Right, and of course the hypothetical is set up so the cabal doesn’t kill Hitler to prevent the war, they’re killing Hitler’s innocent housekeeper. But you’re preventing suffering! Therefore the only moral stance is to stand proudly atop the mountain of corpses you created, all in the name of the greater good!
As Robespierre put it:
Everyone who dislikes the hypothetical, your cookies are at my house, and I’m glad you stopped by the thread to say so! Consider yourself heard and me duly chastised, and I hope you can find a thread of greater quality to post in.
I think Lemur and greenmario are representing the different ends of the spectrum of the interesting arguments. Yes, certainly such a cabal should continue looking for alternate, less-lethal solutions. But given the premise–that they’ve offered convincing evidence (not merely their say-so) of the efficacy of their methods, and of the urgency of continuing the methods–what should be done in the meantime? Should their murders stop immediately, if that risks a war in which more innocent people will die?
If they convince me that they can’t stop killing people now, I’d want to hear their credible plan to get to a point where they don’t have to kill people. If they don’t have such a plan, I turn them in. I agree with those who note that any such cabal that has this extraordinary capability and does not also have the capability of finding a non-lethal method of dealing with these key individuals can’t be believed to actually have such an extraordinary capability in the first place. Otherwise, the hypothetical is essentially magic, and once we stray into the realm of magic, then we can always come up with better magic to fix the problem.
LHoD, does my “Godlike aliens grab you and show you two visions of the future: one with world government that murders 20 people per year but is otherwise perfect and peaceful, or one with widespread unrest and disruption resulting in thousands dead from war each year – you must choose one or the Earth will be disintegrated” hypothetical answer the same central question as yours? If so, I think it’s much harder to weasel/nitpick/etc., and feel free to use it if that’s the question you’re trying to get at.
I don’t dislike the hypothetical, which means I don’t get a cookie. That makes me sad.
I still maintain I’d back away quickly and maintain my silence, though. Consider the possibilities:
There is a cabal of people who can, by whatever method, reliably predict and compare futures based on various actions they take at least well enough to prevent events that would threaten world peace. I found out about their scheme, and they’re begging me to choose to keep silence else something bad will happen. Oh, and these people are willing to kill people for the greater good, and are convinced that they serve the greater good.
In this scenario, I can be pretty sure that they either predicted I would discover them and decided it didn’t matter if I did, or they didn’t predict that I would discover them, which means that my actions will not threaten world peace.
This means that one of these situations must be the case:
The problem with 2a is that if it really wouldn’t matter if I told, they’d know that, and wouldn’t bother trying to convince me not to tell. So 2a is probably not the case.
2b, on the other hand, suggests that because I can speak freely without imperiling world peace, no matter whether these guys can see the future or not, I might as well reveal them and topple them if they happen to be no longer necessary. But there’s a wrinkle here: whether or not this cabal is actually necessary to world peace, or whether they just think they are, they’re self-admittedly willing to kill to achieve their goals. If they think I’m taking them down they’re nigh-certain to come for my head. No thanks!
And for those who are fighting the hypothetical and insist they can’t predict the future, well, they either think they can, or are pretending to think they can in a flimsy attempt to justify their habit of murdering people now and then. And in either case they murder people to achieve their goals. If they think they can they’re the same as case 2b - they will totally murder you for speaking out. And if they’re faking it then they’ll super kill you if you speak out. These guys are killers, man! Don’t screw with them!
Maybe? IME people who nitpick hypotheticals aren’t as concerned about the hypothetical as they are about demonstrating that they’re clever and are super good at winning, so I’m not especially interested in changing the hypothetical to meet their demands. But if that helps people tamp down the need to show how clever they are, then sure, that gets at essentially the same question.
There’s 3:
3) They’re very good at making predictions on a large scale about social trends, and once they have a large scale prediction, they can drill down to find specific individuals whose death will alter these trends, but that’s basically the high point of their predictive powers. They cannot predict incredibly unlikely, once-every-two-centuries events, such as the fluke that led to their discovery by you. Consequently they’re not in a position to assassinate you before you reveal what they’ve done.
Again, though, you’re basically fighting the hypothetical here. The interesting part isn’t questioning whether they really have predictive powers (stipulate that you’ve seen convincing evidence), nor is it asking whether you’re able to reveal their presence in a way that’d undercut their abilities. Questioning that shit is just hypothetical-fighting that’s about as interesting as “Bang I shot you!” “No you didn’t you missed!” and I’ve no time for that.
