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Headaches
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.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on November 25, 2006 at 10:08 AM in Economics, Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
If somebody volunteers to die a horrible death to help alleviate a million headaches, I'd thank him kindly. I don't think that really answers the question, though.
Posted by: josh at Nov 25, 2006 10:40:07 AM
The coal mining analogy doesn't quite fit because any deaths which occur among coal miners are unintentional, and mining companies and others make reasonable efforts to avoid any deaths.
Posted by: Peter at Nov 25, 2006 10:51:30 AM
Oh dear. In one case the people in question have rights and in the other they don't (or he doesn't), and you can't even see the difference from a moral perspective? Go to the bottom of the class.
Posted by: ZF at Nov 25, 2006 10:54:22 AM
Surely the (unresolvable) problem in Tyler's example is that utility of living, or avoiding a headache, is only known to the person involved. We can only know the utility of one relative to the other for that individual, but we cannot compare between individuals.
In your example, we can only conclude that coal miners value the risk to their lives less than the compensation we pay them.
Posted by: mark adams at Nov 25, 2006 10:55:12 AM
If all electricty was good for was reducing headache symptoms by one second, I'd gladly give it up.
And other commenters have pointed out that people choosing voluntarily to be paid to take a degree of risk is morally different than imposing torture on the unwilling.
But you are as caught up in your ideaology as the Taliban are in theirs.
So you will never see a counter-argument in your life that undermines your cherished dogma.
Posted by: Contrarian at Nov 25, 2006 11:03:18 AM
You forgot the part I wrote: "(No, by its construction, this is not an exercise in risk reduction or Rawlsian reasoning. It is just a brute comparison of certain costs and benefits.)" There is no reason why we should prefer to transform a choice based on perfect information into a choice based on less information.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Nov 25, 2006 11:09:22 AM
There's also too little information and too vague of definitions.
Working with the headache example, does it make a difference if the death is accidental/incidental or deliberate? If it is a one-off, or a continuing process? If there were viable alternatives? If it was out of our control anyway?
Additionally, who defines what is a benefit? Currently, I benefit in thousands of minor ways from pain and tragedy of others. That's simply a fact. Is it morally justified? That really depends on where your basis of morality comes from. One death = 1 less second of headaches for billions. What happens when the equation changes to 100 death = 1 less second for thousands? 1000 deaths = 1 less second for 100s? 1 million deaths for a good parking spot on Tuesdays?
Does the number in any way change the moral equation? Does the type of benefit change the equation?
Some things to think about at least. I used rather absurd examples, in an attempt to illustrate the boundaries of this thinking. I would love to hear what you all think.
Posted by: Jordan Peacock at Nov 25, 2006 11:10:24 AM
I don't think you should underestimate the value of finding a good parking spot on Tuesdays.
Posted by: Martin at Nov 25, 2006 11:18:18 AM
Tyler,
there is no uncertainty that some coal miners will die producing coal. The fact that we can't identify which ones is morally irrelevant. The uncertainty gives us "moral wiggle room" to feel ok about ourselves but there really is no difference.
Most people suggest that rights or voluntarism makes the difference but that's simply a rejection of cost/benefit analysis. I'm fine with that but note that it takes all the air out of the example since from the rights perspective the size of the benefits and costs is irrelevant.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Nov 25, 2006 11:33:00 AM
So long as the person being tortured volunteered for his or her sacrifice. Otherwise, I would only be in favor of such things if I were personally in charge of choosing the one to be tortured.
Posted by: Ray G at Nov 25, 2006 11:44:21 AM
I'm always surprised to see economists -- who otherwise believe that inter-personal comparison of utility is a no-no -- make cost/benefit arguments where the costs and benefits fall on different sets of people. Am I missing something?
Posted by: tom s. at Nov 25, 2006 12:28:42 PM
Alex responds: "Tyler, there is no uncertainty that some coal miners will die producing coal. The fact that we can't identify which ones is morally irrelevant. The uncertainty gives us "moral wiggle room" to feel ok about ourselves but there really is no difference." This *might* establish that we should treat the uncertain case like the certain case, which is namely an irreducible interpersonal comparison. It doesn't establish that we should treat the certain case like the uncertain.
Per another commentator, it is also worth challenging the morphing of the small headaches into coal and the very foundations of civilization, etc.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Nov 25, 2006 12:33:24 PM
First of all, 50 years of being awake 16 hours/day is about a billion seconds, so the tradeoff seems roughly fair (at least numerically).
Philosophically, I think an even better example is driving. Would we trade a trip that is 1 second shorter for a 10^{-9} chance of dying? Since your probability of dying on the road is proportional to the fourth power of velocity, choosing to speed will shorten your trip but increase your risks of death (and speeding tickets, which I'll ignore). I did the calculation on my blog and it turns out that 65mph is not so far from an optimal speed. So I would say that everyone who goes 5mph over the speed limit would accept this trade-off personally.
