rules

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.

Go ahead and identify as a season

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 2 JDN 2460464

A few weeks back, Fox News was running the story that “kids today are identifying as seasons instead of genders”. I suspected that by “kids today” they meant “one particular person on the Internet”, but in fact it was even worse than that; the one person on the Internet they had used as an example hadn’t actually said what Fox claimed they said.

What they actually said was far more nuanced: It was basically that their fluid gender expression varied based on what kind of clothes they wear, which, naturally, varies with the seasons. So they end up feeling more masculine at certain times of year when they like to wear masculine clothing. Honestly, this would be pretty boring stuff if conservatives hadn’t blown it out of proportion.

But after thinking about it for awhile, I decided that I don’t even care if kids want to identify as seasons.

It seems silly. I don’t understand why you’d want to do it. It would probably always feel weird to me. (And what pronouns do you even use for someone who identifies as “summer”?)

But ultimately, it seems completely, utterly harmless. So if there are in fact kids—or adults—out there who really feel that they want to identify their gender with a season, I’m here to tell you now:

Go right ahead and do that.

It’s really astonishing just what upsets conservatives in this world. Poverty? No big deal. Climate change? Probably a hoax or something. War? That’s just how it goes. But kids with weird genders!? The horror! The horror!

I think the reasoning here goes something like this:

  1. Civilization is built upon social constructions.
  2. Social constructions rely upon consensus behavior.
  3. Consensus behavior relies upon shared norms.
  4. Challenging any shared norms challenges all shared norms.
  5. Challenging any norm will cause it to collapse.
  6. Challenging gender norms is challenging a shared norm.
  7. Therefore, challenging gender norms will cause civilization to collapse.

Premises 1 through 3 are true, though I suspect that phrases like “social construction” would actually not sit well with most conservatives. (Part of their whole shtick seems to be that if you simply admit that money, government, and national identity are socially constructed, that in itself will cause them to immediately and irretrievably collapse. Nevermind that I can tell you money is made up all day long, and you’ll still be able to spend it.)

Premise 6 is also true, indeed, nearly tautological.

And, indeed, the argument is valid; the conclusion would follow from the premises.

So of course we come to the two premises that aren’t valid.


Premise 4 is wrong because you can challenge some norms but not others. I have yet to see anyone seriously challenge the norm against murder, for example. Nor does it even seem especially popular to challenge the norm in favor of democratic voting. But those are the kind of norms that actually sustain our civilization—not gender!

And premise 5 is even worse: A norm that can’t withstand even the slightest challenge is a norm that’s too weak to rely upon in the first place. If our civilization is to be strong and robust, it must allow its norms to be challenged, and those norms must be able to sustain themselves against the challenge. And indeed, if someone were to challenge the norm against murder or the norm in favor of democratic voting, there are plenty of things I could say to reply to that challenge. These norms aren’t arbitrary. They are strong because we can defend them.

What about gender norms? How defensible are they?

Well, uh… not very, it turns out.

The existence of sexes is defensible. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and the vast majority of humans can be readily classified as either male or female. Yes, there are exceptions even to that, and those people count too. But it’s a pretty useful and accurate heuristic to divide our species into two sexes.

But gender norms are so much more than this. We don’t simply recognize that some people have penises and others have vaginas. We attach all sorts of social and behavioral requirements to people based on their bodies, many of which are utterly arbitrary and culturally dependent. (Not all, to be fair: The stereotype that men are stronger than women is itself a very useful and accurate heuristic.)

Worse, we don’t merely assign stereotypes to predict behavior—which might sometimes be useful. We assign norms to control behavior. We tell people who deviate from those norms that they are bad. We abuse them, discriminate against them, ostracize them from society. This is really weird.

And for what?

What benefit do gender norms have?

I can see how norms against murder and in favor of democracy sustain our civilization. I’m just not seeing how norms against using she/her pronouns when you have a penis provide similar support.

It’s true, most human societies throughout history have had strict gender norms, so maybe that’s some sort of evidence in their favor… but how about we at least try not having them for awhile? Or just relax them here and there, a little at a time, see how it goes? If indeed it seems to result in some sort of disaster, we’ll stop doing it. But I don’t see how it could—and so far, it hasn’t.

