prior probability

Note: This is part six of our review of “Stubborn Attachments.”

We restated Tyler Cowen’s “six critical issues” and discussed three of these issues in our previous post. Here, we shall consider the other three issues: rules, rights, and common sense morality.

4. Rules

Cowen asks, “Can we make a fundamental choice to think in terms of rules and principles per se? … Or are we caught in the trap of always worrying about the exceptions and thus we end up back with rules as a useful fiction? In other words, do moral rules have “independent power” (i.e. are such rules self-enforcing), or are they just “useful fictions.” For our part, we agree with Cowen that, even if rules are just useful fictions, we should think in terms of general rules. (How could we not, since moral obligations are always expressed in terms of rules or general principles?) And this is the reason why we prefer our Intertemporal Golden Rule approach to population ethics. The golden rule is not plagued with exceptions and caveats as most moral rules are. More importantly, the golden rule, however it is formulated, does not require massive amounts of good will or an all-powerful moral leviathan. Rather, its efficacy is based on man’s self-interest and simple Humean notions reciprocity! (Cf. Robert Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism.)

5. Rights

Cowen blends his population utilitarianism with metaphysical rights: “I’m not going to derive rights deductively from scratch, but I do believe in (nearly) absolute human rights.” In other words, Cowen is not going to bother to explain where these natural rights come from, nor will he bother to specify what these natural rights consist of, he is just going to conjure up a set of Kantian rights out of a magic hat to avoid any nasty outcomes that population utilitarianism might engender. (As an aside, we often speak of Kantian duties” but we can use the terms rights and duties interchangeably, since duties always imply the existence of rights, and vice versa, rights imply duties.)

Although we sympathize with the notion that “individuals have rights” (to borrow Nozick’s famous formulation), where do these natural rights come from, and what do these rights consist of? These are precisely the questions that Cowen leaves unanswered! Again, this is one of the virtues of our Intertemporal Golden Rule. Its efficacy does not depend on the existence of metaphysical rights. Instead, as we mentioned above, the genius of the golden rule is that is based on the notion of “reciprocal altruism”, i.e. self-interest.

6. Common sense morality

Cowen closes his list of “six critical issues” with the importance of common sense morality. In brief, any theory of population ethics that is incompatible with most people’s moral intuitions is a worthless theory. (And to his credit, Cowen correctly notes that utilitarian theory “appears to suggest an extreme degree of self-sacrifice” when taken to its logical conclusion.) In any case, this is the beauty of our Intertemporal Golden Rule approach to population ethics. The golden rule is such a familiar and common sense moral principle that it appears in many religions and cultures. More fundamentally, it is a moral principle that is grounded in self-interest and reciprocal altruism, and that is probably why the golden rule is consistent with our common sense morality.

But how can the golden rule or reciprocal altruism work intertemporally? How could future generation ever hope to “pay us back” if those generations don’t even exist yet? Also, we have yet to address the main thesis of “Stubborn Attachments.” We will return to these questions in our next two posts.

Trivers (1971)

Note: This is part five of our review of Tyler Cowen’s new book “Stubborn Attachments.” Also, we won’t be blogging this weekend, so our next post will appear on Monday (12/3).

As we mentioned in our previous post, Tyler Cowen identifies “six critical issues” in the introduction to “Stubborn Attachments,” six fundamental questions that any theory of population ethics must address. The issues are time (how to weigh the interests of future generations), aggregation (how to aggregate conflicting preferences), radical uncertainty (how to predict ex ante the long-term effects of our decisions), and the role of rules, rights, and common sense morality in population ethics. We also introduced the idea of an “intertemporal golden rule,” i.e. the possibility of a Kantian approach to population ethics. Now, let’s evaluate our Kantian approach in light of Cowen’s laundry list of issues.

1. The role of time and discount rates

Tyler Cowen begins his laundry list of fundamental questions by asking, “How should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future? … [D]o we have reasons to weight the present more heavily simply because it is the here and now?” Well, it turns out that the present is more heavily weighted than the future in almost every human endeavor, including business, economics, and law, fields in which future cash flows are “discounted” to their present value as a matter of course. Yet, as Cowen notes, this standard practice is based on a morally questionable assumption, the implicit idea that the future declines in moral importance with the simple passage of time. But whether they like it or not, population utilitarians like Cowen must commit themselves to this assumption as well. Why? Because utilitarian approaches are ultimately probabilistic in nature, requiring us to estimate or predict ahead of time what the most likely consequences or effects of our decisions will be. By contrast, a Kantian approach to population ethics can hold time constant, requiring us to treat all persons, including unborn or contingent ones, with equal value and respect.

