Luke Smillie and others write,
intellectually curious people–those who are motivated to explore and reflect upon abstract ideas–are more inclined to judge the morality of behaviors according to the consequences they produce. . .
individuals who are more curious, respectful, and adherent to salient social norms, tend to judge the morality of an action not by its consequences, but rather by its alignment with particular moral rules, duties, or rights.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I attach a lot of importance to the distinction between intentions and consequences, and my natural inclination is to focus on the latter. Some more comments:
1. Focus on intentions, and you blame the baker for “greed.” Focus on consequences, as Adam Smith does, and you enjoy your bread.
2. Good intentions motivate the rabbi and most congregants at our synagogue to support Black Lives Matter. For now, let us assume that everyone involved in BLM has good intentions (although obviously that is never completely true of any movement). But I cannot stop there. As I see it, the consequences of BLM thus far are bad, and they will be worse. I don’t think this is fixable within BLM. The assumption that racism is the most important factor (indeed, the only factor) in police killings of young black men is false.
I disapprove of racism. I disapprove of police killing young black men. But I also disapprove of overstating the link between the two.
3. In How Humans Judge Machines, Cesar Hidalgo finds that humans judge machines more by their consequences and humans more by their intentions.
In a complex society, I think we are better often better off looking at outcomes as if they came from a disinterested machine rather than as coming from an intentional human.
For example, I believe that social media has harmful consequences. However, these consequences were not the intentions of the people involved in creating smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design
In the end, the justification for the importance of moral rules, duties, or rights always comes down to the claim that too little regard for them will result in really bad….consequences.
Yes, from a secular, “eliminative materialist” point of view.
But from the religious perspective, moral law is an extension of fundamental natural law.
Just as there is no justification for, say, General Relativity as a fact about the way the universe works without any apparent ‘deeper’ explanation, there is no consequential justification for the moral rules themselves, which one has to accept as given.
There are justifications for *obeying* the moral laws, because of the individual and collective consequences of disobedience such as the eternal damnation of one’s soul. But from the religious point of view, the consequences and impact of the rules on secular, empirical measures of personal or social welfare is irrelevant, because the important action is all on the spiritual plane.
If one’s religion commands vegetarianism, it may be true that the material consequences of meat-eating in some context would produce healthier, happier people. But those kinds of consequences don’t matter to the religiously vegetarian, because the spiritual consequences of transgression are worse.
Yes, but then “spiritual consequences” are those special consequences that are claimed to be even more consequential than ordinary consequences. Still seems like it’s all about consequences to me. Only even more so.
Yes and no.
From a natural law perspective, goodness is about conforming as best to one’s essential nature as possible.
A good triangle is one that is well drawn with crisp lines and with angles that add up to 180 degrees. A bad triangle is sloppily drawn, perhaps with lines that don’t even close together.
Like triangles and everything else, human beings have essences, but unlike anything else, humans have the intellect to be able to understand what is good or bad for them according to their essential nature and the will to carry it out. A result of seeking and acting upon the good generally has good consequences, as creatures tend to flourish when they behave in accordance with their nature, but this is secondary.
This provides yet another excellent example of the necessity to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court. With enough righteous justices, the Court can overturn the laws of unintended consequences. No decent person could argue with that.
Isn’t judging by intentions over consequences one of Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD traits?
Greg g points toward the issue that is not covered in this post….time. Immediate consequences are not the same as intermediate consequences and many times they are opposite of long term consequences. The time frame that you consider can not be sensibly left out of the equation.
If only there were a way to try and judge how the person you are interacting with will treat you over time, rather then just a one off. Like, if they seemed intent on doing good by you, you might have more confidence that an ongoing relationship with them would have positive long run consequences as new situations came up.
Of course there is nuance here. Their wanting to do good by you and their being able to do good by you are different things. And sometimes one who doesn’t much care about you can nonetheless do good by you.
But generally speaking I don’t see a lot of successful personal or business relationships between people who wish ill for one another. My baker may be indifferent, but he doesn’t hate me, and he probably wouldn’t poison my bread even if he could go without detection.
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
Henry David Thoreau
My family comes to my house with the conscious design of doing me good every day. My neighbors and friends often. And they do indeed do me good.
