Problems of Utilitarianism #2: Parfit and Rawls Are Incompatible

Previous problem of utilitarianism here. Next problem of utilitarianism here.


The Rawlsian conception of a just society is incompatible with Parfit's extension of utilitarianism.

Rawls claimed that a just society was necessarily a very egalitarian one. His argument was that if you were going to be placed into a society without knowing ahead of time what your role would be, if you're smart, you would want a society where there's not much difference between the guy at the top, and the guy at the bottom. That is to say: sure it would be a blast to be a plantation-owner in the antebellum American South, but if you fell out of the sky at random into a role in that society, chances are much greater you'd end up as a slave or tenant farmer breaking your back for one of the plantation owners.(1)

Parfit extended utilitarianism by saying that if we want the greatest good for the greatest number, we should want not just more happiness, but more people. The equation is average happiness of each person * # people = total amount of happiness. In this view, having more people to be experiencing some happiness can even counterbalance the amount of happiness that each person is experiencing. Another way of saying this: if utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number, don't neglect the "number" part.

The full elaboration of this claim runs counter to most people's moral intuitions and lead to what's known as the repugnant conclusion (summarized below).

Imagine two societies: a society of a million people who have the best lives possible, whose lives are 99% worth living. (I don't know, sometimes it's cloudy when they go to the beach, otherwise life is perfect.) Compare that to a society of a hundred million whose lives are only 1% better than death: they groan each day under the oppressive weight of a dictatorship, but sometimes see a nice flower, which keeps them from wanting to kill themselves.(2) Because 99% * a million is less overall happiness than 1% * a hundred million, the repugnant conclusion according to Parfit's interpretation of utilitarianism, is that it's better to have the much bigger, much less happy society.

The obvious rejection is that an individual experiences individual happiness - total happiness is not something that is experienced - and the individual experience of objective happiness is what matters. Of course, if you make that claim, you're arguing against utilitarianism.

To illustrate Parfit's repugnant conclusion concretely in contrast to Rawls, let's apply it to a real historical situation, the concrete example of black slavery in the United States. Of course the QALY (quality-adjusted life years) measurements for utility will necessarily be a little fudged. On the eve of the American Civil War in 1860, the census showed 3,953,761 slaves in the United States. Let's round that up to four million and assume these people had lives 1% worth living(3) (after all they're literally in the horrible dictatorship that I described above.) [Added later: the very next day after I wrote this post, I ran across Robin Hanson's blog post "Power Corrupts, Slavery Edition" which contains the statement "US south slave plantations were quite literally small totalitarian governments".] Now let's compare that to Avalon on the California island of Catalina. Ever been there? It's really nice, as you might expect, and has a population of just under 4,000, and while it's not completely egalitarian, you can't be bought or killed with impunity. It's a really nice place, so let's assume there's 99% average happiness. Parfit concludes that it's better to have that slave society than modern Avalon.

By Parfit's interpretation of utilitarianism, the problem is not the institution of slavery's impact on quality of life, as long as we can overcome this by having enough slaves. Rawls could never recommend choosing a slave society over a non-slave society ("well how big a slave society is it?" the repugnant conclusion says you should ask.) By Rawls (and most of our intuitions) the answer of which you would rather be randomly thrown into is obvious, and wholly contingent on whether moral value comes from some abstract total register of utility points, or the experienced utility of an individual human being. Since policy makers do these calculations to make decisions, this absurd conclusion could conceivably make a difference, and some respected thinkers (Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer among them) have argued that our intuitions are wrong.

Of course the counterargument is: if individually experienced utility is all that matters, isn't it better to have one really happy person then two ho-hum people? Shouldn't we feed the utility monster then? I don't know, other than to say fatalistically, that possibly moral reasoning either is not a real process, and that we are unable to make decisions like this about groups of people that we do not know. Which would be terrible, considering that modern societies are forced to do so all the time. But it would be consistent with Adam Smith's thought experiment about losing a single joint of a finger versus an earthquake in China that kills a hundred thousand. Humans cannot reason about abstract people as moral agents, because we did not evolve with a need to do so - other than as threats or trade partners.

NOTES

1. Rawls also suffers from the problem of differing agents: assume that someone doesn't care about relative status, only absolute comforts. If such a person gets his head frozen and wakes up in a future where there are absolute un-displaceable overlords but who give them amazing experiences and material comfort, that person might not care, even though someone else might chafe under such an uber nanny-state regime. I also wonder how meaningful the question of a choice can be, because there is no neutral position to choose from and all are habituated to the specifics of times and places. I.e., to me England appears a nightmarish dystopia but the people I've met from there seem to be reasonable people who enjoy their lives and even return there voluntarily, so who knows.

