Deontological bars should reference the actor's beliefs

Scott Alexander has a recent piece about "deontological bars" in the context of AI safety. He describes the state of the discourse like this: I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an internal debate in the AI safety movement. Some people want to work with the least irresponsible AI labs, helping them “win” the “race” and hopefully do a better job creating superintelligence than their competitors. Others want to pause or ban AI research - the exact details vary from plan to plan, but assume they’ve already thought of and written hundred-page papers addressing your obvious objections. Different people have different opinions about which strategy is more likely to help, and it’s possible to coexist and pursue both at once. But in fact, both sides are a little nervous that the other is breaking a deontological bar. Some of the people working on pause-AI regulations think there might be a deontologic bar against supporting AI companies. These companies are racing each other to create a potentially world-ending technology. If one company’s product has a 90% chance of ending the world, and another’s has an 80% chance of taking over the world, giving your money/support/encouragement to the 80%-ers seems kind of like endorsing evil. I don’t know if it was encouraged by this question exactly, but someone held a Twitter poll about whether you would become a concentration camp guard if you predicted you could get away with being only 90% as brutal as your average coworker. Taking the job would have good consequences, but is there a deontological bar in the way? Some of the people working with the companies think there might be a deontologic bar against certain types of mass activism. The sorts of arguments that do well on LessWrong.com won’t give us landslide wins in national elections. That’s going to require things like working with Steve Bannon, working with Bernie Sanders, working with NIMBYs who hate data centers because they’re a thing that might be built in som