Philosophy, et cetera

Satisficing by Effort [draft]

2013-06-02T16:58:00.000-04:00

I'm currently revising my paper, 'Satisficing by Effort: From Scalar to Satisficing Consequentialism', for the upcoming RoME conference. It's due in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd throw it out there in case any readers have suggestions to improve it...

Abstract:

Traditional forms of Satisficing Consequentialism risk condoning the gratuitous prevention of goodness above the baseline of what qualifies as "good enough". I propose a new, effort-based version of the view that avoids this problem, and that better fits with the motivation of avoiding an excessively demanding conception of morality. I further argue that the resulting view can be motivated even starting from the sparse starting point of Scalar Consequentialism, so long as we're willing to supplement our consequentialism with independent norms of blameworthiness. Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism is thus shown to be both extensionally plausible and theoretically well-motivated.

[link to full pdf]

Comments welcome -- posted here or emailed!

Unexperienced Virtual Realities

2013-05-29T16:42:00.000-04:00

I've long thought that a shared virtual world could, in principle, be just as "real" (in any sense that matters) as the material world. But Helen recently got me thinking about what we metaphysical anti-chauvinists should say about "virtual worlds" that, though capable of supporting interactions between conscious minds, never actually do support any such experiences or interactions. (Many of the following thoughts I owe to her.)

On the one hand, it seems weird to say that every simulation (assuming the information it contains could, in principle, be "experienced" in some way, however simple and low-resolution the resulting "perceptions" would be) is thereby a new reality in its own right. That would seem to stretch the concept beyond all recognition. On the other hand, however, it doesn't seem that the metaphysical status of a world as "real" or not should depend on its happening to actually support conscious experiences. The material world could have existed without ever giving rise to sentient beings, so why should the same not be said of a rich Matrix-style virtual world to which nobody ever plugs in?

In Section 6 of 'The Matrix as Metaphysics', Chalmers writes:

[G]iven an abstract computation that could underlie physical reality, it does not matter how the computation is implemented.... In particular, it is irrelevant whether or not these implementing processes were artificially created, and it is irrelevant whether they were intended as a simulation. What matters is the intrinsic nature of the processes, not their origin. And what matters about this intrinsic nature is simply that they are arranged in such a way to implement the right sort of computation. If so, the fact that the implementation originated as a simulation is irrelevant to whether it can constitute physical reality.

There is one further constraint on the implementing processes: they must be connected to our experiences in the right sort of way. That is when we have an experience of an object, the processes underlying the simulation of that object must be causally connected in the right sort of way to our experiences. If this is not the case, then there will be no reason to think that these computational processes underlie the physical processes that we perceive. If there is an isolated computer simulation to which nobody is connected in this way, we should say that it is simply a simulation.

But why should we say this? The preceding sentence suggests that Chalmers is focused on the specific question of whether the processes constitute our reality. But can't we also ask the more general question of whether they constitute a genuine reality at all (regardless of whether it is ours)?

At this point one might reasonably question what hangs on whether we call something a "reality" or not. Is this merely a verbal dispute? I think the best way to avoid this danger is (as usual) to focus on the potential normative implications. Some people think that natural beauty (say) can have intrinsic value, even in a world with no conscious beings. So, the question becomes, should such people also value any similar natural beauty that is to be found within a never-experienced virtual world? Would it be worthwhile to create such worlds, just to increase the amount of natural beauty "out there"?

We might also consider less extreme versions, say where a world has been experienced in the past but never will be again. Often we care about what will happen after our deaths. Could an inhabitant of such a "dying world" reasonably care about what happens after the last conscious person leaves it?

In either case, I'm (tentatively) inclined to think that anyone who would say "yes" to the parallel question regarding a material world should likewise answer "yes" to the case involving a virtual world. But it's a little tricky, because I'm dubious about attributing value to any states of affairs that lack conscious beings or agents. (In which case, it would no longer matter whether an unexperienced world counts as "real" or not, because it lacks a crucial precondition for genuine value regardless.)

What do you think?

Locating the benefit of future-directed desires

2013-05-13T17:04:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Princeton's recent (and very interesting) "Workshop on Well-being", I've been thinking about the debate between Bradley and Dorsey over the question: Where in time should Desire Theorists "locate" the benefit of a satisfied future-directed desire? At the time (t1) of the person's having the desire, or the later time (t2) where the object of the desire, i.e. the desired "good", is located?

I'm not sold on the idea that harms and benefits must be temporally located at all. But supposing we do want to locate the benefit here, the former option -- locating it at the time of the state of desire -- seems to me to make most sense. This may be illuminated by translating welfare talk into 'for the sake of' talk.

Let's say that (i) S at t1 desires that P obtains at t2, and (ii) P does indeed obtain at t2. According to the desire theory in question, P's obtaining at t2 is good for S, in virtue of S's desire at t1. The question is: is P's obtaining at t2 good for S at t1, or at t2? Or, better: is P's obtaining at t2 desirable for the sake of S-at-t1, or for S-at-t2?

This re-statement helps to bring out that, in assigning "temporal locations" to harms and benefits, we are not thereby treating them as some kind of ghostly substance that itself has a kind of physical presence in space-time. Rather, it is just to pin down more precisely the recipient of the harm or benefit. It is not just S-as-a-whole that is harmed or benefited (we are supposing), but specifically the momentary timeslice that is S-at-t1, or S-at-t2. And when seen in these terms, it's clear that the relevant recipient is the timeslice doing the desiring, not the timeslice (if there even is one) that happens to be temporally co-existent with the previously (but no longer) desired object.

So this suggests that Desire Theorists who want to count future-directed desires should reject Bradley's Internalism ("How well things are going for a person at a time is wholly determined by the things happening at that time that are intrinsically good or bad for that person.") in favour of Dorsey's Time of Desire View ("If S desires at t1 that P, S benefits at t1 iff P obtains at any time").

Justification and Explanatory Normalcy

2013-05-10T19:20:00.003-04:00

In his very interesting 'Justification, Normalcy and Evidential Probability', Martin Smith argues that justification requires one's belief to be normally true, rather than just very likely true, given one's evidence. The relevant sense of 'normalcy' is explanatory rather than statistical: for the belief to turn out false would call out for explanation. Beliefs based on perception, for example, are generally "normically supported" in this way -- for the belief to be false, something weird must have happened (perhaps the agent hallucinated, or was tricked somehow -- there must be some further explanation). By way of contrast, the belief that your lottery ticket is going to lose might be as likely as can be (stretch the odds of the lottery as much as you like), still it would require no special explanation were this ticket to turn out to be the winning one -- some or other ticket must win, after all, it's just a matter of random chance.

It's an interesting proposal, and seems to capture common usage pretty nicely, but I wonder about the normative significance of normic support. It seems to me that we are better off, epistemically speaking, with beliefs that are very likely true than we are with beliefs that are normally true (given our evidence). On p.18, Smith offers the following:

If one believes that a proposition P is true, based upon evidence that normically supports it then, while one’s belief is not assured to be true, this much is assured: If one’s belief turns out to be false, then the error has to be explicable in terms of disobliging environmental conditions, deceit, cognitive or perceptual malfunction or some other interfering factor. In short, the error must be attributable to mitigating circumstances and thus excusable, after a fashion. Errors that do not fall into this category are naturally regarded as errors for which one must bear full responsibility – errors for which there is no excuse. And if error could not be excused, then belief cannot be permitted.

But if I'm making a high-stakes decision, I would (I hope!) prefer any mistake on my part to be unlikely rather than excusable. We should want to get things right, and not to merely offload responsibility onto "disobliging environmental conditions". And the best, most reliable way to get things right is to follow the probabilities, rather than rely on cooperative environmental conditions by taking perceptual evidence (and the like) at face value.

A background point: I'm a little unsure about the significance of so-called "all-out belief", as opposed to credence (or degrees of belief). So, rather than claiming that Smith is mistaken about what justifies all-out beliefs, I might instead say that we shouldn't be interested in them at all. In an uncertain world, rational decisions should be informed by our credences, not our beliefs. That would be another way to express my main point. But however we say it, the crucial point is just that likelihood, rather than normalcy, seems to be what really matters, epistemically speaking.

The practical importance of this comes out in Smith's example of privileging (notoriously unreliable) eye-witness testimony over statistical evidence. His account captures standard practices very well, but this seems like an issue that calls out for a more revisionist approach. If we care about getting accurate verdicts, we should want to reform the legal system (and others like it) to rely less on eye-witness accounts, and more on statistical evidence that has a higher probability of seeing us right.

What do you think?

Testing Google+ Comments System

2013-04-18T16:47:00.002-04:00

The good folks at Blogger have released a new commenting platform that's integrated with Google+, which I'm curious to try out.

The main advantages seem to be:

Any public discussions of the blog post on Google+ will also show up on the blog itself
Comments get a "+1" button, and can be sorted by rating so the best comments drift to the top.
More privacy options: you can post non-public comments, only shared with certain "circles" of friends, if you prefer.
Commenters can easily "share" their comments on Google+, encouraging more people to join in the discussion.

