The moral sphere needn’t work like a threshold, where one should extend equal concern to everyone within the sphere and no concern at all to anyone outside it. My moral beliefs are not cosmopolitan—I think it is morally right to care more for my family than for absolute strangers. In fact, I think it is a huge failing of standard utilitarianism that it doesn’t deliver this verdict (without having to rely on post-hoc contortions about long-term utility benefits). I also think it is morally acceptable to care more for people cognitively similar to me than for people cognitively distant (people with radically different interests/beliefs/cultural backgrounds).
This doesn’t mean that I don’t have any moral concern at all for the cognitively distant. I still think they’re owed the usual suite of liberal rights, and that I have obligations of assistance to them, etc. It’s just that I would save the life of one of my friends over the lives of, say, three random Japanese people, and I consider this the right thing to do.
I follow a similar heuristic when I move across species. I think we owe the great apes more moral consideration than we owe, say, dolphins. I don’t eat any mammals but I eat chicken.
The idea of a completely cosmopolitan ethic just seems bizarre to me. I can see why one would be motivated to adopt it if the only alternative were caring about some subset of people/sentient beings and not caring at all about anyone else. Then there would be something arbitrary about where one draws the line. But this is not the most plausible alternative. One could have a sphere of moral concern that doesn’t just stop suddenly but instead attenuates with distance.
The morality you suggest is what Derek Parfit calls collectively self-defeating. This means that if everyone were to follow it perfectly, there could be empirical situations where your actual goals, namely the well-being of those closest to you, are achieved less well than they would be if everyone followed a different moral view. So there could be situations in which people have more influence on the well-being of the family of strangers, and if they’d all favor their own relatives, everyone would end up worse off, despite everyone acting perfectly moral. Personally I want a world where everyone acts perfectly moral to be as close to Paradise as is empirically possible, but whether this is something you are concerned about is a different question (that depends on what question your seeking to answer by coming up with a coherent moral view).
By this reasoning everyone should give all their money and resources to charity (except to the extent that they need some of their resources to keep their job and make money).
People are motivated to do things that make money because the money benefits themselves and their loved ones. Many such things are also beneficial to everyone, either directly (inventors, for instance, or people who manufacture useful goods), or indirectly (someone who is just willing to work hard because working hard benefits themselves, thus producing more and improiving the economy). In a world where everyone gave their money to random strangers and kept them at an equal level of wealth, nobody would be able to make any money (since 1) any money they made would be accompanied by a reduction by the money other people gave them, and 2) they would feel (by hypothesis) obligated to give away the proceeds anyway). This would mean that money as a motivation would no longer exist, and we would lose everything that we gain when money is a motivation. Thts would be bad.
Even if you modified the rule to “I should give money to people so as to arranbge an equal level of wealth except where necessary to provide motivation”, in deciding exactly who gets your money you’d essentially have a planned economy done piecemeal by billions of individual decisions. Unlike a normal planned economy, it wouldn’t be imposed from the top, but it would have the same problem as a normal planned economy in that there’s really nobody competent to plan such a thing. The result would be disaster.
So overall it would be a better world if people kept the money they made even if someone else could use it more than they could.
Furthermore, the state where everyone acts this way is unstable. Even if your family would be better off if everyone acted that altruistically, your family would be worse off if half the world acted that way and you and they were part of that half.
Yes. At least as long as there are problems in the world. What’s wrong with that?
Everyone, including nonhumans, would have their interests/welfare-function fulfilled as well as possible. If I had to determine the utility function of moral agents before being placed into the world in any position at random, I would choose some form of utilitarianism from a selfish point of view because it maximizes my expected well-being. If doing the “morally right” thing doesn’t make the world a better place for the sentient beings in the world, I don’t see a reason to call it “right”. Also note that this is not an all-or-nothing issue, it seems unfruitful to single out only those actions that produce the perfect outcome, or the perfect outcome in expectation. Every improvement into the right direction counts, because every improvement leads to someone else being better off.
If all the agents in the situation acted according to utilitarianism, everyone would be better off. To the extent that everyone acting according to common sense morality predictably fails to bring about the best of all possible worlds in this situation, and to the extent that one cares about this fact, this constitutes an argument against common sense morality.
Of course, if decision theory or game theory could make those agents cooperate successfully (so they don’t do predictably worse than other moralities anymore) in all logically possible situations, then the objection disappears. I see no reason to assume this, though.
