John Stuart Mill

How to be a deontological consequentialist

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 7 JDN 2461017

As is commonly understood, there are two main branches of normative ethics:

  • Deontology, on which morality consists in following rules and fulfilling obligations, and
  • Consequentialism, on which morality consists in maximizing good consequences.

The conflict between them has raged for centuries, with Kantians leading the deontologists and utilitarians leading the consequentialists. Both theories seem to have a lot of good points, but neither can decisively defeat the other.

I think this is because they are both basically correct.

In their strongest forms, deontology and consequentialism are mutually contradictory; but it turns out that you can soften each of them a little bit, and the results become compatible.

To make deontology a little more consequentialist, let’s ask a simple question:

What makes a rule worth following?

I contend that the best answer we have is “because following that rule would make the world better off than not following that rule”. (Even Kantians pretty much have to admit this: What maxim could you will to be an absolute law? Only a law that would yield good outcomes.)

That is, the ultimate justification of a sound deontology would be fundamentally consequentialist.

But lest the consequentialists get too smug, we can also ask them another question, which is a bit subtler:

How do you know which actions will ultimately have good consequences?

Sure, if we were omniscient beings who could perfectly predict the consequences of our actions across the entire galaxy on into the indefinite future, we could be proper act utilitarians who literally choose every single action according to a calculation of the expected utility.

But in practice, we have radical uncertainty about the long-term consequences of our actions, and can generally only predict the immediate consequences.

That leads to the next question:

Would you really want to live in a world where people optimized immediate consequences?

I contend that you would not, that such a world actually sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Immediate consequences say that if a healthy person walks into a hospital and happens to have compatible organs for five people who need donations, we should kill that person, harvest their organs, and give them to the donors. (This is the organ transplant variant of the Trolley Problem.)

Basically everyone recognizes that this is wrong. But why is it wrong? That’s thornier. One pretty convincing case is that a systematic policy of this kind would undermine trust in hospitals and destroy the effectiveness of healthcare in general, resulting in disastrous consequences far outweighing the benefit of saving those five people. But those aren’t immediate consequences, and indeed, it’s quite difficult to predict exactly how many crazy actions like this it would take to undermine people’s trust in hospitals, just how much it would undermine that trust, or exactly what the consequences of that lost trust would be.

So it seems like it’s actually better to have a rule about this.

This makes us into rule utilitarians, who instead of trying to optimize literally every single action—which requires information we do not have and never will—we instead develop a system of rules that we can follow, heuristics that will allow us to get better outcomes generally even if they can’t be guaranteed to produce the best possible outcome in any particular case.

That is, the output of a sophisticated consequentialism is fundamentally deontological.

We have come at the question of normative ethics from two very different directions, but the results turned out basically the same:

We should follow the rules that would have the best consequences.

The output of our moral theory is rules, like deontology; but its fundamental justification is based on outcomes, like consequentialism.

In my experience, when I present this account to staunch deontologists, they are pretty much convinced by it. They’re prepared to give up the fundamental justification to consequences if it allows them to have their rules.

The resistance I get is mainly from staunch consequentialists, who insist that it’s not so difficult to optimize individual actions, and so we should just do that instead of making all these rules.

So it is to those consequentialists, particularly those who say “rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism”, to whom the rest of the post is addressed.

First, let me say that I agree.

In the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents, rule utilitarianism mathematically collapses into act utilitarianism. That is a correct theorem.

However, we do not live in the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents. We are not even close to that ideal case; we will never be close to that ideal case. Indeed, I think part of the problem here is that you fail to fully grasp the depth and width of the chasm between here and there. Even a galactic civilization of a quintillion superhuman AIs would still not be close to that ideal case.

Quite frankly, humans aren’t even particularly good at forecasting what will make themselves happy.

There are massive errors and systematic biases in human affective forecasting.

One of the post important biases is impact bias: People systematically overestimate the impact of individual events on their long-term happiness. Some of this seems to be just due to focus: Paying attention to a particular event exaggerates its importance in your mind, and makes it harder for you to recall other events that might push your emotions in a different direction. Another component is called immune neglect: people fail to account for their own capacity to habituate to both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. (This effect is often overstated: It’s a common misconception that lottery winners are no happier than they were before. No, they absolutely are happier, on average; they’re just not as much happier as they predicted themselves to be.)

People also use inconsistent time discounting: $10 today is judged as better than $11 tomorrow, but $10 in 364 days is not regarded as better than $11 in 365 days—so if I made a decision a year ago, I’d want to change it now. (The correct answer, by the way, is to take the $11; a discount rate of 10% per day is a staggering 120,000,000,000,000,000% APR—seriously; check it yourself—so you’d better not be discounting at that rate, unless you’re literally going to die before tomorrow.)

