The greatest superhero of them all

I look forward to future episodes of this one, in which The Utilitarian (ΣU) gets in a big fight with The Utilitarian (Max median(U)) and The Utilitarian (Max U-bar) about just what they should be doing.

ΣU: Stop what you're doing! He clearly prefers being alive to your killing him, and his existence is a net addition to total utility (unlike that criminal from before)!

Maximize average: Nobody will even notice that he's gone, and he just barely prefers being alive anyway - thanks to you. What the hell did you do to increase the birth rate by so much anyway? 

ΣU: Zapped all the contraceptive plants. People enjoy life less because of less sex, but the addition of more people is clearly worth it. You were too busy stealing from people to give to the utility monster to notice (and I didn't mind that either). 

Median U: I noticed...

Drowning children

Jason Brennan says Singer's standard requires too much.

Recall that, in Singer's thought experiment, if you'd be willing to ruin your $500 iPhone by jumping into a pool to save a drowning child, you should also be willing to spend $500 to save a child's life. Since there are plenty of charities in the third world that can save lives at fairly low cost, people are not consistent if they would do the former but do not do the latter.

Jason ably points out a problem:

But the central problem with Singer’s thought experiment is that it is *not* analogous to the situation we find ourselves in. In Singer’s drowning child thought experiment, I save one life at some personal expense, and then move on with my life. I don’t remain in perpetual service to others.

What Singer needs, for his thought experiment to be an actual analog of our current situation, is something like this:

Many Drowning Children

You’re walking alone one day, when you come across millions of drowning children. The children you save will for the most part remain saved, though some might fall back in. However, no matter how many you save, there will always be more about to drown. You can spend your entire waking life pulling children out of pools.

Singer’s entire argument rests upon people’s moral intuitions in the One Drowning Child. But One Drowning Child doesn’t do the work he needs it to do, because One Drowning Child isn’t analogous to the situation Singer thinks we actually find ourselves in. Instead, what Singer needs to do is determine what people’s moral intuitions are in Many Drowning Children. Even if you judge you must save the one child in One Drowning Child, you might not judge that you must dedicate your life to, or even spend a huge amount of time on, saving children in Many Drowning Children.

Note that I am not claiming that Singer’s conclusions are wrong, just that his argument for those conclusions doesn’t succeed.

I'm reminded of a time I was walking our then four year old to daycare. We came upon an earthworm on the sidewalk. The rain had ended and the worm would likely die without intervention. We picked up the worm and put it onto the lawn. Then we turned the corner and saw several hundred worms on the sidewalk. She prepared to start picking them all up, and I instead brought her on to daycare. There are only so many hours in a day.

Utilitarian abortion

Bryan Caplan asks:

Pro-life utilitarians are very scarce.  A philosophy professor recently told me that he knows of zero pro-life utilitarians in the entire philosophy profession.  

This is deeply puzzling.  While I'm not a utilitarian, the utilitarian case against abortion seems very strong.  Consider: Even if a pregnant woman deeply resents her pregnancy, she is only pregnant for nine months.  How could this outweigh the lifetime's worth of utility the unwanted child gets to enjoy if he's carried to term?  

I expect it hinges on your model of whether abortion simply changes the identity of which children a woman bears or the number of children that would be born.

I don't have any strong priors on which is true on average, but in some cases it would simply be a shifting in timing of births where a woman intends on having a family of fixed size and isn't ready yet to start it. In those cases, and where the woman has reasonable expectations that a child later would be happier than a child now, pro-choice utilitarianism makes a lot of sense.

If instead we're considering options where the number of children isn't fixed and where abortion reduces the number of kids who get to be born, then Bryan's puzzle holds - but doesn't utilitarianism run into trouble where n isn't fixed?

Cats: internalising the externality

The typical North American housecat cat is declawed: a veterinarian surgically removes the cat's front claws. Or, at least that was the case when we lived in North America. The norm in New Zealand is not to declaw as it's viewed as cruel to the cat and being not unlike amputating your fingers above the last joint. Some online sources suggest it is illegal to declaw cats in New Zealand.

If declawed cats are less able to indulge in their murderous ways, it can be the case that something somewhat cruel to cats is nevertheless on net animal welfare increasing. And, it seems a fairly appropriate way of internalising the relevant externality: the cat gets to exist,

Imagine yourself behind the Veil. You do not know whether you will be born a cat or a bird. In the state of the world in which cats are declawed, you are more likely to get to exist, get to exist as a cat, have a less happy life if a cat, and have a happier life if a bird. Do you, behind the veil, choose to prohibit, allow, or mandate declawing? It'll depend on how unhappy declawing makes cats, and how much effect declawing has on cats' ability to torment birds. The first isn't easy to assess, though I'd definitely pick declawed cat over non-existence. Does anybody know anything about the second?

