Brian Tomasik – Reasons to Be Nice to Other Value Systems

Summary

I suggest several arguments in support of the heuristic that we should help groups holding different value systems from our own when doing so is cheap, unless those groups prove uncooperative to our values. This is true even if we don't directly care at all about other groups' value systems. Exactly how nice to be depends on the particulars of the situation, but there are some cases where helping others' moral views is clearly beneficial for us.

Contents (available at link)

1. Introduction
2. Example: Altruism tabling
3. Reasons to be nice
   1. Iterated prisoner's dilemmas
   2. Evolved emotions
   3. Reputation
   4. Common sense
   5. Norms and universal rules
   6. Encouraging global cooperation
   7. Utilitarianism
   8. Moral uncertainty
   9. Superrationality
4. Is it ok to cheat in secret?
5. Risks to being nice
6. How nice should you be?
7. Applications to space colonization

Note from Tessa: Because of the ongoing Decade Review I am re-posting some classic posts under the review crosspost tag. I have not crossposted the complete text, as the author of this post does not like crossposting since it makes updating the content of posts more difficult.