Here is a moral puzzle in the spirit of Eliezer’s Torture vs. Dust Specks post. It is directed to free market admirers. A company has 100 employees. It has the opportunity to make $1 billion but only if a task gets completed. There are two ways of completing the task.
But whenever they have been implemented, they have generally been disasterous, and the key word "consenting" seems to get sucked out of the system
What are you talking about?I doubt that polygyny leads to women-as-property, rather than the other way around (but I don't know its history). Slavery is associated with raiding your neighbors for slaves; but (1) that's the least of the problems and (2) there wasn't much consenting going on in the first place.
The classic example of coerced employment is at sea, but the problem there is more the physical constraints than the institution of absolute power of the captain.
The correct answer, of course, is obviously (insert letter here)
Isn't it amazing how many people start like this? Anyway, I believe the Utilitarian thing to do here would be to allow the company to go ahead with the plan. UNLESS - It can be "kept secret" that the government ordered John to be killed after all. If it is almost positively certain that the government's decision to have "only John" killed can be kept silent, and made it seem like the company ended up with option B, then there is no corruption of implicit social contract, there is no loss of belief in the system, and thus you can maintain stability while maximizing your consequentialist calculation.
But my point is not that people advocate resurrecting the USSR, but that the way it turned out is a real, recorded unintended consequence of taking a certain approach to the problems of society.
Yes, and the point is good. But the comparaison is somewhat limited - the USSR, for instance, was a dictatorship. A closer example would be Western Europe after the second world war, up to the 70's. There, a certain approach to problems in society, resulted in:1) Spectacular, record-breaking growth, relatively well spread across society,2) Fullish employement,3) Some public policy disasters,4) Long-term structural problems,5) An eventual reduction in the government role in the economy.
A mixed picture, to be sure, but not an entirely negative one (and not exclusively due to starting from a low base, or to the Marshall plan, either). And, as for the particular example being discussed, as far as I know, every country would outlaw such behaviour. So I don't think we can argue from history that any intervention by the state in private companies is a disaster (in certain specific instances, I'd argue they were very beneficial).
People prefer to eat than to starve; they prefer to be acknowledged than insulted. A government which operates along those principles (with exceptions for those who clearly demonstrate that they are in a different case) would not suffer much from this unknown preference issue.
But what is the government competent to do, given this knowledge? Produce food? Recall the Soviet and Chinese famines. Oops, there I go again with the historical examples.
Historical examples as good! I'd personally prefer the government did nothing with the knowledge that people prefer praise to insults - but the point is, they know it, and if they acted on it, lack of information would not be the problem.
As for the food, there are a whole host of things a government can do. The simplest and the most effective is susidise it - when it does so, more food is produced. Historical example: England, which went from an under-producer to a bloated over-producer through subsidies.
Well-run governments also show skill in the distribution of food, in times of shortage (again, England, WWII, rationning - hell, even the Nazi puppet regimes of western europe could manage that). There are costs to both these interventions (distorted markets, black markets, long term unexpected consequences), but there are also costs to not doing anything.
I feel there is a saliency issue here - if the government does something, and it has costs, then the government is to blame. If it does nothing, and there are costs, then the universe is to blame, or it's part of the natural order of things, so people accept it better, even if the result is worse.
Please don't believe I am advocating unrestrained governmental interventions, by the way :-) Lacking information on people's choices, fostering a culture of dependency or encouraging rent-seeking, excessively using coersive force, bloating laws and regulations, etc... - these are the costs of interventions. But I don't feel they are high enough to rule out a priori all governmental interventions. In some cases (old style elite-only basic education) I feel these costs are insignificant in comparaison to doing nothing.
Stuart_Armstrong: You're saying that "not permitting anyone, ever, to pay or be paid for absorbing an increased risk of death" is "what you would do" and is "consistent with a respect for human life", the latter being "infinitely precious"?
In that case, the next steps would be to explain:
-Why you paid or were paid for absorbing higher risk of death several times during the past week.-How you would get law enforcement to take on the increased risk of death in enforcing regulations such as these.