This seems nonsensical; a utility function does not prescribe actions. If I care about my family most, but acting in a certain way will cause them to be worse off, then I won’t act that way. In other words, if everyone acting perfectly moral causes everyone to end up worse off, then by definition, at least some people were not acting perfectly moral.
The problem is not with your actions, but with the actions of all the others (who are following the same general kind of utility function but because your utility function is agent-relative, they use different variables, i.e. they care primarily about their family and friend as opposed to yours). However, I was in fact wondering whether this problem disappears if we make the agents timeless (or whatever does the job), so they would cooperate with each other to avoid the suboptimal outcome. This is seems fair enough since acting “perfectly moral” seems to imply the best decision theory.
Does this solve the problem? I think not; we could tweak the thought experiment further to account for it: we could imagine that due to empirical circumstances, such cooperation is prohibited. Let’s assume that the agents lack the knowledge that the other agents are timeless. Is this an unfair addendum to the scenario? I don’t see why, because given the empirical situation (which seems perfectly logically possible) the agents find themselves in, the moral algorithm they collectively follow may still lead to results that are suboptimal for everyone concerned.
No, but you need some decision theory to go with your utility function, and I was considering the possibility that Parfit merely pointed out a flaw of CDT and not a flaw of common sense morality. However, given that we can still think of situations where common sense morality (no matter the decision theory) executed by everyone does predictably worse for everyone concerned than some other theory, Parfit’s objection still stands.
(Incidentally, I suspect that there could be situations where modifying your utility function is a way to solve a prisoner’s dilemma, but that wasn’t what I meant here.)
It seems implausible to me that there is any ethical decision procedure that human beings (rather than idealized perfectly informed and perfectly rational super-beings) could follow that wouldn’t be collectively self-defeating in this sense. Do you (or Parfit) have an example of one that isn’t?
Anyway, I don’t see this as a huge problem. First, I’m pretty sure I’m never going to live in a world (or even a close approximation to one) where everyone adheres to my moral beliefs perfectly. So I don’t see why the state of such a world should be relevant to my moral beliefs. Second, my moral beliefs are ultimately beliefs about which consequences—which states of the world—are best, not beliefs about which actions are best. If there was good evidence that acting in a certain manner (in the aggregate) wasn’t effective at producing morally better states of affairs, then I wouldn’t advocate acting in that manner.
But I am not convinced that following a cosmopolitan decision procedure (or advocating that others follow one) would empirically be an effective means to achieving my decidedly non-cosmopolitan moral ends. Perhaps if everyone in the world mimicked my moral behavior (or did what I told them) it would be, but alas, that is not the case.
Utilitarianism is not collectively self-defeating, but then there’d be no room for non-cosmopolitan moral ends.
(rather than idealized perfectly informed and perfectly rational super-beings)
This part shouldn’t make a difference. If humans are too irrational to directly follow utilitarianism (U), then U implies they should come up with easier/less dangerous rules of thumb that will, on average, produce the most utility. This is termed “indirectly individually self defeating”, if you have a theory that implies it would be best to follow some other theory. Parfit concludes, and I agree with him here, that this is not a reason to reject U. U doesn’t imply that one ought to actively implement utilitarianism, it only wants you to bring about the best consequences regardless of how this happens.
If humans are too irrational to directly follow utilitarianism (U), then U implies they should come up with easier/less dangerous rules of thumb that will, on average, produce the most utility.
This is a pretty dubious move. Why think there will be easy to follow rules that will maximize aggregate utility? And even if such rules exist, how would we go about discovering them, given that the reason we need them in the first place is due to our inability to fully predict the consequences of our actions and their attached utilities?
Do you just mean that we should pick easy to follow rules that tend to produce more utility than other sets of easy to follow rules (as far as we can figure out), but not necessarily ones that maximize utility relative to all possible patterns of behavior? In that case, I don’t see why your utilitarianism isn’t collectively self-defeating according to the definition you gave. A world in which everyone acts according to such rules will not be a world that is as close to the utilitarian Paradise as empirically possible. After all, it seems entirely empirically possible for people to accurately recognize particular situations where actions contrary to the rules produce higher utility.
Also note that the view you outlined is often concerned with the question of helping others. When it comes to not harming others, many people would agree with the declaration of human rights that inflicting suffering is equally bad regardless of one’s geographical or emotional proximity to the victims. Personal vegetarianism is an instance of not harming.
I disagree with cosmopolitanism when it comes to “not harming” as well. I think needlessly inflicting suffering on human beings is always really bad, but it is worse if, say, you do it to your own children rather than to a random stranger’s.