Potential disadvantages:

Google account required to comment
Limited threading of comments (only nests 1 reply deep, it seems?)

What do you think?

Update: reverted to the old commenting system, for two main reasons. (1) I don't seem to be notified in any way of new comments, unlike old system where I receive email notifications (and readers can likewise subscribe for email or RSS updates to a particular thread).

(2) As a reader pointed out, there are real concerns about the long-term accessibility of comments using the new system. The old system seems more stable. (For example: the old comments still appear when you switch to the new system. But new Google+ comments do not remain if you switch back to the old one. They thus seem more "fragile".)

If these two problems are addressed in some future update, I may later make the switch.

Robin Hoodery

2013-04-08T11:33:00.001-04:00

Robin Hood is a popular figure: stealing from the rich, to give to the poor -- what could be more just? So consider a modern-day Robin Hood, who hacks into your bank account (you do realize that you're extremely rich by global standards, right?) and transfers your life savings to GiveWell's top charities. Do you think that Hood acts wrongly, in this case? Would you consider him blameworthy?

It's a nice test case, I think, of whether you really think you have a stronger moral claim to your holdings than the desperately needy do. (I find that I don't. Of course, I don't want to lose all my savings. But I couldn't honestly blame an agent of the global poor who simply took them. It'll make much more of a difference to them than to me, after all.)

If you're worried about Hood breaking the law (or generally accepted rules of social cooperation necessary for the flourishing of society), suppose that he's an outsider -- a Martian -- rather than a fellow member of our society. Would Martians have any (non-instrumental) moral reason to respect our property claims? Do you really deserve your great wealth, in any deep sense? I find such claims hard to believe. But I'd be curious to hear others' reactions...

Moral Supervenience

2013-03-25T18:24:00.000-04:00

A curious new piece in Analysis from Gerald Harrison argues that 'The moral supervenience thesis is not a conceptual truth' -- or, for that matter, an obvious a priori truth. I think it is at least the latter, so I was interested to read what Harrison has to say against it.

Moral supervenience (S) is the thesis that the moral truths supervene on the "natural" (read: "non-normative") truths. This seems self-evident: moral facts cannot "float free" of the underlying natural facts -- there could not be a world just like ours, but where Hitler was actually a virtuous fellow. Such a radical moral difference would need to be grounded in a corresponding natural difference in the world -- say where Adolf never become a fascist, and instead dedicated himself to the peaceful pursuit of philanthropic ends. To expand upon this intuitive point:

(1) There seems an important sense in which the descriptive facts are what ground the particular moral facts. But without moral supervenience, the descriptive facts would be insufficient to determine what moral facts hold in a situation. There would instead be brute moral truths that aren't fully grounded by the descriptive facts, insofar as the former could change despite no change in the latter. Not only is this intuitively crazy, but it also violates our theoretical sense of how the particular moral truths are grounded.

(2) The fundamental moral truths are plausibly necessarily true conditional statements, perhaps of the form, "In completely described natural circumstances Ci, the applicable moral truths are Mi." This then explains the sense in which the particular moral truths Mi are grounded in the descriptive truths Ci. But it also straightforwardly entails moral supervenience (S).

(3) The falsity of S would make nonsense of the guiding role of moral truths. Note that, e.g., if someone is virtuous, or morally admirable, then it's fitting for us to admire them, or hold them in a certain positive regard. Moreover, to avoid moral fetishism, what we should admire in them is not "virtue" in the abstract, but rather the particular psychological characteristics that are virtues. But if S is false, then our emotions and attitudes cannot be guided in this way. It makes no sense to admire someone for their psychological characteristics in our world, but then to condemn them for being exactly the same way in exactly the same descriptive circumstances in another world, where the moral truths about them brutely differ.

Harrison addresses something along these lines:

The principle of universalizability (U) states that if an action is right, then every action that is similar in morally relevant respects is right too.

However, he holds that the denial of S is compatible with U, because a brute moral difference would, trivially, be a difference in "morally relevant respects".

Of course, U is generally not meant to be interpreted so trivially. Rather, when we speak of "morally relevant respects" here, we mean the underlying descriptive properties that have the higher-order property of being morally important. Harrison goes on to consider:

[U2] if act x is right, then any act having the same properties in virtue of which act x is right, is also right.

Unfortunately, he reads U2 as entailing an implausible absolutism:

Act A might be wrong because it was an act of cruelty. Act B might also have been an act of cruelty in exactly the same way, yet have saved a million lives. According to U2 if A is wrong, B is too.

This, too, is not the best interpretation of Universalizability. We should not be considering right-makers and wrong-makers in isolation, but rather the totality of natural facts that together entail the rightness or wrongness of an act. This may include "negative" facts, such as that act A does not save a million lives. That's a morally relevant natural feature of A, which differs from B, and explains why one may consistently reach different moral verdicts about the two.

When U2 is understood in this (obviously more sensible!) way, it is far harder to deny. The whole paper seems to rest on neglect of this crucial point. (It re-emerges later when Harrison takes a grounding-style claim to be motivated by U2.)

Admittedly, if one is determined to reject the self-evidence of S, and hence even the better interpretation of Universalizability that I've offered here, then I'm not sure what more could be said to persuade them to reconsider. But it would seem awfully odd and unmotivated.

Immoral Nihilism?

2013-03-15T16:25:00.000-04:00

It's often thought that one's metaethical views are more or less independent of one's first-order moral views. Anti-realists can still value other people's welfare, want to prevent the innocent from suffering, etc. But is this enough? An argument I owe to Helen suggests it may not be. Anti-realists can of course have benevolent preferences, and be disposed to blame people who act malevolently, but there is something they're missing: They can't accommodate the moral datum that other people really matter -- matter simpliciter, "from the point of view of the universe", as opposed to merely mattering to them, personally, in light of their contingent preferences. And, the argument goes, there's something morally disreputable about the more superficial attitude to which (consistent) anti-realists are limited. Positive regard should not be something we choose to bestow upon others; it is something they are owed, in light of the kinds of beings they are. The worry is, in other words, that anti-realists must regard their good will as too... optional. They fail to really see people as mattering in themselves.

Does that seem right? Expressivists and "quasi-realists" seem likely to want to deny it, insisting that they can endorse all the same first-order norms as moral realists. "People do matter, and deserve to be regarded with respect," they will say, by which they mean that they endorse norms of treating people as if they matter and deserve to be regarded with respect. But going through the motions is surely not the same as really believing these things, and it seems plausible that morality (or genuine respect for persons) calls for the latter, over and above the former.

What do you think?

The Possibility of Moral Realism

2013-03-11T17:58:00.000-04:00

I've been wondering whether the non-contingency of moral realism (it's either true in all possible worlds, or false in all possible worlds) undermines parsimony-based objections to it.

We can explain all our observations without appeal to moral facts. So, the argument goes, that's precisely what we should do -- why multiply entities beyond necessity? Of course, I'm inclined to start with a broader conception of the philosophical data to be explained, but parsimony is surely worth something, and it isn't difficult to get into a skeptical mindset of wondering whether the theoretical "costs" of positing moral properties shouldn't lead us to instead take anti-realism as the "default" position.

But now notice that in the standard cases (teacups orbiting Pluto, etc.), we don't take the more complex hypothesis to be impossible or anything, but merely less likely to be actual. So, we might interpret the basic rule of parsimony as follows: given a set of possibilities, distribute your credences (all else equal) in proportion to the simplicity of each hypothesis.

The precise details don't matter here. What's interesting about this interpretation of parsimony is that it would render the principle entirely inapplicable to the moral realism debate. For there we are not "given" rival possibilities, either of which might (with greater or lesser likelihood) turn out to be actual. Rather, the debate is about what's true of the possibilities themselves -- e.g., is any possible instance of gratuitous torture non-instrumentally bad? Is fine-grained description D a case where moral property M holds? These questions don't hang on the contingencies of what happens to be actual. So, if parsimony only speaks to the latter, then it just doesn't have anything to say about the former questions.

Which is, perhaps, all just to say that moral anti-realism is a stronger position than it might at first appear. It's not just to claim that there happen not to be any moral properties. Really, the anti-realist is committed to the stronger claim that there couldn't be such properties. But why should we think that? Mere parsimony doesn't seem to establish impossibilities. So it seems that the real case against Moral Realism must rest on other grounds -- arguments that attack, not its likelihood, but its very coherence. (E.g. Humean worries about "necessary connections" and the supervenience of the normative upon the non-normative; or perhaps confused worries about how non-natural properties could be normative at all.)

Forthcoming in Noûs

2013-03-08T20:57:00.000-05:00

... is my paper, 'Value Receptacles'. The abstract:

Utilitarianism is often rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons, instead treating people as mere "receptacles of value". I develop several different versions of this objection, and argue that--despite their prima facie plausibility--they are all mistaken. Although there are crude forms of utilitarianism that run afoul of these objections, I advance a new form of the view--'token-pluralistic utilitarianism'--that does not.

