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A fun framework I often go to for thinking about policy issues is what I guess I'll call "identifying a Buridan point". The gist is:
Given a binary decision (options A or B) I must make based on a continuous input where:
there must exist some point C (Y>C>X), where I am perfectly equivocal between options A and B. This point C is the "Buridan point" and gives me a quantification of my stance on a particular issue.
Here is a simple example: Suppose Joe must decide if he supports euthanizing all dogs based on the rate of children killed by dogs:
Therefore, there must exist some "acceptable" rate of children killed by dogs X at which Joe finds the benefits of dog ownership to exactly offset the lives of killed children.
In an ideal world, people would keep control of their dogs but there will be mistakes and there will be bad actors. The only way to absolutely guarantee that no child is killed by a dog is by eliminating all dogs. The decision to not euthanize all dogs is accepting that the children killed by dogs every year are an acceptable sacrifice for the option of dog ownership.
What is X(dogs) for you?
Control+F replace all, dog -> gun
Control+F replace all, euthaniz -> confiscat
What is X(guns) for you?
Obviously actual policy decisions have a continuous or at least graded set of options, rather than an extreme binary, but I find such questions revealing nevertheless. Despite the absurdity, it makes me ask myself: "How much better/worse do things have to get for me to reverse my position?"
Anyways, any thoughts on whether this has any value for quantifying preferences?
I use this same framework for a lot of my policy reasoning. It works for:
@faceh mentions this is useless because of second-order effects. I disagree strongly. The algebra problem gets slightly more complex, that's all. The rate of children killed by guns needs to be balanced against the value I ascribe (.99) to potentially having better weapons to kill criminals (probability X) or the National Guard (probability Y).
You can't make the equation too complex to where the changing variables are difficult to find in your mind. But using the gun control scenario as an example: Probability X and Y increased as race riots ran rampant across the country and the left began to flex their lawfare power. This, in turn, increased the acceptable amount of dead children I'm willing to accept to keep my semi-autos. This is what people mean by the gun control debate being over.
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Not very useful in practice.
What’s your Buridan number for dogs-vs.-children? How’d you come to that assessment?
Me with dogs is a bad example because I deeply hate dog culture, so I wouldn't mind deleting dogs even at zero children (can preserve a couple at zoos, but eliminate the pet culture). There are already leash laws, pick-up-your-dog's-shit laws, noise ordinances, no-dog-zones. At least in my city, dog owners consistently ignore all of these and no one bothers to enforce them. And I'm thoroughly fed up with dodging piles of shit every time I go for a walk, smelling dog piss in every hallway and elevator of my building, seeing dogs licking items at the grocery store, hearing hours long bark sessions, etc. All these negative externalities, coupled with my belief that dogs are essentially a superstimulus for friendship/childrearing and I already find them a net negative to society even before accounting for the kids they maul every year.
Agreed it is a bad example. You’re in the edge case for dog culture: a well-paved city, the concrete jungle, where woofers wouldn’t tread were they human-less.
In the country, working dogs are worth their weight in silver. In the suburbs, they’re indeed a superstimulus for friendship/childrearing, but also induce friendliness betwixt dog people, and function as alarm systems.
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Exactly. The Burundian (thanks, autocorrect!) number is downstream of your reasoning, so it’s hard to recommend as a quantifying tool.
But is it not useful as a measure of how much I value the right to dog ownership (i.e., not at all)? I imagine a dog-lover would have a much higher number and the difference could be reflected somewhat quantitatively as such.
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I don't fall for these kinds of traps usually because I also understand there are potentially second order effects to consider, and thus its not a pure linear tradeoff, even if we design the policy on that basis.
Maybe the population of dogs, despite killing kids, was also curbing some additional threat where, if the dogs were removed, would mostly replace the dogs as the primary threat to child livelihood.
In fact we have a very topical analogy for this, in the real world! WOLF REINTRODUCTION!
Ranchers killed off wolves because they were a threat to cattle herds, but this also allows the local deer, elk, etc. population to explode, which means overforaging of vegetation and other potential environmental harms, which is ALSO bad for the cattle on top of all else!
So they've brought back wolves in certain areas and the argument is that now the herbivore population is back into a 'natural' balance checked by the predators which is better for the local flora, which is better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Similarly, imagine we get rid of guns and criminal psychopaths with knives are suddenly springing up everywhere, stabbing children, unchecked by their natural predators.
