But there’s no objectively rigorous way to decide who gets how much of the credit!
Why are you talking about “credit” at all? This is a confused concept. See sec 3.3.1 of Parfit’s Ethics:
According to the Share-of-the-Total view, when a group collectively brings about some outcome, each member counts as producing their “share” of the total. For example, if 5 people work together to save 100 lives, each participant is credited with saving 20 lives. But if our moral decision-making were guided by this kind of accounting procedure, it could lead to foolish decisions with obviously detrimental results, such as:
(a) unnecessarily joining a group of benefactors (who together save 100 lives) who could do just as well without you, when you could instead have saved 10 additional lives independently, or
(b) single-handedly saving 50 lives instead of joining a group that needs you in order to save 100.
As these cases demonstrate, it does not really matter what “share of the total” gets attributed to you on the basis of the group that you join (as though group size were inherently morally significant). What matters is just performing the act, of those available to you, that results in the most lives being saved (or, more generally, the most good being done), in total. In case (a), you can bring it about that 110 lives are saved, rather than just 100, if you act independently. In case (b), you can bring it about that 100 lives are saved, rather than just 50, if you contribute to the group. These are the numbers that matter. No moral insight is gained by dividing any of these numbers by the contributing group size to yield some kind of agential “share”. To think otherwise, Parfit argues, is simply a mistake.
Yes, I agree it’s a confused concept. But I think that same confused concept gets smuggled into conversations about “impact” quite often.
It’s also relevant for coordination: any time you can be the 100th person that joins a group of 100 that suddenly is able to save lots of lives, there first must have been 99 people who coordinated on the bet they’d be able to get you or someone like you. But how did they make that bet?
Yep. If you want to retrospectively compensate people for doing some good action, though, you might want to try to reward people in proportion to their “contribution”.
Fwiw, there’s been some discussion on how to attribute impact to individual agents; e.g. here. I’m not read up on these issues, though, and couldn’t say how participants in that debate would respond to your line of criticism.
If you compensate according to share-of-the-total, then yes.
If you pay everyone according to the their impact vs the case where they did nothing, then no, but you have a different problem. Suppose, for example, you want to reward a firing squad who have killed Hitler. Without any one of the shooters, the others would still have shot Hitler. So none of them can claim any counterfactual impact. But surely they should (collectively, if nothing else), be able to claim a reward.
So there is at least a practical question, of what procedure to use.
Why are you talking about “credit” at all? This is a confused concept. See sec 3.3.1 of Parfit’s Ethics:
According to the Share-of-the-Total view, when a group collectively brings
about some outcome, each member counts as producing their “share” of the
total. For example, if 5 people work together to save 100 lives, each participant
is credited with saving 20 lives. But if our moral decision-making were guided
by this kind of accounting procedure, it could lead to foolish decisions with
obviously detrimental results, such as:
(a) unnecessarily joining a group of benefactors (who together save 100 lives)
who could do just as well without you, when you could instead have saved
10 additional lives independently, or
(b) single-handedly saving 50 lives instead of joining a group that needs you in
order to save 100.
As these cases demonstrate, it does not really matter what “share of the total”
gets attributed to you on the basis of the group that you join (as though group
size were inherently morally significant). What matters is just performing the
act, of those available to you, that results in the most lives being saved (or, more
generally, the most good being done), in total. In case (a), you can bring it about
that 110 lives are saved, rather than just 100, if you act independently. In case
(b), you can bring it about that 100 lives are saved, rather than just 50, if you
contribute to the group. These are the numbers that matter. No moral insight is
gained by dividing any of these numbers by the contributing group size to yield
some kind of agential “share”. To think otherwise, Parfit argues, is simply
a mistake.
Yes, I agree it’s a confused concept. But I think that same confused concept gets smuggled into conversations about “impact” quite often.
It’s also relevant for coordination: any time you can be the 100th person that joins a group of 100 that suddenly is able to save lots of lives, there first must have been 99 people who coordinated on the bet they’d be able to get you or someone like you. But how did they make that bet?
Yep. If you want to retrospectively compensate people for doing some good action, though, you might want to try to reward people in proportion to their “contribution”.
Wouldn’t that incentivize bad choices like (a) and (b)?
Fwiw, there’s been some discussion on how to attribute impact to individual agents; e.g. here. I’m not read up on these issues, though, and couldn’t say how participants in that debate would respond to your line of criticism.
Interesting, thanks. Note that the top-rated comment there is Toby Ord making just this Parfitian line of criticism.
If you compensate according to share-of-the-total, then yes.
If you pay everyone according to the their impact vs the case where they did nothing, then no, but you have a different problem. Suppose, for example, you want to reward a firing squad who have killed Hitler. Without any one of the shooters, the others would still have shot Hitler. So none of them can claim any counterfactual impact. But surely they should (collectively, if nothing else), be able to claim a reward.
So there is at least a practical question, of what procedure to use.