The Nonlinear Library EA - Moral Misdirection (full post) by Richard Y Chappell
Jun 15, 2024
28:27
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Moral Misdirection (full post), published by Richard Y Chappell on June 15, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I previously included a link to this as part of my trilogy on anti-philanthropic misdirection, but a commenter asked me to post the full text here for the automated audio conversion. This forum post combines my two substack posts on 'Moral Misdirection' and on 'Anti-Philanthropic Misdirection'. Apologies to anyone who has already read them.
Moral Misdirection
One can lie - or at least misdirect - by telling only truths.
Suppose Don shares news of every violent crime committed by immigrants (while ignoring those committed by native-born citizens, and never sharing evidence of immigrants positively contributing to society). He spreads the false impression that immigrants are dangerous and do more harm than good.
Since this isn't true, and promulgates harmful xenophobic sentiments, I expect most academics in my social circles would judge Don very negatively, as both (i) morally bad, and (ii) intellectually dishonest.
It would not be a convincing defense for Don to say, "But everything I said is literally true!" What matters is that he led his audience to believe much more important falsehoods.[1]
I think broadly similar epistemic vices (not always deliberate) are much more common than is generally appreciated. Identifying them requires judgment calls about which truths are most important. These judgment calls are contestable. But I think they're worth making.
(Others can always let us know if they think our diagnoses are wrong, which could help to refocus debate on the real crux of the disagreement.) People don't generally think enough about moral prioritization, so encouraging more importance-based criticism could provide helpful correctives against common carelessness and misfocus.
Moral misdirection thus strikes me as an important and illuminating concept.[2] In this post, I'll first take an initial stab at clarifying the idea, and then suggest a few examples. (Free free to add more in the comments!)
Defining Moral Misdirection
Moral misdirection involves leading people morally astray, specifically by manipulating their attention. So explicitly asserting a sincerely believed falsehood doesn't qualify. But misdirection needn't be entirely deliberate, either. Misdirection could be subconscious (perhaps a result of motivated reasoning, or implicit biases), or even entirely inadvertent - merely negligent, say. In fact, deliberately implicating something known to be false won't necessarily count as "misdirection".
Innocent examples include simplification, or pedagogical "lies-to-children". If a simplification helps one's audience to better understand what's important, there's nothing dishonest about that - even if it predictably results in some technically false beliefs.
Taking all that into account, here's my first stab at a conceptual analysis:
Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one's audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience's moral beliefs.
Explanation: Someone who is sincerely, wholeheartedly in error may have the objective effect of leading their audiences astray, but their assertions don't functionally operate towards that end, merely in virtue of happening to be false.[3] Their good-faith erroneous assertions may rather truly aim to improve the importance-weighted accuracy of their audience's beliefs, and simply fail. Mistakes happen.
At the other extreme, sometimes people deliberately mislead (about important matters) while technically avoiding any explicit assertion of falsehoods. These bad-faith actors maintain a kind of "plausible deniability" - a sheen of superficial intellectual respectability - while deli...
I previously included a link to this as part of my trilogy on anti-philanthropic misdirection, but a commenter asked me to post the full text here for the automated audio conversion. This forum post combines my two substack posts on 'Moral Misdirection' and on 'Anti-Philanthropic Misdirection'. Apologies to anyone who has already read them.
Moral Misdirection
One can lie - or at least misdirect - by telling only truths.
Suppose Don shares news of every violent crime committed by immigrants (while ignoring those committed by native-born citizens, and never sharing evidence of immigrants positively contributing to society). He spreads the false impression that immigrants are dangerous and do more harm than good.
Since this isn't true, and promulgates harmful xenophobic sentiments, I expect most academics in my social circles would judge Don very negatively, as both (i) morally bad, and (ii) intellectually dishonest.
It would not be a convincing defense for Don to say, "But everything I said is literally true!" What matters is that he led his audience to believe much more important falsehoods.[1]
I think broadly similar epistemic vices (not always deliberate) are much more common than is generally appreciated. Identifying them requires judgment calls about which truths are most important. These judgment calls are contestable. But I think they're worth making.
(Others can always let us know if they think our diagnoses are wrong, which could help to refocus debate on the real crux of the disagreement.) People don't generally think enough about moral prioritization, so encouraging more importance-based criticism could provide helpful correctives against common carelessness and misfocus.
Moral misdirection thus strikes me as an important and illuminating concept.[2] In this post, I'll first take an initial stab at clarifying the idea, and then suggest a few examples. (Free free to add more in the comments!)
Defining Moral Misdirection
Moral misdirection involves leading people morally astray, specifically by manipulating their attention. So explicitly asserting a sincerely believed falsehood doesn't qualify. But misdirection needn't be entirely deliberate, either. Misdirection could be subconscious (perhaps a result of motivated reasoning, or implicit biases), or even entirely inadvertent - merely negligent, say. In fact, deliberately implicating something known to be false won't necessarily count as "misdirection".
Innocent examples include simplification, or pedagogical "lies-to-children". If a simplification helps one's audience to better understand what's important, there's nothing dishonest about that - even if it predictably results in some technically false beliefs.
Taking all that into account, here's my first stab at a conceptual analysis:
Moral misdirection, as it interests me here, is a speech act that functionally operates to distract one's audience from more important moral truths. It thus predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience's moral beliefs.
Explanation: Someone who is sincerely, wholeheartedly in error may have the objective effect of leading their audiences astray, but their assertions don't functionally operate towards that end, merely in virtue of happening to be false.[3] Their good-faith erroneous assertions may rather truly aim to improve the importance-weighted accuracy of their audience's beliefs, and simply fail. Mistakes happen.
At the other extreme, sometimes people deliberately mislead (about important matters) while technically avoiding any explicit assertion of falsehoods. These bad-faith actors maintain a kind of "plausible deniability" - a sheen of superficial intellectual respectability - while deli...