1. Consider some unlikely situation.

2. In this situation, moral philosophy X says you should do Y.

3. Y is clearly immoral.

4. Therefore, X cannot be true.

In response, people who believe X often try to refute (2)—the idea that Y follows from X. In many cases, this is a mistake. Typically, the weakest point here is (3)—the assumption that Y is immoral. Even if we intuitively feel that Y must be immoral, our intuitions often misguide us; if we want to think clearly, we must apply rationality to our judgments whenever possible. We cannot reject a moral philosophy because of a thought experiment.

Intuitional and Rational Judgments

When making ethical judgments, people tend to rely heavily on intuition. An ethical system must contain some sort of intuition as the basis for a first principle; but it is important to select the right intuition. Most people who have not studied ethics (and even many who have) tend to act on whatever intuition they happen to feel in the moment, even if it contradicts some previous feeling.

When establishing an ethical theory, one should choose a few basic intuitions and then use rational principles to develop a consistent philosophy.

Once one selects some ethical framework, one can no longer make statements such as “Y is clearly immoral.” It must be proven immoral within the framework, not by our limited and often-inconsistent [1] instincts.

Below, I discuss three thought experiments that have been used to reject utilitarianism, and why they fail at this purpose.

Repugnant Conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion is stated as follows:

Consider two worlds, A and B. In worlds A, there exist a small number of people who are all very happy. In worlds B, there exist more people who are each less happy, but the total utility is still greater than that of situation A. According to classical utilitarianism, B is a better world than A.

Keep descending like this until we reach a world with many people whose lives are barely worth living. This world is “clearly” (i.e. intuitively) worse than world A.

For a somewhat more detailed description and some diagrams, see “Mere Addition Parodox”.

This is an interesting thought experiment because it effectively outlines numerous reasons why we cannot rely on intuition.

Most total utilitarians I have seen do not believe this is a problem, although many others try to create strange and convoluted alternatives to total utilitarianism to avoid the repugnant conclusion. (Some even go so far as to reject transitivity of happiness comparisons, which has to be one of the most absurd ethical positions ever espoused. If you’re rejecting mathematical axioms to make your ethical system work, you’re probably doing something wrong.)

It often surprises me how far some philosophers—ostensibly, seekers of truth—will go to avoid a little emotional uneasiness with their own theories. The whole point of creating an ethical framework is to find answers to moral questions in situations where our intuitions leave us blind. If we always try to mold our framework to fit every little intuition, then why bother with a framework at all? Why not just do whatever feels right, and give no regard to any abstract philosophical theory? Why not just live with the cognitive dissonance of arbitrary intuitions and forget about trying to behave consistently?

If we accept a few basic premises, we must accept that the best world is the world with the most happiness and least suffering. Therefore, it must be better to create a world with more people who are each less happy as long as the total amount of happiness increases. One should not be willing to reject the basic premises of utilitarianism just because one feels a little uncomfortable about the so-called Repugnant Conclusion.

The argument against the Repugnant Conclusion is not purely theoretical. There exists strong scientific evidence that our intuitions mislead us in this case.

It is a well-documented fact that humans do not deal well with changes in scope. This scope insensitivity causes us to misunderstand the significance of large numbers. One cannot coherently discuss the Repugnant Conclusion without understanding scope insensitivity. (If you have not read the linked article, please do so—here it is again.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

My own analysis of the Repugnant Conclusion is that its apparent force comes from equivocating between senses of barely worth living. In order to voluntarily create a new person, what we need is a life that is worth celebrating or worth birthing, one that contains more good than ill and more happiness than sorrow – otherwise we should reject the step where we choose to birth that person. Once someone is alive, on the other hand, we’re obliged to take care of them in a way that we wouldn’t be obliged to create them in the first place – and they may choose not to commit suicide, even if their life contains more sorrow than happiness. If we would be saddened to hear the news that such a person existed, we shouldn’t kill them, but we should not voluntarily create such a person in an otherwise happy world. So each time we voluntarily add another person to Parfit’s [2] world, we have a little celebration and say with honest joy “Whoopee!”, not, “Damn, now it’s too late to uncreate them.”

And then the rest of the Repugnant Conclusion – that it’s better to have a billion lives slightly worth celebrating, than a million lives very worth celebrating – is just “repugnant” because of standard scope insensitivity. The brain fails to multiply a billion small birth celebrations to end up with a larger total celebration of life than a million big celebrations.

From The Lifespan Dilemma.

See also: Torture vs. Dust Specks.

People even fail to properly account for scope when only considering their own personal well-being: see The Lifespan Dilemma.

Utility Monster

Another favourite is the Utility Monster:

Suppose there exists a being called the Utility Monster that gets more pleasure per unit of resources than anyone else, and does not suffer from diminishing marginal utility. According to utilitarianism, we should give all our resources to the Utility Monster and spend our entire lives as slaves to it.

The Utility Monster is illustrated by this webcomic.

The concept of the Utility Monster is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism, but I have no problem with the concept. If such a being exists, and utilitarianism says we should devote our lives to improving its welfare, then I absolutely agree that we should.

Surely this thought produces a negative visceral reaction. It used to have that effect on me, too, but I’ve gotten used to it. The fundamental principles of utilitarianism are too important to throw out the window just because a thought experiment makes me feel uncomfortable [3].

