Comments on: Moral arbitrage

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:35:26 +0000

The discussion has helped to clarify my thoughts a bit, or maybe replace old confusions with new ones. Here’s a provisional restatement. Suppose that, in deciding how to act, we take a range of considerations into account, including consequences. It seems to me that we can do this consistently if either
(i) Some considerations, such as duties or prohibitions, trump consequences; or
(ii) For some kinds of acts, consequences aren’t relevant
My problem arises when a principle (like DDE) allows you, in effect, to evaluate an action by its consequences, but to price different consequences differently. Granted that there is always some possibility of doing this, DDE and similar approaches seem to allow (and even require) it on a much larger scale. That’s an objection from a consequentialist view; I’d think a deontologist would be concerned that these approaches turn duties into high-priced consequences.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:04:14 +0000

I mentioned (3) in the opening sentence of the post, as an example of the kind of thing I find problematic. To push it a bit further, it seems as if, provided we can convince ourselves that particular claims are just (not too hard, when we are judges in our own case) any bad consequences of actions we take to enforce them can be blamed on the wrongful resistance of others.

By: Tom Hurka

Tom Hurka — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:59:47 +0000

It’s also wrong to say the DDE is consequentialist about unintended consequences. (1) Its proportionality rule may require the benefits resulting from even unintended harms to be not just a little but a lot greater than the harms. (2) In weighing benefits against harms it may not count all resulting benefits as relevant, e.g. it may not count as relevant to assessing the proportionality of a military tactic that collaterally harms civilians that it will give pleasure to the bombers or enable their superiors to test military equipment. And (3) it may discount some resulting harms for other people’s wrongful contributing agency, e.g. (very relevantly to the current Gaza situation) if the civilians were only there to be harmed because the enemy wrongfully placed them there to be used as shields. Consequentialism does none of these things, so the DDE’s treatment of even unintended consequences can be far from consequentialist.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:05:20 +0000

The basic point that you’re making is that in any situation where a range of different principles, criteria and values are in play there will be opportunities for those of bad faith to emphasise what suits their interests, downplay what doesn’t, engage in trade-offs, goalpost shifts etc. That’s a regrettable feature of human affairs, but it doesn’t, as such, give us any reason to believe that there isn’t a plurality of values.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:51:03 +0000

I haven’t fully worked this out, as I meant to say in starting the post. But it does seem to me that the arbitrage idea points up the difficulties in combining moral outlooks and particularly the problems with the (intuitively appealing) idea that consequentialism should be combined with other considerations.

It certainly seems to me that, in practice, reasoning based on DDE is often casuistical (in the pejorative sense of the term) and that the easy availability of moral arbitrage is a large part of the reason.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:00:25 +0000

Oh and whilst DDE may, as you put it “require you to be a deontologist for some purposes and a consequentialist for others” so, in a sense, does any sane moral outlook. After all, consequences matter, but they aren’t all that matters.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:57:46 +0000

Well, of course, John I see your point. But it does rather rely on the proposition that people can reclassify at will, just as it suits them to. However any moral outlook can be manipulated for PR purposes by those who are keen to do so. You don’t even need to switch between outlooks. Take consequentialism: if you big-up the long-term or short-term consequences, factor in tiny risks of total catastrophe etc, you can get things coming out to suit you. Bad faith? Sure. But different moral frameworks are only one of the resources available.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:33:11 +0000

I had in mind, for example, the Doctrine of Double Effect, which seems to require you to be a deontologist for some purposes (roughly, intended consequences) and a consequentialist for others (unintended consequences). Actions can then be permitted or not, depending on how consequences are classified, and this seems to create all sorts of arbitrage opportunities as the thread on that topic showed.

