Cool write up!
Before I did research for this essay, I envisioned Bentham as a time traveller from today to the past: he shared all my present-day moral beliefs, but he just happened to live in a different time period. But that’s not strictly true. Bentham was wrong about a few things, like when he castigated the Declaration of Independence
Heh, I would not be so sure that Bentham was wrong about this! It seems like quite a morally complex issue to me and Bentham makes some good points.
what was their original their only original grievance? That they were actually taxed more than they could bear? No; but that they were liable to be so taxed...
This line of thought is all quite true. Americans (at least, the free landholders whose interests were being furthered by the declaration) at the time were among the wealthiest people in the world, and payed among the lowest taxes—less taxed than the English subjects. They weren’t oppressed by any means, British rule had done them well.
But rather surprising it must certainly appear, that they should advance maxims so incompatible with their own present conduct. If the right of enjoying life be unalienable, whence came their invasion of his Majesty’s province of Canada? Whence the unprovoked destruction of so many lives of the inhabitants of that province?
This too, remains pertinent to the modern discourse. In response to Pontiac’s Rebellion, a revolt of Native Americans led by Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, King George III declared all lands west of the Appalachian Divide off-limits to colonial settlers in the Proclamation of 1763.
Americans did not like that. The Declaration of independence ends with the following words:
“He (King George III) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
The Declaration of Independence voided the Proclamation of 1763, which contributed to the destruction of the Native Americans, a fact which is not hindsight but was understood at the time. Notice how indigenous communities still thrive in Canada, where the proclamation was not voided. There is also argument that slavery was prolonged as a result of it, and that this too is not hindsight but was understood at the time.
Of course, I doubt the British were truly motivated by humanitarian concern, and it’s not clear to me from this piece that even Bentham is particularly motivated to worry about the indigenous peoples (vs. just using their suffering as a rhetorical tool to point out the hypocrisy of the out-group where it fits his politics) - you can tell he focuses more on the first economic point than the second humanitarian one. But his critiques would all be relevant had this event occurred today.
Really I think with the hindsight of history, that entire situation is less a moral issue and more a shift in the balance of power between two equally amoral forces—both of whom employed moral arguments in their own favor, but only one of which won and was subsequently held up as morally correct.
I think the lesson to be learned here might be less that Bentham was ahead of his time, and more that we are not as “ahead” in our time as we might imagine—e.g. we continue to teach everyone that stuff which was bad is good, we continue to justify our violence in similar terms. One thing I’ve noticed in reading old writings is that so many people often knew that what was going on was bad and that history would frown upon it but they continued to do it (e.g. Jefferson’s and many other’s writings on slavery largely condemn it, but they kept doing it more or less because that was the way that things were done, which is also not unlike today).
I think that what is causing some confusion here is that “value drift” is (probably?) a loanword from AI-alignment which (I assume?) originally referred to very fundamental changes in goals that would unintentionally occur within iterative versions of self improving intelligences, which...isn’t really something that humans do. The EA community borrowed this sort of scary alien term and is using it to describe a normal human thing that most people would ordinarily just call “changing priorities”.
A common sense way to say this is that you might start out with great intentions, your priorities end up changing, and then your best intentions never come to life. It’s not that different from when you meant to go to the gym every morning...but then a phone call came, and then you had to go to work, and now you are tired and sitting on the couch watching television instead.
Logistically, it might make sense to do the phone call now and the gym later. The question is: “Will you actually go to the gym later?” If your plan involves going later, are you actually going to go? And if not, maybe you should reschedule this call and just going to the gym now. I don’t see it as a micro death that you were hoping to go to the gym but did not, it’s that over the day other priorities took precedence and then you became too tired. You’re still the same person who wanted to go… you just …didn’t go. Being the person who goes to the gym requires building a habit and reinforcing the commitment, so if you want to go then you should keep track of which behaviors cause you to actually go and which behaviors break the habit and lead to not going.
Similarly you should track “did you actually help others? And if your plan involves waiting for a decade …are you actually going to do it then? Or is life going to have other plans?” That’s why the research on this does (and ought to) focus on things like “are donations happening”, “is direct work getting done” and so on. Because that’s what is practically important if your goal is to help others. You might argue for yourself “it’s really ok, I really will help others later in life” or you might argue “what if I care about some stuff more than helping others” and so on, but I think someone who is in the position of attempting to effectively help others in part through the work of other people (whether through donations or career or otherwise) over the course of decades should to some degree consider what usually happens to people’s priorities in aggregate when modeling courses of action.