If we create an extreme thought experiment that we cannot hope to have an intuition about, and it conflicts with our intuitions, this proves what exactly? . . . If we consider utilitarianism as a suggested morality, then it doesn’t matter at all what our intuition is at the conclusion. Most people are born with an intuition that heavy objects will fall faster than lighter ones, and that the sun goes around the Earth once a day. Intuition simply doesn’t lead to truth. -rudster

Our intuitions properly guide us most of the time, but they do not help us much when we encounter novel situations. Our intuitional understanding of how objects move makes quantum mechanics harder to comprehend, and our perception of time makes relativity seem counterintuitive. If we existed as very tiny or very fast-moving beings, our intuitions would be suited to these situations; similarly, if we existed in a universe where beings do not experience diminishing marginal utility, our intuitions would better help us understand the Utility Monster.

Additionally, I find that I cannot grok the idea of a being that does not have diminishing marginal utility. Every time I try to imagine what it would be like to be the Utility Monster, I think, “Well, after Bill Gates gives me all his money, I won’t really find any value in getting money from Jane down the street.” It seems practically impossible not to think this way. But that’s not how the Utility Monster works.

And what is it like to get more pleasure per unit of resources than anyone else? This is even harder to comprehend than a being with no diminishing marginal utility. In short, we cannot rightly make the intuitional judgment that the Utility Monster is wrong if we cannot even properly conceive of it.

Arepo on Felicifia makes an interesting observation about the Repugnant Conclusion and the Utility Monster:

I’m surprised though that when discussing the [Repugnant Conclusion] and [Utility Monster] alongside, you don’t point out how closely related they are – each is conceptually a reductio of rejection of the other. Think having loads of just-barely-happy people sounds horrible? Then you must support condensing them into fewer more-happy-people. One entity getting all the utility is unjust? Then you presumably prefer it if we divide it into numerous proportionately-less-happy entities.

If our intuitions reject a world where all the utility becomes concentrated in a single individual, and they also reject a world where utility is spread out thinly among many individuals, this demonstrates as clearly as anything why we should not rely on them so heavily. When we consider the Repugnant Conclusion and the Utility Monster in unison, it becomes painfully obvious that our intuitions are not internally consistent [4].

Kill One to Save Many

There are many examples of moral dilemmas in which you must choose between killing one and letting many die. One of the most striking such scenarios is the organ transplant dilemma:

You are a transplant surgeon with five patients who each need a different organ: one needs a heart, one needs a lung, one a pancreas, one a kidney, and one a liver. You have no organ donors, and each of these people is on the verge of death. You are in your office, trying to figure out what to do, when a healthy man walks in for a checkup. You could kill him while he’s sleeping and harvest his organs, saving your five dying patients. Should you do it?

This was the hardest dilemma for me to come to terms with, until I remembered that we don’t base ethical decisions on our emotional reactions to thought experiments.

If this scenario exists in isolation, utilitarianism clearly dictates that you should kill the patient to save the five. But in reality, things are quite different. You would almost certainly be charged with murder and be thrown in jail for the rest of your life. More importantly, you would be unable to continue your role as a doctor, unable to help those who most need it. Even if you weren’t convicted of murder, no one would trust you anymore and they’d refuse treatment out of fear that you’d kill them. Knowledge of this event would spread, causing many to become fearful of doctors even when they most need medical treatment. In the long run, killing the one man to save the five would have greater negative consequences than positive.

Furthermore—and this point is worth repeating—you should choose a school of moral philosophy based on its foundations, not based on how well it accords with all of your intuitions. There is no moral philosophy that fully aligns with intuition, because intuition is internally inconsistent.

Moral instinct is grounded in reality. Thought experiments where you have to kill one person to save many—such as the organ transplant dilemma—seem somewhat absurd because they have so little connection to reality. A better thought experiment would be, “If you could save dozens of animals in factory farms for less than $100, would it be good to do so?” Such a thought experiment reflects an actual choice that exists in the real world—I suppose this makes it less of a thought experiment and more of a reality experiment. However, it is still enlightening to consider because many people simply glance over questions such as these. Real-life ethical questions such as this one do not encounter the same failures that many thought experiments do.

So let’s stop trying to use thought experiments to argue against an ethical theory. Instead, let’s consider the theory’s principles and its applications to the real world.

Notes

[1] To many, it may not be immediately obvious that moral intuitions are inconsistent. Here are some examples:

1. Sometimes morality is based on rules (murder is always wrong, no matter what), and sometimes it is based on consequences (lying is wrong, unless of course you have a really good reason). It cannot be both.

2. Morality lives in the world, which means there is no reason a priori to distinguish between killing and letting die (it may not be clear that the latter assertion follows from the former, but I have no room to justify it here and almost any consequentialist would agree). But killing is wrong and letting die is not.

3. The Repugnant Conclusion is bad and the Utility Monster is also bad (this essay explains these, and why our intuitions contradict each other in this case).

A thoughtful reader can probably come up with more examples.

[2] Derek Parfit is the philosopher who devised the Repugnant Conclusion.

[3] Interestingly, once I accept that my intuitions are wrong, they tend to fade. I used to feel a strong negative reaction to the thought of the Utility Monster being real, but now I just accept it in the same way that I accept The Monty Hall Problem—it used to seem unintuitive, but my intuitions have adapted to better model reality.

[4] It may appear that utilitarianism is also inconsistent if it endorses both the Utility Monster and the Repugnant Conclusion, but this is not the case. In both hypothetical scenarios, the option that our intuitions tend to reject is the option of greatest utility. For the Utility Monster, a single individual has more happiness than everyone else combined; for the Repugnant Conclusion, many individuals have more happiness than a few individuals.

[T]here is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.

The article asserts that increased demand in quinoa is responsible for perpetuating the impoverishment of people in Bolivia and Peru, but it fails to show to what extent the rising prices of quinoa is due to increased demand in the United States, and to what extent this harms the poorer people. It just takes it for granted that it must be Americans’ fault and it must be bad.