Now, compound that with the fact that different human beings come at the world from radically different perspectives and with radically different preferences.

How good do you think we are at predicting what will make other people happy?

Damn right: We’re abysmal.

Basically everyone assumes that what they want and what they would feel is also what other people will want and feel—which, honestly, explains a lot about politics. As a result, my prediction of your feelings is more strongly correlated with my prediction of my feelings than it is with your actual feelings.

The impact bias is especially strong when forecasting other people’s feelings in response to our own actions: We tend to assume that other people care more about what we do than they actually care—and this seems to be a major source of social anxiety.

People also tend to overestimate the suffering of others, and are generally willing to endure more pain than they are willing to inflict upon others. (This one seems like it might be a good thing!)

Even when we know people well, we can still be totally blindsided by their emotional reactions. We’re just really awful at this.

Does this just mean that morality is hopeless? We have no idea what we’re doing?

Fortunately, no. Because while no individual can correctly predict or control the outcomes of particular actions, the collective action of well-designed institutions can in fact significantly improve the outcomes of policy.

This is why we have things like the following:

  • Laws
  • Courts
  • Regulations
  • Legislatures
  • Constitutions
  • Newspapers
  • Universities

These institutions—which form the backbone of liberal democracy—aren’t simply arbitrary. They are the result of hard-fought centuries, a frothing, volatile, battle-tested mix of intentional design and historical evolution.

Are these institutions optimal? Good heavens, no!

But we have no idea what optimal institutions look like, and probably never will. (Those galaxy-spanning AIs will surely have a better system than this; but even theirs probably won’t be optimal.) Instead, what we are stuck with are the best institutions we’ve come up with so far.

Moreover, we do have very clear empirical evidence at this point that some form of liberal democracy with a mixed economy is the best system we’ve got so far. One can reasonably debate whether Canada is doing better or worse than France, or whether the system in Denmark could really be scaled to the United States, or just what the best income tax rates are; but there is a large, obvious, and important difference between life in a country like Canada or Denmark and life in a country like Congo or Afghanistan.

Indeed, perhaps there is no better pair to compare than North and South Korea: Those two countries are right next to each other, speak the same language, and started in more or less the same situation; but the south got good institutions and the north got bad ones, and now the difference between them couldn’t be more stark. (Honestly, this is about as close as we’re ever likely to get of a randomized controlled experiment in macroeconomics.)

People in South Korea now live about as well as some of the happiest places in the world; their GDP per capita PPP is about $65,000 per year, roughly the same as Canada. People in North Korea live about as poorly as it is possible for humans to live, subject to totalitarian oppression and living barely above subsistence; their GDP per capita PPP is estimated to be $600 per year—less than 1% as much.

The institutions of South Korea are just that much better.

Indeed, there’s one particular aspect of good institutions that seems really important, yet is actually kind of hard to justify in act-utilitarian terms:

Why is freedom good?

A country’s level of freedom is almost perfectly correlated with its overall level of happiness and development. (Yes, even on this measure, #ScandinaviaIsBetter.)

But why? In theory, letting people do whatever they want could actually lead to really bad outcomes—and indeed, occasionally it does. There’s even a theorem that liberty is incompatible with full Pareto-efficiency. But all the countries with the happiest people seem to have a lot of liberty, and indeed the happiest ones seem to have the most. How come?

My answer:

Personal liberty is a technology for heuristic utility maximization.

In the ideal case, we wouldn’t really need personal liberty; you could just compel everyone to do whatever is optimal all the time, and that would—by construction—be optimal. It might even be sort of nice: You don’t need to make any difficult decisions, you can just follow the script and know that everything will turn out for the best.

But since we don’t know what the optimal choice is—even in really simple cases, like what you should eat for lunch tomorrow—we can’t afford to compel people in this way. (It would also be incredibly costly to implement such totalitarian control, but that doesn’t stop some governments from trying!)

Then there are disagreements: What I think is optimal may not be what you think is optimal, and in truth we’re probably both wrong (but one of us may be less wrong).

And that’s not even getting into conflicts of interest: We aren’t just lacking in rationality, we’re also lacking in benevolence. Some people are clearly much more benevolent than others, but none of us are really 100% selfless. (Sadly, I think some people are 100% selfish.)

In fact, this is a surprisingly deep question:

Would the world be better if we were selfless?

Could there be actually some advantage in aggregate to having some degree of individual self-interest?

