There seems to be a problem in thinking about the role of government that I don't know how to resolve: For any possible issue, there exists an argument for government intervention due to 3rd party effects / externalities. These arguments are many times very far fetched or highly implausible, or not very important, but people deserve a response to them. A perfect example is kidney sales. It's a very easy argument because the property rights to a kidney are well defined. However, the argument somehow devolves into worrying about the small chance that someone is killed for their kidney and ignores the patients with a 100% chance of needing a kidney. It's almost like there needs to be a social norm established where the burden of proof should be on the person who invokes the sci-fi third party effects that could possibly happen. David Friedman has done a good job of explaining why determining who properly owns a piece of property is far more complicated than most people think. This is where I run into trouble: I don't think efficiently assigning property rights is as easy as some libertarians believe, but I rarely buy other people's externality arguments, and in agreement with your post, government intervention is a new externality problem aimed at fixing another externality problem.
“David Friedman has done a good job of explaining why determining who properly owns a piece of property is far more complicated than most people think.”
I guess there is emphasis on the “properly?” Which book or article are you thinking of?
It might be even more complicated than Friedman thinks. He is silently making some assumptions that may not be justified. Here is an article that accuses economists of having 5 different theories of property, which they take for granted without resolving the controversy.
For instance, Friedman makes utilitarian assumptions which might not always apply. I think it would not be too difficult to think of an example where a very complex rule might be more efficient in some sense, but people would prefer a simple rule that everyone can understand and apply without having to go to court. I guess we could finagle our utilitarianism to count that as more efficient, but that just shows that utilitarianism doesn’t automatically solve this.
So if a particular jurisdiction chooses not to use Friedman's criteria, should we say it isn’t talking about property?
I think I went on too long of a rant to keep my central point in place. Here's where I was going... I'll try every once in a while to start an interesting conversation with a friend on something like "why we should allow people to sell their kidneys." It would seem like that would be the easiest thing to talk about without 3rd party effects to really come up. After all, if I don't own my extra kidney, then nobody owns anything. The transfer of a kidney would follow all the normal rules of a transaction, etc. Yet, my usually very sincere friend will assume that this will lead to any possible problem you can think of.... I guess my point is that even if you set up a "clean" problem that illustrates it can be solved by the market, it's an uphill battle. This problem is compounded when the problem isn't as neat and clean, and the number of objections increases greatly. Also, more of the objections become reasonable.
Sorry, I wasn’t really responding to your point, just digressing on my own hobby horse.
I’m not sure people like your friend know why they think it is icky for people to sell their kidney, or why they think it is a net plus for the legislature to promulgate paternalistic prohibitions. This would almost make sense if there were a fairly reliable mechanism in place that would adjust the law to new circumstances and discoveries, but it’s not clear how anyone can discover a new way to avoid problems if the activity is just prohibited. People who run experiments generally are held to a high ethical standard of informed consent, unless they are members of the legislature. There may be a reason that a different standard applies to them, but I don’t know what it is. One of Huemer's books has debunked most of the reasons people have tried to sell.
I phrase the problem as "How to prevent the strong (including strong coalitions) from preying on the weak?". I think your formulation boils down to much the same thing. (If you disagree, I'm very interested in your thinking.)
You say "crimes are mainly actions that have expected benefits to the agent but larger harms to others". From a rights-oriented viewpoint, there's a huge problem with that statement.
In practice, people do seem sympathetic to cases with apparent positive-sum outcomes - if a starving man steals a piece of bread from a wealthy merchant, there's a rights violation but few people support harsh punishment for such cases. By your formulation, maybe there's no "crime".
But If a sex-starved man rapes a woman, one could argue that the harm to the woman is less than the benefit to the man, but most people would be horrified at the idea that the relative harms and benefits make this "not a crime".
And, of course, your formulation says there's no crime when 5 starving people murder 1 innocent to eat him (saving 5 lives at the expense of 1), and no crime when a stadium of spectators enjoys the torture of a single innocent, provided the benefit to the spectators is greater than harm to the innocent. To me, just because the outcome is positive sum doesn't automatically make it "not a crime".
Re: the strong and the weak, well, a weak person could also commit a crime against a strong person. Or a strong person against another strong person, etc. We want to prevent all of that.