I’m not saying that Americans are not harming poor Bolivians, but that the leap of inference is dubious. Here are some possible reasons why it might fail:

•  Prices increased due to some factor other than increased demand in America.

•   The increased prices help provide income for poor quinoa farmers.

•   Bolivians and Peruvians have access to a variety of foods other than quinoa.

Again, these things are not necessarily true, but they could be and the article does not address them.

Then the author goes on a bit of a tangent about soybeans:

Soya, a foodstuff beloved of the vegan lobby as an alternative to dairy products, is another problematic import, one that drives environmental destruction [see footnote]. Embarrassingly, for those who portray [soy] as a progressive alternative to planet-destroying meat, soya production is now one of the two main causes of deforestation in South America[.]

Embarrassingly, meat-eaters are responsible for much more soybean consumption than vegans. Farmed animals eat a lot of soybeans; a pound of beef requires about five pounds of soybeans to produce. You’d have a much smaller impact (by a factor of five) if you just ate the soybeans.

The best part about this, though, is that the author admits it:

This footnote was appended on 17 January 2013. To clarify: while soya is found in a variety of health products, the majority of production – 97% according to the UN report of 2006 – is used for animal feed.

So this footnote essentially says, “Well, actually that entire paragraph was incorrect, but I’m going to go ahead and leave it there anyway.”

[A] rummage through the shopping baskets of vegetarians and vegans swiftly clocks up the food miles, a consequence of their higher dependency on products imported from faraway places[.]

I suppose the implication here is that veg*nism is not environmentally friendly, which is completely bogus. Eating meat accounts for a majority of most people’s greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for a disproportionately large amount of land and water use (see here for more information). Similarly, the article sets up quinoa as a replacement for meat, but misses the fact that meat has a much more strongly negative political and environmental impact than quinoa.

This article smells distinctly of “I love meat so I’m going to try to make up reasons why being vegan is worse than being an omnivore.”

I frequently see articles about how some particular food or product is harmful in some way. Lots of such products exist, and lots more don’t even have articles written about them. But how can we know which products are the most important to avoid? I would like to see some sort of scientific review that rigorously examines the impacts of hundreds of the most popular products and compares them along a number of dimensions (effect on local economies, labor conditions for the workers, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.). But it the absence of any such review, it does not make sense to avoid every product that some article says is bad. Instead, we have to focus on the most important choices. The choice to eat or not to eat animal products is by far the most important choice we can make as consumers. For more on why this is so important, please read “Animal Suffering”.

Edit: This article addresses some of the points raised here. In particular, it offers some anecdotal evidence that poor Bolivians have no difficulty affording food (although the evidence is difficult to verify).

This article specifically responds to the Guardian piece.

As a utilitarian, I’d say you should of course run into the fat man. That’s not very interesting. But what other reasons might one give to make one choice or the other?

As far as I can see, only two factors distinguish the trolley case from the fat man case. The first is that you are killing the fat man with your own hands, whereas you only indirectly kill the man on the track. [1] If one believes that this is the relevant distinction, it would be acceptable to program a computer to kill the fat man since you are not killing him yourself.

The second factor is that you use the fat man as a means stop the train—it would not stop without pushing him—whereas the man on the track only just happens to be in the way. In Kantian terms, you treat the fat man as a means to an end and not as an end in himself. Kant would say that you should program the machine not to kill the fat man.

But the real answer is that you should kill the fat man because doing so increases utility.

Notes

[1] I think this is the reason why most people switch sides between the trolley problem and the fat man problem—an aversion to direct killing, not actual moral reasoning.

Light Books
Practical Ethics, Peter Singer
Animal Liberation, Peter Singer
The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer

Heavy Books
The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick
Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham

Introductions
Consequentialism FAQ
Utilitarian FAQ
Common Criticisms of Utilitarianism

Organizations
80,000 Hours
Effective Animal Activism
GiveWell
The High Impact Network
Giving What We Can

Collections
Utilitarian Philosophers
Utilitarianism: past, present and future
Recommended Reading

Communities
Felicifia
Less Wrong

Essays and Blogs
Essays on Reducing Suffering
Reflective Disequilibrium
Greatplay
Measuring Shadows
Philosophy, et cetera
Reducing Suffering

When it comes to charity, there are three kinds of people:

• People who think every charity is good and give to whatever charity they want.
• People who think a lot of charities are bad, and therefore don’t give money to charity.
• People who think a lot of charities are bad, and therefore put some effort into finding the good ones.

Unfortunately, not too many people seem to fall into the third category. If only more people cared about being effective.

Category one is forgivable, because it often seems intuitively true that charity must do good, and it is considered taboo to criticize charities. But I don’t get category two.

Okay, that’s not true. I do get category two. It’s a fake justification. People do not arrive at this position by thinking, “I want to do as much good as possible, but I don’t know which charities are effective. I suppose I should just not give any money to charity and not look into it any further.” Instead, they usually think, “I don’t want to give to charity. And, you know, they’re probably not that effective anyway.”

While we are right to be skeptical of charities’ claims, I think it’s unfortunate that most skeptics are driven not by the desire to find the truth (i.e. which organizations are most effective) but by the need to justify their actions [1]. To put it another way, most people who are thinking in the right direction are doing so for the wrong reasons, and therefore will never reach the proper conclusion of their skepticism—i.e., that we should put care into finding which charities do the most good instead of simply picking our personal favorite cause.

Notes

[1] I don’t know for sure that most skeptics are motivated in this way, but anecdotally, it appears to be true.

1. People should follow Christianity because we will be more moral if we have to avoid eternal damnation.
2. The theory of evolution says that since people evolved from bacteria and have no immortal souls, human lives are worthless. Therefore, we can rape and kill each other and there’s nothing wrong with that.
3. The theory of evolution says that people should act selfishly all the time.
4. If free will doesn’t exist, people will be free to hurt and kill each other and won’t be held responsible.