This is my favourite of my papers to date, so I'm especially glad that it found such a good home!

The Weakest (Philosophical) Link

2013-03-06T10:35:00.004-05:00

Which of your philosophical views are you least confident of? What do you think are the most compelling objections -- the ones you really take seriously, and are closest to being convinced by?

I'm perhaps most ambivalent about normative realism. The metaphysical extravagance and epistemological leaps of faith are certainly worth worrying about (though not, of course, decisive objections). My main reasons for accepting normative realism are (i) strong "Moorean" priors in favour, and (ii) the "might as well" argument that it can't very well be a normative fault to believe in normative facts. The belief is properly evaluable only if true, after all. [Update: Helen suggests a third option, of distinctively moral reasons, which I'll explore in a future post.]

Within ethics, I have trouble taking any thorough-going anti-consequentialist view remotely seriously. But that still leaves a lot of scope within the "broadly consequentialist" tent for uncertainty -- e.g. about the correct theory of value, whether there are agent-relative values, etc. So my self-identification as a "utilitarian" is rather more tentative, in at least three respects:

(1) Partiality: I've never had much sympathy for the idea that we must give extra weight to our own interests, but there's something much more compelling about the idea that it would be a deep mistake not to fundamentally value my wife more than (even comparably awesome) others. So I'm somewhat more agnostic about impartialism these days, and much less sure of the "might as well" argument that partiality could be at most permitted, not required.

(2) I'm also not entirely sure what to think about the non-identity problem, and whether we should be biased towards actually existent people -- preferring the actual state of affairs over another with a slightly better-off population consisting of completely different people. I certainly feel some pull towards the Cohen-conservative idea that our concerns should, in a sense, "latch" onto the actual things that are of value.

(3) Then of course there's the question of "welfarism" -- whether welfare is the only thing of value -- about which I have long been torn. I'm strongly inclined to think that various kinds of intellectual and cultural/artistic accomplishment have non-instrumental value. But they may be included as constituents of our welfare, so they don't make for clear counterexamples. Tricky questions also arise in the case of natural beauty -- is the waterfall in itself, or rather our appreciation of it, that has final value?

Moving on to metaphysics... The non-existence of popular deities seems pretty obvious to me, though once unbundled from the usual religious baggage I'd give some non-trivial credence to a non-traditional "creator deity", supported mainly by the fine-tuning argument.

Epiphenomenalism may be one of my most controversial views, though if anything it seems better supported than non-naturalist normative realism. (The arguments against naturalism's capacity to accommodate the phenomena are similar in both cases, but the phenomenon of consciousness itself is much more difficult to deny.) The most pressing worry is of course the paradox of phenomenal judgment, but the availability of correlative explanations -- together with the Humean observation that we never actually observe our qualia causing anything, but merely a "constant conjunction" between them and their apparent effects -- does pretty significantly mitigate the concerns, to my mind. As far as competing views go, I've nothing against Russellian monism / "panprotopsychism" -- in fact the view seems so similar that I hesitate to call it a "competitor" at all.

What about yourself, dear reader? What would you identify as your "weakest link(s)"? (Or, alternatively, how would your diagnoses of mine differ from the above?)

Grading with gDocs: Updated

2013-02-24T19:50:00.001-05:00

If anyone's interested, I've updated my Grading with Google Docs python scripts to work with the latest gdata library from Google.

So, after setting up the scripts correctly, I can create individualized google docs for each student in my class, just by typing "python CreateDocs.py". The student is automatically emailed the link to their new google doc, and when the due date for the paper has passed, I can remove student access to the papers while I grade, by simply typing "python RemovePermits.py". And then, once all the grading is complete, return the papers instantly with "python ReturnDocs.py".

It's pretty neat. Anyone else tempted to try it? (Though I'd probably only recommend it if you have at least some background in programming, in case you run into any bugs that I haven't foreseen.)

A few "known issues" to be aware of before you do:

* It requires Python 2.7.x (won't work with Python 3)

* If you use "two factor authentication" on your Google account (as you should!), you'll need to set up an "application-specific password" to use in these scripts.

* The scripts may crash mid-way through if an item (name or email) in your student-data spreadsheet contains extraneous whitespace (e.g. a cell with "jdoe@gmail.com " instead of "jdoe@gmail.com"). When I generate the spreadsheets via google forms, I always seem to have at least one student who adds an extra space in somewhere, so it's worth double-checking...

Conflating the Worth Of and To a Person

2013-02-15T11:06:00.000-05:00

Erik Nord, in 'Values for Health States in QALYs and DALYs: Desirability versus Well-Being and Worth', writes (p.126):

I define the worth of a person as the value attached by society to the enhancement of the interests and opportunities of that person relative to the interests and opportunities of other persons. One important form of enhancement of interest is the protection of the person’s life. If society regards two persons as being of equal worth, it means, among other things, that it is willing to do equally much to protect their lives.

This only follows on the false assumption that all life extensions are equal. If some people have a greater interest in continued living than others, then assigning equal value to the "enhancement of [their] interests" should fairly straightforwardly entail a greater willingness to "protect" the life of the person who would thereby gain more from it. We would still be "willing to do equally much" to equally benefit either person. But there's no reason to think that everyone benefits equally from the protection of their (respective) lives.

Nord thus seems to be repeating Harris' mistake of conflating the worth of a person (i.e. what weight we should give their interests) with the worth of a particular life-extension to the person. Recognizing that people have "equal worth" in the first sense -- that we should count their interests equally -- in no way entails that we should treat all life-extensions as having equal priority. Quite the opposite, in fact, if some life extensions are more beneficial to their subjects than others. Valuing their interests equally means preferring a great enhancement to one person's interests over a merely mild enhancement to another's.

Update: Erik Nord clarifies that by "interests" here he is talking about the psychological notion of feeling "interested" in an outcome, rather than the normative concept of one's welfare interests.

Early Death vs. Non-Existence

2013-02-10T17:16:00.003-05:00

Consider what we might call the "Pure Deprivation Account" of the harm of death, that death is worse for you the more (of a good future) it deprives you of. So it's a grievous harm to die the moment after you come into existence. McMahan objects to this kind of view on the grounds that it would render it "profoundly important to prevent the existence" of one who would otherwise immediately die (whereas he takes it that such preventive measures are not profoundly important). Ben Bradley, in 'The Worst Time to Die', offers the intriguing response that it isn't always important to prevent great harms. In this post, I want to explore this idea further.

Bradley writes (p.300):

Remember that death is a harm that is merely extrinsically bad for its victim. Death is harmful because of what it prevents; it has a sort of extrinsic value. When determining whether there is any reason at all not to perform the action, we should never consider the extrinsic values of the results of the action. For example, suppose you save my life by curing me of a debilitating disease and, as a result, I live an extra ten very happy years. I then die from an unrelated cause, and my later death deprives me of yet another ten happy years. Your saving my life was an indirect cause of my later death, and my later death was very bad for me. But my later death was merely extrinsically bad, and in evaluating how good it was that you saved my life, the extrinsic badness of my later death is irrelevant. Before my death I would not be justified in complaining, “Yes, you saved my life and gave me ten happy years, but you also indirectly caused an event that will prevent me from getting another ten happy years; so the bad you caused cancels the good you caused.” The reason this would be an unjustified complaint is that your saving my life, rather than letting me die, did not prevent me from getting those later ten years of a happy life that my later death prevents me from having. Similarly, in the case at issue in McMahan’s argument, the act of allowing a person to come into existence, rather than preventing his existence, does not prevent that person from getting the goods of which his death deprives him. Even though the act of allowing the person to come into existence indirectly causes another event that is very harmful to the person, that fact is not relevant to the evaluation of the act.

The upshot of this argument is that it matters greatly how we would prevent the harm of death. We have very strong reasons to prevent death by ensuring the continued living of the subject. But we have no such reasons to prevent death by preventing the subject from ever existing at all. The harm of death, on Bradley's view, is just that it deprives the subject of future goods, but non-existence is no better in that regard.

Does that really seem right, though? I'm dubious. Consider two possibilities in turn. First, suppose we accept some broadly "biological" view of identity, such that an embryo is one and the same entity as the person it grows into. Here we run into the spontaneous abortion objection: it just doesn't seem true that we typically have very strong reasons to save the lives of embryos that would otherwise be spontaneously aborted (with no-one aware that a pregnancy had even taken place). There's no real "harm" there.

On the other hand, suppose we instead accept a broadly "psychological" view of identity, such that we don't come into existence until we acquire something close to mental "personhood" -- as toddlers, say. It's now clear that we have reasons to ensure the continued living of the subject, but the second claim is now in doubt: should we really think that the death of a toddler is no worse than simply failing to conceive it would have been? The early death of a person seems to me positively bad in a way that mere non-existence is not. (Do you agree? It's obviously instrumentally worse, e.g. for the emotionally-invested parents, but even bracketing all that... it just seems worse, in itself, to have more people exist with brief, tragic lives.)