Touché'. Maybe better to say "How to prevent predation between members of society?" Even that presumes a definition of predation that I think requires some kind of rights framework, so its absence in your post seems confusing. Unless you really don't think rights are necessary.
Re "crime", we're both talking about crimes with victims, not crimes of pure "rule breaking" without victims, I think. Where do you stand on acts of predation that are positive-sum? Criminal? Criminal but less serious? Non-criminal? ("Mostly" is kind of vague re what you mean.)
(I know figuring out whether a transaction is positive-sum is itself a hard problem.)
I agree people are by nature self-interested; I see that in myself. However, like you, I have an “altruistic” bent to make the world a better place; hence, my libertarian ideology. This is likely true of millions of people who think their preferred political parties, policies, ideologies, etc. will better serve mankind. How do you explain that bent?
check out Robin hansons and Kevin simlers book "elephant in the brain"
short answer to your question: Most people care far less about policy and actually improving the world, and mostly care about their appearances, how good or smart or loyal or Socialist or - etc they seem.
But knowing this is hard since we are bad liars, and really good at lie detection in others, so we are programmed for self deception.
I disagree. If a person professes to be, say, a socialist, he may not be well-read on the topic, but I see no reason to doubt his sincerity even if he hasn’t cracked any economics books.
I think that selfishness combined with a long term outlook is successful for the individual and for society. If the criminal adds up his long term gains and losses from hurting someone for short-term profit, he/she will realize this is not in their own best interest.
Decent overview of the basic social problem here, but it seems inevitable that part 2 will fail to effectively handle what I consider to be the central (correct) libertarian insight: "Governments are best modeled as stationary bandits who exploit the population over whom they rule in order to extract resources for themselves."
My rejoinder to this insight is: Yes, but *so what*? What are you going to do about it? Governments tend not to willingly sacrifice their power (and why would they?), so if you want to get rid of them you'll have to do a lot of violence. And in the end, you'll wind up where you started, with the group of people most capable of executing organized violence in charge.
Advocating for competition is all well and good. I, too, am an advocate for competition. Markets work, incentives shape behavior, economics is real, etc. I'm not retarded, I'm not a lefty (but I repeat myself), so none of this is new. However, monopolists have no incentive to allow for competition that will drive them out of business, and this is true for governments as well.
You acknowledge that just teaching people to be nice is a fantasy solution. I claim that just teaching governments to allow for competition is no less a fantasy. What say you, Prof Huemer?
(Apologies if my tone seems hostile, as this is not intended to be a rhetorical question. I'd be stoked to have my mind changed about this; I'm not just expecting it.)
Well, about half the world's governments are democratic, which makes them (often) responsive to public opinion. So if public opinion were much more favorable to free markets, then leaders might reduce government intervention in those societies.
>Well, about half the world's governments are democratic, which makes them (often) responsive to public opinion.
Nominally? Sure. Actually? Press X to doubt. Besides, why be responsive to public opinion when you can shape it instead? It'd be downright weird if the most powerful institution in society were a servant rather than the master; that's why elements of the state have been and still are so heavily invested in influencing what people think. They're not all-powerful, but they are pretty good at it - the NPC class enthusiastically licking the boots of the Iraq War architects and going all-in for the latest MIC boondoggle (Slava Ukraini!) is a testament to that, if nothing else.
>So if public opinion were much more favorable to free markets, then leaders might reduce government intervention in those societies.
(1) "Let’s just teach people to be nice."
(2) "Let's just teach people to be much more favorable to free markets."
Why is (1) "The Fantasy Solution" while (2) is not?
You don't believe that something akin to Marx's labor theory of value runs strong evolutionarily in a species with an ancestral environment primarily consisting of small hunter-gatherer bands?
Is that a fact? I've thought for a long time that levels of support for free markets are heavily influenced by human nature and evolution. After all, what isn't? And how else would you explain the overwhelmingly disproportionate support found among people with a particular ancestral/chromosomal makeup, independent of upbringing?
Ev psych explanations for the nigh-universal resistance (if not outright hostility and opposition) to markets may be "just-so stories," but they don't seem crazy to me. I think it was Bret Weinstein/Heather Heying's Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century where I most recently remember encountering the idea that complex traits imposing material costs on their bearers that nevertheless persist within a population over time should presumptively be considered adaptations rather than spandrels, but it definitely wasn't the first.
