Do the rich deserve their wealth?

Do the rich deserve their wealth? Greg Mankiw believes they do. But Mankiw is asking the wrong question. Suppose everyone had as much wealth as today's 1 percent. Undoubtedly, some would not "deserve" such wealth. But so what? Everyone's rich; let's just enjoy our wealth, right?

A better question would be, do the poor "deserve" their poverty?

Much depends on what we mean by "deserve." Like most moral language, "deserve" and related words are equivocal. We often use "deserve" in a utilitarian sense. When we say, for example, "The rich deserve their wealth," we might mean that the everyone is better off with what wealth and income inequality we have. Arthur Okun makes an implicitly utilitarian argument in his "leaky bucket" theory. Okun argued transferring wealth from the rich to the poor always involved some inefficiency; we might become more equal after a transfer, but we have less stuff overall. Whether or not Okun was correct, and whether or not the utility of equality outweighs the overall loss of stuff, Okun is making a utilitarian argument. Similarly, when we say that criminals "deserve" punishment, we often mean that punishing criminals deters others from committing crimes, thus making the world better off. That the criminal himself suffers is the price we must pay, and because the whole problem arises because of the criminal's choices, we are less troubled by his own suffering. We use this sense of "deserve," with its utilitarian implications, all over the place, mostly unproblematically.

But Mankiw spends considerable ink denying the utilitarian argument. His argument against utilitarianism is not very good, but that's not my concern for today; what matters is that Mankiw argues that the rich "deserve" their wealth on grounds other than utilitarianism. It is inherently wrong, regardless of effects on utility, to confiscate the wealth of rich people, precisely because they "deserve" it. But if that's true, if we reject utilitarianism, then if (most) rich people deserve their wealth, then (most) poor people deserve their poverty.

It is therefore equally wrong, regardless of the utilitarian consequences, to give money to poor people. Not only must this money be taken from rich people, violating their rights, but the overall argument is that people should get what they deserve, and giving them something other than what they deserve, whether they deserve wealth or poverty, is inherently wrong.

If we take Mankiw's argument to its logical conclusion, then a society with tremendous economic inequality is not merely tolerable, it is mandatory. The highest moral imperative is that people must get what they deserve. If the poor deserve poverty and misery, it is immoral to alleviate their misery, even if we could do so without diminishing anyone else's happiness. (Which would blatantly contradict economists' usual endorsement of Pareto efficiency.)

Mankiw he probably does not, at least consciously, intend this interpretation: he admits the utility of some transfers. But without this interpretation, the argument is pointless. The claim that it is immoral to be rich — that no one should ever be rich, regardless of our economic circumstances — almost by definition is immune to an argument from positive deservingness. No one would argue, for example, that anyone deserves to murder, rape, or steal. Even apologists for murder, rape, and theft don't argue that doing so is a reward for merit; they argue that the victims deserve to be killed, raped, and expropriated by force. Arguments from deservingness always work to justify the lack of a privilege or right.

I think a democratic communist must fundamentally reject the concept of deservingness, except in the trivial sense that everyone "deserves" to be happy, and no one "deserves" to suffer. That everyone cannot all be happy, and that some will in fact suffer becomes a practical problem rather than a fundamental problem. Notwithstanding the enormous practical problems, the fundamental role of all our social systems should be to make as many people as we can as happy as we can. To do otherwise is simply to dress the legitimate grievances against capitalism in robes of red rather than green.

Winning

The popular quotation, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing,"* is not just about sports (where it's manifestly untrue**) is at the very heart of capitalism. The marginal utility of a dollar is usually negative; the marginal value of the dollar that makes someone a "winner" is everything. No matter how many dollars a loser makes, the loser has the negative utility of losing; once a winner has won, and gained the positive utility of winning, there's no point in accumulating more dollars. However, we don't know which dollar is the winning dollar until after the game — and the game of capitalism never ends — so we have to fight over every dollar as if it's the winner.

*Henry Russell "Red" Sanders; incorrectly attributed to Vince Lombardi.
**Sports are not really about winning; they're about entertainment. Winning is just a part of the entertainment.

To the extent that capitalism is "designed" (more precisely, justified ex post), the primacy of winning is by design. Supposedly, we want every firm and every worker to fight to the death over every dollar, which affords the motivation to ruthlessly cut costs and build efficiency. No one gets to rest on his or her laurels; even the richest, most powerful individual or corporation needs to fight off potential challengers.

Capitalism is not about maximizing one's material, economic well-being. If it were, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would have stopped after a million dollars; maybe two or three million, but not ten thousand times more than that. Empirical evidence has shown that after about $75,000 per year, more money (and more stuff) stops making people happier. If it ever were just about maximizing material, economic well-being, capitalism stopped being about that in the early 19th century.

Capitalism is about winning and losing. Winners are good. Losers are bad. We reward winners, not because we want everyone to be a winner (obviously, everyone can't be a winner), but because winners are good, and that good deserves reward is just what good means. Similarly, we punish losers not because we want no one to lose (we can't have winners without losers), but because losers are bad, and that bad deserves punishment is just what bad means.

I think that Republicans want to punish poor people not because they're evil or sadistic, but because they're moral. If we reward the bad and punish the good, we become immoral; if we do not reward and punish, then we become amoral: we fail to distinguish between good and bad. Poor people are losers, losers are bad, so to not punish them is contradict or abandon morality itself.

