A Problem For Consequentialist Libertarians
Apr 08, 04 | 3:35 am by John T. KennedyShould we rob from the rich to give to the poor?
Economist Brad DeLong blogged this yesterday:
…even a small amount of belief in diminishing marginal utility of wealth leads to the conclusion that the government ought to put its thumb on the scale on the side of a more middle-class and a less Second-Gilded-Age economy and income distribution.
He’s basically saying that the gain of $100 or $1000 will improve the lot of a poor man more than the loss of an equal amount will harm a rich man and that therefore when we compel the transfer of such a sum from rich man to poor man there is a net gain for society.
At the margin $1000 is of negligible value to Bill Gates. If he found it lying on the sidewalk he might not bother to pick it up. The same $1000 could be a small fortune to a poor man. So if we force Gates to hand over $1000 to the poor man the benefit to the poor man is far greater than the harm to Gates.
Is there any reason why we shouldn’t consider this a good consequence?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 4:57 am
Actually, yes.
Bill Gates can’t physically consume the extra $1000 — he’s got all the drugs, prostitutes, and jet aircraft he can meaningfully use.
What’s Bill going to do with his $1000? Purchase means of production with which to crank out useful stuff to sell to everyone else. If Bill Gates knows what he’s doing — which is how he got much of the first $50 billion — he’ll produce useful stuff efficiently, driving down the cost of whatever class of stuff he produces. This benefits the poor guys directly.
For the $1000 to be of much use to the poor guys they need something to buy. For this to happen the means of production need to be in the hands of those who can produce the most useful stuff.
Really poor people in the US might not have much actual cash, but as a result of letting people like Bill keep their $1000, these poor people have access to lots of really amazing (by 1800’s standards) stuff for free, like clean water, 5 year old computers, etc.
So, no problems for this consequentialist libertarian here. The fundamental principles are good because they lead to results we like. In this case the results are more liberty (in the form of better, cheaper stuff) for just about everybody.
And yes, Brad de Long is dropping the ball.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:01 am
Did I mention that Monica Bellucci is really hot?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:01 am
Even if the idealized consequences are good, which I’m willing to say they are, in practically, the consequences are almost always bad. There’s no getting around the fact that someone has to be in charge of the redistribution, and the people who end up in charge inevitably turn out to be con artists, thieves and murderous thugs.
According to this paper: http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez/w8467.pdf, income equality, income inequality increases during times of relative peace and generally increasing prosperity, and falls during times of war, depression and economic stagnation. (Cribbed from http://www.marginalrevolution.com.)
$1000 may be of negligble value to Bill Gates, but the $27 billion he’s giving away of his own free will, certainly isn’t. I’d rather that Gates redistribute his fortune than George Bush or Ted Kennedy, or even Ron Paul. And, I would trust that the consequences would be better, even if he chose to spend his fortune building pyramids in the Cascades.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:17 am
Michael touched on what would be my objection: Even if we grant a diminishing marginal utility of wealth (I do grant this), this still isn’t an argument for moderate government-enforced income redistribution unless we can first show that the government will actually be able to achieve this desirable objective without imposing significant perverse costs, such as: inefficient overhead, taking from the wrong people (the poor to lower middle class), giving to the wrong people (the rich to upper middle class), redistributing far too much, etc.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 6:10 am
But you do hold that benefiting the poor man at the expense of the rich man is a desirable result, Micha?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 6:16 am
It definitely doesn’t fit with my strong personal libertarian intuitions, but I have to concede that it is a desirable result.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 6:17 am
Did I mention that Monica Bellucci is really hot?
Yeah, but not half as hot as my baby.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 7:34 am
This may be one of those desirable results that in the medium-to-long term is essentially impossible to implement. Attempts to do so seem to cripple the production system, leaving the poor men worse off.
Maybe this is why envy is a sin: acting on it by taking people’s stuff by force leads to everyone losing.
Principles sure are handy.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 7:36 am
First of all, why should I approve if some rich guy is robbed and the money given to some poor guy? Why should I prefer this particular form of zero-sum transaction to any other, or to none at all? In the abstract, if I’m neither the poor guy nor the rich guy, it has no effect upon me, so I have no reason to value the result. If I’m the rich guy, I clearly have reason not disvalue the result. Only if I’m the poor guy do I have any reason to value the result.
Secondly, why should we assume that giving $1000 to a poor guy will benefit him more than it will subtract from the total utility of a rich guy? This assumption flies in the face of the subjective theory of value. Perhaps the poor guy is poor because he doesn’t care as much about money as the rich guy. Perhaps the rich guy will derive greater subjective benefit from keeping the $1000 than the poor guy will get from being given $1000. This sort of interpersonal utility-comparison simply can’t be done.
Then we get to the question of whether the State has correct institutional incentives to perform this zero-sum transaction, and only this zero-sum transaction, without also performing other transactions that are so undesirable as to outweigh the alleged benefits of the desired redistribution from rich to poor. The empirical answer to that question is obviously: No.
Tim Starr
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 8:42 am
“Is there any reason why we shouldn’t consider this a good consequence?”
You mean… apart from the obvious psychosis of doing so, right? …that small bit about facts of reality, I mean. You know; whose stuff is whose & all that.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:03 pm
You’re never going to make it as a consequentialist, Beck.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:14 pm
T.J.,
“What’s Bill going to do with his $1000? “
Lose it in his couch cushions.
“Purchase means of production with which to crank out useful stuff to sell to everyone else.”
We’re talking about $1000 for the moment. Bill Gates isn’t going to purchase any more or less means of production regardless of what happens to this $1000. It’s a negligible factor of production at this margin.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:15 pm
> Is there any reason why we shouldn’t consider this a good consequence?
Oh, John. This was an amazing demonstration. You’re overrun with collectivists!
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:31 pm
Michael and Micha seem prepared to concede that the consequence is good and desirable, but have concerns about the implementation. For the moment let’s leave the state out of this. For now we’re not talking about a collectivist policy but just whether we should rob from the rich and give to the poor.
By design or chance you find yourself in a position to easily steal $1000 from Bill Gates and pass it on to a poor but hard working family. In this hypothetical situation your chances of getting caught are nil and nobody but you will know where the $1000 really came from - the poor family won’t know they’re receiving stolen money.
