Morality

Steve Landsburg has up what I like to think of an as answer to some of my critique of his post on economic efficiency. I don't want to deal with that now, though, because I got distracted by his Consequentialist theory of morality, which he calls the Economist's Golden Rule - see his book on the Big Questions. Briefly stated, he says an action is moral if it leaves the world a "better" place. You might not be too astonished to learn that often enough, this can be interpreted to mean that he who has the gold, rules.

I have a visceral dislike of Consequentialist ethics, and as usual, Landsburg has a gift for stating, and endorsing one of its conclusions in the most offensive way possible. Suppose, says he - I'm working from memory here - that you are in control of a two position toggle switch. If left in the current state, you know that one billion people will get a brief, mild but painful headache. If you flip it, the one billion will be spared, but one innocent person will be murdered. Should you flip the switch?

Yes, says Landsburg, and exhibits his efficient consequentialist gold rules logic, involving something about what one billion people would pay to be spared a headache and what they would pay to be spared the one in a billion chance that one wack economist would off them. Not only that, but he asserts, implausibly, that "every" economist would agree.

Consequentialist arguments often seem to take on this fairy tale quality of situation and logic. Even applied in the real world, the fairy tale narrative governs: is it worth torturing one terror suspect in order to prevent another 9/11? If you try to project these into reality, things become more complex. If you whack some guy to spare some headaches, the victims allies and family will have a well earned right to retaliate against the toggle flipper, and even more so against those who set up the sadistic experiment - especially any guilty economists. If you torture and murder a thousand terror suspects, you might or might not prevent a terror attack or two, but you will surely enrage hundreds of thousands more and incite them to murder.

I prefer a different Golden Rule, articulated by, among others, Jesus Christ: Love thy neighbor as thyself. That golden rule has an attribute missing from Landsburg's: locality. Physicists are familiar with the advantages of locality - the science would be impossible without it. JC's golden rule only involves you and your neighbor, a domain small enough in which to plausibibly make reasonable projections of effects. I wonder if Landsburg would reach the same conclusion if the victims were his hundred closest associates - or his own family? Trying to solve problems globally almost always leads to inextricable complexity.

Of course there really are global problems...