This is my first post, but hopefully not my last. We'll see if the the powers that be (John and Ben) approve. I should be writing a paper about international business transactions, but this sounds funner.
It seems to me that so much disagreement between the non-fringe left and non-fringe right boils down to disagreements over macroeconomic policy. On the left are generally those who think some form of stimulus is needed to return the economy to full employment. On this view, the American Recovery Act was the right medicine, the Obama Administration just used too low of a dose.
The right is far more interesting. Again, aside from the fringe groups, fiscal conservatives are divided on a variety of issues. Some doubt that the debt is a short-term problem, while others think it is. Some believe--on the theory that the financial system has an extremely high demand for money--that the Federal Reserve should inject trillions of dollars into the American economy; others think the Fed has already gone too far. And finally, some right-wing economists believe that tax cuts will stimulate the economy, while others think that stimulus of any kind--be they tax cuts or direct purchases and infrastructure investment--are a kind of Keynesian illusion, doomed to long-term failure.
I don't really know the answer, though as a conservative, I'd like to believe that one of the conservative strands of economic thought is right. But truth be told, no one has any idea what we need to do. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman sounds pretty sure, but given that there's an army of Nobel Laureates lining up against him, why should I take his advice? Because he seems more confident? If confidence correlated with wisdom, George W. Bush was a regular Abe Lincoln. Yeah, right.
Distinguished macroeconomist Greg Mankiw had a column in the New York Times about this very issue a few days ago. I liked the column because Mankiw--almost certainly a future Nobel Laureate--admitted that the economics profession just doesn't know much. I'm much more willing to trust someone who's deferential to his own ignorance.
We really have no idea. In the 1980s, Reagan's supply-side tax cuts, combined with an extremely conservative monetary policy, lifted the economy out of a recession that, by many metrics, is worse than our current one. When Bill Clinton raised taxes in the 1990s, the same people who spearheaded the Reagan tax reforms cried bloody murder and promised a Second Great Depression. Last I checked, the 1990s were pretty sweet.
I wonder often whether the problem is that macroeconomists are asking the wrong questions these days. Maybe the problem with Keynesian stimulus programs isn't that they were always doomed to failure, but that 1950s-style stimulus programs were designed for a society that has changed fundamentally over the last six decades. The idea of Keynesian stimulus spending--whether on taxes or government purchases--is that the government increases the demand for consumer goods and services. But in an economy with a massive trade deficit like ours, much of the money in a government stimulus package is spent overseas.
In a similar vein, I think of how technology has eliminated the need for many jobs. Think of it like this: when Charles Dickens was publishing, he was arguably the most famous man in the world. But printing and distributing his works required much more labor than it would today. So his work created more jobs, but Dickens was, at best, an upper-middle class person. J.K. Rowling, by comparison, is the first billionaire author. Technology eliminated a lot of publishing jobs and made her quite a bit richer. I worry that a similar dynamic exists in a lot of sectors of our economy, and perhaps that explains persistently high unemployment (and rising inequality, even in those European countries with massive social welfare states).
Then again, I'm an economic novice at best, so I wouldn't trust me. But I think ignorance is probably better than confidence. It's too bad that many macroeconomists disagree.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Self-Righteousness Run Amok
In the days since Osama bin Laden's death, some have chosen to celebrate loudly and openly. Others—perhaps most—quietly and privately delight at the demise of a mass murderer. An especially annoying minority have turned self-righteous, taking the stance that no death should ever mark a happy occasion. Others have gone further, and likened the American reaction to the post-9/11 celebrations seen in some Arab countries.
Both of the latter positions are absurd and frivolous. Osama bin Laden was not a good person fighting for a cause which just happened to run contrary to American interests. He was as evil as men get—an open advocate of the mass murder of civilians. When bin Laden took this stance—when he chose to lead al Qaeda—he voluntarily placed himself in conflict with much of the world. In helping to organize mass killings both in America and abroad, he made his incapacitation necessary, and gave plenty of justified reasons to hate (yes, hate) him.
In other words, bin Laden gave the world reason to smile at the thought of his eventual demise. This is what distinguishes the celebrations following 9/11 from the celebrations following bin Laden's death. The individuals who died that Tuesday morning were not willing participants in a global war (and delighting in their deaths was indeed barbaric, just as it would have been barbaric to delight in any civilian deaths that were incidental to bin Laden's killing and the War on Terror generally). The same can't be said of bin Laden, and this makes all the difference, as can be shown with an analogy to assault. It would be unacceptable to crowd around an individual and cheer his assault. Does this mean that cheering a tackle at a football game is equally unethical? Hardly; context matters, and that's just one of many things the critics of the American sense of satisfaction are missing.