Here’s your golden opportunity. Will you play Robin Hood?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:32 pm
Can someone give me background on consequentialism? Which famous libertarians are consequentialists? Are these supposed to be contra natural right people? Sorry to be so lost, my english is not so good. Links relevenent would help me!
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:38 pm
The Marginal Utility of Bill Gates
John T. Kennedy poses a question to consequentialists: At the margin $1000 is of negligible value to Bill Gates. If he found it lying on the sidewalk he might not bother to pick it up. The same $1000 could be…
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 2:50 pm
Oh, John. This was an amazing demonstration. You’re overrun with collectivists!
Be vewy, vewy, qwiet. I’m twacking conseqwentewists.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 4:04 pm
>Bill Gates can’t physically consume the extra $1000 — he’s got all the drugs, >prostitutes and jet aircraft he can meaningfully use.
He certainly can consume it. For example, perhaps he might decide to put astrobiologists on Titan. Or research the cures to currently intractable diseases. Or do a whole bunch of things which statists like to claim only governments can fund.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 4:33 pm
Tim,
“First of all, why should I approve if some rich guy is robbed and the money given to some poor guy?”
Okay, here’s a fundamental question for consequentialists: By what standard ought consequences be evaluated?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:13 pm
Morally, it isn’t a good consequence, because it involves the theft of property.
Economically, it isn’t a good consequence, because Bill Gates is a more efficient user of money than the poor family.
Socially, it isn’t a good consequence, because it reduces everyone’s property rights, just a little, and that small loss adds up to much more harm than any “good” that could come from the poor family’s gain.
Finally, if it truly is a good consequence, the same reasoning should apply universally, and be repeatable. If Bill Gates won’t miss $1,000, why should he miss $1,000,000? Or even a cool billion? He doesn’t really NEED it, after all. Similarly, why should a healthy person get to keep BOTH kidneys, when there are people out there who will DIE without one of them? If the scale of Bill Gate’s loss is a factor in whether or not you take $1,000 from him, then surely the loss of a human life should outweight any other concerns about property rights. This sort of reasoning leads in one direction: whoever gets to decide the moral balance, gets to be the absolute tyrant.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:30 pm
“Morally, it isn’t a good consequence, because it involves the theft of property.”
Bob, I want you go over and sit in the non-consequentialist corner with Beck for now. Today we’re giving consequentialists a hearing.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:53 pm
John T. asks:
“By design or chance you find yourself in a position to easily steal $1000 from Bill Gates and pass it on to a poor but hard working family. In this hypothetical situation your chances of getting caught are nil and nobody but you will know where the $1000 really came from - the poor family won’t know they’re receiving stolen money.
Here’s your golden opportunity. Will you play Robin Hood?”
My answer: probably not. The reason being that I have learned over the years that consequences are many and varied. There is what is seen and what is unseen. I don’t think there is a human being alive who is smart enough to figure out what all the unseen conseqences of such, seemingly harmless, redistribution schemes would be. Conseqently, as a consequentialist, I have determined that it is better to develop and follow rules of behavior that preclude such redistribution schemes, and those rules should be followed with only few exceptions. (An exception: if my family is starving, and you have plenty of food, but aren’t willing to be charitable, I’m taking some of it, if I can. I’ll do my best to make it up to you later, but my family isn’t going to starve. To hell with whose stuff is whose, and all that.)
Similar scenerios play out in real life every day. Consider, instead of theft, tresspass. I ride my motorcyle to work and along the way it spews some small amount of pollutants into the air which land on other people’s property. Well, it’s wrong to throw my junk on other people’s property, right? But they don’t notice, and I get a very big benefit from it, so I do it, and think nothing of it. How is that any different that Bill Gates losing $1000, which he won’t notice in any way, and giving that $1000 to a poor person who will benefit greatly?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 5:56 pm
an occasional visitor objects to Robin Hood theft on the following consequentialist grounds:
“He [Bill Gates] certainly can consume it [$1000 that might be stolen for a poor family]. For example, perhaps he might decide to put astrobiologists on Titan. Or research the cures to currently intractable diseases. Or do a whole bunch of things which statists like to claim only governments can fund.”
Bill Gates will do any of these things with $1,000, and be unable to do them without it?
Jeeze, and consequentialists accuse us natural lawyers of building castles in the sky?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 6:56 pm
John,
By design or chance you find yourself in a position to easily steal $1000 from Bill Gates and pass it on to a poor but hard working family. In this hypothetical situation your chances of getting caught are nil and nobody but you will know where the $1000 really came from - the poor family won’t know they’re receiving stolen money.
Michael Giesbrecht already gave the rule utilitarian answer. There may be other possible responses; I’m not sure. Certainly, if we change the relative weights of the hypothetical, I would be very willing to steal from Bill Gates for someone else’s benefit. If we could take $1 from Bill Gates against his will and make the world better off by $100 trillion dollars, I would do so. Or, to use David Friedman’s example,
Consider the following example. A madman is about to open fire on a crowd; if he does so numerous innocent people will die. The only way to prevent him is to shoot him with a rifle that is within reach of several members of the crowd. The rifle is on the private property of its legitimate owner. He is a well known misanthrope who has publicly stated on numerous occasions that he is opposed to letting anyone use his rifle without his permission, even if it would save hundreds of lives.
Two questions now arise. The first is whether members of the crowd have a right to take the rifle and use it to shoot the madman. The answer of libertarian rights theory, as I understand it, is no. The owner of the rifle is not responsible for the existence of the madman, and the fact that his rifle is, temporarily, of enormous value to other people does not give them a right to take it.
The second question is whether it is desirable that someone take the rifle and use it to shoot the madman–whether, to put it more personally, I wish that someone do so, or whether I would rather see the members of the crowd stand there and be shot down. The answer to this question seems equally unambiguous. If someone takes the rifle, there is a relatively minor violation of the legitimate rights of its owner; if no one does, there is a major violation of the legitimate rights (not to be killed) of a large number of victims–plus a substantial cost in human life and human pain. If asked which of these outcomes I would prefer to see, the answer is obviously the first.
