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My Kind of Moral Responsibility
The following is an excerpt of an exchange between Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci, from the transcript for Rationally Speaking Podcast episode 132:
Massimo: [cultivating virtue and 'doing good' locally 'does more good' than directly eradicating malaria]
Julia: [T]here's lower hanging fruit [in the developed world than there is in the developing world]. By many order of magnitude, there's lower hanging fruit in terms of being able to reduce poverty or disease or suffering in some parts of the world than other parts of the world. In the West, we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit, and by any sort of reasonable calculation, it takes much more money to reduce poverty in the West -- because we're sort of out in the tail end of having reduced poverty -- than it does to bring someone out of poverty in the developing world.
Massimo: That kind of reasoning brings you quickly to the idea that everybody here is being a really really bad person because they spent money for coming here to NECSS listening to us instead of saving children on the other side of the world. I resist that kind of logic.
Massimo (to the audience): I don't think you guys are that bad! You see what I mean?
I see a lot of people, including bullet-biters, who feel a lot of internal tension, and even guilt, because of this apparent paradox.
Utilitarians usually stop at the question, "Are the outcomes different?"
Clearly, they aren't. But people still feel tension, so it must not be enough to believe that a world where some people are alive is better than a world where those very people are dead. The confusion has not evaporated in a puff of smoke, as we should expect.
After all, imagine a different gedanken where a virtue ethicist and a utilitarian each stand in front of a user interface, with each interface bearing only one shiny red button. Omega tells each, "If you press this button, then you will prevent one death. If you do not press this button, then you will not prevent one death."
There would be no disagreement. Both of them would press their buttons without a moment of hesitation.
So, in a certain sense, it's not only a question of which outcome is better. The repugnant part of the conclusion is the implication for our intuitions about moral responsibility. It's intuitive that you should save ten lives instead of one, but it's counterintuitive that the one who permits death is just as culpable as the one who causes death. You look at ten people who are alive when they could be dead, and it feels right to say that it is better that they are alive than that they are dead, but you juxtapose a murderer and your best friend who is not an ascetic, and it feels wrong to say that the one is just as awful as the other.
The virtue-ethical response is to say that the best friend has lived a good life and the murderer has not. Of course, I don't think that anyone who says this has done any real work.
So, if you passively don't donate every cent of discretionary income to the most effective charities, then are you morally culpable in the way that you would be if you had actively murdered everyone that you chose not to save who is now dead?
Well, what is moral responsibility? Hopefully we all know that there is not one culpable atom in the universe.
Perhaps the most concrete version of this question is: what happens, cognitively, when we evaluate whether or not someone is responsible for something? What's the difference between situations where we consider someone responsible and situations where we don't? What happens in the brain when we do these things? How do different attributions of responsibility change our judgments and decisions?
Most research on feelings has focused only on valence, how positiveness and negativeness affect judgment. But there's clearly a lot more to this: sadness, anger, and guilt are all negative feelings, but they're not all the same, so there must be something going on beyond valence.
One hypothesis is that the differences between sadness, anger, and guilt reflect different appraisals of agency. When we are sad, we haven't attributed the cause of the inciting event to an agent; the cause is situational, beyond human control. When we are angry, we've attributed the cause of the event to the actions of another agent. When we are guilty, we've attributed the cause of the event to our own actions.
(It's worth noting that there are many more types of appraisal than this, many more emotions, and many more feelings beyond emotions, but I'm going to focus on negative emotions and appraisals of agency for the sake of brevity. For a review of proposed appraisal types, see Demir, Desmet, & Hekkert (2009). For a review of emotions in general, check out Ortony, Clore, & Collins' The Cognitive Structure of Emotions.)
So, what's it look like when we narrow our attention to specific feelings on the same side of the valence spectrum? How are judgments affected when we only look at, say, sadness and anger? Might experiments based on these questions provide support for an account of our dilemma in terms of situational appraisals?
In one experiment, Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards (1993) found that sad subjects consider events with situational causes more likely than events with agentic causes, and that angry subjects consider events with agentic causes more likely than events with situational causes. In a second experiment in the same study, they found that sad subjects are more likely to consider situational factors as the primary cause of an ambiguous event than agentic factors, and that angry subjects are more likely to consider agentic factors as the primary cause of an ambiguous event than situational factors.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, watching someone commit murder, and merely knowing that someone could have prevented a death on the other side of the world through an unusual effort, makes very different things happen in our brains. I expect that even the utilitarians are biting a fat bullet; that even the utilitarians feel the tension, the counterintuitiveness, when utilitarianism leads them to conclude that indifferent bystanders are just as bad as murderers. Intuitions are strong, and I hope that a few more utilitarians can understand why utilitarianism is just as repugnant to a virtue ethicist as virtue ethics is to a utilitarian.