But few are condescending enough to actually draw the analogy between the celebrations after the 9/11 attacks, and the ones following bin Laden's death. Instead, most seem to think that no death can ever be a cause for celebration. I'm willing to concede that we should never place intrinsic value on one's death. Nevertheless, it is perfectly acceptable to be thrilled that a homicidal maniac no longer roams the earth. Perhaps it would have been better had we taken him alive. (I have no interest in getting into that debate, and I don't think this position is a component of the self-righteous minority's stance.) But still, assuming the alternatives were (1) dead or (2) free, isn't option 1 better? And even if option 1 is worse than option 3—"capture and imprisonment"—is it so much worse that people should not be happy that bin Laden has planned his last attack? When a serial killer is sentenced to death rather than life in prison, aren't we happy that he is punished rather than acquitted, even if we quibble with the method of punishment?
I will admit that the particularly vocal celebrations were juvenile. They might even have been foolish insofar as they provided terrorist organizations with recruitment or motivational material (though any effect was surely negligible). But as obnoxious as these celebrations may have been, it's far more obnoxious to use bin Laden's death as a soap box from which to deliver a holier-than-thou message. Please step down.
Both of the latter positions are absurd and frivolous. Osama bin Laden was not a good person fighting for a cause which just happened to run contrary to American interests. He was as evil as men get—an open advocate of the mass murder of civilians. When bin Laden took this stance—when he chose to lead al Qaeda—he voluntarily placed himself in conflict with much of the world. In helping to organize mass killings both in America and abroad, he made his incapacitation necessary, and gave plenty of justified reasons to hate (yes, hate) him.
In other words, bin Laden gave the world reason to smile at the thought of his eventual demise. This is what distinguishes the celebrations following 9/11 from the celebrations following bin Laden's death. The individuals who died that Tuesday morning were not willing participants in a global war (and delighting in their deaths was indeed barbaric, just as it would have been barbaric to delight in any civilian deaths that were incidental to bin Laden's killing and the War on Terror generally). The same can't be said of bin Laden, and this makes all the difference, as can be shown with an analogy to assault. It would be unacceptable to crowd around an individual and cheer his assault. Does this mean that cheering a tackle at a football game is equally unethical? Hardly; context matters, and that's just one of many things the critics of the American sense of satisfaction are missing.
But few are condescending enough to actually draw the analogy between the celebrations after the 9/11 attacks, and the ones following bin Laden's death. Instead, most seem to think that no death can ever be a cause for celebration. I'm willing to concede that we should never place intrinsic value on one's death. Nevertheless, it is perfectly acceptable to be thrilled that a homicidal maniac no longer roams the earth. Perhaps it would have been better had we taken him alive. (I have no interest in getting into that debate, and I don't think this position is a component of the self-righteous minority's stance.) But still, assuming the alternatives were (1) dead or (2) free, isn't option 1 better? And even if option 1 is worse than option 3—"capture and imprisonment"—is it so much worse that people should not be happy that bin Laden has planned his last attack? When a serial killer is sentenced to death rather than life in prison, aren't we happy that he is punished rather than acquitted, even if we quibble with the method of punishment?
I will admit that the particularly vocal celebrations were juvenile. They might even have been foolish insofar as they provided terrorist organizations with recruitment or motivational material (though any effect was surely negligible). But as obnoxious as these celebrations may have been, it's far more obnoxious to use bin Laden's death as a soap box from which to deliver a holier-than-thou message. Please step down.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
A Graphical Representation of Paper Writing
This is a representation of how paper writing goes for me. The Y-axis is the value I think my idea has, and the X-axis is time. When I begin, I'm optimistic about it. Quickly I begin to have doubts. I vacillate between thinking it's good and thinking it's awful, with the high points slowly becoming lower until I reach the stage of utter dissatisfaction.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Many Paths to the Same Summit: The "Right" Way to Raise Kids
Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor and mother, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," a paean to a style of mothering which she identifies with the stereotypical Chinese (or Chinese-American immigrant) mother. The style of parenting she has in mind basically involves strict, unsympathetic, and unforgiving parenting: forbidding children from (ever) watching TV, playing computer games, attending sleepovers, or being in a school play; punishing children for getting anything other than straight A's in school, or for attempting to play anything other than piano or violin; berating them as stupid, disgraceful, or garbage for failing at any activity; and forbidding children from choosing their own extracurricular activities.