What’s interesting about your question is that the same problem applies to many ethical egoists (i.e. Objectivists). I’ve never heard a good answer for why an ethical egoist should respect the rights of others when he can be sure he will not get caught and there will be no negative repurcussions for him. What could you possibly say to someone in this situation to convince them that they should respect the rights of others even if they could benefit themselves by doing otherwise? Why is it in his interest to adhere to some metaphysical concept of rights?
The pat answer one usually gets to this question involves something like living in accord with the “facts of reality.” But this doesn’t really answer much at all; the time-space continuum will not crumble if someone steals from or murders another person for selfish reasons.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 7:26 pm
I see a striking similarity here between Friedman’s example and Swann’s position on the war. I think it’s fair to say Swann holds that the war entails moral crimes but that we should prefer such moral crimes to the alternative - the end of civilization.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 7:42 pm
Micha,
In the same book Friedman rejects utilitarianism: “Utilitarianism is a possible moral rule, but it is not one that I am willing to accept. Why? For the same reason that I reject all simple statements of libertarianism–because I can construct hypothetical situations in which it seems clear to me that the rule gives the wrong answer.
You are the sheriff of a small town plagued by a series of particularly brutal murders. Fortunately, the murderer has left town. Unfortunately, the townspeople do not believe that the murderer has left, and will regard your assertion that he has as an attempt to justify your own incompetence in failing to catch him.
Feeling is running high. If no murderer is produced, three or four innocent suspects will get lynched. There is an alternative. You can manufacture evidence to frame someone. Once he has been convicted and hung, the problem will be gone. Should you do it?
On utilitarian grounds, it seems clear that the answer is yes. You are killing one innocent person but saving several–and you have no reason to believe that the one you kill values life any more than the ones you save. You yourself may receive disutility from knowing that you have framed an innocent man–but if it gets bad enough you can always kill yourself, leaving a profit of at least one life’s worth of utility.
I am not willing to accept the conclusion. In an earlier hypothetical, I said that I would steal; in this one, I would not frame. To save a million lives, perhaps, but for a net profit of one or two, no. It follows that I am not a utilitarian.
This is also a rejection of consequentialism.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 7:56 pm
The madman question is interesting, but I think flawed. Individuals who choose to go about unable to defend themselves without resorting to the theft, however necessary, of someone else’s property are obviously willing to ignore someone else’s property rights when convenient. They are hardly “innocent”. They might be considered “neglected”, in the case of a child, or they might be considered the victims of a statistical aberration, but they aren’t innocent, just as I wouldn’t be an innocent victim of an automobile accident if I was severly injured only because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. If a member of the crowd stole the rifle, killed the madman, he would still have violated the rifle owner’s property rights. The question suggests that the issue is only one of whether violating the rifle owner’s property rights is a greater violation than allowing the madman to fire upon the crowd. I would suggest that a better question is why should anyone else place a greater value on the crowds’ lives than they do themselves? If their lives aren’t worth the trouble of being armed, why are their lives worth violating the property rights of the rifle owner? If I thought their lives were worth such a violation, and did so, I would have to accept that I now have a moral debt to the rifle owner, even though the crowd might have a much greater debt to me. I say “might” because the members of the crowd, being the type to go about unarmed, might also consider me to be guily of some moral crime against the madman.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 8:00 pm
Michael Giesbrecht doesn’t like unseen consequences. So I’ll describe his solution as ‘do nothing - or as little as possible’. He also keeps an escape: ‘if the problems are big enough - my family is starving - why not do it ?’.
However, everybody sees to assume that the only way to get Bill’s money is to stick a gun in his face. Doesn’t anybody practice the art of persuasion anymore? Can you talk Bill into giving that $1000? It might be just as fast as the robbery, nobody gets too upset, and while we’re talking, let’s make it $1 billion.
The next step of course is, why stop at Bill? There are others with a lot of money. Say there are a million humans with a big heap of money. If I talk to each for five minutes, that’s 5 000 000 minutes, or during 8 hours a day, that’s more than 28 years. We will have to organise this. Let’s get their representatives and our representatives together for an open discussion. Now how are we going to call this discussion ? Let’s use the word ‘lawmaking’. And picking representatives can be called ‘electing’.
And how do we get everybody to stick to the agreement the representatives make ? Law enforcement, tax collectors …
So would Bill prefer having a million hungry poor at his door wanting to discuss a gift of $1000, or will he pay taxes and ‘buy’ a few senators, accountants, … to keep the tax rate low ?
Now that’s a consequence to discuss with libertarians …
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 8:20 pm
>>So would Bill prefer having a million hungry poor at his door wanting to discuss a gift of $1000, or will he pay taxes and ‘buy’ a few senators, accountants, … to keep the tax rate low ?
Actually, Bill would probably prefer that some large foundation skilled at distributing money to poor people efficiently knock on his door and ask for the money. He can spend a few hours assessing the quality and trustworthiness of the foundation. (Alternatively, he could spend some money to hire people to set up his own foundation.) Then he can cut a really big check, and have some assurance that the big pile of money he just gave away will do some good.
Processing the paperwork associated with paying taxes probably takes 10x the manpower (on a per dollar basis) then the overhead associated with giving to half-decent charities.
>>>”What’s Bill going to do with his $1000? “
>>Lose it in his couch cushions.
IMPORTANT: When Bill loses the $1000 in his couch, he’s really just making an interest-free loan to the government. The Fed will notice the money supply has shrunk, and will print an extra $1000. When Bill finds the $1000 and puts it back into circulation, the Fed will likely “decrease the rate at which it prints money” by $1000.
Note also that if Bill sets the money on fire, it’s literally the same as paying extra in taxes.
We have to be careful about distinguishing between money, raw materials, and production. It’s like the difference between the oil that lubricates your engine, the fuel that powers it, and the horsepower it generates.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 8:57 pm
Micha: I’ve never heard a good answer for why an ethical egoist should respect the rights of others when he can be sure he will not get caught and there will be no negative repurcussions for him.
My answer is egoism: Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image. In other words, the “negative repurcussions for him” are inescapable.
JTK: I see a striking similarity here between Friedman’s example and Swann’s position on the war. I think it’s fair to say Swann holds that the war entails moral crimes but that we should prefer such moral crimes to the alternative - the end of civilization.