Here are some ways that might hold, just off the top of my head:

  • Partial self-interest supports an evolutionary process of moral and intellectual development that otherwise would be stalled or overrun by psychopaths—see my post on Rousseaus and Axelrods
  • Individuals have much deeper knowledge of their own preferences than anyone else’s, and thus can optimize them much better. (Think about it: This is true even of people you know very well. Otherwise, why would we ever need to ask our spouses one of the most common questions in any marriage: “Honey, what do you want for dinner tonight?”)
  • Self-interest allows for more efficient economic incentives, and thus higher overall productivity.

Of course, total selfishness is clearly not optimal—that way lies psychopathy. But some degree of selfishness might actually be better for long-term aggregate outcomes than complete altruism, and this is to some extent an empirical question.

Personal liberty solves a lot of these problems: Since people are best at knowing their own preferences, let people figure out on their own what’s good for them. Give them the freedom to live the kind of life they want to live, within certain reasonable constraints to prevent them from causing great harm to others or suffering some kind of unrecoverable mistake.

This isn’t exactly a new idea; it’s basically the core message of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (which I consider a good candidate for the best book every written—seriously, it beats the Bible by a light-year). But by putting it in more modern language, I hope to show that deontology and consequentialism aren’t really so different after all.

And indeed, for all its many and obvious flaws, freedom seems to work pretty well—at least as well as anything we’ve tried.

Moral progress and moral authority

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 8 JDN 2460653

In previous posts I’ve written about why religion is a poor source of morality. But it’s worse than that. Religion actually holds us back morally. It is because of religion that our society grants the greatest moral authority to precisely the people and ideas which have most resisted moral progress. Most religious people are good, well-intentioned people—but religious authorities are typically selfish, manipulative, Machiavellian leaders who will say or do just about anything to maintain power. They have trained us to respect and obey them without question; they even call themselves “shepherds” and us the “flock”, as if we were not autonomous humans but obedient ungulates.

I’m sure that most of my readers are shocked that I would assert such a thing; surely priests and imams are great, holy men who deserve our honor and respect? The evidence against such claims is obvious. We only believe such things because the psychopaths have told us to believe them.

I am not saying that these evil practices are inherent to religion—they aren’t. Other zealous, authoritarian ideologies, like Communism and fascism, have been just as harmful for many of the same reasons. Rather, I am saying that religion gives authority and respect to people who would otherwise not have it, people who have long histories of evil, selfish, and exploitative behavior. For a particularly striking example, Catholicism as an idea is false and harmful, but not nearly as harmful as the Catholic Church as an institution, which has harbored some of the worst criminals in history.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is quite literally composed of a cadre of men who use tradition and rhetoric to extort billions of dollars from the poor and who have gone to great lengths to defend men who rape children—a category of human being that normally is so morally reviled that even thieves and murderers consider them beyond the pale of human society. Pope Ratzinger himself, formerly the most powerful religious leader in the world, has been connected with the coverup based on a letter he wrote in 1985. The Catholic Church was also closely tied to Nazi Germany and publicly celebrated Hitler’s birthday for many years; there is evidence that the Vatican actively assisted in the exodus of Nazi leaders along “ratlines” to South America. More recently the Church once again abetted genocide, when in Rwanda it turned away refugees and refused to allow prosecution against any of the perpetrators who were affiliated with the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s right; the Vatican has quite literally been complicit in the worst moral crimes human beings have ever committed. Embezzlement of donations and banning of life-saving condoms seem rather beside the point once we realize that these men and their institutions have harbored genocidaires and child rapists. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible source of moral authority.

Most people respect evangelical preachers, like Jerry Falwell who blamed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on feminists, gays, and secularists, then retracted the statement about 9/11 when he realized how much it had offended people. These people have concepts of morality that were antiquated in the 19th century; they base their ethical norms on books that were written by ignorant and cultish nomads thousands of years ago. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 indeed condemn homosexuality, but Leviticus 19:27 condemns shaving and Leviticus 11:9-12 says that eating fish is fine but eating shrimp is evil. By the way, Leviticus 11:21-22 seems to say that locusts have only four legs, when they very definitely have six and you can see this by looking at one. (I cannot emphasize this enough: Don’t listen to what people say about the book, read the book.)

But we plainly don’t respect scientists or philosophers to make moral and political decisions. If we did, we would have enacted equal rights for LGBT people sometime around 1898 when the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded or at least by 1948 when Alfred Kinsey showed how common, normal, and healthy homosexuality is. Democracy and universal suffrage (for men at least) would have been the norm shortly after 1689 when Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. Women would have been granted the right to vote in 1792 upon the publication of Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, instead of in 1920 after a long and painful political battle. Animal rights would have become law in 1789 with the publication of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. We should have been suspicious of slavery since at least Kant if not Socrates, but instead it took until the 19th century for slavery to finally be banned. We owe the free world to moral science; but nonetheless we rarely listen to the arguments of moral scientists. As a species we fight for our old traditions even in the face of obvious and compelling evidence to the contrary, and this holds us back—far back. If they haven’t sunk in yet, read these dates again: Society is literally about 200 years behind the cutting edge of moral science. Imagine being 200 years behind in technology; you would be riding horses instead of flying in jet airliners and writing letters with quills instead of texting on your iPhone. Imagine being 200 years behind in ecology; you would be considering the environmental impact of not photovoltaic panels or ethanol but whale oil. This is how far behind we are in moral science.

