Four terrific posts by David Friedman, partly on psychic harm, partly on talking about psychic harm. I’d recommend these highly even if they hadn’t invoked my name.
Landsburg v Bork: What Counts As Injury?
Response to Bork and Landsburg
Why Landsburg’s Puzzle is Interesting
Our most recent nightmare scenario triggered some great discussion. (So did the earlier nightmare scenarios, which I’ll review in a day or two.) The conundrum was this:
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In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it’s imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are: A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple. All four people agree that if they die, they want to be well remembered. Therefore all four ask you, please, to choose A so that anyone who dies will be remembered by a loving spouse. If you care about the four people in front of you, what should you do? |
Commenters, interestingly, split pretty much 50-50 (though it’s hard to get an exact count because several equivocated). Many bought the argument that unanimous preferences should be respected (leading to A). About equally many bought the argument that the preferences of the dead don’t count, and it’s better to leave two happily married survivors than two grieving widows/widowers (leading to B).
A few highlights:
Rush Limbaugh is under fire for responding in trademark fashion to the congressional testimony of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who wants you to pay for her contraception. If the rest of us are to share in the costs of Ms. Fluke’s sex life, says Rush, we should also share in the benefits, via the magic of online video. For this, Rush is accused of denying Ms. Fluke her due respect.
But while Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty. I expect there are respectable arguments for subsidizing contraception (though I am skeptical that there are arguments sufficiently respectable to win me over), but Ms. Fluke made no such argument. All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.
To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.
One thing I like about the study of economics is that it fosters compassion. When part of your job is to predict human behavior, you quickly learn the value of understanding other people’s problems. When the other part of your job is ferreting out the unseen global consequences of our choices, you’ve taken the first step toward caring about those consequences.
For example: Suppose a guy with no health insurance and no assets shows up at a hospital emergency room with an urgent life-threatening condition. Should you let him die? Ordinary compassion says no. The heightened compassion of the economist says, at the very least, maybe.
First, a policy of providing emergency health care to everyone is pretty much the same thing as a policy of providing emergency health insurance to everyone. It was specified here that this was a guy who didn’t want health insurance. So let’s recognize for starters that such a policy runs counter to — I am tempted to say runs roughshod over — the guy’s own revealed preference. It’s an odd sort of compassion that forces people to buy things they don’t want.
Now you might object that nobody’s forcing this guy to buy emergency health care; we’re trying to give him emergency health care. Not so fast. Here’s the first place where a little economic training goes to hone one’s sense of compassion: The emergency health insurance we’re foisting on this guy has a cost. We can spend that money on emergency rooms or we can spend it on a myriad of other things the guy might prefer. How is it compassionate to give him one thing when he prefers another?
This is particularly true if the guy happens to be very poor. Poor people have a lot of problems, and emergency health care is only one of them. They need better education, they need better transportation, and they need a little help buying groceries.
There is room for lots of debate and lots of disagreement about how much we as a society should be spending to help poor people. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is: Given that you’ve decided to spend an extra such-and-such many dollars a year helping poor people, why would you spend it in this particular way rather than one of the many other ways they could use it? For God’s sake, why not at least ask them if they’d rather have the cash?
The ever-insightful philosopher Peter Smith has a number of interesting things to say about abortion, but I found one of those things particularly striking — partly because I don’t recall ever having thought of it before, and partly because, in retrospect, I don’t see how I could have failed to think of it.
Namely: The argument is made that zygotes/embryoes/fetuses, even at a very early stage, have the full moral status of human beings. Yet if that were true, surely we’d want to divert a substantial portion of the medical research budget away from relatively minor scourges like, say, cancer, to the spontaneous abortions that take the lives of something like 30% of these full-fledged humans. In a typical year, there are about 8 million cancer deaths worldwide; the number of early-stage spontaneous abortions must be at least twice that.
In Smith’s words:
very few of us are worried by the fact that a very high proportion of conceptions quite spontaneously abort. We don’t campaign for medical research to reduce that rate (nor do opponents of abortion campaign for all women to take drugs to suppress natural early abortion). Compare: we do think it is a matter for moral concern that there are high levels of infant mortality in some countries, and campaign and give money to help reduce that rate.
Smith is struck by the fact that this attitude is very widespread; I am more struck by the fact that it seems to be very widespread even among those who characterize themselves as pro-life.
By now you’ve probably encountered one of the various “do you push the fat man in front of the subway train to stop it from running over five innocent people trapped on the tracks?” puzzles that moral philosophers have been using lately to distinguish the consequentialists (who care only about ends) from the deontologists (who care also about means). (I invoked some of these puzzles, in a slightly non-conventional way, in Chapters 16 and 17 of The Big Questions.)
Now come psychologists Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro to report that choosing what they call the “utilitarian” solution (by which they mean the consequentialist solution, though one might have more faith in their scholarship if they’d used the accurate word) is correlated with higher scores on measures of psychopathy, machiavellianism, and “life meaninglessness”. Those who would push the fat man are more likely to agree with statements like “I like to see fistfights” or “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” or “When you think about it, life is not worth the effort of getting up in the morning”. In other words, they are what we tend to think of as an unpleasant bunch.
But you see, here’s the thing: Bartels and Pizarro did the wrong test. Because in every one of the dozen or so moral dilemmas presented to the subjects, they asked: Would you shoot the crewmember? or would you execute one of the hostages? or would you flip off the switch to the ventilator? — which doesn’t get to the moral issues at all. The moral issue is this: In your opinion, should you shoot the crewmember or execute the hostge or flip the switch? The researchers never asked those questions, so we have no idea what the subjects’s opinions were.
Tell me a story about 20 children trapped in a burning building and ask me if I think I should rush in to save them. My answer is yes. Now ask me if I would. If I’m honest, I am very unsure I would do the right thing.
So what do we learn from this research? Here’s one interpretation: Maybe most people agree that you should push the fat man, and most people realize that they themselves would shrink from this moral duty out of squeamishness (just as most people agree that you should save the children from the fire, and most realize they might shirk this moral duty). Therefore they answer “No, I would not push the fat man.” But it’s only the psychopaths and Machiavellians who exaggerate their own moral virtues by claiming that they would rise to this particular occasion.
Bill Gates is walking through the desert carrying a bottle of water. He passes a man who is half dead of thirst. Should he offer the man a drink? Should the law require him to?
We’ve been talking about economic efficiency and why it’s a good thing to care about. Today I want to look at this hardest of cases through the efficiency lens.
Let’s suppose Bill’s water is worth, say, $10,000 to him. He’d be willing to pay that much for it, and he wouldn’t cheerfully sell it for less. Why such a high number? It’s not because Bill enjoys his water any more than you or I do — it’s just because Bill happens to be filthy rich.
And the dying fellow? He’s willing to pay up to $100 for that water. He’d pay more if he had it, but $100 happens to be all he has in the world.
Should the law require Bill to give up his water? And regardless of the law, what’s his moral obligation?
A few observations:
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