This might be taken to suggest that death is not only extrinsically bad after all. Early death, on this alternative proposal, introduces an element of tragedy that plausibly contributes positive disvalue to a state of affairs. So even if Bradley is right that the extrinsic badness of early death is no reason to prefer non-existence, this additional aspect of death's badness might furnish such reasons after all.

Another possible explanation is opened up if we accept actualist partiality. On this view, it is only for people who actually come into existence that we can be presented with "personal" (as opposed to merely "impersonal") reasons. So, in cases of early death, we have personal reasons for regret that we would not have in the case of mere non-existence. (There we could at most have impersonal reasons for regretting that the world doesn't have an additional happy person in it.) We would have additional reasons for thinking that things had turned out badly -- that it would be so much better had the person lived on. Had they never existed, we would not have such strong reasons to prefer that they had existed.

But this does not yet get us the conclusion that early death is worse than non-existence. To get that, it seems we need some further principle to the effect that it's better to prevent deeply regrettable events. But this brings us back to Bradley's original argument (just with "deeply regrettable events" substituted for "great harms"). So I don't think actualist partiality can do any real work here. If early death is worse than non-existence, then this must simply be a basic datum in our (impersonal) axiology.

What do you think?

Two Metaphysical Pictures

2013-01-25T17:30:00.001-05:00

While there are any number of logically consistent combinations of metaphysical views that one could hold, it seems to me that there are two particularly coherent and ideologically unified competing "pictures" on offer. We might call them the objects in flux view vs. the timeless qualities view. Let me sketch each view in turn.

(1) Objects in Flux: On this view, objects are taken to be the fundamental building blocks of reality, and they endure as they change. Abstracting from these concrete changes in objects gives rise to the notion of time. But since temporal talk is just a way of regimenting the changes objects undergo, the resulting conception of time is thoroughly tensed and indeed presentist in nature. The objects existing now are, strictly speaking, the only objects that there are; though we can also speak of what was (before certain changes took place), and speculate about what will be.

Laws of nature are generative: they govern how the world changes, and so bring about the future. These changes involve genuine causation.

There are fundamental facts about the identities and essences of things: whether this object will endure through various changes, or whether it will instead be replaced by a different kind of thing. In this way, the view endorses haecceitism and essentialism. De re (or objectual) modality is seen as prior to de dicto (or qualitative) modality, as famously championed by Kripke (ht: Rad Geek):

[W]e do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects. (53)

(2) Timeless Qualities: On this picture, qualities (shape, mass, charge, etc.) are fundamental, and distributed across the four dimensions of space-time. Comparing different moments of time gives rise to the notion of change. Reality is itself tenseless, as all moments of time are metaphysically on a par. ('Now' functions as an indexical, much like 'here'.) They stand in 'before' and 'after' relations to other moments, but there's no privileged location in time that qualifies as objectively present. Each moment is present to itself. The space-time "loaf" as a whole is eternal.

Laws of nature merely describe patterns or regularities in spacetime. They are explanatorily downstream of the space-time "loaf". There's no fundamental causation -- mere "constant conjunction", as Hume taught us.

There are no deep facts about identities or essences -- such talk is purely conventional. We can bundle different qualities (spread through space and time) together into "objects" however we like. There are no deep facts about de re modality, or whether I could have been a poached egg. All is qualitative, as Lewis would have it. So, first we grasp the qualitative possibilities, and then we decide which of the people in those possible worlds are enough like me to qualify as my "counterparts" for our current purposes.

Do you agree that these are the most natural ways to "cluster" the specific metaphysical views discussed? Have I missed anything? For convenience, let's call adherents of the two pictures "Fluxians" and "Humeans", respectively. Presumably most Humeans will be either physicalists or epiphenomenalists about the mind. Any interactionist dualists would surely adhere to something closer to the "objects in flux" picture (though it's not a strict dichotomy, of course; also worth noting that Fluxians need not be dualists). I suspect that Humeans tend strongly towards consequentialism, whereas deontologists are more likely to be Fluxians (or, again, somewhere in that general vicinity).

Geographically speaking, this 'Humean' worldview is strongly associated with Australian philosophy. It seems likely to appeal to those with a penchant for systematization, and a suspicion of extravagant metaphysics. Though rarely discussed together, it seems very natural to say, "Haecceities? Natural rights? Nonsense on stilts, the both of them!"

If you agree with my categorization: which cluster are you more drawn to, and why?

Non-identity, Variability and Actualist Partiality

2013-01-23T21:30:00.002-05:00

Melinda Roberts has a fun piece in Philosophy Compass, 'An Asymmetry in the Ethics of Procreation', which explores the non-identity problem, and how to account for the putative "Asymmetry" according to which "it is wrong to bring a miserable child into existence but permissible not to bring a happy child into existence." I've previously argued that the Asymmetry is best explained by value holism as applied to our contingent circumstances of high average welfare. Now I want to focus on the more general question of how we should balance the conflicting interests of (i) people whose existence is contingent on our choice, vs. (ii) people who will exist regardless of our choice.

By way of background: I'm inclined to think that, while we can of course have impersonal reasons to take non-existent people into consideration (e.g., by preventing miserable lives from coming into existence), we cannot have personal reasons that ultimately stem from non-existent entities. Roberts argues against this view by means of a temporal analogy (p.769):

[T]he judgment that continuing to exist would be worse than dying for me, on the face of things, would seem perfectly cogent. I am not sure why the judgment that coming into existence makes things worse for the miserable Meg is not just as cogent. The subject doesn’t exist at the world where the choice is made not to bring Meg into existence, just as the subject doesn’t continue to exist at the world where the choice is made to die. But in both cases there is still a subject; the future could have unfolded in a way that includes Meg, just as the future could have unfolded in a way that (still) includes me.

But this strikes me as a bad (or at least limited) analogy. Given Eternalism, I exist (here and now) regardless of whether I die tomorrow or not. My current existence suffices to provide a subject that can continue to be referred to even after I die. But in non-identity cases, whether there is a subject at all depends on what choice we make. If we choose to bring Meg into existence, then there is a subject and we can regret her suffering for her sake. But if we don't, then there isn't, and our reason for relief at avoiding such suffering can only be impersonal.

(Roberts adds, on p.770, that "even if some form or another of modal actualism is true, any plausible articulation of moral law is going to require some reference to – not a de re reference; not a singular reference; but some way of talking, at least in some descriptive way, about – people who will in fact never exist at all." Which is true enough, but compatible with my view that this descriptive way of talking can only ground impersonal reasons.)

So, let's accept that we have only impersonal reasons to prevent the suffering of the non-existent (by ensuring that they don't exist), but both personal and impersonal reasons to relieve the suffering of actual people. Does that mean that the latter "count for more"? One difficulty with this idea is that, were we to discount a supposedly non-existent person's interest in non-existence to the point where we allow them to come into existence (say to prevent a lesser harm to others), then suddenly they turn out to be an actual person whose interests count with full force, and hence who we have wronged by discounting. So we can't discount the value of preventing miserable existence in this way, relative to relieving the misery of actual people. The personal value of preventing suffering must substitute for, rather than add to, its impersonal value.

On the other hand, it seems we can coherently discount the positive value of bringing more happy people into existence, compared with the value of making actual people happier. (Were we to bring them into existence, we would turn out to have personal reasons to be glad we did so. But no personal wrong is done by failing to bring them into existence. This seems like a curious case where the moral quality of one's options depends upon which option one actually takes.) So it's open to us to hold that personal value adds to the impersonal value of increasing happiness for actual people, in contrast to the case of preventing misery. This would seem an odd asymmetry though. What could explain such an asymmetry between promoting the good and preventing the bad? Perhaps just the observed point: If we are to count personal value over and above impersonal value, this is the only coherent way to do it. (Still, I want to stress that it strikes me as very much an open question whether we should want to count personal reasons in addition to impersonal reasons, rather than as merely substituting the one kind of normative force for an equally weighty other kind.)

For a point of comparison: Roberts proposes a view she calls Variabilism to systematize the asymmetry (p.773):

The loss of wellbeing incurred at a world where the person who incurs that loss does or will exist has full moral signiﬁcance for purposes of evaluating an act performed at a given world that imposes that loss and any alternate act performed at any alternate world that avoids that loss, while a loss incurred by that very same person at a world where that person never exists at all has no moral signiﬁcance whatsoever.

This accommodates some central intuitions, but seems to lack any theoretical rationale. So I wonder whether the central intuitions might be better captured by the view I describe above. If we take seriously the idea that personal value can only arise for actual people, together with the idea that discounting the misery of non-actual people is incoherent, then this also gets us the desired results that (1) We have strong reasons to prevent miserable lives from coming into existence, and (2) We have weaker reasons to bring happy lives into existence (at least if we actually refrain from doing so).