One subfield of moral science has done somewhat better: The economics of theory and the economics of practice differ by only about 100 years. Capitalism really was instituted on a large scale only a few decades after Adam Smith argued for it, and socialism (while horrifyingly abused in the Communism of Lenin and Stalin) has nonetheless been implemented on a wide scale only a century after Marx. Keynesian stimulus was international policy (despite its numerous detractors) in 2008 and 2020, and Keynes himself died in only 1946. This process is still slower than it probably should be, but at least we aren’t completely ignoring new advances the way we do in ethics. 100 years behind in technology we would have cars and electricity at least.

Except perhaps in economics, in general we entrust our moral claims to the authority of men in tall hats and ornate robes who merely assert their superiority and ties to higher knowledge, while ignoring the thousands of others who actually apply their reason and demonstrate knowledge and expertise. A criminal in pretty robes who calls himself a moral leader might as well be a moral leader, as far as we’re concerned; a genuinely wise teacher of morality who isn’t arrogant enough to assert special revelation from the divine is instead ignored. Why do we do this? Religion. Religion is holding us back.

We need to move beyond religion in order to make real and lasting moral progress.

Scope neglect and the question of optimal altruism

PNRJ heuristics and biases , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457090 EDT 16:15.

We’re now on Eastern Daylight Time because of this bizarre tradition of shifting our time zone forward for half of the year. It’s supposed to save energy, but a natural experiment in India suggests it actually increases energy demand. So why do we do it? Like every ridiculous tradition (have you ever tried to explain Groundhog Day to someone from another country?), we do it because we’ve always done it.
This week’s topic is scope neglect, one of the most pervasive—and pernicious—cognitive heuristics human beings face. Scope neglect raises a great many challenges not only practically but also theoretically—it raises what I call the question of optimal altruism.

The question is simple to ask yet remarkably challenging to answer: How much should we be willing to sacrifice in order to benefit others? If we think of this as a number, your solidarity coefficient (s), it is equal to the cost you are willing to pay divided by the benefit your action has for someone else: s B > C.

This is analogous to the biological concept relatedness (r), on which Hamilton’s Rule applies: r B > C. Solidarity is the psychological analogue; instead of valuing people based on their genetic similarity to you, you value them based on… well, that’s the problem.

I can easily place upper and lower bounds: The lower bound is zero: You should definitely be willing to sacrifice something to help other people—otherwise you are a psychopath. The upper bound is one: There’s no point in paying more cost than you produce in benefit, and in fact even paying the same cost to yourself as you yield in benefits for other people doesn’t make a lot of sense, because it means that your own self-interest is meaningless and the fact that you understand your own needs better than the needs of others is also irrelevant.

But beyond that, it gets a lot harder—and that may explain why we suffer scope neglect in the first place. Should it be 90%? 50%? 10%? 1%? How should it vary between friends versus family versus strangers? It’s really hard to say. And this inability to precisely decide how much other people should be worth to us may be part of why we suffer scope neglect.

Scope neglect is the fact that we are not willing to expend effort or money in direct proportion to the benefit it would have. When different groups were asked how much they would be willing to donate in order to save the lives of 2,000 birds, 20,000 birds, or 200,000 birds, the answers they gave were statistically indistinguishable—always about $80. But however much a bird’s life is worth to you, shouldn’t 200,000 birds be worth, well, 200,000 times as much? In fact, more than that, because the marginal utility of wealth is decreasing, but I see no reason to think that the marginal utility of birds decreases nearly as fast.

But therein lies the problem: Usually we can’t pay 200,000 times as much. I’d feel like a horrible person if I weren’t willing to expend at least $10 or an equivalent amount of effort in order to save a bird. To save 200,000 birds that means I’d owe $2 million—and I simply don’t have $2 million.