The moral sphere needn’t work like a threshold, where one should extend equal concern to everyone within the sphere and no concern at all to anyone outside it. My moral beliefs are not cosmopolitan—I think it is morally right to care more for my family than for absolute strangers. In fact, I think it is a huge failing of standard utilitarianism that it doesn’t deliver this verdict (without having to rely on post-hoc contortions about long-term utility benefits). I also think it is morally acceptable to care more for people cognitively similar to me than for people cognitively distant (people with radically different interests/beliefs/cultural backgrounds).
This doesn’t mean that I don’t have any moral concern at all for the cognitively distant. I still think they’re owed the usual suite of liberal rights, and that I have obligations of assistance to them, etc. It’s just that I would save the life of one of my friends over the lives of, say, three random Japanese people, and I consider this the right thing to do.
I follow a similar heuristic when I move across species. I think we owe the great apes more moral consideration than we owe, say, dolphins. I don’t eat any mammals but I eat chicken.
The idea of a completely cosmopolitan ethic just seems bizarre to me. I can see why one would be motivated to adopt it if the only alternative were caring about some subset of people/sentient beings and not caring at all about anyone else. Then there would be something arbitrary about where one draws the line. But this is not the most plausible alternative. One could have a sphere of moral concern that doesn’t just stop suddenly but instead attenuates with distance.
The morality you suggest is what Derek Parfit calls collectively self-defeating. This means that if everyone were to follow it perfectly, there could be empirical situations where your actual goals, namely the well-being of those closest to you, are achieved less well than they would be if everyone followed a different moral view. So there could be situations in which people have more influence on the well-being of the family of strangers, and if they’d all favor their own relatives, everyone would end up worse off, despite everyone acting perfectly moral. Personally I want a world where everyone acts perfectly moral to be as close to Paradise as is empirically possible, but whether this is something you are concerned about is a different question (that depends on what question your seeking to answer by coming up with a coherent moral view).
By this reasoning everyone should give all their money and resources to charity (except to the extent that they need some of their resources to keep their job and make money).
That’s not much of a reductio ad absurdum. It would be much better if people did that, or at least moved a lot in that direction.
People are motivated to do things that make money because the money benefits themselves and their loved ones. Many such things are also beneficial to everyone, either directly (inventors, for instance, or people who manufacture useful goods), or indirectly (someone who is just willing to work hard because working hard benefits themselves, thus producing more and improiving the economy). In a world where everyone gave their money to random strangers and kept them at an equal level of wealth, nobody would be able to make any money (since 1) any money they made would be accompanied by a reduction by the money other people gave them, and 2) they would feel (by hypothesis) obligated to give away the proceeds anyway). This would mean that money as a motivation would no longer exist, and we would lose everything that we gain when money is a motivation. Thts would be bad.
Even if you modified the rule to “I should give money to people so as to arranbge an equal level of wealth except where necessary to provide motivation”, in deciding exactly who gets your money you’d essentially have a planned economy done piecemeal by billions of individual decisions. Unlike a normal planned economy, it wouldn’t be imposed from the top, but it would have the same problem as a normal planned economy in that there’s really nobody competent to plan such a thing. The result would be disaster. So overall it would be a better world if people kept the money they made even if someone else could use it more than they could.
Furthermore, the state where everyone acts this way is unstable. Even if your family would be better off if everyone acted that altruistically, your family would be worse off if half the world acted that way and you and they were part of that half.
Yes. At least as long as there are problems in the world. What’s wrong with that?
Everyone, including nonhumans, would have their interests/welfare-function fulfilled as well as possible. If I had to determine the utility function of moral agents before being placed into the world in any position at random, I would choose some form of utilitarianism from a selfish point of view because it maximizes my expected well-being. If doing the “morally right” thing doesn’t make the world a better place for the sentient beings in the world, I don’t see a reason to call it “right”. Also note that this is not an all-or-nothing issue, it seems unfruitful to single out only those actions that produce the perfect outcome, or the perfect outcome in expectation. Every improvement into the right direction counts, because every improvement leads to someone else being better off.
That’s a game theory/decision theory problem, not a problem with the utility function.
If all the agents in the situation acted according to utilitarianism, everyone would be better off. To the extent that everyone acting according to common sense morality predictably fails to bring about the best of all possible worlds in this situation, and to the extent that one cares about this fact, this constitutes an argument against common sense morality.
Of course, if decision theory or game theory could make those agents cooperate successfully (so they don’t do predictably worse than other moralities anymore) in all logically possible situations, then the objection disappears. I see no reason to assume this, though.