My main thrust here is that "Is a bystander as morally responsible as a murderer?" is a wrong question. You're always secretly asking another question when you ask that question, and the answer often doesn't have the word 'responsibility' anywhere in it.
Utilitarians replace the question with, "Do indifference and evil result in the same consequences?" They answer, "Yes."
Virtue ethicists replace the question with, "Does it feel like indifference is as 'bad' as 'evil'?" They answer, "No."
And the one thinks, in too little detail, "They don't think that bystanders are just as bad as murderers!", and likewise, the other thinks, "They do think that bystanders are just as bad as murderers!".
And then the one and the other proceed to talk past one another for a period of time during which millions more die.
As you might expect, I must confess to a belief that the utilitarian is often the one less confused, so I will speak to that one henceforth.
As a special kind of utilitarian, the kind that frequents this community, you should know that, if you take the universe, and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, then you will not find one agentic atom. If you only ask the question, "Has the virtue ethicist done the moral thing?", and you silently reply to yourself, "No.", and your response is to become outraged at this, then you have failed your Art on two levels.
On the first level, you have lost sight of your goal. As if your goal is to find out whether or not someone has done the moral thing, or not! Your goal is to cause them to commit the moral action. By your own lights, if you fail to be as creative as you can possibly be in your attempts at persuasion, then you're just as culpable as someone who purposefully turned someone away from utilitarianism as a normative-ethical position. And if all you do is scorn the virtue ethicists, instead of engaging with them, then you're definitely not being very creative.
On the second level, you have failed to apply your moral principles to yourself. You have not considered that the utility-maximizing action might be something besides getting righteously angry, even if that's the easiest thing to do. And believe me, I get it. I really do understand that impulse.
And if you are that sort of utilitarian who has come to such a repugnant conclusion epistemically, but who has failed to meet your own expectations instrumentally, then be easy now. For there is no longer a question of 'whether or not you should be guilty'. There are only questions of what guilt is used for, and whether or not that guilt ends more lives than it saves.
All of this is not to say that 'moral outrage' is never the utility-maximizing action. I'm at least a little outraged right now. But in the beginning, all you really wanted was to get rid of naive notions of moral responsibility. The action to take in this situation is not to keep them in some places and toss them in others.
Throw out the bath water, and the baby, too. The virtue ethicists are expecting it anyway.
Demir, E., Desmet, P. M. A., & Hekkert, P. (2009). Appraisal patterns of emotions in human-product interaction. International Journal of Design, 3(2), 41-51.
Keltner, D., Ellsworth, P., & Edwards, K. (1993). Beyond simple pessimism: Effects of sadness and anger on social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 740-752.
Ortony, A., Clore, G. L., & Collins, A. (1990). The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. (1st ed.).
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Comments (116)
You might also consider that you simply lack a moral modality that other people have. It is the right question for them, but no more meaningful to you than color is to a blind person.
I wonder if you actually lack the moral modality for responsibility, or are merely analyzing based on your ideological meta ethical beliefs. I wonder if a lot of people lack that modality.
Responsibility, duty, rights - they all create a space between my preferred outcome and the outcome of your action where I will refrain from coercion, retaliation, threats, or even disapproval. That's the space where freedom and autonomy lives.
When Jonathan Haidt first created his moral foundations, he didn't have a dimension for autonomy. It had to be pointed out to him. I find it disturbing to contemplate people lacking that modality. It's looking into the eyes of a person, and seeing Clippy starting back at me.
Wow, okay, so I am not talking about a situation where you can do whatever the hell you want, and I'm not proposing any sort of position that makes you start coercing and threatening people, or taking away people's rights. You are lumping a lot more stuff in. I'm really only talking about how people make causal inferences, and how these result in different feelings like sadness, anger, and guilt. The reason it's good to feel guilty is because it gives you a signal that you are the causal origin of a negative outcome. But then people try to reconcile their scope insensitivity with their causal inference mechanism, and if they discredit their intuitions about scope and locality, then that causal inference mechanism gives you a huge dose of 'you are the causal origin of a negative outcome' signal. That's the 'repugnant conclusion'. The other decision is to discredit your intuition about the causal inference mechanism: say that anyone who focuses on outcomes is obviously missing some larger point about morality, because there's no way that we're all bad people. I'm saying, when you know what guilt actually is, and what it's for, you can stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we're doing successfully half of the time. You don't need to care about the guilt because the system that delivers it was never designed to make inferences of that scope. If anything, the level of guilt people feel when they believe that they should be utilitarians is an underestimate, because of the scope insensitivity! Recognizing your feelings as sources of information about what you actually want, instead of constantly, implicitly using them as value judgments about 'you' due to a lack of understanding, is totally different from saying that you can do anything you want, and that guilt is an illusion.