Seems pretty clear to me that anti-market bias was hardwired into (most of) us by something about our ancestral environment. Certainly hoping I'm wrong, though! Why don't you think so?
It seems if genuine anti-market bias was so hardwired into the majority of people, then we wouldn’t have had anything resembling markets or capitalism well before the Industrial Revolution. Not that I don’t buy into the idea that anti-market bias exists to a strong enough degree.
You don't need *global* anti-market bias to be absent in order for basic markets to emerge; you only need individuals to override their global attitude when it comes to their own particular job, purchases and trades.
By that logic, if genuine selfishness was so hardwired into the majority of people, then we wouldn't have had anything resembling Christianity or charity before the birth of Christ. Evolutionarily-prescribed tendencies aren't necessarily destiny; you can fight them, to an extent. The best religions are even fairly successful at promoting pro-social behaviors over selfish ones. But it's always an uphill battle.
Will you write a post that at some point explains the difference between anarcho-capitalism and individual retaliation? The private police force idea is basically just individuals or groups paying for collective retaliation forces that would operate like a state but with far less oversight as the people choosing them and their victims are entirely different
There is one other version of the Fantasy Solution.
Some people are extremely altruistic, perhaps a similar percentage of the population as the psychopaths. The underlying psychological traits that lead to this behavior also seem (like most psychological traits!) to be highly heritable. Therefore:
2a. The Great Improvement People Find Monstrous
Let's put a lot of effort into artificially selecting / engineering morally better humans. As the first stage, let's put substantial thought into what a rights-respecting, voluntaryist approach to improving the gene pool would look like.
Sure, you *can* train a Queensland Heeler not to bite your friends when they hug you, but it sure takes a lot less work if you start with a Golden Retriever.
Dr. Huemer wrote a post about how psychopaths have a tendency to come across as extremely charismatic. Such a system would result in those psychopaths being successful. It may raise the rate of naturally altruistic people, but would also raise the rate of psychopaths. Therefore, it would fail.
Also, eugenics are evil so maybe let’s not propose that idea
"Also, eugenics are evil so maybe let’s not propose that idea"
This statement is a better candidate for being called "evil", if "evil" means causing a large amount of unnecessary suffering.
The broad concept referred to by the scary "e-word" is nothing more than the counterpart to education, except that we have more reason to believe it'll work. It's not inherently bound to any totalitarian, racist or mass-murdering ideology, any more than education is, even though those ideologies very much supported education as well. It's not hard at all to think of what social-democratic or libertarian approaches to caring about the genomes of future generations would look like. Both involve positive incentives. A social-democratic form worried about racism employs some kind of affirmative action rules. A libertarian version involves voluntary persuasion and markets. And so on. Neither are murderous or repressive at all, let alone genocidal.
Arguments on the topic typically involve both blatant denial of facts (e.g. that partner and child abuse has a large genetic component) and poor ethical reasoning (e.g. that leaving the future generation entirely up to the vagaries of evolved mate selection interacting with modern contraception is somehow an important moral constraint), but then there's always the scary "e-word", the trump card, the conversation-stopper, taboo of all taboos. And that taboo is going to cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering.
The problem is that there is a natural, unalienable right to reproduction if one can find a willing (adult, unrelated) partner. Forced sterilization of so-called psychopaths is thus incredibly immoral. Financial incentives are weird in this scenario as well. If people are taxed or fined for reproducing when the government does not want them to, this violates the right to reproduction. If those who the government wants to have reproduce are instead rewarded, then there is a system where the government is paying psychopaths specifically due to the fact that they are evil. If some UBI is provided to everyone, and people the government doesn’t want reproducing are specifically denied this, it is effectively a fine, which again violates human rights.
Additionally, the point about psychopaths being good manipulators stands.
Okay, let's just stick with the level of rational persuasion and rights-respecting social pressure.
Right now, people with significant rates of child beating in their family are generally advised to "break the cycle": take whatever steps they can not to do it, and then their children will be freed from the cycle!
I think that runs strongly contrary to our best evidence. Someone with propensity to such violence in their genome may avoid its actualization in themself, but when they're passing it on genetically, they're not "breaking a cycle". Their kids will still be more likely than the population average to become abusers, and more likely to require more effort to resist being abusive. The best advice for someone with greatly harm-producing behavior overrepresented in their close genetic kin, and who cares about future welfare, should be to consider not genetically reproducing. So that's how I think you should advise such a friend. No government at all there, just free people discussing a case of applied ethics.