2. If you think assigning numbers to such situations is spurious and academic, I'm afraid I must inform you that they are very concrete and very real-world, as health systems use units of DALYs and QALYs all the time to make decisions. And some systems do assign negative values, meaning that some conditions are considered to make life not worth living, i.e. they are literally worse than death.

3. I tried to look up the suicide rate for slaves, as this would give an idea of how many slaves thought their life was not worth living. Although I couldn't find numbers, apparently suicide was unexpectedly rare, and the threat of execution by owners would not have been an effective deterrent for slaves who thought continued slavery was worse than death. In several places (e.g. here) I saw an article referenced: David Lester, Center for the Study of Suicide, "Suicidal Behavior in African-American Slaves," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 37:1 (1998), 1-13.

Problems of Utilitarianism #1: Real Utility Monsters

Next problem of utilitarianism here.


Utilitarianism is often formulated as the claim: "The best society is the one with the greatest good for the greatest number."

There are many problems with this, first and foremost is that such an abstract formulation submerges the question of how to achieve and maintain this. To make this concrete, it doesn't even distinguish between radical capitalism and radical communism.

But another problem troubles it, one which crops up in multiple places in reasoning about moral societies: the problem of differing agency. Many of us understand on some level how troubling this is to the Enlightenment project of organizing societies, and this is evident in our discomfort discussing (for instance) behavioral genetics.

Here is an innocuous case of differing agency - one might call it trivially differing agency - that is not problematic for utilitarianism: I kind of like chicken. But my wife really likes chicken. If we get to the end of the meal and there's one piece of chicken left, the obvious best choice is to give it to her, because there will be more happiness in the world if she eats it. In the same way, I once refused a free ticket to a PGA tour event because I can't stand golf, and it is almost certainly true that whoever got that ticket instead of me, they enjoyed the event more. My taking up a spot at such an event would be an anti-utilitarian travesty.

Differing agency remains innocuous only so long as agents differ somewhat randomly in their specific tastes but not on average in the intensity of their pleasure and suffering. To illustrate this problem, Robert Nozick imagined a utility monster, that would always derive more enjoyment from everything. It doesn't habituate, it has no hedonic treadmill. You could imagine the utility monster as some kind of hedonistic superintelligent alien that had come to Earth to experience chocolate ice cream and massages, and experience them it does, on wondrous levels of ecstasy we can't begin to imagine. To it, we are as dim beasts, barely able to register pleasure compared to the raptures that the monster can attain. If we are true utilitarians, we always have to give our chicken and golf tickets (and chocolate ice cream and massages) to the utility monster. (Let's assume it's a nice utility monster that doesn't destroy things like the one below, it just likes the things we like, more than we like them, which is still a big problem.)



Not exactly how Nozick imagined it, but hey it's funny.
From Existential Comics

And as it turns out, this is not a thought experiment, because humans actually do differ, both in their capacity to experience pleasure, and the damage done by negative stimuli. People in the throes of a manic episode take great hedonic value from a great many things, including money and sex, which is partly why such episodes are psychiatric emergencies. Do we feel obligated to help them continue spending sprees or accept their propositions? People with borderline personality disorder are much more badly harmed by social rejection than the rest of us; do we feel obligated to constantly reassure them that we are their best friends, to the exclusion of other people who are healthier in this regard? You might argue that over time the greatest good is not to help them make worse decisions that will surely harm them in the long run. But there are certainly people whose happiness set points are constitutionally lower or more fragile (anti-utility monsters), and outside of mental health professionals there are very few of us who see a moral obligation in continually propping up their current hedonic state.

My gut reaction is that we don't have such an obligation, but I can't see why we shouldn't, if utilitarianism is correct.

Of note, Nozick also critiqued the Rawlsian conception of a just society, but there is a further critique of Nozick in the instantiation of societies of humans, which again relies on the actual differing capacities of humans that affect the quality of their agency. And despite heroic efforts to create equal agents, humans continue to stratify themselves based on these differing qualities.

