Archive for the 'Ethics' Category

After the Nightmare

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 28, 2012
in Ethics, Morality and Puzzles
. 39 Comments

Our most recent nightmare scenario triggered some great discussion. (So did the earlier nightmare scenarios, which I’ll review in a day or two.) The conundrum was this:

 

In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it’s imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are:

A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple.
B. Kill both members of a randomly chosen couple.

All four people agree that if they die, they want to be well remembered. Therefore all four ask you, please, to choose A so that anyone who dies will be remembered by a loving spouse.

If you care about the four people in front of you, what should you do?

  

Commenters, interestingly, split pretty much 50-50 (though it’s hard to get an exact count because several equivocated). Many bought the argument that unanimous preferences should be respected (leading to A). About equally many bought the argument that the preferences of the dead don’t count, and it’s better to leave two happily married survivors than two grieving widows/widowers (leading to B).

A few highlights:

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Intermission

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 23, 2010
in Books, Ethics, Policy and Politics
. 18 Comments

After six months of blogging nearly every weekday, I’m taking a four day weekend. This will give you a chance to browse through the archives for all the good stuff you might have missed. Or, if you’re looking for a good read to tide you over, I can recommend Chapter Two of my book Fair Play. Some of the examples are dated (Wal-Mart, as far as I know, no longer advertises that “we buy American so you can too”), but it makes a good companion piece to yesterday’s post.

I’ll be back on Tuesday with, I expect, something new to say.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Tragedy of the Chametz

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 2, 2010
in Economics, Ethics and Religion
. 34 Comments

matzahIt is the season of both Lent and Passover, which means that for Christians and Jews it is the season of making small but pointless sacrifices. This always strikes me as mildly tragic. If you’re going to sacrifice your pleasures in order to feel virtuous, why not at least do it in a way that helps someone? Instead of giving up meat or leavened bread, donate a few hundred dollars to a worthy cause.

[Before you tell me that giving up meat is socially beneficial because it holds the price of meat down, remember that low prices are good for buyers only to exactly the same extent that they’re bad for sellers. Changing a price does no net good. The rigorous proof of this is part of the theory of pecuniary externalities, on which the Wikipedia entry is uncharacteristically useless.]

Observing Lent or Passover has much in common with things like running around a track: You push yourself to do something hard, you feel good about it, and you leave the world pretty much the way you found it. What a shame that you didn’t push yourself to do something useful instead. I bet you could have learned to feel almost as good about that.

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When Is It Okay to Counterfeit?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 1, 2010
in Economics and Ethics
. 15 Comments

counterfeitsWhen I spoke at George Mason University last week, grad student Eli Dourado brought me up short with a question I wasn’t prepared for. He was riffing off the following passage from The Big Questions:

Is it okay to steal? Certainly not, and I’ve already told you why: The time and effort you spend stealing things is time and effort you could spend producing things instead. Theft leaves the world poorer than it could have been.

Is it okay to counterfeit? Certainly not, because counterfeiting is stealing. The time and effort you spend producing a phony dollar bill entitles you to a Hostess cupcake or a bus ride or a Blockbuster video rental without adding anything to the world’s stock of food, transportation, or entertainment. The cupcake you eat is made of flour and sugar that someone else could have eaten.

With that as background, Eli asked me this:

Is it okay for me to counterfeit if the central bank is not being sufficiently expansionary?

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For the Children

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 22, 2010
in Ethics
. 23 Comments

children

In a post last week, I asked:

How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?

There are a lot of comments there worth reading, including one from Ryan Yin that rephrased the problem so clearly that I want to highlight it here.

First, though, some answers that I think don’t work. Cos asked:

Why is it so puzzling that we value the preferences of people who exist over the hypothetical preferences of people who might’ve existed but don’t?

Sierra Black drew the same distinction between people who exist and those who don’t, though she phrased it in terms of rights:

Children aren’t possessions or art projects, they’re people. Before you have a child, you’re a person with a certain right to control what happens to your body. After the child is born, that child has some of the same rights you do, including the right not to be mistreated.

