This is one of those ideas I might turn into a paper sometime
in the next decade. The odds increase if I ever return to a philosophy job. I’ve
had this idea for a while, but it’s really come to the fore of my mind recently
because I’ve been talking to and reading effective altruists a lot and their
commitment to (crude) utilitarianism at the exclusion of other doctrines is
jarring. Note that this idea is less than half-baked.
There are three prominent dimensions of ethics: deontology
(or Kantian ethics), utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. We have evolved the
faculties responsible for all three. This suggests that all three are important
for survival. Depending on the ethical problem at hand, sometimes one dimension
seems intuitively the salient consideration. For example, cost-benefit analysis
of whether to expand the bus network or build light rail is an obvious place
for utilitarianism. Criminal justice is a mostly Kantian domain. And the ethics
of leadership is all about virtue. At other times, all three dimensions seem to
bear on the problem at hand. This is where ethicists really get to work.
Unfortunately, I find that a lot of ethical debate in these
areas is facile because champions of each dimensions try to present their
preferred dimension as the only thing that needs to be considered. Often times
this outcome results from the computation- and classification-obsessed analytical
philosophy mind always taking things to their logical extremes. I find utilitarians
particularly prone to this, for complex reasons that I won’t get into here. Yet
it should be an elementary insight drilled into you in your first year of
philosophy that there are choice problems where all and none of the three
dimensions appears decisive.
Sen had a good example in his 1999 book Development as Freedom. The choice was who to give some a job (i.e.
some money) to. The problem was something like this. One candidate was the poorest but also the happiest. Another
was less poor but also very depressed by their downtrodden lot. And a third was
part of a marginalized group often excluded from work opportunities, but this
individual otherwise had a life that was slightly better than that of candidates A and B. Who do you choose? Even to a utilitarian this should be unclear,
because it will depend on whether you think utility is a mental state (e.g.
happiness) or about preference-satisfaction. If you’re into rights-based
ethics, which mostly come from Kantian perspectives, then you might be inclined
to candidate C. In the end, I think you have to go with the deservingness of each individual (a virtue argument). Or your gut! Gut makes
total sense to me because ethical precepts are not Platonic axioms embedded in
the firmament but attempts to articulate the principles behind feelings that we have.
The logical extremes of any of the three dimensions
inevitably give rise, in most people at least, to feelings of things being not
quite right. For example, one classic critique of utilitarianism is the suicide
lottery, where people are randomly selected by the state to be killed and their
organs used for transplants. A net increase in utility but horrifying from a
Kantian point of view. Super hero films always play with this tension,
confronting protagonists with a horrifying choice between utilitarian and
Kantian principles. The heroes typically exercise their virtue ethics to say no
to the impossible choice and find a clever or effortful workaround. Avengers
endgame was interesting because it showed what happens when you fail. After
all, heroes are always pursuing low-odds outcomes, so failures should be
common. I can just picture some dense utilitarian saying:
If the odds are too low, you should pick the utilitarian
choice. This is dense because some odds are not amenable to frequentist logic
i.e. you cannot guess the odds with any precision (Strange takes precisely such
an ambiguous punt in handing over the time stone).
I thought that one way to break the facile stalemate of
logical extremes in ethics might be to present multi-dimensional ethical
theory in a mathematical way. To wit...
Think of the ethical doctrines literally as dimensions:
utilitarianism for height, Kantianism for width, and virtue ethics for depth.
Now you can represent the ethical space as follows:
If you were to populate this space with points that
represent certain problems, like the one from Sen, and then connect these points
with a surface, you might end up with something like the following (I should
draw something better myself, but I can’t be bothered for this blog post):
Now you can see visually that there are some problems where
one dimension is vastly more salient than others. For example, the mountain in the foreground seems to be a utilitarian
case. In contrast, the valley in the top left corner of the foreground seems to be a Kantian case. These are the cases from where
these ethical principles are distilled in their cleanest form, like Singer’s
drowning baby intuition pump. At other points, two principles are equally
salient, but a third is missing. These are the stuff of endless debate in
ethical philosophy—things like the trolley problem or abortion rights. And then
there are points, many points, where all three dimensions are relevant.
Now a fool might think that decisions in conflicted areas
should be made according to whichever dimension has the highest score. That’s
not how math works. Identifying the maxima of a function like y (ethical choice) = ax + bz + cw involves all of x (Kant), z (utilitarianism), and w (virtue),
not just the highest value of one of these variables. We are talking about a surface here—there are three dimensions, not one!
Where this kind of reasoning is most relevant is when
thinking about your own goodness in your day to day life. Treat others as you
would have them treat you (Kant/Bible) goes a long way. But maybe you actually
want someone to treat you/others differently in some cases. Perhaps you’re a
hard-working genius and think it would be really good for the world if you were
given disproportionate access to resources to do your work (utilitarian logic).
You might also think that practicing the Golden Rule is insufficient to make
you a good person. Maybe you also need to show some especial loyalty to close friends
and colleagues or have some qualities like a sense of humor and practical
wisdom (virtue ethics). If you only practice one, I daresay that you will be
insufferable. If you want to meet insufferable Kantians, go to church (or read Kant haha). If you
want to meet insufferable utilitarians, go to undergraduate philosophy seminars.
And if you want to meet insufferable virtue ethicists, do an ethnography of prestigious
scholarship recipients (or read Nietzsche's political writings, which are terrible). These communities contain many good people (also many
bad people). But some of them go a little bit extreme in their goodness and tip
over into something else.
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| Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophers, from the fabulous: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/23 |
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