And I'm still noting that you seem to lack cognizance of the responsibility modality. Causality is a part of responsibility, but does not determine it. Getting out of bed in the morning may causally lead to you getting hit by a bus, or someone else getting hit by a bus, but that doesn't make you morally responsible for the accident.
Again, I wonder if you don't get it at all, and simply lack a moral modality I have.
People clearly get this idea to varying degrees. People often still feel guilty when they are part of a causal chain, even when they "know" they were not responsible. Seeing how that tendency distributes across Haidt's distributions of moral foundations would be really interesting.
As for our emotions and moral intuitions, I agree that one should realize one's essential freedom in how we respond to them. They are all data. We can choose.
For the rest of your post, I'm not a utilitarian and wasn't really interested in commenting on your apparent attempt to ameliorate guilt in utilitarians.
You can do anything you can do.
As I read it, you interpreted guilt as the emotional reaction to being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome. That's not an illusion. It's a mistake to think I held it you were saying it was.
Why are you assuming that the signal is correct?
I tend to think of guilt as pain feedback for breaking internalised norms. A lot of these norms are social or socially created. That does not make them automatically "right".
Take a sincere Catholic girl who slept with some guy and is now feeling very very guilty about that. Is it good for her to feel guilty? What that guild "actually is, and what it's for"? What should she do if she wants to "stop relying on vague intuitions and just always do what the intuitions we're doing successfully half of the time"?
Damn, I had considered using the word 'useful', but I used 'good' instead, so that I could avoid flak from the other guy! Of course signals can be 'incorrect', in a sense.
I admit that I didn't consider this the sort of advice that sincere Catholic girls with really conservative beliefs about sexuality would read. I am assuming a certain level of background knowledge here. If I have made an error in that regard, then I bear responsibility for it. (Heh.)
Knowledge? Our sincere Catholic girl is very knowledgeable. Perhaps you mean that your advice applies only to people with the "correct" moral systems?
Not even. I'm assuming that her ontology for anything but the most immediate, important, tangible things would be practically useless. You can generate and possess an accurate world-model with a botched morality, but you're very unlikely to commit the moral action if the values are spot on but the world-model and its generator are botched. You should begin with ontology and epistemology and then move on to ethics.
Ironically, I actually talked about not feeling guilty, as opposed to feeling guilty, in the article above. But that probably wouldn't be helpful for someone like that either, even if it seems like it superficially would be in your thought experiment.
In which sense useless? She's a contemporary, educated girl, she can navigate this world perfectly well and you probably won't disagree with her about much in the descriptive sphere. What you would disagree about is the normative sphere, but that doesn't have to do much with ontology. Why do you assume that her "world-model" is botched? There are plenty of very bright religious people.
I haven't read the relevant literature, but I wouldn't think this is actually the question they are asking themselves. I don't see any virtue based conceptual framework referred to in the question.
Any virtue ethicists out their who could weight in?
Thanks for speaking up. I just framed this as a verbal question for convenience. Massimo talks about how utilitarianism leads him to the conclusion that most people must be extremely bad, and that this is counterintuitive enough for him to reject utilitarianism. My hypothesis is that he means that the way that his brain natively evaluates responsibility does not agree with an evaluation of responsibility that is equivalent to asking "What are the consequences of this action or inaction?" Virtue-ethical language doesn't come into play because they're looking for reasons not to be utilitarians, not ways to be virtue ethicists. Does that make sense?
You have to consider that humans don't have perfect utility functions. Even if I want to be a moral utilitarian, it is a fact that I am not. So I have to structure my life around keeping myself as morally utilitarian as possible. Brian Tomasik talks about this. It might be true that I could reduce more suffering by not eating an extra donut, but I'm going to give up on the entire task of being a utilitarian if I can't allow myself some luxuries.