I do not intend to defend lax parenting. There can clearly be parenting which lets the inmates run the asylum, so to speak--frazzled parents who will placate any demand their children place on them in order to avoid a tantrum or meltdown, parents who are completely uninvolved in their kids' academic or extracurricular lives, and so on.
But Chua's stereotyped version of Chinese motherhood just tilts the parenting style to the opposite extreme. In the article, she (proudly) recounts screaming at her seven year old daughter until she lost her voice because she wasn't able to play "The Little White Donkey" on the piano adequately. "I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic," Chua wrote. It got to the point when her husband intervened and asked that she stop insulting her daughter. Chua's reaction is instructive:
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way."
As this article in the New York Times points out, "Western" parenting styles are increasingly becoming trendy in China, while--if Chua's article is indicative of anything more than her own insecurities--Chinese styles are looking faddish in the West. It makes sense, as the author suggests, that we shouldn't expect one parenting method to succeed over all others. But it also makes sense that people who have had some success personally and were parented in a certain way might mistake that style of parenting as the overriding cause of their success--the source of their drive and talent, rather than something that (if anything) wrecked their childhood without driving them to be more successful than they already would have been if their parents were tough and firm, but not vituperative or cruel.
Is it impossible that statements made to children ("You are garbage! You are pathetic and cowardly and self-indulgent!") might stay inside of the child for longer than the happiness (or perhaps in Chua's children's case, relief) from successfully learning a piece on piano? If Chua's daughter, twenty years from the incident, were asked which stuck in her mind more--the joy from playing "The Little White Donkey" with technical precision when she was seven, or the image of her mother trying to hurt her as much as she could without actually breaking the law to get her to play it--which would she choose?
Chua seems to think these are rhetorical questions. I don't. Merciless parenting may lead to happier lives and better academic outcomes for children, but simply assuming that it will as a matter of stereotyping and folk psychology isn't really on the table as an intellectually honest (or persuasive) option--even if doing so in a WSJ article moves copies of Chua's book.
Chua's primary mistake is attributing her own success entirely (or even largely) to her parents (rather than to her own intelligence, and her own decisions about how to pursue her goals). This is fine as a matter of gratitude--where would I be without my parents?--but may not be factually correct.
She then makes the same mistake with her own children. She assumes that whatever success her children have is a result of her own work, rather than something that is fortuitous and--while susceptible to parental influence--is not solely a factor of parental drive. So her kids are smart. So SHE is smart. But if she looks around the Yale Law faculty, will she find that every professor was raised in the same way? Will she find that they all were berated as children?
Or will she find that one style of parenting may work for her, but may or may not work for others, and that parenting is a bit more complex than screaming and calling your kid names?
I'm agnostic about the right way to raise kids. But I have a nagging suspicion that it doesn't involve an extreme parenting gimmick, and probably has to do with staying involved in their lives, trying to get them to do homework and to take education seriously, and to prepare them for a productive, healthy, and happy adult life. There are probably hundreds of ways to do this. I'm skeptical that Chua's is one.
I do not intend to defend lax parenting. There can clearly be parenting which lets the inmates run the asylum, so to speak--frazzled parents who will placate any demand their children place on them in order to avoid a tantrum or meltdown, parents who are completely uninvolved in their kids' academic or extracurricular lives, and so on.
But Chua's stereotyped version of Chinese motherhood just tilts the parenting style to the opposite extreme. In the article, she (proudly) recounts screaming at her seven year old daughter until she lost her voice because she wasn't able to play "The Little White Donkey" on the piano adequately. "I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic," Chua wrote. It got to the point when her husband intervened and asked that she stop insulting her daughter. Chua's reaction is instructive:
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way."
As this article in the New York Times points out, "Western" parenting styles are increasingly becoming trendy in China, while--if Chua's article is indicative of anything more than her own insecurities--Chinese styles are looking faddish in the West. It makes sense, as the author suggests, that we shouldn't expect one parenting method to succeed over all others. But it also makes sense that people who have had some success personally and were parented in a certain way might mistake that style of parenting as the overriding cause of their success--the source of their drive and talent, rather than something that (if anything) wrecked their childhood without driving them to be more successful than they already would have been if their parents were tough and firm, but not vituperative or cruel.