So the Buridan point for being in favor of mass dog euthanasia is going to be relatively high, for me, and I would certainly explore other policy options before committing to it.
Higher order effects can and should be taken into account when selecting a Buridan point. For example, I would imagine the Buridan point for car ownership vs motor vehicle deaths would be rather high given the immense benefits/conveniences of car ownerships to people and society at large. I partially chose the dog example because:
most people like dogs so they'd probably be willing to tolerate several deaths per year (we already do)
dogs provide no net benefit to anyone but the pleasure of the owners (they are completely removed from the food chain and they otherwise are a net detriment given their massive carbon footprint, the daily urine/stool output providing loci for disease spread, and other externalities like barking noise, smell, etc.)
letme nitpick (bust mosty agree) 2. non-owners might also get pleasure (e.g. by looking at photos of puppies, by playing with a friend's dog ).
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Seeing eye dogs and handicapped assistance dogs, bomb and/or drug sniffing dogs, rescue dogs, I mean let's at least be clear about what is being given up.
To say nothing of cattle dogs and sled dogs and other working dogs.
I'm not just against Dog Euthanasia because I like dogs, we have millennia of shared history with the species and we've bred them to fill dozens of niches that have aided human society for centuries. Giving up that benefit with no takesies backsies is not something to do flippantly.
I guess it's about 0.1% of them. I live where there is snow and yet I barely remember anyone using Huskies or Malamuts for their original use, it's so rare. These uses are nearly obsolete. WTF who needs a 80 kg cattle dog in a 10M city but here they are.
Better hope that nothing happens that renders them more useful again, is all I'll say.
(which is similar to what I say about many types of guns)
Okay, now I want a zombie movie where uninfected dogs help human zombies find living humans, and while the zombie eats the brains, the dog eats the rest.
You're greenlit for a 10 episode Netflix series.
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I'm a 2A guy but stabbings are a stupid example, you can stab a few folks that might die or shoot like 200 that will die in the same amount of time. America would be much "safer" if we yanked every gun. (It would mostly stop suicides and gang bangers, but statistically "safer") A better example is that we still have 1A while most of the world does not.
I'm really not convinced we'd be noticeably safer all told.
I still remember The Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack which killed 6 and injured 62. Trucks are relatively cheap, at least to rent, and can rack up a body count. If shootings get supplanted by trucks running down parades as the preferred modus operandi, I don't know that the death toll from the mass killings would be substantially less.
And I will consistently remind people that Guns can be 3D printed, so a sufficiently motivated psycho or criminal is going to be able to procure a weapon if they really want to. This will only get easier going forward.
And try estimating of the number of casualties that would be sustained in the process of confiscating firearms! If even 1% of firearms owners choose to resist, and 10% of those incidents result in at least one officer being injured or killed, we're talking somewhere on the order of 80,000 - 100,000 casualties over however many years. Compared to 21k homicides per year.
Is that reallllly worth the tradeoff, if we don't believe we can confiscate every firearm without incident?
Anyhow, I would redirect you to my recent policy proposal about banning and confiscating guns for Democrats only,, as my proposed compromise on this topic.
If I could Thanos snap every privately owned gun away in the US (and future proof so it any other gun or firearm disintegrates as soon as it is made or brought within the border) I probably would, I think it would indeed make the country safer. However given that I can't do that, and that regardless of the laws, there are so many guns, and so many ways to import guns or make them, I think banning them would be overall counter-productive for the average citizen as it stands. Which I guess makes me a theoretical gun grabber and a practical 2A supporter, give or take.
“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.
Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).
Agreed it would take at least a decade of permanent citizen firearm disarmament for American politicians to turn full tyrant.
But I bet in that time, the combined rage and innovation of the new “guncels” will come up with a ranged weapon which is deadlier or safer, or both. I’m guessing phasers with stun and kill.
I’m betting on Elon’s STEM minions finding the end-run around the gun ban.
Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.
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Air rifles are very under-developed. US federal law has never considered them to be firearms.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science. The last time anyone seriously tried to make a military firearm of this nature was the late 1700s, though there are a few current manufacturers that make manually-repeating hunting rifles based on this concept.
