If arithmetical utilitarianism works so well, it would work in weird territory.
Note the bank robbery thread below. Someone claims that “the utilitarian math” shows that robbing banks and donating to charity would have the best consequences. But they don’t do any math or look up basic statistics to do a Fermi calculation. A few minutes of effort shows that bank robbery actually pays much worse than working as a bank teller over the course of a career (including jail time, etc).
In Giving What We Can there are several people who donate half their income (or all income above a Western middle class standard of living) to highly efficient charities helping people in the developing world. They expect to donate millions of dollars over their careers, and to have large effects on others through their examples and reputations, both as individuals and via their impact on organizations like Giving What We Can. They do try to actually work things out, and basic calculations easily show that running around stealing organs or robbing banks would have terrible consequences, thanks to strong empirical regularities:
Crime mostly doesn’t pay. Bank robbers, drug dealers, and the like make less than legitimate careers. They also spend a big chunk of time imprisoned, and ruin their employability for the future. Very talented people who might do better than the average criminal can instead go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley and make far more.
Enormous amounts of good can be done through a normal legitimate career. Committing violent crime, or other hated acts close off such opportunities very rapidly.
Really dedicated do-gooders hope to have most of their influence through example, encouraging others to do good. Becoming a hated criminal, and associating their ethical views with such, should be expected to have huge negative effects by staunching the flow of do-gooders to exploit the vast legitimate opportunities to help people.
If some criminal scheme looks easy and low-risk, consider that law enforcement uses many techniques which are not made public, and are very hard for a lone individual to learn. There are honey-pots, confederates, and so forth. In the market for nuclear materials, most of the buyers and sellers are law enforcement agents trying to capture any real criminal participants. In North America terrorist cells are now regularly infiltrated long before they act, with government informants insinuated into the cell, phone and internet activities monitored, etc.
It is hard to keep a crime secret over time. People feel terrible guilt, and often are caught after they confess to others. In the medium term there is some chance of more effective neuroscience-based lie detectors, which goes still higher long-term.
The broader society, over time, could punish utilitarian villainy by reducing its support for the things utilitarians seek as they are associated with villains, or even by producing utilitarian evils. If animal rights terrorists tried to kill off humanity, it might lead to angry people eating more meat or creating anti-utilitronium (by the terrorists’ standards, not so much the broader society, focused on animals, say) in anger. The 9/11 attacks were not good for Osama bin Laden’s ambitions of ruling Saudi Arabia.
There are other considerations, but these are enough to dispense with the vast bestiary of supposedly utility-boosting sorts of wrongdoing. Arithmetical utilitarianism does say you should not try to become a crook. But unstable or vicious people (see the Caplan Leninist link) sometimes do like to take the idea of “the end justifies the means” as an excuse to go commit crimes without even trying to work out how the means are related to the end, and to alternatives.
Disclaimer: I do not value total welfare to the exclusion of other ethical and personal concerns. My moral feelings oppose deontological nastiness aside from aggregate welfare. But I am tired of straw-manning “estimating consequences” and “utilitarian math” by giving examples where these aren’t used and would have prevented the evil conclusion supposedly attributed to them.
I’m confused. Your comment paints a picture of a super-efficient police force that infiltrates criminal groups long before they act. But the Internet seems to say that many gangs in the US operate openly for years, control whole neighborhoods, and have their own Wikipedia pages...
Gang membership still doesn’t pay relative to regular jobs
The police largely know who is in the gangs, and can crack down if this becomes a higher priority
Terrorism is such a priority, to a degree way out of line with the average historical damage, because of 9/11; many have critiqued the diversion of law enforcement resources to terrorism
Such levels of gang control are concentrated in poor areas with less police funding, and areas where the police are estranged from the populace, limiting police activity.
Gang violence is heavily directed at other criminal gangs, reducing the enthusiasm of law enforcement, relative to more photogenic victims
The other side is that robbing banks at gunpoint isn’t the most effective way to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those to whom it should go.
I suspect that the most efficient way to do that is government seizure- declare that the privately held assets of the bank now belong to the charities. That doesn’t work, because the money isn’t value, it’s a signifier of value, and rewriting the map does not change the territory- if money is forcibly redistributed too much, it loses too much value and the only way to enforce the tax collection is by using the threat of prison and execution- but the jailors and executioners can only be paid by the taxes. Effectively robbing banks to give the money to charity harms everyone significantly, and fails to be better than doing nothing.