I'll do this, as it'll help me make my ideas coherent. I see no objection to paying people to accept increased risk (I personnally feel they should be paid more than they are, but that's another issue for another day). I feel though, that there is a difference between the set-up "accepting a bribe to increase your risk of death by 3%" and "accepting a bribe to be one of a hundred people, three of which will be killed (by a corporation or an individual)". It is the prohibition against murder that is being diluted in the second case (and it is being strongly diluted: someone is being killed, and that person can't object, because "he accepted the risks"). The first case just dilutes the prohibition against being exposed to increase danger.
Now there are cases where the two are indestinguishable (war, for example), but I feel it has been a great source of progress that we have maintained a prohibition against murder in times of peace - even if, from the point of view of the corpse, the result is the same.
I feel the same about slavery, incidentally, and somewhat similarly about polygammy - the arguments for accepting them, among consenting adults, are very strong. But whenever they have been implemented, they have generally been disasterous, and the key word "consenting" seems to get sucked out of the system :-)
Please point out the weak points in this argument - I want to explore this area further, and counter-arguments help a lot.
Each employee has a right to his own life, which he can voluntarily waive, but not transfer (if he could transfer this right, then slavery would be justifiable). So, while any employee would trade a 3% chance of death for $5 million, he has a right to exit the lottery at any time, even after it takes place.
This is more bad science fiction. There's no real moral dilemma here worth analyzing, here. You might as well talk about the ethics of PacMan eating up the little blue monsters in the eponymous video game. Whatever you guys think you're doing, wouldn't it be at least a little more interesting to try doing it with a situation that has some remote possibility of being encountered in your actual lives?
History magazine did an article, this month, called "What Would You Have Done?" based on the book The Darkest Hour, by Laurence Rees. I must get this book. The article describes moral dilemmas faced by specific people during WWII and how they dealt with them.
Examples:
- As a teenager, Estera Frenkiel, a secretary in a Lodz ghetto, was given ten certificates excusing Jews from the death camps. How did she decide who to excuse?
- Having joined SMERSH, the notorious Soviet counter-intelligence unit, Zinaida Pytkina was expected to kill a German prisoner. How did she justify it?
- British intelligence officer Nigel Nicolson was told to lie about the likely fate of Croats handed over to Tito's partisans. Could he obey orders and still find a way of telling the truth?
A consequence of our technical/medical capacity to harvest human organs to extend the lives of the privileged wealthy class means we have people in the world being offered big money for their organs, or simply being killed for those organs (not my idea of a "good" unregulated market) right now.
History teaches us that wealth always conspires to maintain wealth, and we should know that corporations are required by law to pursue profit over social and moral considerations -- so there will always be a class of people susceptible to this offer of "cash for death." Will we offer a family in poverty large sums to harvest the organs of one healthy child? Will we decide to harvest organs from those with mental disease? Given the cost of parenting, should we encourage a family to have an "extra" child (they pick the weakling of the litter) to sacrifice for the good (college education) of the others? (I suppose a libertarian might argue this is quite similar to the tradeoff made in nature.)
How about criminals? Larry Niven has written at length and quite persuasively on this subject. When people want something, they will gradually eliminate the barriers to getting it. We might start with only those criminals on death row. After all, why waste their organs? But that won't be enough. We'll need more hearts and livers and cataract-free eyes. So we'll make more crimes deserving of the death penalty.
The price of life has always been the price of some other life. Now, medical technology offers the possibility that the "other life" we're living on can be human.
~~~
A very real problem for libertarianism is that people can't live as islands (individually), and no group of people has ever persisted for more than a few moments without a member wanting to impose their will (and regulate) the collective. Even the libertarian impulse is the imposition of a certain kind of rule -- a "no-rule" rule. We're a social species with extremely aggressive tendencies -- and that should end the argument. To have a "no-rule" state would require a strong central authority to impose and maintain a "no-rule" rule. The trouble is, a state strong enough to maintain a "no-rule" rule always works to benefit a "leader-class" (hence, the unrealizable utopian goal of libertarians to be rid of regulation).
The best we can hope for is regulation (rule-of-law) that supports the individual as an equal (as difficult as that is to define) to all others in the collective (yes, worldwide), with powers vested in the people to manage and "own" the leadership. Our experience with even the approximations of "no-rule" rule in unbridled free-market capitalism should inform us of its winner-take-all rapaciousness -- and the danger of that short-sighted rapaciousness to the future of all life on this planet.
