This question actually has two distinct meanings:
1. Should we do things if benefits of the ends exceed the cost of the means?
2. In various individual cases, does the benefit of the ends actually exceed the cost of the means?
The first question is normative while the second is empirical. To illustrate this distinction, let’s start by considering three cases:
The US government sent young men to their death in Iraq, because the ends were supposed to justify the means.
The US government drafted young men to fight in Vietnam, because the ends supposedly justified the means.
Patients with kidney disease suffer greatly because the benefit of banning kidney sales supposedly outweighs the benefits of ending the transplant kidney shortage.
There are many such examples of “ends justify the means” arguments.
Here’s what I find rather ironic. Most intellectuals are strongly opposed to utilitarianism, which is also an ends justify the means moral system. And popular arguments against utilitarianism often are constructed around thought experiments. “What if torturing someone would make society better off.” Or, “What if taking away a person’s freedom would make society better off?” Or, “What if killing someone would make society better off.” The specific examples that are constructed are often far-fetched.
But as I just indicated, you don’t need to look far to find public policies that rely on similar arguments. The three examples above show that the US government does effectively torture people, or take away their freedom, or have them killed, all for “ends justify the means” reasons. And yet anti-utilitarians present their thought experiments as if it were obvious that no sane person would ever approve of such horrible policies. Apparently that’s wrong, unless the entire US government is insane.
So how should I feel about that fact, since I’m an “ends justify the means” utilitarian? I believe that in all these cases the government has incorrectly answered the second question at the top of this post. That is, they’ve assumed that certain government policies are justified by the rather vague and uncertain benefits they promise, even though there are very clear costs for specific people. And these assumptions are usually wrong. Governments just aren’t very good at using highly coercive techniques to achieve a better world. It’s theoretically possible that this sort of policy might work, but it doesn’t happen very often. (Perhaps the draft was justified in WWII. I don’t know.)
Scott Alexander has a wonderful post on public policy toward pain treatment. He points out that patients in extreme pain often fall into a sort of Catch-22 trap, where asking for pain medication is considered evidence of addiction and is viewed as reason to withhold relief:
Greene & Chambers present this as some kind of exotic novel hypothesis, but think about this for a second like a normal human being. You have a kid with a very painful form of cancer. His doctor guesses at what the right dose of painkillers should be. After getting this dose of painkillers, the kid continues to “engage in pain behaviors ie moaning, crying, grimacing, and complaining about various aches and pains”, and begs for a higher dose of painkillers.
I maintain that the normal human thought process is “Since this kid is screaming in pain, looks like I guessed wrong about the right amount of painkillers for him, I should give him more.”
The official medical-system approved thought process, which Greene & Chambers are defending in this paper, is “Since he is displaying signs of drug-seeking behavior, he must be an addict trying to con you into giving him his next fix.”
Alexander is a psychiatrist and his long post is well worth reading. I can’t do it justice here. In the post, he presents seven cases he knows of where people were needlessly tortured by our drug policies (my terminology, not his). Here are just a couple:
Case 1: Mary is an elderly woman who undergoes a surgery known to have a painful recovery process. The surgeon prescribes a dose of painkillers once every six hours. The painkillers last four hours. From hours 4-6, Mary is in terrible pain. During one of these periods, she says that she wishes she was dead. The surgeon leaps into action by…calling the on-call psychiatrist and saying “Hey, there’s a suicidal person on my ward, you should do psychiatry to her or something.” I am the on call psychiatrist. After a brief evaluation, I tell the surgeon that Mary has no psychiatric illness but needs painkillers every four hours. The surgeon lectures me on how There Is An Opioid Crisis, Y’Know, and we can’t negotiate with addicts and drug-seekers. I am a consultant on the case and can’t overule the surgeon on his own ward, so I just hang out with Mary for a while and talk about things and distract her and listen to her scream during the worst part of the six-hour cycle. After a few days the surgery has healed to the point where Mary is only in excruciating pain rather than actively suicidal, and so we send her home. . . .
