Emergence and Incremental Probability

In 'Emergence and Incremental Impact', I argued (contra Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong) that emergent properties do nothing to undermine the basic case for individual impact: they're just another kind of threshold case, and thresholds are compatible with difference-making increments.

In that old post, I assumed counterfactual determinacy to make the case for there being some precise increment(s) that make a difference whenever a collection of increments together does.  But while revising my paper on collective harm, it occurred to me that the case becomes much more clear-cut when made in terms of probabilities.

Longtermism Contra Schwitzgebel

In 'Against Longtermism', Eric Schwitzgebel writes: "I accept much of Ord's practical advice. I object only to justifying this caution by appeal to expectations about events a million years from now."  He offers four objections, which are interesting and well worth considering, but I think ultimately unpersuasive.  Let's consider them in turn.

Puzzling Conditional Obligations

If you make a promise (and haven't been released from it), then you're obliged to keep your promise.  The obligation is, in a sense, conditional. Note that you've no moral reason to go around making extra promises just so that you can keep them.  Keeping promises isn't a good to be promoted in this way.  (We might instead think that keeping a promise is neutral, while breaking one is bad.)

It's natural to think that obligations that are in this way "conditional" should mimic this axiological structure: being bad to violate, but neutral between complying and cancelling. For if they were positively good to comply with, that reason would seem to transmit up the conditional and yield us an unconditional reason to get yourself into a position where the obligation (applies and) can be met.

With this in mind, the following putatively conditional obligations begin to look puzzling:

Companies, Cities, and Carbon

This is terrible journalism:

While [donating $1 billion to protect forests] is certainly notable, Bezos’s commitment to protecting the environment serves as a stark reminder that much of his legacy and largely untaxed fortune was built by companies that have staggering carbon footprints. Amazon’s carbon emissions have grown every year since 2018, and last year alone, when global carbon emissions fell roughly 7 percent, Amazon’s carbon emissions grew 19 percent.

Economic activity is (for the time being) carbon-intensive. Amazon constitutes a huge and (especially during the pandemic) growing portion of the US economy. There's nothing said here to suggest that Amazon is unusually inefficient (from an environmental perspective); the author is really just complaining that Amazon is a large and growing part of the economy. (Horrors! They even had the gall to keep the economy going during the pandemic, when other companies did the green thing and shut down, bless their empty coffers...)

Against Anti-Beneficent Paternalism

In a previous post, I argued that "undue inducement" worries are typically deeply misguided, and that banning good compensation is contrary to the interests of the very people that it's intended to help.  In this post, I want to raise a different objection: that even if allowing and/or incentivizing beneficent actions (such as kidney donation, or challenge trial participation) would "induce" some people to perform beneficent acts that they might later regret (or that they wouldn't have agreed to if thinking more clearly), it may nonetheless be the case that banning this would be morally even worse.

The Absurdity of "Undue Inducement"

Have you heard that it's "unethical" to pay people for janitorial work?  After all, the poor have greater need of money, and so would be more likely than the rich to take up such an offer.  To protect them from this "undue inducement", we should outlaw payment for janitorial work, and hope that enough (preferably middle-class) folks volunteer in their stead that we aren't wallowing in filth.  Sure, we can predict that things will be a bit filthier as a result, but it's worth this social cost to protect the poor from janitorial jobs.  I'm sure that our current janitors would appreciate being put out of work, right?

Lessons from the Pandemic

It's generally recognized that our (American) response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous. But I think far fewer appreciate the full scale of the disaster, or the most significant causal levers by which the worst effects could have been avoided.  (Yes, Trump was bad.  But his public health disinformation and politicization of masking -- while obviously bad -- may prove relatively trivial compared to the mammoth failings of our public health institutions and medical establishment.)  Much of the pandemic's harm could have been mitigated had our institutions been properly guided by the most basic norms of cost-benefit analysis.  Consider:

Against Prudish Research Ethics

We're all familiar with prudishness as it applies to sexual ethics: the prude thinks certain sex acts are immoral, even between happily consenting adults.  They also hold that sex work is inherently degrading, and that others should not be allowed to offer monetary compensation in exchange for one's sexual labour.  The prude is not willing to tolerate others engaging in consensual and mutually beneficial exchanges in this arena if they don't stem from what the prude regards as the "right" motivations and take place within "approved" institutional arrangements (e.g. marriage).  It's a deeply illiberal perspective that has thankfully fallen out of favour in recent decades.  We may, of course, have reasonable concerns about the exploitation of sex workers in practice.  But it's increasingly recognized that the best response to such practical concerns is to improve the options available to those in desperate circumstances, not to deprive them of (what they evidently regard as) their current best option.  So I think it's fair to say that liberals have won out over sexual prudes in our current cultural milieu.

Sadly, the reverse appears true within the arena of research ethics.  Research prudes think that certain kinds of medical research (e.g. involving voluntary infection) are unethical, even when all involved are happily consenting adults.  They disapprove of offering monetary compensation to research participants, to make participation worth one's while when it otherwise would not be.  They are not willing to tolerate others' engaging in consensual and mutually beneficial research arrangements if participation doesn't stem from what the research prude regards as the "right" (i.e. non-financial) motivations.  It's a deeply illiberal view that unfortunately still predominates, with cultural bastions like the New York Times routinely dismissing controversial ("queer") research possibilities as "unethical", without argument.  We may, of course, have reasonable concerns about the exploitation of research participants in practice.  But it's depressing how hastily people assume that the best response to such concerns is to paternalistically deprive others of an option that they might well have reasonably preferred over their available alternatives.

Perhaps the most important difference between the two arenas is that the research prude's illiberalism is vastly more harmful.  Medical research has immense positive externalities.  So preventing it has immense negative externalities.  You're not just harming the would-be research participants (not to mention undermining their autonomy), you're also harming all those who end up suffering from medical conditions that could have been cured or prevented had the research gone ahead.  Missed opportunities are rarely salient, and so do not provoke the outrage that they truly deserve.  But on any reasonable estimate, the death toll of research prudishness is surely monstrous.

Innocuous vs Unjust Systemic Discrimination

It's now widely recognized that problematic discrimination need not involve malicious attitudes: certain political structures might systematically disregard the interests of ethnic minorities, for example, even if nobody involved was "racist" in the traditional sense of harbouring prejudicial attitudes.  Still, sometimes people -- even highly-respected philosophers! -- move from this to the opposite error of assuming that any disparity in group outcomes is in itself constitutive of unjust discrimination against the disadvantaged group.  I've found this especially common in debates about QALYs. (One may, of course, raise reasonable questions about how QALY values are determined in practice: perhaps they fail to accurately track the welfare facts in some cases, adjusting down for certain disabilities that are actually harmless. But my target here is the more sweeping complaint that any form of the metric will be "ageist" and "ableist" simply in virtue of its being systematically disadvantageous for the elderly and (detrimentally) disabled, relative to an alternative system that sought to indiscriminately save as many lives as possible.)

Who's Responsible for Offset Harms?

Here's a fun puzzle (that I owe to Caspar Hare): Polluter is trying to work out how to dispose of her toxic waste barrel economically, when she sees her neighbor about to pour his waste barrel into the river.  Delighted, she interrupts her neighbor and pays him to find a more eco-friendly way to dispose of his waste.  Having offset this harm, Polluter now feels free to dump her own waste into the river.  The downstream farm is ruined.  Who is responsible?

Tempting answer: Polluter! She dumped waste, while her neighbor (Paid-Off) didn't.  Polluter clearly caused the harm, and is the only eligible agent to be held morally responsible.

I think this tempting answer is importantly mistaken.

Emergence and Incremental Impact

In 'What’s Wrong with Joyguzzling?', Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong claim that individual greenhouse gas emissions never make a difference.  I find this to be a deeply bizarre claim, since they don't dispute that large amounts of GHG emissions together make a difference, and that large amounts of GHG can be produced by adding together many smaller amounts.