Such arguments are bogus. Any new information about reality, if properly understood (that part is important), can only cause people to become more ethical. Morality is contingent upon the nature of the universe; the better we understand the universe, the better we understand morality.

Some people fear that if we investigate reality, we will discover truths that cause us to behave unethically. In some cases, people even wish to discount discoveries that already have been made—such as natural selection or the nonexistence of free will [1]—on the basis that these discoveries may lead to immoral behavior.

Someone may take the theory of evolution and use that as evidence that it is morally justified to behave selfishly at the expense of others. However, such a person would be misinterpreting evolution. Nowhere does the theory of evolution say that we should attempt to propagate our genes at the expense of every other living being; it merely explains that beings that do do that tend to survive and reproduce. Evolution tells us nothing about what we ought to value.

On the other hand, evolution (and, in fact, all branches of science) does tell us something about how to achieve what we do value. Once we understand how the world works, we can take it into account and more effectively work towards our goals. (This is Sam Harris’ thesis in The Moral Landscape.) For example, positive psychology provides insights into how best to make ourselves happy; and biology tells us which animals can feel pain and therefore deserve moral consideration.

It is possible to make a discovery that changes our conceptions about what is or is not moral. If such a discovery is made, what was previously thought to be immoral may be found to be moral, or vice versa. Some Europeans justified slavery by claiming that Africans were stupid or unable to take care of themselves, and that having a master was good for them; when science proved such claims to be false, it was impossible to scientifically support slavery.

Race and Intelligence

When anthropologist Samuel Morton found that Africans had smaller craniums than Europeans, he stirred up considerable controversy. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that Morton’s findings were the result of bias, but later studies affirmed Morton’s results and concluded that Gould had in fact been biased by his desire to affirm racial equality.

As modern neuroscience has shown, there is no correlation between cranial size and intelligence (at least between individuals of the same species). But imagine that it were discovered that Africans and those of African descent are indeed less intelligent on average than Europeans. What would that say about how we should treat them?

It certainly would not justify slavery: a person’s moral worth has nothing to do with her intelligence. If people took an enlightened perspective about this new discovery, it could only serve to improve the world. There would be no question that people of African descent could still be happy and contribute to society. If brains truly functioned differently for different races, a strong understanding of those differences could empower us to improve the education system by teaching in different and more appropriate learning styles. An outcome where a particular race becomes less happy could only arise because the science was not properly understood.

As I write this, I feel some stigma attached to discussing the possibility that people of African descent are less intelligent. I see three main reasons for this. The first is that, not so long ago, African-Americans were considered unintelligent by the large portion of Western society and currently it is taboo even to raise a hypothetical scenario in which they are less intelligent. The second reason is that they are probably not. Races tend to score differently on IQ tests (with Asians scoring the highest), but (a) this could be the result of environmental influences and biases (including stereotype threat) and (b) IQ is a very limited measure of intelligence (I find myself continually surprised when news articles use the terms “IQ” and “intelligence” interchangeably). No robust evidence has ever demonstrated that one race is more or less intelligent than another. If we treated black people as though they were less intelligent than other races, that would clearly be a problem. The third reason is that even if some races are more or less intelligent on average, there would still be a large amount of overlap. Africans tend to be taller than Asians, for example, but there are plenty of tall Asians and plenty of short Africans. Therefore, it would be unfair to treat all Asians as though they are short and all Africans as though they are tall. (Obviously this example is a bit silly since one can immediately assess how tall a person is, but it is meant only as an illustrative analogy.)

But when people are truly different, treating them differently is not a bad thing. Consider dyslexia. People with dyslexia generally perform more poorly on certain tasks than people without dyslexia. However, they are not stigmatized or oppressed (for the most part, at least); instead, they are given specialized education programs designed to help them learn more effectively. Such programs help dyslexics more easily perform certain tasks that they would otherwise have difficulty performing. And although dyslexics are treated differently, it would not make sense to create separate bathrooms for them or require them to sit at the back of the bus. People with dyslexia are normal in every way, and where they are not, society does not stigmatize but helps them (for the most part, anyway). And where society does fail to help them, it is not because we know too much about them; indeed, it is often because we know too little.

Irrationality

Sometimes knowing the truth makes things worse, but only if one holds irrational beliefs. For example, one may believe that the theory of evolution dictates that people should act selfishly all the time. If one held such a belief, it may be better to ignore the evidence in favor of evolution. Of course, such a belief has no rational basis.

Unfortunately, even mostly-rational people may have difficulty avoiding irrational emotional reactions to facts [2]. A rational person can sometimes override an emotional response, but even the best of us cannot behave completely rationally. Given what we know about human irrationality, how should we adjust our behavior?

Even if we acknowledge that humans behave in predictably irrational ways, we should still err on the side of investigating truth too much rather than too little. Knowing the truth rarely hurts; when it does, it is because we are behaving irrationally; when we are, we can often overcome our irrationality. Indeed, uncovering the truth may actually help us overcome our irrationality.

A particular truth can only hurt someone if he holds a false belief. For example, if he believes that if African-Americans are less intelligent then slavery is justified, it is better for him to believe that black people are not less intelligent. However, the best solution is to rectify the false premise: even if African-Americans are less intelligent, slavery is not justified.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong.”

To close, here is a quote by Richard Feynman:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Notes

[1] Free will is a persistent illusion, and many readers may doubt me when I claim that it does not exist. Sam Harris offers an eloquent and accessible explanation of free will, found here and continued here. I have also written on the subject.