I am an atheist for the same reason I'm a communist: because I'm a utilitarian. Utilitarianism (if it is not trivialized to narrow expediency) necessarily rejects the reward/punishment dichotomy. Utilitarianism is not about locating good and bad, and rewarding the good and punishing the bad. It is about making as many people as possible as happy as possible, and making as few people as possible suffer as little as possible. In theory, a good utilitarian wants to reward everyone and punish no one. (In practice, we cannot reward everyone and punish no one, at least not today, which is what make utilitarianism interesting. And, of course, the inventors of Utilitarianism, especially Jeremy Bentham, had some crazy stupidideas about punishment . So what? They were wrong about those points.) If one constructs the reward/punishment duality as inherent to morality, then utilitarianism is necessarily "amoral."

It is both necessary and sufficient to have a reward/punishment view of morality to support any oppressive social relations. So long as the reward/punishment idea exists, those who have "power", who can exercise physical, violent force, will define what is good (to be like those who have power) and bad (to be like those who don't have power). It then naturally follows that the good should be rewarded and the bad punished. Even if some people disagree about what is good and bad, once those with power establish what is good and bad, reward and punishment will follow.

A lot of leftist don't like this idea. It burns the ass of many feminist women that I know that I think that men who use prostitutes shouldn't be punished, that I think (ideally) rapists shouldn't be punished. It's not that I think prostitution is great (or even not bad), or that rape is no big deal (of course it is); it's that, first, I think that punishing rape doesn't eliminate it, and second, so long as we punish a thousand rapists, we implicitly permit the punishment of tens of millions (soon to be hundreds of millions) of poor people.

(To be honest, I do think that because we are in a social context that strongly relies on reward/punishment, it is presently expedient to punish rapists; we have to do the best we can with what we have, and rape is a problem that cannot simply wait until after the revolution. I'm not strictly against expediency ("in the long run, we're all dead"), but I do not see expediency as a moral ideal. And, of course, when punishment is not even expedient, I'm against it, even if I think some underlying activity is harmful.)

So long as we have capitalism, we will have economic winners and losers, and we will believe socially that winners are good and deserve reward and that losers are bad and deserve punishment (whether of the "hard" Republican punishment of poverty and suffering or the "soft" Democratic punishment of servile dependency). Even if we get rid of the idea that winners are good and losers are bad, even if we get rid of the idea of winners and losers, so long as we have the idea that good people should be rewarded and bad people should be punished as an essential (and not merely expedient) component of morality, we will end up replacing the relations of capitalism with some other oppressive, dominating social relations.

Keeping this idea of reward/punishment as essential to morality is, I think, one important reason why (in the small) the Kerista commune failed, and why (in the large) both Soviet and Chinese communism failed. In Kerista, it was good to be "pure," to be perfectly aligned with the explicit and implicit standards and ideals of the commune; it was bad to be "impure," to have reservations or hesitations with the standards. To be pure, to be good, was to be rewarded with inclusion; to be impure, to be bad, was to be punished by expulsion. In the Soviet Union and China, to be "good" was to be a good communist; to be bad was to harbor "capitalist" sentiments. And, of course, those with power constructed good and bad to reproduce and perpetuate their own power.

Fundamentally, communism is, to be moral, not something that simply changes, either at the fundamental economic level or at the social level, what kinds of behavior is good or bad, and deserves reward or punishment. And, technically, we could have (and, arguably did have) "communist" societies that did reward the good and punish the bad. I maintain, however, that any system, communism included, must abandon the idea of reward and punishment, and their connection with good and bad. Building such a society is a much harder task, I think, than just overthrowing capitalism.

Utilitarianism and physics

trivialknot has an excellent post, Utilitarianism to deontology. In it, he succinctly describes how the appearance of deontology might emerge from utilitarianism.

Before I continue, I want to briefly describe utilitarianism. Utilitarianism first rests on four more-or-less scientific principles:

1. People directly experience "happiness" and "suffering"; they're hard to define precisely, but we know them when we feel them. Happiness is intrinsically good, and suffering is intrinsically bad.
2. People are goal-seeking, which differs from other possible high-level cognitive strategies such as rule-following; (what Daniel Dennett calls sphexishness).
3. People generally create and act on the goal of maximizing their own happiness and minimizing their own suffering.
4. People have evolved to be social, and we have evolved the tendency to feel our own happiness when (some) others are happy, and feel our own suffering when (some) others suffer.

None of these scientific principles entail any particular ethical system. Utilitarianism thus must add an ethical ideology to these principles. There are two fundamental principles:

1. Ideally, we should act so as to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, aggregated over every person, to the end of time.
2. No individual's happiness and suffering is a priori more or less important than anyone else's; there is no privilege or oppression

Thus, utilitarianism is by definition consequential (we always look at the consequences of an action on happiness and suffering), and universal.

The second principle is important: it rebuts the objection that utilitarianism requires that each person sacrifices his life so that his organs could save the lives of more than one other. However, if everyone did so, we would obviously not maximize happiness; if only some did so, those some would be oppressed. If we drew lots, we would have to evaluate the total effect: does drawing lots to sacrifice healthy individuals for organ transplants increase or decrease happiness and suffering vs. letting individuals take their chances. When the answer in certain circumstances is that drawing lots does increase overall happiness and/or decrease overall happiness, such as a draft lottery in wartime, then we actually do it.

