Tendentious Terminology in Ethics

Ethical theorists may sometimes engage in "persuasive definition": re-defining an evocative phrase for their own purposes, in a way that their opponent will reasonably regard as inaccurate and unfair.  Two examples that always annoy me are "treating someone as a mere means" and the "separateness of persons".  Opponents of consequentialism all too often trot out these phrases to indicate deep flaws in consequentialism. But it only works for them if they first redefine these terms to mean something that has nothing to do with the literal meaning of treating someone as a mere means or the separateness of persons.  You might as well redefine "terrorist" to denote adherents of the opposing views, and then complain that your opponents are all terrorists.  It's dishonest rhetoric, and ought to be avoided.  In this post, I'll explain my two examples, and why I consider them so misleading.  Others are welcome to comment with other examples -- especially any that you think consequentialists may be guilty of!

Why Constraints are Agent Neutral

My previous post argued that deontologists must prefer not to violate deontic constraints, or those constraints would lack normative significance. There is one last way that they might avoid my argument that constraints trivialize killing, namely, by holding that while the agent must prefer to abide by constraints, bystanders should prefer that the agent acts wrongly, killing one to save five.  This post will set out why I think that view is mistaken.

Preferring to Act Wrongly

Deontologists hold that it's wrong to kill an innocent person, even to prevent five other such killings. Does it follow that they should prefer Five Killings over One Killing to Prevent Five?  If so, my previous argument kicks in to demonstrate that they care insufficiently about killing.  In this post, I want to argue that the alternative -- preferring to act wrongly -- results in an even worse theory.

The Limits of Defective Character Solutions

In some cases, our intuition that an act is "wrong" may be better explained in terms of the action's revealing a defect of character (e.g. standard counterexamples to consequentialism involving the reckless performance of expectably-bad actions that could only prove optimal by unknowable fluke).  But this philosophical maneuver requires care.  A good test for its prima facie viability is to "naturalize" the case so that the outcome results from purely natural causes, without any agential intervention.  We can then ask: is this is an overall undesirable outcome?  If so, then that would -- contra the character strategy -- suffice to provide objective reasons for an agent not to act so as to bring about that bad outcome.  But if not, i.e. if the outcome itself -- absent any agency -- seems unobjectionable, then it's at least prima facie natural to expect that the act of producing that fine outcome should likewise qualify as unobjectionable.  If our intuitions rebel against an agent performing such an act, we may do better to look to the agent, rather than to the act, as being the true source of the problem.

The Paralysis of Deontology?

MacAskill & Mogensen's Paralysis Argument (forthcoming in Phil Imprint) argues that deontological constraints entail paralysis, once long-term indirect effects are taken into account:

According to most non-consequentialists, reasons against doing harm are weightier than reasons to benefit. Since you have no greater reason to expect that benefits as opposed to harms will predominate among the indirect effects of any action you perform, it therefore seems that you should try as best you can to avoid bringing about any significant indirect effects through your actions at all. Since virtually anything you do will inevitably result in significant numbers of indirect harms, you should therefore try to do as little as possible.

It's a cute argument!  I recommend reading the full paper, where they address (and handily dispose of) a number of possible responses on behalf of the deontologist. For example, the Arms Trader case (p. 17) shows that it won't do to exclude causal chains that involve others' voluntary choices.  And Mystery Box cases (p. 20) similarly warn against excluding convoluted causal chains. They ultimately conclude that the best option for deontologists is to embrace extreme demands: "to escape paralysis, your every motion must be at the service of posterity." (p.34)

But I wonder if deontologists might get by with some more conservative revisions to their views. In our recent reading group discussion of the paper, David O'Brien (mentioned with permission) suggested that something like the Doctrine of Double Effect seems well-suited to resist M&M's argument.  For even if we can, in some sense, foresee that our acts will have long-term effects some of which are harms, we generally do not intend those harms, or use them as a means to whatever everyday goals we are pursuing.  So if deontic constraints are restricted to harms that feature in our intentions, or that we make use of as a means, paralysis may be avoided.

Of course, not all wrongs involve intended harms in this way.  But that's fine.  It's a familiar point that DDE is a supplemental principle, not the entirety of a moral theory.  At a minimum, DDE proponents should agree with consequentialists that even merely foreseen harms (or "collateral damage") can make an act wrong if they outweigh the expected benefits.  The trickier question is whether DDE suffices for all the distinctively deontological constraints that the non-consequentialist might have wanted.  I'd guess that most additionally want some kind of harm/benefit asymmetry, e.g. to rule out fatally driving over one (as collateral damage) on the way to rescuing five (p.7).

