Should you kill that mosquito? Original Position and Reincarnation

[cpollett]

It's summer time here in North America and there are plenty of mosquitos to bite around. My first question is it moral to squish them?

One way to judge the morality of an action is to consider it in terms of something like Rawl's original position. That is, you consider the starting space of all people who might potentially squish mosquitos together with all the mosquitos who potentially might be squished or spared from squishing. The probability of carrying out the action is fair/just/moral provided that if you didn't know what individual human or mosquito you would be assigned to in advance, you would adopt to have the action carried out with that probability.

Each individual in the space has a different pay off for either squishing, not squishing, being squished, not being squished. There are many more mosquitoes than humans. Humans probably have a larger space of opportunities to understanding than mosquitoes. Since the action might be carried out more than once, it is probably an iterated game (hence, the reincarnation in the title).

You could probably come up with some game theory model for this. I haven't. My second question is, does anyone know of results where people have worked this kind of stuff out?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Mosquitos are the reincarnation of people who molested children or drove slowly in the fast lane in a previous life. They have not yet received sufficient karmic retribution for their crimes and deserve to get squished.

Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

 

[another1]

If reincarnation is really a thing, it makes sense to kill everything as fast as we can? Mosquitos, baby seals, stray dogs... Killing them on sight would help the reincarnating souls climb the magic ladder faster?

But there is also the possibility that killing a bug may ultimately result in a murderer incarnating sooner than they would have. When you burned that ant mound because you were bored, did you unleash a horde of rapists through the magic reincarnation portal? The butterfly effect thing. I never kill a butterflies though. It takes a lot of grit to kill a butterfly. They are pretty high on the incarnation list. Butterflies will probably be DMV workers in some distant future. They're good. Mosquitos probably raped someone, if the popular reincarnation theory is true. I don't hesitate to kill them because they carry diseases, forget the myth that they have a soul inside them.

Personally I think we're all the same person, interacting with ourselves in a way that sounds stupid to explain. I'm not even going to try unless you ask, and you wont. You can't reincarnate as a bug, so kill them all. They don't have souls.

 

[sharon45]

There are many more mosquitoes than humans. Humans probably have a larger space of opportunities to understanding than mosquitoes.

Uh, ya think? Come on, nematodes pretty much rule out the so-called sense of reincarnation. Nature is already immoral when it can not help to honestly justify a serial rapist, child molester, and mass-murderer. Right, I am not supposed to kill a mosquito, yet a bat can eat its own body weight in them every night.

 

[Bomb#20]

One way to judge the morality of an action is to consider it in terms of something like Rawl's original position. That is, you consider the starting space of all people who might potentially squish mosquitos together with all the mosquitos who potentially might be squished or spared from squishing. The probability of carrying out the action is fair/just/moral provided that if you didn't know what individual human or mosquito you would be assigned to in advance, you would adopt to have the action carried out with that probability.

But the whole point of Rawls' original position argument is to not take that probability into account. If you took the probability that you're this or that individual into account then all you'd get out of his line of reasoning is plain old Utilitarianism. To get his maximize-the-minimum conclusion Rawls has to appeal to risk aversion -- to his reader imagining himself in the original position and feeling the fear that he'll end up at the bottom regardless of how improbable that may be.

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Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern monkey interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

FIFY.

 

[cpollett]

But the whole point of Rawls' original position argument is to not take that probability into account. If you took the probability that you're this or that individual into account then all you'd get out of his line of reasoning is plain old Utilitarianism. To get his maximize-the-minimum conclusion Rawls has to appeal to risk aversion -- to his reader imagining himself in the original position and feeling the fear that he'll end up at the bottom regardless of how improbable that may be.

What I wrote above is not completely thought out, which was why I was asking if people had seen game theory analyses of this type carried out. But it is not completely removed from the rest of Rawl's argument either. Suppose we have two players H (human) and M mosquito and two outcomes S (squish) and N (no squish). A very crude attempt at a pay-off matrix with made up numbers might be:

       S  N
H  -.01 -1. (it takes effort to squish, so still has a little cost)
M   -10  1 

As you said, Rawls talks about us being blind as to what are the odds of being in the H row situation or the M row situation, and so we should definitely not squish because we might sometimes be a mosquito. A more utilitarian view would be to try to work out the probability you are in row H versus M and determine you are more likely to be a mosquito and so definitely not squish. I was suggesting that maybe there is some model/rationalization that might be in keeping with a Rawl's type notion of justice in which it is okay to squish.
I'm not sure what that would be, but I was trying to think if one did something like rather than have a pure strategy of always squishing or not squishing, you squish with a certain probability. The other change I was thinking was something along the lines that the game is not just played once, but iterated. Whether the action strategy is fair/just must be with respect to the iterated game. Maybe also the matrix needs to be expanded with an extra column where the human doesn't notice the mosquito and so doesn't squish. So there is another probability floating around that the player doesn't control.

