Comment by zoogeny
14 hours ago
Your logic doesn't hold up well to simple escalation logic.
Company A founds itself on doing 0 harm to Area X. Competitor B shows up and starts finding success doing 10 harm to Area X, so Company A makes a "moral" decision: If we do 9 harm to Area X, we are preventing 1 entire harm. Isn't that real value? then Company C shows up and starts finding success doing 100 harm to Area X, so Company A changes it's moral stance to "unless we do 99 harm to Area X ..."
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly kind of logic going on here.
I mean, your proposed logic seems to be quite consistent from a basic game theory perspective. Defecting in a prisoners dilemma and races to the bottom are both well observed phenomena.
We have 10,000+ years of human civilization at this point. There must be some other active ethical maxim operating other than "choose the lesser of two evils" to explain why there is so much cooperation amongst humans. Evidence is not on the side of the preeminence of races to the bottom.
You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.
> You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.
Well aware. Obviously, the entirety of human civilization is a bit more complicated than a prisoners dilemma, iterated or not. Yet prisoners dilemma's and races to the bottom still exist, and it makes no sense to argue against them in the abstract.
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