History is littered with failed attempts to create multi-racial, multi-ethnic societies, and the U.S. is not immune from history. If we are to survive as a united nation, we need to build unity and social cohesion.
BLM and critical race theory serve to divide the nation, and will end up hurting the very people it is trying to help. I wonder how Arnold’s rabbi can be so blind?
“I disapprove of police killing young black men.”
Do you?
Most police killings of young black men are done when they are in danger of committing immediate violence to innocents, police, and/or themselves. I don’t think you actually disapprove of the use of force in these cases.
Some % of police killings of young black men are probably “unfortunate”, but with so many police interactions and the size of our population such instances are inevitable.
The only relevant question is “are there any changes to policing that would likely change the rate at which there are unfortunate shootings of young black men that wouldn’t also endanger other societal objectives of even greater utility (reducing the murder rate, other spending priorities, etc). My guess is the answer to that question is:
1) Not many
2) Wouldn’t have a big effect
3) Aren’t the kind of thing BLM will bring about
asdf,
So then, that percentage of police killings of young black men which are entirely unjustified are “probably ‘unfortunate’ ” but worth it for the net benefit to society but mask mandates and Covid lockdowns you disagree with are unambiguously “evil.” Got it.
You bring up a good point. Most policies will have good results and bad results, and it is possible that the bad will be greater than the good, no matter the intentions of the people pushing the policy.
It’s an empirical question, and all too often we simply don’t know enough to make a sure judgment. Not to mention all the conflicting morals. E.g., would the benefits of having kids in school outweigh the early deaths of grandmas with pre-existing conditions?
“would the benefits of having kids in school outweigh the early deaths of grandmas with pre-existing conditions?”
Yes, and its not even close. People with the other view are evil, wrong, and probably enemies I need to defeat simply to be free of their tyranny.
Yes, and it’s really easy to prove both with evidence and anything resembling a common sense morality.
“entirely unjustified”
I suspect this is a tiny fraction of “partially unjustified” which is an even smaller fraction of “unfortunate”.
For instance, it’s unfortunate that the girlfriend of that drug dealer got caught in the crossfire when the boyfriend fired on the police. It was not unjustified of the police to fire back after being fired upon. Hence why they got off.
We can debate what the best way to approach a situations like that is, but the current method of confronting them itself was the outcome of debates of the different options (its not like this is the first time policing methods have been examined and trade offs weighed, the cops weren’t making shit up on the fly).
Be careful not to associate “intentions” too often with what turns out (or appears) bad or negative. Every individual holds their own intentions, and the marketplace is composed of countless decentralized intentions which create consequences for supply side definitions. Intentions may lack transparency. They have both good and bad consequences, but problems arise when they gain centralized backing which in turn solidifies supply side definition.
Random reactions.
1. This triggers memories of some years spent as a program evaluator, a similar judgment problem was often encountered: were program outcomes/consequences attributable to program design or program execution? The classic work in this area being Michael Lipsky’s theory of street level bureaucracy. What you wind up with is a choice between compliance based accountability (intentions) and performance based accountability (consequences). Each unique situation generally requires a fluid mixture intuitable via management arts.
2. Sympathy for having trouble with the rabbi. But imagine how Roman Catholics must feel with this pope.
3. Some would argue that social media designers are not entirely pure of heart, claiming instead “Social media are designed as addiction machines, expressly programmed to draw upon our emotions.”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/713720
One can easily imagine that the 30 percent of USA citizens without a Facebook account and the 75 percent without a Twitter are likely better off generally, less surveilled, and less manipulated than their counterparts.
Could you clarify your thinking re: Pope and Catholics? (not trolling or challenging. . .genuine curiosity)
Francis’s recent encyclical (http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html )
is full of pronouncements that I imagine would be troubling for many liberal Roman Catholics:
-“We need to attain a global juridical, political and economic order “which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity”.
-The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of “spillover” or “trickle” – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged “spillover” does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at “promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity” and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, “without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist”.
-“As I was writing this letter, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities. Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident. For all our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”
-“In this shallow, short-sighted culture that we have created, bereft of a shared vision, “it is foreseeable that, once certain resources have been depleted, the scene will be set for new wars, albeit under the guise of noble claims”.