It’s only interesting to discuss if you get at the central question: is this devil’s bargain worth making?
This is fair, I think; ignoring the cabal’s claim (of being able to read the future) and simply dealing with their demonstrated willingness to commit murder, might be the only reasonable course open to our hypothetical protagonist.
I disagree with your ‘don’t screw with them’ conclusion, though: if they know the H.P. is on to them, the H.P.'s decision to avoid screwing with them won’t mean anything to them (because they can’t assume that they know what the H.P. is really thinking). Once they know that H.P. knows, they are highly likely to decide to kill H.P. no matter what action H.P. takes.
So–assuming that H.P. wants to live–H.P. should nark on them if he or she can be certain they will be neutralized (taken into custody or whatever) immediately. If that certainty isn’t there, then H.P. should hide, and nark on them discreetly if possible, knowing that a long term of staying in hiding, while the system grinds slowly in investigation of the cabal, probably lies ahead.
The greatest error H.P. could commit would be to agonize over whether or not the cabal’s claim of prescience is valid. This is impossible to prove either way.
The second greatest error would be to try to convince the cabal to stop murdering and start using their supposed powers to remove the identified key people in non-lethal ways…because they’re not going to stop murdering. Whether they have their claimed power or not: if they do have the claimed power then they could have been using non-lethal methods all along; they just don’t want to. And if they don’t have their claimed power, then they just enjoy murdering. They won’t stop.
…No one will write a best-seller using this approach, of course, because it lacks the delicious self-importance of the ‘only I can make the decision that could plunge the world into war, or save it’ theme.
Whether they managed to predict my behavior or not, they are armed, willing to kill, and know I’m there now. I don’t personally have the guts to challenge that, because I like breathing.
If you liked you could alter the hypothetical such that they’re unaware of my existence and I know it - perhaps I hid in a large air duct over their conference room and listened to their new employee orientation ceremony where they begged the applicants not to tattle on them.
Or perhaps you could alter the hypothetical such that I don’t fear death, or am invulnerable to harm or inconvenience.
But regarding this “devil’s bargain”: I presume you want an assessment unsullied by the idea of persuading them to use something other than murder as a way to influence the timeline, and unsullied by interrogations and questions of alternate motives and side effects of their machinations. You simply want an answer to “do the ends justify the means?”
The answer, of course, is have they murdered anybody I like? If so I clearly must storm their complex with an AK47 in each hand - or at least stand on a street corner and shout about them until I’m pelted with garbage and dragged off. Failing that, who cares if they murder people. All governments murder people. And they’re clearly the world’s government, whether the world knows it or not.
Killing Lincoln or Washington wouldn’t have prevented war.
Even if it would, it isn’t the only way.
I specified both of these in my post. You might take more effort to rebut what people actually say, instead of grotesque distortions thereof.
This reminds me of yet another fiction idea I’ll never get around to: a TV drama series about a secret group run by the Vatican that for 1800 years has been postponing the Apocalypse by assassinating all the people who would otherwise have become the Antichrist.
However you want to alter the hypothetical so you’re addressing the central interesting question instead of fighting the hypothetical sounds nifty.
What’s your opinion LHoD? There was a Great Debates thread awhile back that gave me the impression that you would probably let them continue, given that the evidence was sufficient.
I like that concept for you have the problem that the Vatican is now actively denying God’s plan to the displeasure of both people who want God’s revealed plan to come forth and, of course, God.
Well, that’s why I posted it. Letting them continue is clearly a villainous act, especially since I know the chances of my–or my loved ones–suffering from it would be so low. But revealing them seems to steer the train toward the deaths of millions of people. Even if revealing them then opens the door to allowing a greater vote on the subject, I’m not sure how many victims of the ensuing bombings will be comforted in their last moments by thoughts of majority votes.
I think in this case that I’d keep the secret (again, of course, stipulating persuasive evidence that their methods are both effective and the best they’ve been able to come up with), and live with my complicity in villainy; to do otherwise, to reveal their murders in order to keep myself pure, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of other lives, seems to me the worse villainy.
So, you’re right in guessing what I’d do, but I kinda hope someone can convince me to change my mind :).