This is actually just the sort of thing that I'm trying to say. I'm saying that when you understand guilt as a source of information, and not a thing that you need to carry around with you after you've learned everything you can from it, then you can take the weight off of your shoulders. I'm saying that maybe if more people did this, it wouldn't be as hard to do extraordinary kinds of good, because you wouldn't constantly be feeling bad about what you conceivably aren't doing. Most of what people consider conceivable would require an unrealistic sort of discipline. Punishing people likely just reduces the amount of good that they can actually do.
Am I right that we seem to agree on this?
I think I agree with what you're saying for the most part. If your goal is, say, reducing suffering, then you have to consider the best way of convincing others to share your goal. If you started killing people who ran factory farms, you're probably going to turn a lot of the world against you, and so fail in your goal. And, you have to consider the best way of convincing yourself to continue performing your goal, now and into the future, since humans goals can change depending on circumstances and experiences.
In terms of guilt, finding little tricks to rid yourself of guilt for various things probably isn't a good way to make you continue caring and doing as much as you can for a certain issue. I can know that something is wrong, but if I don't feel guilty about doing nothing, I'm probably not going to exert myself as hard in trying to fix it. If I can tell myself "I didn't do it, therefore it's none of my concern, even though it is technically a bad thing" and absolve myself of guilt, it's simply going to make me less likely to do anything about the issue.
Ah, I assumed the guilt would demotivate on net. Maybe it depends on how strongly you identify with utilitarian ideas.
That starts to remind me of medieval Christianity. The only question is whether you can save souls from eternal torment, anything that happens in this world is utterly irrelevant in comparison, and guilt, yes, guilt is a very useful tool.
Thank you, I'll pass.
This isn't exclusively medieval. Lots of modern Evangelicals view the world in rather stark heaven/hell terms.
I don't even really get what you're passing on. I really would like to understand what your criticism is, but this is way too little information for me to infer that.
I'm passing on hard-core utilitarianism, basically. Specifically, I'm passing on on simple functions to be maxmised with everything else considered an acceptable sacrifice if it leads to an uptick in the One True Goal. Even more specifically, I'm passing on using guilt to manipulate people into doing things you want them to do, all in the service of One True Goal.
The parallel should be obvious: if you believe in eternal (!) salvation and torment, absolutely anything on Earth can be sacrificed for a minute increase in the chance of salvation.
... yes? What's wrong with that? Are you saying that, if you came across strong evidence that the Christian Heaven and Hell are real, you wouldn't do absolutely anything necessary to get yourself and the people you care about to Heaven?
The medieval Christians you describe didn't fail morally because they were hard-core utilitarians, they failed because they believed Christianity was true!
Yes, I'm saying that.
I'm not sure you're realizing all the consequences of taking that position VERY seriously. For example, you would want to kidnap children to baptize them. That's just as an intermediate step, of course -- you would want to convert or kill all non-Christians, as soon as possible, because even if their souls are already lost, they are leading their children astray, children whose souls could possibly be saved if they are removed from their heathen/Muslim/Jewish/etc. parents.
Yes, I acknowledge all of that. Do you understand the consequence of not doing those things, if Christianity is true?
Eternal torment, for everyone you failed to convert.
Eternal. Torment.
Yes, I do. Well, since I'm not actually religious, my understanding is hypothetical. But yes, this is precisely the point I'm making.
Well, my point is that stating all the horrible things that Christians should do to (hypothetically) save people from eternal torment is not a good argument against 'hard-core' utilitarianism. These acts are only horrible because Christianity isn't true. Therefore the antidote for these horrors is not, "don't swallow the bullet", it's "don't believe stuff without good evidence".
Is that so?
Would real-life Christians who sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that Christianity is true agree that such acts are not horrible at all and, in fact, desirable and highly moral?
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror. "Better they burn in this life than in the next."
Various arguments have been made that it's impossible to be sure to the degree required. I don't accept them, but I don't think you're advancing one of them either.
Yes? Of course? With the caveats that the concept of 'Christianity' is the medieval one you mentioned above, that these Christians really have no doubts about their beliefs, and that they swallow the bullet.
Are you trolling? Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?
The real danger, of course, is being utterly convinced Christianity is true when it is not.
The actions described by Lumifer are horrific precisely because they are balanced against a hypothetical benefit, not a certain one. If there is only an epsilon chance of Christianity being true, but the utility loss of eternal torment is infinite, should you take radical steps anyway?
In a nutshell, Lumifer's position is just hedging against Pascal's mugging, and IMHO any moral system that doesn't do so is not appropriate for use out here in the real world.