Combining that with electronic controls (and a lack of NFA- so for this application computer-based fire control, full-auto, and integrated suppressors will obviously be standard) provides even more interesting options. Want to fire a non-lethal burst at a target before the next trigger pull fires a burst that's going fast enough to penetrate? That's impossible with a traditional firearm simply due to its nature but eminently practical with an air rifle (liability issues aside).
The only problem here is how you're going to turn that into a handgun, but cartridge-and-captive-piston storage technology might be sufficiently promising in that regard to obviate that concern as well.
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Again I'd be curious as to what happens when it becomes known that nobody anywhere is in possession of a gun, whether the incentive shifts would make criminals more bold, or less bold.
If we're talking Thanos-snapping, I'd pretty much prefer to Thanos snap any person with a propensity for uncontrolled violence away, I think it'd create more immediate gains, even if there were second-order impacts.
Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens. Indeed we could fix everyone to be maximally productive and happy.
One possible argument is: We have too many people in this country as it is. We’re overpopulated. Eliminating that chunk of the population frees up housing and space. It staves off the YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY wars by making existing housing cheaper and more available without needing to build another wave of commie-block apartment complexes. It frees up medical resources, school spending, and all of the other financial outlays that would apply to those people even if you magically turned them into productive citizens.
Now, one counter-argument is to say that if we could turn all these people into productive citizens, those people could then go gentrify and revitalize all the myriad small towns in America - places like Springfield, OH - with a population of productive Americans instead of welfare-dependent Haitians. The danger, of course, is that if you turn all the current thugs and junkies in America into middle-class domesticated Americans, they’re going to do the same thing that most middle-class domesticated Americans are currently doing: go to college and move to a major population center to seek white-collar work. This is just going to introduce another population influx into those cities, further constricting the housing and job supply. By eliminating these people entirely, you ease population pressure instead of just turning one type of problem into another type of problem.
Right, but then we can also make them happy to stay in small towns right? We're already turning them into productive citizens, might as well make them happy where they are productive citizens. The reason why Thanos's plan in killing half the universe is stupid is because he has power over Minds, Reality, Souls , Space and Time. He can create resources, change people to not need so many resources, change people to work together better, create housing and planets, and suns.
If we can turn people into productive citizens then housing is the least of our worries. We'll turn a chunk of them into builders and contractors and miners and some into interior designers and so on. Snap loads of bricks and mortar into existence. Make New York into a TARDIS where Manhattan can have infinite housing in a finite area or whatever. Or make people happy to live 10 a room. Sky is the limit.
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I mean, El Salvador basically did a small version of that by just rounding up and locking up the most violent people they could find (as judged by gang affiliation) and it worked fabulously. Murder rates plummeting down immediately.
Didn't need to go after every citizen to see if they had guns, just find the dangerous ones. They arrested and imprisoned about 80,000 people, which is not nothing, but much more modest than forcing millions to hand over weapons.
I have many reasons to believe a similar approach would do the same in the U.S.
Sure, but that won't catch people who snap and go on a spree, or accidental deaths, or suicides etc. But it's not like there is any chance of either happening in the US.
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I mean you can look up the stats yourself. Murder and suicide rates in any country banning guns with the same or close GDP of the USA are a tiny fraction of what ours are. Do I think the tradeoff is worth it? Yes. But it is still there and obvious. Are you really linking me to a comment recommending only your opponents be disarmed? Come on man.
Do it by state.
There's virtually no correlation within the U.S. between gun ownership rates and crime, or murder rates, on the state level.
Likewise, Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rates in Europe, and is around the lowest for crime and murder too!
Literally, there is no good evidence that guns are the driving factor in crime and death. Likewise, very little evidence that increased gun control drives decreases in crime.
I can't even understate how weak the actual case for gun control as a policy is, compared to various other policies that could be implemented with less expense, less interference with peaceful citizens, and less risk of unrest and resistance in response!
My request is to disarm those people who assert that disarmament is good! Its about the fairest possible prescription.
If Democrats don't believe in Second Amendment rights, they shouldn't raise much fuss over waiving their said rights.
Yeah we have free travel of goods and people in the USA, banning a guns in chicago etc...was never ever going to work.
