Can we quantify human benevolence vs. malevolence? Humans are biologically empathetic and compassionate (mirror neurons), but they are also self-deceiving hypocrites, egoists, out-group haters and sadists. They engage in altruistic punishment and instinctively aid others in distress, but they also torture with surprising ease (Milgram experiments, Stanford prison experiment) and sometimes just for fun (sexual or otherwise).

I know you can't really just subtract one from the other because they are context-sensitive, but if you had to commit to an answer, which is the stronger tendency in humanity, benevolence or malevolence?

Imagine humanity, in its current psychological and cultural conditions, suddenly becomes far more powerful than it is now. Would this create more pleasure than suffering, more suffering than pleasure, or would you think the expectation values are roughly equal?

Steven Pinker, on the basis of his book The Better Angels of our Human Nature would argue that we are more benevolent.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Can we quantify human benevolence vs. malevolence? [...] Imagine humanity, in its current psychological and cultural conditions, suddenly becomes far more powerful than it is now. Would this create more pleasure than suffering, more suffering than pleasure, or would you think the expectation values are roughly equal?

I think the sentences that follow the first question do not describe an adequate way of testing answers to that question. Human benevolence seems clearly to preponderate over human malevolence. Thus, there are lots and lots of charities that campaign to help people and animals, but there is to my knowledge no organization with the express ultimate goal of harming other beings. This however doesn't mean that we create more pleasure than suffering, since benevolent or malevolent intent only explains a tiny fraction of all human behavior. Most of the impact we have on the wellbeing of other sentient beings is a side effect of our acting in pursuit of our own self-interest. So I think the really interesting question is whether such self-interested pursuits on the whole cause more pleasure than pain, and, if not, whether the surplus of pain can be offset by human benevolence.

RyanCarey wrote:Steven Pinker, on the basis of his book The Better Angels of our Human Nature would argue that we are more benevolent.

Yes, fascinating. I didn't read the book but I now watched a talk where he presents his main points and evidence. I think what's interesting is that the major reasons of the decline in violence, namely the Leviathan (central government, policing, law) explanation and the "Gentle Commerce" (positive-sum trade) explanation don't require benevolence at all. Humans could even have a malevolence bias and still come up with these trends that are essentially just increases in sophisticated cooperative techniques to facilitate selfish goals. Maybe I'm a sadist but control it because I want to make a profit, keep my underlings loyal and functional, and so forth. Only the third explanation, the Expanding Circle, seems to show evidence for a benevolence bias, but a cynic might say that's just an artifact of public homo hypocritus signaling, i.e. people present themselves as (mildly) benevolent (i.e. trustworthy) in order to gain an advantage in recruiting potential allies, and the more visible it is through technology, the more the expectation of general benevolence will build up, hence the Expanding Circle. In this model, you'd still predict subtle forms of signals to accept cooperative exploitation of others, such as the use of euphemisms.

My point is that the historical trend towards non-violence, even if it is strong and robust, is not necessarily a sign of benevolence-over-malevolence bias in total, nor is it necessarily going to continue in the future.

Pablo Stafforini wrote:Human benevolence seems clearly to preponderate over human malevolence. Thus, there are lots and lots of charities that campaign to help people and animals, but there is to my knowledge no organization with the express ultimate goal of harming other beings.

A homo hypocritus explanation would put this down to signaling in a world in which expectation of empathy is a norm, while sadism happens covertly, including selectively cooperative, conspiring sadism. Everybody's publicly against rape, yet human traffickers make billions.

This however doesn't mean that we create more pleasure than suffering, since benevolent or malevolent intent only explains a tiny fraction of all human behavior.

Yes, hence my question what would happen if vast increases in human power occured (such as through technology), which would remove the need to act benevolently in pursuit of self-interest. The question of whether self-interest in our actual future will coincide more or less with benevolence than today is a different type of question, though an important one. If we were all vastly empowered, would empathy or aggression tip the scales? Imagine all currently existing humans became god-like entities who could rule omnipotently and intuitively over a (finite) universe of their own - would that cause more pain or more pleasure, or equal measures of both?

The main question relies on a measurement scale that could be used to objectively evaluate benevolence and malevolence on a single scale. The question might be answered (indirectly) by making more specific claims accompanied by assumptions: perhaps estimating quality life-years lost due to violent acts vs quality life-years sustained by benevolent acts. There could be a thousand variations of things that people might want to measure. I don't have the answer to that question, but it is an empirical question and could theoretically be answered.

Measuring the death rate due to violence would be a step toward answering my version of the question. Describing an expanding circle of compassion might be another step... but I'm hesitant to predict long-term trends on these points (where 'long-term' means thousands of years into the future).

Hedonic Treader wrote: the historical trend towards non-violence

I am aware of the argument that the estimated death-rate from acts of violence is less now than it was long ago, but keep in mind that part of that trend is due to a certain kind of political power structure that is not necessarily indicative of future events. In other words, my best prediction about the future is that humans will fail to control their population through voluntary means, and the logical consequence of that will be shortages of natural resources (on a per person basis) and an increase probability of political instability. The trend of any alleged expanding circle of compassion could easily fall by the wayside if people barely have the means to survive. People who are barely surviving, by definition, lack the resources to substantially help others who are at risk of death or suffering.

Spambots are clever. I'm pretty sure josh34's comment is a spam comment based on his signature url and the not-all-there tone of the text. I thought maybe the spambot found this question elsewhere on the web and copied text from someone else's reply, but I can't find this text by Googling it. Maybe this comment is written by a person hired via crowdsourcing to produce short, coherent forum comments?

Brian Tomasik wrote:Maybe this comment is written by a person hired via crowdsourcing to produce short, coherent forum comments?

That seems pretty plausible to me.

Regardless, verdict =



Better spam strategy: go back to the plan where you don't put in the spam link until a month after the original post, when everyone has forgotten.

peterhurford wrote:Better spam strategy: go back to the plan where you don't put in the spam link until a month after the original post, when everyone has forgotten.

Must have been a different company. I guess we're helping select for the survival of the smarter spammers.