I think maybe the problem here is that conservatives don’t understand how to evaluate norms, or perhaps even that norms can be evaluated. To them, a rule is a rule, and you never challenge the rules, because if there were no rules, there would be chaos and destruction.

But challenging some rules—or even all rules—doesn’t mean having no rules! It means checking to make sure our rules are good rules, and if they aren’t, changing them so they are.

And since I see no particular reason why having two genders is an especially good rule, go ahead, make up some more if you want.

Go ahead and identify if a season, if you really want to.

Against deontology

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 6 JDN 2460163

In last week’s post I argued against average utilitarianism, basically on the grounds that it devalues the lives of anyone who isn’t of above average happiness. But you might be tempted to take these as arguments against utilitarianism in general, and that is not my intention.

In fact I believe that utilitarianism is basically correct, though it needs some particular nuances that are often lost in various presentations of it.

Its leading rival is deontology, which is really a broad class of moral theories, some a lot better than others.

What characterizes deontology as a class is that it uses rules, rather than consequences; an act is just right or wrong regardless of its consequences—or even its expected consequences.

There are certain aspects of this which are quite appealing: In fact, I do think that rules have an important role to play in ethics, and as such I am basically a rule utilitarian. Actually trying to foresee all possible consequences of every action we might take is an absurd demand far beyond the capacity of us mere mortals, and so in practice we have no choice but to develop heuristic rules that can guide us.

But deontology says that these are no mere heuristics: They are in fact the core of ethics itself. Under deontology, wrong actions are wrong even if you know for certain that their consequences will be good.

Kantian ethics is one of the most well-developed deontological theories, and I am quite sympathetic to Kantian ethics In fact I used to consider myself one of its adherents, but I now consider that view a mistaken one.

Let’s first dispense with the views of Kant himself, which are obviously wrong. Kant explicitly said that lying is always, always, always wrong, and even when presented with obvious examples where you could tell a small lie to someone obviously evil in order to save many innocent lives, he stuck to his guns and insisted that lying is always wrong.

This is a bit anachronistic, but I think this example will be more vivid for modern readers, and it absolutely is consistent with what Kant wrote about the actual scenarios he was presented with:

You are living in Germany in 1945. You have sheltered a family of Jews in your attic to keep them safe from the Holocaust. Nazi soldiers have arrived at your door, and ask you: “Are there any Jews in this house?” Do you tell the truth?

I think it’s utterly, agonizingly obvious that you should not tell the truth. Exactly what you should do is less obvious: Do you simply lie and hope they buy it? Do you devise a clever ruse? Do you try to distract them in some way? Do you send them on a wild goose chase elsewhere? If you could overpower them and kill them, should you? What if you aren’t sure you can; should you still try? But one thing is clear: You don’t hand over the Jewish family to the Nazis.

Yet when presented with similar examples, Kant insisted that lying is always wrong. He had a theory to back it up, his Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

And, so his argument goes: Since it would be obviously incoherent to say that everyone should always lie, lying is wrong, and you’re never allowed to do it. He actually bites that bullet the size of a Howitzer round.

Modern deontologists—even though who consider themselves Kantians—are more sophisticated than this. They realize that you could make a rule like “Never lie, except to save the life of an innocent person.” or “Never lie, except to stop a great evil.” Either of these would be quite adequate to solve this particular dilemma. And it’s absolutely possible to will that these would be universal laws, in the sense that they would apply to anyone. ‘Universal’ doesn’t have to mean ‘applies equally to all possible circumstances’.

There are also a couple of things that deontology does very well, which are worth preserving. One of them is supererogation: The idea that some acts are above and beyond the call of duty, that something can be good without being obligatory.

This is something most forms of utilitarianism are notoriously bad at. They show us a spectrum of worlds from the best to the worst, and tell us to make things better. But there’s nowhere we are allowed to stop, unless we somehow manage to make it all the way to the best possible world.

I find this kind of moral demand very tempting, which often leads me to feel a tremendous burden of guilt. I always know that I could be doing more than I do. I’ve written several posts about this in the past, in the hopes of fighting off this temptation in myself and others. (I am not entirely sure how well I’ve succeeded.)

Deontology does much better in this regard: Here are some rules. Follow them.