At this point, I suspect that our deontological intuitions are mostly just tracking the salience of the harm.  If you see or touch the harmed person, we're apt to attribute outsized importance to the harm. Distant future harms to unknown ("statistical") victims, by contrast, seem maximally non-salient, and so avoid activating deontological intuitions.  As a result, the suggestion that there could be deontological constraints against these sorts of harms can seem intuitively absurd.  But insofar as we doubt that salience provides a sufficiently principled basis for counting some harms more than others, we may be forced to conclude that deontological constraints against salient harms are ultimately in no better position.

It's a nice challenge, at any rate, which deontologists will need to address if they want to appeal to anything stronger than the Doctrine of Double Effect.

[Update: I've been pointed to Nye's very similar 2014 paper, 'Chaos and Constraints', which also contains some nice arguments against appealing to the DDE here, e.g. by comparing lesser means-harms with greater collateral harms.]

Five Fallacies of Collective Harm

It's often thought that "collective harm" can result from a collection of contributions despite each individual increment to the number of contributions allegedly making no difference at all. I think this is incoherent, or at any rate entirely unmotivated. There seem to be five main reasons why people tend to hold this dubious view. In this post, I'll briefly explain why each is misguided.

(1) The Rounding to Zero Fallacy. As Parfit noted in his famous discussion of "moral mathematics", it's really important not to neglect tiny chances of having a huge impact.  The latter could well have high expected value, which you'll lose sight of if you mistakenly treat "tiny chance" as equivalent to "no chance at all". (Previously discussed here.)

Learning from Lucifer

Via Daily Nous, I came across this funny comic on "Effective Villainy", which in turn got me thinking about what we could learn from the apparent symmetry between good and evil.  After all, it might be clearer what evil calls for, in which case we could -- if we accept symmetry -- then draw interesting conclusions about what's right and good.

Consider side-constraints, as in this evil transplant scenario: a car crash victim is about to bleed out, but then their healthy organs would save five transplant patients -- unless Lucifer sweeps in and "heroically" stems the bleeding, saving the car crash victim (and ensuring the other five die).  What should_[subscript evil] Lucifer do?  It seems clear that a side-constraint against saving lives would make no sense, from the perspective of evil: the rational pursuit of evil would lead Lucifer to do whatever ultimately proves most harmful, regardless of whether he had to get his hands "dirty" helping (ick!) various individuals along the way.   Better_[sub evil] to save one than to allow five to be saved.

Or consider aggregation. Opponents of aggregation may ground their view in either axiological intuitions (e.g. in Scanlon's transmitter room case, it just seems worse for the one person to suffer from electrocution than for the billions to miss out on seeing the football game live), or in hand-waving claims that aggregation somehow fails to respect the "separateness of persons".  Parfit showed the former to be incoherent, and I've argued that the latter is baseless, but suppose you're not yet convinced. Let's learn from Lucifer!

In the transmitter room case, it's natural to assume that Lucifer would want the guy to be electrocuted, which I think reveals our intuition that this is (seemingly! but we need not endorse this seeming upon reflection) the worse outcome -- not actually a case in which what's right diverges from what's consequentially best.  So that seems like a problem for the anti-consequentialist's use of this thought experiment.

In other cases, where it's clearer that the many's interests really do (factually) outweigh the one's, it would seem weird for Lucifer to prioritize harming the one a lot over harming the many by more in aggregate (except insofar as this was motivated on prioritarian grounds, perhaps).  It would seem especially bizarre for Lucifer to embrace a strict "numbers don't count" view, and be indifferent between drowning one or drowning five in a lifeboat case. ("Killing more people isn't worse for anyone than killing one is for the one, so in what sense is it really worse at all?  Why should I bother to kill more?" - Evil Taurek. Given how poorly Evil Taurek seems to understand evil-doing, why would you consider his light-side self any less confused?)

Overall, then, it seems clear that Satan would be a consequentialist.  So, shouldn't you follow suit? (Just, you know, aiming at the opposite ends...)

Or should we instead reject the apparent symmetry, and think that genuine morality should look rather different from the simple opposite of pure immorality?  Perhaps one could think that morality is responsive to certain considerations -- respect for persons, or whatnot -- that evil is simply indifferent to (rather than being positively opposed to)?  It'd be interesting to hear the idea spelled out in greater depth.

For those who are on board with the symmetry, what other lessons might be drawn?  (I like Michael Slote's suggestion, from his 1985 Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism, p.77, that the implausibility of the minimalist view that only the very worst option is wrong provides us with grounds to doubt maximizing accounts of the right...)