Comment writes:"So that's what it comes down to, a smear on the character of libertarians, based on the writer's own abysmal ignorance."
My posting above was indeed ignorant, and certainly contained a straw man. I do not believe that it was ad hominem.
TGGP writes:"John Mark Rozendaal, you really shouldn't shoot your mouth off like that unless you don't mind coming off looking silly."
Actually I don't mind coming off looking silly. I don't mind exposing my abysmal ignorance either. I learned several things here, and I hope that my learning didn't cost the others who participate in this blog too much. A good debate on ethics has value far higher than my concealing my abysmal ignorance or appearing clever.
One fairly good strategy would be to do nothing beforehand, and then slap a huge fine on the company afterwards. You should be able to collect at least $1.5 billion because the company will be getting $1 billion profit, plus the company will have reserved $5 million for each of its 100 employees.
It seems a clever resolution of the problem, but it is not consistent with democracy. In a democratic and constitutional State one cannot apply fines and punishment to whoever, if there is not a legal support for this. So, to create this system of regulatory acts and laws, legislators must act beforehand and. For example, it is forbidden to cross when the red light is on. If you do it, you can be fined or even arrested, depending on the consequences. However, there is no specific prohibition on hanging a coat on a chair. No one can fine or arrest you for that. If someone does, without legal support, you are closer to suppression of individual guarantees than you'd like to be.
There's one interesting aspect to the idea of consent.
Clearly at some point in the past, before this scenario arose, John was essentially random, therefore the chance that he would be the employee to die in the scenario is a 1% chance. Also note that he is one of the employees willing to accept the 3% for $5 million, so clearly he would be willing to accept a chance of 1% for $5 million (option C).
The main thing here is he is never asked if he would accept this wager, we know he would have accepted if he was asked but the fact remains that he was not asked.
Therefore how beholden is John to a deal he would certainly have made, but wasn't given the opportunity to make? Note that while John is receiving the poor end of the deal the other 99, who also never agreed to the deal, reap the benefits.
I think the key to solving this puzzle is the phrase "you are a government regulator". Your goals in order of priority are:1. You need to be perceived as increasing safety.2. You need to increase the number of employees working in your agency.3. You want to reduce the number of people who die.Goal 3 is important, but it is significantly lower in priority than goals 1 and 2.One fairly good strategy would be to do nothing beforehand, and then slap a huge fine on the company afterwards. You should be able to collect at least $1.5 billion because the company will be getting $1 billion profit, plus the company will have reserved $5 million for each of its 100 employees.After you have the $1.5 billion, give a large amount to the families of the people who died. Then give a large amount to lawyers who are working on contingency. With the remainder, hire a PR firm. Don't give any of the money to the employees who didn't die (explain that this is blood money and they shouldn't profit from other peoples' tragedies). Also, put the CEO in jail.
TGGP: I agree that John Mark Rozendaal came across as silly, but if he had said "The people with actual power who say that they favor free markets actually favor market regulations that advantage them and not others." he would be more or less correct, would he not?
I'll give you an example of what I mean: Global Warming. That's a classic "moral dilemma". Either we permit the planet's climate to warm, with various semi-predictable and probably on balance unpleasant consequences, or we drag industrial civilization to a screeching halt, killing many thousands in a worldwide super-recession, and stranding the third world in perpetual low-carbon poverty.
The typical entrepreneurial thinker would refuse to tolerate the dilemma, and instead cut right down the middle with questions like "how about nuclear power instead" and "why not engineer the climate, there are probably hundreds of ways to do that, we already cause global dimming with particulate aerosol emissions".
A principled libertarian / free marketer would say (1) you MAY NOT kill coercively, neither one nor three, and the task must go undone if this were the only option. The actual worth of the task is completely immaterial. (2) In the worst successful case, you might be able to find suicidal volunteers willing to accept payment in the form of favors for third parties. (3) In the best successful case, you can and should break the arbitrary and imposed rules of the game by discovering a means to complete the task without killing anyone. All reasonable effort should be bent toward this option.
Moral dilemmas are creatures, themselves, of the regulating mind, because they say "by my command, the world is thus, now solve an impossible problem". The free marketer sees the world as existing without fiat, and will attempt to find a way to bisect the dilemma.
