The quote seems very myopic. Let’s say that we have a religion X that has an excellent track record at preventing certain sorts of defections by helping people coordinate on enforcement costs. Suffering in the service of stabilizing this state of affairs may be the best use of resources in a given context.
I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
The quote seems very myopic. Let’s say that we have a religion X that has an excellent track record at preventing certain sorts of defections by helping people coordinate on enforcement costs. Suffering in the service of stabilizing this state of affairs may be the best use of resources in a given context.
I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
Yeah, S-risk minimizer being trivially exploitable etc.