Case 4: John is a 70 year old man on opioids for 30 years due to a mining-related injury. He is doing very well. I am his outpatient psychiatrist but I only see him once every few months to renew meds. He gets some kind of infection, goes to the hospital, and due to normal hospital incompetence he doesn’t get his opioids. He demands his meds, and like many 70 year old ex-miners in terrible pain, he is not diligently polite the whole time. The hospital doctors are excited: they have caught an opioid addict! They tell his family and outpatient doctors he cannot have opioids from now on, then discharge him. He continues to be in terrible pain. At first he sneaks pills from an extra bottle of opioids he has at home, but eventually he uses all those up. After this, he is still in terrible pain with no reason to expect this to ever change, and so he shoots himself in the chest. This is the first point in this entire process at which anyone attempts to tell me any of this is going on, so I get a “HEY DID YOU KNOW YOUR PATIENT SHOT HIMSELF? DOESN’T SEEM LIKE YOU’RE DOING VERY GOOD PSYCHIATRIST-ING?” call. The patient miraculously survives, eventually finds a new pain doctor, and goes on to live a normal and happy life on the same dose of opioids he was using before.
Alexander is just one psychologist. If he sees these cases quite often, then I assume there must be thousands of such cases across the US. Of course there are also cases that cut the other direction, where people become addicted to opiates that are not needed.
Now let’s think about this from an “ends justify the means” perspective. When the US government tortures people by denying needed painkillers, they are doing so on the basis that the alternative is worse, that allowing widespread use of painkillers would have even worse consequences. That’s an empirical claim.
But if you are going to use a “what if aggregate utility maximization called for torture” argument against utilitarianism, then I’d recommend using a real example like the war on opioids, not some fanciful example where society obviously would not actually be better off (like “what if torturing babies made people happy.”). We really do torture some people using an essentially utilitarian justification, and yet these drug laws are often supported by people who would be horrified if you called them a utilitarian.
Now as a matter of fact the drug wars are probably wrong, even using a utilitarian criterion. The ends do not happen to justify the means. A few years back the government cracked down on opioid prescriptions. After this occurred, people switched to illegal alternatives that were far more dangerous and death rates soared:
So it’s not at all clear that the war of drugs “works”, even on utilitarian grounds. Indeed it’s even worse than I’ve suggested. It’s not just that illegal alternatives are dangerous and hurt the users; we also imprison 400,000 in the war on drugs, destroying many lives, separating families, and imposing a huge cost on taxpayers. We destabilize countries in Latin America. In the past, some commenters argued that these people are bad and would be doing bad things in any case. That’s true of some, but murder rates in America rose sharply under alcohol prohibition (in both boom and depression years), and then fell in half after prohibition was repealed in 1933 (in good times and bad.) So these laws really do create violence. (In fairness, Prohibition also reduced alcohol consumption somewhat.)
The following claims are all plausible:
1. The true model of ethics is utilitarianism. That’s the right set of goals.
2. Because of cognitive illusions, people relying on utilitarianism are likely to advocate an excessively coercive set of government policies. They’ll see bad things and wrongly assume that, “there outta be a law.” They’ll forget all the negative side effects caused by military drafts, prohibitions, and other forms of coercion.
3. Because many (not all) utilitarians are too optimistic about government effectiveness, natural rights advocates who focus on “negative liberty” will actually construct regimes that are better at maximizing utility than what you would get from an avowedly utilitarian government. (Mainland China might be an example of misguided utilitarianism. Singapore is a much less misguided example.)
[As an aside, there are similar arguments for religion.]
This way of thinking about the issue may explain people like Milton Friedman, who often seemed to waver between utilitarian and natural rights arguments for his preferred policies.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Oct 4 2019 at 1:59pm
Welcome to the club. Here’s a Doonesbury cartoon on that topic from
20 years ago.
Floccina
Oct 4 2019 at 2:40pm
And there is this:
nobody.really
Oct 4 2019 at 2:56pm
I know the feeling.
1: Like Sumner(?), I believe in doing things when I expect the benefits will exceed the costs. This policy conforms to some people’s understanding of rationality. This policy conforms to some people’s understanding of utilitarianism.
Yet not everyone embraces this view. Some people profess to embrace categorical views that transcend cost/benefit analysis. They would rather starve to death than eat pork–and not because doing so would impair their chance at a heavenly reward (a cost/benefit analysis), but … just because.