By: J Anderson

J Anderson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:06:26 +0000

I don’t think I’m grasping how one can “be” a virtue ethicist and “be” a deontologist and “be” a consequentialist. If one understands each of these to be a moral outlook based on some underlying principle(s), and believes that to “be” one is to adopt those underlying principles and use them to arrive at moral judgments, then one might not be able to “be” all of them at once. For example, if to be a consequentialist is to accept the notion that acts are to be judged solely by their outcomes, while to be a deontologist is to accept that acts are to be judged not by outcomes but by some inherent property of the act itself, then you can’t be both. On this understanding of what it is to “be” something, arbitrage is just inconsistency.

But this objection (which Paul Gowder raises in a somewhat different way in his post) seems so obvious that I wonder if Quiggin has something else in mind: a sort of moral pluralist who has managed to cobble together elements of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism into a coherent outlook. For example, one could be a consequentialist to the extent that one believes consequences matter but not to the extent that they are all that matters, thus leaving room for other considerations such as character and duty. Was that it, John?

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:38:00 +0000

Wow. An Israeli-Palestinian thread with only 9 comments. CT isn’t measuring up – or down, perhaps.

By: Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:34:25 +0000

I'm not sure I get the point of moral arbitrage. My comments became too long, so I sprung them out into a post of my own, but the basic worry is that there are two readings of the claim "moral arbitrage exists." On the first, it's a valid form of reasoning, and that can't be true. On the second, it's a human psychological blunder, in which case, of course it is, it's old-fashioned wishful thinking.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:32:01 +0000

I’m convinced by now that consequentialism is not ethics but a corrective or override to ethics. Where there’s no conflict (where the “right” thing to do by some given standard coincides with the one that will bring the best outcome, or where the “wrong” thing to do brings a bad outcome) you don’t need consequentialism. Consequentialism only is meaningful where there’s a conflict. And what happens is that you’re faced with a choice—how much ethical cost to pay for a good outcome, and how much consequential cost you’re willing to pay for ethics.

Consequentialism strikes me as most valid in a political or administrative context, where you have to deal with the differences between the acts of leaders of large groups and the acts of individuals facing other individuals in communities. But even then, omelette-making argument is often horribly overused.

Consequentialism is also often used as a kind of sophistry by bright, argumentative gameplayers to put inarticulate moral actors at a disadvantage, often for some self-serving reason. The accusation of irrationality is used aggressively. Lifeboat ethics is the worst case of this, and self-serving people eat it right up.

In the worst cases, the rational calculation is a purely hypothetical one, and the ability to predict outcomes is imaginary. The sole use of these arguments is to soften people up by getting them to admit that doing bad things for good purposes is not only permissible, but a duty.

The crime of Leninism was just in setting up a competing state, of course. All states are omelette-makers. A loyal citizen of any modern state must grant that under some circumstances bombing day care centers is permissible; in the worst case, to insist otherwise might amount to demanding that your nation be left helpless in the face of its enemies.

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:22:04 +0000

“Positive and negative aspects” can be anything, though. For example, if I believe that my reputation in an Internet discussion group has fallen so low that younger posters are demonstrating their prowess by taking apart my arguments in other groups I don’t read, then presenting third parties’ arguments against “their” arguments as their arguments against mine, a cost-benefit analysis might lead me to pretend to opinions that I believe so ludicrous no intelligent person would even take them seriously. (I don’t do this—not anymore :| .)

But zounds, I’m on a different page than the other commenters here.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:16:25 +0000

For example, an advocate of the Iraq war can be a virtue ethicist as regards their own heroic standard against Ba’athist dictatorship, a deontologist regarding obligations to punish the criminal behavior of their enemies, regardless of the unintended effects on the millions of people living in the general vicinity, and a consequentialist regarding the necessity to excuse the criminal behavior of their leaders for fear of subsequent bad effects on the polity.

Quite often, within the same comments thread.

By: Picador

Picador — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:30:26 +0000

This applies to political economy as well as moral philosophy, of course. Gore Vidal’s adage about free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich is a pretty succinct example: one shifts one’s economic frame depending on the group under consideration.