 

[cpollett]

Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

 

[cpollett]

Here's a set up I can think of where it might be more to squish the mosquito...
One round of the bite the human game has payoff

H -0.1
M 1

If you don't squish the mosquito, another round is played. If you do squish the mosquito, the game stops.
If you didn't know in advance whether you were H (the human) or M (the mosquito), then if you squish,
in the worst case you are a human who has lost only -0.1. If you don't squish, and you happen to be human
then you have lost -0.2. So its justified to squish the mosquito.

In my original game up there where we add a column

        S     N  .9D

H    -.01   -1.  -1

M    -10     1   1

where D in the above means don't notice and the .9 indicates the odds we don't notice.
In this case, the expected payoffs if we always squish when we notice versus we never squish when we notice become:

        S         N 

H    -.9901   -1.

M     .8         1 

Here we compute the M-S entry as .1*-10 + .9*1 = .8. The effect of adding the random don't notice column seems to be to make it more morally ambiguous whether to squish or not in the original game.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

Well, there is no objective theory of morality. It's all completely subjective and based on what we want it to be. Space aliens would be included in the "human" definition if they're intelligent, since they're groups which we'd need a set of rules to interact with. Insects don't require such a thing.

 

[Treedbear]

Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

If the space aliens are intelligent they have a moral code of some sort that governs their interactions between themselves as well as their environment. Just like humans do. If they are far more intelligent than us that moral code might not include as much regard for the wellfare of such dissimilar creatures as humans as they would if we were more equal. If it turns out that intelligence isn't all that important as a survival tool and it's just another case of our narcissitic anthropomorphism showing then they might just consider us on par with mosquitos. But to be truly objective about morality as an area of study one needs to see it from a non-human point of view. In that case even mosquitos can act in ways that are moral. It's simply about survival. For humans and other intelligent species it's something that evolves culturally. For mosquitos it's pretty much just genetic and epigenetic. Sucking blood from mammals is the moral thing for mosquitos to do. Swatting mosquitos is the moral thing for humans to do, although eliminating all mosquitos might have some unfortunate consequences. There is no universal moral code other than survival because that principle places all species, and to some extent all individuals, into competition and potential conflict. That's why in practical application it has to be interpreted subjectively.

 

[cpollett]

That's why in practical application it has to be interpreted subjectively.

I think it will be interpreted subjectively/heuristically until people come up with better models for the moral questions at hand. I believe that at some point it will be possible to analyze a wide variety of ethical/moral questions and come up with definite answers with respect to a given model. Just like any science, people will then propose different models and with respect to a defined list of criteria say which one is better than the other. Just because there might not be a single best model for all situations doesn't mean that one can't develop objective models which capture specific criteria for a situation and allow us to say something definite.

 

[J842P]

But the whole point of Rawls' original position argument is to not take that probability into account. If you took the probability that you're this or that individual into account then all you'd get out of his line of reasoning is plain old Utilitarianism. To get his maximize-the-minimum conclusion Rawls has to appeal to risk aversion -- to his reader imagining himself in the original position and feeling the fear that he'll end up at the bottom regardless of how improbable that may be.

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Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern monkey interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

FIFY.

And it all reduces to emotivism in the end

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Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

Why should it?

We can objectively measure the snouts of dogs. Does that mean we can objectively measure the snouts of starfish?

You are going to have to fill in some of your reasoning here...

 

[cpollett]

Either that, or morality is a device designed to govern human interactions with each other and doesn't apply to how we treat insects.

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

Why should it?

We can objectively measure the snouts of dogs. Does that mean we can objectively measure the snouts of starfish?

You are going to have to fill in some of your reasoning here...

The starfish's snout has length 0. I appreciate the point that the theory might not be very meaningful for some domains. An objective moral theory would probably have results of the form, if these conditions are met, then this is a model of such-and-such moral problem, and here are some consequences of the model.

 

[Keith&Co.]

It's summer time here in North America and there are plenty of mosquitos to bite around. My first question is it moral to squish them?

If reincarnation is real, and if it has a director (agency, committee or bureaucracy), then presumably the reason people are reincarnated into mosquitoes is because they deserve to suffer what happens to mosquitoes.
So whether they're squashed by humans or eaten by bats/birds/dragonflies, that's what's supposed to happen to them.

If there is no director to reincarnation, it's just souls picking places to hang out for an incarnation, and nothing you do to a mosquito will change where you end up in your next life.

If there is no reincarnation, then they're just fucking mosquitoes.

Actually, they're just fucking mosquitoes no matter what. They just may or may not have a soul attached that 'matters' in some grand scheme. But whether or not it matters in a grand scheme doesn't change the fact that i had a mosquito bite on my dick, once, and there's all SORTS of people i'd send straight to Hell to prevent that happening again....

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The starfish's snout has length 0.

Feel free to show your work in reaching this conclusion... Or at least describe how you determined the location to take your measurements at.

 

[Treedbear]

That's why in practical application it has to be interpreted subjectively.