Moreover, various studies suggest this perspective is more common than I had thought. The famous Trolley Hypothetical indicates that people would generally see five people killed rather than push one person to his death in order to save those other five. And in conducting the studies underlying his Moral Foundations Theory, Jonathan Haidt found that many people had strong visceral aversions to behavior that seemed to have no obvious costs–for example, eating your dog after he has died. (Admit it, who hasn’t had an urge to wok the dog…?)
2: To some extent, Sumner’s argument illustrates the difference between Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. Pareto efficiency entails rejecting a policy if it makes anyone worse off, regardless of the benefit it would generate for others. Kaldor-Hicks efficiency entails rejecting a policy only if the aggregate net benefit would be insufficient to compensate those harmed. For example, the Fifth Amendment—permitting government to use take private property for public purposes, provided government compensate the person—embraces Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, not Pareto efficiency.
As a practical matter, Pareto efficiency generally precludes almost any policy. For example, if the policy of enforcing property rights would make a potential thief worse off, then Pareto efficiency would preclude enforcement of those rights.
Note that Kaldor-Hicks efficiency does not REQUIRE that a person harmed by a policy receive compensation; it merely requires that the policy generate sufficient net benefits that could THEORETICALLY finance compensation. Thus, Kador-Hicks might acknowledge that government should wage a war because the social costs of losing would exceed the social costs of fighting and prevailing—even if the harmed parties will not be compensated for their losses.
3: As I said, many people who might claim to embrace utilitarianism also have a visceral aversion to actions that impose no obvious costs. Likewise, many people who claim to reject utilitarianism would acknowledge the merits of doing things when the benefits exceed the costs.
As Sumner notes, sometimes people who object to an “ends justifies the means” philosophy will cite examples when people purporting to embrace this view did things where the net costs EXCEEDED the net benefits. In other words, objectors express the concern that people who embrace an “ends justifies the means” philosophy often err in their assessment of the ends and means.
This illustrates one obvious shortcoming with the philosophy: The net costs and benefits of a policy can only be judged in retrospect—which renders the philosophy must less useful as a guide for people living prospectively. (Much like the investing advice “Buy low; sell high”: excellent advice for people with time machines, but not quite so useful for the rest of us.)
The other shortcoming has to do with subjectivity: Public policy effects groups. Different people will weigh a policy’s costs and benefits differently, and will thus come to different conclusions about which policies are/were justified. Kaldor-Hicks efficiency offers no framework to address this matter. Conceptually, Pareto efficiency addresses this matter by giving everyone–including thieves–a veto. (But conceptually not. Some argue that a policy is Pareto efficient if all parties are made OBJECTIVELY better off, even if some parties refuse to give assent—“hold out”—as a strategy for extracting a greater share of the policy’s benefits for themselves.)
nobody.really
Oct 4 2019 at 3:07pm
If we ranked the parts of the globe where a “better world” might be found, I suspect the high-ranking places would also be places where governments employ coercive techniques such as taxation and enforcement of property rights. And I suspect the list of places lacking effective governments–the middle of the ocean, or war zones, or sparely populated locations in jungles/deserts/mountain range–would rank fairly low on that list.
I couldn’t prove a causal relationship between those benefits and those governments, but I certainly suspect one.
Scott Sumner
Oct 4 2019 at 3:23pm
I don’t view the enforcement of property rights as “coercion”. Rather coercion is the removal of property rights, such as banning the sale of kidneys.
nobody.really
Oct 4 2019 at 4:20pm
Joe and Paul each claim title to the same plot of land, and each forceably tries to expel the other. The trial court rules for Joe. The appellate court rules for Paul. And before the final ruling from the supreme court, they both sign quit-claim deeds transferring the property to Mary, and the court dismisses the case as moot. Which litigant had engaged in “coercion” and which in enforcement of property rights?
The answer is purely conclusory, resting entirely on whoever you like/whoever receives the endorsement of the powers that be. The winners re-write the history books accordingly.
Mark Z
Oct 4 2019 at 6:34pm
The essence of property rights, imo, is in the enforcement contracts. Original allocations may be somewhat arbitrary, but after that when Joe sells a plot to Paul, signs it away, then later tries to use it, countries where the courts prevent Joe from violating a contract he signed with impunity tend to be better ones that those where they merely give it to ‘whoever they like,’ including those where they automatically like whichever of Joe or Paul happens to be poorer.