There are a couple of subtle differences between the two proposed views that may be brought out as follows. (i) Suppose Adam actually exists, and consider a world w where he never exists. Obviously w is in no way accessible from our world, but we might still adopt various evaluative attitudes towards it. On one natural understanding of my account, we should regard w as lamentable for its lack of Adam (even if some other, similarly happy person 'Bob' exists in his place). Not so on Roberts' account, as I understand it: Adam doesn't exist in w, so when evaluating w his loss counts for nothing.

(ii) Imagine a world w+ where the (actually non-existent) 'Bob' is even happier than in w, and another world @+ where Adam is similarly happier than he is in the actual world @. On my proposed view, we have merely impersonal reasons to prefer w+ to w, and whereas we have both impersonal and (non-substituting) personal reasons to prefer @+ over @. So the latter preference should be stronger than the former. On Roberts' view, since the beneficiaries each exist in their relevant world (w+ and @+, respectively), they both have "full moral significance" and hence there would seem no grounds for any difference in preference.

While these are subtle differences, I think they count in favour of the view I've described. If we are to countenance any fundamental asymmetry at all (and I'm not yet convinced that we should: the merely 'derivative' asymmetries offered by value holism seem quite adequate to me), then it seems to make most sense -- on both theoretical and case-based grounds -- to have it stem from a kind of partiality towards actually existing people (within the above-noted constraints).

2012 in review

2012-12-31T18:34:00.003-05:00

Time to summarize the year's work... (Cf. 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.)

Professional: It's been a big year, professionally. I finished my dissertation, started a bioethics postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania (dept of medical ethics) while Helen's been a Bersoff fellow at NYU, and next fall we will both start tenure-track positions in philosophy at BGSU. (Hooray for solving the two-body problem!)
Articles accepted for publication in 2012 include: (1) 'Fittingness: The Sole Normative Primitive' in Phil Quarterly, which argues that the normative domain is "structured" in an important sense -- while we can flatly evaluate anything for its desirability (value), there are other kinds of normative assessment (e.g. "rightness") that only apply to agential (judgment-sensitive) evaluands like acts, beliefs, and desires.

(2) 'Knowing What Matters' (in a forthcoming OUP volume on Parfit) sets out what I think realists ought to say about moral epistemology. (But I think similar lessons apply to the epistemology of philosophy more broadly.)

(3) A review of Parfit's On What Matters, for the journal Philosophy. (Blogged here.)

(4) Co-authored with Helen: 'Mind-Body Meets Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy' in Phil Studies. This is a fun one, where we basically argue that (cognitivist) metaethical naturalists aren't nearly as sophisticated as their physicalist counterparts in philosophy of mind, and that once we learn from the latter what kind of moves really need to be made to adequately address the strongest conceivability arguments, the prospects for metaethical naturalism look rather more dim.

(Anyone interested in phil mind should also check out Helen's 'Circularity in the Conditional Analysis of Phenomenal Concepts' in Phil Studies.)

Now on to the blog posts...

Consequentialism

* The Separateness of Persons: Commensurability without Fungibility sets out what I think is a decisive refutation of the traditional 'separateness of persons' / 'value receptacle' objections to consequentialism. I expand upon this in my paper 'Value Receptacles' [pdf], which I actually think is my best and most important paper, but it's still waiting to be accepted by a journal...

* Competing Claims and Separate Persons explores Michael Otsuka's conception of the separateness of persons as requiring different responses in "non-identity" vs "fixed-identity" cases.

* General and Particular Moral Explanations -- and why it's the reasons that feature in the latter that are relevant to the good-willed agent's motivations. (A response to Philip Stratton-Lake's "motive objection" to consequentialism.)

* Assessing Decision Procedures: Background sets up the debate about assessing decision procedures. Action-Guidance and Rational Decision Procedures then argues against the excessively subjective, 'instruction manual' approach of Holly Smith and Fred Feldman, in favour of a more objective standard for rational decision-making. Only the latter, I argue, has any genuine normative significance.

* The Strongest Self-Effacingness Objection should be pretty self-explanatory. My follow-up on Consequentialist Decision Procedures then sets out how I think the objection is best addressed. These ideas form the core of my paper, 'What's Fit for the Fallible' [pdf]

* When is Significant Self-Sacrifice Obligatory? looks at respects in which even common-sense morality allows for the possibility of very "demanding" situations, and so raises the question of why we shouldn't think that our actual situation (being wealthy in a world that contains preventable poverty and suffering) is one of them.

* Singer's Pond and Quality of Will uses the latter to defuse a common objection to the former. We may, for contingent psychological reasons, be less blameworthy for failing to donate to effective charities than we would be for letting a child drown before our eyes. But that's compatible with holding that we have equally strong reasons for action in either case.

* Parfit on Aggregation and Iteration - why we shouldn't think that a large harm to one person is more important to prevent than a very great number of smaller harms to different people. (And see the comments thread for a fuller elaboration of the argument.)

* Consequences in Time - a straightforward response piece, explaining what's wrong with an argument that consequentialism is incompatible with presentism (and other non-eternalist views about time).

* Direct vs. Indirect Beneficiaries argues that Kamm's distinction lacks normative significance -- and that her argument to the contrary rests on a misconception.

* Counterexamples to Consequentialism explains why I don't find the standard "organ-harvesting" type "counterexamples" particularly persuasive (and nor should you).

* Ethics as What's Worth Caring About - and how this conception of ethics naturally leads one to (welfarist?) consequentialism.

Metaethics

* Parfit on Philosophical Waste corrects a common misinterpretation of what Parfit means when he says that much of his life's work would be a waste if naturalism turned out to be true.

* Information and Necessarily Coextensive Properties argues (against Jackson and Streumer) that we shouldn't think that all necessarily coextensive properties are thereby identical.

Political Philosophy

* What if everyone did that? analyses this argument form and its limits, with particular reference to the (ir)rationality of voting.

* Migration and Sustainability argues that we shouldn't prioritize the latter over relieving poverty via the former.

* Immigration and the "right to exclude" questions whether there is any such "right" sufficiently weighty to override the rights of outsiders to escape severe poverty and/or oppression.

* Individual vs. Political Feasibility explains what's wrong with the thought that "there's something odd about philanthropists like Warren Buffett calling for higher taxes when their own philanthropic efforts are instead directed towards funding non-governmental organizations."

Bioethics - Resource Allocation

* Lives Can't be Saved argues against the (distressingly common) practice of treating person-numbers "saved" as an independent goal, over and above the more general utilitarian goal of extending (happy) lives by as many years as possible.

* QALYs, DALYs, and Complete Lives argues, against Persad et al., that some (generally: younger) years of life are more important than others.

* Fine-Grained vs. Indiscriminate Allocation argues for the former over the latter.

* Treatment, Prevention, and Bad Bioethics offers a fairly scathing review of Macklin and Cowan's paper, 'Given financial constraints, it would be unethical to divert antiretroviral drugs from treatment to prevention'.

* Catering to Mistaken Morals - If folks commonly believe in the "rule of rescue" (a bias in favour of "identifiable" over "statistical" victims), is that a reason to follow it?

* Weight Discrimination in Drug Rationing - and why it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Other

* The Value of Defiance explores just what the title suggests. This is something I remain unsure about, and would love to hear others' thoughts.

* The Value of Life suggests that our opposition to anti-natalism (the view that procreation is bad) is better grounded by substantive moral premises about the positive value of (happy) life, rather than purely formal arguments.

* Confucian Moral Psychology introduces some interesting ideas from... well, you know.

* Unreliable Philosophy? addresses Jason Brennan's challenge, that "[w]idespread disagreement shows that pursuing philosophy is not a reliable method of discovering true answers to philosophical questions."

* Effective Giving - on how to get the most bang for our charitable buck.

Happy new year!

Weight Discrimination in Drug Rationing

2012-12-30T16:56:00.000-05:00

Suppose we have a severe shortage of a drug that is prescribed on a "grams per kilogram" basis, i.e. a 300 pound patient needs three times as much of the drug as a 100 pound patient. Should weight then play a role in allocation decisions, such that (all else equal) lighter patients will have priority over heavier patients, or would it be more fair to simply allocate by lottery until the drug runs out?

It seems to me pretty clear that we ought to prefer to help more rather than fewer people, all else equal, even if it means that all those helped have a characteristic in common (low weight). But I expect that a lot of people would disagree with this, and automatically regard it as "discriminatory" and hence "unfair". Can such objections be rationally defended?