You're hand-waving a lot of problems. Or you added too many negatives to that last sentence.
You're describing a situation where some people hold factually incorrect beliefs (i.e. objectively wrong religions). And there's an infinitely powerful entity - a simulator, an Omega, a God - who will torture them for an unbounded time unless they change their minds and belive before they die. The only way to help them is by making them believe the truth; you completely believe this fact.
Do you think that not overriding other people's will, or not intervening forcefully in their lives, is a more important principle than saving them from eternal torture? What exactly is the rule according to which you (would) act?
Given your certainty, it seems that it would be easy for you to demonstrate and even to prove that these beliefs are "factually incorrect". Would you mind doing that? It would settle a lot of issues that humanity struggled with for many centuries:-/
Like gjm says, you seem to have missed that I was describing a counterfactual. I don't personally hold such a (religious) belief, so I can't do what you ask.
But more relevantly, people have failed for many centuries to convince most others of many true facts I do believe in - such as atheism, or (more relevantly) the falsehood of all existing religions.
This isn't because the beliefs aren't true or the proofs are hard to verify; it's because people are hard to convince of anything contrary to something they already believe which is of great personal or social importance to them. People, in short, are not truth seekers, and also lack by default a good epistemological framework to seek truth with.
You're very... cavalier about putting an equals sign between things you believe in and things which are true. Yes, of course you believe they are true, but there is Cromwell's beseechment to keep in mind. Especially in a situation where you hold a certain belief and other people hold clearly different beliefs.
Oh really? You can prove that all religions are false? Let me go back to my comment, then, where it seems I wasn't quite clear. If you can provide proofs of atheism being true, please do so.
Of course, proving a negative is notoriously hard to do.
I try to keep in mind a probabilistic degree of belief for different beliefs. But I do endorse my previous statement for some beliefs, which I hold strongly enough to simply refer to them as true, even after taking all the meta-arguments against certainty into account.
Those are two different things. It's hard to prove that atheism is true in the sense that all possible religions are false. But it's quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I'm talking to have ever heard of) is false.
(*) (Excluding some philosophies which are called 'religions' but don't make any concrete claims, either natural or supernatural, limiting themselves to moral rules and so on; obviously those can't be true or false, proven or disproven.)
The two parts of your last paragraph oppose one another -- given the difficulty people have in seeking the truth, all proofs of that kind are hard to verify. You cannot say "the proofs are easy to verify, but most people do not have the ability to do so." Saying that something is easy just means that it does not take much ability.
You can say that it is easy for you, perhaps, but not that it is just easy.
It's true that the difficulty of understanding a proof is relative to the one doing the understanding. But what I meant was different.
People don't (merely) "have difficulty in seeking the truth", or find the proofs "hard to verify". Rather, people are generally not interested in seeking truth on certain subjects, and not willing to accept truth that is contrary to their dearly held beliefs, regardless of the nature or difficulty of the proof that is presented to them. When I said that "people are not truth seekers", I didn't mean that they are bad at discovering the truth, but that on certain subjects they usually (act as if they) don't want to discover it at all.
I think you are misunderstanding what DanArmak wrote. The "situation" in question -- which it would be more accurate to say you were describing other people's belief in -- was that Christianity is right and unbelievers are going to hell; neither you nor Dan were endorsing that situation as an accurate account of the world, only as what some people have believed the world to be like.
(Right, Dan?)
That's right.
What does this mean in this context?
Means "pay special attention to, this is a key expression".
I believe that is still the official Catholic position.
Pascal's wager applied.
Some quote from some "official source" went like "better that we all die an agonizing death than that one soul is lost to damnation".
Kinda-sorta. On the one hand, yes, on other hand nowadays Vatican likes to talk about ecumenism and how everyone (notably including non-Christians) should live in peace and harmony.
As usual, what it means is "better that you die an agonizing death than that one soul is lost to damnation"
On the object level, I think you are almost completely wrong.
You say, "There is not one culpable atom in the universe." This is true, but your implied conclusion, that there are no culpable persons in the universe, is false. Likewise, there may not be any agenty dust in the universe. But if your implied conclusion is that there are no agents in the universe, then your conclusion is false.
But if there are agents in the universe, and there are, then there can be good and bad agents there, just as there are good and bad apples in the universe.
Richard Chappell, I think, has used Singer's own argument against him. Suppose you are jogging somewhere in order to make a donation to a foreign charity. The number of expected lives saved from your donation is 3. On the way, you witness a young child drowning in a river. You have a choice: continue on, expecting to save 2 lives overall. Or save the child, expecting to lose 2 lives overall.