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You're playing games with statistics here. Based on your hypothesis here, we'd expect Switzerland (which has incredibly liberal gun laws) to be a hotbed of murder and suicide - but it isn't. Venezuela, on the other hand, has extremely tight gun laws, despite formerly being the homicide capital of South America. It isn't the guns that make people kill each other and you're being dishonest when you imply it.
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The unspoken assumption here is that there’s only one way to solve the problem. The only solution to the dead baby is shooting the dog. But that isn’t true most of the time, in fact it only seems to make sense if you’re talking about a single product, and only if the product cannot somehow be made safer. Dogs are not like that. We can have leash laws, muzzles, requirements for training, size and breed regulations as alternative, to dog genocide. In the case of guns, you can require training, gun safes, restrictions on caliber and speed of firing, or limit the number of bullets available. In both situations there are probably solutions that are similar that I’m not thinking of.
That was only meant to be a simple, illustrative example. I suppose a more relevant real world example would be, say, how many children killed by pitbulls specifically would it take for you to support banning ownership of that breed (see UK). The same framework would still apply.
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You’re missing an assumption: to get your conclusion, your preference for B must be continuous in X. To illustrate, I am fine with dogs living so long as no kids are harmed, but the second one hair on a kid’s head is harmed, genocide all the dogs. There’s no amount of dead kids for which I’m ambivalent about genocide.
For further reference, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_value_theorem
This is a good point, I should probably adjust my wording to account for this oversight of mine. However, my main goal was to illustrate there must be a transition point between options A and B. In the discontinuous case, as long as monotonicity still holds, that would just be the value at the point of discontinuity (in your example, effectively 0). It's been more than a decade since I did any proper math, so I can't seem to access the right words to make it rigorous. I suppose I could define the two sets of inputs that yield A vs B, with one set being a closed interval [0,z] and the other being an open interval (z,1] or something of that flavor.
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The fundemental problem with utilitarianism is that it depends on a belief that "utilty" is fungible. That x amount of happy puppies can directly offset y number of dead babies or that the suffering of person a can be converted into the enjoyment of another without loss. I do not believe that ethier of these are the case at all.
I think this is a good example of how attacking 'utilitarianism' is used as a shield to avoid difficult moral choices. Society simply has made and will always make difficult choices involving people living and dying. People die, or are severely disabled by, vaccine side effects somewhat regularly. These people are, of course, different people than the people who would've died of the disease itself. But since they're many fewer of the former, we recommend vaccinations. Around forty thousand people will die in traffic accidents next year. Many of them won't be at fault. We could massively lower that number by simply significantly reducing speed limits, yet we choose not to, because we like getting to places quickly. Yet we could also raise the speed limit even more, and get to places even faster, in exchange for more deaths! Utilitarianism or not, people are making these decisions and will make these decisions, based on the tradeoffs between lives and lives, or lives and other useful things.
And the point of OP's thought experiment is to make you think about that. If the choice was 'no cars' or '1 random child dies per year', obviously we're picking the latter, because it's much better than what we have now. If the choice is 'no cars' or '5% of the population dies per year', we'd very quickly ditch cars. I believe you'd make those decisions too, if you had to! So you do recognize that tradeoffs exist, and that tough decisions must be made. And the question then is, how? why? what for?
Okay, here is one possible answer: gut feeling, instinct and heuristics. I may choose to hold dog owner criminaly liable if he has dangerous dog - so the kid is mauled and dog owner's ass is hauled into prison. We may implement one of the ranges of laws ranging from "one free bite" law or mandatory muzzles/leashes etc. In fact more often than not I find it more correct than endless harping over hypothetical trolley problems. One issues with this "rational" thinking is that it leads you astray. It strips the situation of context, forces you to abstract looking at the problem from some inhumane birds eye view and reconstruct stuff from some first principles, which often smuggles in more assumptions. More often than not, it is not useful or sometimes outright misleading.
I will actually use one example, that of famous Rawl's original position. At the first glance it seems reasonable, you are just using thought experiment to sharpen your moral instinct "rationally". However what it really does is smuggle in some strange or outright spiritual assumptions. The Original Position assumes that people are distinct from their bodies. They are all indistinguishable immaterial souls possessing all the rational faculties and all the knowledge and they are about to decide into what society to reincarnate. This is deeply spiritual and political assumption. The Original Position basically assumes some spiritual space communism and utopian equity between souls about to be trapped in sometimes stupid or weak human bodies maybe even of “wrong” sex and asks, if you would not want to recreate Social Justice communism here on Earth, that is what you would want to do in this scenario - right?