Declawing: to help reduce the risk.

Conflict of interest watch: after our eventual extensive home repairs (earthquake), we'll likely have to get another cat. I prefer that that cat be declawed even counting the losses to the cat. I don't think this colours my analysis above.

Counting Lewd's utility

It's currently legal in New Zealand to post online racy pictures of your ex. The Law Commission recommends changing that:

The commission also recommends the exemption for personal or domestic information should not apply if the collection or disclosure of the information would be highly offensive.

The change would deal with situations such as when a person posts naked photographs of their ex-partner online without consent.

Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff welcomed the report. "It will put, for the first time, the careless, the predatory and the criminal on notice," she said. "There will be consequences if you misuse our information."

I'm not particularly opposed to the law change. But I'm near certain that the Law Commission won't have weighed the benefit provided to voyeurs of the current legal framework. David Friedman argues, persuasively, I think, that we have to count all the benefits in the utilitarian calculus lest we wind up assuming our conclusion:

If instead of treating all benefits to everyone equally we first sort people into the deserving and the undeserving, the just and the unjust, the criminals and the victims, we are simply assuming our conclusions. Benefits to bad people don't count, so rules against bad people are automatically efficient. We cannot deduce moral conclusions from economics if we start the economics by assuming the moral conclusion.

It wouldn't surprise me if the utilitarian calculus found the law change to be efficient. Presumably, if the taking of private photographs has benefits for the couples involved, willingness to have such photos taken would depend on the likelihood of future dissemination. Further, some couples that would do better to split up may stay together, inefficiently, because of the hostage problem posed by the photographs' existence. It's entirely plausible that the losses to voyeurs are smaller than these gains. But I rather doubt that anybody's sought to measure either side.

Utilitarianism and meddlesome preferences

Brad suggests that utilitarianism has no way of sorting out how to deal with meddlesome preferences:

Liberals and libertarians need to think very carefully about the kinds of preferences/harms should be considered valid policy concerns. The are obvious cases: I wrong you when kick you in the shin, but not when I wear clothes you find distasteful. It seems that this is so even when you have a very high tolerance for shin pain and a low tolerance for fashion crimes, and the harm/disutility is equal in each case. Most people find it reasonable that people have a presumptive right not to be physically attacked, but no such right not to be visually offended by poor taste. There is a large grey area in between these two cases. Utilitarianism as a moral theory is incapable of considering this question, or even admitting that it is a problem. This, more than anything else, is why I am not a utilitarian. The Mill of On Liberty was not a utilitarian in this respect either. On some readings, not even the Mill of Utilitarianism was really a utilitarian.

I'll disagree. Buchanan and Stubblebine provide a very nice framework for thinking about the problem. Sure, the offense I feel when I see someone in a Che Guevara t-shirt is real. And it can be viewed as an external harm imposed upon me just as my wearing my Hayek t-shirt may impose similar harms on others. But the fact of an external effect isn't sufficient to make it policy relevant. Rather, the externality has to be Pareto-relevant: my willingness to pay to avoid seeing Che t-shirts has to be higher than the other guy's willingness to pay to wear the shirt. If the aggregate sum of all willingness-to-pay-weighted distaste caused by Che shirts is higher than the aggregate sum of all willingness-to-pay-weighted pleasure caused by the wearing of such shirts, then a ban could be efficient. Of course, we have no way of extracting that kind of information about preferences outside of market transactions. But in principle there's no conflict with utilitarianism: it's just the generalized problem of the absence of reliable hedonometers.

In some cases we can draw reasonable conclusions though. In the absence of regulations forbidding or mandating the practice, we'd expect that evidence that a bus company allows smelly people on the bus to be evidence that the money-weighted preferences of those imposed-upon aren't high enough to overcome the transactions costs of enforcing a "no smelly people" rule and the losses to the smelly people. Otherwise, the bus company could earn higher profits by banning smelly folks from the bus and charging a higher ticket price for the better service. Similarly, if a grocery store bans entry of customers wearing neo-nazi t-shirts, they must reckon such bans are worth the effort of enforcement and the lost custom from skinheads. In both cases, the common third party (bus service, grocery store) transforms all into internalities.

In general, for externalities the magnitude of which or the enforcement costs of which are very difficult to ascertain apriori, a rule allowing property owners to make the call is most efficient: Coase operates. Where it's pretty likely to weigh one way or the other and transactions costs among all affected parties are likely to be very high, blanket bans or blanket allowances may be more efficient. I'm certainly not saying that such an approach positively explains the pattern of regulation anywhere in the world; rather that such an approach is consistent with utilitarianism.