Ideally, we want to maximize happiness and suffering for everyone to the end of time. Obviously, we cannot actually determine the effect on any action for the 7 billion people presently existing, and however many will exist until the end of time. Thus, we operate under both risk and uncertainty, i.e. known and unknown probabilistic distribution of possible outcomes, respectively. TK has an excellent and succinct explanation in his post on the effects of risk and uncertainty on utilitarianism, so I will simply quote:

One appealing resolution is to say that these two problems solve each other. It is true that a naive utilitarianism does not account for uncertainty. But when we do account for uncertainty, then we will reproduce most of our moral intuitions. Although perhaps we will not reproduce every moral intuition, and so this provides a useful way to distinguish between intuitions which are correct and intuitions which are incorrect.

For example, whenever we make decisions, we are more certain of the consequences to ourselves than we are of consequences to people far away. In the face of uncertainty, consequences tend to be a wash, so it is good to prioritize ourselves.

Another example. Whenever we drop a brick off the roof of a building, we cannot distinguish beforehand the cases where the brick will hit someone and the cases where it won't do anything. Therefore, we must judge all brick-dropping the same way. We must make a rule against the action of dropping bricks in random places. This reproduces deontological ethics, which makes rules about particular actions based on the qualities of those actions.

This also neatly solves one of the problems with deontological ethics, which is that there isn't a clear way to generate new rules about actions. This framework suggests that the correct way to generate new rules is to consider the probabilistic consequences of a class of actions.

TK's main point is to note some differences between physics and ethics.

First, he asserts that both physics and utilitarianism are reductionist, i.e. you can (in theory) calculate higher-order phenomena from the behavior lower-order phenomena. However, physics purports to describe how the universe actually is, whereas TK is unclear on whether utilitarianism even purports (much less actually does) describe how the world is.

This is an easy one. Utilitarianism does not describe how the world actually is. It is a framework that people chooses or does not choose to evaluate their actions. The "reductionism" just happens to be part of the theory; as a proponent of utilitarianism, I would not say that utilitarianism is true because it is reductionist. (Indeed, I would not say that utilitarianism is true. Full stop.) Reductionism just serves to make the theory easier to use.

The idea, however, that we know physics is true, that it really describes the world, because it is reductionist is very philosophically problematic. There's no denying that reductionism is a really useful tool in physics, but the connection between reductionism and truth seems very hard to justify. So I don't known that physics and utilitarianism are really very different on this criterion.

Second, TK notes that increasing the precision of our moral calculations do not just allow us to know the moral status of actions with more precision, it can actually radically change the moral status. TK's example is particularly trenchant:

If we discover with certainty that dropping a brick at a particular time won't hurt anyone, and will instead kill a butterfly and stop a hurricane in a hundred years, then that action literally goes from unacceptable to acceptable.

Indeed: and not just acceptable, but compulsory.

But again, is this sensitivity to precision all that different from physics? Do we not have Chaos theory and Three-body problem? I don't actually see much difference here between physics and utilitarianism.

Finally, TK makes a legitimate argument from ignorance: he doesn't know how utilitarianism reproduces such basic, intuitive things as rights, so he cannot effectively use it. I have two responses. First, TK could in fact become an expert in utilitarianism: he's a smart guy, and I think I've made at least the prima facie case that utilitarianism is worthy of study. However, I suspect that the world is better off if TK puts more of his time and effort into the study of physics and as an advocate for social justice. So my second response is that most people's naive intuition about how to act is already utilitarian: you don't have to be an expert in utilitarianism to act as a good utilitarian. Most "nice" people usually act on the following rules/guidelines:

1. If I can clearly benefit myself without hurting anyone else, then I should.
2. If I can clearly benefit someone else without hurting myself (much), then I should.
3. If I can clearly prevent great suffering, even if it harms me, or risks harming me substantially, I should.
4. Most social rules handle the general cases where the outcome is not immediately clear: I should act according to social rules in uncertain situations.
5. If a social rule seems like it causes more harm than benefit, I should subject that social rule to heightened scrutiny, and consider changing it.

Really, that's 99.999% of utilitarianism. The 0.001% comes in how we should examine apparently problematic social rules. Even then, the "experts", who have the training to look deeply into that 0.001%, have the task of justifying their analysis to the rest of the "lay" population.

I will try to write a more detailed analysis of how rights come from utilitarianism.

The utilitarianism of ridicule

I think it's good to ridicule religion.

Ridicule is complicated from a utilitarian perspective. By design, ridicule is immediately harmful: it makes its target feel bad. So, in a consequentialist utilitarian framework, we can justify ridicule only by concluding first that we can know, directly or indirectly, that the overall effects of ridicule promote more happiness and less suffering in the long run to offset the immediate suffering. Second, we have to know that there is no alternative means that is less immediately harmful.

The idea of doing something bad in the short run for a good in the long run is incredibly problematic. We have a lot more knowledge about the short run than we do about the long run. That's the whole point of ethical principles: ethical principles encapsulate our social knowledge (as well as social prejudice, confusion, ignorance, and delusion) about the expected long run effects of short run actions. I strongly suspect that, for instance, people don't like flipping the switch in the Trolley Problem* precisely because we are socially conditioned that uncertainty** about the indirect and long term effects prohibit actively killing a person. We also must consider the meta-problem: when we justify doing a short-run harm for a long-run good, we have to also ask: who will be making those decisions, under what constraints, and to fulfill which ends? But saying that causing immediate, local harm now for a long-run, global good is problematic is not to say that it cannot possibly be justified.