In Praise of Dilettantism; Or, Going Through "Phases" As Therapy

Those of us with wide-ranging interests can hit a wall at a certain age. As our career takes a greater share of our time, it becomes more difficult to escape noticing that some of our interests actually pay off in ways that directly improve our lives (like interest in the subject matter of our careers), as opposed to mere curiosity in things with neat-o factor but that are basically intellectual consumption goods. At a certain point, curiosity, praiseworthy though it is, just isn't good enough. It's against the backdrop of this conflict that some of us adopt and discard not just curiosities, but investments in communities and skills. Some of these quickly-jettisoned phases make it under the wire initially because they offer improvements to our perceived weaknesses, and while that is good enough at first, soon enough we encounter diminishing returns.

I'm posting this because this conflict engenders the adoption of certain kinds of new skills and activities at a certain age, and if this seems familiar, read on. (Intellectual mid-life crises? I won't say it but you can if you want.) For a concrete example: not long ago a retired friend of mine was going through a higher math phase. He was learning a lot of difficult, dense stuff that he'd always been interested in as a younger man - and I've had exactly the same urge on occasion - but he admitted to me a year ago that he was starting to question the rewards and his motivations in the first place. (I don't know if he's stuck with it.)

And I closely identified with him. Two years ago, I went through a chess phase. As with my friend, this was something I had wanted to do since college, and only once I was a couple months in to the daily games and studying did I begin to contemplate the massive amount of time and effort required to properly develop such a skill. After a beginner's bump, my Elo rating was frustratingly inert.

I revisited my motivation for learning chess, with renewed honesty. First, I thought that learning and improving at chess would improve my strategic thinking generally. Second (something which I could finally admit to myself) I could dump my long-standing inferiority complex around my ability to learn strategy games. As for the first point, I went looking for evidence that learning chess would in fact improve strategic thinking in some ways. What I found were some scattered results that there was an improvement in academic achievement in children learning chess, but nothing like general improvements in strategic thinking in a grown-ass man, other than at chess (duh). (Note: having done this kind of research for several such activities, one of the patterns that has emerged is that efficiencies in our thinking mostly do not generalize outside very limited, concrete domains as much as we would like to think. Even the famous N-back results for improving working memory have not generalized well.) As for the second point, I then asked myself if learning chess would only make me better at chess, did it really matter?

I am proud to say I quickly made the decision to quit, and have not played a game in almost 2.5 years. More importantly I'm not troubled that I made this decision. I'm actually quite proud, as you might guess by my taking the time to write about it in public. And in fact it's not the only recent instance of gleeful hobby-abandonment: I had a very similar experience with learning how to really hit a baseball for the first time at age 42. I hired a former pro to teach me for five lessons. Ridiculous? Maybe. Did I get much, much better at hitting? Yes! (Have you ever reliably hit overhand pitches from a pro? Didn't think so bro.) At this point, am I good enough to join even the recciest of rec leagues? Probably not. But most importantly, do I get mad thinking about how I could never hit a baseball when I see people playing baseball, or hear them talking about playing baseball? No, not anymore! And THAT is what I wanted. Who knows if I would improve my coordination or definition in my arms from hitting; I bet not, but anyway there are better ways of doing that.

A reader might think, "Well that's super, this guy is celebrating being a dilettante and/or quitter." For chess and baseball, yes, quitting is worth celebrating. And really, what would be the most contemptible outcome here, celebrating quitting, or a 40-year-old man suddenly deciding he's going to put his heart and soul into chess and baseball, activities for which the window of opportunity is long closed even if I'd ever had some innate advantage for either? (The fact that I don't is the whole reason I did these things.) There are more important things to commit to - in direct opposition to the flakiness described above, I take my marriage and my career very seriously and almost every day I literally measure how I'm improving at those.

My own focus here is that these (mercifully brief) phases let me jettison my concerns about things that, once I do them and improve a little, show that I did get better, but they weren't that important. I mostly want to recommend similar liberations to my fellow humans, since this process has certainly benefited me.

The Bad Stripe = "Greater Appalachia"

The Bad Stripe I've identified based on voting out of sync with the rest of the country and even the rest of their states, and a consistent cluster of low human development indicators - and it appears on Jayman's blog, more or less, as his Greater Appalachia. Is it because it's a boundary zone? Settled by Border Reivers?



Above: the yall zone, the border of which is basically the Bad Stripe. Note the correspondence with northern Greater Appalachia.

More Sleep, Further East in Time Zone Equals Higher Wages

Paper here.

Polk, Truman, Eisenhower Are Most Unjustly Forgotten, Ford is Most Relatively Obscure U.S. President

1) Who is the most obscure president, adjusting for temporal distance? That is to say; Gerald Ford and Millard Fillmore are both obscure, but Fillmore's excuse is that he was in office 170 years ago. After 170 years will people remember Ford even less?

