Omnibus paribus, individuals will make decisions based on least-cost methods. The decision to accept the State is made because it carries the least cost to other options, such as confronting the State, leaving for another State, etc.
I am sure that this is true, for some definition of cost.
In fact, for some definitions of cost,
you can remove the ceteris paribus clause and just say that people will always make decisions that way, on praxeological grounds. But, if you adopt that interpretation of the word cost,
the interesting question is now what sorts of things people will incorporate into their understanding of the costs and benefits of a situation. Presumably physical or emotional pain for you will usually count as a cost, ceteris paribus, and so will things that endanger your health or material well-being. But, for example, does the suffering of people other than yourself count as a cost to you? From the standpoint of Wertfrei economics, there’s no reason why it couldn’t or shouldn’t; people can choose to value or disvalue all kinds of things. And from the standpoint of moral deliberation, I think that just about everyone in the world does treat that as part of their conception of costs, to a greater or lesser extent, and that absolutely everyone has good reason to treat it as part of their conception of costs. (Because, whether any given person recognizes it or not, the kind of life she would have to live to remain indifferent to, or taking pleasure from, the suffering of other people, is a mean and miserable sort of life for her to live.)
But, clearly, if the suffering of others is one of the things you consider (ceteris paribus) a cost
in any situation that has it, then that’s going to significantly affect your deliberation about the least-cost option.
It also matters whether the person deliberating views all costs and benefits as qualitatively on a par with each other — so that for any given cost there is some quantity of benefit that would make the cost an acceptable trade-off — or whether one’s conception of cost includes certain kinds of costs that cannot be overridden by any quantity of other kinds of benefits. (E.g., if I accept that my personally doing an injustice to somebody else is a cost — and, after all, why should I not view that as a cost? — it remains to be asked whether that cost is an absolute bar to any course of action that involves it, or whether there is some level of benefit that might make the cost an acceptable trade-off.) Again, economics has nothing to say about whether or not an agent can or should incorporate these sorts of decisively-defeating costs into her calculations, or whether she’ll treat everything as negotiable. What morality has to say on the topic about whether people should incorporate them into their deliberation is a matter of dispute; in fact, that’s pretty much the whole of the dispute between consequentialists and deontologists.
And again, whether an agent has these kind of decisively-defeating costs, or whether she views all costs and benefits as qualitatively on a par, and differing only in quantity, will make a significant difference to the outcome of her deliberations about what the least-cost option is.
Now, on the other hand, if you meant to use the word cost
to mean something more narrow (like, say, balance of pain over pleasure for the agent herself, damage over health for the agent herself, and/or economic outflows over economic income for the agent herself), then I don’t think it’s at all true that people always choose the option that they believe will minimize cost in that narrow sense. A lot of people no doubt do that nearly all of the time, and nearly all people no doubt do that a lot of the time. But I don’t think anybody could honestly look at history, or just at the people around them — family, friends, and lovers, and conclude that those narrowly-defined costs are the only sorts of evils that people act to avoid, or that their opposites are the only sorts of goods that people act to achieve. (Hence the popularity, amongst people who want to uphold a version of this narrower and stronger claim, of psychoanalytic speculation about the unacknowledged deep motives supposedly behind human behavior; where honest inspection won’t get the job done, there is always bullshitting about the real
motives behind an act.)
The top killers on the planet, perhaps the most vicious species ever to walk the Earth, save certain bacteria.
Well, if viciousness requires deliberative rationality, then human beings are probably the only vicious species ever to walk the earth (possibly with the exception of some other primates and cetaceans). But then also the only virtuous species ever to walk the earth.
Bacteria may be dangerous; they may even be loathsome. But it would make no sense to call them despicable or vicious when they kill, or admirable when they do something useful or save our lives (as some bacteria also do). They don’t choose to be dangerous or loathsome and they can’t choose to be anything else. We can, and I think that, not some kind of inner fixed nature,
is the real issue.
Endorsement of the state entails endorsement of some crime but it doesn’t entail any necessary endorsement of the particular crime you name. Iraqi children aren’t dying for him if he opposes the war.