As far as psychopaths being good manipulators and thereby getting hold of whatever the levers of power happen to be, well, my comparison with education still stands. Evil ideologies tend to like using educational intervention to try and change the distribution of human behaviors in society. Psychopaths will presumably be good at getting themselves to the top of education hierarchies. Yet most people don't see these as reasonable grounds for rejecting education wholesale.
What's the difference between advocating rights-respecting, voluntarist "nature" intervention (scary e-word) aimed at reduction of suffering and promotion of flourishing, versus rights-respecting, voluntarist "nurture" intervention (comfy e-word "education") aimed at reduction of suffering and promotion of flourishing, other than that the former is much more likely to be effective?
EDIT: I should add that ethical objections to government subsidies seem orthogonal to the question of whether future "human nature" ought to be taken for granted and all intervention of whatever political form be strictly "nurture". If government subsidizing people to drive electric cars is "well-intentioned, but misguided and unfair to taxpayers", then government subsidizing violent people to not biologically reproduce shouldn't be "the darkest evil idea ever birthed from the depths of Tartarus".
also, a lot of people think someone has to be on top, and they rather be certain who it is than not visibly have someone on top but they are uncertain if it's really the case, or they have to be vigiliant
But studies of anarchist communes have shown that there is always someone on top. If no formal rules are defined, the most charismatic or politically able person(s) will exert disproportionate influence and rule de facto. There is no everyone-is-equal anarchy, not even amongst small groups. This is in my mind not an improvement at all, as others lose the ability and organisation to boot out the leaders if required. And if you try to compensate for that tendency by adding check and balances to de facto rulers... well, you end up with a formal system of government again.
There seems to be a problem in thinking about the role of government that I don't know how to resolve: For any possible issue, there exists an argument for government intervention due to 3rd party effects / externalities. These arguments are many times very far fetched or highly implausible, or not very important, but people deserve a response to them. A perfect example is kidney sales. It's a very easy argument because the property rights to a kidney are well defined. However, the argument somehow devolves into worrying about the small chance that someone is killed for their kidney and ignores the patients with a 100% chance of needing a kidney. It's almost like there needs to be a social norm established where the burden of proof should be on the person who invokes the sci-fi third party effects that could possibly happen. David Friedman has done a good job of explaining why determining who properly owns a piece of property is far more complicated than most people think. This is where I run into trouble: I don't think efficiently assigning property rights is as easy as some libertarians believe, but I rarely buy other people's externality arguments, and in agreement with your post, government intervention is a new externality problem aimed at fixing another externality problem.
“David Friedman has done a good job of explaining why determining who properly owns a piece of property is far more complicated than most people think.”
I guess there is emphasis on the “properly?” Which book or article are you thinking of?
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch_10.htm
I guess "properly" wasn't the right word, but this piece should show the complexity of the problem fairly quickly.
It might be even more complicated than Friedman thinks. He is silently making some assumptions that may not be justified. Here is an article that accuses economists of having 5 different theories of property, which they take for granted without resolving the controversy.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-7976.2011.01238.x
For instance, Friedman makes utilitarian assumptions which might not always apply. I think it would not be too difficult to think of an example where a very complex rule might be more efficient in some sense, but people would prefer a simple rule that everyone can understand and apply without having to go to court. I guess we could finagle our utilitarianism to count that as more efficient, but that just shows that utilitarianism doesn’t automatically solve this.
So if a particular jurisdiction chooses not to use Friedman's criteria, should we say it isn’t talking about property?
I think I went on too long of a rant to keep my central point in place. Here's where I was going... I'll try every once in a while to start an interesting conversation with a friend on something like "why we should allow people to sell their kidneys." It would seem like that would be the easiest thing to talk about without 3rd party effects to really come up. After all, if I don't own my extra kidney, then nobody owns anything. The transfer of a kidney would follow all the normal rules of a transaction, etc. Yet, my usually very sincere friend will assume that this will lead to any possible problem you can think of.... I guess my point is that even if you set up a "clean" problem that illustrates it can be solved by the market, it's an uphill battle. This problem is compounded when the problem isn't as neat and clean, and the number of objections increases greatly. Also, more of the objections become reasonable.