The problem with the coal miner example is that equating lives with money is difficult, and introduces more equity issues.
Posted by: aram at Nov 25, 2006 12:40:13 PM
There is no such thing as ethics and problems such as Tyler's simply don't have a correct answer.
Posted by: josh at Nov 25, 2006 12:46:22 PM
The reason people balk at this tradeoff is that no-one would rationally bargain his life away, since he would be unable to enjoy his compensation. For an alternative approach, see David Friedman's paper, What is "fair compensation" for death or injury?
Posted by: guest at Nov 25, 2006 12:50:48 PM
So basically if we do anything today, it's the reason to continue doing it in the future? Gimme a break.
Posted by: A Tykhyy at Nov 25, 2006 12:54:12 PM
I'm not usually so blunt, but I have to say that's a pretty dumb scenario. In my mind there's no cost-benefit analysis which concludes that billions of people have any moral right to have their headaches alleviated by anyone else's sacrifice, including a hard day at work, being dunked in ice water for five minutes, having to watch an awful movie, etc., etc. That simply makes no sense to me. And the question posed is not equivalent to coal-mining and electricity.
Posted by: Xanthippas at Nov 25, 2006 1:15:43 PM
Check out the bottom of page 21 in Norcross's article "Puppies, Pigs, and People." It's a wonderfully provocative article, but I could have done without the grouping of Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush with Stalin and Hitler . . .
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~norcross/Puppies.pdf
Posted by: Rice Grad Student at Nov 25, 2006 1:18:21 PM
The easiest way to avoid the confusion of "voluntary" risks, such as when driving, is to note that there are also involuntary risks that we create for others by our driving. And all sorts of other behaviors.
And now that we've determined what we are, we're merely arguing about price.
Posted by: Mike Huben at Nov 25, 2006 2:11:15 PM
Besides the good points raised by others we should note that heat and electricity are themselves life-saving, so calculating the costs and benefits is tricky.
No doubt there are some uses that have no life-saving potential, but the marginal number of coal miner deaths associated with those uses may be quite small. And if we are going to inquire into how many marginal deaths these uses cause, shouldn't we also ask what the death rate for those miners would be in their alternative careers? What if they became cab drivers, for example? After all, none of us leads a risk-free existence.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Nov 25, 2006 2:28:21 PM
Only the market can give a proper answer to this question. Any attempt to centrally answer any such question of cost-benefit is a denial of the power and moral validity of the market process.
Posted by: Francois Tremblay at Nov 25, 2006 2:48:54 PM
The biggest problem with Alex's example is that he ignores the fact that the coal miners get compensated for their risk. Coal miners are always paid well compared to prevailing wage rate around them.
The only time that will ever not be true is if you used slave labor. Would Alex feel comfortable buying coal produced with slave labor?
As other people have pointed out, discussing morality without discussing what you consider to be foundations of morality is a pointless exercise.
But even apart from that, I don't think Alex's comparison between coal minders and someone having a terrible death is valid without reference to compensation.
What Alex is arguing is equivalent to arguing that it is okay for one person to be raped to bring billions of people pleasure. But I don't think he would be quite as comfortable with that analogy as the one he used.
Posted by: The Chieftain of Seir at Nov 25, 2006 2:52:59 PM
Prof. AT,
The coal miners don’t provide a mere second but a steady stream of electricity. Furthermore, I don’t think that mining is necessarily the equivalent of a “terrible and tortured death.”
The least persuasive is the one second factor. Torture and kill a tyrant for the liberation of millions, perhaps. But won’t we have a bigger headache knowing that we are so callous about human life and suffering for one second of comfort. Consider the original headache the cost of maintaining human dignity.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Nov 25, 2006 3:08:11 PM
I tend to agree with Alex's general sentiment on this question. However, one issue that might confuse our intuitions a bit on this particular example is the shortness of pleasure that each person receives. The value of one second of relief from a headache that will last hours seems very small, even after accounting for the short duration.
I think there is probably a synergistic effect of moments of pleasure being sequential so that one minute of continuous relief probably has greater utility than the sum of the utility of 60 one-second reliefs, each separated by a minute.
Posted by: jason braswell at Nov 25, 2006 3:13:20 PM
I agree with Alex that the uncertainty issue is a red herring. Take the original example (one torturous death for billions of alleviated headaches) and add some uncertainty about who will be the victim. Maybe his identity will be determined by lot. Does that really change the nature of the question? Any point the original poser of the question wished to make could, I think, still be made even with the added uncertainty.
But Alex's coal miner story is a still question-begging. When Alex says, "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," that's really not true. What we do everyday is let people voluntarily risk their lives in exchange for compensation. So this example provides no evidence that our "true" values countenance doing the same thing involuntarily and without compensation.
Now, maybe we *should* embrace a more utilitarian ethic, which seems to be Alex's point. But the coal miner example does not demonstrate that we already implicitly done so.
Posted by: Glen Whitman at Nov 25, 2006 3:34:45 PM