You can get similar results to the bird experiment if you use children—though, as one might hope, the absolute numbers are a bit bigger, usually more like $500 to $1000. (And this, it turns out, is actually about how much it actually costs to save a child’s life by a particularly efficient means, such as anti-malaria nets, de-worming, or direct cash transfer. So please, by all means, give $1000 to UNICEF or the Against Malaria Foundation. If you can’t give $1000, give $100; if you can’t give $100, give $10.) It doesn’t much matter whether you say that the project will save 500 children, 5,000 children, or 50,000 children—people still will give about $500 to $1000. But once again, if I’m willing to spend $1000 to save a child—and I definitely am—how much should I be willing to spend to end malaria, which kills 500,000 children a year? Apparently $500 million, which not only do I not have, I almost certainly will not make that much money cumulatively through my entire life. ($2 million, on the other hand, I almost certainly will make cumulatively—the median income of an economist is $90,000 per year, so if I work for at least 22 years with that as my average income I’ll have cumulatively made $2 million. My net wealth may never be that high—though if I get better positions, or I’m lucky enough or clever enough with the stock market it might—but my cumulative income almost certainly will. Indeed, the average gain in cumulative income from a college degree is about $1 million. Because it takes time—time is money—and loans carry interest, this gives it a net present value of about $300,000.)

But maybe scope neglect isn’t such a bad thing after all. There is a very serious problem with these sort of moral dilemmas: The question didn’t say I would single-handedly save 200,000 birds—and indeed, that notion seems quite ridiculous. If I knew that I could actually save 200,000 birds and I were the only one who could do it, dammit, I would try to come up with that $2 million. I might not succeed, but I really would try as hard as I could.

And if I could single-handedly end malaria, I hereby vow that I would do anything it took to achieve that. Short of mass murder, anything I could do couldn’t be a higher cost to the world than malaria itself. I have no idea how I’d come up with $500 million, but I’d certainly try. Bill Gates could easily come up with that $500 million—so he did. In fact he endowed the Gates Foundation with $28 billion, and they’ve spent $1.3 billion of that on fighting malaria, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

With this in mind, what is scope neglect really about? I think it’s about coordination. It’s not that people don’t care more about 200,000 birds than they do about 2,000; and it’s certainly not that they don’t care more about 50,000 children than they do about 500. Rather, the problem is that people don’t know how many other people are likely to donate, or how expensive the total project is likely to be; and we don’t know how much we should be willing to pay to save the life of a bird or a child.

Hence, what we basically do is give up; since we can’t actually assess the marginal utility of our donation dollars, we fall back on our automatic emotional response. Our mind focuses itself on visualizing that single bird covered in oil, or that single child suffering from malaria. We then hope that the representative heuristic will guide us in how much to give. Or we follow social norms, and give as much as we think others would expect us to give.

While many in the effective altruism community take this to be a failing, they never actually say what we should do—they never give us a figure for how much money we should be willing to donate to save the life of a child. Instead they retreat to abstraction, saying that whatever it is we’re willing to give to save a child, we should be willing to give 50,000 times as much to save 50,000 children.

But it’s not that simple. A bigger project may attract more supporters; if the two occur in direct proportion, then constant donation is the optimal response. Since it’s probably not actually proportional, you likely should give somewhat more to causes that affect more people; but exactly how much more is an astonishingly difficult question. I really don’t blame people—or myself—for only giving a little bit more to causes with larger impact, because actually getting the right answer is so incredibly hard. This is why it’s so important that we have institutions like GiveWell and Charity Navigator which do the hard work to research the effectiveness of charities and tell us which ones we should give to.

Yet even if we can properly prioritize which charities to give to first, that still leaves the question of how much each of us should give. 1% of our income? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? Should we give so much that we throw ourselves into the same poverty we are trying to save others from?

In his earlier work Peter Singer seemed to think we should give so much that it throws us into poverty ourselves; he asked us to literally compare every single purchase and ask ourselves whether a year of lattes or a nicer car is worth a child’s life. Of course even he doesn’t live that way, and in his later books Singer seems to have realized this, and now recommends the far more modest standard that everyone give at least 1% of their income. (He himself gives about 33%, but he’s also very rich so he doesn’t feel it nearly as much.) I think he may have overcompensated; while if literally everyone gave at least 1% that would be more than enough to end world hunger and solve many other problems—world nominal GDP is over $70 trillion, so 1% of that is $700 billion a year—we know that this won’t happen. Some will give more, others less; most will give nothing at all. Hence I think those of us who give should give more than our share; hence I lean toward figures more like 5% or 10%.

But then, why not 50% or 90%? It is very difficult for me to argue on principle why we shouldn’t be expected to give that much. Because my income is such a small proportion of the total donations, the marginal utility of each dollar I give is basically constant—and quite high; if it takes about $1000 to save a child’s life on average, and each of these children will then live about 60 more years at about half the world average happiness, that’s about 30 QALY per $1000, or about 30 milliQALY per dollar. Even at my current level of income (incidentally about as much as I think the US basic income should be), I’m benefiting myself only about 150 microQALY per dollar—so my money is worth about 200 times as much to those children as it is to me.

