by Tyler Cowen
In other words, rights rarely conflict with consequences in the simple ways set out by philosophical thought experiments. We can therefore shift the way we think about radical uncertainty and consequences. Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.
We can also see this radical uncertainty as supporting a new enchantment with human life and choice; we can accept that most or all of our actions will have consequences we cannot possibly predict. On average these consequences will be positive, just as average economic growth is positive, but we will always wonder about the future consequences we have set in motion. We will wonder about our strange and almost magical powers in this regard.
For all the confusion we might feel about the marginal product of an individual act, this is also an empowering notion, and it relates to the idea that all fruitful societies are based on some notion of faith. In this case we can hold onto our faith in doing the right thing—and indeed doing the right thing for its own sake—without being brutally beaten back by the fear that we are bringing about some sort of consequentialist disaster.
Now let’s consider another crazy philosophical thought experiment: either we murder a specified baby, or aliens from Alpha Centauri will destroy the entire Earth. Here we have more room to be what is called a rights consequentialist. Murdering the one baby is wrong, but if we don’t do it, even more babies will be murdered—many millions more, in fact. On one side of the equation, we have “murder one baby.” On the other side of the equation, we have “all babies get murdered, everything on Earth is lost, and, since human life on Earth ends, no more Crusonia plants, no significant froth of uncertainty to follow.”
It is possible to see why we would opt to kill the baby in this case. For one thing, the cost of not murdering the baby is now much higher. For another—and this is significant—if the entire world ends, there is no residual uncertainty about what will happen next. We should pursue the better consequences, and there is no remaining froth of uncertainty to justify sticking with the rights of the individual baby. And in that sense, the notion of rights postulated here is not strictly absolute against all possible external consequences that philosophers might dream up. Still, most or all of the hypothetical examples in which rights should be violated are not very relevant to the real-world choices we have had to face so far.
To be sure, we do not know exactly where this comparison should end and at what point the case for murdering an innocent baby looks strong. What if the choice is murdering one baby or aliens will destroy only the nation of Nepal? The number of lives affected by the alien threat could be made larger or smaller until the rights theorist cries uncle. We don’t know exactly where to draw that line. You can think of this as one of the weaknesses of the rights theory I am putting forward. Still, this leaves us with a rights theory in which rights are indeed absolute, at least provided the examples we consider match some very basic facts about the real world, for instance the existence of Crusonia plants and the froth of consequentialist uncertainty.
Using this understanding of the epistemic problem, we can also see some further evidence for why “lifeboat ethics” might differ from our more usual and more practical ethical recommendations. I define lifeboat ethics as the ethics which should govern as the end of the world—or the end of some sufficiently segmented part of the world—approaches. People in a (not-to-be-rescued) lifeboat cannot look forward to great improvements in their future welfare or much economic growth. The sharks are circling and supplies of food and water will run out. By design, the lifeboat in this example is not connected to the broader froth of uncertainty in the world at large.
So what does that mean? In lifeboat settings, the benefits at stake will typically be small precisely because lifeboats, even the relatively large ones, are small. Rights therefore acquire greater force, in relative terms. No matter what you do, you can’t produce large social benefits in lifeboat examples, so there is a stronger case to be made for simply doing the right thing. Don’t toss the weak guy overboard or cook his flesh; it is the wrong thing to do, and there is only so much to be gained from it. Making an omelette may require the breaking of some eggs, but here the omelette is small, and not very tasty besides, so I say leave those eggs intact. Once again, the case for human rights is stronger than it appears at first.
1. Lenman (2000) provides one clear statement of the epistemic critique of utilitarianism and cites some precursors. For additional perspectives on the epistemic critique, see also Norcross (1990), Frazier (1994), Howard-Snyder (1997), Dorsey (2012), Mason (2004), Lang (2008), Burch-Brown (2014), and Kolmar and Rommeswinkel (2013). Hayek (1991) can be thought of as offering a version of the epistemic critique as well. Shelly Kagan (1998, 64) calls this epistemic argument “the most common objection to consequentialism.” William Whewell provided one early statement of the epistemic critique; see Mill (1969 [1852]). Cowley, Ambrose, and McCullough (2000) consider “what if?” questions in the context of military history. Moriarty (2005) considers the implications of the epistemic argument for concepts of desert. My initial crack at these topics is Cowen (2006). MacAskill (2014) analyzes how we ought to maximize across the expected values of possibly conflicting moral theories with possibly conflicting conceptual frameworks.