<a name="2"[2] This is not to say that emotions are always irrational, or that rationality is opposed to emotion. Rather, some particular emotional responses can arise for irrational reasons. See Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Feeling Rational”.

Today’s article is an excellent piece that explains consequentialism and why it makes sense, and explains some of its implications. It is probably the best introduction to consequentialism that I have ever read.

Here’s an excerpt:

In the deep jungles of Clamzoria across the Freptane Sea is a tall and snow-capped mountain. Within this mountain is a cave which is the lair of the dreaded Hrogmorph, Slayer of Men. Encased within the chest of Hrogmorph is a massive ruby called the Heartstone, a ruby with legendary magic powers. The stories say that whoever wears the Heartstone is immune from the moral law, and may commit any actions he desires without them being even the mildest of venial sins.

Lured by the legend of the stone, you sail the Freptane Sea and trek through the Clamzorian jungle. You defeat the dreaded Hrogmorph, Slayer of Men, in single combat, take the Heartstone from his body, and place it around your neck as an amulet. Upon returning home, you decide to test its powers, so you adopt a kitten from the local shelter, then kill it.

You feel absolutely awful. You just want to curl up in a ball and never show your face again. “Well, what did you expect?” asks the ghost of Hrogmorph, who has decided to haunt you. “The power of the Heartstone isn’t to prevent you from feeling guilty. Guilt comes from chemicals in the brain, chemicals that live in the world like everything else – not from the metaphysical essence of morality. Look, if it makes you feel better, you didn’t actually do anything wrong, since you do have the amulet. You just feel like you did.”

Then Animal Control Services knocks on your door. They’ve gotten an anonymous tip – probably that darned ghost of Hrogmorph again – that you’ve drowned a kitten. They bring you to court for animal cruelty. The judge admits, since you’re wearing the Heartstone, that you technically didn’t commit an immoral act – but you did break the law, so he’s going to have to fine you and sentence you to a few months of community service.

While you’re on your community service, you meet a young girl who is looking for her lost kitten. She describes the cat to you, and it sounds exactly like the one you adopted from the shelter. You tell her she should stop looking, because the cat was taken to the animal shelter and then you killed it. She starts crying, telling you that she loved that cat and it was the only bright spot in her otherwise sad life and now she doesn’t know how she can go on. Despite still having the Heartstone on, you feel really bad for her and wish you could make her stop crying.

If morality is just some kind of metaphysical rule, the magic powers of the Heartstone should be sufficient to cancel that rule and make morality irrelevant. But the Heartstone, for all its legendary powers, is utterly worthless and in fact totally indistinguishable, by any possible or conceivable experiment, from a fake. Whatever metaphysical effects it produces have nothing to do with the sort of things that make us consider morality important.

This article was written by Scott Alexander Siskind. He has written a number of excellent pieces and frequently contributes to Less Wrong.

At the start of the essay, he determines that we have a moral obligation not to eat meat: “Our factory farms, which supply most of the meat and eggs consumed in developed societies, inflict a lifetime of misery and torment on our prey[.]” I would make a small amendment here: although he is technically correct that most of our meat and eggs come from factory farms, he understates the true proportion, which in fact exceeds 99% (according to data collected by the United States Department of Agriculture).

Having established this fact, McMahan moves on to discuss the subject of wild-animal suffering. He explains why it is a problem and why we should do something about it, and addresses a number of objections to his argument. His main thesis is that we should work toward the extinction of all carnivorous species once we gain the capacity to do so without serious environmental disruption.

McMahan also wrote a response to critics. It is well worth a read if you find yourself skeptical of his ideas after reading “The Meat Eaters.” McMahan makes a number of excellent points in this essay, but one thing he says is especially worth quoting:

The commentators’ gesture toward the alleged suffering of plants seemed no more than a rhetorical move in their attack on my argument. But if one became convinced, as some of the commentators appear to be, that plants are conscious, feel pain, and experience suffering, that ought to prompt serious reconsideration of the permissibility of countless practices that we have always assumed to be benign. If you really believed that plants suffer, would you continue to think that it’s perfectly acceptable to mow your grass? . . . Shouldn’t that elicit serious moral reflection rather than being deployed as a mere debating point?

This sort of thing happens all the time in arguments over ethics: someone makes an ostensibly-outlandish claim merely for the purpose of refuting an argument, and does not carry it to its logical conclusion. If plants really do suffer, for example, then we ought to consider the moral implications of that fact.

Expected Value of Voting

For those who care about maximizing the welfare of society, the importance of voting increases as the population increases. Below is the mathematical justification for this claim. These calculations assume that you know the correct person to vote for. If you wish to avoid math, you can skip to the next section.

Let v = a number representing the expected value of voting.
Let n = the population size.
Let p = the proportion of the population that votes.
Let e = the expected value per person of your voting.
Let f = a number representing the opportunity cost of voting [1].

If v is greater than 0, voting is worthwhile. If v is less than 0, it is not.

If you only care about yourself,
v = e * (n*p choose n*p/2) – f

v is only greater than 0 for unrealistically large values of e or very small values of n.

If you care about every citizen,

v = n * e * (n*p choose n*p/2) – f

In this case, v increases as n increases; that is, the larger the population size, the more important it is that you vote.

Here, (n*p choose n*p/2) represents the probability that the vote will be exactly tied, as this is the only case in which your vote decides the election. This calculation assumes that everyone votes randomly between the top two candidates, which is incorrect but still works reasonably well as a model. The next sections attempt to refine this model.

The following sections assume that the voters must decide between two candidates. Most of the reasoning also applies to voting on a proposition.

Polls

If we know nothing about an election, we simply assume that the population is evenly split among options, in which case our vote has a relatively high chance of swinging the election. But we rarely know nothing about an election. Here I will continue to assume that the election is decided by popular vote, because the electoral college makes things much more complicated.