Or even lesser bad consequences. This is straight Janioism. You have the capacity to do anything you can accomplish, tautologically. Ordinarily, you ought to behave in the way I describe, responding in real-time to injury either forcefully or not, depending on your own judgment of the circumstances, understanding that you may yourself thereby cause actionable injuries, most obviously to uninvolved parties.* After the fact, where possible, you should elect to respond to injury non-coercively, thus assuring that you are not yourself committing crimes. But if the immediate circumstance requires you to initiate an injury in order to avoid an even greater injury, either to yourself or someone else, you should do what you need to do, possibly answering for it later in court. In the same way, if in your opinion the only workable response to an after-the-fact injury is to commit a crime, you do what you think you need to do and make restitution to the victims if you’re later found against.
(*Bye, bye, Barney Fife: Yes, I know you think you should not be held responsible for the plate glass you destroyed while wrestling with Otis the Drunkard. In my courtroom, that would be a colorable argument, but we would start with the rebuttable presumption that you were not unavoidably obliged to choose to brawl. Prove the contrary or pay for the glass.)
This has nothing to do with morality or natural rights or any other ideology. It is simply a social lubrication machine. It will work because it doesn’t require formal explication or mass agreement. In the 99+% of social transactions where I am dealing with civilized people, I will always behave non-coercively as long as they do. In that tiny fraction of cases where other people try to coerce me–or who injure me without intending to, for that matter–I will seek restitution through the free market courts, with its rulings being effected by access to the marketplace itself. In the extremely rare circumstance that this procedure does not work–perhaps in a place infested by an infinite number of imaginary Friedmaniacs–I will take such action as the situation requires and answer for the consequences after-the-fact. Importantly, as above, I can compensate the victims of an injury I have caused, but I cannot undo the inescapable damage I will have done to my self-image.
The issue is a Calculus of Los in the very, very rare event that the only way to avoid a greater crime (always politically defined as injury, not as a moral issue) is to commit a lesser crime. The War on Terror is a perfect example, alas. In Janio at a Point, Janio cites at two other examples: A molester of pre-verbal children and a storm-crazed passenger attempting to destroy a sailboat. These are not exceptions to moral or political precepts, they are political precepts for dealing righteously with exceptional circumstances.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 10:22 pm
“Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image. In other words, the “negative repurcussions for him” are inescapable.”
If you’re in a certain political position, you can go from one end of your life to the other doing evil, and never face negative repurcussions. Should you do so? Certainly, you can, if you so desire. And obviously your valuations, as a dictator, are more valuable than those of anyone you might trample, because you have more guns with which to pursue and realize them. Your little empire may collapse twenty or thirty years after you die, but so what?
Kennedy,
“Okay, here’s a fundamental question for consequentialists: By what standard ought consequences be evaluated?”
Bingo.
I’ll go sit in the non-consequentialist corner now.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 11:09 pm
JTK,
In the same book Friedman rejects utilitarianism… This is also a rejection of consequentialism.
You neglected to quote what comes next. Friedman continues,
“Although I reject utilitarianism as the ultimate standard for what should or should not happen, I believe that utilitarian arguments are usually the best way to defend libertarian views. While most people do not believe that maximizing human happiness is the only thing that matters, most do believe that human happiness is important. Libertarians are not the only ones who avoid conflicts by believing that the system they favor works both morally and practically. To the extent that I can show that a particular libertarian proposal–abolition of heroin laws, or minimum wage laws, or all government–produces attractive results, I have an argument which will have some weight in convincing almost anyone to support it.
So one reason to base my arguments on consequences rather than justice is that people have widely varying ideas about what is just but generally agree that making people happy and prosperous is a good thing. If I argue against heroin laws on the grounds that they violate the addicts’ rights, I will convince only other libertarians. If I argue that drug laws, by making drugs enormously more expensive, are the chief cause of drug-related crime, and that the poor quality control typical of an illegal market is the main source of drug-related deaths, I may convince even people who do not believe that drug addicts have rights.
A second reason to use practical rather than ethical arguments is that I know a great deal more about what works than about what is just. This is in part a matter of specialization; I have spent more time studying economics than moral philosophy. But I do not think that is all it is. One reason I have spent more time studying economics is that I think more is known about the consequences of institutions than about what is or is not just–that economics is a much better developed science than moral philosophy.
If so, the implications are not limited to the best choice of arguments with which to convince others. In the previous chapter I gave a long list of questions which I saw no way of using libertarian principles to answer. In the next chapter I will argue that they are all questions that can, at least in principle, be answered by using economic theory to discover what rules maximize human happiness. If so, then economics is not only a better way of persuading others. It is also a better way of figuring out what I myself am in favor of.
It is not correct to say that Friedman rejects consequentialism, or even utilitarianism. He recognizes that both have their problems, just like all moral theories have their problems, but that they are the best we have available.
I plan to put all this together into a coherent post for Catallarchy when I get a chance; I’ve been a bit busy lately and don’t have much time right now.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 11:31 pm
Greg,
My answer is egoism: Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image. In other words, the “negative repurcussions for him” are inescapable.
I don’t see how this is any different than the (Aristotelian? Platonic? It’s one of those Greek dudes) belief that one should not act immorally because immoral actions are harmful to one’s soul. If Rand and other Objectivists reject the soul as metaphysical nonsense, why do they introduce the metaphysical concept of “long-term self-image”? People can be conditioned into believing that moral actions are immoral and immoral actions are moral. In this sense, morality is in a large part constructed by social factors. So long as a person does not believe that theft or murder is morally wrong, and thus, not destructive of his long-term self-image, he has little reason to refrain from murdering and stealing when he can be sure he will not get caught and there will be no negative repurcussions for him.
This argument is also a bit circular. If I say to you: “Why should I not kill someone if doing so will benefit me?”, you might respond, “Because you might get caught and suffer harmful repurcussions, so murder is not in your self interest.” If a situation arises where I need not fear getting caught, the fallback response seems to be that I should not murder because murder is morally wrong, and “Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image.” But what if I do not agree that murder is morally wrong? What is the argument put forth to prove why murder is immoral? And even if such an argument could be made, what if I simply don’t accept it, and continue to believe that murder is just fine and dandy? How will this be destructive of my long-term self-image?