Its unrealistically cynical to say might determines all everywhere and always. It may be the case to some extent everywhere, but some places more than others, and those where it’s less so are the better places.
Scott Sumner
Oct 4 2019 at 7:01pm
I think you are confusing cases where the property rights are ambiguous, and cases where coercion prevents any exercise of property rights—as in the kidney example.
Robert EV
Oct 5 2019 at 10:19am
Hi Scott,
There is a utilitarian claim to only allow the sale of kidney’s when two criteria are met:
1) The kidney is as close to an ideal match as possible for the recipient. (Minimizing the side-effects of donation, and minimizing the odds of rejection.)
2) The donor is thoroughly evaluated to ensure that they are most likely to live a normal, healthy lifespan with only one kidney, and thus unlikely to be a financial or medical burden on society. (Minimizing externalities of the donation.)
Would you be okay with both of these restrictions?
One positive side effect of the limitation of donations is the added impetus to research growing organs in vitro. This would be a utilitarian sacrifice of current generations for the benefit of future generations. Though it’s quite possible this impetus would have been just as great due to the limits of finding compatible donors for other organs (outside of a totalitarian society where compatible organs can be taken from inmates.)
Scott Sumner
Oct 5 2019 at 1:02pm
I’m not sure what restrictions are appropriate, but they should be the same for donations of kidneys and sales of kidneys.
Robert EV
Oct 5 2019 at 1:14pm
I emphatically agree.
Josh
Oct 4 2019 at 4:21pm
Utilitarianism for an individual seems like a sound moral philosophy. But when applied to two or more individuals it seems to always be morally wrong. “This pain I’m causing is ok because it reduces total aggregate pain” is morally indefensible.
Utilitarianism does seem to give the “right answer” quite often but I would argue that’s only because it’s approximating some other, better moral philosophy. I think something more like natural rights is the deeper morality most people follow. Utilitarianism is an efficient heuristic for that, and as such has value. But like any heuristic, it’s going to give the wrong answer some of the time. All of the gotcha thought experiments against utilitarianism are really just revealing those cases where the heuristic breaks down.
As it pertains to drugs, if we restrict ourselves to a single individual, then figuring out whether drugs or no drugs would maximize their total utility is reasonable. But passing a law that bans (or requires) drugs should be morally indefensible, even if we find that the increased pain felt by people with too few drugs is more than offset by the reduced pain felt by people who would otherwise consume too many.
Thaomas
Oct 4 2019 at 4:47pm
This would make any policy that is not literally pareto optimal impossible and therefore immortalize the status quo.
Mark
Oct 4 2019 at 6:59pm
I would argue the reverse–“do no harm” as a moral rule is a heuristic for achieving utilitarianism. Most people naturally weigh the interests of themselves and their in-groups more highly than the interests of others and their out-groups, so if people had to actually make utilitarian judgments, they would typically be biased in favor of action that harms others and benefits themselves. “Do no harm” is a good rule of thumb that corrects for this, but should not be followed in every case.
Thaomas
Oct 6 2019 at 7:15am
I don’t see how it can be literally followed in any case. [Maybe if the starting point were a utopia, then any coercive transaction would be anti-utilitarian.]
Take a simple case: substituting a slightly higher EITC for an equivalent reduction in the minimum wage. This would increase employment to the extent that the minimum wage had been suppressing it and reduces the “tax” on owners, customers and suppliers of the firms affected by the minimum wage. But it raises the tax on taxpayers in general and cannot be said to literally do NO harm. So even this would be forbidden by the do not harm rule.
The first do no harm rule (first arising in the medical context, no?) seems to be an injunction against careless treatment that might cause more harm than good.
Scott Sumner
Oct 4 2019 at 7:04pm
Each time I pull my car onto the freeway I am imposing harm on others. I am adding to traffic congestion. But the benefit to me may exceed the harm to others.
Thaomas
Oct 5 2019 at 6:38am
Which is why we ought to have congestion taxation for the use of streets and roads/taxation of nets CO2 emissions to make sure that when we decide to pull out of the driveway or burn a carbon atom we have taken account of the harm caused to others in relation to the good done to ourselves.