Ryan Yin (after agreeing with Sierra!) put his finger on exactly why I find her answer (and others like it) so unsatifying— though I’m not sure he intended his observation to be used in exactly this way:

Suppose you were thinking of having a child. Suppose that once the child is born, the child would wish he’d never been born (and prefer that to killing himself), and further that this is entirely predictable. By the logic given above, you aren’t allowed to care about this fact until after the child is born (at which point there’s nothing to be done). This seems like a very odd way of valuing the preferences of others.

Exactly! If (as Cos says) it’s perfectly reasonable not to value a person’s preferences until after s/he’s born, or (as Sierra says) people don’t acquire rights until after they’re born, then there can be no objection to creating a miserable life. I might be dooming my child to a life of misery, but that’s okay because s/he hasn’t been born yet and therefore has no rights and no preferences I choose to care about.

Surely this can’t be right. And if it’s not, then the Cos/Sierra story can’t be exactly right.

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Moral Education

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 19, 2010
in Ethics and Memories
. 57 Comments

tower-of-babelWhen I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.

I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.

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Bringing in the Sheaves

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 15, 2010
in Ethics and Math
. 39 Comments

grothIn 1958, the 30-year-old Alexandre Grothendieck stunned the International Congress of Mathematicians with his audacious proposal to remake the foundations of algebraic geometry, vastly expanding the scope of the field, subsuming all of commutative algebra and algebraic number theory, and paving the way for the solution of the elusive Weil conjectures, then considered decades or centuries out of reach. No mathematical vision had ever been more radical or more ambitious. Someday I will blog about that vision. Today’s post is about genius, eccentricity and intellectual property.

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Ethics by Pronouncement

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 7, 2009
in Ethics, Outrage and The Ethicist
. 4 Comments

14ethicist_190In this week’s insult to his readers’ intelligence, Randy Cohen, the designated “Ethicist” at the New York Times, responds to two reader inquiries: May I refuse to hire someone because I don’t like his politics? (Answer: “No you may not”.) And: May I, as a doctor, refuse to treat someone because I don’t like his occupation? (Answer, in essence: “Yes you may”.)

More striking even than Cohen’s characteristic “ethics by pronouncement”, refusing to acknowledge, let alone address, the underlying issues, is that he doesn’t even seem to notice that these questions have something in common. He treats them as two separate reader inquiries, from two separate and non-overlapping universes. Thus it’s okay for the doctor to turn away a patient because “You cannot be forced to practice medicine” and because the patient can always find another doctor. One might wonder, then, in the case of the employer, why it’s not true/relevant/dispositive that “You cannot be forced to provide employment” and/or that the candidate can always find another job.

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The Oracle of Eighth Avenue

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 30, 2009
in Ethics, Outrage and The Ethicist
. 5 Comments

Randy Cohen, the house ethicist at the New York Times, frequently strikes me as disappointingly shallow. Take, for example, his latest column, posing this ethical quandary:

You’re redesigning a website and you want to include a photo of a generic customer. The client does not want the generic customer to be African-American, partly because he has never had an African-American customer and thinks it unlikely that he ever will. Is this okay?

My objection is not to Cohen’s answer (which is “no”) but to the way it’s dispensed, as if from an oracle, with no attempt at a derivation from clearly stated principles.

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Analogize This

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 23, 2009
in Economics, Ethics and Policy
. 21 Comments

Over on Econlog, Bryan Caplan uses an example from The Big Questions to illustrate his intuitionist approach to meta-ethics: Start with concrete, specific cases where your ethical intuition is clear, and reason by analogy from there. If you have multiple intuitions that lead you down conflicting paths, give some thought to which ones you’re most willing to jettison.

Bryan’s example is about discrimination, a subject that has come up before on this blog, but I want to emphasize that the argument Bryan quotes is quite separate from the arguments we got into in that earlier thread, and, for the sake of clarity, I hope we manage to keep them separate.

Bryan (paraphrasing me!) starts with the rather strong intuition that it’s okay for tenants and workers to discriminate. If you don’t want to live in an Albanian-owned building or an work for an Albanian employer, that’s your right (no matter how strongly we might strongly disapprove of your attitude). By analogy, then, it might seem that landlords and employers should have the same right to discriminate.

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Blind Justice

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 9, 2009
in Economics, Ethics, Fairness and Policy
. 62 Comments

Partially blind gamer Alexander Stern wants Sony to make its games more accessible to him and others like him—and he’s gone to court to force the issue. This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?

A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won’t rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?

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