Population ethics remains tricky.  Would Lucifer prefer to immiserate existing people, or bring into existence an entirely new population of even more miserable future people (who would otherwise not exist at all)?  Not obvious...

Hedonism, Egoism, and Implausible Restrictions

Rational Egoism claims that self-interest is uniquely rational; concern for anything besides your own wellbeing is (on this view) strictly irrational or unwarranted.  Value hedonists claim that pleasure is the only thing that has value: it follows that caring about anything besides pleasure is strictly irrational and unwarranted. (Though, due to the paradox of hedonism, it may be rational to try to acquire such irrational concerns, if this would actually serve to better promote your happiness.)  Both views are, I think, deeply implausible, in a distinctive kind of way.

Compare subjectivist (preferentist) views, which place no substantive restrictions on the content of what we may rationally prefer and pursue.  While these, too, strike me as implausible -- for broadly Parfitian reasons -- I can at least get myself into the mindset of appreciating their liberality.  "Who's to say what's really worth pursuing?"

But Hedonism and Egoism are different. These views purport to offer objective normative constraints on what really matters, but their substantive content just seems ludicrously unmotivated.  I mean, one's own wellbeing is indeed something that matters.  And pleasure is certainly of value.  So that much is right. But why on Earth would anyone think that either of these was the only thing that matters? (What could be more obvious than that love also matters?  That we shouldn't -- or at least needn't -- be indifferent to the possibility of our loved ones being secretly replaced by robots?) 

Moral Theory and Motivational Contingency

Parfit sometimes suggested that Act Consequentialism might best be understood, not as a moral theory, but as an external rival to morality.  The implicit thought seems to be that morality involves some essentially social mode of thought (perhaps concerned with public codes, or norms of praise and blame, or what principles you'd want everyone to accept), AC does not depend upon any such mode of thought, but it nonetheless offers an account of what you really ought (rather than just "morally ought") to do.

I'm not a fan of that conception of morality, largely because it seems to devalue it, depriving morality of its interest and significance -- if it is not what you really ought to do, then who cares what you "morally ought" to do?  Putting that worry aside, though, it does seem interesting that (only?) consequentialists are apt to regard their normative commitments as not contingent upon being the true moral theory.  That is, if I learned that Kantianism was true, my response (besides incredulity) would be to say, "So much the worse for morality."  In that sense, I don't particularly care about morality, and don't think anyone else should either.  (You should lie to the murderer at the door to save lives, and I don't care about any sense of "wrong" in which doing more good is "wrong".)  But I suspect that, if the roles were reversed, Kantians would not react analogously.  (Can any Kantian readers confirm?)

If that's right, I wonder if anything interesting follows from this observation.  Might it suggest that consequentialism matters more than other theories?  Others seem to depend upon inheriting the normative halo of "morality", whereas consequentialist properties have such clear intrinsic significance that no further halo is required!  Ha, maybe.  More neutrally, it may just be that other theories are so closely tied to some essentially social mode of thought that it's harder to make sense of them mattering without also being what matters morally -- and such a connection needn't have any implications for how much they matter.

A related question (which I owe to David Enoch): how -- if at all -- would (and should) your motivations change upon learning that the meta-normative error theory is correct, and nothing objectively matters at all?  Insofar as you had proper de re desires for what you previously took to be good, it isn't clear why these would be contingent or conditional upon your normative (or meta-normative) beliefs.  Our concern for each individual's welfare, at least, presumably should not be conditional in such a way.  Perhaps deontological concerns -- e.g. to avoid violating rights even if it would overall help people more -- are more appropriately conditional on their actually being right, leaving deontological moral motivation more vulnerable to the threat of moral scepticism?

Another possible exception, even for consequentialists, might involve distant-future non-identity cases (about which it seems difficult to muster direct concern and motivation).  Consider some case where we can either help the already-existing global poor (with no expected downstream effects), or we can bring it about that a whole generation of people a million years hence will be much better off (than the different generation that would otherwise exist in their place).  For purely theoretical reasons, I currently prefer the greater distant good.  But if I came to believe in error theory, I would be much more tempted to just go with my gut, indulge my narrow sympathetic impulses, and help the already-existing people.  (Perhaps a more virtuous consequentialist would have a less theoretically-contingent commitment to the distant future!)

Any thoughts?  Which of your moral motivations do you regard as theoretically contingent in these ways?