Such objections remind me of Harris' confused claim that the QALY metric is inherently "ageist" and "ableist". In both cases, the objector moves too swiftly from unequal outcomes to the procedural conclusion that members of the less-helped group must have been unjustly neglected. But this is simply fallacious. It's true that it would be unjustly discriminatory to count the interests of some people as less important than those of others, on the grounds of some morally irrelevant feature like age or weight. But unequal outcomes are not always the result of counting some people's interests for less. When utilitarians advocate for these unequal outcomes, they do it precisely because they are counting all people's interests equally, and there just happen to be contingent practical reasons why some people can be more easily helped than others. A morally irrelevant feature (i.e., of no intrinsic moral significance) may be highly practically relevant (i.e., of great instrumental significance) to the securing of morally worthwhile ends.

In the age case, the appearance of "ageism" results from the practical fact that younger people tend to have greater life expectancy, and so a persisting health benefit will tend to help them for longer than a superficially similar "benefit" to an older person. The duration of a benefit, while less salient than the momentary impact of a benefit, is highly relevant to how great a benefit it is. The accusation of "ageism" thus results from a failure to look beyond the immediate impact of a benefit. When we see that a certain intervention actually offers a greater benefit to a younger person than it does to an older one, then there can no longer be any reasonable objection to it. There is nothing objectionably "discriminatory" about prioritizing more-beneficial health interventions over less-beneficial ones.

The weight case is slightly different. Here the issue is not that heavier people get less benefit from treatment, but just that they require more of the scarce resource in order to receive treatment. This means that, if we want to help as many people as we can, without regard for their morally irrelevant characteristics, then we will naturally end up prioritizing lighter patients. This is not because we count their interests for more. It is just that they are easier to help -- we can help more of them for the same amount of resources. And given a choice between helping more people or fewer, we should surely prefer to help more.

To think otherwise is, in fact, the objectionably discriminatory position. If one wants to avoid the appearance of differential outcomes, then one must actually take morally irrelevant features into account -- to treat a single 300-pound person as morally equal to three 100-pound people, and hence to treat the former person's interests as three times as weighty as the interests of each of the lighter people.

This is not what the superficial egalitarians intend, of course -- they do not think of their preference for superficial equality as "discriminatory" in this way -- but it is the actual moral upshot of their approach to the issue. It is deeply morally misguided. We should not prioritize superficial equality over the more fundamental equality embodied in the utilitarian ideal of giving equal consideration to the interests of all, regardless of their superficial characteristics.

Catering to Mistaken Morals

2012-12-02T16:13:00.000-05:00

According to the "Rule of Rescue", we ought to do all we can to save the lives of identifiable people at risk (e.g. trapped miners), even if this exhausts resources that would otherwise have saved a greater number of ("statistical", or not antecedently identifiable) lives, say by preventing traffic accidents. This "rule" is, I take it, completely insane, but seems to be fairly widely accepted by unreflective people. (Our altruistic motivation is more easily engaged by the salient needs of identifiable individuals, after all.) Does the widespread acceptance of this mistaken moral view provide reason to act in accordance with it? As Cookson et al write in 'Public healthcare resource allocation and the Rule of Rescue':

A more promising line of argument is that application of the Rule of Rescue by public policy makers can have ‘‘symbolic value’’. Some actions by the state may have indirect and/or long-term benefits in making citizens feel better about the society in which they live, in promoting trust and co-operation, or simply as ‘‘the mark of a civilised and humane society’’. (543)

Suppose it's true that, by unjustly misallocating our resources to rescue a few miners rather than preventing a greater number of traffic fatalities, most citizens in the society will "feel better". And suppose that a sufficient number receive this happiness-boost to make it the happiness-maximizing option, all things considered. Does that make it worth doing after all?

I'm inclined to think not. Morally deluded happiness, like sadistic pleasure, seems like it should count for less. Malicious/sadistic pleasure doesn't seem to have value in the way that most happiness does. (If anything, it seems positively disvaluable.) And while the morally deluded pleasure one takes in seeing the rule of rescue enforced is clearly not as bad as outright malicious emotional responses, insofar as it derives from a misguided moral viewpoint, it is plausibly at least a step in that direction, and so is likewise of less value than more right-headed happiness would be. (Perhaps it even lacks value entirely, but isn't positively bad in the way that malicious pleasures are.) It certainly seems pretty unappealing to let more innocents die just so that morally wrongheaded people can feel that the "humane" decision was made.

Things might be different if the effects went beyond the immediate emotional responses. "Trust and co-operation" are obviously vital for a well-functioning society. So if people's misguided moral beliefs would cause these crucial civic virtues of theirs to be eroded if the more just allocation were to be made, then we may need to cater to their moral delusions. For while their "interest" in deluded moral gratification is of little or no value, the same cannot be said of the interests of others to enjoy the fruits of their trust and cooperation. They still count, as much as any legitimate interests -- even, I think, if these "others" are themselves deluded supporters of the Rule of Rescue. For it is not as though the interests of the morally deluded (but not outright vicious) generally count for less. It is, I think, merely their "interest" in the delusion itself that is to be discounted.

So, if everyone in a society has the unfortunate disposition described above, whereby their civic virtue is held hostage to the Rule of Rescue, then I guess we owe it to everybody else to preserve their good behaviour by following the Rule of Rescue (if that is what best serves the legitimate interests of people on the whole). And this is so even though it's "unfair" to the extra innocents who die as a result, in the sense that they would have been saved if only their compatriots didn't unjustly neglect their interests. This is not to say that we are at all neglecting their interests, when we ultimately abide by the Rule of Rescue and hence let them die. Rather, what's happened is that the unjust attitudes and dispositions of their compatriots put others' interests at risk -- which, in the ideal world, they would not have been.

So, that's a possible situation in which a consequentialist case for following the "Rule of Rescue" could be made. But the empirical prerequisites don't sound all that likely to me. And, crucially, once we abandon the crudest hedonistic utilitarianism, we needn't be beholden to the misguided moral feelings of RR supporters. It is, perhaps, only legitimate interests that we need to take into account.

Effective Giving

2012-11-25T16:36:00.000-05:00

I encourage everyone who wants to make the world a better place to join Giving What We Can and pledge to give 10% of their pre-tax income to effective charities. You can expect to save several lives each year (averaging over your lifetime earnings, if you're currently a student), which is pretty amazing when you think about it, and it's surprisingly easy too. (A 10% change in income generally doesn't impose any drastic lifestyle changes!) Some people give even more, and that's even cooler. Some start with less, and every bit helps. However much you give, for the remainder of this post I want to turn to the question of where to give.

The safest and simplest answer, I think, is to simply donate to GiveWell for re-granting to their top charities. The folks at GiveWell are clearly "pros" when it comes to evaluating charities, so if you want to defer to widely-recognized experts, they're it. (And since they're so transparent, you can read through their research in detail if you want to reach your own conclusions.) You can also donate directly to their recommended charities, via their website. (Note that it's important to donate through GiveWell's website, or otherwise let them know about it, so that they can accurately track their "money moved", which is important for growing their influence.)

This is a "safe" option, because GiveWell's in-depth research offers the best guarantee available that donations to the charities they recommend really do get results. Further, by adding to GiveWell's "money moved", and hence influence, you can reap the (potentially much greater) benefits of promoting meta-charities. For these reasons, I gave $2500 this year to GiveWell for re-granting.

A more speculative option, with a potientially even greater upside, is to donate to GWWC itself (or its sister organizations within the Centre for Effective Altruism). GWWC is expanding fast, and has recently taken on some paid staff to help facilitate further growth. Given that each new member goes on to donate 10% of their income to highly effective charities, expanding the membership seems like a potentially very high-impact endeavour. Will Crouch makes the case:

Last March we did an impact assessment for Giving What We Can. Some more info is available here, and I can provide much more information, including the calculations, upon request. As of last March, we’d invested $170 000’s worth of volunteer time into Giving What We Can, and had moved $1.7 million to GiveWell or GWWC top-recommended development charities, and raised a further $68 million in pledged donations. Taking into account the facts that some proportion of this would have been given anyway, there will be some member attrition, and not all donations will go to the very best charities (and using data for all these factors when possible), we estimate that we had raised $8 in realised donations and $130 in future donations for every $1’s worth of volunteer time invested in Giving What We Can. We will continue with such impact assessments, most likely on an annual basis.

I encourage anyone interested in meta-charities to read Will's full post, and seriously consider donating to GWWC to help in their expansion. I donated $3000 to them this year.

So, those are the conclusions I reached this year. But I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on where best to give. (Perhaps you can help me to find even better giving opportunities for next year.)

One final recommendation: Wherever you give, and however much you give, do so publicly. It may be too awkward to bring up in person (depending on context), but there's really no downside to social broadcasting via Facebook, blogging, or whatever. You can help your friends to think about effective giving, and by force of example help to promote more philanthropic norms. In such a way, the indirect effects of your giving may ripple out beyond merely the direct effect of your personal donation. That'd be pretty awesome.

Ethics as What's Worth Caring About

2012-11-20T16:57:00.001-05:00

Ethical theories can be seen as attempts to track what is worth caring about. This thought may naturally seem to support consequentialism, and especially utilitarianism. After all, the utilitarian can simply say, "I care about people! I want everyone to be as well-off as possible." And that seems a pretty attractive goal! There seems no doubt that people's welfare (and, more broadly, the welfare of sentient beings) is worth caring about. Is anything else comparably important, or worth caring about?