Several things left unclear:
(1) is killing the ONLY thing they do? Ie, if they detect 100 upcoming turning points where war is likely, do the kill 100 people, or do they do their best to find non-lethal ways to avoid the upcoming turning points, and succeed in 97/100 instances, and only kill someone in 3/100?
(2) Is their mission “prevent all war no matter what” or “prevent human suffering”? If a war to overthrow Kim Jong Un will have 1000 casualties, but will lead to the gradual democratization and bettering of North Korea, do they prevent that war just because preventing war is the thing they do?
Interesting. Let’s say:
Murder truly is the best solution to all problems. Or at least it’s cheaper than bribery and more effective than asking nicely. It’s pretty clear that anybody who can predict outcomes like this could come up with less murdery and more rube-goldbergy ways of deterring or distracting of kidnapping/replacing the problematic people, but if there are only a few of them and the only real skills they have are prediction and murdering highly protected people, it’s actually quite reasonably that they would adopt such final methods.
Then I answered your hypothetical in the post quoted: the ends justify the means, unless the ends involved doing something I really don’t like. It’s all well and good to recognize that it would be objectively evil to stop this cabal (even if you didn’t use the obvious method: a single bullet flying in a circle to hit everyone in the room) but if they do something that really hits me on an emotional level, then logic goes out the window. To the detriment of all concerned because emotional reactions are bad things to wholly base life-and-death decisions on.
It might be instructive to compare this to the classic thought experiment about the train that’s careening towards a dozen doe-eyed orphans, with you standing next to a switch that will divert the train onto a different track with only one orphan. Will you MuRdEr that single innocent orphan, or stand by and be in no way culpable for the dozens that will die if you do nothing?
The reason this comparison is instructive is because in this case you’re choosing between two trains: the cabal which careens toward a handful of innocents, and unchecked reality that careens toward tens of thousands of innocents. You are standing at a switch which can stop one train at the expense of starting the other - and inaction kills fewer people. So why would you want to flip the switch?
At the moment, in the hypothetical, you’re not actually affiliated with the cabal. Is there any specific reason for you to feel responsible enough to take on their choices?
Absolutely a good comparison (and I also think the references to Omelas are on-point).
The difference, as I see it, is that there are two trains, as you say. I can’t stop the war train; I have no influence there. I do have influence over the murder train. At first blush, stopping the evil that I can immediately stop seems like a great idea.
What complicates the arrangement is that I kinda do have influence over the war train: the evidence has convinced me that if I stop the murders, I’ll restart the wars, albeit uncertainly and indirectly. Is the distance I’m removed from restarting wars sufficient to make me not responsible for their resumption? Is the uncertainty involved enough to absolve me?
I tend to think it’s not. My basic moral code says that I share responsibility for the foreseeable outcomes of my decisions. If I stay silent, I share responsibility for the murders that I enable. If I speak, I share responsibility for the wars I enable. My finger may never touch the trigger, but I’m not sure that that’s important.
For folks curious about the book, I’ll try to give a quick summary of how the conspiracy works. Major major spoilers for the books mentioned in the OP spoiler:
[spoiler]It’s about 500 years in the future. Transportation is revolutionized by supersonic “flying cars” that can traverse the globe in a matter of a few hours with almost no pollution; there are billions of them in the air at any point. Increased transportation has rendered nation-states obsolete, and instead people choose the “Hive” that they join, the group of people with a philosophy and set of laws they like.
The whole transportation system is controlled by “Set-sets,” people raised since infancy connected to computers that translate data into direct sensory input. They get data from all the vehicles in real-time fed into sensors across their skin, tongues, ears, eyes. Here’s the second, key technology: these set-sets understand data on a nearly intuitive level that makes them almost metahuman. The normal senses the rest of us have, they don’t; but the world of data they live in is virtually an alternate universe connected to ours. Imagine each point of data as roughly equivalent to a molecule of water, where you don’t feel that point as much as you feel the slosh of the wave–except the difference is that they can also zoom in to feel an individual molecule if they think it’s important.
They are, of course, the ones who can predict social patterns. The amount of data they have on everyone on earth is unparalleled, and they use this data to make predictions. There aren’t very many of them, so their power is limited; but one of them, for example, is also an amateur chemist, and can make nearly undetectable poisons.
There’s way, way more to it, but that’s the basic premise. And if you want to fight it, the author is Ada Palmer, and I’m sure you can find her email address online :).[/spoiler]