2. The economic literature on probability offers a debate about whether we can ever say we have “no idea” about the likelihood of an outcome. Under one view, we can always attach a Bayesian probability, whether explicit or implicit, to various outcomes (Caplan 1999). Even if we are very uncertain, in principle there exist betting odds that we would or would not be willing to take on a given choice. These counterfactual bets help us pin down implicit probability estimates for any imaginable outcome. Under a second view, we simply cannot assign probabilities to some events (O’Driscoll and Rizzo 1996). Those events are unique and “radically uncertain,” and thus do not fit into the standard categories of probability theory. But even in these cases we still have degrees of uncertainty. I may have “no idea” about my forthcoming birthday surprise, but this uncertainty is not comparable to my “no idea” about intelligent life on other planets. Background social context will give us some expectations, even if we cannot assign definite numbers to probability forecasts. For an earlier look at the argument that we often have some idea about consequences, see Mill (1969 [1852], 180).
3. Lenman (2000) appears to favor “ethical theories for which the focus is on the character of agents and the qualities of their wills, for theories that are broadly Kantian or Aristotelian in spirit.”
4. Philosophers often write of the closely related ideas of incommensurability and incomparability. On these ideas more generally, see Chang (1997, 2002). On the related concept of vagueness, see the work of Timothy Williamson, for instance “Vagueness in Reality” (2003).
Conclusion
Conclusion—where have we landed?
Some of my arguments have concerned the theme of distance. I have claimed that the inhabitants of the future are less distant from us, in moral terms, than many other views would indicate. Therefore, we should take more seriously the implications of our choices for that future.
That greater concern for the future induces us to rethink a variety of moral questions, including the importance of economic growth and the best kinds of redistribution, and it makes the stability of social systems a higher priority, among other considerations. The previous chapter on agnosticism and radical uncertainty made an additional argument for being willing to think big. If our values are to rise in importance above the froth of long-run uncertainty about the effects of our actions, we must look to relatively large and important values. This returns us to a place where Crusonia plants reign supreme and sustainable economic growth is all-important.
Here is my short, three-point summary of where these arguments have brought us:
First, believing in the overriding importance of sustained economic growth is more than philosophically tenable. Indeed, it may be philosophically imperative. We should pursue large rather than small benefits, and we should have a deep concern for the more distant future rather than discounting it exponentially. Our working standard for evaluating choices should be to increase sustainable economic growth, because those choices overcome aggregation problems and are decisively good. That provides us with a broad quantitative proxy for the long-run development of human civilization, and it constitutes one means of finding and promoting comoving plural values.
Second, there is plenty of room for our morality, including our political morality, to be strict and based in the notion of rules and rights. We should subject ourselves to the constraint of respecting human rights, noting that only semi-absolute human rights will be strong enough to place any constraint on pursuing the benefits of a higher rate of sustainable economic growth.
At the end of this tunnel we do not have the “Best Ethical Theory,” as a philosopher might wish to derive, but rather some good decision-making rules to live by, as well as some standards for how we might imagine a much brighter future.
To be sure, I have made no attempt to prove the absolute existence of rights. But once we start thinking in terms of big, comprehensive changes, a belief in rights fits in quite naturally. We have some rules for what to do—maximize sustainable growth—and other rules—rights—which place some constraints on those choices. In other words, the lower-order rules exist within the confines of higher-order rules, namely respecting human rights. We should stick to our chosen priorities and our chosen rules rigidly. Rather than rights and consequentialist considerations representing warring or contrasting approaches to philosophy, the door is open for consilience and compatibilism to reign, all within a rules-nested approach to thinking about both the rights-based and the practical, consequentialist sides of the equation.
We need not defend such rules-based perspectives on the grounds that they are a highly practical “noble lie.” It is nice to see the practical benefits of rules recognized, but the noble lie approach is too cynical. It assumes that rules are philosophically weak to begin with when they are not. So rather than viewing belief in strict rules as a noble lie, view it as a very important noble truth.
On the purely practical side, it is unlikely that democratic real-world decision-makers will think too big. The nature of politics is more likely to produce too much small fry than too little. Policymakers often make decisions on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis, simply hoping to survive the next election cycle. I don’t mean that as a cynical criticism of human nature; rather, it is an implication of political competition within relatively short electoral cycles relative to the time horizons over which policy matters. (The U.S. House of Representatives has a two-year voting cycle for policies which may have effects over twenty or thirty years, or, in the case of environmental policies, longer still.) That is one reason why our politics makes as many mistakes as it does. So, from a purely pragmatic or consequentialist point of view, there is an additional argument to be made for imagining our political choices in terms of broader bundles of choices and rules, at least provided we get the rules right.