Take promises. People sometimes criticize utilitarianism on the grounds that it affords no intrinsic significance to promise-keeping, so utilitarians may be expected to break promises (at least when it's sufficiently clear that it really would be for the best). But does it really make sense to care about promises more than people? That sounds terribly perverse! Promises can be a useful tool for coordination, and hence serving our collective interests. But when promise-keeping and human welfare diverge, surely it's the latter that really matters.

Or consider objections based on "justice" and "fairness". Of course, I'm opposed to injustice as I understand it, which generally involves people suffering harms for no good reason. But if you think of justice and fairness as something opposed to the general welfare -- e.g., giving intrinsic weight to equality, or disproportionately weighting the interests of the worst-off -- then this seems harder to justify in terms of what's worth caring about. "I care about justice and equality rather than people" sounds like a kind of weird moral fetishism. Even prioritarianism: "I care about people, and the worst-off most of all" just seems kind of perverse -- doesn't it make more sense to care about all people equally (at least if they're not people you have any special relationship to)?

Various attempts at deontological distinctions -- doing/allowing, intended/foreseen, harming/failing to benefit, etc. -- seem similarly unmotivated when looked at through the lens of what's worth caring about. "I care about not myself performing such-and-such act types" sounds like a narcissistic concern for one's own moral purity, not an accurate perception of what really matters.

One might reasonably expand consequentialism beyond narrowly welfarist concerns: "I care about people, but also cultural flourishing, natural beauty, and philosophical understanding," sounds pretty reasonable to me. Likewise, putting an agent-relative twist on one's welfarism: "I care about people, but my wife and kids most of all." No problem. But the sorts of thoroughly non-consequentialist concerns discussed above just don't seem much worth caring about. Do you disagree?

I guess deontologists would want to say that they, too, "care about people", but just have a different understand of what this involves. They may say that caring about people in the ethically appropriate sense entails respecting their rights to be left alone, rather than promoting their welfare. But I have trouble understanding why anyone would care about rights independently of welfare. After all, a person's welfare just is what we should want insofar as we care about them. Whereas rights are either generally reliable rules or else constitute objectionable status quo bias. While the former are at least worth attending to, neither are plausibly of fundamental importance.

So, that's how things look from my (admittedly thoroughly consequentialist) perspective. What do others think? Can you offer a more sympathetic and compelling story about what deontologists care about? Or would you instead object to framing ethical debate in terms of what's worth caring about?

General and Particular Moral Explanations

2012-11-19T20:44:00.000-05:00

In 'Recalcitrant Pluralism', Philip Stratton-Lake draws on Korsgaard's Symmetry Thesis -- that the reason why a good-willed person does an action, and the reason why the action is right, are the same -- to argue against Consequentialism. He's making the kind of character-based objection that I think is worth taking seriously, but I think that PSL goes importantly astray in how he understands the fitting (good-willed) consequentialist agent.

By way of background: PSL considers a case where a villager can save either his father's life or that of a (relevantly similar) stranger. He then considers a form of consequentialism which tries to accommodate the intuition that the villager ought to save his father by assigning value not just to welfare but also to states of affairs in which sons help their fathers. PSL then raises the motive objection (p.380):

Why would he help his father in preference to a stranger? Given the symmetry thesis this will be because of the reason why he ought to help his father. So if the consequentialist account of why he ought to help his father is correct, then the reason why he would help him in preference to a stranger would be because he will be producing a better state of affairs in the world than if he did any other act. [...]
The deciding factor in whether this state of affairs is best is the fact that his act will have as a consequence a state in which a son helps his father. But this should not lead us to think that the relation that figures in this state will figure in the villager’s motivation after all. The fact that his act will have this consequence is the reason why the act will have the best outcome, since it breaks the tie between the value of the benefit conferred on either his father, or a stranger. But it is the fact that his act has produced the best outcome, not the fact that it has produced a state in which a son helps a father, that makes it the right act to do. Otherwise this really would look like a mere semantic victory for the consequentialist. What makes it stand out from the intuitionist account is that it is the production of impartial value that grounds this duty. This is not merely a rewording of the intuitionists view.

While I wouldn't defend this particular form of consequentialism, I think PSL is mistaken about what fitting motives follow from the view, and also mistaken to think that the view would otherwise collapse into Rossian intuitionism.

For any moral theory, we need to distinguish between (i) the particular right-making features it posits, or what makes some particular action right, and (ii) the general property shared by all right actions, or what makes actions in general right (when they are right). Applied to Consequentialism: what makes actions in general right is that they produce the best outcome -- this is what all right actions have in common. But each particular action will be right in a different way. The good-making features of the outcome (the values it realizes) will differ from case to case, and hence so do the right-making features of the actions that bring about these good outcomes. PSL confuses these when he gives the general answer to the particular question of what makes the villager's act of helping his father right. The correct answer, according to the form of consequentialism he's considering, will appeal to the particular values at stake in the decision, including the value of sons helping their fathers.

Note that this same distinction applies to PSL's Rossianism. Imagine if I argued against his view as follows:

The deciding factor in whether the balance of prima facie duties favours the son's helping his father over the stranger is the fact that he has a prima facie duty of fidelity (or whatever) to his father. But this should not lead us to think that the relation that figures in this state will figure in the villager’s motivation after all. The fact that his act will satisfy this prima facie duty is the reason why the act will satisfy the balance of prima facie duties, since it breaks the tie between the prima facie duties of beneficence that apply equally to his father and the stranger. But it is the fact that his act satisfies the balance of prima facie duties, not the fact that it satisfies his prima facie duty of fidelty to his father, that makes it the right act to do.

This would be a bad objection to Rossianism. Sure, what all right actions have in common, on this view, is that they best satisfy the balance of prima facie duties. So one might, speaking loosely, say that it is possession of this general property that explains why an act is right. But it would also be misleading to say this, for it may lead one to overlook the fact that in any given case there will be a more particular explanation, invoking particular right-making features, and it is these particular right-making features that feature in the motivations of the virtuous agent.

And so it is in the case of consequentialism! I'm not sure why more people haven't previously realized this, but if my work only ever leads to the wider appreciation of one insight, I hope it is this: that the virtuous (or fitting) consequentialist agent desires each particular good, and not just the promotion of abstract value as such.

Of course, the form of non-welfarist consequentialism that PSL discusses here can still be exposed as perverse (and distinct from Rossian Pluralism). For it implies that it's fitting to desire that sons help their fathers (generally), and hence he should let his father die if it would thereby enable two other sons to aid their (respective) fathers. Nobody should hold that view. Either one should endorse full-blown agent-relative value, such that the son should value his father's welfare over that of the stranger, or else simply stick with good old-fashioned utilitarianism, according to which the son should care deeply about the welfare of his father and the stranger, equally.

Similar remarks apply to PSL's resentment objection (p.382):

[T]he fact that the villager has failed to bring about the best state of affairs leaves the fact that his father has been wronged completely unexplained. If anyone is wronged here, it would be the world which has not been made as good as it could have been. But that, of course, makes no sense.

It's not clear whether PSL sees this form of objection as applying just to the specific view he discusses, or to consequentialism more generally. So let me just flag that it's not generally true that consequentialism can't account for personal wrongs (and hence warranted resentment). Even on utilitarianism, if someone chooses to prevent a lesser harm to another instead of a greater harm to Bob, then Bob -- and not just the world -- has been wronged by them. They have failed to take Bob's interests sufficiently into account, which is a kind of disrespect to Bob -- a failure to appreciate his distinctive value as a person, or to respond to it in the manner that is due.

To think otherwise is, again, to let the general facts about value blind one to the more particular value facts -- such as the distinctive value of each individual person, which we must (morally) take into account, for the individual's own sake.

Direct vs. Indirect Beneficiaries

2012-11-19T13:10:00.000-05:00

Suppose you save a doctor's life, and the doctor goes on to save the lives of a dozen other people (who would otherwise die -- suppose he's the only doctor in the region). You have then indirectly benefited the dozen others, by directly benefiting the doctor. It's a clear enough distinction, though not, I think, a particularly significant one. Kamm (in Morality, Mortality vol.1) places great weight on it, however. She claims that a "distribution of our lifesaving drug would be unfair if we distinguished between candidates who directly need our resource on the basis of a personal characteristic unrelated to the distribution of our resource for saving lives." (p.110) According to Kamm, it is somehow "unfair" to treat the interests of mere "indirect beneficiaries" equally, though such unfairness "could be overridden by significant utility". But you should, apparently, prefer to save ten people directly rather than a dozen indirectly.