Sorry, I wasn’t really responding to your point, just digressing on my own hobby horse.
I’m not sure people like your friend know why they think it is icky for people to sell their kidney, or why they think it is a net plus for the legislature to promulgate paternalistic prohibitions. This would almost make sense if there were a fairly reliable mechanism in place that would adjust the law to new circumstances and discoveries, but it’s not clear how anyone can discover a new way to avoid problems if the activity is just prohibited. People who run experiments generally are held to a high ethical standard of informed consent, unless they are members of the legislature. There may be a reason that a different standard applies to them, but I don’t know what it is. One of Huemer's books has debunked most of the reasons people have tried to sell.
I think I learned about intuitionism far too late. I got the reputation of being "that guy" lol.
I phrase the problem as "How to prevent the strong (including strong coalitions) from preying on the weak?". I think your formulation boils down to much the same thing. (If you disagree, I'm very interested in your thinking.)
You say "crimes are mainly actions that have expected benefits to the agent but larger harms to others". From a rights-oriented viewpoint, there's a huge problem with that statement.
In practice, people do seem sympathetic to cases with apparent positive-sum outcomes - if a starving man steals a piece of bread from a wealthy merchant, there's a rights violation but few people support harsh punishment for such cases. By your formulation, maybe there's no "crime".
But If a sex-starved man rapes a woman, one could argue that the harm to the woman is less than the benefit to the man, but most people would be horrified at the idea that the relative harms and benefits make this "not a crime".
And, of course, your formulation says there's no crime when 5 starving people murder 1 innocent to eat him (saving 5 lives at the expense of 1), and no crime when a stadium of spectators enjoys the torture of a single innocent, provided the benefit to the spectators is greater than harm to the innocent. To me, just because the outcome is positive sum doesn't automatically make it "not a crime".
Some kind of rights framework seems necessary.
Yes, that's why I said "mainly".
Re: the strong and the weak, well, a weak person could also commit a crime against a strong person. Or a strong person against another strong person, etc. We want to prevent all of that.
Touché'. Maybe better to say "How to prevent predation between members of society?" Even that presumes a definition of predation that I think requires some kind of rights framework, so its absence in your post seems confusing. Unless you really don't think rights are necessary.
Re "crime", we're both talking about crimes with victims, not crimes of pure "rule breaking" without victims, I think. Where do you stand on acts of predation that are positive-sum? Criminal? Criminal but less serious? Non-criminal? ("Mostly" is kind of vague re what you mean.)
(I know figuring out whether a transaction is positive-sum is itself a hard problem.)
Criminal but less serious.
The correct principles of individual rights might themselves be determined by utilitarian considerations (https://fakenous.substack.com/p/rule-utilitarianism-isnt-so-crazy).
I agree people are by nature self-interested; I see that in myself. However, like you, I have an “altruistic” bent to make the world a better place; hence, my libertarian ideology. This is likely true of millions of people who think their preferred political parties, policies, ideologies, etc. will better serve mankind. How do you explain that bent?
check out Robin hansons and Kevin simlers book "elephant in the brain"
short answer to your question: Most people care far less about policy and actually improving the world, and mostly care about their appearances, how good or smart or loyal or Socialist or - etc they seem.
But knowing this is hard since we are bad liars, and really good at lie detection in others, so we are programmed for self deception.
I disagree. If a person professes to be, say, a socialist, he may not be well-read on the topic, but I see no reason to doubt his sincerity even if he hasn’t cracked any economics books.
i mean, its not fully what i said, but its a mixture of honest beliefs, ideology, keeping up appearences and stuff
sorry for explaining it badly
I think that selfishness combined with a long term outlook is successful for the individual and for society. If the criminal adds up his long term gains and losses from hurting someone for short-term profit, he/she will realize this is not in their own best interest.
Decent overview of the basic social problem here, but it seems inevitable that part 2 will fail to effectively handle what I consider to be the central (correct) libertarian insight: "Governments are best modeled as stationary bandits who exploit the population over whom they rule in order to extract resources for themselves."
My rejoinder to this insight is: Yes, but *so what*? What are you going to do about it? Governments tend not to willingly sacrifice their power (and why would they?), so if you want to get rid of them you'll have to do a lot of violence. And in the end, you'll wind up where you started, with the group of people most capable of executing organized violence in charge.