2) Presidents can be remembered for good or bad reasons. Unfortunately it seems easier to forget those who did a decent job. So when ranking obscurity against performance, who are the undeservedly forgotten presidents?


1. The Most Obscure President, Relative to Time Since Leaving Office

Results here are for presidents through Reagan. Here I assume obscure = least remembered = least discussed in print at a certain recent point in time. (We don't care that Zachary Taylor was discussed in 1849, of course he was, he was in office!) So I looked at Google Ngram mentions of the president's names in the year 2000. This means I excluded all presidents who did not complete their administration by that point (Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton) and also excluded George H.W. Bush because of confusion with his son in the 2000 primary season. I included common variants of their names ("Chester A. Arthur" and "Chester Alan Arthur"; "JFK" especially may be overinflated by mentions of the airport.) I did not include nicknames (Tippecanoe, Ike, etc.) I consider Cleveland to have left office in 1897 (no special treatment due to non-consecutiveness.)

Once I had the number of Google Ngram mentions per president, I compared against how long they'd been out of office. Not surprisingly, the trend is that the longer you're out of office, the more obscure you are. For all of these graphs, Y-axis is remembrance (%Ngram mentionsx10,000), and X-axis is years out of office. (X-axis might be counter-intuitive; earlier presidents are on the RIGHT.)


It's reasonable to think that most of the forgetting occurs in the first couple decades; that is, from 1 year after they leave office to 21 years after they leave office, people will forget faster than from 101 years to 121 years. And indeed that's the case.




Above you can see the curve for (more recent) 20th century presidents, which is three times steeper (we forget the more recent ones faster) than the overall curve for all presidents. Also, the older group starting with John Quincy Adams through Cleveland is essentially flat. So, after they've been gone a century, we've basically forgotten whatever we're going to forget. (I started with John Quincy Adams to avoid inflation by Founding Fathers; those presidents were already well-known for their involvement with the Revolution and Constitution, and I want to learn about remembrance relating to what they did as president.)

Now we can look for presidents that are furthest off-trend from the curve. I modified the original curve from linear to a power function, which reflects the early forgetting trend better than a linear function.

Sure enough, relative to how long he's been out of office, Gerald Ford is the most obscure. He is furthest below the curve, on the lower left. Most presidents are in a sea of average-to-obscure just below the curve, starting with Coolidge as we go back. But there are plenty of more memorable outliers.

So who are the best-known, relative to the the time since they left office? FDR, LBJ, JFK (remember, airport signal), Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington. Honorable mentions are John Adams, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. What's interesting is that being famous before you're president (usually for being a war hero, but in one case being an actor) doesn't seem to matter for how well you're remembered, even if it helps you get elected. (Today do we talk about Grant the president, or Grant the general?)


2. How Are Presidents Remembered Relative to Performance? Who is Most Under-Rated?

My source for presidential performance is the Wikipedia article on ranking of the presidents; I averaged every survey they have in the scholar survey results. I convert the average of all the scores into a decimal between 0 to 1. 0 means everyone unanimously agreed he was the best president, 1 that he was terrible. These surveys span 1948 to 2015. The curve in the previous graph predicts how well-remembered they should be based on how long they've been out of office. For each, their distance above or below the curve is the relative remembrance. This compares the relative remembrance to their historical ranking. (For grins, I compared my own ranking against the historians and got an R^2 for 0.4527; there was general agreement except relative to historians, I really don't like John Adams and LBJ.)

As it turns out, there may be justice after all. The better the president, the more likely they are to be remembered. (Although it must be said, if the winners write history, this is also what we should expect to see.)

Looking at the two "unjust" quadrants (bad but remembered, or good but forgotten), let's focus on the good-but-forgotten; they're the ones we should be thinking more about, plus the good-but-forgotten stand out above the curve much more than the bad-but-remembered.

I circled the three most unjustly forgotten presidents. As I'd expected, Polk was a good but forgotten president (come on, click on that and read about him, he deserves it!) In particular, he explicitly set a number of ambitious foreign policy and domestic goals, and achieved them, prosecuting the Mexican War and expanding to the Pacific, settling the Oregon Territory question peacefully but to American advantage even against Victorian Britain, and establishing the forerunner to our modern treasury. (He would have been a very good candidate for futarchists!) Eisenhower and Truman are also standouts underrated by the attention we pay them.

What Are the Things That Could Derail the Improvement of Life on Earth?