Is it impossible that statements made to children ("You are garbage! You are pathetic and cowardly and self-indulgent!") might stay inside of the child for longer than the happiness (or perhaps in Chua's children's case, relief) from successfully learning a piece on piano? If Chua's daughter, twenty years from the incident, were asked which stuck in her mind more--the joy from playing "The Little White Donkey" with technical precision when she was seven, or the image of her mother trying to hurt her as much as she could without actually breaking the law to get her to play it--which would she choose?
Chua seems to think these are rhetorical questions. I don't. Merciless parenting may lead to happier lives and better academic outcomes for children, but simply assuming that it will as a matter of stereotyping and folk psychology isn't really on the table as an intellectually honest (or persuasive) option--even if doing so in a WSJ article moves copies of Chua's book.
Chua's primary mistake is attributing her own success entirely (or even largely) to her parents (rather than to her own intelligence, and her own decisions about how to pursue her goals). This is fine as a matter of gratitude--where would I be without my parents?--but may not be factually correct.
She then makes the same mistake with her own children. She assumes that whatever success her children have is a result of her own work, rather than something that is fortuitous and--while susceptible to parental influence--is not solely a factor of parental drive. So her kids are smart. So SHE is smart. But if she looks around the Yale Law faculty, will she find that every professor was raised in the same way? Will she find that they all were berated as children?
Or will she find that one style of parenting may work for her, but may or may not work for others, and that parenting is a bit more complex than screaming and calling your kid names?
I'm agnostic about the right way to raise kids. But I have a nagging suspicion that it doesn't involve an extreme parenting gimmick, and probably has to do with staying involved in their lives, trying to get them to do homework and to take education seriously, and to prepare them for a productive, healthy, and happy adult life. There are probably hundreds of ways to do this. I'm skeptical that Chua's is one.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
An Abortion Thought
In my opinion, the question of the morality of abortion is difficult and divisive because it hinges on a question without an answer.[1] Allow me to elaborate.
[1] I am addressing only the moral issue of abortion, which might not be the same as the legal issue.
[2] The other important question would be what constitutes an “exceptional circumstance.” I do not address that here, other than to note that I think there would be more common ground on abortion were this the only disagreement.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Moral Forecasting: Is Abortion Wrong?
One thing that I think is strange about the public discourse over abortion is how little consequentialist language is used, and--when it is used, how limited its function is in the arguments that are advanced.
A typical argument about abortion might center around, say, whether the fetus is human. On this, pro-life individuals seek to establish that:
But a purely consequentialist outlook would cover very different ground. On a strictly consequentialist view, what would make abortion wrong (what would make anything wrong) is if its bad consequences outweighed its good ones. Most people would agree that the pain of the fetus, if the fetus feels pain (this depends on when in the pregnancy the termination is carried out--some reports put this at around twenty weeks after fertilization) is a bad consequence. All else equal, on a consequentialist view, if a fetus is going to be aborted, it should be aborted before it can feel pain.
This suffering should be weighed against the inconvenience of carrying the fetus (the sickness, unwieldiness, and other side effects) for the mother, the pain of childbirth, and the serious financial and emotional burdens of either raising a child, or putting the newborn up for adoption.
Typically the consequentialist discussion ends there, with a few notable exceptions. But exceptions like this spark extremely loud and largely negative reactions. If abortion is wrong, the argument goes, then who cares if it lowers crime in the future? It also eliminates the positive externalities from those of the aborted fetuses who would have gone on to become productive, tax-paying adults, who would coach their kid's softball team and volunteer to mulch flower beds at nursing homes. And even if we find that the former outweighs the latter, shouldn't the (counter-factual) utility, or positive consequences, of the would-be lives of the aborted fetuses drastically outweigh anything else?
This last question depends on whether we think the average life of a typical aborted fetus would have been worth living or not worth living, which presents a series of bizarre and fantastical questions for the run-of-the-mill consequentialist. It leads to calculations and quantification that an ordinary person (a non-philosophy major? A non-law student?) might find distasteful at best, or morally perverse at worst. Suppose that "happiness" or "well-being" is the consequence we're looking for, from an evaluative perspective. We might say that 10 is the happiest that a person could ever be over a lifespan, and -10 is someone who is tortured (physically and mentally) in the most excruciating and agonizing possible way at all waking moments. -1 would be someone whose life, on the whole, is a mildly unhappy one; 1 would be someone whose experiences, on balance, have been slightly happier than sad. 0 is the puzzle. 0 is neither happy nor sad--a life in which all joys are met with exactly commensurate sorrows, or one in which there is no joy or no sorrow whatsoever (it's somewhat strange that these lives would get the same 'number').