Robert EV
Oct 5 2019 at 12:08pm
Taxation of net CO2 emission (for most vehicles) already exists in the form of gasoline taxes.
Thaomas
Oct 6 2019 at 7:22am
It’s probably inefficient to try to tax each fuel’s carbon content at the point just before combustion and by itself would not create the incentive for CO2 sequestration. But it does imply that road user charges would need to be shifted to some vehicle class charge per mile.
Dustin
Oct 7 2019 at 1:21pm
I think you’re basically entirely incorrect, and it seems like you missed most of the blog you’re responding to. For example, sending soldiers to war is causing some people pain for the benefit of others. This is certainly morally defensible.
Thaomas
Oct 4 2019 at 4:42pm
Is it intellectuals (especially) who are anti-utilitarian?
I think most (at least leftish) intellectuals ARE utilitarian about “normal” policy issues (progressive taxation, minimum wages, immigration reform) not too far from the status quo. Granted they do not apply utilitarian reasoning to kidney transplant markets, but do non-intellectuals? It’s Libertarians that are explicitly anti-utilitarian.
Generally the question is asked (with a presumend, “no” for an answer) as does some supposedly highly desirable outcome justify overriding “normal” scruples against some behavior? Is the omelette (Communist utopia) worth the eggs (murder of Cossacks) that have to be broken?
Kursad Gorgen
Oct 4 2019 at 5:46pm
Not really. Many important classical liberal theorist of 20th century were rule utilitarianist.
For instance, Hayek, as a post-positivist empiricist, built a significant part of his arguments on rule utilitarianism(see Mirage of Social Justice, pp. 17-24). He also rejected the idea/theory of the natural, numerable rights. On the other hand, Friedman’s position was somewhere between natural rights and rule utilitarianism. Likewise, Karl Popper was closer to Hayek(he was a post-positivist empiricist too).
However, most of libertarians who are more economically right-wing(for example ancaps) or Nozick favored natural rights theory.
Many contemporary classical liberal theorists favor rule utilitarianism. On the other hand, many other classical liberals favored the natural rights theory.
We cannot speak of a consensus or majority here.
Mark Z
Oct 4 2019 at 6:45pm
Normarively, yes, most libertarians are not utilitarian. But libertarians also almost invariably argue that the laissez faire approach to governance is utility maximizing. Otherwise they wouldn’t spend all this time talking about how great markets are and would just argue that markets are innately morally superior regardless of the outcome. I think the classical liberal response to utopian repression is actually the perfectly utilitarian question: where’s the omelette? And of course a general skepticism (justified I’d say even from a utilitarian perspective) that anyone murdering or repressing lots of people is likely to really be doing so for the greater good.
Scott Sumner
Oct 4 2019 at 7:06pm
I was not trying to suggest that non-intellectuals are not also opposed to utilitarianism. I was just trying to focus on intellectual arguments that I had read. I actually don’t know very much about what most people think of utilitarianism.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 4 2019 at 7:58pm
On the ends justifying the means.
(1) The means chosen affects the ends. How you do things typically affects how your intentions play out.
(2) The means have consequences, typically consequences beyond the ends themselves.
(3) Since you may or may not achieve your ends, that elevates the importance of the means chosen.
(4) The principle is often invoked as essentially permitting total discounting of concern over means.
(5) As (4) is illegitimate, and as the means have to be assessed in their own right, and in light of the possibility that you will still not achieve the intended ends, the ends are almost always never enough to justify the means.
(6) The above is generally not good news for prohibitionists.
Robert EV
Oct 5 2019 at 10:38am
You’ve got a choice between nicotine gum, nicotine patches, chewing tobacco, “snus”, cigarettes, cigars, and vapes.
Chewing tobacco increases the need to spit, and people typically don’t carry around portable spitoons. Smoked tobacco generates noxious second-hand smoke, unless one has a portable activated carbon filter or HEPA filter (not typical). Vapes also generate second-hand “smoke”, though of a less noxious variety. This leaves nicotine gum, patches, and snus as the nicotine delivery system without externalities to others (though snus may increase cancer incidence).