Let’s look at the 2008 election between Obama and McCain. Imagine that we are back in 2008, and it’s the day before the election. Gallup predicts that Obama will win with 55% of the popular vote, and McCain will receive 44%. Gallup has a history of effective representative sampling, so it’s safe to assume that this poll has no systematic bias.

Gallup’s sample size for this poll is 3050 participants. Remember, the only situation in which your vote changes the outcome is if the election is perfectly split 50/50. If the American population does indeed vote 50% for Obama and 50% for McCain, the probability of Gallup getting the results they did is about 1 in 3 billion (p = 3.0E-8). This significantly reduces the expected value of voting. I do not have the necessary knowledge of statistics to calculate the precise expected value in this case, but I would guess that voting is no longer worthwhile.

The Electoral College

The above calculations assume that we use a popular voting system—which is not always the cause. Under an electoral system, determining whether voting is worthwhile is much harder to figure out.

If you live in a district that consistently supports one party, then there is no point in voting if you are just interested in changing the outcome of the election (although this may not be the only reason to vote, as I discuss below). If, however, you live in a swing state, voting is a smart decision as long as both candidates are about equally favored (that is, the more-favored candidate has less than, say, 52% of the vote). Read the polls to determine whether voting is worth it.

Third Parties

In the United States, third parties have virtually no chance of winning a major election. But by voting for a third party candidate, you express your support for that candidate and platform. The more votes a third party gets, the more likely it is that at least one of the main two parties will adapt itself to move closer to the third party.

Suppose, for instance, the Libertarian candidate gets 5% of the vote. Republicans, who tend to agree with Libertarians on most points, know that they can win over some of those 5% if they change their platform to work better for Libertarians. When I vote for the Libertarian party, I express my support and increase the likelihood that Republican candidates will align their political positions more closely with those of Libertarians.

Furthermore, by voting Libertarian, I express my support to the public. If Libertarians get enough votes, mainstream voters (and especially swing voters) will start to take their opinions more seriously. It may influence more people to vote Libertarian or vote to support libertarian-minded policies within their own party of choice.

Which Party Is Best

I suspect that this section may be the most contentious of this essay. Many people believe that politics is a matter of opinion, and that I cannot tell you which party is best. I disagree. Questions about political policy are simply questions about which policy will best increase the welfare of beings in the world. Answering this question is not always straightforward. For instance, what sort of economic policy will best reduce unemployment? Such questions have empirical answers, but we don’t always know what they are.

Often, however, we do know which policy is best, and people only disagree because some sorts of biases—typically, old-fashioned and religiously-driven conceptions of morality—affect their thinking. For instance, abortion is clearly morally permissible for at least the first trimester and there is no legal or ethical reason to deny homosexuals the right to marry or at least form civil unions. If people didn’t base so much of their ethics on Christianity, which holds all human life as sacred and condemns homosexuality, this wouldn’t be a problem. (Other religions cause similar problems in other nations.)

Selfishness also causes a lot of political disagreement. People often desire their own happiness over the happiness of others, which causes many very wealthy people to oppose tax increases for the upper brackets (even though evidence suggests that, over a certain level of income, money has no effect on happiness). People also value the citizens of their own nation over the citizens of other nations, causing them to support foreign policies that hurt the citizens of other countries. Additionally, they value the present over the future, causing them to neglect long term problems such as environmental issues.

Democrats have better policies than Republicans on the majority of issues that have a clear right or wrong answer (e.g. abortion, gay rights, animal welfare, stem cell research, the existence of anthropogenic global warming, etc.) [2]. They disagree on a lot of issues that are much harder to judge, such as welfare, fiscal policy, and national defense spending. (If you have some way of objectively determining the best policy on one of these issues, by all means let me know.) But among those issues where the correct policy clearly follows from some basic tenets of morality, the Democrats have the advantage [3]. Given what information we have, the Democrats look like the party whose policies best improve the well-being of society.

But neither party effectively addresses the issues that matter most. Wild-animal suffering represents the biggest source of suffering we know of, but neither party cares even remotely about it [4]. The next three biggest issues are human mistreatment of non-human animals, human-caused environmental degradation, and impoverished humans in the developing world. Democrats tend to care more about these issues than Republicans, but neither party cares nearly as much as they should. It appears that the party that gives the most attention to these issues is the Green Party of the United States. It gives a great deal of attention to environmental issues. And in addition, it is the only national party that seriously addresses animal welfare in its platform:

Cruelty to animals is repugnant and criminal. The mark of a humane and civilized society lies in how we treat the least protected among us. To extend rights to other sentient living beings is our responsibility and a mark of our place among all of creation. We call for an intelligent, compassionate approach to the treatment of animals.

We reject the belief that our species is the center of creation, and that other life forms exist only for our use and enjoyment. Our species does not have the right to exploit and inflict violence on other creatures simply because we have the desire and power to do so. Our ethic upholds not only the value of biological diversity and the integrity and continuity of species, but also the value of individual lives and the interest of individual animals [my emphasis].

The bold section is critical. Many politicians accept the value of biodiversity, even if they do not push for policies to support it; but very few recognize that individual animals have interests that matter.

The Green Party platform not only proposes actions to reduce animal suffering, but also acknowledges the moral significance of animals and calls for an end to the homo sapiens-centric way of thinking that is the norm. This position is extremely important in that it helps cultivate people’s feelings of caring for animal suffering.

Which Party to Vote For

Although the Green Party appears to increase the general welfare more than any other party, this does not mean we should necessarily vote for them. Rather, we must consider the political climate of the United States, and try to put our vote where it will have the greatest positive impact.

