Defects in the greatest good for the greatest number

Should we want the greatest good for the greatest number? (And, by the way, should “we” mean a numerical majority?) The Trolley Problem in philosophy brought this issue to light. I was reminded of this in an interesting article by economist and philosopher Michael Munger: “Adam Smith discovered (and solved!) the trolley problem” (June 28, 2023), as well as in a sequel Econtalk podcast.

The precise form of the Trolley Problem was formulated by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in a 1967 article. Imagine you see a runaway trolley driving down a steep street and about to meet five men on the track. work, to run over and kill. But you are standing near a switch that can divert the cart to another track where only one man is working. None of the men see the cart coming. You are assured that if you change tracks, only one dies instead of five. Should you change it, as a utilitarian would?

If you answered yes, consider an equivalent dilemma (quoting Munger’s article):

Five people in a hospital will die tomorrow if they do not respectively: (a) receive a heart transplant; (b) a liver transplant; (c) and (d) kidney transplants; and (e) a blood transfusion of a rare blood group. There is a sixth person in the hospital who, by astonishing coincidence, is an exact match as the donor for all five. If the chief surgeon does nothing, five people will die tonight, without any hope of living until tomorrow.

Assuming there is no legal risk (the government is run by utilitarians who want the greatest good for the greatest number and are fond of cost-benefit analysis), the chief surgeon must then kill the providential donor to harvest his organs and save five lives to rescue? To answer this question, most people would probably change their minds and reject the crude utilitarianism they espoused in the previous Trolley problem. Why?

Munger states that Adam Smith formulated another example of the Trolley Problem in his 1859 book The theory of moral sentiments and discovered the principle to solve it. Smith didn’t put it that way, but his solution points out the distinction between deliberately killing an innocent person, which is clearly immoral, and letting him die from independent causes, which is not necessarily immoral. Drowning someone to kill them is immoral, but not saving someone who is drowning may not be. Intentionally shooting an African child is murder; not giving to charity the $100 that would save his life is certainly not criminal.

A more recent argument by Philippa Foot (see chapter 5 of her book Moral dilemmas: and other topics in moral philosophy [Oxford University Press, 2002]) explains that the underlying fundamental distinction is “between initiating a harmful sequence of events and not intervening to prevent it” (this succinct formulation of her full argument comes from the summary of her article). More precisely she writes:

The question we are concerned with is posed dramatically by asking whether we are as much to blame for allowing people in third world countries to starve as we are for killing them by sending them poisoned food?

The basic principle emphasizes moral freedom of choice

Sometimes it is permissible to allow a certain harm to happen to someone, although it would have been wrong to inflict this harm on him on his own, by initiating or initiating the sequence that causes the harm to stand firm.

In his 2021 book Knowledge, reality and value, the libertarian-anarchist philosopher Michael Huemer also deals with the Trolley problem and arrives at a similar solution, albeit more nuanced in extreme cases. His philosophical approach is ‘intuitionism’, as the subtitle of this book suggests: A largely common sense guide to philosophy. (My double Regulation judgement, “A broad-based libertarian philosopher, reasonable and radical”, gives the flavor of this book and of him The problem of political authority: an investigation into the right to coerce and the duty to obey [2013].)

Anthony de Jasay’s condemnation of utilitarianism as a justification for government (coercive) interventions is based on the simple economic observation that there is no scientific basis for comparing utility between individuals; For example, it is meaningless to say that saving five men produces “more utility” than killing one. Useful statements, he writes, ‘cannot be falsified and will forever remain my say against your say.’ (See my Econlib review of him Against politics.)

What is quite certain is that utilitarianism, and certainly “trade utilitarianism” (as opposed to “rule utilitarianism”), does not work, except perhaps in the most extreme and uninteresting cases – such as “stealing $20 from Elon Musk without that he notices and transferring the money to a homeless person would create net utility,” that is, Musk would lose less utility than the pauper would gain. Even though the explanation seems logical, we cannot predict the behavior of a single individual, but only general categories of events: maybe that homeless person will use the $20 to buy cheap alcohol, get drunk, and kill a mother and her baby , which would have been a second Beethoven. He could even be a utility monster, getting ‘more utility’ from the harm he causes others than what he himself loses. Even if the homeless guy uses his $20 to buy a used copy of John Hicks A theory of economic history, the story of his “gift” could spread and lead to a billion greedy people clamoring for the same transfer from Musk. Or they can argue for the $20 billion to be expropriated directly by the state to fund subsidies for them.

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I have done my best to make DALL-E (the most recent version) represent the simplest version of Philippa Foot’s trolley problem. Despite my detailed descriptions, ‘he’ just couldn’t understand it – which isn’t really surprising, after all. He could not even imagine the idea of ​​a fork in the track of a wagon with five workers on one side and one on the other. Finally I asked him to draw a runaway cart with one track and five workers in the middle of the track. The images he created were some of his most surreal, as you can see in the image in this post. Given his poor performance, I mentally apologized to Philippa Foot (who died in 2010 at the age of 90) and instructed DALL-E to add to the statue “an old, dignified woman (the philosopher Philippa Foot) who is deeply thinks and looks at the coming trolley.” .” In this simple task the robot did quite well.