If we are to evaluate nonexistence as neither good nor bad from an evaluative perspective--and, since there can be no evaluation without an evaluator, some subject with experiences which affect him, her, or it, why not?--then 0 is the point at which a rational individual is indifferent between life and a painless death. Assuming, at any rate, that it's coherent in the first place to talk about nonexistence having an evaluative rating. A rational person with a -1 life might prefer nonexistence to his own life, ceteris paribus. But then he might have positive externalities--he makes his grandchildren laugh, so +1, and he is an excellent husband and father, +3. Thus, from an "eye in the sky" perspective, his life is evaluated at 3, even though his subjective experience, if considered in isolation, is a bad one. (Maybe this is the best way to describe the life of George Bailey, from It's a Wonderful Life). And on a consequentialist perspective, there are familiar examples of the opposite. Adolf Hitler may have loved his life (call him a +7), but his effects on the lives of others would make him close to a -10. That is, if he could have been assassinated by some plot among his officers, it would have had wonderful consequences for a tremendous number of people.
(Additionally, whether one rationally prefers existence or nonexistence could also be a function of how he gets from point A to point B. A man with a life of -1, who--ceteris paribus--would be "better off," subjectively, if he didn't exist, might still be rational in preferring existence over a dreadfully painful and prolonged death that would decrease him to a -10 for a period of time (especially if he had a painless method of ending his existence later on, which would move him from -1 to 0 immediately.)
The reason this type of evaluation isn't used with respect to abortion, except rarely, is simply that it's impossible to forecast, on a case-by-case basis, who will be "Hitler" (or a small-time crack dealer), and who will be George Bailey (or at least, I don't know, Sean Casey; he seemed like a pretty good guy).
What this means is that the moral status of any one abortion is, ex ante, completely uncertain. So, ex ante, the abortion debate has to focus on generalizations. The most important question is this: is the typical life above the 0 threshold (including externalities), or is it below? This considers not just the subjective experience of the fetus throughout its hypothetical life, but also the externalities (positive and negative) that the fetus would produce throughout its life.
But this question must be qualified and reframed in a certain respect. Typically, women who seek abortions share an important similarity: they do not want to have a child, either right now, or ever. This fact means that in those instances in which women actually have abortions, by and large they are averting at least one serious negative externality--that which carrying the fetus to term would impose on themselves.
Moreover, they are averting a second, generally negative, set of consequences, though not external ones: those emotional, romantic, psychological, financial, or health reasons which influenced the mother to abort the fetus would also, in a number of cases, make the fetus's life significantly worse. Perhaps the mother is unable to support the fetus. Perhaps the mother feels that either she or the father would be unable to provide a child with stable support at that time (or ever). Perhaps delivering the baby would seriously injure or even kill the mother, and the fetus would be without a parent for its entire life.
In sum, on a consequentialist picture, evaluating any particular abortion is impossible. The problem is forecasting whether abortions generally produce good or bad consequences, and "playing the probabilities," so to speak--if there's an 80% chance that a given abortion will produce bad consequences, then, ex ante, the consequentialist would advise you to not have an abortion. But the very factors that lead women to choose to have an abortion suggest that abortions will generally take place when the overall consequences of a life are, at the very least, worse than average (even if not below the 0 threshold which, on one view, is the point of indifference between existence and nonexistence). So the question to ask is not "is the typical life above the 0 threshold, or is it below?" Rather, the question to ask is "is the typical life of an individual whose mother seeks an abortion above the 0 threshold (including externalities), or is it below?"
I have no idea how to answer that question, and attempts may be useless. But, from an ex ante, consequentialist perspective, it might be the only question worth asking.
A typical argument about abortion might center around, say, whether the fetus is human. On this, pro-life individuals seek to establish that:
- A fetus has certain characteristics--DNA, a heart beat (after a certain point), potential for growth--that mandate its classification as "human."
- It is always wrong, save perhaps in instances of self-defense or defense of others, to kill a human.
- Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus, save perhaps in instances of self-defense (a mother choosing to abort her fetus) or defense of others (as with a doctor aborting a fetus to save the mother's life).
But a purely consequentialist outlook would cover very different ground. On a strictly consequentialist view, what would make abortion wrong (what would make anything wrong) is if its bad consequences outweighed its good ones. Most people would agree that the pain of the fetus, if the fetus feels pain (this depends on when in the pregnancy the termination is carried out--some reports put this at around twenty weeks after fertilization) is a bad consequence. All else equal, on a consequentialist view, if a fetus is going to be aborted, it should be aborted before it can feel pain.