You’re getting nicotine regardless, though it can be argued that the oral and lung routes result in faster hits, and dosing in the manner the addict is used to (a chicken and egg problem). The one thing you aren’t controlling is people reactions to your nicotine ingestion. Gum and patches are the least visible nicotine use, though.
Right, smoking and chewing as nicotine (or THC/CBD) delivery mechanisms aren’t justifiable means.
It’s not good news for smokers and chewers, either.
Lorenzo from Oz
Oct 5 2019 at 8:10pm
Prohibitionists seek to affect everyone. Consumers of nicotine typically affect mostly themselves. The scale of both means and ends are important. The greater the scale of both, the more importance thinking through the means-ends interaction is.
Nick
Oct 5 2019 at 2:39am
I think, if you haven’t already, read the works of Michael Heumer, in particular, ‘The problem of Political Authority: An examination of the right to coerce and the duty to obey’
It is probably the best book on libertarian ideas. Even when I was fairly libertarian myself, I never could be sold on AnCap theory. This is the work that finally pushed me there.
Philo
Oct 5 2019 at 10:27am
Outstandingly good philosophizing!
robc
Oct 5 2019 at 6:50pm
That the US government is insane is a very reasonable position. Or evil, take your pick.
Thaomas
Oct 5 2019 at 8:42pm
The US government is pretty good at collecting taxes and making transfer payments SS/Medicare/ACA/EITC; not so good at spending (the F35)
robc
Oct 6 2019 at 9:54am
So you are picking evil? Works for me.
ChrisA
Oct 6 2019 at 3:26am
Scott – how can you understand the issue (impossible to calculate the costs and benefits of an action) and still call yourself a Utilitarian? We are basically back to the same point we always get on these debates – “utilitarian means what Scott likes.” Ok fine, that is how my thinking works; I am in favor of policies that result in outcomes I like. But I don’t dress it up with some fancy high falutin’ philosophical title.
Seriously, how would you encode your approach in an AI?
Scott Sumner
Oct 6 2019 at 2:39pm
Chris, You can certainly estimate costs and benefits, and I believe that people often try to do so. What’s the alternative? Ignore problems like global warming? Ignore the kidney shortage?
ChrisA
Oct 6 2019 at 3:34pm
Scott you probably could not find someone who has less disagreement with your views on policies than me. What I am trying to say though is that you should not try to make claims that we have discovered some universal moral rules that are logically correct. These are just our preferences. There has been lots of misery caused in this world by people who blindly follow some ethical system, we don’t need to do that again.
Mark Z
Oct 6 2019 at 10:24pm
Are you arguing that Scott’s scenario 2 is the case? That utilitarianism, even if true, is not useful because utilitarians will tend to make morally bad decisions (or at least not better than non-utilitarians)?
ChrisA
Oct 7 2019 at 1:26am
Mark
How can a moral system be “true”? This is the general question. Then on top of that taking utilitarianism seriously requires impossible calculations about the future. So it is meaningless even as a system of preferences. The reality is that all defined moral systems are really just rationalisations for our intuitions, which are largely genetic.
Scott Sumner
Oct 7 2019 at 12:24pm
But I’m not advocating that people “blindly” follow any moral system. I’m advocating they follow my moral system with their eyes wide open, with an awareness that it is hard to estimate costs and benefits.
Warren Platts
Oct 7 2019 at 4:46pm
That’s gotta be the understatement of the year… But at least China has solved the “kidney shortage” problem. If you need one (or a heart or liver or lungs), the waiting time is only two weeks! When I used to give the utilitarianism lecture for Philosophy 101, I would tell the class of mostly healthy 19-20 year olds that if only we had mandatory organ donations, each of them could save the lives of 5 other people. They didn’t like that idea, but in China, they take it seriously!
https://chinatribunal.com/statement-made-to-the-united-nations-september-2019/
As for the ramp up in fentanyl deaths in your chart above, notice that the inflection point is 2013–the same year that Paramount Leader Xi Jinping acceded to power. Are you asking us to believe that is a mere coincidence? Or could it be that General Secretary Xi engaging in misguided ultilitarianism by calculating that killing 30,000 Americans every year is “worth it”?
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