Advocating for competition is all well and good. I, too, am an advocate for competition. Markets work, incentives shape behavior, economics is real, etc. I'm not retarded, I'm not a lefty (but I repeat myself), so none of this is new. However, monopolists have no incentive to allow for competition that will drive them out of business, and this is true for governments as well.
You acknowledge that just teaching people to be nice is a fantasy solution. I claim that just teaching governments to allow for competition is no less a fantasy. What say you, Prof Huemer?
(Apologies if my tone seems hostile, as this is not intended to be a rhetorical question. I'd be stoked to have my mind changed about this; I'm not just expecting it.)
Well, about half the world's governments are democratic, which makes them (often) responsive to public opinion. So if public opinion were much more favorable to free markets, then leaders might reduce government intervention in those societies.
>Well, about half the world's governments are democratic, which makes them (often) responsive to public opinion.
Nominally? Sure. Actually? Press X to doubt. Besides, why be responsive to public opinion when you can shape it instead? It'd be downright weird if the most powerful institution in society were a servant rather than the master; that's why elements of the state have been and still are so heavily invested in influencing what people think. They're not all-powerful, but they are pretty good at it - the NPC class enthusiastically licking the boots of the Iraq War architects and going all-in for the latest MIC boondoggle (Slava Ukraini!) is a testament to that, if nothing else.
>So if public opinion were much more favorable to free markets, then leaders might reduce government intervention in those societies.
(1) "Let’s just teach people to be nice."
(2) "Let's just teach people to be much more favorable to free markets."
Why is (1) "The Fantasy Solution" while (2) is not?
(2) doesn't require overcoming human nature or 2 million years of evolution?
You don't believe that something akin to Marx's labor theory of value runs strong evolutionarily in a species with an ancestral environment primarily consisting of small hunter-gatherer bands?
Is that a fact? I've thought for a long time that levels of support for free markets are heavily influenced by human nature and evolution. After all, what isn't? And how else would you explain the overwhelmingly disproportionate support found among people with a particular ancestral/chromosomal makeup, independent of upbringing?
Ev psych explanations for the nigh-universal resistance (if not outright hostility and opposition) to markets may be "just-so stories," but they don't seem crazy to me. I think it was Bret Weinstein/Heather Heying's Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century where I most recently remember encountering the idea that complex traits imposing material costs on their bearers that nevertheless persist within a population over time should presumptively be considered adaptations rather than spandrels, but it definitely wasn't the first.
Seems pretty clear to me that anti-market bias was hardwired into (most of) us by something about our ancestral environment. Certainly hoping I'm wrong, though! Why don't you think so?
It seems if genuine anti-market bias was so hardwired into the majority of people, then we wouldn’t have had anything resembling markets or capitalism well before the Industrial Revolution. Not that I don’t buy into the idea that anti-market bias exists to a strong enough degree.
You don't need *global* anti-market bias to be absent in order for basic markets to emerge; you only need individuals to override their global attitude when it comes to their own particular job, purchases and trades.
By that logic, if genuine selfishness was so hardwired into the majority of people, then we wouldn't have had anything resembling Christianity or charity before the birth of Christ. Evolutionarily-prescribed tendencies aren't necessarily destiny; you can fight them, to an extent. The best religions are even fairly successful at promoting pro-social behaviors over selfish ones. But it's always an uphill battle.
Will you write a post that at some point explains the difference between anarcho-capitalism and individual retaliation? The private police force idea is basically just individuals or groups paying for collective retaliation forces that would operate like a state but with far less oversight as the people choosing them and their victims are entirely different
There is one other version of the Fantasy Solution.
Some people are extremely altruistic, perhaps a similar percentage of the population as the psychopaths. The underlying psychological traits that lead to this behavior also seem (like most psychological traits!) to be highly heritable. Therefore:
2a. The Great Improvement People Find Monstrous
Let's put a lot of effort into artificially selecting / engineering morally better humans. As the first stage, let's put substantial thought into what a rights-respecting, voluntaryist approach to improving the gene pool would look like.
Sure, you *can* train a Queensland Heeler not to bite your friends when they hug you, but it sure takes a lot less work if you start with a Golden Retriever.
Dr. Huemer wrote a post about how psychopaths have a tendency to come across as extremely charismatic. Such a system would result in those psychopaths being successful. It may raise the rate of naturally altruistic people, but would also raise the rate of psychopaths. Therefore, it would fail.