Monotonicity and Inadvisable Oughts

Daniel Muñoz & Jack Spencer have a great new paper, 'Knowledge of Objective ‘Oughts’: Monotonicity and the New Miners Puzzle' (forthcoming in PPR).  In it, they dispute that knowing that you objectively ought to do something entails that you subjective ought to do it, on the basis of non-maximal act-types, which might be performed in multiple ways (some ideal, some disastrous). Their argument depends upon 'ought' being upward monotonic (UM): "if you ought to do a certain act X, and X-ing entails Y-ing, then you ought to do Y."  I think their central case instead demonstrates why we should reject UM (and similar normative inheritance claims, as found, e.g., in Doug Portmore's Opting for the Best).

In a classic mineshafts case, you know that (to save the most lives) either you objectively ought to block shaft A, or you objectively ought to block shaft B, but you don't know which.  Because blocking the wrong shaft would be disastrous, you rationally (or "subjectively") ought to block neither. M&S now highlight that the above disjunction, together with UM, entails the less-specific prescription that you objectively ought to block a shaft.  You could know this to be true, they argue, but still you (rationally) shouldn't block a shaft, given the risk of disaster.

UM violates a plausible constraint on the objective ought: that if it would be morally worse for you to ϕ, then it is not the case that you objectively ought to ϕ.  Since you might block the wrong shaft, we cannot know that you objectively ought to block a shaft: depending on how you did it, you might kill everyone!  And it's certainly not the case that you objectively ought to do something that would kill everyone.  So we should reject UM.

M&S write: "UM is backed up by some formidable arguments, and the objections to it, even if they work, don’t apply in the Miners case." (p.8).  Let's take a closer look.

Nefsky on Tiny Chances and Tiny Differences

In her Philosophy Compass survey article, 'Collective Harm and the Inefficacy Problem', Julia Nefsky expresses skepticism about appeals to "expected value" to address worries about the ability of a single individual to really "make a difference".  In section 4.2, she notes that the relevant cases involve either "(A) an extremely small chance (as in the voting case) or (B) a chance at making only a very tiny difference."  Addressing each of these in turn:

Normativity for Value Realists

At the recent Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (great conference, btw), I was surprised to learn that Alastair Norcross doesn't believe in normative reasons.  He's happy to speak of "moral reasons", "prudential reasons", and even "Nazi reasons", but seems to view these all as objectively on a par. He happens to prefer the morality framework of standards to the Nazi one, and will condemn Nazis accordingly, but not in any way that implies that they are making an objective, framework-independent practical error.  In interpreting this view, since I don't think that framework-relative "reasons" are genuinely normative reasons at all ("Nazi reasons" do not count as providing genuine considerations in favour of genocide), Alastair's view strikes me as a form of normative nihilism.

Interestingly, though, Alastair is a value realist.  He thinks there is intrinsic value (and disvalue), and seems to accepts a traditional hedonistic account of these (the wrong view, IMO, but not our topic for today).  Such Value Realism may naturally lead one to a broader Normative Realism, I think, in a couple of ways.  So I'll address the rest of my post to any readers who share Alastair's starting point of Value Realism without Normative Realism, and see whether either of these arguments is persuasive.

Actualism, Evaluation and Prerogatives

In his new paper, 'An Argument for Objective Possibilism', Pete Graham argues that Actualism has trouble with cases of merely permissible (i.e. not required) beneficial sacrifice.

Suppose that the agent can now save two out of three lives, but knows that if they do, they will subsequently choose to save the third life at the cost of losing their leg.  Graham suggests that Actualism must treat this as equivalent to the choice of saving three lives at cost of losing a leg, or letting all three die, and that such sacrifice is not required.  But it's absurd to permit the agent to let all three die when they could have saved two lives at no cost.  So, Graham argues, Actualism is false.

It's an interesting objection.  I think the Actualist has a couple of different options for how to respond.

When Killing is Worse than Letting Die

Consider two plausible ethical claims: (1) It's much worse to kill someone for money than it is to refrain from saving a life due to the monetary cost. (2) There's no intrinsic or fundamental significance to the distinctions between doing and allowing, killing vs letting die, etc. (It's notoriously difficult to give a sound metaphysical account of these distinctions that seems to be getting at anything fundamentally important, after all.) Together, these points suggest that we should want to account for such distinctions having a kind of indirect significance -- say, by typically correlating with something else that has intrinsic significance.

Acts, Attitudes, and the Separateness of Persons

My previous post discussed the first of Seth Lazar's two objections to my account of the separateness of persons. Here's the second:

Chappell thinks the objection has to do only with attitudes. His token-pluralistic utilitarianism can, in its deontic verdicts, be extensionally identical to token-monistic utilitarianism (according to which only aggregate well-being is non-instrumentally valuable), but preferable since it encourages us to adopt the appropriate attitude to the losses inflicted in the pursuit of the overall good. This misunderstands the separateness of persons worry. It has nothing to do with our attitudes: it concerns instead what we ought to do. We ought not assume that benefits to one person can cancel out same-sized costs to another.