But whenever they have been implemented, they have generally been disasterous, and the key word "consenting" seems to get sucked out of the system
What are you talking about?I doubt that polygyny leads to women-as-property, rather than the other way around (but I don't know its history). Slavery is associated with raiding your neighbors for slaves; but (1) that's the least of the problems and (2) there wasn't much consenting going on in the first place.
The classic example of coerced employment is at sea, but the problem there is more the physical constraints than the institution of absolute power of the captain.
But then you have a corrupt government that manipulates the people for its own end, Kevin, and that never ends well.
The correct answer, of course, is obviously (insert letter here)
Isn't it amazing how many people start like this? Anyway, I believe the Utilitarian thing to do here would be to allow the company to go ahead with the plan. UNLESS - It can be "kept secret" that the government ordered John to be killed after all. If it is almost positively certain that the government's decision to have "only John" killed can be kept silent, and made it seem like the company ended up with option B, then there is no corruption of implicit social contract, there is no loss of belief in the system, and thus you can maintain stability while maximizing your consequentialist calculation.
Dear Constant,
But my point is not that people advocate resurrecting the USSR, but that the way it turned out is a real, recorded unintended consequence of taking a certain approach to the problems of society.
Yes, and the point is good. But the comparaison is somewhat limited - the USSR, for instance, was a dictatorship. A closer example would be Western Europe after the second world war, up to the 70's. There, a certain approach to problems in society, resulted in:1) Spectacular, record-breaking growth, relatively well spread across society,2) Fullish employement,3) Some public policy disasters,4) Long-term structural problems,5) An eventual reduction in the government role in the economy.
A mixed picture, to be sure, but not an entirely negative one (and not exclusively due to starting from a low base, or to the Marshall plan, either). And, as for the particular example being discussed, as far as I know, every country would outlaw such behaviour. So I don't think we can argue from history that any intervention by the state in private companies is a disaster (in certain specific instances, I'd argue they were very beneficial).
People prefer to eat than to starve; they prefer to be acknowledged than insulted. A government which operates along those principles (with exceptions for those who clearly demonstrate that they are in a different case) would not suffer much from this unknown preference issue.
But what is the government competent to do, given this knowledge? Produce food? Recall the Soviet and Chinese famines. Oops, there I go again with the historical examples.
Historical examples as good! I'd personally prefer the government did nothing with the knowledge that people prefer praise to insults - but the point is, they know it, and if they acted on it, lack of information would not be the problem.
As for the food, there are a whole host of things a government can do. The simplest and the most effective is susidise it - when it does so, more food is produced. Historical example: England, which went from an under-producer to a bloated over-producer through subsidies.
Well-run governments also show skill in the distribution of food, in times of shortage (again, England, WWII, rationning - hell, even the Nazi puppet regimes of western europe could manage that). There are costs to both these interventions (distorted markets, black markets, long term unexpected consequences), but there are also costs to not doing anything.
I feel there is a saliency issue here - if the government does something, and it has costs, then the government is to blame. If it does nothing, and there are costs, then the universe is to blame, or it's part of the natural order of things, so people accept it better, even if the result is worse.
Please don't believe I am advocating unrestrained governmental interventions, by the way :-) Lacking information on people's choices, fostering a culture of dependency or encouraging rent-seeking, excessively using coersive force, bloating laws and regulations, etc... - these are the costs of interventions. But I don't feel they are high enough to rule out a priori all governmental interventions. In some cases (old style elite-only basic education) I feel these costs are insignificant in comparaison to doing nothing.
Dear Silias:
Stuart_Armstrong: You're saying that "not permitting anyone, ever, to pay or be paid for absorbing an increased risk of death" is "what you would do" and is "consistent with a respect for human life", the latter being "infinitely precious"?
In that case, the next steps would be to explain:
-Why you paid or were paid for absorbing higher risk of death several times during the past week.-How you would get law enforcement to take on the increased risk of death in enforcing regulations such as these.
I'll do this, as it'll help me make my ideas coherent. I see no objection to paying people to accept increased risk (I personnally feel they should be paid more than they are, but that's another issue for another day). I feel though, that there is a difference between the set-up "accepting a bribe to increase your risk of death by 3%" and "accepting a bribe to be one of a hundred people, three of which will be killed (by a corporation or an individual)". It is the prohibition against murder that is being diluted in the second case (and it is being strongly diluted: someone is being killed, and that person can't object, because "he accepted the risks"). The first case just dilutes the prohibition against being exposed to increase danger.
