"Victimless act" as defined as "not invoking harm to anyone but the self". This poll isn't for any higher purpose, I'm just interested to see how secular Manifold responds.
1,000"Victimless act" as defined as "not invoking harm to anyone but the self".
Very odd definition, if it harms yourself then you are a victim and it is not a victimless act
Is any act really victimless though? If downstream consequences are considered. Maybe that's too abstract
@MalachiteEagle tfw I saved several galaxies from eternal hellish torture but I mildly inconvenienced someone 3 trillion years from now via butterfly effect 😞
Can the victim be other than a person and still qualify as a victim. Thinking specifically about destruction of culture.
@JussiVilleHeiskanen If you undermine or in some way shit all over somebody's culture I imagine the people whose culture it is are the victims, assuming the consequences in some way reach them. Or, if you're the last member of some nearly extinct culture and deliberately erase your cultural knowledge for no reason you're depriving humanity as a whole of your culture's contribution. I can see how in most circumstances these are only weakly immoral but to whatever extent they are is because of the existence of victims other than yourself
@AlexBokov interesting take. What if destruction of culture is beneficial to the people whose culture it is?
@JussiVilleHeiskanen Oh, I'm no deontologist. It's a harm/benefit decision. If you convince the last cannibal to abandon their traditional ancestral diet, on the net you are doing good. But it's not an unalloyed good, its good enough to outweigh the badness of destroying culture.
@AlexBokov Perhaps this could be a steelman of degeneracy? "When you do something that you are formally within your rights to do and doesn't physically harm bystanders. However, you do this activity with disregard for their emotional well-being, and undermining their ability to preserve and spread their culture"
@AlexBokov But that still comes back to being bad because there are victims. I.e. if you spout horrible hateful vile stuff where nobody can possibly hear you, I don't think that's degenerate?
Or maybe... degeneracy is encouraging yourself to become the sort of person who will later care less about not harming others even if right now you don't harm them?
@AlexBokov But then, this is bad because it increases the risk that there will be victims, so we're back to consequentialism
@AlexBokov Assuming the consequentialist framework, this person suddenly becomes by your worldview an amoral actor if they're detained in the ISS, or if they're put in a simulation with no other alive actors, etc.
I guess you helped me understand something about my own intuitions: the class of decisions that matter because of other people are similar to what other people call mortality, while the ones strictly dealing with the utility/safety/happiness of an individual are what other people call pragmatic decisions. Though there is a lot to think about in extreme cases... e.g. if you are the last human, do you have some sort of moral responsibility to preserve information about humans for future intelligent species to find?