So now we have to ask ourselves the really uncomfortable question: How much do I value those children, relative to myself? If I am at all honest, the value is not 1; I’m not prepared to die for someone I’ve never met 10,000 kilometers away in a nation I’ve never even visited, nor am I prepared to give away all my possessions and throw myself into the same starvation I am hoping to save them from. I value my closest friends and family approximately the same as myself, but I have to admit that I value random strangers considerably less.

Do I really value them at less than 1%, as these figures would seem to imply? I feel like a monster saying that, but maybe it really isn’t so terrible—after all, most economists seem to think that the optimal solidarity coefficient is in fact zero. Maybe we need to become more comfortable admitting that random strangers aren’t worth that much to us, simply so that we can coherently acknowledge that they aren’t worth nothing. Very few of us actually give away all our possessions, after all.

Then again, what do we mean by worth? I can say from direct experience that a single migraine causes me vastly more pain than learning about the death of 200,000 people in an earthquake in Southeast Asia. And while I gave about $100 to the relief efforts involved in that earthquake, I’ve spent considerably more on migraine treatments—thousands, once you include health insurance. But given the chance, would I be willing to suffer a migraine to prevent such an earthquake? Without hesitation. So the amount of pain we feel is not the same as the amount of money we pay, which is not the same as what we would be willing to sacrifice. I think the latter is more indicative of how much people’s lives are really worth to us—but then, what we pay is what has the most direct effect on the world.

It’s actually possible to justify not dying or selling all my possessions even if my solidarity coefficient is much higher—it just leads to some really questionable conclusions. Essentially the argument is this: I am an asset. I have what economists call “human capital”—my health, my intelligence, my education—that gives me the opportunity to affect the world in ways those children cannot. In my ideal imagined future (albeit improbable) in which I actually become President of the World Bank and have the authority to set global development policy, I myself could actually have a marginal impact of megaQALY—millions of person-years of better life. In the far more likely scenario in which I attain some mid-level research or advisory position, I could be one of thousands of people who together have that sort of impact—which still means my own marginal effect is on the order of kiloQALY. And clearly it’s true that if I died, or even if I sold all my possessions, these events would no longer be possible.

The problem with that reasoning is that it’s wildly implausible to say that everyone in the First World are in this same sort of position—Peter Singer can say that, and maybe I can say that, and indeed hundreds of development economists can say that—but at least 99.9% of the First World population are not development economists, nor are they physicists likely to invent cold fusion, nor biomedical engineers likely to cure HIV, nor aid workers who distribute anti-malaria nets and polio vaccines, nor politicians who set national policy, nor diplomats who influence international relations, nor authors whose bestselling books raise worldwide consciousness. Yet I am not comfortable saying that all the world’s teachers, secretaries, airline pilots and truck drivers should give away their possessions either. (Maybe all the world’s bankers and CEOs should—or at least most of them.)

Is it enough that our economy would collapse without teachers, secretaries, airline pilots and truck drivers? But this seems rather like the fact that if everyone in the world visited the same restaurant there wouldn’t be enough room. Surely we could do without any individual teacher, any individual truck driver? If everyone gave the same proportion of their income, 1% would be more than enough to end malaria and world hunger. But we know that everyone won’t give, and the job won’t get done if those of us who do give only 1%.

Moreover, it’s also clearly not the case that everything I spend money on makes me more likely to become a successful and influential development economist. Buying a suit and a car actually clearly does—it’s much easier to get good jobs that way. Even leisure can be justified to some extent, since human beings need leisure and there’s no sense burning myself out before I get anything done. But do I need both of my video game systems? Couldn’t I buy a bit less Coke Zero? What if I watched a 20-inch TV instead of a 40-inch one? I still have free time; could I get another job and donate that money? This is the sort of question Peter Singer tells us to ask ourselves, and it quickly leads to a painfully spartan existence in which most of our time is spent thinking about whether what we’re doing is advancing or damaging the cause of ending world hunger. But then the cost of that stress and cognitive effort must be included; but how do you optimize your own cognitive effort? You need to think about the cost of thinking about the cost of thinking… and on and on. This is why bounded rationality modeling is hard, even though it’s plainly essential to both cognitive science and computer science. (John Stuart Mill wrote an essay that resonates deeply with me about how the pressure to change the world drove him into depression, and how he learned to accept that he could still change the world even if he weren’t constantly pressuring himself to do so—and indeed he did. James Mill set out to create in his son, John Stuart Mill, the greatest philosopher in the history of the world—and I believe that he succeeded.)