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 11:44 pm
JTK,
Okay, here’s a fundamental question for consequentialists: By what standard ought consequences be evaluated?
It depends on which consequentialist you ask. Some are pure utilitarians, some rule-utilitarians, and some efficiency maximizers of the Marshall, Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks variety. I’m sure with a bit of googling I could come up with many more.
So too, a fundamental question for deontologists might be: By what standard ought rights be evaluated? There are certainly just as many different versions of natural rights, human rights, positive rights, negatives rights, etc., etc., ad nauseum as there are different versions of consequentialism. If the criticism of consequentialism is that there is not one single standard to which all adherents subscribe, then this criticism applies with just as much force to deontologists.
The important difference, of course, is that consequences are, in my opinion, relatively easier to measure empirically, and most people share similar beliefs about what constitutes desirable consequences compared to vast disagreement over what constitutes a proper theory of rights.
April 8th, 2004 at Apr 08, 04 | 11:55 pm
After a long quote in which David Friedman defends his focus on consequentialist arguments, Micha remarks:
“It is not correct to say that Friedman rejects consequentialism, or even utilitarianism. He recognizes that both have their problems, just like all moral theories have their problems, but that they are the best we have available.”
But this hardly seems like an accurate statement of Friedman’s position, given the quotes above. What Friedman defends in the quote you’ve posted is not what is meant by “utilitarianism” or “consequentialism” when they are used to name particular moral theories; what he is defending is what is meant by “consequentialism” when it is used to characterize specific moral justifications. Natural lawyers do not reject the idea that consequentialist justifications are sometimes valid justifications for a practice–the reason, for example, that we go to the doctor when we’re sick is that the consequence (healing, one hopes) is better than staying sick. What natural lawyers reject, and what consequentialism as a moral theory entails, is not the claim that consequentialist considerations can justify particular practices, but rather that consequentialist considerations are the only sort of justification that can justify any sort of practice. That stance Friedman certainly rejects–at least in its utilitarian variety–because, as he remarks, it seems to give no basis for ruling out absolutely unjustifiable conduct; the sort of considerations that you need to pull in to show why murdering the scapegoat are wrong are not consequentialist ones.
All that Friedman points out above is this: while there are good reasons, founded in a theory of natural rights, that justify a libertarian social order, there are also consequentialist reasons; justice is its own reward, but it also has good consequences. So the question of which aspect of the case for liberty to highlight–for Friedman–is a question of rhetorical effectiveness; which sort of argument is more likely to convince people who have good-faith disagreements with libertarianism? His answer is that appeals to the good consequences of justice are more likely to convince. I don’t think that he’s right about what is most effective at convincing, but that’s another issue for another day. To count as a consequentialist, Friedman would have to hold that the sorts of considerations he presents are the only considerations relevant in moral or political arguments; he does not think they are. Thus Friedman is not a consequentialist. Q.E.D.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 12:01 am
> But what if I do not agree that murder is morally wrong?
I think these are dumb, Friedmanical questions. The mental states, as evidenced by their behavior, of Saddam Hussein and his sons are instructive. That people who already suffer an immense self-loathing do not seem to evince an additional increment of self-hatred as a result of an instant infraction does not imply that they do not in fact already suffer an immense self-loathing. Everything in Janioism references the idea of Splendor, the experience of a total and enduring self-adoration. There is nothing in David Friedman’s pretend universe that refelcts an understanding of this true–and metaphysically normal–state of thriving in the uniquely human life. I would hope that the world he lives in is very much larger than the world he persists in writing about.
Self-image is an idea. Every human being has this idea, his own concept of his own life, mind, body, and his awareness of past, present and anticipated experiences of being alive. This is an inescapable consequence of the human upbringing of a normal genetic homo sapiens. Nothing like the idea of a supernatural soul.
I do not speak for “Rand and other Objectivists”, nor for anyone but myself. To my knowledge, no one on Earth even agrees with the positions I take.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 12:02 am
Greg Swann replies to Micah’s complaint against ethical egoism:
<blockquote>Micha: I’ve never heard a good answer for why an ethical egoist should respect the rights of others when he can be sure he will not get caught and there will be no negative repurcussions for him.
My answer is egoism: Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image. In other words, the “negative repurcussions for him” are inescapable.</blockquote>
But that seems entirely ass-backwards, doesn’t it? Surely the reason that predatory behavior is “destructive of your own long-term self-image” is because it is morally loathsome, not vice versa. Why should it be destructive of one’s “own long-term self-image” unless it is already regarded as loathsome for independent reasons? If it’s not loathsome for independent reasons, then it would seem that the negative psychological reaction to it is just a form of irrational phobia. If, on the other hand, it is loathsome for independent reasons, then there’s no need to appeal to a hit on your self-esteem to explain why you shouldn’t do it.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 12:39 am
> But that seems entirely ass-backwards, doesn’t it?
Are you asking a question or convincing yourself you already have the answer? Human morality, according to me, is first and always a matter of self-construction or self-destruction. Not “self-esteem”, and I don’t even like the construct “self-image.” Self, the Latin word ego, is more accurate, the fundamental and sine qua non idea of human life. Every purposive human action is taken first by the self upon the self, and most purposive human actions are not only not social, they are not even observeable from outside the person acting. This runs all through my work, with Janio at a Point being as close as I’ve gotten to a Grand Unifying Theory, so far, but if people here are interested in what I have to say, working the links from the manifesto page of my weblog is not the worst way to start.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:03 am
Rad,
I don’t have the time or inclination to debate whether or not Friedman is a consequentialist; I think he has made his position fairly clear, and it seems to me that this debate is more hair-splitting than anything else. Anyway, I’d rather talk about my own beliefs than defend someone else’s. At the end of the day, one must decide which moral theory trumps the other: natural rights or consequentialism. I consider myself a consequentialist because if and when the two conflict, I favor better consequences over respecting rights.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:06 am
…the poor man. If it could be determined that a poor man valued $1000 more than Bill Gates did then presumably some of these consequentialists would approve of Robin Hood style transfers.