It is not as if I just brought the Iraq war up out of the blue. Smathers introduced the issue himself, in order to say that he freely approves of the State’s authority over other people, including on the Iraq war, even though he himself regards the Iraq war as involving injustice against real victims, because of alleged positive benefits that he gets from the unchallenged authority of the State.
The point of the barb isn’t that Smathers somehow purposes for innocent Iraqis to be killed by the U.S. government, or that he’s not trying to do something to rescue them. It’s that he openly acknowledges a cost of government in one area (inflicted on other people against their will), but, even taking that cost into account, he nevertheless claims to freely support the unchallenged authority of government in that area because of the alleged benefits for quality of life that he gets from it in other areas. That’s a fundamentally different claim from the claim made by someone who grudgingly surrenders to the power of government under coercion, but regards it as illegitimate. The first claim involves an underlying claim about whether or not other people’s lives are acceptable trade-offs for you to make in choosing the means to your own purposes. The second claim doesn’t involve such a claim.
Incidentally, I don’t think that Iraqi children are dying for Smathers in any case, because Smathers has no effectual control over the process that’s killing Iraqi children, one way or the other. My claim is just that his ethical position, as stated in the column, is that it would be O.K., on balance, if Iraqi children were dying for him. Which is a position that I hope he’d be willing to abandon if he thought about it a bit harder.
Kennedy,
Aren’t dead American children an inevitable consequence of traffic? Does this mean no traffic in America can be justified?
There’s risk in everything in life, but don’t you think that there’s a significant moral difference between (1) small risks that people consensually take on in order to achieve their day-to-day goals, and (2) major risks that governments impose on innocent third parties, without their consent, in order to achieve their statist policy goals?
The ordinary risk of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians being killed in traffic accidents is an example of the first kind of risk; it’s a risk that they choose to take on in order to get where they need to go. It’s terrible when anybody is killed in an auto accident, but you’re quite right that that doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of driving, because people can choose to risk whatever they want to risk as far as their own lives are concerned.
But the risk of an innocent Iraqi getting a bomb dropped on her head, just for existing in the wrong neighborhood, is a risk of the second kind, not the first. It’s not a risk that anybody takes on for herself but rather a risk imposed on large numbers of nonconsenting third parties by a gang of criminals pursuing goals that they had no right to pursue in the first place. If that kind of risk doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of government war, then proving that will at least take more argument than you’ve given here.
If you want an analogy between dead Iraqi children and deaths in traffic, then you would have to discuss risks that go above and beyond the normal risks that drivers, passengers, and pedestrians consensually accept as part of choosing to use the road. For example, tearing down the wrong side of the road at 90mph while you’re drunk out of your mind. I’d agree that that’s an appropriate analogy for government warfare, and that death and mayhem are the inevitable consequence of driving like that. And I’d say that, given that inevitable consequence, there’s no way to justify driving like that, either.
]]>I couldn’t agree more, Jimi G.
Smathers, you, and I all get the same regime and political evironment regardlss of what we think of it as individuals. There is no political benefit to holding correct views or political cost to holding incorrect views. You can’t hope to change many people’s political opinions when their opinions make no difference in their individual lives.
For some reason I can’t decipher what you mean by the above. A gamble isn’t necessarily rational; it’s (hopefully) a calculated guess based on an incomplete understanding of the game board.
Then again, I might be totally wrong in my theory. It’s been known to happen.
]]>Yes and no. Statistics can be used to justify any position, so presenting a statistical fact that X number of children die in auto accidents every year can be read as an indictment of motor vehicle travel. However, I posit that there are individuals operating those motor vehicles who are responsible for the deaths of those children, not the traffic system per se.
For example, guns are used in many homicides every year in America. Are guns responsible for those homicides? What if guns were magically removed from existence and homicides proceeded apace with knives instead? Are knives then responsible? At what point is the responsibility rightly devolved to human individuals?
Backyard swimming pools create a hazardous enough environment to create many child deaths every year, yet they are not forbidden by law. Is every backyard swimming pool owner guilty by association, every citizen?