I agree with that last sentence.  Indeed, that is the heart of my account of the separateness of persons: that we should not treat people as fungible, such that "benefits to one person can cancel out same-sized costs to another".  However, whether costs are cancelled or merely outweighed is precisely something that (I show) has implications for fitting attitudes rather than for what acts are ultimately most worth performing.

Constitutive Instrumentality: a response to Lazar

Seth Lazar's forthcoming paper, 'Moral Status and Agent-Centred Options' contains some interesting objections to my 'Value Receptacles' paper.  Here's the first:

Chappell’s treatment of the separateness of persons has several weaknesses. First, what does it mean to value aggregate well-being non-instrumentally, while valuing the well-being of individuals only instrumentally? The view seems a straw man. Aggregate well-being is composed of the well-being of individuals. If aggregate well-being is a noninstrumental value, then individual well-being is a non-instrumental value, since aggregate well-being just is all the individual well-being taken together. Treating different people’s well-being as totally fungible is a conceptual mistake, hence not a charitable interpretation of the separateness of persons objection. 

This is incorrect.  An important upshot of my paper was that we need to recognize two very different kinds of instrumentality.  The most familiar kind is when one thing is a causal means to another, as (e.g.) in the case of money being useful for buying desired objects.  But we should also recognize the possibility of one thing being a constitutive means to another.  This is what's going on in the case of someone who most fundamentally cares about a kind of good in the aggregate, rather than having any basic, non-derivative concern for the particular instances that make up the aggregate.  Their concern for the instances is wholly derivative of their concern for the whole, in a way that makes them entirely indifferent to internal variation (e.g. in the identities of the instances) as long as it doesn't affect the overall value of the whole.

Harms, Benefits, and Framing Effects

Kahneman and Tversky famously found that most people would prefer to save 200 / 600 people over a 1/3 chance of saving all 600, and yet would prefer a 1/3 chance of none of the 600 dying over a guaranteed 400/600 deaths.  This seems incoherent, since it seems our preferences over a pair of options are reversed merely by describing the very same case using different words.

In 'The Asian Disease Problem and the Ethical Implications Of Prospect Theory' (forthcoming in Noûs) Dreisbach and Guevara argue that the folk responses are compatible with a coherent non-consequentialist view.  Their basic idea (if I understand them correctly) is that the "400 will die" case is suggestive of a different causal mechanism: perhaps the 400 die from our intervention, so the choice is between guaranteed or gambled harms, whereas the "saving" choice is between guaranteed or gambled benefits.  They then suggest that non-consequentialist principles might reasonably mandate a special aversion to causing guaranteed harm (and so think it better to risk harming either all or none, despite no difference in expected value between the sure thing and the gamble).  In the first case, by contrast, they suggest that non-consequentialists might think it easier to justify saving some lives as a "sure thing" rather than taking a gamble that would most likely save nobody at all.

Nanoseconds that Matter

Take an arbitrarily short duration -- I'll speak of 'nanoseconds' for familiarity and convenience, but you could use an even smaller measure of time.  Could removing a mere (arbitrary) nanosecond from your life plausibly make your life any worse on the whole?  You might think not, on the basis that "surely nothing of any significance could occur during such a short time."  On the other hand, if you remove all the nanoseconds then we have no life left at all, which is certainly a significant difference.  Is it coherent to think that many individually worthless moments might collectively have value?

I have my doubts, and have previously suggested that such putatively vague goods (as a "sufficient duration to matter") are better understood as graded and/or involving threshold effects.  A friend suggested minuscule scales of time as a challenge to this view, but I think my approach still makes good sense of this case.  Here's how...

Aggregating the Right Moments

Should we prefer to give one person half a million minutes (i.e. one year) more life, or to give a million people one minute more each?  If iterated a million times over (once for each person in the million), the latter repeated choice is clearly better for all (by half a million minutes).  Moreover, as I suggested in comments to that post, if we assume that the million choices are independent of each other in value -- that is, the value of making one such choice does not depend on how the other choices are made -- then it quickly follows that it's better to give the million tiny benefits rather than the one big benefit, even in a one-off choice situation.

However, it's worth flagging that on one very natural (but philosophically distorting) way of imagining the situation, the independence assumption will not hold.

Do we have Vague Projects?

Tenenbaum and Raffman (2012) claim that "most of our projects and ends are vague." (p.99)  But I'm not convinced that any plausibly are.  I've already discussed the self-torturer case, and how our interest in avoiding pain is not vague but merely graded.  I think similar things can be said of other putative "vague" projects.