-“if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.”
-“The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities. In other times, for example, lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty, nor was it a source of hardship. Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.”
-“In today’s world, many forms of injustice persist, fed by reductive anthropological visions and by a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings. While one part of humanity lives in opulence, another part sees its own dignity denied, scorned or trampled upon, and its fundamental rights discarded or violated”.
-“Individualism does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal. The mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family. Nor can it save us from the many ills that are now increasingly globalized. Radical individualism is a virus that is extremely difficult to eliminate, for it is clever. It makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”
-Indeed, “to claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practise doublespeak”.[83] Words like freedom, democracy or fraternity prove meaningless, for the fact is that “only when our economic and social system no longer produces even a single victim, a single person cast aside, will we be able to celebrate the feast of universal fraternity”.
Yeah, not feeling too bad about having stopped going to mass.
“liberal” in the classical sense, yes, I absolutely agree.
I sometimes think nowadays everyone’s dream job is to be a political pundit. Movie reviewers, actors, celebrity chefs treat their day jobs as excuses to disseminate their hare-brained political ideas. I guess this applies to popes as well. Protestants should be pleased at least, since this pope is doing a lot discredit the papacy.
I was going to say the same thing: I think Arnold is a bit quick to let social media company execs off the hook.
I’d be interested to read his take on it, but my impression is that Kling is not happy when those companies implement their biases and play favorites in the same way he is not happy when academic institutions do the same. But I suspect he reasons that any feasible cures have potential side effects that are worse than the disease.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds (of Instapundit) discusses social media as a new thing we have to get used to. Just like when we started living in cities 8,000 years ago and had to innovate new forms of hygiene, sanitation, and waste disposal, or suffer periodic epidemics.
He says it better than I can. _The social media revolution_.
I guess the general issue is that it’s an arms race, a competitive dynamic. We have to learn to ignore clickbait. We have to learn to ignore trolling. The thing on social media that makes us enraged, and seems to demand a response, is the very thing we need to ignore–so as not to get sucked in.
I believe Prof. Kling discussed the need to view our phones as adversaries as well as assistants. That same approach must be taken to social media.
The second quote is wrong
that individuals who are more courteous, respectful, and adherent to salient social norms, tend to judge the morality of an action not by its consequences, but rather by its alignment with particular moral
I believe that social media has harmful consequences.
I have an instinctive opposition to this sort of argument, because ultimately you could substitute in any form of communication. The media is not the message.
But “X” has harmful consequences” is essentially saying that humans are incapable of using “X” responsibly. Which seems like a fundamentally reactionary, irrational, and anti-freedom approach to such things.
Radio and the printing press had harmful consequences as well, as do cars and understanding of nuclear power. If one stops and thinks about it, pretty much everything can have harmful consequences.
Point is, focusing on the activity (technology, object, etc.) that can be harmful is misplaced. The focus should always be on the human action. We don’t say that cars or drugs should be banned because they can be harmful, we say that people should responsibly use these things.
But we do regulate drugs and many other things. I can’t get a beer at a ball game after the 7th inning because we figured out that lots of people couldn’t control themselves driving drunk on the way home if they could.
Generally we regulate all of these things much more than we should.
The optimal amount of speech regulation is pretty close to zero. And that’s what regulation of social media would be.
The arguments against social media sound a lot like the arguments against the printing press made by the Catholic church. No, the Bible’s not for you peasants! You’re better off without it, and we’re gonna F’ing kill you if you don’t trust us on this.
Posts by Samantha Mandeles on Legal Insurrection (09/13/2020 & 06/03/2020) document vandalism of synagogues in Kenosha and LA during riots that erupted in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the death of George Floyd at the hands of local police. The earlier post also documents efforts by anti-Israel activists to link police killings of Black Americans to American-Israeli law enforcement exchanges. Examples of the intersection between the SJW movement, of which BLM is a part, and anti-Semitism are not hard to find. Nevertheless, like the invasion of the body snatchers, the SJW movement has taken over Reform Judaism. As a non-observant Jew, the only explanation I can think of is that many of my fellow Jews are meshuga. I also can’t help but think about European Jews who ignored the signs in the period leading up to WWII.