Life is inherently risky, owing to the omnipresence of death. Morality is rooted in economics and individuals will choose the least-cost method in nearly every case, judging non-material things like standard of living and diversion as possessing an economic value greater than the risk of death in certain cases like motor vehicle travel, gun possession and backyard swimming pools.
So, to bring it home, it is the individual who must make the economic decisions as to whether traveling by car is worth the risk to his/her children, or whether supporting the occupation of Iraq is worth the lives of Iraqi children.
There are six billion individual answers to that one question.
]]>Morality is thus an economic matter. Bertoldt Brecht said, “First comes food, then comes morality.”
Face it, the human race is a species of KILLERS. The top killers on the planet, perhaps the most vicious species ever to walk the Earth, save certain bacteria.
I think the sooner individuals accept and confront their killer nature, the sooner a rational dialogue can commence.
]]>Aren’t dead American children an inevitable consequence of traffic? Does this mean no traffic in America can be justified?
This “poor innocent chuldren” argumentation is weak.
]]>Suppose you’re paying taxes here, but could move to another country and avoid having your ransom fund this war. Would it be fair to say Iraqi children are dying so you can live in America?
I wouldn’t say so, because their deaths are no part of your purposes and do not serve your purposes. And I see no evidence that those deaths are any part of Smathers’ purposes either.
]]>For the individual who quoted the post they put on my piece about the Iraqi child, […]
If you’re referring to the comment in the comments section for your Op-Ed (by Charles Johnson
), that was me. I’m also the one who made the post on this blog. Rad Geek’s a pen name, but not one I adopted for the sake of concealing my identity. I often use my real name when writing outside of the world of blogging.
thank you for taking my argument to an extreme that I did not support.
Well, O.K., but the question is how, given the principles that you explicitly endorsed in your column, you intend to separate yourself from this conclusion. If, in order to get a higher quality of life, you are willing to endorse State authority and obey that authority, even when you regard a particular exercise of that authority to be unjust, and even when the murder of Iraqi children (to take one example) is the direct consequence of that exercise of State authority, then it would seem to follow that you consider dead Iraqi children to be an acceptable loss for your higher quality of life.
Maybe you think there are cases where the cost is too extreme, and where the injustice is so terrible that no benefit to you could justify condoning State authority on that point. That’s what you seemed to be arguing in your e-mail when I asked you a similar question about whether, had you lived in the North in 1854, you would obey or defy the Fugitive Slave Act. If you do believe that conscience trumps or erases State authority in cases like those, then that speaks well of you, and I agree with you. But then I don’t understand how that position is compatible with what you said earlier about the Iraq war. Aren’t dead Iraqi children an inevitable consequence of the war on Iraq? Isn’t that part of the reason that you consider the war unjust? And if so, then why do you condone the authority of the State to prosecute the Iraq war, while repudiating it in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act? Isn’t the unjust killing of children as serious a crime as capturing escaped slaves and forcing them back into slavery?
(Or, if you don’t regard it as a serious enough crime to motivate you to repudiate the authority of the State, on at least the point of the Iraq war, then how is my reductio at all unfair?)
But even those who question the government often live under their umbrella. Why? Because they do not give a wholesale revocation of trust in the system. If they truly did, they’d leave.
And where would we go, exactly?
The fact that I don’t move to another country has little to do having any trust in the United States government. It has a lot to do with not having any trust in any other government, either.
]]>Paying taxes under coercion doesn’t make anybody responsible for deaths of Iraqi children.
However, endorsing the existence of the State, even taking into account State projects which you yourself believe to be unjust, on the grounds that it makes your life simpler, does indicate something about your hierarchy of values.
If Smathers had written, I think the Iraq war is unjust, but I obey the unjust laws that perpetuate it because I don’t want the government to shoot me,
rather than appealing to some alleged positive benefit that the authority of the State offers for his own quality of life, I wouldn’t have had any problem with it.
“Why do people obey unjust laws?”
To stay out of jail.
What do you think would happen to tax revenues if the threat of punishment for non-payment was dropped? Do you think most people would voluntarily contribute to support the state? Would you voluntarily contribute, knowing that your money was funding the war?
]]>