*See also Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?

**The assumption of certainty made in the presentation of the problem just doesn't help: our intuition about the world is both unconscious and deeply conditioned (usually) about how the world actually is; it's difficult or impossible for us to consciously adjust our intuition to conform to alternative physics. It's hard enough to adjust our intuition to true but non-obvious physics.

The justification for ridicule, then, must address what the long-run effects of ridicule will be, how we know what those effects are, whether they outweigh the short-run harm, whether less harmful methods exist, and how we socially decide whom to ridicule and when. I think we can justify ridiculing religion on these grounds.

The expected long-term effects of ridicule are change of behavior. When we ridicule some people, or actions, or ideas, we are saying that these people, or people who do or think these things should change. Hence, ridiculing people for unchangeable characteristics — race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, height, and, to some extent weight — cannot effect any long-term change in behavior; therefore, the immediate harm cannot be outweighed by the impossible to achieve long-term effects. If you ridicule someone for being Black, you're just being mean.

Second, since individuals are the best judge of what is harmful, it doesn't make sense to ridicule people only for harming themselves. Even if fat people could change their weight (and there's a lot of science that shows that losing weight is incredibly difficult, and often impossible), they harm no one but themselves. Presumably, they are rational people, and have decided that even if losing weight were possible for them, the short-term pain outweighs the long-term benefits, and they, not I, are the experts on their own utility functions.

However, we can reasonably expect long-term positive effects of ridiculing religion. We want people to stop using religion to hurt other people. We know how religion harms people: people use religion to justify and perpetuate sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, national chauvinism, and a host of other obvious ills. We know that people use religion to perpetuate subordination, exploitation, and in some cases outright victimization. And we know that the underlying justification — some people know what God wants, and what God wants overrides anything that mere human beings might want — is utterly without merit.

(I want to take a brief sidebar and address the argument: I'm (this or that religion), and I don't think that God wants us to be sexist, racist, exploitative, etc. The fundamental problem with religion is not content but methodology. You don't know any better than the sexists, racists, etc. about what God does or does not want. You have to appeal either to personal revelation or to scripture. If you appeal to revelation, then the charisma and rhetorical skill of those who claim revelation becomes more ethically persuasive than the content of the revelation. If you appeal to scripture, then, well, scripture is equivocal enough that it's certainly possible to read most anything into it, but you're still relying on the charisma and rhetoric of the interpreter, rather than the content of the interpretation, for ethical persuasion. If you want to argue on the basis of content, then you don't need God in the first place: we can just look at the content directly.)

We won't stop all sexism, misogyny, racism, etc. ad nauseam by convincing people to stop being religious (or just stop being such assholes about their religion), but I think we could put a real dent in these social ills. And whatever positive effects religion might have, if we can tell that that effects are positive without appeal to religion, then we can find non-religious ways of gaining the effects.

We also have to look at the potential negative effects. First, ridicule might be ineffective. Ridicule often enough is effective, but it's not always effective. But the immediate short-run effects are relatively small: some people have their feelings hurt. Just having a small negative effect is not a justification by itself — a small harm is still a harm — but it does say that the risk of ineffectuality is relatively low.

More importantly, when individuals of a particular religion are generally subjugated in some context, ridicule can perpetuate and justify that subjugation. For example, one argument against Charlie Hebdo is that because Muslims are generally subjugated in France, ridiculing Islam perpetuates and justifies that subjugation. This argument has some merit but I think there are some good counter-arguments.

First, Muslims in France are not subjugated because they are Muslims (much less because Charlie Hebdo ridiculed them). I'm no expert in French sociology, but as a communist, I tend to see the underlying cause of subjugation and exploitation as capitalism, not religion. If Muslims really are subjugated in France, it's because capitalism requires that somebody be subjugated, and the Muslims (perhaps among others) just got the shitty end of the stick: if it weren't the Muslims, then it would be someone else. I obviously don't think that people should be subjugated because of their religion (or race, or gender, or any other ineluctable characteristic), but I also don't think that we should distribute subjugation "fairly": we shouldn't subjugate anyone.

But not everyone believes that capitalism is the underlying problem, or that capitalism requires subjugation, or that subjugation is necessarily bad. I would disagree with the position overall, but I do think the argument has at least some merit that the subjugation of Muslims in French society is at least in part due to their resistance to assimilation. Just being religious, just going to the Mosque on Friday instead of Church on Sunday (or no Church at all), is no barrier to assimilation, but insisting on private standards of justice, such as the permission of the subjugation of women, or restrictions on others' free speech, can be barriers to assimilation.

The position of Muslim immigrants to France is very different from the position of Black people in the United States: Black Americans were forcibly brought to the United States and forced into literal chattel slavery (along with genocide and wars of aggression, one of the Unforgivable Curses). Their presence in the United States is 100% the result of and the responsibility of White Americans. Black Americans have zero duty to "assimilate" to a culture that forced their inclusion; White Americans have at the very least (and we have a lot more duties) a duty to simply take Black Americans as they are, and change ourselves to include them fully in American society. In contrast, Muslim immigrants to France came there, presumably, because they thought French society was better than their original society. And French colonialism was not slavery; decolonization is obviously justified, but non-assimilative immigration seems more difficult to justify.