If you have the chance to vote for a Green Party candidate who actually has a high probability of winning, then by all means do so. But in most elections, the Green Party nominee is a fringe candidate with little hope of victory. In such a case, it still makes sense to vote for him or her—as was discussed above.

We usually cannot do much good by voting in the primaries for the Green Party (GP). We ought to support the Green Party message rather than any particular candidate—as far as I can tell, no single GP candidate stands out as having far better policies than the others. We support the GP message by voting for them in the general election, but voting in their primaries does not do much good.

Instead, we should vote in either the Democratic or the Republican primary, depending on which is more strategically advantageous. You could vote for the mainstream candidate that you most support or for a candidate in the opposing party whom you expect to lose to your preferred candidate in the general election.

In the primaries, a vote does the most good in one of the mainstream parties; but in the general election, you should express support for your favorite candidate overall, irrespective of how few votes you expect them to get.

Local Elections

Local elections have low turnout (often around 5 to 10 percent), so your vote has a greater impact. Voting for a strong third-party candidate in a local election, even if she has little chance of winning, this will push her up in the ranks and cause her to be taken more seriously. Should she receive enough support, she may choose to campaign vigorously during the next election season and may even win. Your vote has a relatively high chance of giving her the support she needs to make a serious local impact.

If anything, voting for third-party candidates in local elections is more important than in national elections. I think the best way to increase support for a party’s platform is to vote to support that party in local elections and try to get the party in control of certain districts. Once the party is considered mainstream in those districts, it can more easily spread its influence to other districts.

Is Voting Worthwhile?

It is unclear exactly how much good voting does, but donating to an efficient charity probably has a much bigger impact. If it takes you a half-hour to vote, and you had spent that time working instead, the money you would have earned likely could have done much more good than your vote.

Of course, it’s not always possible to get paid for just half an hour’s work. If you can find some way to do that, great. Otherwise, voting may still be a good idea because it would have a low opportunity cost.

It is definitely more worthwhile to vote in local elections, especially if you live in a district where you expect your third party candidate to be able to get some serious support. (A GP candidate probably has a much better chance in Berkeley than in Lubbock.)

In summary: Vote for a major party in the primaries and the best party in the general election. Don’t neglect local elections. Vote Green when possible and Democrat otherwise.

Notes

[1] When I refer to a thing’s “value”, I mean the extent to which it improves the well-being of individuals in the world. It may not be possible to strictly quantify the value or the opportunity cost of voting; even if it is possible, it is certainly not easy. But we can make estimations, which is sufficient to make this equation useful.

[2] Here I will briefly justify the claim that each of these issues has a clear right or wrong answer.

abortion: For about the first half of pregnancy, a fetus cannot suffer and cannot have interests. Therefore, we do not violate its interest when we kill it. Once the fetus develops the capacity to feel pain, abortion becomes more questionable, but I still think it is permissible. For a more in-depth explanation as to why, see Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics.

gay rights: Allowing homosexual couples to participate in society in the same ways as heterosexual couples makes them happy, and has never been demonstrated to have negative effects.

animal welfare: See Animal Suffering.

environmental issues: All scientific evidence points to the fact that human actions are having a significant negative impact on the environment, which will greatly harm both humans and other animals.

anthropogenic global warming: Scientists agree—global warming is real, we are causing it, and we need to act fast to prevent it.

stem cell research: The only argument against stem cell research (as far as I know) is that it violates the sanctity of human life, which is an unjustified position.

[3] The only exception I know of here is that Democrats often support government involvement on economic policy where most economists believe that free-market solutions work better. For example, most economists agree that school vouchers improve the quality of schooling, whereas many Democrats disagree.

Of course, Libertarians deviate even further from mainstream economic opinion. Nearly all economists support government stimulus in response to economic recession, a policy that most Libertarians tend to oppose. Furthermore, Ron Paul and his supporters advocate for the gold standard, but close to 100% of economists believe it will not increase price stability or employment.

In reality, it’s not as simple as “more government” or “less government,” and a party that simplifies it so much—as Libertarians often do—misses many important nuances.

[4] We do have plenty of laws about how to treat endangered species, but the intention here is to conserve biodiversity, not to promote the well-being of the animals. Such laws are either motivated by anthropocentrism (i.e. we need certain species to provide us with resources) or by the strange belief that biodiversity is inherently valuable.

If the purpose of morality is to maximize the happiness of sentient beings, as I often claim, then whether free will exists is irrelevant. In fact, whether free will exists does not matter as long as morality focuses on the consequences of actions, rather than their motives.

The traditional argument goes: if free will is an illusion, then we are not in control of our own actions, which means we cannot be held responsible for them. So it doesn’t matter what actions we take, right? We can run around killing people, right? Well, no. Our actions still matter just as much as they ever did: they affect the outside world whether they are the product of free will or the result of deterministic processes. Others are still affected by our actions. We still feel emotions, even if those emotions arise deterministically.

Right and Wrong

The question of what is right or wrong is still relevant. Some actions make people happy, and other actions cause people to suffer. A “good” action increases well-being, and a “bad” action decreases it.

The non-existence of free will has some implications regarding the definition of “ought.” Without free will, it does not make as much sense to ask what we ought to do, since we are unable to freely control our actions; we can only ask what we do do. One might conclude that morality itself is meaningless; but good and bad still exist, whether we are freely able to create them or not.

It is possible to make sense of “ought” by defining it in terms of consequences rather than strict moral rules. The question of moral obligation relates to what actions will likely bring about the best outcomes—we ought to increase happiness, and we ought not increase suffering, in the sense that increasing happiness is good and increasing suffering is bad.