This suffering should be weighed against the inconvenience of carrying the fetus (the sickness, unwieldiness, and other side effects) for the mother, the pain of childbirth, and the serious financial and emotional burdens of either raising a child, or putting the newborn up for adoption.
Typically the consequentialist discussion ends there, with a few notable exceptions. But exceptions like this spark extremely loud and largely negative reactions. If abortion is wrong, the argument goes, then who cares if it lowers crime in the future? It also eliminates the positive externalities from those of the aborted fetuses who would have gone on to become productive, tax-paying adults, who would coach their kid's softball team and volunteer to mulch flower beds at nursing homes. And even if we find that the former outweighs the latter, shouldn't the (counter-factual) utility, or positive consequences, of the would-be lives of the aborted fetuses drastically outweigh anything else?
This last question depends on whether we think the average life of a typical aborted fetus would have been worth living or not worth living, which presents a series of bizarre and fantastical questions for the run-of-the-mill consequentialist. It leads to calculations and quantification that an ordinary person (a non-philosophy major? A non-law student?) might find distasteful at best, or morally perverse at worst. Suppose that "happiness" or "well-being" is the consequence we're looking for, from an evaluative perspective. We might say that 10 is the happiest that a person could ever be over a lifespan, and -10 is someone who is tortured (physically and mentally) in the most excruciating and agonizing possible way at all waking moments. -1 would be someone whose life, on the whole, is a mildly unhappy one; 1 would be someone whose experiences, on balance, have been slightly happier than sad. 0 is the puzzle. 0 is neither happy nor sad--a life in which all joys are met with exactly commensurate sorrows, or one in which there is no joy or no sorrow whatsoever (it's somewhat strange that these lives would get the same 'number').
If we are to evaluate nonexistence as neither good nor bad from an evaluative perspective--and, since there can be no evaluation without an evaluator, some subject with experiences which affect him, her, or it, why not?--then 0 is the point at which a rational individual is indifferent between life and a painless death. Assuming, at any rate, that it's coherent in the first place to talk about nonexistence having an evaluative rating. A rational person with a -1 life might prefer nonexistence to his own life, ceteris paribus. But then he might have positive externalities--he makes his grandchildren laugh, so +1, and he is an excellent husband and father, +3. Thus, from an "eye in the sky" perspective, his life is evaluated at 3, even though his subjective experience, if considered in isolation, is a bad one. (Maybe this is the best way to describe the life of George Bailey, from It's a Wonderful Life). And on a consequentialist perspective, there are familiar examples of the opposite. Adolf Hitler may have loved his life (call him a +7), but his effects on the lives of others would make him close to a -10. That is, if he could have been assassinated by some plot among his officers, it would have had wonderful consequences for a tremendous number of people.
(Additionally, whether one rationally prefers existence or nonexistence could also be a function of how he gets from point A to point B. A man with a life of -1, who--ceteris paribus--would be "better off," subjectively, if he didn't exist, might still be rational in preferring existence over a dreadfully painful and prolonged death that would decrease him to a -10 for a period of time (especially if he had a painless method of ending his existence later on, which would move him from -1 to 0 immediately.)
The reason this type of evaluation isn't used with respect to abortion, except rarely, is simply that it's impossible to forecast, on a case-by-case basis, who will be "Hitler" (or a small-time crack dealer), and who will be George Bailey (or at least, I don't know, Sean Casey; he seemed like a pretty good guy).
What this means is that the moral status of any one abortion is, ex ante, completely uncertain. So, ex ante, the abortion debate has to focus on generalizations. The most important question is this: is the typical life above the 0 threshold (including externalities), or is it below? This considers not just the subjective experience of the fetus throughout its hypothetical life, but also the externalities (positive and negative) that the fetus would produce throughout its life.
But this question must be qualified and reframed in a certain respect. Typically, women who seek abortions share an important similarity: they do not want to have a child, either right now, or ever. This fact means that in those instances in which women actually have abortions, by and large they are averting at least one serious negative externality--that which carrying the fetus to term would impose on themselves.
Moreover, they are averting a second, generally negative, set of consequences, though not external ones: those emotional, romantic, psychological, financial, or health reasons which influenced the mother to abort the fetus would also, in a number of cases, make the fetus's life significantly worse. Perhaps the mother is unable to support the fetus. Perhaps the mother feels that either she or the father would be unable to provide a child with stable support at that time (or ever). Perhaps delivering the baby would seriously injure or even kill the mother, and the fetus would be without a parent for its entire life.