Also, eugenics are evil so maybe let’s not propose that idea
"Also, eugenics are evil so maybe let’s not propose that idea"
This statement is a better candidate for being called "evil", if "evil" means causing a large amount of unnecessary suffering.
The broad concept referred to by the scary "e-word" is nothing more than the counterpart to education, except that we have more reason to believe it'll work. It's not inherently bound to any totalitarian, racist or mass-murdering ideology, any more than education is, even though those ideologies very much supported education as well. It's not hard at all to think of what social-democratic or libertarian approaches to caring about the genomes of future generations would look like. Both involve positive incentives. A social-democratic form worried about racism employs some kind of affirmative action rules. A libertarian version involves voluntary persuasion and markets. And so on. Neither are murderous or repressive at all, let alone genocidal.
Arguments on the topic typically involve both blatant denial of facts (e.g. that partner and child abuse has a large genetic component) and poor ethical reasoning (e.g. that leaving the future generation entirely up to the vagaries of evolved mate selection interacting with modern contraception is somehow an important moral constraint), but then there's always the scary "e-word", the trump card, the conversation-stopper, taboo of all taboos. And that taboo is going to cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering.
The problem is that there is a natural, unalienable right to reproduction if one can find a willing (adult, unrelated) partner. Forced sterilization of so-called psychopaths is thus incredibly immoral. Financial incentives are weird in this scenario as well. If people are taxed or fined for reproducing when the government does not want them to, this violates the right to reproduction. If those who the government wants to have reproduce are instead rewarded, then there is a system where the government is paying psychopaths specifically due to the fact that they are evil. If some UBI is provided to everyone, and people the government doesn’t want reproducing are specifically denied this, it is effectively a fine, which again violates human rights.
Additionally, the point about psychopaths being good manipulators stands.
Okay, let's just stick with the level of rational persuasion and rights-respecting social pressure.
Right now, people with significant rates of child beating in their family are generally advised to "break the cycle": take whatever steps they can not to do it, and then their children will be freed from the cycle!
I think that runs strongly contrary to our best evidence. Someone with propensity to such violence in their genome may avoid its actualization in themself, but when they're passing it on genetically, they're not "breaking a cycle". Their kids will still be more likely than the population average to become abusers, and more likely to require more effort to resist being abusive. The best advice for someone with greatly harm-producing behavior overrepresented in their close genetic kin, and who cares about future welfare, should be to consider not genetically reproducing. So that's how I think you should advise such a friend. No government at all there, just free people discussing a case of applied ethics.
As far as psychopaths being good manipulators and thereby getting hold of whatever the levers of power happen to be, well, my comparison with education still stands. Evil ideologies tend to like using educational intervention to try and change the distribution of human behaviors in society. Psychopaths will presumably be good at getting themselves to the top of education hierarchies. Yet most people don't see these as reasonable grounds for rejecting education wholesale.
What's the difference between advocating rights-respecting, voluntarist "nature" intervention (scary e-word) aimed at reduction of suffering and promotion of flourishing, versus rights-respecting, voluntarist "nurture" intervention (comfy e-word "education") aimed at reduction of suffering and promotion of flourishing, other than that the former is much more likely to be effective?
EDIT: I should add that ethical objections to government subsidies seem orthogonal to the question of whether future "human nature" ought to be taken for granted and all intervention of whatever political form be strictly "nurture". If government subsidizing people to drive electric cars is "well-intentioned, but misguided and unfair to taxpayers", then government subsidizing violent people to not biologically reproduce shouldn't be "the darkest evil idea ever birthed from the depths of Tartarus".
also, a lot of people think someone has to be on top, and they rather be certain who it is than not visibly have someone on top but they are uncertain if it's really the case, or they have to be vigiliant
But studies of anarchist communes have shown that there is always someone on top. If no formal rules are defined, the most charismatic or politically able person(s) will exert disproportionate influence and rule de facto. There is no everyone-is-equal anarchy, not even amongst small groups. This is in my mind not an improvement at all, as others lose the ability and organisation to boot out the leaders if required. And if you try to compensate for that tendency by adding check and balances to de facto rulers... well, you end up with a formal system of government again.
> lot of people think someone has to be on top
correctly, I might add.