Assimilation and acculturation are obviously complicated issues: immigrants, by virtue of acceptance into a culture, are entitled to participate in the social construction and evolution of that culture. But, frankly, ridicule (on both sides) is a part of the process of social construction. Even native-born members of a culture have a duty of enculturation; as a native-born White American, I cannot simply say that I am who I am, and everyone else has to unconditionally adjust around me. And if were I try to say that, I would subject myself to ridicule.

The point is: Unlike Black Americans, French Muslims did not start out as completely powerless. They chose to came (and the French chose to accept them), so they are part of the process. Immigrants have the right to argue, by any appropriate and effective means, for whatever cultural change they want; unlike White Americans, the French also have the right to argue back. They should avoid perpetuating subjugation, but unless Muslims were almost completely powerless, just because they are exploited to some extent in France does not mean they are immune to criticism. And if ridicule is legitimately part of that argument back, that criticism, then so be it.

(In contrast, the only "argument" White Americans have is, "I'm sorry. What happened to you and what is happening now is completely inexcusable. I can't change the past, but I will do today whatever you think is reasonable or moderate to fix the problem.")

We next have to ask: is there a better alternative to ridicule? Obviously, rational persuasion is always better. But rational persuasion is singularly ineffective when it comes to changing most people's religious beliefs. (Rational persuasion does work on some individuals, and in general having a rational basis for any position is valuable.) When rational persuasion fails to correct harmful behavior, we must resort to stronger measures. I am not a lets-hold-hands-and-sing-Kumbaya mushy liberal; I will not give up just because a harm requires stronger methods to correct. I think ridicule is a stronger method than rational persuasion, but it is milder than outright coercion. The most puerile, immature, scatalogical, and even misguided ridicule might sting, but I'll take it any day over the policeman's baton or the soldier's bayonet. Furthermore, a lot of religious people are just as offended, have their feelings just as hurt, just by people saying they disagree with them, much less offering rational criticism. So I think that the harm done by ridicule is often no worse than rational criticism, and substantially less worse than outright violent coercion. And ridicule is very different from, and less bad than, threats, harassment, or near-incitement.

Finally, we socialize ridicule by letting anyone do it. Ridiculing other people is a right, not a privilege. It's not even a privilege of the rich; it doesn't take that much wealth to print a magazine, and almost no wealth to ridicule people on the internet. No one, I think, can legitimately argue that unlike, for example, the Koch brothers, Charlie Hebdo used their immense wealth to magnify the impact of their speech; before the attacks, the magazine had been flying six inches from the ground for years, with a circulation in the tens of thousands (compared to the ~64 million just in Metropolitan France). I'm not saying that White (or non-Muslim) privilege is non-existent, but it's hard to tie any kind of privilege to Charlie Hebdo. (If France had actually tried to shut down any satirical publications because they were Islamic, that might be different, but I've seen no evidence of that. Even then, the response would not be to condemn Charlie Hebdo for using its privilege, but to condemn the French for creating the privilege.)

We can always argue that some instance of ridicule is misguided, mistaken, unwarranted, or otherwise defective. But we can always argue that any position, expressed in any form, from a scientific paper to a casual remark, is somehow defective. It is never wrong to criticize any speech for its content. But if we disapprove of ridicule itself just because it hurts people's feelings, then to be consistent, I think we have to disapprove of a lot of things, like criticism and simple disagreement, that also hurt people's feelings. If we want to disapprove of specific kinds of ridicule, then we have to justify why those specific kinds of ridicule are wrong, but not others.

I have not yet seen a compelling argument that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists did anything more wrong than does anyone else who expresses strong opinions about socially important issues. They made some mistakes — as does everyone — and may have missed their intended targets — as does everyone — but I think they both intended to and actually were making the world a better place. Their deaths are not just an offense against the general prohibition against killing, but a real loss for the world.

Utilitarianism in one easy lesson

Several readers, many considerably smarter than I am, have complained that many of my recent posts are too boringly technical. I like being boringly technical, a legacy of (or perhaps cause of) my career as a computer programmer. This blog is for myself, to think out loud, but it's also to communicate. So I want to try to explain Utilitarianism in a somewhat less technical way. If anyone has any technical questions, feel free to dig into them in the comments. I hope (probably vainly) that this disclaimer will reduce the sort of you-didn't-address-this-technical-issue-you-moron responses I get when I talk about philosophy.

Utilitarianism is an ethical system that says an individual should choose what will maximize the well-being (utility) of everyone (including herself) in the world, over time, keeping in mind that we have a scary level of uncertainty about how to do so. The rest is commentary.

Like any other ethical system, there is no absolutely compelling reason why one should or must adopt Utilitarianism: people choose to adopt Utilitarianism. (They can also choose to lie about adopting Utilitiarianism; that some non-Utilitarians lie and say they are Utilitarians is one argument that Utilitarianism seems like a good idea.)

Utilitarianism starts from the scientific psychological theory that individuals try to maximize their own individual subjective utility. They choose what they evaluate will maximize their own "happiness" and minimize their own "suffering." This theory is distinct from "sphexishness," the theory that people just act out algorithmic scripts and make no evaluations about the outcome. Psychological utility is a theory; we cannot directly measure utility, so psychological utility uses a "hidden variable" to explain observed human behavior.

Utilitarianism then builds on the scientific psychological theory that human beings have evolved the faculties of sympathy and empathy. We can, to no small extent, understand the happiness and suffering of other people (and animals), and we ourselves feel happy at others' happiness and suffering at others' suffering (or, sometimes, the other way around). We don't consciously choose to be empathic; our empathy is more-or-less directly connected to our emotions. We do, however, scientifically observe that this connection is, for many, fragile: a person can be persuaded or socialized to break the connection between others' happiness and suffering and his own.