The SJW movement has taken over Reform Judaism? Who do you think invented it?
Sorry, Arnold. I think that Smillie and others made a serious mistake in their approach to personality as a determinant of how we judge human actions. Leave aside the issue of personality (theories and measures) and focus on how we judge human action (I emphasize ACTIONS because that’s is what the authors want to judge and usually is what we all want to judge). Indeed, they refer to individual actions, not to social interactions, but we have to be careful because all social interactions are based on individual actions. I will refer only to individual actions leading to social interactions (the focus of all social sciences, including economics).
We observe social interactions and their outcomes, but even for simple interactions between two persons, we may fail to identify how the individual actions determine the outcome. Just remember the Edgeworth box and the possibility of multiple Pareto outcomes: the probability of each one of these outcomes depends on how the two persons negotiate (they can call a third person to adjudicate the conflict of interest in choosing one of the Pareto outcomes). If we wanted to judge their interaction by looking only to the outcome it’d be easy, but if we wanted to judge each of the two parties by finding their “intentions”, we would have to review their individual decision-making processes. Since we cannot observe these processes, we would have to speculate about their preferences and beliefs, and more importantly, about their abilities to think clearly about their preferences and beliefs. Just to give you an example of what we should explore, let us remember that the Edgeworth box assumes, among other things, that none of the two interacting parties will consider stealing the other’s good (the box assumes perfect enforcement of property rights). If John realizes that stealing is an alternative (say, because the probability of effective punishment is low), then we will be outside the box and should consider how John decides between stealing Peter’s apple and negotiating an exchange. But we don’t observe this: we may conclude that since John negotiated with Peter, he decided against stealing but it doesn’t mean anything in terms of John’s compliance with Peter’s property rights because we can speculate that the price of stealing was higher than its benefit. And if we were to find that John ended up eating the apples and keeping his money, we could presume that John stole Peter’s apple, but any other outcome would hardly justify a presumption that John stole Peter’s apple.
My point is “forget about intentions” because it means nothing. If we want to judge the extent to which an individual has been responsible for the observed outcome of social interaction, we must focus on both the individual’s decision-making process and the dynamics of social interaction. Yes, maybe the individual was negligent or malicious leading to non-compliance with some social norms, but to prove it we have to find reliable and relevant evidence before seeking justice. But if we only want to judge whether the outcome of social interaction was good or bad (like or not, good means Pareto efficient), we may presume compliance with all social norms by all interacting parties and focus on the dynamics of the social interaction. Indeed, usually, we are interested in judging both the responsibility of the interacting parties and the outcomes of social interactions.
When it comes to morality, consequences are often important but intentionality is the necessary part. Without intentionality, there is no morality at all.
If a man shoots another man with the intention of murdering him, but misses and the man lives, he commits a moral evil.
If a man shoots at a deer, misses, and accidentally kills a fellow hunter who was (unbeknownst to him) hidden two hundred feet beyond the deer, he does not commit a moral evil.
If a tree falls over and kills a man, the tree is likewise not morally evil. As the tree had no intellect to comprehend what the good is and no will to carry it out, nothing a tree can ever do could be considered morally evil. This holds for all non human animals and inanimate objects, which is why people judge machines according to their consequences.
Greed is indeed a moral vice, but the reason we shouldn’t be quick to accuse others of greed is that we can’t see the interior life of another person and it’s very hard from external appearances to tell whether an action was caused by greed as opposed to, say, high factor costs. Market competition also tends to limit the effects of greed in a more effective manner than government can.
In traditional textbook moral philosophy, the two major metaethics categories of morality systems are:
A. utilitarianism or consequentialism or moral anti-realism: the ends justify the means.
B. deontology or kantian morality or moral realism: the ends don’t justify the means. There are “moral facts” on what is morally right or wrong. Behavior is judged on its own merits regardless of the consequences, which
In this post, the quote categorizes morality systems as either based on consequences (consequentialism) or based on intent. Both of these are considered moral-antirealist philosophies. This omits metaethical theories of moral realism.
Here’s a good easy to consume video on metaethics:
https://youtu.be/FOoffXFpAlU