Many of the rules are in fact very good rules that most people successfully follow their entire lives: Don’t murder. Don’t rape. Don’t commit robbery. Don’t rule a nation tyrannically. Don’t commit war crimes.

Others are oft more honored in the breach than the observance: Don’t lie. Don’t be rude. Don’t be selfish. Be brave. Be generous. But a well-developed deontology can even deal with this, by saying that some rules are more important than others, and thus some sins are more forgivable than others.

Whereas a utilitarian—at least, anything but a very sophisticated utilitarian—can only say who is better and who is worse, a deontologist can say who is good enough: who has successfully discharged their moral obligations and is otherwise free to live their life as they choose. Deontology absolves us of guilt in a way that utilitarianism is very bad at.

Another good deontological principle is double-effect: Basically this says that if you are doing something that will have bad outcomes as well as good ones, it matters whether you intend the bad one and what you do to try to mitigate it. There does seem to be a morally relevant difference between a bombing that kills civilians accidentally as part of an attack on a legitimate military target, and a so-called “strategic bombing” that directly targets civilians in order to maximize casualties—even if both occur as part of a justified war. (Both happen a lot—and it may even be the case that some of the latter were justified. The Tokyo firebombing and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much in the latter category.)

There are ways to capture this principle (or something very much like it) in a utilitarian framework, but like supererogation, it requires a sophisticated, nuanced approach that most utilitarians don’t seem willing or able to take.

Now that I’ve said what’s good about it, let’s talk about what’s really wrong with deontology.

Above all: How do we choose the rules?

Kant seemed to think that mere logical coherence would yield a sufficiently detailed—perhaps even unique—set of rules for all rational beings in the universe to follow. This is obviously wrong, and seems to be simply a failure of his imagination. There is literally a countably infinite space of possible ethical rules that are logically consistent. (With probability 1 any given one is utter nonsense: “Never eat cheese on Thursdays”, “Armadillos should rule the world”, and so on—but these are still logically consistent.)

If you require the rules to be simple and general enough to always apply to everyone everywhere, you can narrow the space substantially; but this is also how you get obviously wrong rules like “Never lie.”

In practice, there are two ways we actually seem to do this: Tradition and consequences.

Let’s start with tradition. (It came first historically, after all.) You can absolutely make a set of rules based on whatever your culture has handed down to you since time immemorial. You can even write them down in a book that you declare to be the absolute infallible truth of the universe—and, amazingly enough, you can get millions of people to actually buy that.

The result, of course, is what we call religion. Some of its rules are good: Thou shalt not kill. Some are flawed but reasonable: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Some are nonsense: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

And some, well… some rules of tradition are the source of many of the world’s most horrific human rights violations. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18). If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Leviticus 20:13).

Tradition-based deontology has in fact been the major obstacle to moral progress throughout history. It is not a coincidence that utilitarianism began to become popular right before the abolition of slavery, and there is an even more direct casual link between utilitarianism and the advancement of rights for women and LGBT people. When the sole argument you can make for moral rules is that they are ancient (or allegedly handed down by a perfect being), you can make rules that oppress anyone you want. But when rules have to be based on bringing happiness or preventing suffering, whole classes of oppression suddenly become untenable. “God said so” can justify anything—but “Who does it hurt?” can cut through.

It is an oversimplification, but not a terribly large one, to say that the arc of moral history has been drawn by utilitarians dragging deontologists kicking and screaming into a better future.

There is a better way to make rules, and that is based on consequences. And, in practice, most people who call themselves deontologists these days do this. They develop a system of moral rules based on what would be expected to lead to the overall best outcomes.

I like this approach. In fact, I agree with this approach. But it basically amounts to abandoning deontology and surrendering to utilitarianism.

Once you admit that the fundamental justification for all moral rules is the promotion of happiness and the prevention of suffering, you are basically a rule utilitarian. Rules then become heuristics for promoting happiness, not the fundamental source of morality itself.

I suppose it could be argued that this is not a surrender but a synthesis: We are looking for the best aspects of deontology and utilitarianism. That makes a lot of sense. But I keep coming back to the dark history of traditional rules, the fact that deontologists have basically been holding back human civilization since time immemorial. If deontology wants to be taken seriously now, it needs to prove that it has broken with that dark tradition. And frankly the easiest answer to me seems to be to just give up on deontology.