How to Make a Difference

Steven Hales complains that we (folk and academic ethicists alike) focus too much on individual action:

We like to believe that when it comes to the great global issues of our time—climate change, pollution, poverty, mass extinction—that we each can make a difference. A small one maybe, but a real and significant difference, nonetheless. [...] That’s a mistake. It not only makes us guilt-ridden and worse off psychologically, but even more harmfully it also provides only the illusion of effective action, thereby allowing global problems to fester without a proper solution. [... W]hen it comes to global-scale issues, what individuals do is somewhere between 100 percent pointless and 99.9999999 percent pointless.

There's something right about this, but the central claim is crucially wrong.  After all, if you're able to alleviate just 0.0000001% of global harms, that's actually quite a lot of good you've done!  You may have saved someone's life, or slightly increased the chance of humanity's continued survival, or slightly increased the average quality of life for future generations (and either of the latter two may in fact involve astronomical amounts of good).  Once we grasp the magnitudes involved, it becomes clear that having a proportionate impact is far from pointless.

Police Shootings: Mortal Threats vs Tragic Mistakes

Police sometimes face mortal threats.  They also face innocent people whom they mistakenly judge to pose a mortal threat.  If too slow to react to the former, the police risk being killed.  If too quick to react to the latter, they risk killing innocent civilians.  What is the right way to balance these risks?  Three options present themselves:

Worthless Harm-Prevention and Non-Existence

We typically assume that it's really important to prevent great harms.  And indeed, usually it is.  But there are at least a couple of exceptions.

Most obviously, some harms might be outweighed by greater associated benefits.  Benatar thinks it's terrible to allow someone to come into existence given all the subsequent harms their life will contain (no matter how overall happy their life will be).  That's obviously nuts.  These harms are more than compensated for by the overall happiness of the life.  So it's only uncompensated harms, or "net harms", that we should seek to prevent.

More interestingly, even net harms may nevertheless not warrant preventing (in a certain way).  For suppose the harm is comparative in nature: the harmful event does not put the victim in an intrinsically bad state, but rather harms them in virtue of depriving them of some much better alternative.  There are then two very different ways in which a comparative harm could be prevented.  You could ensure that they get the better alternative.  (That's the good way!)  Or, you could prevent the "better alternative" from ever arising as a possibility to be deprived of in the first place.  There is generally no reason whatsoever to prevent a harm (however grave) in this way.

Stacking Time-Relative Interests

Jeff McMahan, in The Ethics of Killing, introduces the notion of a 'time-relative interest' in one's future life possibilities, the strength of which depend upon the degree of psychological relatedness that would hold between one's present and future self.  This explains why early abortion is harmless (contra Marquis): the early embryo has no psychology, and hence no unity whatsoever with the future person.  It thus has no time-relative interest in having that possible future be realized, so a death that "deprives" it of that future is not contrary to its interests, or in other words, does no harm.  A later fetus or newborn infant, by contrast, would have some (slight) psychological connectedness with its adult future self, so is harmed by early death (at least slightly).

It's a neat account.  One puzzle that emerges (which I haven't seen discussed elsewhere) concerns how we should aggregate time-relative interests.  In explaining the wrong of pre-natal injury (which causes harm to the future adult), McMahan writes that "we must evaluate the act in terms of its effect on all those time-relative interests it affects, present or future." (283)  That is, while the pre-natal being has little or no time-relative interest in avoiding the pre-natal injury, the future adult's time-relative interests would be gravely affected (we may suppose), which explains why the pre-natal injury is a morally weighty affair.  (In case of abortion, by contrast, there are no future time-relative interests to be negatively affected; the abortion prevents those interests from arising in the first place.)

So far, so good.  But how exactly are we to take all the time-relative interests into account? Utilitarian "equal consideration of interests", adding them all up, clearly won't work.  That would cause massive over-counting.  Compare the deaths of a pair aged 20 and 40.  Suppose that each would have lived for exactly twenty more years of (equally) happy life if not for their current demise. But the 40-year old has twice as many time-relative interests that are thwarted, and many of them will be stronger (assuming stronger connections between his 21-yr old self and current self than are found between the twenty year old and her past infant self).  So aggregating intrapersonal time-relative interests would lead us to the conclusion that the 40 year old's death is a much greater harm.  But that isn't plausible.