In sum, on a consequentialist picture, evaluating any particular abortion is impossible. The problem is forecasting whether abortions generally produce good or bad consequences, and "playing the probabilities," so to speak--if there's an 80% chance that a given abortion will produce bad consequences, then, ex ante, the consequentialist would advise you to not have an abortion. But the very factors that lead women to choose to have an abortion suggest that abortions will generally take place when the overall consequences of a life are, at the very least, worse than average (even if not below the 0 threshold which, on one view, is the point of indifference between existence and nonexistence). So the question to ask is not "is the typical life above the 0 threshold, or is it below?" Rather, the question to ask is "is the typical life of an individual whose mother seeks an abortion above the 0 threshold (including externalities), or is it below?"
I have no idea how to answer that question, and attempts may be useless. But, from an ex ante, consequentialist perspective, it might be the only question worth asking.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Candidates Who Reject Evolution
Many people are bothered by candidates who deny evolution. I am too, but potentially for different a reason than others (which I take to be the unfair belief that denial of evolution shows a lack of intelligence, and the legitimate concern that anti-evolution types will introduce anti-evolution science curricula into public schools). When someone denies evolution, it tells me that when faced with a conflict with pre-existing beliefs and evidence, she will go with pre-existing beliefs. This is not an uncommon trait, but it is dangerous when possessed by someone in a position of leadership. Of course, this requires the assumption that this sort of intransigence pervades her decision-making—i.e. that it isn't isolated just to evolution or conflicts with religious faith—but this assumption strikes me as realistic.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
An even less original thought about evolution
This is in response to Ben's last post. I think a large degree of the denial of evolution actually does have to do with failure to recognize that the listed processes can develop new species. That is, I don't think a number of anti-evolutionists would disagree with any specific premise here:
(1)
and
(2) Environmental pressures change over time
Rather, I think that some either believe or have the general, amorphous, unarticulated attitude that species lines are stable, or somehow fixed. I think a good name for this is "baby platonism." Everything in the world--cars, chairs, humans--come pre-packaged in a discrete "box."
It ignores the fact that reality is unmarked--things exist, and we give them names. These names may or may not correspond to any hard and fast differences in the things that we've named. For instance, we see some object that looks like this and call it a table. We see another object that looks like this and call it a chair. But there's a hazy boundary where there would be debate between reasonable people about whether something is a "table" or a "chair." This debate belies the fact that there just isn't an answer--to quote bone-headed football coaches everywhere, "it is what it is," and nothing more. We aren't arguing about any physical properties of the object in front of us--we're just debating what to call it, what name to give it. It's not pre-labeled "table" or "chair" for us to discover. All debate serves to do is to answer the question "according to our current standards, norms, conventions, and so on, would it be more appropriate to call this a table, or call this a chair?"
I think this point is lost on a lot of people. A number of people (most?) think there's an actual, metaphysical answer to the question "what IS this thing in front of me?" Even if people would accept the point that I made in the previous paragraph with respect to tables and chairs, they would be far less likely to accept the point with, say, humans and a human-like but not-quite-human primate.
There are a lot of reasons for this. One, of course, is religion--humans are put at the center of creation, and this doesn't seem to jibe with the category "human" being just a name that we apply to a broad spectrum of organisms that bear similarities in appearance, behavior, DNA structure, and so on. People resist the proposition that an organism can be more or less "human," and that the distinction--as with the distinction between "table" and "chair," or perhaps "bald" and "non-bald," is a vague one that has to do with language more than reality.
In sum, one of the serious problems (be it intellectual or emotional) that anti-evolutionists have with evolution is that it threatens this conception of reality. Change can occur, on this baby platonist view, but it occurs within the fixed boundaries of a species
(which, like any other concept, is to some degree arbitrary)--at least it does for humans.
One thing worth discussing, but which I won't address in this post, is the effects of the baby platonistic "hard distinction" between human and non-human entities both biologically and morally, and the effect that that mistaken view has on the moral status of animals.