Perhaps we should figure out what proportion of the world’s people are likely to give, and how much we need altogether, and then assign the amount we expect from each of them based on that? The more money you ask from each, the fewer people are likely to give. This creates an optimization problem akin to setting the price of a product under monopoly—monopolies maximize profits by carefully balancing the quantity sold with the price at which they sell, and perhaps a similar balance would allow us to maximize development aid. But wouldn’t it be better if we could simply increase the number of people who give, so that we don’t have to ask so much of those who are generous? That means tax-funded foreign aid is the way to go, because it ensures coordination. And indeed I do favor increasing foreign aid to about 1% of GDP—in the US it is currently about $50 billion, 0.3% of GDP, a little more than 1% of the Federal budget. (Most people who say we should “cut” foreign aid don’t realize how small it already is.) But foreign aid is coercive; wouldn’t it be better if people would give voluntarily?

I don’t have a simple answer. I don’t know how much other people’s lives ought to be worth to us, or what it means for our decisions once we assign that value. But I hope I’ve convinced you that this problem is an important one—and made you think a little more about scope neglect and why we have it.

Are humans rational?

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JDN 2456928 PDT 11:21.

The central point of contention between cognitive economists and neoclassical economists hinges upon the word “rational”: Are humans rational? What do we mean by “rational”?

Neoclassicists are very keen to insist that they think humans are rational, and often characterize the cognitivist view as saying that humans are irrational. (Daniel Ariely has a habit of feeding this view, titling books things like Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.) But I really don’t think this is the right way to characterize the difference.

Daniel Kahneman has a somewhat better formulation (from Thinking, Fast and Slow): “I often cringe when my work is credited as demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only shows that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model.” (Yes, he capitalizes the word “Humans” throughout, which is annoying; but in general it is a great book.)

The problem is that saying “humans are irrational” has the connotation of a universal statement; it seems to be saying that everything we do, all the time, is always and everywhere utterly irrational. And this of course could hardly be further from the truth; we would not have even survived in the savannah, let alone invented the Internet, if we were that irrational. If we simply lurched about randomly without any concept of goals or response to information in the environment, we would have starved to death millions of years ago.

But at the same time, the neoclassical definition of “rational” obviously does not describe human beings. We aren’t infinite identical psychopaths. Particularly bizarre (and frustrating) is the continued insistence that rationality entails selfishness; apparently economists are getting all their philosophy from Ayn Rand (who barely even qualifies as such), rather than the greats such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill or even the best contemporary philosophers such as Thomas Pogge and John Rawls. All of these latter would be baffled by the notion that selfless compassion is irrational.

Indeed, Kant argued that rationality implies altruism, that a truly coherent worldview requires assent to universal principles that are morally binding on yourself and every other rational being in the universe. (I am not entirely sure he is correct on this point, and in any case it is clear to me that neither you nor I are anywhere near advanced enough beings to seriously attempt such a worldview. Where neoclassicists envision infinite identical psychopaths, Kant envisions infinite identical altruists. In reality we are finite diverse tribalists.)

But even if you drop selfishness, the requirements of perfect information and expected utility maximization are still far too strong to apply to real human beings. If that’s your standard for rationality, then indeed humans—like all beings in the real world—are irrational.

The confusion, I think, comes from the huge gap between ideal rationality and total irrationality. Our behavior is neither perfectly optimal nor hopelessly random, but somewhere in between.

In fact, we are much closer to the side of perfect rationality! Our brains are limited, so they operate according to heuristics: simplified, approximate rules that are correct most of the time. Clever experiments—or complex environments very different from how we evolved—can cause those heuristics to fail, but we must not forget that the reason we have them is that they work extremely well in most cases in the environment in which we evolved. We are about 90% rational—but woe betide that other 10%.

The most obvious example is phobias: Why are people all over the world afraid of snakes, spiders, falling, and drowning? Because those used to be leading causes of death. In the African savannah 200,000 years ago, you weren’t going to be hit by a car, shot with a rifle bullet or poisoned by carbon monoxide. (You’d probably die of malaria, actually; for that one, instead of evolving to be afraid of mosquitoes we evolved a biological defense mechanism—sickle-cell red blood cells.) Death in general was actually much more likely then, particularly for children.

A similar case can be made for other heuristics we use: We are tribal because the proper functioning of our 100-person tribe used to be the most important factor in our survival. We are racist because people physically different from us were usually part of rival tribes and hence potential enemies. We hoard resources even when our technology allows abundance, because a million years ago no such abundance was possible and every meal might be our last.

