EA - Beware frictions from altruistic value differences by Magnus Vinding

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Beware frictions from altruistic value differences, published by Magnus Vinding on December 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I believe value differences pose some underappreciated challenges in large-scale altruistic efforts. My aim in this post is to outline what I see as the main such challenges, and to present a few psychological reasons as to why we should expect these challenges to be significant and difficult to overcome.To clarify, my aim in this post is not to make a case against value differences per se, much less a case against vigorous debate over values (I believe that such debate is healthy and desirable). Instead, my aim is to highlight some of the challenges and pitfalls that are associated with value differences, in the hope that we can better mitigate these pitfalls. After all, value differences are sure to persist among people who are trying to help others, and hence a critical issue is how well — or how poorly — we are going to handle these differences.Examples of challenges posed by value differences among altruistsA key challenge posed by value differences, in my view, is that they can make us prone to tribal or otherwise antagonistic dynamics that are suboptimal by the lights of our own moral values. Such values-related frictions may in turn lead to the following pitfalls and failure modes:Failing to achieve moral aims that are already widely shared, such as avoiding worst-case outcomes (cf. “Common ground for longtermists”).Failing to make mutually beneficial moral trades and compromises when possible (in ways that do not introduce problematic behavior such as dishonesty or censorship).Failing to update on arguments, whether they be empirical or values-related, because the arguments are made by those who, to our minds, seem like they belong to the “other side”.Some people committing harmful acts out of spite or primitive tribal instincts. (The sections below give some sense as to why this might happen.)Of course, some of the failure modes listed above can have other causes beyond values- and coalition-related frictions. Yet poorly handled such frictions are probably still a key risk factor for these failure modes.In short, as I see it, the main challenges associated with value differences lie in mitigating the risks that emerge from values-related frictions, such as the risks outlined above.Reasons to expect values-related frictions to be significantThe following are some reasons to expect values-related frictions to be both common and quite difficult to handle by default.Harmful actions based on different moral beliefs may be judged more harshly than intentional harmOne set of findings that seem relevant come from a 2016 anthropological study that examined the moral judgments of people across ten different cultures, eight of which were traditional small-scale societies (Barrett et al., 2016).The study specifically asked people how they would evaluate a harmful act in light of a range of potentially extenuating circumstances, such as different moral beliefs, a mistake of fact, or self-defense. While there was significant variation in people’s moral judgments across cultures, there was nevertheless unanimous agreement that committing a harmful act based on different moral beliefs was not an extenuating circumstance. Indeed, on average across cultures, committing a harmful act based on different moral beliefs was considered worse than was committing the harmful act intentionally (see Barrett et al., 2016, fig. 5).It is unclear whether this pattern in moral judgment necessarily applies to all or even most kinds of acts inspired by different moral beliefs. Yet these results still tentatively suggest that we may be inclined to see value differences as a uniquely aggravating factor in our moral judgments of people’s actions — a...