Can we reliably determine that one person values something more …
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:20 am
“…I favor better consequences over respecting rights.”
(Funny, that’s just what the highwayman said.)
Better consequences by what standard?
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:28 am
Greg,
Of course, “But that seems entirely ass-backwards, doesn’t it?” is a rhetorical question. Unfortunately, it is followed by a series of non-rhetorical questions which you seem to have left unanswered. I certainly agree that human morality is a matter of self-construction or self-destruction; what seems to be at issue here is what sort of considerations count for or against seeing an action as constructive or destructive.
The reason I describe your criteria as “ass-backwards” is the way that you seem to deploy them when it comes to the possibility of predatory behavior that a criminal can “get away with” (i.e., the perpetrator won’t be caught, won’t suffer the usual criminal penalties, etc.). You and I both agree, I take it, that that sort of injustice is a loathsome thing to do, that it is a self-destructive act and morally despicable. But the way that you seem to derive this result is puzzling: in order to show that it is morally wrong, you suggest that predatory conduct — even if the perpetrator “gets away with it” — is destructive because “Taking an action you know in advance to be morally wrong is destructive of your own long-term self-image.”
Perhaps I am merely being uncharitable, and misreading you, but it at least seems from here that the account you are giving attempts to rule out predatory conduct by resting on inescapable psychological consequences, something like the following: predation engenders guilt, guilt is destructive of the self, and thus predation is self-destructive and thus morally wrong. (If that is not what you mean, then what does being “destructive of your own long-term self-image” mean?)
If that is your account, then the obvious objection seems to me to be that it just is ass-backwards: it is because predation is loathsome (and that it is, whether the perpetrator is caught or walks freely) that it engenders guilt; if there were not independent reasons to consider it self-destructive and morally despicable, it would be completely irrational to feel guilty about it; I would, in effect, simply be suffering from an irrational phobia. (Think of it this way: if I’m guilty about X, then it seems like I have to choices to alleviate the suffering: either I can stop doing X, or I can give up my scruples about doing X, and thus stop feeling guilty. Which of these alternatives I should pick obviously depends–it seems to me–on whether my guilt about X is justified or not, and that is determined by whether I have independent reasons for regarding X as self-destructive or not. In the case of predation, becoming a stone cold predator is hardly the right horn of the dilemma to seize.) But of course guilt over predation–even “prudent predation”–is not irrational. It’s rational, but only because predatory conduct is loathsome independently of whatever feelings of guilt it may engender. It’s loathsome because living as a parasite on the genius and the work of others is a pathetic mockery of a life; the horde of a plunderer or a slavemaster is not anything worth having. That, I take it, is not essentially tied to psychological facts about us–although a virtuous person has, or strives for, positive emotional reactions to doing praiseworthy things, and negative emotional reactions to doing despicable things–but rather to teleological facts about us, facts about the sort of creatures we are and the life that a human self leads.
If the position that I have criticized here is not your position, then I apologize for the error and I look forward to being corrected.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:53 am
Micha worries that I’m splitting hairs in my discussion of David Friedman’s position. Perhaps so; but the reason I dwelt on it is that I think the hairs split there may need to be split elsewhere. With this in mind, I’d like to turn to Micha’s statement about his own beliefs: “At the end of the day, one must decide which moral theory trumps the other: natural rights or consequentialism. I consider myself a consequentialist because if and when the two conflict, I favor better consequences over respecting rights.”
I think that John is right to ask what standard is being used to determine what count as “better consequences.” But I also want to set that question aside and re-split some hairs. Here you say that one must decide which moral theory trumps the other, and you declare yourself a consequentialist because you think better consequences trump respect for rights. But there are two different things that this could mean:
(1) Better consequences trump respect for rights because respect for rights only has value insofar as it produces better consequences; since it usually does, respecting rights is, prima facie, the best thing to do; but if the usual benefits are not forthcoming, it has no value at all.
(2) Better consequences trump respect for rights even though respect for rights has value independently of its consequences; respecting rights is, ceteris paribus, the best thing to do; but in the face of terrible consequences that value can be overridden by consequentialist considerations.
Turning back to the hairs I split for Friedman, (1) is a claim compatible with consequentialism as a moral theory; (2) is not. If what you believe is (1), then you are a consequentialist (in the sense of consequentialism as a global moral theory); if what you believe is (2) then you are not, although you think that consequentialist considerations (in the sense of consequentialism as a local justification of specific moral claims) can often or even always override other normative considerations.
This seems to me to be an important distinction for people using consequentialist arguments to make; because while (1) is a comprehensive moral theory there are the usual strong objections to it (among them Friedman’s scapegoat objection); and while (2) can avoid these objections–by saying that our misgivings about the scapegoat objection arise from legitimate, non-consequentialist sources of value–once they are avoided in this way it becomes unclear why we should be confident that consequentialist concerns will always or even usually predominate. (It also becomes unclear how (2) is different in principle from most non-consequentialist approaches, since many if not most of natural lawyers, deontologists, etc. will be willing to say something like (2) for emergency situations…)
I hope that these remarks have clarified my aims somewhat; I look forward to any comments and criticism they may elicit.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 5:45 am
JTK,
Better consequences by what standard?
I already answered this question previously in this thread. You did not respond to it.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 5:51 am
Rad,
It’s loathsome because living as a parasite on the genius and the work of others is a pathetic mockery of a life; the horde of a plunderer or a slavemaster is not anything worth having.
I don’t understand this argument. On what basis do you assume that a person who chooses to live “as a parasite on the genius and the work of others is a pathetic mockery of a life”? If he believed that his act was loathsome, and that this loathsomeness is a pathetic mockery of life, and most importantly, if he believed that being loathsome and mocking life were so much worse than any potential gains he might get as a result, then he wouldn’t steal or kill or what-have-you. But he clearly does think that “the horde of a plunderer or a slavemaster” is worth having; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be a plunderer or slavemaster. So how is this supposed to convince him that he shouldn’t kill or steal if he believes it is in his interests to do so?
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 6:01 am
Rad,
I believe (1). The cost of violating rights should not be taken into account when doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not a particular action or policy has desirable consequences because the deontological morality or immorality of an act does not have costs or benefits independent of the (empirical) consequences of the act itself.