Suppose instead that the (apparent) 40 year old instead popped fully-formed into existence as an apparent thirty-nine year old, one year ago.  This should make no difference to how bad his death now is at forty (given that he would be deprived of just as good a future, to which he would be just as strongly psychologically connected, etc.).  But he has many fewer past time-relative interests in avoiding this death.  So if we are to add them all up, they will now add up to less.

Surely, a person's interest in some event should only be counted once, not once for every moment that they were alive.  This suggests to me that the appropriate way to "take into account all the time-relative interests" in some event is not to count them all, but rather, to find the one strongest time-relative interest from across one's lifetime of moments, and count just that one.  One's weaker time-relative interests in an event are to be subsumed within (not added to) one's greatest time-relative interest in it.

Typically, your strongest time-relative interest in an event will be concurrent with that event.  So this explains why the harmfulness of an event typically doesn't depend upon the length of your life history.  But in the rare cases when one's strongest time-relative interest is found at a different time (as in the pre-natal injury case), it can appropriately override the weaker interest one had at the time of the event in question.

Does that seem right?

Three kinds of offsetting

Distinguish the following kinds of "offsetting" behaviour:

Preventative offsetting -- when potential harms depend on just the global amount of something (say, greenhouse gas emissions), it seems that one can prevent the potential harm done by one's contributions by "offsetting" or paying to reduce others' contributions, so that the net effect of one's behaviour leaves the global magnitudes unchanged.

Cause-specific (or harm-type) offsetting -- when you cause a harm of a certain type, but then seek to 'offset' the badness of this by preventing a like harm from occurring elsewhere.  E.g. donating to a relevant environmental charity after polluting your local river.

Cause-neutral (or net utility) offsetting -- when you cause a harm of a certain magnitude, and then seek to 'offset' the badness of this by preventing a similar amount of harm elsewhere.  E.g. donating to a global poverty charity after polluting your local river.

Pets and Slavery

In 'The Case Against Pets', Rutgers law professors Francione and Charlton argue that "domestication and pet ownership [...] violate the fundamental rights of animals."  This is, I think, a deeply absurd position.

How bad?

Compare five seriously bad things:

(1) Unjust discrimination along the lines of racism, sexism, etc., in Western countries.
(2) War and terrorism
(3) Global poverty
(4) Animal suffering (from factory farming)
(5) Global catastrophic (i.e. civilization-ending) risks

Just how bad is each of these, in the world as we find it today?  If you could prevent just one of them, which would it be?  (What would your rank ordering be if you weren't sure how many philanthropic wishes the genie was going to give you?)

Thinking Realistically about Policy Outcomes

If we want to know whether a certain policy or legal change would be a good idea, we should presumably consider the expected consequences.  Very roughly speaking (abstracting away from uncertainty and hence the need to weight various possible options by their probability), we should carefully assess what would happen if the policy is / isn't instituted, and we can then assess which result is morally better.  (I don't mean to assume consequentialism here -- if a policy violates rights, for example, one might deem it morally "worse" on those grounds.)  Call this approach "thinking realistically about policy outcomes."  (Also known as "thinking like an economist.")

On Furrow's Defense of Eating Meat

Dwight Furrow at 3QD has written up a defense of eating meat (ht: Phil Percs) that strikes me as pretty badly confused.

He begins by complaining that "Singer's arguments are based on utilitarian premises." This is a common mistake.  Singer appeals to principles like the equal consideration of interests -- you shouldn't arbitrarily favour one being's interests over the equally strong interests of another -- and that we shouldn't harm others for the sake of morally trivial benefits to ourselves.  These principles are of course compatible with utilitarianism, but you don't have to be a utilitarian to accept them. Their appeal should be plain to any minimally decent person. (Singer would be a much less accomplished applied ethicist if his arguments merely took the form, "Utilitarianism implies P.  Utilitarianism, therefore P"!)