I think it will be interpreted subjectively/heuristically until people come up with better models for the moral questions at hand. I believe that at some point it will be possible to analyze a wide variety of ethical/moral questions and come up with definite answers with respect to a given model. Just like any science, people will then propose different models and with respect to a defined list of criteria say which one is better than the other. Just because there might not be a single best model for all situations doesn't mean that one can't develop objective models which capture specific criteria for a situation and allow us to say something definite.

The problem arises with the choice of context. There are moral relationships between individuals, families, communities, regions, countries, etc. And they often conflict. We have moral obligations to each of these as well as to our own selves. They all need to be weighed. I don't see how to create a practical model that doesn't.

 

[cpollett]

If reincarnation is real, and if it has a director (agency, committee or bureaucracy), then presumably the reason people are reincarnated into mosquitoes is because they deserve to suffer what happens to mosquitoes.
So whether they're squashed by humans or eaten by bats/birds/dragonflies, that's what's supposed to happen to them.

If there is no director to reincarnation, it's just souls picking places to hang out for an incarnation, and nothing you do to a mosquito will change where you end up in your next life.

If there is no reincarnation, then they're just fucking mosquitoes.

Assume it is an adversary who is deciding how you are reincarnated. I.e., assume the worse case, and then ask would you still think the (law is just)/(action is fair). I brought reincarnation in because, I have known people, and may even had done this myself from time to time, to be careful to let a spider crawl onto paper then set it outside rather than kill it, or to open window to get a fly to go outside rather than swat it, and have heard reincarnation justifications for these actions. If you like, you can imagine it is a video game played between multiple players, each with more than one life. Or you can imagine it as a game first between you and a mosquito then against you and a space alien to which you are a mere insect, followed by a game between that space alien and an even stronger one.

The starfish's snout has length 0.

Feel free to show your work in reaching this conclusion... Or at least describe how you determined the location to take your measurements at.

I guess I was failing to be silly in my response above. To me the statement, "how long is a starfish's snout" asks the evaluator to return a numeric quantity for a nonexistent property. In programming languages, there are lots of ways this may be handled. The one that follows the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle best, at least in the short run, is to return 0.

 

[cpollett]

The problem arises with the choice of context. There are moral relationships between individuals, families, communities, regions, countries, etc. And they often conflict. We have moral obligations to each of these as well as to our own selves. They all need to be weighed. I don't see how to create a practical model that doesn't.

I agree these are all problems that would have to be considered. To the degree that I know any game theory/decision theory, which is not my area, the models I have seen considered are not that complex yet. But I don't see any impediment to better models that would handle these things from eventually being developed. As these models develop I am sure they will inform our current moral attitudes and behaviors.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Assume it is an adversary who is deciding how you are reincarnated. I.e., assume the worse case, and then ask would you still think the (law is just)/(action is fair).

Did i say just or fair?
I said it's the purpose of reincarnating someone as a mosquito. I don't know what the standards are that this disposition judge is using, but if he's an adversary, it doesn't matter a damn what i do, does it? Even if i don't swat the mosquito, he'll find something else to screw me over for.

to be careful to let a spider crawl onto paper then set it outside rather than kill it, or to open window to get a fly to go outside rather than swat it, and have heard reincarnation justifications for these actions.

I've done this, and do not require reincarnation as a justification. I've done this and I'm an atheist.
THere are bugs that are threats and i kill them. There are bugs that are actually beneficial, but i still don't want them crawling across my forehead in the night. I remove them as harmlessly as possible because i can. Not because i expect a reward or hope to avoid a punishment, but because it's in my self interest that beneficial bugs live, just, not in my bedroom.

Or you can imagine it as a game first between you and a mosquito then against you and a space alien to which you are a mere insect, followed by a game between that space alien and an even stronger one.

I don't see how game theory changes my estimation of the situation. Either our reincarnation doesn't matter, or the 'matter' is entirely based on the life most mosquitoes suffer through.

I guess I was failing to be silly in my response above. To me the statement, "how long is a starfish's snout" asks the evaluator to return a numeric quantity for a nonexistent property.

To me, the question asks the student to evaluate if the original question makes sense, in light of trying to apply it to a comparable situation.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Assume it is an adversary who is deciding how you are reincarnated. I.e., assume the worse case, and then ask would you still think the (law is just)/(action is fair). I brought reincarnation in because, I have known people, and may even had done this myself from time to time, to be careful to let a spider crawl onto paper then set it outside rather than kill it, or to open window to get a fly to go outside rather than swat it, and have heard reincarnation justifications for these actions.

But, that's a bad justification.

Regardless of who is in control of reincarnation, getting reborn as a spider or a mosquito is a negative. Either you fucked up and are receiving karmic retribution or someone is punishing you because they're a divine dickhead.

Regardless of the reason that they got reborn as an insect, you are doing their soul a favour by ending that lifetime as quickly as possible and letting them move on to a potentially better one. They go from "Oh shit, I'm a frigging mosquito" to SPLAT - "Yay, now I'm a puppy". It's kind of a win for them.

 

[Kharakov]

Does Karma end when you're a fundamental particle?

What if you cause higher order beings to exist by your existence, without being aware of it?