(1)
(A) Genetic traits that increase the likelihood of reaching reproductive age are more likely to be passed on to the next generation
(B) Traits that reduce the likelihood of reaching reproductive age are less likely to be passed on to the next generation
(C) Therefore, we would expect subsequent generations of animals to retain beneficial traits, and shed those that decrease the chance of reaching reproductive age.
and
(2) Environmental pressures change over time
Rather, I think that some either believe or have the general, amorphous, unarticulated attitude that species lines are stable, or somehow fixed. I think a good name for this is "baby platonism." Everything in the world--cars, chairs, humans--come pre-packaged in a discrete "box."
It ignores the fact that reality is unmarked--things exist, and we give them names. These names may or may not correspond to any hard and fast differences in the things that we've named. For instance, we see some object that looks like this and call it a table. We see another object that looks like this and call it a chair. But there's a hazy boundary where there would be debate between reasonable people about whether something is a "table" or a "chair." This debate belies the fact that there just isn't an answer--to quote bone-headed football coaches everywhere, "it is what it is," and nothing more. We aren't arguing about any physical properties of the object in front of us--we're just debating what to call it, what name to give it. It's not pre-labeled "table" or "chair" for us to discover. All debate serves to do is to answer the question "according to our current standards, norms, conventions, and so on, would it be more appropriate to call this a table, or call this a chair?"
I think this point is lost on a lot of people. A number of people (most?) think there's an actual, metaphysical answer to the question "what IS this thing in front of me?" Even if people would accept the point that I made in the previous paragraph with respect to tables and chairs, they would be far less likely to accept the point with, say, humans and a human-like but not-quite-human primate.
There are a lot of reasons for this. One, of course, is religion--humans are put at the center of creation, and this doesn't seem to jibe with the category "human" being just a name that we apply to a broad spectrum of organisms that bear similarities in appearance, behavior, DNA structure, and so on. People resist the proposition that an organism can be more or less "human," and that the distinction--as with the distinction between "table" and "chair," or perhaps "bald" and "non-bald," is a vague one that has to do with language more than reality.
In sum, one of the serious problems (be it intellectual or emotional) that anti-evolutionists have with evolution is that it threatens this conception of reality. Change can occur, on this baby platonist view, but it occurs within the fixed boundaries of a species
(which, like any other concept, is to some degree arbitrary)--at least it does for humans.
One thing worth discussing, but which I won't address in this post, is the effects of the baby platonistic "hard distinction" between human and non-human entities both biologically and morally, and the effect that that mistaken view has on the moral status of animals.
A likely unoriginal thought about evolution
What I've always struggled to understand about anti-evolution types (I use this phrase rather than "creationist," to avoid being interpreted to say evolution and a creation are inconsistent) is exactly what part of the theory they reject. I realize the view is probably more of an emotional reaction than a reasoned stance, but if there were an argument, how would it proceed? The following seems unassailable:
(1)
and
(2) Environmental pressures change over time
But once this is accepted, how can one reject the notion that, over time, new species will form as selective pressures change? I see two options. First, one can deny that the Earth has been around long enough for these changes to have occured. More on this in a moment. Second, one can deny that these changes can create new species. But the second point needs an explanation, and it seems the only basis for that opinion would be that the Earth hasn't been around long enough.
So are all anti-evolutionists Young Earth creationists? Of course they don't need to be—they could reject the proposition that the Earth has existed for only 6,000 years while still thinking it has not been around long enough to have fostered evolutionary processes at the "macro" level. But I see no reason for holding this belief other than the desire that evolution not be true. So it seems the only intellectually honest argument (or the only potentially intellectually honest argument) against evolution is Young Earth creationism.
(1)
(A) Genetic traits that increase the likelihood of reaching reproductive age are more likely to be passed on to the next generation
(B) Traits that reduce the likelihood of reaching reproductive age are less likely to be passed on to the next generation
(C) Therefore, we would expect subsequent generations of animals to retain beneficial traits, and shed those that decrease the chance of reaching reproductive age.
and
(2) Environmental pressures change over time
But once this is accepted, how can one reject the notion that, over time, new species will form as selective pressures change? I see two options. First, one can deny that the Earth has been around long enough for these changes to have occured. More on this in a moment. Second, one can deny that these changes can create new species. But the second point needs an explanation, and it seems the only basis for that opinion would be that the Earth hasn't been around long enough.
So are all anti-evolutionists Young Earth creationists? Of course they don't need to be—they could reject the proposition that the Earth has existed for only 6,000 years while still thinking it has not been around long enough to have fostered evolutionary processes at the "macro" level. But I see no reason for holding this belief other than the desire that evolution not be true. So it seems the only intellectually honest argument (or the only potentially intellectually honest argument) against evolution is Young Earth creationism.
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