I found this really helpful. In particular I liked how you illustrated why breaking a norm for the president would NOT be creating a slippery slope. It’s intuitive but hadn’t seen it spelled out that way before. As others have commented it’s obviously tough to perfectly anticipate the future consequences of breaking a norm, which is exactly why thinking about the ratio of potential first to second order consequences (how much benefit do we get by breaking the norm and how much chance is there of that norm breaking leading to future norm breaks) is a helpful framework for analyzing particular situations and pointing us in the right direction
Good one. Even the Bhagavad Gita recognises that there may be times when it is necessary to tell a lie, such as to protect someone from harm or to uphold justice. To quote an instance: Krishna tells Yudhisthira this is a war that must be won. And that if a lie must be told to win it, so be it.
Yes, that example captures a high-stakes norm violation since the protagonist is otherwise honest to a fault. Islam has a concept called "Taqqiya", which some claim is permission to lie to non Muslims if it serves the higher goals of Islams. Needless to say, the morality of one's "ends "/one's intrinsic values matter. All of this holds only if the larger war is a morally good one..
A bit of an aside - trading 1000s or lives for the President's seems too high IMHO. One way to reduce the consequences of an untimely death is to have a clear chain of succession which wouldn't result in policy change. The US system is not ideal here - the Speaker of the House is 2nd in line, who might be from a different party. For example, it gives incentives for Putin to assassinate the President and VP and get a President who is likely to cut off US support for Ukraine. Especially if he can do this without it being traced back to Russia.
Liked the article! Matches my intuitions on norm violations. I think you hinted at this -- there are economic benefits to upholding norms. A society where most folks follow the "don't steal" norm (ie, a high trust society), is a lot more efficient. You have to allocate far less resources to deter and prevent theft.
Humans will always be walking the balance beam between deontology and utilitarianism, but as you pointed out, predicting outcomes is a difficult thing to do. If the smartest minds/best algorithms out there can't accurately make financial predictions based on concrete data, how can we know whether there will be net positive or negative outcomes of extremely complex social phenomena? We're not great at it even at an individual level.
A large part of the reason we have the norm in the first place is because we think the long run consequences of norm violation are net negative. My claim is that we should inspect the assumptions behind why we have the norm in the first place and be attentive to when those reasons no longer hold. Of course, we can't actually get it right precisely, but we already have laws and norms because we can somewhat do this.
I found this really helpful. In particular I liked how you illustrated why breaking a norm for the president would NOT be creating a slippery slope. It’s intuitive but hadn’t seen it spelled out that way before. As others have commented it’s obviously tough to perfectly anticipate the future consequences of breaking a norm, which is exactly why thinking about the ratio of potential first to second order consequences (how much benefit do we get by breaking the norm and how much chance is there of that norm breaking leading to future norm breaks) is a helpful framework for analyzing particular situations and pointing us in the right direction
Good one. Even the Bhagavad Gita recognises that there may be times when it is necessary to tell a lie, such as to protect someone from harm or to uphold justice. To quote an instance: Krishna tells Yudhisthira this is a war that must be won. And that if a lie must be told to win it, so be it.
Yes, that example captures a high-stakes norm violation since the protagonist is otherwise honest to a fault. Islam has a concept called "Taqqiya", which some claim is permission to lie to non Muslims if it serves the higher goals of Islams. Needless to say, the morality of one's "ends "/one's intrinsic values matter. All of this holds only if the larger war is a morally good one..
A bit of an aside - trading 1000s or lives for the President's seems too high IMHO. One way to reduce the consequences of an untimely death is to have a clear chain of succession which wouldn't result in policy change. The US system is not ideal here - the Speaker of the House is 2nd in line, who might be from a different party. For example, it gives incentives for Putin to assassinate the President and VP and get a President who is likely to cut off US support for Ukraine. Especially if he can do this without it being traced back to Russia.
Liked the article! Matches my intuitions on norm violations. I think you hinted at this -- there are economic benefits to upholding norms. A society where most folks follow the "don't steal" norm (ie, a high trust society), is a lot more efficient. You have to allocate far less resources to deter and prevent theft.
Humans will always be walking the balance beam between deontology and utilitarianism, but as you pointed out, predicting outcomes is a difficult thing to do. If the smartest minds/best algorithms out there can't accurately make financial predictions based on concrete data, how can we know whether there will be net positive or negative outcomes of extremely complex social phenomena? We're not great at it even at an individual level.
A large part of the reason we have the norm in the first place is because we think the long run consequences of norm violation are net negative. My claim is that we should inspect the assumptions behind why we have the norm in the first place and be attentive to when those reasons no longer hold. Of course, we can't actually get it right precisely, but we already have laws and norms because we can somewhat do this.