Everyone knows that the right choice here is to save the child, and that the utilitarian choice is wrong.
The utilitarian error is this: it is asking, "what actions will have the most beneficial effects?" But that is the wrong question. The right question is, "What is the right thing to do?"
(Edit: there is another inconsistency in your way of thinking. If you assume there is no culpability in the universe because atoms are not culpable, neither is it worthwhile to save human lives, because there are no atoms in the universe that are worth bothering about.)
This. I call the inference "no X at the microlevel, therefore, no such thing as X" the Cherry Pion fallacy. (As in, no cherry pions, implies no cherry pie.) Of course more broadly speaking it's an instance of the fallacy of composition, but, this variety seems to be more tempting than most, so it merits its own moniker.
It's a shame. The OP begins with some great questions, and goes on to consider relevant observations like
But from there, the obvious move is one of charitable interpretation, saying, Hey! Responsibility is declared in these sorts of situations, when an agent has caused an event that wouldn't have happened without her, so maybe, "responsibility" means something like "the agent caused an event that wouldn't have happened without her". Then one could find counterexamples to this first formulation, and come up with a new formulation that got the new (and old) examples right ... and so on.
The OP has explicitly denied committing the cherry pion fallacy here. I confess, though, that I'm not sure what point the OP is making by observing that grinding the universe to dust would not produce agenty dust. I can see two non-cherry-pion-fallacy-y things they might be saying -- "agency doesn't live at the microlevel, so stop looking at the microlevel for things you need to look further up for" and "agency doesn't live at the microlevel, but it's produced by the microlevel, so let's understand that and build up from there" -- but I don't see how to fit either of them into what comes before and after what the OP says about agenty dust. Gram_Stone, would you care to do some inferential-gap bridging?
Yes, morality has a cluster of concerns, including obligation, praise, blame and rightness of action Thats the deontologucal cluster, If you are concerned about culpability, you need to think about what responsibilities you are under. You have an obligation to pay your taxes, but not one to spend your disposable income in any particular way.
There's another cluster to do with voluntary action, outcomes and making the world better. That's e cosequentalist cluster, Utilitarianism is a good tool for spending money optimally, but if you try to use it as a theory of oblgaion, it breaks
The third cluster is virtue theoreic, concerned with self cultivation. I don't know why Pigliuci thanks you can tell whether you are obligated by examining subjective feelings, You are obligated to do something if you are likely to be blamed for not doing it.Self bame is/secondary to that, You have to took outward, not inward, to find the objective fact.
One way of fixing emotional problems s to run off the right theory,
Suppose you know there are three people being held hostage across the street, who will be killed unless the ransom money is delivered in the next ten minutes. You're running there with the money in hand; there's no-one else who can make it in time. On the way, you witness a young child drowning in a river. Do you abandon your mission to save the child?
I claim that many (most?) people would be much more understanding if I ignored the child in my example, than if I did so in yours. Do you agree?
The only difference between the two scenarios is that the hostages are concrete, nearby and the danger immediate, while the people you're donating to are far away in time and space and probably aren't three specific individuals anyway. And this engages lots of well known biases - or useful heuristics, depending on your point of view.
How would one argue that it's right to save the child in your example, and right to abandon it in mine? I think most people would (intuitively) try to deny the hypothetical: they would question how you can be so sure that your donation would save exactly three lives, and why making it later wouldn't work, and so on. But if they accept the hypothetical that you have a clear choice between the two, then what difference can motivate them, other than the near-far or specific people vs. statistic distinctions? What other rule can be guiding 'what is the right thing to do'? And do you accept this rule?
I agree that the differences are more or less what you say they are, and I think those differences can be enough to determine what is right and what is not. I do not think it has anything to do with being biased.
Certainly, you can assign moral weight to strangers according to their distance from you, their concreteness, and their familiarity or similarity to you. That is what many people do, and probably everyone instinctively does it to some degree. Modern utilitarians, EAers, etc. don't pretend to be perfect; most of them just deviate a little bit from this default behavior.
One problem with this is that, in historically recent times, a very few people are sometimes placed in positions where they can (or must) decide the lives of billions. And then most people agree we would not want them to follow this rule. We don't want the only thing stopping nuclear first strikes to be the fear of retaliation; if Reagan had had a button which would instantly wipe out all USSR citizens with no fear of revenge strikes, we would want him to not press it for moral reasons.