Note the bank robbery thread below. Someone claims that “the utilitarian math” shows that robbing banks and donating to charity would have the best consequences. But they don’t do any math or look up basic statistics to do a Fermi calculation. A few minutes of effort shows that bank robbery actually pays much worse than working as a bank teller over the course of a career (including jail time, etc).
In Giving What We Can there are several people who donate half their income (or all income above a Western middle class standard of living) to highly efficient charities helping people in the developing world. They expect to donate millions of dollars over their careers, and to have large effects on others through their examples and reputations, both as individuals and via their impact on organizations like Giving What We Can. They do try to actually work things out, and basic calculations easily show that running around stealing organs or robbing banks would have terrible consequences, thanks to strong empirical regularities:
Crime mostly doesn’t pay. Bank robbers, drug dealers, and the like make less than legitimate careers. They also spend a big chunk of time imprisoned, and ruin their employability for the future. Very talented people who might do better than the average criminal can instead go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley and make far more.
Enormous amounts of good can be done through a normal legitimate career. Committing violent crime, or other hated acts close off such opportunities very rapidly.
Really dedicated do-gooders hope to have most of their influence through example, encouraging others to do good. Becoming a hated criminal, and associating their ethical views with such, should be expected to have huge negative effects by staunching the flow of do-gooders to exploit the vast legitimate opportunities to help people.
If some criminal scheme looks easy and low-risk, consider that law enforcement uses many techniques which are not made public, and are very hard for a lone individual to learn. There are honey-pots, confederates, and so forth. In the market for nuclear materials, most of the buyers and sellers are law enforcement agents trying to capture any real criminal participants. In North America terrorist cells are now regularly infiltrated long before they act, with government informants insinuated into the cell, phone and internet activities monitored, etc.
It is hard to keep a crime secret over time. People feel terrible guilt, and often are caught after they confess to others. In the medium term there is some chance of more effective neuroscience-based lie detectors, which goes still higher long-term.
The broader society, over time, could punish utilitarian villainy by reducing its support for the things utilitarians seek as they are associated with villains, or even by producing utilitarian evils. If animal rights terrorists tried to kill off humanity, it might lead to angry people eating more meat or creating anti-utilitronium (by the terrorists’ standards, not so much the broader society, focused on animals, say) in anger. The 9/11 attacks were not good for Osama bin Laden’s ambitions of ruling Saudi Arabia.
There are other considerations, but these are enough to dispense with the vast bestiary of supposedly utility-boosting sorts of wrongdoing. Arithmetical utilitarianism does say you should not try to become a crook. But unstable or vicious people (see the Caplan Leninist link) sometimes do like to take the idea of “the end justifies the means” as an excuse to go commit crimes without even trying to work out how the means are related to the end, and to alternatives.
Disclaimer: I do not value total welfare to the exclusion of other ethical and personal concerns. My moral feelings oppose deontological nastiness aside from aggregate welfare. But I am tired of straw-manning “estimating consequences” and “utilitarian math” by giving examples where these aren’t used and would have prevented the evil conclusion supposedly attributed to them.
I’m confused. Your comment paints a picture of a super-efficient police force that infiltrates criminal groups long before they act. But the Internet seems to say that many gangs in the US operate openly for years, control whole neighborhoods, and have their own Wikipedia pages...
The gangs do well, and the rare criminals who become successful gang leaders may sometimes do well, but does the average gangster do well?
Gang membership still doesn’t pay relative to regular jobs
The police largely know who is in the gangs, and can crack down if this becomes a higher priority
Terrorism is such a priority, to a degree way out of line with the average historical damage, because of 9/11; many have critiqued the diversion of law enforcement resources to terrorism
Such levels of gang control are concentrated in poor areas with less police funding, and areas where the police are estranged from the populace, limiting police activity.
Gang violence is heavily directed at other criminal gangs, reducing the enthusiasm of law enforcement, relative to more photogenic victims
The other side is that robbing banks at gunpoint isn’t the most effective way to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those to whom it should go.
I suspect that the most efficient way to do that is government seizure- declare that the privately held assets of the bank now belong to the charities. That doesn’t work, because the money isn’t value, it’s a signifier of value, and rewriting the map does not change the territory- if money is forcibly redistributed too much, it loses too much value and the only way to enforce the tax collection is by using the threat of prison and execution- but the jailors and executioners can only be paid by the taxes. Effectively robbing banks to give the money to charity harms everyone significantly, and fails to be better than doing nothing.