But let me ask you dear reader, to consider another thought experiment I will call Georgioz's Positon. It is identical to Original Position except that there also exists Christian God floating above all the commie souls from Rawls's thought experiment. Teachings of Jesus Christ are correct and if you do not adhere to it, you will go to hell after you die. Under such assumptions, you would surely want to be incarnated into body of a good Christian, right?
It is the same here with this example: let's assume this thought experiment, where you are presented with a choice between two outcomes with some range of various values - please calibrate the exact percentage threshold of your choice. We are assuming utilitarianism here in this thought experiment, which I refuse. Maybe I will refuse to calculate values X, Y, C, B, A and number of children or dogs killed as you steer me to do. Fuck that, maybe all I care about is adherence to eye-for-an-eye Hammurabi style of law: if a child gets mauled by some dog, then the dog owner will be sentenced to a colosseum, where he himself gets mauled by pack of bloodthirsty mastiffs - and portion of ticket sales for the spectacle will be used to pay for damages. Justice was served, next case. And also please dear utilitarian, calculate exact threshold between 5 to 10 mastiffs you think is the best choice when executing the transgressor in this thought experiment. I am sure you will come up with something interesting here.
As I said to the other commenter, I'm not defending utilitarianism!
I agree the dog example isn't a very practical one. This is why I brought up the speed limit and vaccine examples, which are actual decisions of this type our society is currently making. I don't think we should decide speed limits on gut feelings and instincts. Or what the proper rules of war are.
The veil of ignorance is, imo, fine but uninformative. If I think, as a matter of fundamental good, the strongest should do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must, or that kings should rule by divine right and subjects should obey, I can simply believe that behind the veil of ignorance too. The veil of ignorance basically says "if everyone's main ends are benefit and pleasure for themselves, and everyone's human experience matters roughly equally, then we should have equality", and that's as true as 1+1=2, but the "veil" argument hides the importance of the assumptions.
Good, utilitarianism is a monstrous moral system so I give you a point here.
Yes, I think we should do exactly that, bring back common sense and gut feelings. I have zero faith in our philosopher kings running utilitarian calculation for meaning of life, speed limit and war and spitting out number 42. Especially as they scramble to readjust their speed limit calculation after their computer mistakenly said, that legalizing of marijuana was universally good.
Exactly. The veil of ignorance - a very apt name I have to add - is just restating old Marxist trick of declaring every other moral and philosophical system as "ideology", while hiding itself from the same criticism. That is why under the veil of ignorance you divide values between "ideologies" you are incarnated into, such as religion, while Rawls's values are "sacred" and kept outside of the incarnated world as assumptions embodied by commie soul(s) waiting to be incarnated. It is the stupidest and oldest trick in the books.
My point was, that your argument is in similar vein: lets assume that we have to do utilitarian calculation about speed limits, which means measuring exact value between speed and lives lost. What is the value? While there are other approaches. Such as for instance, that we will incarcerate and strip of drivers lince all the psychopathic people who are "obviously" speeding, while the rest of the population will drive normally: they will slow down even to 5miles per hour instead of allowed 15 if they see a school and small kids who are jaywalking to get there in time, and who can simultaneously go 100 miles per hour in broad sunny daylight on empty highway. No need for autistic philosopher-king-utilitarians to abstract from all these "details" and "context" to bring us their perfect formula between miles per hour and deaths. Just normal heuristics of normal people, enforced by good old justice where child killers and reckless or drunk drivers are reported and shamed and punished.
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Is it? Or is utilitarianism "a cope" to avoid dealing with the concept of a necessary evil? ie the idea that a decision can be both terrible and correct. Or that bad things will happen as a result of bad actions and that this is a good thing.
I wasn't defending utilitarianism, my implication was that what you thought was utilitarianism in the initial comment was, in fact, a willingness to acknowledge difficult but necessary moral choices. People who die in car crashes and slowness of travel are, literally, fungible, in the sense that society is actively making decisions that exchange one for the other. A decision must and will be made, and whether via utilitarianism, base instincts, or some other method, the two valuable things will be measured and compared.
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