Another problem is that it creates moral incentives not to cooperate. If two groups are contesting a vital resource, we'd rather they share it; we don't want them to each have moral incentives to go to war over it, because it's morally more important to have a vital resources for yourself than it is not to kill some strangers or deprive them of it.
A related question is the precie function with which moral weight falls off with distance has to be very finely tuned. Should it fall off with distance squared, or cubed, or what? Is there any way for two friends to convince one another whose moral rule is more exactly correct?
I started to write a response to this and then deleted it because it grew to over a page and I wasn't close to being finished. Basically you are looking at things from a utilitarian point of view and would like a description of my position in terms of a utility function. But I don't accept that point of view, even if I understand it, and the most natural description of my way of acting isn't a utility function at all.
(I accept that to the degree that my actions are consistent, it is mathematically possible to describe those actions with a utility function -- but there is no necessary reason why that utility function would look very sensible, given that the agent is not actually using a utility function, but some other method, to make its choices.)
The simple answer (the full answer isn't simple) to your questions is that I should do the right thing in my life, which might involve giving money to strangers, but which probably does not involve giving 50% of it to strangers, and those few people who are in positions of power should do the right thing in their lives, which definitely does not normally involving wiping out countries.
[citation needed]
Saving the child is the choice that feels better, the choice that will make other people think better of us, the choice that all else being equal gives most evidence of being a good person. For all those reasons, I expect many of us would choose to save the child. But is that the right choice? I am very very unconvinced.
A more reputable reason to prefer saving the child: we may reasonably doubt our impact estimates for very indirect charitable activity like donating money to help people far away, and suspect that they may be inflated (because pretty much everyone involved has an incentive to inflate them). So if our "number of expected lives" was estimated without taking that into account, we might want to reduce the estimate substantially. But all that would mean is that one of the things we're comparing against one another is wrong, and that has nothing to do with deficiencies in utilitarianism.
Of course the scenario is ridiculous anyway; it seems to require that arriving ten minutes later and damp will stop us ever making the donation (how??), or else that the donation is so time-critical that every 10 minutes of delay means three more lives lost (in which case we probably shouldn't merely be jogging).
Whether it's the right choice is a function of your moral system. Under some moral systems it is, and under some it isn't. However notice the "everyone knows" part. Everyone does know. Which percentage of the population do you expect to agree that letting the child drown was the right thing to do?
Any more than the trolley one? Hypotheticals aren't know for their realism.
A while back, a lot of people would have agreed that setting cats on fire for entertainment was totally cool.
The idea is that the argument sneaks in intuitions about the situation that have been explicitly stipulated away.
Yes, and which conclusion do you draw from this observation?
I am not sure I understand. Which intuitions have been explicitly stipulated away and where?
I don't see how defining morality as the popular vote doesn't entail moral progress being a random walk, and don't think that that definition provides any kind of answer to most of the questions that we pose within the cultural category 'moral philosophy'.
There's implicit uncertainty about how to compare the moral weight of children and adults. Is there not always some number of adults that would be better to save than a fixed number of children? Would you sacrifice ten million adults for one child? There's some number. People have unique intuitions about the moral weight of children, as opposed to adults, and most utilitarians don't make any kind of concrete judgments about what the weights should be. If you throw in something like this, then you're not countering a claim that anyone has actually made.
There are other intuitions that implicitly affect the judgment, like pleasure, social reputation, uncertainty about the assumptions themselves. In particular, it's hard to suspend your disbelief in a thought experiment. If it really were the case that you knew with certainty that you could live and save two people instead of dying trying to save someone else and failing, then yes, you should pick the action that leads to the outcome with the greatest number of people safe. And finally, these things never actually happen. You seem to champion pragmatism constantly; I don't see how being able to save a life for $4,000 instead of $100,000 and ignoring quirks about my ability to perceive large scopes and distant localities to come to the conclusion that, yes, in fact, I should save twenty-five lives instead of one life, is counterintuitive, unpragmatic, or morally indefensible. I see thought experiments against utilitarianism as counterintuition porn, pitting a jury-rigged human brain against the most alien, unrealistic situation that you possibly can.
You imply that the empirically observed ("popular") morality of different societies at different times is a random walk. Is that a bullet you wish to bite?
The point I had in mind, though, wasn't defining morality through democracy. If you think that your moral opinions about cats on fire are better than those of some fellows a century or two ago, you have a couple of ways to argue for this.