When asked how common something is, we don’t calculate a posterior probability based upon Bayesian inference—that’s hard. Instead we try to think of examples—that’s easy. That’s the availability heuristic. And if we didn’t have mass media constantly giving us examples of rare events we wouldn’t otherwise have known about, the availability heuristic would actually be quite accurate. Right now, people think of terrorism as common (even though it’s astoundingly rare) because it’s always all over the news; but if you imagine living in an ancient tribe—or even an medieval village!—anything you heard about that often would almost certainly be something actually worth worrying about. Our level of panic over Ebola is totally disproportionate; but in the 14th century that same level of panic about the Black Death would be entirely justified.

When we want to know whether something is a member of a category, again we don’t try to calculate the actual probability; instead we think about how well it seems to fit a model we have of the paradigmatic example of that category—the representativeness heuristic. You see a Black man on a street corner in New York City at night; how likely is it that he will mug you? Pretty small actually, because there were less than 200,000 crimes in all of New York City last year in a city of 8,000,000 people—meaning the probability any given person committed a crime in the previous year was only 2.5%; the probability on any given day would then be less than 0.01%. Maybe having those attributes raises the probability somewhat, but you can still be about 99% sure that this guy isn’t going to mug you tonight. But since he seemed representative of the category in your mind “criminals”, your mind didn’t bother asking how many criminals there are in the first place—an effect called base rate neglect. Even 200 years ago—let alone 1 million—you didn’t have these sorts of reliable statistics, so what else would you use? You basically had no choice but to assess based upon representative traits.

As you probably know, people have trouble dealing with big numbers, and this is a problem in our modern economy where we actually need to keep track of millions or billions or even trillions of dollars moving around. And really I shouldn’t say it that way, because $1 million ($1,000,000) is an amount of money an upper-middle class person could have in a retirement fund, while $1 billion ($1,000,000,000) would make you in the top 1000 richest people in the world, and $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) is enough to end world hunger for at least the next 15 years (it would only take about $1.5 trillion to do it forever, by paying only the interest on the endowment). It’s important to keep this in mind, because otherwise the natural tendency of the human mind is to say “big number” and ignore these enormous differences—it’s called scope neglect. But how often do you really deal with numbers that big? In ancient times, never. Even in the 21st century, not very often. You’ll probably never have $1 billion, and even $1 million is a stretch—so it seems a bit odd to say that you’re irrational if you can’t tell the difference. I guess technically you are, but it’s an error that is unlikely to come up in your daily life.

Where it does come up, of course, is when we’re talking about national or global economic policy. Voters in the United States today have a level of power that for 99.99% of human existence no ordinary person has had. 2 million years ago you may have had a vote in your tribe, but your tribe was only 100 people. 2,000 years ago you may have had a vote in your village, but your village was only 1,000 people. Now you have a vote on the policies of a nation of 300 million people, and more than that really: As goes America, so goes the world. Our economic, cultural, and military hegemony is so total that decisions made by the United States reverberate through the entire human population. We have choices to make about war, trade, and ecology on a far larger scale than our ancestors could have imagined. As a result, the heuristics that served us well millennia ago are now beginning to cause serious problems.

[As an aside: This is why the “Downs Paradox” is so silly. If you’re calculating the marginal utility of your vote purely in terms of its effect on you—you are a psychopath—then yes, it would be irrational for you to vote. And really, by all means: psychopaths, feel free not to vote. But the effect of your vote is much larger than that; in a nation of N people, the decision will potentially affect N people. Your vote contributes 1/N to a decision that affects N people, making the marginal utility of your vote equal to N*1/N = 1. It’s constant. It doesn’t matter how big the nation is, the value of your vote will be exactly the same. The fact that your vote has a small impact on the decision is exactly balanced by the fact that the decision, once made, will have such a large effect on the world. Indeed, since larger nations also influence other nations, the marginal effect of your vote is probably larger in large elections, which means that people are being entirely rational when they go to greater lengths to elect the President of the United States (58% turnout) rather than the Wayne County Commission (18% turnout).]

So that’s the problem. That’s why we have economic crises, why climate change is getting so bad, why we haven’t ended world hunger. It’s not that we’re complete idiots bumbling around with no idea what we’re doing. We simply aren’t optimized for the new environment that has been recently thrust upon us. We are forced to deal with complex problems unlike anything our brains evolved to handle. The truly amazing part is actually that we can solve these problems at all; most lifeforms on Earth simply aren’t mentally flexible enough to do that. Humans found a really neat trick (actually in a formal evolutionary sense a goodtrick, which we know because it also evolved in cephalopods): Our brains have high plasticity, meaning they are capable of adapting themselves to their environment in real-time. Unfortunately this process is difficult and costly; it’s much easier to fall back on our old heuristics. We ask ourselves: Why spend 10 times the effort to make it work 99% of the time when you can make it work 90% of the time so much easier?

Why? Because it’s so incredibly important that we get these things right.