Utilitarianism is very much a real-world system. Hence, Utilitarians don't worry much about philosophical pseudo-problems such as Omelas, the Trolley Problem, or the Lifeboat scenario. Would Klingons be Utilitarians? Vulcans? Groachi? All of these scenarios wave away important real-world constraints, especially uncertainty, that have shaped human moral intuition. I can't, for example, even imagine a world where the suffering of a child could have any beneficial effect whatsoever, much less be necessary for a utopian society; I really don't care that Utilitarianism in an imaginary world with inconceivably different physics conflicts with my moral intuitions shaped by this world. And how often do people find themselves trapped on an overcrowded lifeboat? Is the most important task for our ethical philosophy to give the right answer in such a situation? Don't get me wrong: a lot of people (myself included) find all of these philosophical investigations interesting (and digging down and getting technical, I think Utilitarianism can either give a good account for itself or at least a good account of why these scenarios assume away critical foundations of utilitarianism) and thought provoking; they just not very good for helping us shape our choices in this world, in this society.

Instead, Utilitarianism focuses on answering the ethical problems that face real people in real societies. Who should I vote for? What laws and public policies should I support? What rules should the police operate under? When and how much should I conserve water, gasoline, CO₂ emissions? When should I obey the law and when should I break it? Should I shop at Wal-Mart, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, or at the bodega?

Utilitarianism has, in my opinion, one good answer to these questions: do the best you can to maximize the utility of everyone, including yourself, assuming that (most) everyone does the same. If you cannot be assured that most everyone really will do the same, you have a bigger problem than the immediate choice.

I want to address some typical objections to Utilitarianism that are not just pseudo-problems.

The first objection is that Utilitarianism requires perfect knowlege (which is different from the pseudo-problematic objection that Utilitarianism would fail if we had perfect knowledge). This objection fails because it assumes that without perfect knowledge, we can say nothing at all about the consequences of our actions on the well-being of other people. This assumption contradicts our everyday experience. I don't know all the consequences of going on a killing spree — who knows, I might kill someone who would otherwise become the next Hitler — but I can be pretty confident that I will be harming a lot of people, and their suffering will far exceed the pleasure I might get from such unbridled violence. (I suppose I really need to say it: this is a thought experiment. I would not actually get any pleasure whatsoever from killing anyone.)

Utilitarianism deals with uncertainty in three ways. First, if it isn't broken, don't fix it: If you don't have good reason to believe that changing the status quo will lead to more well-being, then don't change it. Second, talk about it: have a social conversation about what other people really want and how best to get it. It's not always true, but it often is true that all of us are smarter than any one of us. Finally, learn from history: we have spent millennia (and even the earliest written records show that people had been talking about morality, law, and politics in sophisticated ways) discussing what the greater good consists of and how to establish and maintain a society that provides it. We are not, as Burke suggests, bound by history, but we ignore it at our peril.

The second objection is that Utilitarianism entails that no one individual, not even one's self, is special or privileged. It seems to follow then that I should kill myself, because my organs could save at least seven people (two kidneys, two lungs, a heart, a liver, and a pancreas, not to mention my skin, corneas, veins and arteries, and bones). Seven lives are better than one, n'est pas. However, the "no one is special" principle cuts both ways: it entails the principle of universiality: I should sacrifice my own utility only if I believe that well-being would be maximized if everyone sacrificed the same utility. Otherwise, I am singling myself out to be special.

The third objection, related to the second, is that Utilitarianism requires that we put the well-being of slackers, racists, assholes, and criminals on an equal basis to the well-being of hard-working, egalitarian, nice, law-abiding civilized citizens. This objection is sort of accurate: we are obligated to treat everyone's utility "equally," but only in an abstract sense. Most of our intutions deprecating others' utility turn out, on abstract philosophical investigation, to be Utilitarian. Even if, as a thought exercise, we don't make a prior commitment that the happiness of the rapist just doesn't count, we find that the rapist's happiness is far outweighed by the victim's suffering. In the rest of the cases, we really should change our intuitions: when, as a thought experiment, we don't make a prior commitment that the happiness of a homosexual doesn't count, we find that others' disgust of his sexuality is far outweighed by his happiness at having a same-sex relationship.

The fourth objection is that Utilitarianism is not rights-respecting. Rights-respecting ethical systems state that there are things we should not do, rights we should not violate, even if we have good reason to believe that violating a right would improve overall well-being. In one sense, this objection is just the trivial statement that different ethical systems are different. However, the argument for extra-Utilitarian rights usually relies on wildly unrealistic hypotheticals: Omelas, for example, is wrong in a rights-respecting system because regardless of utility, they are violating the rights of the tortured child. But as I discussed above, it's not really worthwhile talking about the morality of situations that we have good reason to believe cannot ever happen in the future.

The other arguments for rights usually consist of defining utility too narrowly. It might seem that randomly killing people for their organs passes the Utilitarian "no one is special" test (since, hypothetically, each person has an equal probability of being harvested), but this hypothetical construes utility too narrowly. We don't implement such a system because most people would prefer (find greater utility) to take their chances with voluntary organ donation than risk being harvested. Similarly, sacrificing an innocent individual to appease an angry mob seems to have short-term utility, but we have good reason to believe that in the long term, such an action would substantially diminish the well-being of people in a society, who couldn't trust fair and impartial (or as fair and impartial as we can manage) justice.