One would be to claim that moral progress exists and is largely montonic and inescapable, thus your morality is better just because it comes later in time. Another would be to claim that you are in some way exceptional (in terms of your position in space and/or time), for example you can see the Truth better than those other folks because they were deficient in some way.
As you are probably well aware of, such claims tend to be controversial and have issues. I was wondering which path do you want to take. I'm guessing the moral progress path, am I right?
Sure, but what has been explicitly stipulated away?
That's not what we are talking about, is it? We are talking more about immediate, visceral-reaction kinds of actions versus far-off, unconnected, and statistical-averages kinds. In some way it's an emotion vs intellect sort of a conflict, or, put in different terms, hardwired biological imperatives vs abstract calculations.
You are saying that abstract calculations provide the right answer, but I don't see it as self-evident: see my post above about putting all your trust into a single maximization.
Right. And provided some of the latter moral systems are ones endorsed by actual people, it cannot be true that "Everyone knows ...".
Oh, I'm sorry. I'd thought we were having a discussion about ethics, not a popularity contest. What percentage of the population has even heard of utilitarianism? What proportion has heard of it and has a reasonably accurate idea what it is?
Nope, ridiculous to a similar extent and in similar ways. This is relevant not because there's anything wrong with using unrealistic hypothetical questions to explore moral systems, but because there's something wrong with making a naked appeal to intuition when addressing an unrealistic hypothetical question (that being what entirelyuseless just did). Because our intuitions are not calibrated for weird hypothetical situations and we shouldn't expect what they tell us about such situations to be very enlightening.
(I like your way of thinking, and I like even more that you look at this problem in the first place. I've had this mental note that says "utilitarianism vs guilt???" for a while now.)
One facet of the problem I think you overlooked is the "social group" dynamic.
Consider, which of these two is a more accurate expansion of "I'm a utilitarian" as observed in Real Life (TM):
"My goal is to save lives effectively, in accordance with a coherent utility function (etc.)"
"I think it's 'good'/'proper' to save lives effectively, in accordance with a coherent utility function (etc.)"
Isn't the question of someone being a good or a bad person at all a part of virtue ethics? That is, for a utilitarian the results of the bystander's and murderer's actions were the same, and therefore actions were as bad as each other, but that doesn't mean a bystander is as bad as the murderer, because that's not a part of utilitarian framework at all. Should we implement the policy of blaming or punishing them the same way? That's a question for utilitarianism. And the answer is probably "no".
I've had similar thoughts in the past few days. It does seem that utilitarianism merely prescribes the moral action, without saying anything about the goodness or badness of people. Of course, I've seen self-identifying utilitarians talk about culpability, but they seem to be quickly tacking this on without thinking about it.
It is possible to talk about utilitarian culpability, but it's a question of "would blaming/punishing this (kind of) person lead to good results". Like you usually shouldn't blame those who can't change their behavior as a response to blame unless they self-modified themselves to be this way or if them being blameless would motivate others that can... That reminds me of the Eight Short Studies On Excuses, where Yvain has demonstrated an example of such an approach.
Moral responsibility is related to but not the same thing as moral obligation, and it's completely possible for a utilitarian to say one is morally forbidden to be a bystander and let a murder happen while admitting that doing so doesn't make you responsible for it. This is because responsibility is about causation and obligation is about what one ought to do. Murderers cause murders and are therefore responsible for them, while bystanders are innocent. The utilitarian should say not that the bystander is as morally responsible as the murderer (because they aren't), but that moral responsibility isn't what ultimately matters.
It's quite possible to acknowledge that real agents, including myself, do not have perfect models, nor perfect understanding of their own utility, nor perfect control of their subpersonal modules in order to act in accordance with stated beliefs all the time. Personally, I am not a utilitarian because I think that most utility functions are not consistent, and even if they were I don't have sufficient knowledge to compare them within myself, let alone across individuals.
In any case, it's pretty clear that no known actual (non-mythical) agent is perfect in application of whatever ethic they espouse. Everyone behaves more selfishly than they claim to want. No virtue ethicist acts with 100% virtue, no deontologist fails to break a rule occasionally, no consequentialist ALWAYS acts in ways they expect improve future worlds, no utilitarian actually maximizes group utility.
Both guilt and moral outrage share a purpose: they are motivators to be somewhat better than the current state. Importantly, this is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Going to a conference rather than buying mosquito netting is an incorrect action under many/most stated ethical models. Bite that bullet. Next time, maybe you can improve your behavior by actually doing what you say is important.