Now there are cases where the two are indestinguishable (war, for example), but I feel it has been a great source of progress that we have maintained a prohibition against murder in times of peace - even if, from the point of view of the corpse, the result is the same.
I feel the same about slavery, incidentally, and somewhat similarly about polygammy - the arguments for accepting them, among consenting adults, are very strong. But whenever they have been implemented, they have generally been disasterous, and the key word "consenting" seems to get sucked out of the system :-)
Please point out the weak points in this argument - I want to explore this area further, and counter-arguments help a lot.
Each employee has a right to his own life, which he can voluntarily waive, but not transfer (if he could transfer this right, then slavery would be justifiable). So, while any employee would trade a 3% chance of death for $5 million, he has a right to exit the lottery at any time, even after it takes place.
This is more bad science fiction. There's no real moral dilemma here worth analyzing, here. You might as well talk about the ethics of PacMan eating up the little blue monsters in the eponymous video game. Whatever you guys think you're doing, wouldn't it be at least a little more interesting to try doing it with a situation that has some remote possibility of being encountered in your actual lives?
History magazine did an article, this month, called "What Would You Have Done?" based on the book The Darkest Hour, by Laurence Rees. I must get this book. The article describes moral dilemmas faced by specific people during WWII and how they dealt with them.
Examples:
- As a teenager, Estera Frenkiel, a secretary in a Lodz ghetto, was given ten certificates excusing Jews from the death camps. How did she decide who to excuse?
- Having joined SMERSH, the notorious Soviet counter-intelligence unit, Zinaida Pytkina was expected to kill a German prisoner. How did she justify it?
- British intelligence officer Nigel Nicolson was told to lie about the likely fate of Croats handed over to Tito's partisans. Could he obey orders and still find a way of telling the truth?
-- James
A consequence of our technical/medical capacity to harvest human organs to extend the lives of the privileged wealthy class means we have people in the world being offered big money for their organs, or simply being killed for those organs (not my idea of a "good" unregulated market) right now.
History teaches us that wealth always conspires to maintain wealth, and we should know that corporations are required by law to pursue profit over social and moral considerations -- so there will always be a class of people susceptible to this offer of "cash for death." Will we offer a family in poverty large sums to harvest the organs of one healthy child? Will we decide to harvest organs from those with mental disease? Given the cost of parenting, should we encourage a family to have an "extra" child (they pick the weakling of the litter) to sacrifice for the good (college education) of the others? (I suppose a libertarian might argue this is quite similar to the tradeoff made in nature.)
How about criminals? Larry Niven has written at length and quite persuasively on this subject. When people want something, they will gradually eliminate the barriers to getting it. We might start with only those criminals on death row. After all, why waste their organs? But that won't be enough. We'll need more hearts and livers and cataract-free eyes. So we'll make more crimes deserving of the death penalty.
The price of life has always been the price of some other life. Now, medical technology offers the possibility that the "other life" we're living on can be human.
~~~
A very real problem for libertarianism is that people can't live as islands (individually), and no group of people has ever persisted for more than a few moments without a member wanting to impose their will (and regulate) the collective. Even the libertarian impulse is the imposition of a certain kind of rule -- a "no-rule" rule. We're a social species with extremely aggressive tendencies -- and that should end the argument. To have a "no-rule" state would require a strong central authority to impose and maintain a "no-rule" rule. The trouble is, a state strong enough to maintain a "no-rule" rule always works to benefit a "leader-class" (hence, the unrealizable utopian goal of libertarians to be rid of regulation).
The best we can hope for is regulation (rule-of-law) that supports the individual as an equal (as difficult as that is to define) to all others in the collective (yes, worldwide), with powers vested in the people to manage and "own" the leadership. Our experience with even the approximations of "no-rule" rule in unbridled free-market capitalism should inform us of its winner-take-all rapaciousness -- and the danger of that short-sighted rapaciousness to the future of all life on this planet.
/ehj2
Comment writes:"So that's what it comes down to, a smear on the character of libertarians, based on the writer's own abysmal ignorance."