This seems nonsensical; a utility function does not prescribe actions. If I care about my family most, but acting in a certain way will cause them to be worse off, then I won’t act that way. In other words, if everyone acting perfectly moral causes everyone to end up worse off, then by definition, at least some people were not acting perfectly moral.
The problem is not with your actions, but with the actions of all the others (who are following the same general kind of utility function but because your utility function is agent-relative, they use different variables, i.e. they care primarily about their family and friend as opposed to yours). However, I was in fact wondering whether this problem disappears if we make the agents timeless (or whatever does the job), so they would cooperate with each other to avoid the suboptimal outcome. This is seems fair enough since acting “perfectly moral” seems to imply the best decision theory.
Does this solve the problem? I think not; we could tweak the thought experiment further to account for it: we could imagine that due to empirical circumstances, such cooperation is prohibited. Let’s assume that the agents lack the knowledge that the other agents are timeless. Is this an unfair addendum to the scenario? I don’t see why, because given the empirical situation (which seems perfectly logically possible) the agents find themselves in, the moral algorithm they collectively follow may still lead to results that are suboptimal for everyone concerned.
You don’t follow a utility function. Utility functions don’t prescribe actions.
… are you suggesting that we solve prisoner’s dilemmas and similar problems by modifying our utility function?
OK, bad choice of words.
No, but you need some decision theory to go with your utility function, and I was considering the possibility that Parfit merely pointed out a flaw of CDT and not a flaw of common sense morality. However, given that we can still think of situations where common sense morality (no matter the decision theory) executed by everyone does predictably worse for everyone concerned than some other theory, Parfit’s objection still stands.
(Incidentally, I suspect that there could be situations where modifying your utility function is a way to solve a prisoner’s dilemma, but that wasn’t what I meant here.)
It seems implausible to me that there is any ethical decision procedure that human beings (rather than idealized perfectly informed and perfectly rational super-beings) could follow that wouldn’t be collectively self-defeating in this sense. Do you (or Parfit) have an example of one that isn’t?
Anyway, I don’t see this as a huge problem. First, I’m pretty sure I’m never going to live in a world (or even a close approximation to one) where everyone adheres to my moral beliefs perfectly. So I don’t see why the state of such a world should be relevant to my moral beliefs. Second, my moral beliefs are ultimately beliefs about which consequences—which states of the world—are best, not beliefs about which actions are best. If there was good evidence that acting in a certain manner (in the aggregate) wasn’t effective at producing morally better states of affairs, then I wouldn’t advocate acting in that manner.
But I am not convinced that following a cosmopolitan decision procedure (or advocating that others follow one) would empirically be an effective means to achieving my decidedly non-cosmopolitan moral ends. Perhaps if everyone in the world mimicked my moral behavior (or did what I told them) it would be, but alas, that is not the case.
Utilitarianism is not collectively self-defeating, but then there’d be no room for non-cosmopolitan moral ends.
This part shouldn’t make a difference. If humans are too irrational to directly follow utilitarianism (U), then U implies they should come up with easier/less dangerous rules of thumb that will, on average, produce the most utility. This is termed “indirectly individually self defeating”, if you have a theory that implies it would be best to follow some other theory. Parfit concludes, and I agree with him here, that this is not a reason to reject U. U doesn’t imply that one ought to actively implement utilitarianism, it only wants you to bring about the best consequences regardless of how this happens.
This is a pretty dubious move. Why think there will be easy to follow rules that will maximize aggregate utility? And even if such rules exist, how would we go about discovering them, given that the reason we need them in the first place is due to our inability to fully predict the consequences of our actions and their attached utilities?
Do you just mean that we should pick easy to follow rules that tend to produce more utility than other sets of easy to follow rules (as far as we can figure out), but not necessarily ones that maximize utility relative to all possible patterns of behavior? In that case, I don’t see why your utilitarianism isn’t collectively self-defeating according to the definition you gave. A world in which everyone acts according to such rules will not be a world that is as close to the utilitarian Paradise as empirically possible. After all, it seems entirely empirically possible for people to accurately recognize particular situations where actions contrary to the rules produce higher utility.
Also note that the view you outlined is often concerned with the question of helping others. When it comes to not harming others, many people would agree with the declaration of human rights that inflicting suffering is equally bad regardless of one’s geographical or emotional proximity to the victims. Personal vegetarianism is an instance of not harming.
I disagree with cosmopolitanism when it comes to “not harming” as well. I think needlessly inflicting suffering on human beings is always really bad, but it is worse if, say, you do it to your own children rather than to a random stranger’s.