(There are other, more technical, objections to rights-respecting ethics, which I can address in the comments. See Robert Nozick's Anarchism, State, and Utopia, for a catalog of errors a sincere rights-respecting ethical philosopher can make.)

The final objection I want to discuss is that Utilitarianism is hard. Yep, 'tis indeed. We don't know what other people really want. We don't know who is or is not a sincere Utilitarian. We don't know all the consequences of our actions. The best I can say about Utilitarianism is that it gives us a framework for each of us, individually and collectively, to do the best we can with what we have, and it rests on a foundation that is scientifically sound. If you want easy answers, join a religion (or become a Libertarian). All I can say about Libertarianism is, "Are you fucking kidding me?" And all I can say about religion is that either god is a shitty Utilitarian (and if so, fuck him/her/it/them), or he/she/it/they want us to work this stuff out for ourselves, which is what I'm trying to do.

Epistemology of ethics

The chief question of any moral philosophy is its epistemic basis. How do we know moral statements? This question resolves to asking, what is the foundation of moral philosophy, and what kind of foundation is it?

Briefly, there are two kinds of foundations: axiomatic and hypothetical. An axiomatc foundation is one with premises (or a rule for constructing premises) accepted as axioms, i.e. true by definition, and all theorems, i.e. statements that deductively follow from those axioms according to inference rules, are true. Most (but not all) mathematics uses axiomatic foundations. The axioms of set theory, for example, are true by definition, and all theorems, however surprising or counterintuitive, are true. The "game" of mathematics is to try to derive a lot of "interesting" theorems, especially theorems that explain our experience, with as few axioms as possible. Set theory, on that basis, is wildly successful.

A hypothetical foundation, on the other hand, takes a collection of theorems (and nontheorems), i.e. complex statements, as true (or false) by definition. The project under an empirical foundation is to construct the smallest set of hypotheses and inference rules from which we can derive the truth of the foundational theorems (and the falsity of the foundational nontheorems). Natural science is the paradigm of hypothetical foundationalism: statements about experience are taken as true by definition, and our scientific theories are collections of hypotheses from which we can derive those statements of experience.

In an axiomatic foundation, the truth of the theorems is the same "kind" of truth as the axioms: we cannot consistently call a theorem false without rejecting one or more axioms (or inference rules). In a hypothetical foundation, however, hypotheses are never true in the same sense as the foundational theorems: we can reject a hypothesis, regardless of its explanatory power, without rejecting the foundational theorems, especially if we discover a new foundational theorem or nontheorem that the hypothesis contradicts. It is, in a sense, impossible to be mistaken if we apply the inference rules accurately about the truth of theorems in an axiomatic system. In contrast, even if we apply the rules accurately, we can be mistaken about the truth of a hypothesis.

We have the same choice in moral reasoning: what do we take as our foundation? If we want to use an axiomatic foundation, then as we see in mathematics, we have a lot of choice in our axioms. In mathematics, this choice is unproblematic, we can just say that each choice of axioms is a different branch of mathematics. We really don't care, for example, if the parallel postulate is "really" true or "really" false; we just call the axiom set where it's true by definition, "Euclidian (plane) geometry," and call the axiom sets where it's not true by definition, different kinds of "non-Euclidian geometry." In moral philosophy, however, this choice is more problematic: a moral philosophy is, by definition, normative, it should tell us what to actually do, and we can do only one thing at a time. So if I can derive from one set of moral axioms that I should pay my taxes, and I can derive from another set that I should not pay them, I am no better off deciding whether I should or should not pay my taxes than I was before I studied moral philosophy; and I cannot both pay and not pay my taxes. It's pretty clear (at least to me) that trying to base moral philosophy on an axiomatic foundation is a dead end.

Most philosophers (including Nozick) implicitly or explicitly use moral intuition as a hypothetical foundation. They try to set up moral hypotheses that "capture" our moral intuitions; especially, they try to show that some alternative moral theory contradicts our moral intuition, and is therefore false. The problem with this foundation is that moral philosophy is still non-normative: our intuitions themselves are normative; our moral philosophy merely describes, in a more-or-less compact way, our foundational moral intutions. Moral philosophy, on an intuitive level, is descriptive. Indeed it is a rather blatant contradiction to say that moral philosophy X explains and describes some subset of moral intuitions, and therefore should be accepted, and then say that X contradicts certain other moral intuitions, and we should therefore reject those other intuitions. (This fundamental contradiction is so pervasive, and perhaps unavoidable, in academic moral philosophy that I simply abandoned the idea of pursuing philosophy as a career.)

(There is another mostly unrelated problem in using moral intuition as a hypothetical foundation: how robust should our moral theories be to counterfactuals? Should we reject a moral theory because it contradicts our intuition about states of affairs that appear physically impossible? Such is one rebuttal to the Omelas problem: It seems not only physically impossible in this world that the torture and deprivation of a single child was necessary to produce a society where everyone else was happy, but also that the laws of physics could be such that it was necessary but everything else was the same as this world. The inapplicability of my intutions to such a wild counterfactual seems completely irrelevant; Omelas is problematic only to the inhabitants of that world; it says nothing at all about this actual world. Similarly is the rebuttal to a lot of hypotheticals so beloved by many moral philosophers such as the Trolley Problem (parodied masterfully in Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?) that assume perfect knowledge or absolute certainty that is physically impossible.)

