Sacrificing One for the Benefit of Many (Once Again) at Law & Society Blog

Sacrificing One for the Benefit of Many (Once Again)

Published by Hanno Kaiser November 26th, 2006 in Philosophy, Law and Society

It seems that we can’t get enough of this timeless problem. (Maybe that’s why it’s timeless.) This time, it is discussed at Marginal Revolution in the context of the implications of a zero discount rate. Alex Tabarrok writes:

Tyler asks, following philosopher Alastair Norcross, whether it could ever satisfy a cost-benefit test for one person to die a terrible and tortured death in order to alleviate the headaches of billions of others by one second. Tyler begs off with “a mushy mish-mash of philosophic pluralism, quasi-lexical values” and moral conceit. I will have none of this. The answer, is yes. The clearest reason to think that we should trade a terrible and tortured death of one in order to alleviate the headaches of billions is that we do this everyday. Coal miners, for example, risk their lives to heat our homes and to generate the electricity that drives this blog. We know that some of them will die horrible deaths but few of us think that we are morally required to give up electricity.

I object to Tabarrok’s analysis on two levels. First, consequentialism and the “summing up” of people that goes along with it, is undoubtedly a principle of greatest moral significance. Unlike most competing principles it is intellectually rigorous, autitable, and eminently practical. However, consequentialism presupposes a model of the person, because we are not summing real people up, we are summing up abstractions. This is not a shortcoming of consequentialism. Consequentialism does not purport to be or to contain a theory of the person. However, the choice of our theory of the person may impose certain limitations on what goes into the consequentialist calculus. Tabarrok’s “I will have none of this. The answer, is yes” seems to imply a model of the person without “absolute” rights, that is, a model in which the value placed on being free of headaches, v(-h), is fully commensurable with the value placed on not being put to a terrible death, v(-d). That is not to say that v(-h) is equal in “weight” to v(-d), but given the right multiplier, v(-h) * x > v(-d), in which case torturing one person to death to alleviate the headaches of many is morally permissible.

In my view, a more plausible view of the person is rooted in deontological considerations. Practical reason (starting from “I”) or considerations of recognition (starting from “you”) demand that we attribute individuals with a hard nucleus of rights - rights sufficiently hardened to resist the pull of consequentialist considerations that can only be restricted and in some instances overridden by conflicting rights. Once those minimal deontological requirements are satisfied, free reign may be given to consequentialism. In the torture/headache example, I submit, those minimal conditions are not satisfied. Thus, sacrificing one for the good of the many would be morally impermissible.

Does that mean that it is never morally permissible to sacrifice one for the good of the many? Unfortunately not, I think, even though life would be so much easier if it were. As much as the normative power of consequentialism is subject to the prior satisfaction of certain rights-based conditions, rights may similarly be constrained by a consequentialist override in extreme circumstances, e.g., if saving the lives of many (How many? I don’t know) with certainty requires the sacrifice of one. (That’s why I put “absolute” rights above in quotation marks.)

My second objection goes to the coal miner example. Presumably, the miner is doing his or her job voluntarily. Miners make a trade-off between risk and reward. The person tortured to death to alleviate the headaches of others doesn’t. The moral problem only arises in instances of “involuntary sacrifice.” Thus the coal miner’s voluntary trade-offs provide no basis for concluding that torturing someone to death for the benefit of others is morally permissible.

In this context, it is helpful to recall Jonathan Wolff’s article “Making the World Safe for Utilitarianism,” which I discussed earlier on this blog. Wolff lists four conditions (”fortunate circumstances”) under which consequentialism works. (To what extent basic rights are designed to bring about or to maintain those conditions would be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.)

There need to be regular opportunities of a similar nature. (Call this the assumption of “many chances”.)

No single loss (or likely repeated series of losses) creates a type of level of harm for any individual from which recovery is very difficult or impossible. (The assumption of “recoverable loss”.)

There is no reason to doubt that the probabilities run true. (The assumption of “true odds”.)

All relevant gains and losses can be quantified and compared to each other. (The assumption of “weak commensurability”.)

Technorati Tags: philosophy, moral theory, consequentialism, deontolology

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One Response to “Sacrificing One for the Benefit of Many (Once Again)”

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1 Ben Samuel Nelson Nov 26th, 2006 at 11:59 am

Wolff’s condition 3 (reasonable, unfettered odds) and 4 (”weak commensurability”) seem unarguably correct. For consequentialism to work, it has to be subjective, but always striving for objective correctness; so it is to Wolff’s credit that he adds the phrase “there is no reason to doubt”. And, of course, if we couldn’t compare sufferings or happinesses, even in some abstract, rough-and-ready form, then we couldn’t have consequentialism.

For conditions 1 (”many chances”) and 2 (”recoverable loss”), though, we need to pause and reconsider.

The many chances condition is phrased in terms of law and public policy, and not morality. When it comes down to policies that have a robust amount of data — for instance, say, incidences of fatalities when the driver is not wearing their seat belt — we have tons of data, and we can take its advice in terms of a policy. But this is not to say that conditions cannot deviate (in what Wolff calls “one-off” decisions), where the situation’s factors are all unique, and all need to be evaluated carefully. All this means that 1 shouldn’t be phrased in terms of absolute necessity by the author’s standards. It is not a necessary, condition, but rather, an informative thing to have.

(And this is not to say that we must enter blind into one-off decisions. It just means that we have to scrutinize the context relatively more.)

The “recoverable loss” assumption plays a huge role in decision-making across the board. It also seems clear that Wolff has intuitions that seem viable: we need to allow behavior that carries small yet unrecoverable risks. (To quote the worries of one venerable Mr. Simpson: “What if I got into the shower and slipped on a bar of soap? OhmyGod, I’d be killed!” Well, of course we should still take showers, despite the risk of unrecoverable loss.)

Nevertheless, it seems quixotic to me, precisely for the reason that Hanno gave. Sometimes, for utilitarianism, unrecoverable losses have to be allowed to happen in order to do the right thing, because on balance the alternative is worse. And it makes no sense to say that “unrecoverable loss” has been assumed in the calculation if that’s precisely the consequence that has been predicted and endorsed. And if this isn’t allowed, then one of the core intuitions behind utilitarianism falls by the wayside, which may be enough to close the books on it for good. Of course, I dispute that.

—

I’m having trouble with one of Hanno’s comments, that “consequentialism is not summing real people up”. If I interpret it in its strongest form, in the sense that the contextual factors involved in a particular act (including the features of the actor) are not taken to be the thing to examine in a consequentialism analysis, then I would disagree. If consequentialism (and utilitarianism) couldn’t (or doesn’t) deal with real actors, then it would be wholly alienated from making context-sensitive judgments. But clearly we can make such judgments, as we regularly do in ethics classes.

Rather, what I think what Hanno meant with the above quoted comments is that consequentialism doesn’t necessarily have a particular actor or theory of action in mind. For, he writes directly afterward that “Consequentialism does not purport to be or to contain a theory of the person. However, the choice of our theory of the person may impose certain limitations on what goes into the consequentialist calculus.” That’s surely true.

Also, I think that Hanno’s point about the ideal actor is on target so long as we’re speaking about the consequentialist’s approach to the habits of persons. But if we’re talking at that level of abstraction, it seems to me that we’re bound to start talking about rights as a matter of course; not because they’re a feature of the abstract actor, but because there are certain kinds of act that are more acquainted with the production of happiness than others, and those kinds of acts sit parallel with whatever kinds of rights that we might imagine. In other words, I see rights as an outcome of a utilitarian analysis at the level of the habit, and not as a precondition for the analysis itself. (I hope that makes sense.)

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