Such a view seems quite bizarre. Of course, there might be practical grounds for preferring direct effects insofar as a shorter causal chain is more of a "sure thing", less likely to get derailed, etc. If you don't trust the doctor to actually save more lives in future, then you need to factor in the uncertainty of the later possible benefits. But that isn't Kamm's concern here. Rather, it's simply better in principle (for reasons of "fairness") to prioritize the people you can save directly rather than indirectly.

Why think this? Kamm seems to think that to do otherwise is to treat the non-doctors amongst us "merely as a means": (p.148)

I have argued that to favor the person who can produce [extra utility ...] is to treat people “merely as means” since it decides against the person who cannot produce the extra utility on the grounds that he is not a means. It does not give people equal status as “ends in themselves” and, therefore, treats them unfairly.

But this is clearly confused. The utilitarian does not favour the doctor because he has greater status as an "end in himself" -- all people are regarded equally as ends. The difference is rather that, besides his value as an end in himself (equal to the janitor), the doctor also has -- ex hypothesi -- greater value as a means to helping other people, who are themselves "ends in themselves", and whose interests merit equal consideration.

Is there any better reason to take Kamm's distinction here seriously? (For the curious: the earlier "argument" she references can be found on p.112: "[I]t may be said that we are treating A only as a means since we decide who gets aid by seeing what function each person can perform... It is true that here we do not ignore A's needs entirely... Yet denying him the drug because he is not useful, when it is not in his interest to be denied the drug, is, I believe, adequate grounds for saying we are treating him solely as a means." Colour me unconvinced.)

What if everyone did that?

2012-11-07T14:50:00.000-05:00

People often appeal to "What if everyone did that?"-style moral arguments (e.g. for a putative obligation to vote). While there's something to the underlying thought here, I think it is often misapplied. If we're not careful, this "universalizing" reasoning can easily mislead us into accepting stronger conclusions than are actually warranted.

For example, advanced economies depend upon there being diverse and specialized professions. So if everyone worked in (say) construction, we'd all starve; but that obviously doesn't make working in the construction sector immoral. Even if construction work is widely regarded as permissible, there is no risk of everyone doing it, and hence no risk of disaster. Similarly for choosing not to have children. As these cases suggest, the relevant question turns out to be, not "what if everyone did that?", but rather, "what if everyone felt free to do that?" The answer to this latter question will often be, appropriately enough, "no problem!"

Other times, the "what if everyone did that?" heuristic serves to highlight a genuine moral problem, but one that can be equally well addressed from a straightforwardly Act Consequentialist perspective. This can take two forms:

(1) We often unjustly neglect the aggregate impact of small differences made to large numbers of people. So, iterating these effects can help to make them more visible, and bring us to see that actually each individual instance was more significant than we realized (i.e., more significant than was a competing, more visible effect on a single person).

(2) Sometimes decisions (e.g. buying factory-farmed meat) have what I call "chunky impacts", or threshold effects, whereby the vast majority of instances have no effect, but then a single threshold-breaking instance has a proportionately huge effect, such that the expected value comes out to the same (if you have a proportionate chance of being the threshold-breaker).

In either case, there's no special "collective action problem" that requires us to pretend that we're deciding for everyone. Simply assessing the expected utility of our individual action yields the right result.

Things can be different in threshold cases where you have background knowledge suggesting that it's (disproportionately) unlikely that you'll be a threshold-breaker. Voters in non-swing states may be in such a position, where the odds of their (presidential) vote making a difference are so slim that the expected value of their vote is negligible, even given the high stakes of a presidential election. (This will, of course, depend on the details!)

In this case, Act Consequentialism may recommend not voting. Critics then object that if every right-thinking citizen followed this recommendation, then even "safe states" would no longer be safe, with disastrous consequences! But note that AC's recommendation is highly contingent on our background evidence regarding others' dispositions. As it happens, we know that many people vote for expressive reasons, etc. If this were to change -- were we to suddenly find ourselves in a society of Act Consequentialists who don't get any intrinsic value out of the act of voting itself -- then the expected value of our voting would also change. For each right-thinking citizen who "drops out" of voting in a once-safe state, the expected value of the remaining citizens' votes increases, until you reach a point where the optimal number of right-thinking people are voting.

Of course, things can be trickier if the society falls into a bad equilibrium. If every right-thinking citizen drops out simultaneously, then subsequently there will be no act-consequentialist reason for them to start voting again, as no one alone has any chance of making a difference. (One can multiply examples along these lines, involving firing squads, etc.) The proper solution to this pure coordination problem is to build in some of the insights of Donald Regan's Cooperative Utilitarianism:

The basic idea [of Cooperative Utilitarianism] is that each agent should proceed in two steps: First he should identify the other agents who are willing and able to co-operate in the production of the best possible consequences. Then he should do his part in the best plan of behaviour for the group consisting of himself and the others so identified, in view of the behaviour of non-members of the group. (p.x)

In a world where all the right-thinking citizens are cooperative utilitarians, and some X% of them need to vote in order to avoid disaster, then a bit over X% of them should vote. (Perhaps each person would use a randomizing device to determine whether they fall into the voting group.) Meanwhile, in the real world, for as long as there are vanishingly few cooperative utilitarians around, those of us in non-swing states probably needn't bother.

Competing Claims and Separate Persons

2012-10-29T18:16:00.001-04:00

I've previously argued that consequentialist moral theories respect the "separateness of persons" when they recognize individual persons as being of distinct intrinsic value, rather than seeing them as mere means to the single token value of aggregate welfare. (This entails more fine-grained non-instrumental desires, and associated emotions like regret, but doesn't ultimately affect what actions are the right ones to perform.) So I was interested to come across a different conception of the separateness of persons in Michael Otsuka's 'Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons'. According to Otsuka, a theory respects the separateness of persons when it is sensitive to "competing claims" and so treats "non-identity" cases differently:

It is morally relevant that there are distinct persons with competing claims to receive benefits. Such competing claims ground moral complaints on the part of those who would be worse off, relative to others, and the case for giving benefits to people with such complaints is stronger than it otherwise would be in analogous [intra-personal or non-identity] cases in which the prioritarian value of distributing goods in one way rather than another is equally great, yet such complaints are lacking. (371-2)

To illustrate, suppose we must choose between offering a larger benefit to a mildly impaired person or a lesser benefit to a more severely impaired person. Otsuka claims that it makes a moral difference whether the lesser benefit would be identity-affecting. If it would cause a different, slightly-less-severely impaired person to come into existence, distinct from the severely-impaired person who would otherwise come into existence, then there is no "competing claims" justification for choosing this lesser benefit. If you instead help the mildly impaired person (yielding a greater benefit), the severely impaired person has no personal grounds for complaint against you, since there is nothing you could have done to help them more -- treating the more severe impairment would (ex hypothesi) have instead brought someone else into existence. So, Otsuka claims, it is easier to justify helping the mildly impaired person in this identity-affecting case than it would be in the simpler case where such a choice would amount to failing to help the worse-off person.

Suppose we fill in the details so that this difference in justification actually tips the scales: a morally-motivated stranger ought (according to the "competing claims" view) to choose the greater benefit in the identity-affecting case, but the lesser benefit in the basic (constant identities) case.

I'm suspicious of the idea that mere identity facts can, in this way, affect what we (as morally-motivated strangers, bracketing any partiality towards our "nearest and dearest") ought to do. I'd initially thought that such suspicions might be buttressed by appeal to the "Veil of Ignorance", which forces fair and impartial moral choices by hiding all identity facts and forcing us to choose between outcomes on purely qualitative grounds. But now that I think of it, I guess there's not any reason why the Veil couldn't allow through facts about sameness or difference of identity, just so long as it blocks the chooser behind the veil from knowing which identity is hers. So, never mind that then.

Let me instead raise a different challenge: Why think that the only way for a moral theory to be sensitive to "competing claims" is via its verdicts for right action? Couldn't a theory instead respect the separateness of persons by seeing these cases as calling for different emotional responses (as I previously argued)? If we reject the idea that one's baseline welfare makes any difference to the strength of one's claim, then this seems like the way to go. We should (according to the separateness-respecting utilitarian) always bestow the greater benefit to one rather than a lesser benefit to another. But sometimes this decision will call for more "inner turmoil" than others. In particular, we can continue to see it as regrettable for Bob's sake if Bob could have benefited from an alternative decision (even though the maximizing decision was the right one), whereas in an identity-affecting tradeoff there will be no such grounds for pro tanto regret -- the decision will be, in this sense, a psychologically "easier" one, though the various reasons for action present in the case are unaffected.

Using my previous account as a model, then, it seems that a separateness-respecting prioritarian could say something similar. They will hold that we have more reason to benefit people the worse off they are (regardless of whether or not the benefit would be "identity-affecting"). We have no additional reasons for action given by "competing claims" in the constant-identity cases. But we may have additional reasons for regret, whenever a particular person is less well-off than they otherwise could have been. So we can, in this way, respect the separateness of persons -- even where this is understood to entail "sensitivity to competing claims" -- without requiring this sensitivity to take the particular form of affecting our actions.