It also makes sense in some situations to treat people as “good” or “bad.” People may not freely choose how they act, but giving them different kinds of feedback (for example, punishment and reward) causes them to behave in certain ways, and the best possible social arrangement would be one in which the feedback consistently encourages morally desirable behavior.

Justice

Once free will is out of the picture, we can actually make more sound moral judgments. Anthony Cashmore wrote an excellent paper on how free will affects the criminal justice system. In the paper, he argues that we should eliminate “the illogical concept that individuals are in control of their behavior in a manner that is something other than a reflection of their genetic makeup and their environmental history,” and that once we do so, the justice system will be much improved.

It is better to acknowledge the truth regarding free will and adjust our judgments accordingly than to continue to base so many important moral decisions on such a nebulous concept. We can make judgments on a purely consequentialist basis, and choose whichever course of action we decide will do the most good.

Let us ask the question: how might we change the justice system if we focus solely on consequences, and give no regard to the notion of free will? It might not actually be that much different. Our goal is to maximize happiness for as many people as possible (including the convicted). Sometimes the best way to do this is to imprison a dangerous criminal, not for retribution [2] but for the good of society. That said, prisons should be made as comfortable as possible for the benefit of the people in them (keeping in mind certain considerations, e.g. prison should not be more comfortable than poverty—otherwise, poor people would break the law specifically so they could go to jail). For more on this subject, see an essay by Cody Franklin.

Cashmore has a list of purposes for imprisonment, none of which has anything to do with free will:

To a), protect society; b), protect the offending individuals from society; c), provide such individuals with appropriate psychiatric help; d), act as a deterrent (the act of incarceration and the presence of a criminal code forming part of the environment [that influences people's actions]); and e), alleviate the pain of the victim.

Society ought to use these principles to enact a justice system, rather than focusing on retribution.

Moral Responsibility

It is commonly argued that if we do not have free will, then we cannot be held responsible for our actions. In some sense this statement is correct, but in another sense it is meaningless.

The traditional definition of moral responsibility would hold responsible the person or persons who caused some event. However, without free will, this definition does not make sense. A man who shoots his wife caused the trigger to be pulled, the trigger caused the bullet to fire, and the bullet caused the woman’s body to cease functioning. If the man was the first cause, he can be held responsible. However, he was not the first cause: his action was the direct result of previous actions, and completely determined by his genes and environment. The processes that caused the man to pull the trigger were the same sorts of processes that caused the trigger to make the bullet fire. The man did not kill his wife any more than did the gun, the trigger, or the bullet.

This traditional definition of moral responsibility is nonsensical. It has no concrete definition; arguments about whether someone holds moral responsibility cannot be resolved, because different people may adopt different definitions of the term.

Fortunately, the concept of moral responsibility is not concrete; it is an abstract idea created by humans to try to make morality easier to understand. It does not exist in reality. Once we understand that responsibility is a human invention, we are free to use it to whatever ends we want. Therefore, we should define moral responsibility in the manner that brings about the most favorable consequences.

It makes sense in some cases to treat people as though they are morally responsible for their actions, even though they aren’t. Similarly to why we identify good and evil, we can identify moral responsibility because doing so helps to clarify our ethical judgments.

Consider some concrete examples, taken from an article by Sam Harris:

1. A four-year-old boy was playing with his father’s gun and killed a young woman. The gun had been kept loaded and unsecured in a dresser drawer.
2. A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.”
3. A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.” An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral impulses).

In the case of the four-year-old, it does not make sense to treat him as responsible for his actions. He is unable to fully understand what he did, and holding him responsible would not teach him anything. To revisit Cashmore’s five reasons for imprisonment, none of them apply to this case, so it does not make sense to imprison the child: (a) he will soon grow up and learn to examine the consequences of his actions, and this event is unlikely to repeat itself, so society does not need protection; (b) children are easily forgiven, so he needs no protection from society; (c) his mistake did not stem from psychiatric troubles, but merely from ignorance; (d) four-year-olds are not in a suitable environment for deterrence to be effective (they are not usually familiar with the laws regarding four-year-olds), nor could they necessarily comprehend the concept of deterrence even if they were; (e) the family of the victim is unlikely to hold a grudge against a young child. Note, however, that some of the five reasons for imprisonment do apply to the father who left the gun unlocked, so it makes sense in some ways to hold the father responsible. Imprisoning the foolish father could potentially do some good.

For the second example, where the twenty-five-year-old shoots a young woman for fun, all five of Cashmore’s reasons are applicable. It makes sense to hold this man responsible for his actions because he was fully aware of what he was doing, and holding him responsible could prevent murders like this from happening in the future.

In the case of the man with the tumor, he may be likely to kill again, but he is not sane. Holding him responsible makes partial sense: society needs to be protected from people like him, but there is no way to deter his behavior since people like him are not acting rationally. Removing the tumor would be far more effective a response than imprisonment.

On some level, the absence of free will means that moral responsibility does not exist. However, it often makes sense to act as though rational people are responsible for their actions, because treating them as such will improve society.

Notes

[1] The compatibilist position has merit, and I can understand why one may prefer a definition of free will that allows for its existence. However, the definition I use—”the capacity to make a choice that ultimately is not influenced by any outside entity and completely unpredictable, but also is completely rational from the perspective of the entity making the choice”—makes the most sense in the context of this essay. Every time I refer to free will, I refer to this definition; all my arguments still hold water even if you prefer to use a different definition of free will.

[2] Here is an interesting piece on Less Wrong that helps to explain why so many people believe in retributive justice (i.e. “criminals deserve punishment”). To paraphrase:

Saying “People who commit crimes deserve to get hurt!” is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, prison is harmful, and no, criminals do not deserve to get hurt, but we’re going to imprison them anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.”