2. Aggregation and social choice

As Cowen notes, “Aggregation refers to how we resolve disagreements and how we decide that the wishes of one individual should take precedence over the wishes of another.” Or in the context of population ethics, how can we resolve intertemporal disagreements between present and future generations? Any utilitarian approach to population ethics will require some voting rule or procedure to aggregate and resolve these types of intertemporal disagreements, but whatever aggregation method we choose, there is a fundamental problem with utilitarianism. Population utilitarians like Cowen must commit themselves to the primacy of the interests of future generations. Again, why? Because absent a world-wide catastrophe or extinction event, there will always exist much more people in the future than in the past! Simply put, even if the human population on Earth were to stabilize or even decline over time, more and more people will continue to be born into the world. Our Kantian approach, by contrast, is invariant to the number of people who exist or who might exist in the future. Unlike utilitarian approaches, our theory of intergenerational reciprocity does not depend on the number of people who might exist in the future relative to the number of people exist now.

3. Radical uncertainty and epistemic modesty

To his credit, Cowen openly acknowledges the problem of uncertainty: “how can we pretend to assess good and bad consequences as a product of our actions? How can we make any decision at all without being morally paralyzed and totally uncertain about what we are doing?” This problem is not just a minor blemish on utilitarian approaches to population ethics and to morality generally; it is a mortal wound, a fatal blow! How so? Because the further we attempt to peer into the future, the more uncertain the future becomes. It is one thing to imagine what the world will be like in 2020 A.D. (two years hence) or in 2060 A.D. (52 years hence), but no one has any idea what the world will be like a thousand or five hundred or even one hundred years from now. How, then, can we predict the most likely consequences of our decisions given this radical uncertainty? Our intertemporal golden rule, by contrast, is more much epistemically modest and is thus better suited to deal with such radical uncertainty. The validity of the golden rule does not depend on what picture of the future you happen to believe in. Simply put, the content of such Kantian moral precepts will remain stable and unchanging regardless what beneficial or harmful innovations the future brings and regardless how many natural or manmade disasters occur in the future.

Because this post is already too long, we will consider the remaining three items in Cowen’s laundry list of issues in our next post.

Source: Andrew Thatcher, et al.

Credit: The Economist

Note: This is part four of our review of Tyler Cowen’s new book “Stubborn Attachments.”

We now find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma! On the one hand, we have resolutely dismissed utilitarian theories of population ethics. (To sum up, consequentialism is always going to be a non-starter until population utilitarians like Tyler Cower or Derek Parfit discover a crystal ball that allows us to predict the long-term effects of our decisions, or until they are able to at least provide us with a non-circular definition of “utility” or “welfare” or whatever else we are supposed to be maximizing.) But at the same time we wish to accept the truth of Cowen’s Axiom: the idea that we may owe moral duties to future generations. How can we reconcile this difficult dilemma? Why not formulate a Kantian theory of population ethics: an “intertemporal categorical imperative” or, better yet, an “intertemporal golden rule”?

Perhaps the most famous formulation of the golden rule appears in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, “do unto others what you would have them do unto you …” (Matt. 7:12). [See also below (left) for another famous formulation of this moral principle by Hillel the Elder, pictured below (right).] However this maxim is worded, the golden rule, the idea that you should treat others as you yourself wish to be treated, is a familiar and common sense moral principle. It not only appears in many religions and cultures; it also satisfies the two main criteria of Kantian morality: universality and reversibility. My suggestion, then, is this: an intertemporal golden rule. After all, if the traditional golden rule can be extended spatially across borders and cultures, why can’t we also extend it temporally across generations?

Now then, regardless of which moral precept you prefer (Kantian duties or Humean consequences), Tyler Cowen identifies “six critical issues” that any theory of population ethics must contend with, including such conundrums as intertemporal discounting (i.e. how should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future) and intertemporal social choice (i.e. how should we aggregate the conflicting preferences of different generations). We will restate these important issues and evaluate our proposed intertemporal golden rule in light of them in our next two posts.

More here.

Note: This is part three of our review of “Stubborn Attachments.”

In our previous post we rechristened the basic premise of population ethics as Cowen’s Axiom (the notion that we may owe moral duties to future generations) in honor of Tyler Cowen’s beautiful new book Stubborn Attachments. (By the way, we could just as well have called this important idea “Parfit’s Principle” in honor of Derek Parfit, who invented the field of population ethics, but in keeping with Stigler’s Law, I will stick to the formulation “Cowen’s Axiom.”) We also explained why this notion of forward-looking moral duties is, in principle, consistent with both Kantian and utilitarian moral frameworks. Here, however, I shall point out a fundamental flaw with Cowen’s Axiom and with population ethics generally: the problem of indeterminacy. In brief, regardless of your preferred moral framework (Kantian duties or Humean utilities), any such moral framework can be easily rigged or gamed.

