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Comment by zetazzed | Hacker News Reader

Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it doesn't take into account probability. If you have the potential to live in Junkland, where life is moderately unhappy for everyone, or in Omelas, which is utopia for 1,000,000 individuals and pure torture for 1, Rawls asserts that you should obviously choose Mediocreland. But if you are randomly assigned a place in Omelas, you have really great odds of coming out quite well. The book includes some contortions to ensure this outcome. It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.

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Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.

Thank you for putting it that way. I was always confused by the Omelas story, what people got out of it.

There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.

> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.

I'm don't think you're being fair to Rawls.

Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off.

So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical.

That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.

> That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.

The Wikipedia page says that's a common criticism of Rawls, but it might be wrong.

> Economists strongly disagree

What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)?

Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.

Why would a rational actor want to do that though? Show me a single decision theory that does reasonably well in game theory simulations (I mean R-CDT/UDT tier), that also supports maximin, and I'll write a 1000 word article in the praise of John Rawls.

I am not quite well in Omelas. Don’t think I can ever fully be.

The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.

Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.

But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this.

As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.

It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress.

Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.

People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others. At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.

In the first case, what you're looking at is unawareness, stiff competition for limited attention and care budgets, and a diversity of opinion with respect to the evaluation of tradeoffs for this specific, micro-topic. People who labor in sweatshops that provide goods for Amazon want those jobs because its better than the alternative. They don't want those conditions, but that's a problem that is not going to be fixed tomorrow, whereas they have to worry a lot about their tomorrow. People making decisions within that complex matrix of forces is not evidence that Amazon buyers don't care about other people. It's evidence that the world is complex and that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time. Even Ghengis Khan was talked out of genociding the Chinese by someone who admired Chinese society and suggested that he would be better off taxing the skilled artisans of China instead of genociding them, as he usually did to any society that defied him.

Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ? Or that morality was the sole possession of a tiny vanguard ? If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.

>People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others.

Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that.

>At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.

It very much is. Colonialism was built on slavery and genocide, and the colonizers cared very little for the suffering of the colonized.

>Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time.

"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature.

>Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ?

Now we're at the part of the comment where you purposely misconstrue my comment and make it into some weird anti-leftist rant.

No, I didn't say that, and when did I even mention anything about modern partisan politics? Of course diverting from the topic with strawman arguments means you don't have to take the topic seriously, which is another coping mechanism.

>If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.

Ooh. "I wonder what you'd be willing to do?" That's a nice turnabout. The only true evil is pointing out evil. I bet you also like to say the only true racists are the black people who keep complaining about racism. Turning me into the enemy, nothing but a windmill to be tilted at, is yet another coping mechanism.

Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point. Not only would you not leave Omelas, you don't even think there's anything wrong with Omelas. Rather you'd be the one spreading FUD about anyone who does leave.

But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.

> It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.

It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.

You find it incomprehensible of late, but you've made similar arguments on this site in the past; for instance, the Rawlsian logic you're objecting to here is the same as the logic you use to justify antiterrorism work. So whatever the issue is here, I don't think it's your background in engineering.

I don’t support anti terrorism because I put myself in the shoes of victims of terrorism. I do it because I think terrorism requires harsh responses to maintain norms against political violence. So for example I would abolish the TSA because I’m not afraid of actually being the victim of a terrorist attack.

It’s possible this sentiment is punitive—I just want to see terrorists punished—and such a response isn’t necessary to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence. But I would submit that extreme responses to e.g. Islamism is important to keep a real threat to order at bay. We’ll probably have a real A/B experiment with this in Bangladesh now that Hasina—who was doing a good job crushing the Islamists—has been overthrown. Will Bangladesh turn into Pakistan in the absence of that enforcement? We will see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563156

Can you reconcile this with the comment I just replied to?

It’s the same thought. Terrorist attacks are directed to the nation as a whole even if they kill a small percentage of the population. That makes them different from events that just happen to kill the same number of people.

The biggest problem in Pakistan right now is the Army propping up everything. But I doubt that’s what you were driving at.

If even half of what I read about Hasina is true she has completely gone around the bend and has no business running any country anymore.

>designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios

I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme.

It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.

Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority.

Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule

This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.

Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.

>Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes

Oh, wow, I had no idea. (Rawls's response is quite different from my response to the hypothetical of the veil of ignorance.) Sorry for adding noise to this thread. I agree with everything you wrote in this thread.

> the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.

It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.

But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.

> But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.

Rawls's original position (a.k.a. veil of ignorance) is, in essence, "There, but for the grace of God, go I or my loved ones — so let's help others the way we'd hope to be helped if life had dealt us a similarly-bad hand." (That latter part should sound familiar ....)

Not to mention that relief of human suffering comes mainly from technological advances and that, in turn, depends on advances in material science and basic science which wouldn't exist except for the economic incentives produced by a capitalist society which produces "stuff" for the 90%.

> The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.

We saw a lot of folks carefully ignoring a related issue during the covid pandemic: They argued angrily that it made no sense to mandate masks, lock down society, and spend billions on vaccine development, when only a small percentage of people would die or have long-term adverse effects. (There was a lot of that kind of talk in Texas.) But those folks never seemed willing to admit that they were really saying, "I'm willing to roll the dice that I'll be all right; the rest of you, well, you're on your own."

Sadly, folks like that seldom take enough precautions on their own — and they're often the first to plead for "the gummint" to help them when they get in trouble. (Cf. the bail-outs of big, de-regulated banks during the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, the demands for federal hurricane assistance by people who lived in flood zones, etc. Privatize the profits, socialize the risks.)

Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up. The vax was hugely destructive to healthy people and did not prevent transmission. These things are well established facts. The argument was never ”I'm too selfish to care about grandma”, it was always about the facts at hand.

> Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up.

You’re going against what’s been widely publicized as the overwhelming scientific consensus, so it’d be useful if you’d cite some evidence, including your qualifications, to help the rest us feel comfortable accepting your judgment in this area. And you seem excessively sure of yourself (as do some of your other comments — yes, I looked you up), which tends to weigh against accepting your view.

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