That said, I like how you mentioned the prima facie case for respecting rights; rights provide a useful short-hand tool for determining the answer to most moral conflicts.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 6:38 am
The cost of violating rights should not be taken into account when doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not a particular action or policy has desirable consequences because the deontological morality or immorality of an act does not have costs or benefits independent of the (empirical) consequences of the act itself.
So let’s suppose that the cost-benefit analysis of snatching you off of the street and harvesting your organs was broken out like this:
Costs:
Micha loses his life.
Benefits:
Organ harvesters make $500,000;
Half a dozen people’s lives are saved with the harvested organs;
Two people’s lives are saved with the exsanguinated blood.
Can you give me a consequentialist argument that says the organ harvesters ought not to snatch you off of the street and cut you up for spare parts? Or to put it another way, doesn’t your consequentialisim boil down to “The greatest good for the greatest number”?
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 6:47 am
I asked by: By what Standard?
“I already answered this question previously in this thread. You did not respond to it.”
This was your earlier answer:
“It depends on which consequentialist you ask. Some are pure utilitarians, some rule-utilitarians, and some efficiency maximizers of the Marshall, Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks variety. I’m sure with a bit of googling I could come up with many more.”
It depends on what consequentialist I ask? I asked you. I asked again when you said:
“Anyway, I’d rather talk about my own beliefs than defend someone else’s.”
But in answering this question you’ve only talked about the beliefs of others and not the standard by which you evaluate consequences.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 8:30 am
JTK,
Ah, my mistake. I didn’t realize you were asking about my beliefs in particular as opposed to the beliefs of consequentialists in general.
I think a standard of economic efficiency is the best available. I have no emotional attachment to it, as it has its flaws, and I am more than willing to give it up if a better one comes along. But for now, it’s better than the alternatives.
In terms of what specific consequences I find desirable and would want to increase using a standard of efficiency: happiness, wealth, longevity, and all the other good things in life.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 8:48 am
John Lopez,
Can you give me a consequentialist argument that says the organ harvesters ought not to snatch you off of the street and cut you up for spare parts?
Is there a less costly way to achieve the same goal? The primary reason we have an organ shortage now is because the sale of organs, even post-mortem, is prohibited. Were this prohibition removed, the supply of organs would increase significantly, to the point it does not seem likely that the least-costly way of saving those lives is by killing me.
But we need not deal with such a complicated scenario. The point that you are trying to make can be just as easily made using the scenario of the lynch mob which will kill three innocent people unless the sheriff hands over a scapegoat. This example is often used to demonstrate an alleged flaw in utilitarianism. But I don’t see this as a huge flaw; isn’t it better to have one innocent person die than three innocent people die?
Or to put it another way, doesn’t your consequentialisim boil down to “The greatest good for the greatest number”?
Yes. Note, though, that I don’t speak for all consequentialists.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 9:08 am
I think a standard of economic efficiency is the best available.
Is that the standard you applied to find the forced transfer from the rich man to the poor man desirable? In a perfectly free market you would still expect to find some people far richer than others, wouldn’t you? So are we to conclude that coercive Robin Hood style transfers of wealth would improve the efficiency of a perfectly free market?
Paul Heyne writes this on efficiency:
“The inescapably evaluative nature of the concept raises a fundamental question for every attempt to talk about the efficiency of any process or institution: whose valuations do we use, and how shall they be weighted?”
I have to know whose valuations you’re using and how the should be weighed to know what you mean by efficiency. Heyne goes on to hold money as the standard, but Robin Hood Revisited explains why money is not a standard by which the values of different individuals can be compared. How can it be a standard if people value money differently?
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 10:59 am
>> In a perfectly free market you would still expect to find some people far richer than others, wouldn’t you?
Oddly enough, as I’ve argued to Chomsky, I would expect much greater equality of wealth in a perfectly free market.
There is evidence for this even in our state-capitalist society. Bill Gates’s standard of living is better than mine, but the spread is much smaller than that between a member of the Politburo and the average Soviet worker.
In a very real sense Bill Gates is not that much richer than we are. Bill has a private jet, we fly Southwest airlines. Bill can drive 60 mph in his fancy limo, we can drive 60 mph in our Hondas. Bill’s MP3 player is likely slightly snazzier than ours. Bill can buy excellent health care, but my health insurance is still pretty good. We both share the incredible blessing that is clean water. Both Bill and I have air conditioning. Bill’s bed isn’t much bigger than mine, and probably not much comfier either.
In some respects I’m richer than Bill. My computer runs Linux and therefore works better. I have more free time than Bill — Bill’s business empire owns him as much as he owns it. My fiancee is hotter than Bill’s wife.
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 1:54 pm
T.J.: But Bill Gates maximizes value, every minute of his day.
You waste time arguing with propagandists for genocide! How is ole Noam doing?
April 9th, 2004 at Apr 09, 04 | 2:45 pm
Micha: But he clearly does think that “the horde of a plunderer or a slavemaster” is worth having; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be a plunderer or slavemaster.
Do you have much actual, real-life experience with people who exploit other people? I find your remarks (and others’) amazing in light of the full context of the behavior of predators.
Micha again: [I]sn’t it better to have one innocent person die than three innocent people die?
I think this again is an ivory tower niavete. I wrote about this a long time ago. In real life, human beings are neither black boxes nor blank canvases–nor are they ephemeral.
Rad Geek: I certainly agree that human morality is a matter of self-construction or self-destruction
The interesting thing about that is that the self is the primal concept. It is not abstract in origin. Its seed is the mammal brain’s perception of its own existence, coupled with the vestiges of mammalian notions of justice. (Does your dog “understand” private property? Try to take his food, then write up your results when your hand heals.) It takes root in what I call Mothertongue, the essentially non-verbal language of intimate human social interaction. It bursts into the light when the child acquires the capacity to reason in Fathertongue, abstract notational systems, but this is a very late development, age four or five. What you think of as moral codes are all abstract Fathertongue systems grafted onto an idea that is most fundamentally not itself a Fathertongue system. So if “human morality is a matter of self-construction or self-destruction” then it is not in its most fundamental sense a matter of compliance or non-compliance with detailed, abstract moral codes.