Third, we should be very cautious in our attitudes about specific policies. Even if we succeed in taking true aim at what we think are the best courses of action, the chance that we are right on the specifics—even if the chance is as high as possible—is still not very high. It’s like trying to guess at the origin of the universe. The best you can do is to pick what you think is right at 1.05 percent certainty, rather than siding with what you think is right at 1.03 percent. Most likely you’re wrong, even if others are likely to be even more wrong than you are, and thus your attitude should be correspondingly modest in the epistemic sense.
For some more concrete recommendations, I’ll suggest the following:
Policy should be more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future.
Governments should place a much higher priority on investment than is currently the case, in both the private sector and the public sector. Relative to what we should be doing, we are currently living in an investment drought.
Policy should be more concerned with economic growth, properly specified, and policy discussion should pay less heed to other values. And yes, that means your favorite value gets downgraded too. No exceptions, except of course for the semi-absolute human rights.
We should be more concerned with the fragility of our civilization.
The possibility of historical pessimism stands as a challenge to this entire approach, because in that view the future is dim no matter what, and there may not be a more distant future we can look toward in order to resolve the aggregation dilemmas involved in making decisions that affect so many human beings.
We should be more charitable on the whole, but we are not obliged to give away all of our wealth. We do have an obligation to work hard, save, invest, and fulfill our human potential, and we should take these obligations very seriously.
We can embrace much of common sense morality with the knowledge that it is not inconsistent with a deeper ethical theory. Common sense morality can also be reconciled with many of the normative recommendations which emerge from a more impersonal and consequentialist framework.
When it comes to most “small” policies affecting the present and the near-present only, we should be agnostic, because we cannot overcome aggregation problems to render a defensible judgment. The main exceptions here are the small number of policies which benefit virtually everybody.
The utopian vision
My utopian political vision is a society that follows these principles. That means a society that lets individuality, happiness, and autonomy flower to their maximum extent. I don’t expect something so good to actually come about, but it is nonetheless a vision to live by and one to use when defining one’s personal and political philosophy. And for smaller subsets of political issues, especially those which are so narrow that they would not affect sustainable economic growth, there is plenty of room for coexisting visions, political and otherwise. There is a significant open-ended aspect to this approach, and it represents one building block of political thought rather than a closed system that answers or addresses every possible question. You can adopt this perspective without having to give up all of your other micro-visions for a better political and social order.
That all said, most normative work is connected to some gut-level intuition, and this exposition is no exception. I have the feeling—and yes, I am willing to describe it as such—that we should look more than a bit beyond our currently perceived constraints. It is easy enough to perform the obviously beneficial small tasks; the most important policy advice should not always feel comfortable or practical.
We should strive to significantly augment future human well-being over long spans of time. As we struggle for great achievements, we will encounter many incidental costs and obstacles along the way. We are not certain how much weight we should attach to these costs, just as we were not sure how to value the dog’s broken leg in the D-Day example in chapter five, given the high uncertainty associated with our choices. But these incidental costs—and benefits—are probably less important than we think. They should be less of an obstacle to our attempts to improve our civilization and render it more durable.
When thinking about policy, I often have a little voice inside my head that says, “Let’s just worry about making some small improvement today. Grand schemes come to naught. What is the future, anyway? Aren’t current improvements, however small, hard enough to implement? Let us be supreme pragmatists and focus only on the here and now. That is the best we can do for the future, in any case. The future can take care of itself. Let us drop our fantasies.”
But then I think again, and I realize that I am engaging in a comfortable form of self-deception. I kno
w that we as human beings are biologically programmed to respond to immediate stimuli and the near term at the expense of the future. Many of us do not plan far enough ahead or save enough for our retirements. Sufficiently thirsty individuals will drink salt water out of desperation, even if it lessens their chances of survival. So we cannot always trust our innate programming and response mechanisms. These mechanisms may have been adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies, but they are suddenly more costly in a flourishing civilization with large-scale political institutions, persistent long-run problems, and the ability to generate sustained and compounding economic growth.
I would therefore like to be more suspicious of our little voice in favor of supreme short-run pragmatism. I wish to suggest that it is a vice, the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification. It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn. I suggest that we should instead turn our political energies to thinking about the long-run fortunes of our civilization. That means focusing on the future of freedom, wealth, science, and healthy, well-functioning institutions governed by rules and rights.
I end this book by reiterating some core claims. Our civilization carries many wonderful plural values. Preserving and extending those values through time should be our priority. Sustainable economic growth elevates living standards and human welfare, and delivers other plural values. The case for a good society, appropriately specified, is sound, and it does not fall prey to the usual problems of utilitarianism or consequentialism. It is permissible to believe in absolute or near-absolute human rights. We can be, and must be, partially utopian in our personal and political commitments. We should not be afraid to think in terms of the big picture, rather than evaluating everything on a case-by-case basis. We should be deeply skeptical of particular instrumental views of what is likely to promote the good.