Let’s start with “population utilitarianism” first, since consequentialist theories are so easy to dispose of. However we define “utility” or “happiness” or “welfare” or whatever else we are supposed to be maximizing, population utilitarians like Tyler Cowen claim that we should be maximizing the utility (or happiness, well-being, etc.) of future generations. But should we be maximizing “total utility” or utility on a per capita basis? Either way, the problems with both versions of utilitarianism are so well-known by now that I will not bother to rehearse them here. Indeed, Cowen himself hedges his utilitarian axiom: he openly acknowledges that any method of future utility maximization must be subject to some inalienable side constraints such as “human rights.” Alas, Cowen fails to specify what these (Nozickian?) side constraints are; nor does he tell us who is supposed to enforce them. More problematically, what is the source of these side constraints? How are we to discover them?

Despite these problems, Cowen’s strategic hedge in favor of human rights or Nozickian side constraints points us in a potentially more promising direction. Specifically, why not use a Kantian or deontological framework to figure out what duties we owe future generations? That is, why can’t we have an Intertemporal Golden Rule? We will explore this very possibility in our next few posts.

Note: This post is part two of our review of “Stubborn Attachments.”

We posed the following question in our previous post: What ethical, moral, or legal duties, if any, do we owe to future generations? We also noted that this is the central question in Tyler Cowen’s beautiful new book “Stubborn Attachments,” available here via Amazon. Of course, just because something is legal does not make it moral, and vice versa, just because something is illegal does not make it immoral. So, before we delve into this difficult question, we must ask an even more fundamental question, How can we tell when a decision is morally right or wrong? In short, what theory of morality or ethics should we apply to our decisions regardless of the temporal scope of our moral rights and moral obligations, i.e. past, present, or future.

In summary, there are at least two ways of judging the moral dimension of our decisions. One method is legalistic in spirit. It asks us to evaluate the morality of a decision in light of universal moral duties, such as do no harm, or always tell the truth, or always keep your promises. The other method emphasizes the potential consequences of our decisions. A decision is morally or ethically right if it produces the greatest amount of happiness or the greatest good for the greatest number or satisfies some other utilitarian criterion. Now, before proceeding any further, notice that both major theories of ethics (Kantian duties and Humean consequences) are broad enough to encompass the interests of future generations. After all, if Kantian duties are spatially categorical, it makes logical sense to say that Kantian duties are temporally universal as well. Similarly, taking theories of consequentialism to their logical conclusion, why shouldn’t the well-being or welfare of future generations be included in any utilitarian calculus? For his part, Professor Cowen claims that the interests of future generations should matter when we are deciding matters of public policy. (Because Cowen merely accepts this conclusion as true, I shall refer to this position as “Cowen’s Axiom.”)

Nevertheless, whether we apply a Kantian or Humean framework to questions of population ethics, I shall offer an expanded critique of Cowen’s Axiom in my next post. Although axioms are supposed to be self-evident and are thus not to be questioned, the theoretical and practical problems with Cowen’s Axiom are too large to ignore …

(Cowen, 2018, p. 19)

This fascinating question takes center stage in Tyler Cowen’s beautiful new book Stubborn Attachments (pictured below). Professor Cowen, a polymath who teaches economics at George Mason University, combines a branch of moral philosophy called “population ethics” (pioneered by the late Derek Parfit) with a branch of social science called “welfare economics.” In summary, economists engaged in welfare economics attempt to measure the aggregate well-being of populations, while philosophers engaged in population ethics attempt to answer the question posed in the title of this post. Cowen’s contribution is to explore this question from an economic perspective. Furthermore, according to Cowen (spoiler alert!), the welfare of future generations should matter just as much as our own welfare. Or stated in the formal jargon of academic economics, we should apply a low “discount rate” (possibly even as low as zero; see Cowen, p. 127) to the future. (As Cowen notes on page 65 of his book, “A discount rate tells us how to compare future benefits to current benefits (or costs) when we make decisions.”) Although a zero-discount rate may look like a morally attractive principle at first glance, there are numerous practical and theoretical problems with this view. (See this overview, for example, or see this lecture by Jens Saugstad.) We will explore some of these difficulties in our next few posts.

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Hat tip: The Amazing Tyler Cowen.