“The ‘precautionary principle’ (‘better safe than sorry’) popular in Europe is not a useful alternative to cost-benefit analysis, if only because of its sponginess.”

Unless following it gives Bush kinglike power, then I guess it’s ok.

And here is a description of him from a recent New Yorker profile:

Posner prefers to avoid social life. “People don’t say interesting things,” he says… When you’re just talking with your friends about trivia, what’s the point?”

So, whether or not he is clinically an Asperger’s sufferer, he is not an ordinary person with a normal social life. It’s not surprising that he places no value on freedom from government surveillance. He doesn’t understand the concept of personal privacy.

IMHO, it’s just another case of ‘right-wing libertarianism’ being shown to be a fundamental contradiction.

Geoff, the word that seems to fit is ‘consequentialist’, I believe.

? order of magnitude? 5000×7,000,000 = 35 billion. (So far in Iraq alone the USA has spent $225bn)

I’m not talking about the cost benefit analysis, I’m talking about Kieran’s setup of “here he uses probabilities, here he doesn’t”. Posner’s arguments are crap in both quotes, but that doesn’t make Kieran’s objection valid.

But does he have to? If Thomas’ numbers are right (and they’re close to what my grandfather would put it, on average), then saving 5000 lives is worth 3.5 Trillion USD. Let’s say the increase over expectation is at its highest, or 2x, that means that, after three years, we could expect 1,250 additional lives lost than w/o War on Terror. Let’s subract their contributions from our sum (gruesome, I know—but we’re utilitarians here, for argument’s sake). We still have 2.6 trillion to spend… now, to discount based on probabilities. 1/1000th event leaves us at 2.6 billion in expenditure… 2% discount rate of death, however, puts us up to 100 billion and additional calculation for your personal risk of having to fight puts us up to about 97 billion.

You’re off by a 100 billion or so, as a utilitarian, but that’s easy to make up with a few adjustments—which is to say, on utilitarian calculus, the “War on Terror” isn’t insane. It’s insane in lots of other ways… but it’s at least arguable on this model of moral reasoning (along certain vectors, anyway—e.g., you don’t believe the war to be increasing the likelihood of future, successful, attacks).

The problem, of course, lies with utilitarian moral reasoning—and, more importantly, with the lack of Bush administration imagination on any standard of reasoning w/r/t this war. Just because something can be argued successfully w/in certain constraints doesn’t make it true (or right). I always think, in these cases, of Russell’s wonderful rejoinder to Fr. Coppleston in their debate on the existence of God, upon Coppleston’s putting of Pascal’s wager to Russell: “What if,” replied Russell, “I believed in a God who would damn me to hell for accepting his existence on a bet?”

As I’ve mentioned before, give me the second with no checks and balances and with a little bit of ingenuity I’ll deliver you the first.

No kidding. Of coures this extends to literally any kind of action, including multilating your genitals, eating babies, raping old people, and attacking a non-imminent threat. What exactly is the point of the “classroom example” with the made-up numbers?

Also, you don’t adequately explain Posner’s 2005 quote. The questioner is obviously suggesting that the risk of terrorism is being overstated; the response—that the risk of terrorism cannot be precisely quantified, so therefore caution dictates that it can’t be overstated either—is incoherent.

As I understand it, Posner, when addressing these issues in more detail (that is, in his book on the subject and not in a real-time online chat), does try to focus on actual costs and benefits. (I’ll quote a sample of that kind from his blog, at the bottom.) He also, as I understand it, supplies some reasons for thinking that people systematically underestimate the risks posed by low probability events.

Here’s another bit from his blog:

The Indian Ocean tsunami illustrates a type of disaster to which policymakers pay too little attention—a disaster that has a very low or unknown probability of occurring, but that if it does occur creates enormous losses. Great as the death toll, physical and emotional suffering of survivors, and property damage caused by the recent tsunami are, even greater losses could be inflicted by other disasters of low (but not negligible) or unknown probability. The asteroid that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a hydrogen bomb might have killed millions of people had it exploded above a major city. Yet that asteroid was only about 200 feet in diameter, and a much larger one (among the thousands of dangerously large asteroids in orbits that intersect the earth’s orbit) could strike the earth and cause the total extinction of the human race through a combination of shock waves, fire, tsunamis, and blockage of sunlight, wherever it struck. Other catastrophic risks include, besides earthquakes such as the one that caused the recent tsunami, natural epidemics (the 1918–1919 Spanish influenza epidemic killed between 20 and 40 million people), nuclear or biological attacks by terrorists, certain types of lab accident, and abrupt global warming. The probability of catastrophes resulting, whether or not intentionally, from human activity appears to be increasing because of the rapidity and direction of technological advances.