We assume that wealth will grow, violence will decrease, and in general life will get better for life on Earth, if only things keep going roughly as they are now. What might happen to interrupt this process?

On a Timescale of Minutes to Years:

1. Weapons of mass destruction/acute ecocide. This breaks down into three categories:

a) nukes: there are a lot of them left. This one is frustrating because it's still an existential threat but it's been around for a long time, so people have become used to it.

Once one is is used deliberately or even explodes by accident, the taboo is broken, and more will follow in much shorter order than the interval between that event and Nagasaki.

b) any other such weapons, especially biological weapons.

c) The Singularity. Superhuman general artificial intelligence would still not necessarily be intelligent enough to be evolutionarily stable, and instead of a blossoming of ultra-intelligence, could just result in ultimate ecological castastrophe.

2. Natural events that could destroy parts of the infrastructure the modern economy relies on. Earthquakes weren't a big deal when you could rebuild your bark longhouse in a few annoying hours. Not so San Francisco. 9.0 earthquakes aren't that frequent, but they occur. Similarly, we don't even know how often Carrington-level events happen because until there were electrical lines to be affected, there was no way of knowing and no reason to care. Also related to Carrington events, refer back to item 1a; the result of a nuclear high-altitude EMP would be catastrophic.



Decades to Centuries:

3. Selection against intelligence by economic development, both within and between countries. That is, idiocracy. The most fertile countries are often the most disastrous. Related: the world and technology will not change any slower than they are now (unless one of the disasters in this list occurs) yet there are people (the majority?) who appear constitutionally unable to adapt to this level of change and think in abstract terms. The modern world ironically appears to make these people regress into more and more of a fundamentalist, tribal state where they assume, correctly, that they will not be able to understand the world at all, so they cling to tribal authority.

4. Consumerism and collapse/transparency of status hierarchies, making people unhappy with otherwise stable productive lives.

a) Consumerism: it has been argued that above a certain amount (usually given as US$70,000), gains to income translate increasingly marginally to happiness. However it is increasingly impossible to escape images of houses, mates, experiences that you're not getting even with your $70,000 and your nice home, spouse and vacation. Hence this principle runs up against the human irrationality that we would rather live in a neighborhood of $100k earners and make $120k, then a neighborhood of $200k earners and make $180k.

b) This same media technology also means that increasingly, we are de facto in a world culture where there are few isolated laboratories for meme innovation. In the past, even in neighboring dictatorships, at least the more flawed dictatorship might lose on the battlefield, with the slightly better practices of the other dictatorship winning out. But what will ever fix your shitty institution now? The Mongols aren't about to overrun the DMV for being too slow. Also, increasingly we cannot preserve the independence of our multiple overlapping status hierarchies and "healthily" isolate our social spheres from one another - so your boss, or that girl that was prettier than you in high school, can make fun of your for being the president of a local organization which otherwise would've give you a nice status boost to increase your QOL.


Therefore, to avoid acute events, we should focus on continuing nuclear disarmament, start taking biology more seriously before CRISPR gives us the equivalent to Rosenbergs working with ISIS, and increase focus on AI safety. We should also try to understand how to predict and protect against Carrington solar events and similar century-frequency geological and astrophysical threats.

To avoid the longer-onset ones: no solution here would seem palatable, but otherwise we face death by a thousand cuts. To fix #3, it would seem only eugenics by licensing reproduction would work within a country, but this is abhorrent in Western politics to liberals and conservatives alike. (A certain China does come to mind and they seem to have done "okay", and by "okay" I mean "the greatest developmental triumph in human history". Despite or because of one-child?) There is also the Brave New World style solution of a big reservation or favela for all the people who can't hack it in the future economy, but in Brave New World it was just a few misfits, as opposed to all their Epsilons and Deltas.

For #4, we could adopt cultural norms about media use - while this is already happening to some degree, it takes both personal discipline and is easily eroded by non-cooperators, i.e. your co-worker who you suspect will check their email on the weekend even if they said they wouldn't. Also, solving the "tyranny of territory" would speed the diffusion of good memes, even in a connected mono-culture world. ("Tyranny of territory" is that humans have to live on the surface of the Earth so organizations from families up to government have static boundaries. Charter cities are a nice idea but fall flat as long as they are within territories held by the cartel system of mutually-recognizing violence monopolists, i.e. states. That is, I can't tell my DMV, California, that I choose to use Minnesota's DMV, because at bottom guys with guns will come and make me cooperate.)