{"id":1012,"date":"2011-11-16T16:49:42","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T21:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=1012"},"modified":"2012-11-23T00:30:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T05:30:18","slug":"not-even-if-its-the-right-thing-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/11\/not-even-if-its-the-right-thing-to-do.html","title":{"rendered":"Not Even if it’s the Right Thing to Do"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Overturning tables (and also paradigms)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

So after kicking around the idea of sin-eating \u2014 trying to take on the burden of someone else\u2019s evil, I still think it might theoretically be a moral act, but I\u2019ve come around to recommending that nobody do it. \u00a0It seems to fit neatly into the type of ethical injunctions<\/a> Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended for computers (and people):<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should never, ever murder an innocent person who\u2019s helped you, even if it\u2019s the right thing to do<\/em>; because it\u2019s far more likely that you\u2019ve made a mistake<\/em>, than that murdering an innocent person who helped you is the right thing to do.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And once you spend a long time discussing the ethics of a decision you know you should never make, you should suspect you\u2019ve strayed into High Energy Theoretical Ethics<\/a> \u2014 a nice place to visit, but a bad place to stay. \u00a0So I\u2019d like to change topics to a different instantiation of don\u2019t do [X] even when you think it\u2019s right<\/em>, and this one has a little more real-world\u00a0applicability.<\/p>\n

In the RCIA class I attend, everyone was asked to read the Gospel of Mark and share their impressions of Jesus. I was struck by the revolutionary nature of Jesus\u2019s preaching. In the space of the shortest gospel, he breaks the Sabbath by performing miracles, disavows the old halachic rules for food, and overthrows the law of Moses as a stop-gap measure<\/a>, not the fullness of truth. \u00a0It\u2019s a radical revaluing of values, and I wanted to know how the Jews were supposed to know that they were right to take a leap of faith and value their own judgement of Jesus\u2019s power above the ethical injunction that would have told them to stick with Moses.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to wait until the New Testament to find an example of people overriding their ethical safeguards; it\u2019s hard to do better than the story of Abraham and Isaac<\/a>. \u00a0And I still find all these stories frightening. \u00a0I expect that when you\u2019re willing to trust enough to murder your son, you\u2019re probably over-trusting in a number of other circumstances, even if they\u2019re less dire. \u00a0How important is the divine signal, and how much noise are you prepared to treat as holy edict?<\/p>\n

This is pretty much the \u201chow do you pick a teacher<\/a>\u201d question writ large. \u00a0Do we trust ourselves enough to know which moral rules we\u2019re wise enough to ignore? \u00a0I doubt it. \u00a0I have trouble imagining how you can be so open to radical moral shifts without making a lot of high stakes mistakes. \u00a0You don\u2019t need to be an atheist to acknowledge that the vast<\/a> majority<\/a> of people<\/a> who hear a god<\/a> telling them to do counterintuitive or frightening things are misguided.<\/p>\n

So, even if the lay Jews listening to Jesus were correct to throw over their old allegiances and ethics, how could their decision be epistemologically justified? \u00a0What cognitive framework lets you make correct leaps of faith without making a lot of false positive errors that can put you and everyone you love in serious danger?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So after kicking around the idea of sin-eating \u2014 trying to take on the burden of someone else\u2019s evil, I still think it might theoretically be a moral act, but I\u2019ve come around to recommending that nobody do it. \u00a0It seems to fit neatly into the type of ethical injunctions Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended for computers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","tag-sin-eatersdirty-hands"],"yoast_head":"\nNot Even if it's the Right Thing to Do<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So after kicking around the idea of sin-eating -- trying to take on the burden of someone else's evil, I still think it might theoretically be a moral\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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