The fact that a catastrophe is very unlikely to occur is not a rational justification for ignoring the risk of its occurrence. Suppose that a tsunami as destructive as the Indian Ocean one occurs on average once a century and kills 150,000 people. That is an average of 1,500 deaths per year. Even without attempting a sophisticated estimate of the value of life to the people exposed to the risk, one can say with some confidence that if an annual death toll of 1,500 could be substantially reduced at moderate cost, the investment would be worthwhile. A combination of educating the residents of low-lying coastal areas about the warning signs of a tsunami (tremors and a sudden recession in the ocean), establishing a warning system involving emergency broadcasts, telephoned warnings, and air-raid-type sirens, and improving emergency response systems, would have saved many of the people killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami, probably at a total cost below any reasonable estimate of the average losses that can be expected from tsunamis. Relocating people away from coasts would be even more efficacious, but except in the most vulnerable areas or in areas in which residential or commercial uses have only marginal value, the costs would probably exceed the benefits. For annual costs of protection must be matched with annual, not total, expected costs of tsunamis.

In my book Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford University Press 2004), I try to be more precise about how one might determine the costs of catastrophes. There is now a substantial economic literature inferring the value of life from the costs people are willing to incur to avoid small risks of death; if from behavior toward risk one infers that a person would pay $70 to avoid a 1 in 100,000 risk of death, his value of life would be estimated at $7 million ($70/.00001), which is in fact the median estimate of the value of life of an American. Because value of life is positively correlated with income, this figure cannot be used to estimate the value of life of most of the people killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami. A further complication is that the studies may not be robust with respect to risks of death much smaller than the 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 range of most of the studies; we do not know what the risk of death from a tsunami was to the people killed. Additional complications come from the fact that undoubtedly more than 150,000 people have died or will die—and the total may never be known—and that there is vast suffering and property damage that must also be quantified, as well as estimates needed of just how effective precautionary measures of various scope and expense would have been. The risks of smaller but also still destructive tsunamis that such measures might protect against must also be factored in; nor am I confident about my “once a century” risk estimate. Nevertheless, it seems apparent that the total cost figure of the recent tsunami will come in at an amount great enough to indicate that there were indeed precautionary measures to take that would have been cost-justified.

Why, then, weren’t such measures taken in anticipation of a tsunami on the scale that occurred? Tsunamis are a common consequence of earthquakes, which themselves are common; and tsunamis can have other causes besides earthquakes—a major asteroid strike in an ocean would create a tsunami that would dwarf the Indian Ocean one.

There are a number of reasons for such neglect. First, although a once-in-a-century event is as likely to occur at the beginning of the century as at any other time, it is much less likely to occur in the first decade of the century than later. Politicians with limited terms of office and thus foreshortened political horizons are likely to discount low-risk disaster possibilities, since the risk of damage to their careers from failing to take precautionary measures is truncated. Second, to the extent that effective precautions require governmental action, the fact that government is a centralized system of control makes it difficult for officials to respond to the full spectrum of possible risks against which cost-justified measures might be taken. The officials, given the variety of matters to which they must attend, are likely to have a high threshold of attention below which risks are simply ignored. Third, where risks are regional or global rather than local, many national governments, especially in the poorer and smaller countries, may drag their heels in the hope of taking a free ride on the larger and richer countries. Knowing this, the latter countries may be reluctant to take precautionary measures and by doing so reward and thus encourage free riding. Fourth, countries are poor often because of weak, inefficient, or corrupt government, characteristics that may disable poor nations from taking cost-justified precautions. Fifth, people have difficulty thinking in terms of probabilities, especially very low probabilities, which they tend therefore to write off. This weakens political support for incurring the costs of taking precautionary measures against low-probability disasters.

The operation of some of these factors is illustrated by the refusal of the Pacific nations, which do have a tsunami warning system, to extend their system to the Indian Ocean prior to the recent catastrophe. Tsunamis are more common in the Pacific, and most of the Pacific nations do not abut on the Indian Ocean, but even if the risk of an Indian Ocean tsunami was only a tenth of that of a Pacific Ocean tsunami (a figure I have seen in a newspaper article), it was still worth taking precautions against; but there is a tendency to write down slight risks to zero.

An even more dramatic example of neglect of low-probability/high-cost risks concerns the asteroid menace, which is analytically similar to the menace of tsunamis. NASA, with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, spends only $4 million a year on mapping dangerously close large asteroids, and at that rate may not complete the task for another decade, even though such mapping is the key to an asteroid defense because it may give us years of warning. Deflecting an asteroid from its orbit when it is still millions of miles from the earth is a feasible undertaking. In both cases, slight risks of terrible disasters are largely ignored essentially for political reasons.

In part because tsunamis are one of the risks of an asteroid collision, the Indian Ocean disaster has stimulated new intereset in asteroid defense. This is welcome. The fact that a disaster of a particular type has not occurred recently or even within human memory (or even ever) is a bad reason to ignore it. The risk may be slight, but if the consequences should it materialize are great enough, the expected cost of disaster may be sufficient to warrant defensive measures.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other risks to fighting wars… just to say: those risks are moral/intellectual/political rather than physical. And thus: you get to some of the standard objections to utilitarian theory, generally—and on these (and thus, right) the anti-war opinion must be upheld.

I am happy to uphold an anit-war opinion—but if a utilitarian disagreed with me, it would be on the basis of the axioms of their moral philosophy, not their reasoning (as, I think, Posner’s defenders on this thread have amplified).