There is a lot more to this. Self-destruction is not necessarily a matter of moral culpability, and this is an idea that drives a lot of people crazy, since they have the abstract idea that only willful error should cause what you call “guilt”–itself an easy abstraction for a long series of complex and enduring mental reflections of and upon the self–where in fact–the actual facts of real, actual life, not contrived game theory scenarios–people can and do suffer huge and permanent damage for events that could not have been avoided by any act of will. I provide an example of this in the short story A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan.
I am a peripatetic. I think if economists want to talk about predators, they ought to go out and get to know a few, to discover just how much Splendor there is to be found in a life of unending transparent lies and abstract rationalizations, the necessary actual real-life pre-cursors to predation. (Again, me, Escaping Room 101.)
But that’s enough. The conversation of civilization is carried out in books. You can find my entire argument in short form, including a discussion of the origin of the idea of Rectitude in biology and human upbringing, in Janio at a Point. You can find an overview, at least, of the ideas of Mothertongue and Fathertongue in my novel The Unfallen. In all cases, I work to carry the idea back to the object. Where the idea has nothing in common with the real life entity considered, it is not reality that is in error.
April 10th, 2004 at Apr 10, 04 | 4:27 am
Micha,
But we need not deal with such a complicated scenario. The point that you are trying to make can be just as easily made using the scenario of the lynch mob which will kill three innocent people unless the sheriff hands over a scapegoat. This example is often used to demonstrate an alleged flaw in utilitarianism. But I don’t see this as a huge flaw; isn’t it better to have one innocent person die than three innocent people die?
Not if I’m ‘that person’. I don’t think many people (except perhaps consistent consequentialists) would agree that their life ought to be sacrificed for someone else’s. (Would Swann agree to be exsanguinated to further the War On Terror? He seems willing to sacrifice me…)
Yes. Note, though, that I don’t speak for all consequentialists.
Putting human lives on a balance scale isn’t a really good idea, and here’s why: you are the smallest minority on the planet, Micha. So am I, and so are all of us. “Is there a less costly way to achieve the same goal?” What could be less costly than robbing/enslaving/killing one person to save everyone else in the group?
“My one-and-only life isn’t a fuckin’ resource, and I could give two shits how you think it ought to be “allocated”. — Me
April 10th, 2004 at Apr 10, 04 | 5:13 am
Kennedy wrote:
“What’s Bill going to do with his $1000? “
Lose it in his couch cushions.
The problem is the underestimation of the value of property in the discretionary hands of those who earned, created, or inherited it. I very much value the money in my couch cushions. I value it because it’s mine and if I ever take a notion to turn the furniture upside down to retrieve it, it will be there for me to distribute as I see fit. It would pain me greatly to think that some poor deadbeat had gotten his grubby mits on my loose change without my permission. So the negative to me exceeds any amount of mirth that my loose change can bestow on any family of wretched unfortunates.
April 10th, 2004 at Apr 10, 04 | 5:32 am
Well yes, and we see that when go beyond voluntary transactions people are very often not indifferent to different dollars. Often they will go to far greater lengths to protect the dollar they have than to earn another.
So which value is the consequentialist Robin Hood to use as a standard?
April 10th, 2004 at Apr 10, 04 | 5:55 am
So which value is the consequentialist Robin Hood to use as a standard?
I figured, from the original question, Robin Hood is only gauging magnitudes of value. For example, my great satisfaction of controlling that which is mine, versus one year’s worth of rent that a poor family could afford with my loose change. Unfortunately for the consequentialist Robin Hood, he has no way of gauging just how much my loose change means to me in comparison to the year of shanty rent it can buy someone who has done nothing to rate having my change- nothing, save for walking around as a black hole of need.
If Hood’s aim is to improve the general good, he can only miss his mark repeatedly when he attempts to redistribute wealth toward the needy or the perceived grateful. Robin Hood is a loser. He’s not even an effective consequentialist.
April 10th, 2004 at Apr 10, 04 | 10:27 pm
As a sidebar, Aristotle did not say that you should do good to make your soul better. In Ethics he says you should do good because doing good will make you eudaimonic (not only “happy”, but “successful” and “excellent” and “a model human being”). He attributes bad actions to ignorance of eudaimonia.
I haven’t read Plato recently enough to remember what he thought about it, and The Republic is too much work to go back and look. Off the top of my head, Socrates and friends never come up with a decent definition of justice anyway.
April 11th, 2004 at Apr 11, 04 | 12:37 am
There are some good arguments here for and against consequentalism, and I’ll try to address some of them in my upcoming piece about my angle on the philosophy. For now I’ll just stick with the simple answer to JTK’s question, although its already been stated by others.
While the immediate short-term consequence of transferring wealth from someone with very low marginal utility of money to someone with very high marginal utility of money may be positive, the long-term consequences are likely to make everyone worse off. This is for all the typical public choice / anti-state reasons: ie necessity of a state to perform the redistribution, a state which will inevitably grow and act in its own interests.
Hence while I do believe that a transfer from the rich to the poor is usually a net gain in a very myopic sense, I think a rule for making such transfers is a net loss. And to me the important and interesting question is how to design societies by choosing rules, not how to evaluate an individual action. To let short-term consequences direct our choices would result in the same stupid mistakes of liberals who think raising the minimum wage helps poor people and rent control helps tenants.
April 11th, 2004 at Apr 11, 04 | 2:35 am
John,
Not if I’m ‘that person’. I don’t think many people (except perhaps consistent consequentialists) would agree that their life ought to be sacrificed for someone else’s.
You’re quite right that I would not like to be the one person killed, but by the same token, I would not like to be one of three people killed either. The important question is: Which rule would you prefer if you did not know before hand which person you will be? In other words, let’s say you have an equally random chance of being one of the four people. Would you want a rule which condemns three people to death or a rule which condemns only one person to death? Your chances of dying are either one in four or three in four.
Damn, I’m turning into John Rawls…
April 11th, 2004 at Apr 11, 04 | 2:44 am
…I have not the time to write a short one”.
John asked the excellent question of whether diminishing marginal utility of money implies that wealth transfers from rich to poor are a good consequence. One might …