My posting above was indeed ignorant, and certainly contained a straw man. I do not believe that it was ad hominem.
TGGP writes:"John Mark Rozendaal, you really shouldn't shoot your mouth off like that unless you don't mind coming off looking silly."
Actually I don't mind coming off looking silly. I don't mind exposing my abysmal ignorance either. I learned several things here, and I hope that my learning didn't cost the others who participate in this blog too much. A good debate on ethics has value far higher than my concealing my abysmal ignorance or appearing clever.
One fairly good strategy would be to do nothing beforehand, and then slap a huge fine on the company afterwards. You should be able to collect at least $1.5 billion because the company will be getting $1 billion profit, plus the company will have reserved $5 million for each of its 100 employees.
It seems a clever resolution of the problem, but it is not consistent with democracy. In a democratic and constitutional State one cannot apply fines and punishment to whoever, if there is not a legal support for this. So, to create this system of regulatory acts and laws, legislators must act beforehand and. For example, it is forbidden to cross when the red light is on. If you do it, you can be fined or even arrested, depending on the consequences. However, there is no specific prohibition on hanging a coat on a chair. No one can fine or arrest you for that. If someone does, without legal support, you are closer to suppression of individual guarantees than you'd like to be.
There's one interesting aspect to the idea of consent.
Clearly at some point in the past, before this scenario arose, John was essentially random, therefore the chance that he would be the employee to die in the scenario is a 1% chance. Also note that he is one of the employees willing to accept the 3% for $5 million, so clearly he would be willing to accept a chance of 1% for $5 million (option C).
The main thing here is he is never asked if he would accept this wager, we know he would have accepted if he was asked but the fact remains that he was not asked.
Therefore how beholden is John to a deal he would certainly have made, but wasn't given the opportunity to make? Note that while John is receiving the poor end of the deal the other 99, who also never agreed to the deal, reap the benefits.
I think the key to solving this puzzle is the phrase "you are a government regulator". Your goals in order of priority are:1. You need to be perceived as increasing safety.2. You need to increase the number of employees working in your agency.3. You want to reduce the number of people who die.Goal 3 is important, but it is significantly lower in priority than goals 1 and 2.One fairly good strategy would be to do nothing beforehand, and then slap a huge fine on the company afterwards. You should be able to collect at least $1.5 billion because the company will be getting $1 billion profit, plus the company will have reserved $5 million for each of its 100 employees.After you have the $1.5 billion, give a large amount to the families of the people who died. Then give a large amount to lawyers who are working on contingency. With the remainder, hire a PR firm. Don't give any of the money to the employees who didn't die (explain that this is blood money and they shouldn't profit from other peoples' tragedies). Also, put the CEO in jail.
TGGP: I agree that John Mark Rozendaal came across as silly, but if he had said "The people with actual power who say that they favor free markets actually favor market regulations that advantage them and not others." he would be more or less correct, would he not?
Random vs. Certain Death
I would take certain death as I wouldn't like to be tortured.Anna:)
I'll give you an example of what I mean: Global Warming. That's a classic "moral dilemma". Either we permit the planet's climate to warm, with various semi-predictable and probably on balance unpleasant consequences, or we drag industrial civilization to a screeching halt, killing many thousands in a worldwide super-recession, and stranding the third world in perpetual low-carbon poverty.
The typical entrepreneurial thinker would refuse to tolerate the dilemma, and instead cut right down the middle with questions like "how about nuclear power instead" and "why not engineer the climate, there are probably hundreds of ways to do that, we already cause global dimming with particulate aerosol emissions".
A principled libertarian / free marketer would say (1) you MAY NOT kill coercively, neither one nor three, and the task must go undone if this were the only option. The actual worth of the task is completely immaterial. (2) In the worst successful case, you might be able to find suicidal volunteers willing to accept payment in the form of favors for third parties. (3) In the best successful case, you can and should break the arbitrary and imposed rules of the game by discovering a means to complete the task without killing anyone. All reasonable effort should be bent toward this option.
Moral dilemmas are creatures, themselves, of the regulating mind, because they say "by my command, the world is thus, now solve an impossible problem". The free marketer sees the world as existing without fiat, and will attempt to find a way to bisect the dilemma.