The only answer, it seems, is to bite the bullet: moral philosophy is not normative. A person either chooses the moral axioms she likes and acts according to the theorems derivable from those axioms, or examines her moral intuition and tries to construct a philosophy that explains those intuitions. In the second case, moral philosophy can at least provide guidance when one's immediate moral intuition is unclear, or one feels some sort of contradiction or incompatibility between one's moral intuitions or between intuition and desire.

Furthermore, moral intuition is labile in a sense that (perceptual) experience, the foundation of natural science, is stabile, or at least fundamentally and qualitatively less labile. It is very easy to change one's moral intuition in a way that it is very difficult to change one's perceptions. Perceptions do change, for a number of reasons, but it's still hard to see a tree in my front yard and not see the trees in my back yard. In contrast, people can go from treating Jewish prisoners in concentration camps as human beings to treating them as worse than animals in as little as a few days, and usually a month or two (see Becoming Evil by James Waller).

Moral philosophy is a fundamentally dialectical process, a process that can be divorced neither from this real physical world nor from the society that the moral philosopher thinks and lives in. Moral philosophy emerges from the contradictions between the individual and society and reality.

Engaging in that dialectic is my project as a moral philosopher. I don't claim any transcendent or universal truth for utilitarianism. Because of who I am, my biological evolution, the society in which I was raised, how I was brought up as a child, and my experiences as an adult, I have certain intuitions and feelings about good and bad, preferences about how I want to live my own life, and preferences about the society and culture I both happen to live in now and that I would like to live in tomorrow. Utilitarianism captures a lot of those intuitions, helps me examine those intuitions critically, gives me guidance about what I want to do when my intuitions seem ambiguous and equivocal. I can ask no more from philosophy.

Local and global utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is often held to be the doctrine that when faced with any decision, an individual should choose the alternative that ceteris paribus maximizes immediate social utility. There are many problems with this formulation, but I want to look at one specific problem.

This would be easier with a diagram, but I'm on my pad without a good drawing program, so I'll just have to describe it. Consider a very simple, 2-dimensional model of utility, with states of affairs on the x-axis, and total utility on the y-axis. The utility function is continuous and has many peaks and valleys. We will assume that an individual knows the utility function, and can choose to "move left," "move right," or "stay put," i.e. to choose between two nearby states of affairs with different levels of total utility.

The current state of affairs is near a local maximum/peak, but there is another maximum, which an individual knows, that is substantially higher than the local maximum, with an intervening trough of lower utility. The question is: is an individual justified in moving towards that higher peak even though the immediate effect is to lower total immediate utility?

I will simply define two forms of utilitarianism.

Local Utilitarianism says absolutely, unconditionally not. If random, unchosen social perturbations happen to move us across the trough so that maximizing local utility moves us to the higher maximum, well and good, but it is immoral to intentionally lower total social utility even though we know we are moving towards a higher maximum.

In contrast, Global Utilitarianism says that it is possible to justify moving towards the higher peak even though we are reducing total immediate social utility. It is not necessarily justifiable, however, because there are other constraints. For example, the intervening trough might be so deep, with such negative utility, so as to make movement towards the new peak unjustifiable. One way to capture this constraint is that global utilitarianism seeks to maximize not an immediate utility function, but an integral of that function over time, to maximize not immediate total utility, but total utility over time. Hence we must look at utility in three dimensions: with states of affairs on the x-axis, time on the y-axis, and immediate utility on the z-axis, and we are maximizing a line integral of utility over states of affairs and time. There are other constraints, but this view of Global Utilitarianism directly answers some notable objections to utilitarianism.

For example, I'm about 20% of the way through Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He brings up as an argument against utilitarianism the case where one could choose to punish an innocent individual to satisfy the rage of a rampaging mob. Clearly, the harm caused by punishing one innocent individual will make happier both the rampaging mob and the numerous equally innocent victims of their rage. Local utilitarianism would definitively mandate punishing the innocent individual. However, under Global Utilitarianism, the mandate is not so clear. Global Utilitarianism demands that we evaluate, as best we can, the effect on total utility over time. I'm not considering risk and uncertainty here, so I won't add a probability function; I'll just assume that the innocence of the scapegoat will eventually be discovered. (If there were no possibility that the violation would be discovered, then in what sense could one say that the "scapegoat" really was innocent?) Thus I have to consider the effect of my action over time, given that innocent people would no longer have confidence that their innocence would protect them against punishment. I might well decide that over time, diminishing this social confidence would have an overall negative effect on the utility integral, and choose to protect the innocent person.

Nozick's example "works" precisely because we have strong intuitions, validated by millennia of experience, that protecting the innocent from state retribution has enormous long-term utility. If we weaken the violation of right, we get far more intuitively ambiguous situations. For example, during the fires after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, firefighters intentionally dynamited many buildings, intentionally and purposefully violating the property rights of the owners, to prevent the spread of the fire. This action is precisely equivalent to the strong Trolley Problem (where one chooses between pushing one person onto the tracks to stop a train that would, if not stopped, kill five people). The only difference is that our intuitions that violations of property rights have a much smaller long-term impact on the utility integral.

This construction of Global Utilitarianism is, of course, far less rigorous than Local Utilitarianism. We add two extra abstractions: the prediction of utility over time and some conceptual integral of utility. But who says ethical system has to be perfectly rigorous? It doesn't seem so in real life; I think our ethical system should capture the real-world difficulties.