# Should you work with evil people?

*Epistemic status: Figuring things out.*

My mind often wanders to what boundaries I ought to maintain between the different parts of my life and people who have variously committed bad acts or have poor character. On the professional side, I think it is a virtue to be able to work with lots of people, and be functional in many environments. You will often have to work with people you dislike in oder to get things done. Yet I think that it is not the correct call to just lie on your back and allow people in your environment to do horrendous things all the time without providing meaningful pushback (as per both [Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/) and [Screwtape](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KGvcjCc8SXnDKEAwm/contra-collisteru-you-get-about-one-carthage)).

From one perspective, this a question of how much should you be exposed to other people's crazy beliefs. Suppose that someone comes to the belief that you are evil. Perhaps they think you secretly murdered people and got away with it, or have ruined many many people's lives in legal ways, or that you're extremely power-seeking and have no morals. What should they do?

I think it's natural that they might not want to work with you, and even may wish to impose costs on you, or punish you for your misdeeds. Even if you are 'getting away with it' to some extent, society functions better when misdeeds are punished. But then you get into vigilante justice, where an insane person can cause a massive mess by being wrong. There have been many false mob lynchings in the history of humanity, [still to this day](https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-spread-of-fake-news-has-had-deadly-consequences-in-mexico/?utm_source=chatgpt.com).

Another perspective I've thought about this is as an infrastructure provider. Everyone rests on so much infrastructure to live in the world. Amazon, Stripe, ChatGPT, the bank system, gas and electricity, being able to get legal defense, public transport, etc. When one of these places decides not to support you, it is really difficult to get by. Part of the point of having a civilization is so that different people can specialize in solving different problems, and provide their solutions to everyone else. You're not *supposed* to rebuild all of these pieces of infrastructure for yourself, and to have to do so is a major cost to your ability to function in society. As such, it's really costly for infrastructure like this to remove your access to it, *even if they have a good reason*. If they think that you support a terrorist organization, or that you are a cruel and nasty person, or that you're physically and emotionally abusing your family, or whatever, it's not good for them to take away your ability to use infrastructure. 

This is for two reasons: first, they're not very invested in this. If they hear a rumor that they trust, and ban you, you're screwed in terms of persuading them otherwise. There's no due process where you can repudiate the claim. Second, they're not very skilled at it, and they can get it wrong. They're not investigators of bad behavior in full generality, and shouldn't be expected to be great at it.

However, I think there are kinds of bad behavior that should get you banned. Banks should analyze if you're committing financial fraud with their system. Public transport systems should check if you're not paying for your tickets, and ban you. Amazon should check if you're producing fraudulent products and ban you. This is because they're unusually skilled and experienced with this kind of thing, and have good info about it.

But overall each piece of infrastructure should not attempt to model a full justice system.

...which is a bit confusing, because everyone should strive to be morally good, and to attempt to right the wrongs that we see in the world. If you see someone you know do something wrong, like steal something or physically assault someone, it's right to call them out on it and help them be punished for the behavior. If you see them lie, it's good to inform the person that they lied to (if that's easy) and let people know that they lied. Holding people to good standards helps spread good standards for behavior.

So it's a bit counterintuitive that sometimes you shouldn't do this, because you aren't good at it and might get it wrong and aren't being fair to them or cannot offer them due process.

Some heuristics so far that I've developed include (a) you should attempt to set and enforce standards for good behavior with the people in your life, but also (b) infrastructure providers should only police things directly relevant to the infrastructure (e.g. banks should police fraudulent behavior, hotels should police damaging the rooms, amazon should police not providing the product you're selling, etc).

But I still want to know when (a) ends. When should you stop trying to police all the behavior around you?

I think that most rules here will be phrased about where the limits are. Let me start with the opposite. *It is possible that vigilante justice is sometimes appropriate.* I will not rule it out prematurely. The world is full of [surprising situations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JD7fwtRQ27yc8NoqS/strong-evidence-is-common). But it would be very surprising. If I were to come across the leader of a successful terrorist organization (e.g. Osama Bin Laden), that would be *surprising*, but I hope that I would take some action to apprehend him and not be overly concerned about not physically hurting him in the process of doing so, even though I have never been involved in any serious violence in my life and believe in there being very strong lines against it in almost all situations I'm in. So I don't think I want to simply rule out classes of action (e.g. never commit violence, never try to destroy someone's life, etc) because I expect for all actions there are edge-cases where it's appropriate.

(One constraint is that it's just kind of impossible to police all behavior. There's ~8 billion people, you cannot track all the behavior. Heck, I have a hard time tracking all the good and bad behavior done by just myself, never mind everyone else.)

A different heuristic is a purity one, of not letting evil get near to you. By evil, I mean a force for that which is wrong, that prefers bad outcomes, and is working to make them happen. This is the Joker in Batman, and also sadists who just like to hurt others and endorse this. Some evil people can be saved, some cannot.

But what about people who are merely behaving atrociously, who are not themselves evil, as is the far more common state of affairs? 

(As I say, I think it's a relatively common occurrence that people end up optimizing explicitly for bad things. While the easy answers are desires for sadism and dominance, I think the main thing is culture and believing that it is how to get power. There are many perverse incentives and situations that arise that teach you these awful lessons. I think then, there's a question of how much to shun someone who has learned these lessons. In some sense many people around me are committing grave misdeeds that we haven't noticed or learned to notice e.g. think of a Muslim teenager participating in stoning an adulterer on the advice of their parents; they are less worthy of punishment than if a non-Muslim Westerner stoned an adulterer.)

I think that the purity mindset can still make some sense? I think that people who commit atrocious behavior are often (a) bringing very bad culture with them, and (b) hard to predict when and how they will do this behavior. I think it is good to build boundaries around spaces where no such person can freely enter. For instance, your personal home. I think it reasonable to say that a member of your family cannot bring Sam Bankman-Fried over to stay, nor bring them as a date to your wedding, for you don't want his culture and behavior to corrupt people who were not expecting to have to protect themselves from that force.

This is broadly where I'm at currently: don't withhold infrastructure punitively unless it's about specific abuse-of-that-infrastructure; and build spaces with strong moral boundaries where you can (e.g. family, friends, community, etc).