could respond that they accept that the specific hypothetical isn't wrong, but it's so divorced from practical reality that it isn't useful as a thought experiment.

I've also seen people argue that perpetrators of harm like this are also harmed.

Aside from all that, I know the instinct is to draw up thought experiments that provoke emotion, but using such a charged example is potentially alienating. I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to talk about hard topics, but that maybe bringing up rape (and such a specifically gendered one) as your thought experiment example in such a trivial discussion is a bit extreme.

I get what you're saying, but making the example one about sexual assault is not gratutous but because it poses a unique problem for consequentialism: it's pretty much the only uncontroversial example of an act that is (1) widely agreed to be moral wrong (2) and to be so regardless of its effects on the victim.

Suppose the example had involved instead (say) theft. Then consequentialists would be able point to the fact that the act caused a reduction of the victim's assets as the "negative consequence" which renders the act morally wrong. Likewise if the example involved something as serious as murder, or as (relatively) trivial as property defacement. In all these cases, the wrongfulness of the act coexists with a negative difference (whether mental or physical) it makes to the victim. So they would not serve for the purpose of refuting the core consequentialist idea that an act is made wrong by its negative consequences (rather than say by its violation of moral rules).

If you can think of an example other than sexual assault that satisfies the twin desiderata above ((1) and (2)) equally well, I'm all ears.

My honest knee-jerk reaction to this is that it's not morally wrong for the exact reasons you gave. But then again it is a hypothetical that is all but impossible to occur in real life, as even the fact that the man is being judged would require that we (and thus the woman as well) know it happened.

I prefer your kind of bullet-biting consequentialism to the kind which tries to approximate the intuitively correct (imo) verdict by watering down the concept of consequence (e.g. by going for some version of rule-utilitarianism).

But I disagree with the second point. Consequentialism is a philosophical claim to the effect that an act is morally wrong if and only if such-and-such conditions obtain. If it's possible to imagine a situation, however recherche, involving a morally wrong act but in which "such-and-such conditions" do not obtain, that automatically refutes consequentialism and it either has to be revised or given up altogether.

The counter-intuitive finding here -- which is in favor of rule-utilitarianism -- is that everyone trying to optimize every difficult decision does reliably lead to unpredictable consequences that are worse than the "follow a rule that would lead to optimific outcomes if performed by 99% of the population" set of consequences.

That is, you can hold a belief that the optimal "decision criteria" for an act-consequentialist is actually a rule-consequentialist one, and this belief is fairly common.

Restated: being an act-consequentialist doesn't absolve you from having to determine act-consequentialism's best decision criteria, because if it did then you wouldn't be being act-consequentialist about it. It's recursive like that.

>If I contemplate some criminal act, various unpleasant potential consequences may occur to me, and I may decide against that act "for fear" that those consequences should come to pass.

Isn't the scenario here that if I have a member of my family that commits a particular crime then I have to fear the consequence?

Thus I should fear having children, stupid siblings, or parents who go off the deep end (probably children, but theoretically could have other familial relationships be in the graph of punishment)

At my kids' school we were reminded of the fact that if they don't attend school for x days without a doctor's note, several times that it can impact the amount of child support from the govt.

No idea that existed but always thought it would be a good means to make sure kids go to school instead of just hanging around being a nuisance during school hours. When mom & dad can feel it in their bank account they'll make damn sure the kid goes to school.

You as a parent is responsible for minor kid going to school. And you have control over it too. This is literally punishing the person who failed to do his job - the parent.

If we are imagining not just a society in which (1) people are punished for the crimes committed by their family members, but more specifically (2) a tyrannical society which criminalizes acts (blasphemy, lese-majesty, etc) most of us don't regard as morally wrong, so that even children can commit crimes through stupidity/thoughtlessness, then I agree most people would live in (genuine, suffering-inducing) fear that one of their family members might commit a crime. But IMO the fear in that case comes not so much from the mechanism of family punishment as it does from the tyrannical nature of the society itself (one would equally fear oneself accidentally committing lese-majesty by a slip of tongue, for example).

  > Isn't the scenario here that if I have a member of my family that commits a particular crime then I have to fear the consequence?
  > Thus I should fear having children, stupid siblings, or parents who go off the deep end

Interestingly, the culture that I am familiar with that has family punishment (see my other post in this thread) is also a culture that encourages many children. I could see how such things go hand in hand, for instance it puts a heavy burden on the family to ensure that they raise their children to respect society.

Yep, came here to leave exactly this comment. Terror is a form of suffering! That's the thing we're measuring and trying to avoid across the population!

It's remarkable how often these "ah hah, gotcha, answer that atheists"-style posts are triumphantly self-defeating within their own argument. It feels like so much bad faith arguing.

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