Academic philosopher, co-editor of utilitarianism.net, blogs at https://rychappell.substack.com/
Richard Y Chappell
Karma: 4,711
Charity Vouchers [public policy idea]
Btw, I do very much appreciate feedback on this idea, so if the folks downvoting this post could take a moment to explain why, that would be most helpful. Thanks!
Yes, that sounds plausible.* If one didn’t like this possible consequence, restrictions on eligible charities (e.g. to require non-locality) could change that.
*Though it’s curious that most interest in politics is at a national rather than local level, by contrast.
Ah, got it, thanks. My follow-up post describes one important reason to think this isn’t “weird”, namely, decentralized spending is truly decided/influenced by everyone, whereas government spending is effectively just decided by the winning party, who may not have any interest in representing the entire public.
I think there is some reason to expect that the public’s values *as expressed by allocating a fixed sum of vouchers* could diverge importantly from the values they express when voting. (How many ppl would’ve funded the war in Iraq over their kids’ schools, had the tradeoff been made so explicit?) And public choice theory gives us reasons to expect government “values” to differ from voters’.
I agree the “competence” objection is the big one. Of course, voters aren’t directly *implementing* projects here, so the question is whether they can identify other agencies/organizations that are more competent (on average) than government. A lot would depend upon what sort of media infrastructure developed alongside the policy. (One can imagine celebrity or church endorsements etc. having a lot of influence on ppl’s choices. Obviously it would be preferable for expert endorsements/advice to get more public attention, if possible...)
Philanthropy Vouchers as Systemic Change
Cf. section 6.3 of Parfit’s Ethics:
[O]ne way of characterizing Parfit’s reductionism would be as a kind of illusionism or anti-realism about personal identity: you could say that we don’t really persist through time at all—we can just talk as though we do, for convenience.
Here’s a crucial question: is it rational to anticipate experiences that will be felt by some “future self” to whom you are strongly R-related? Or does anticipation implicitly presuppose a non-reductionist view of identity? Parfit (1984, 312) does not commit himself either way, suggesting that it “seems defensible both to claim and to deny that Relation R gives us reason for special concern.” Of course, your “future selves” (or R-related continuants) are as closely-related to you as can be, so if we have reason to be partial towards anyone, we presumably have reason to partial towards them. But it would still seem a significant loss if we could no longer think of our future selves as ourselves: if they became mere relatives, however close.
I don’t think such a bleak view is forced on us, however. The distinction between philosophical reduction and elimination is notoriously thorny, and analogous questions arise all over the philosophical map. Consciousness, normativity, and free will are three examples for which it is comparably contentious whether reduction amounts to elimination. …
I find it tempting to give different answers in different cases. Consciousness and normativity strike me as sui generis phenomena, missing from any account that countenances only things constituted by atoms. For free will and personal identity, by contrast, I’m inclined to think that the “non-reductive” views don’t even make sense (the idea of ultimate sourcehood, or originally choosing the very basis on which you will make all choices—including that first one!--is literally incoherent). Reductive accounts of these latter phenomena can fill their theoretical roles satisfactorily, in my view.
Other readers may carve up the cases differently. However you do it, my suggestion would be that reductionists can more easily resist eliminativist pressures if they think there is no coherent possibility there to be eliminated. If ultimate sourcehood makes no sense, it would seem unreasonable to treat it as a requirement for anything else, including moral desert.^[To avoid amounting to a merely verbal dispute, I take it that reductionists and eliminativists must disagree about whether some putative reduction base suffices to fill an important theoretical role associated with the original concept.] So we might comfortably accept a compatibilist account as sufficing to make one responsible in the strongest sense, as there simply is nothing more that could be required. Perhaps a similar thing could be said of personal identity. If we think that “Further Fact” views are not merely theoretically extravagant, but outright impossible, it might be easier to regard relation R as sufficient to justify anticipation. What more could be required, after all?
This reasoning is not decisive. Eliminativists could insist that anticipation is *essentially* irrational, presupposing something that could not possibly be. Or they could insist that the Further Fact view is not incoherent, but merely contingently false. Even so, their side too seems to lack decisive arguments. As is so often the case in philosophy, it is up to us to judge what strikes us as the most plausible position, all things considered.
The non-eliminative, reductionist view is, at least, much less drastically revisionary. (If our future selves are better regarded as entirely new people, there would seem no basis for distinguishing killing from failing to bring into existence. You would have to reconceive of guns as contraceptive agents. Nobody survives the present moment anyway, on this view, so the only effect of lethally shooting someone would be to prevent a new, qualitatively similar person from getting to exist in the next moment. Not so bad!) Though even if Parfit’s reductionism can vindicate ordinary anticipation and self-concern, it certainly calls for some revisions to our normative thought....
I blogged a response to Schwitzgebel’s four objections, here. But I’d welcome any suggestions for better responses!
Great dialogue! As an additional ‘further reading’ suggestion, I just want to plug the ‘Population Ethics’ chapter at utilitarianism.net. It summarizes some less well-known possibilities (such as “value blur” in the context of a critical range view) that might avoid some of the problems of the (blur-free) total view.
Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians
Hi! Sure, their proposed utilitarian virtues could fit neatly into Hare’s “intuitive level” of morality, i.e. for guiding everyday behavior.
I don’t know of much other work that really develops such concrete proposals for utilitarian virtues, though you may wish to check out the “Further Reading” suggestions at the end of the article. Most of the related work that I’m familiar with instead addresses the question of how to think about the relationship between utilitarianism and virtue/character in the abstract. On that topic, see:
Adams, Motive Utilitarianism
Pettit & Brennan, Restrictive Consequentialism
Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value
Driver, Uneasy Virtue
Or, for more of an overview, you could try the second half of my (in progress) Oxford Handbook piece, Consequentialism: Core and Expansion.
For readings on utilitarianism, I’d encourage you to check out the whole website at utilitarianism.net. If you read our entire online textbook, you’ll know more about the topic than basically anyone who doesn’t already have a Ph.D. in the area. For philosophy more broadly, you probably already know about the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—it’s a fantastic resource, though the entries vary a fair deal in how accessible they are to non-experts.
For chatting about the topic, you’re welcome to reach out but I can’t promise that I’d respond. Your best bet is probably to follow some philosophy blogs (and participate in the comments sections), such as PEA Soup, Fake Nous, Hands and Cities, or my own Good Thoughts. You might also try a smart philosophy student, like Matthew Adelstein of Bentham’s Bulldog, who is likely to have more time and so may be more open to discussing topics that you propose, or doing some kind of online reading group together.
Good luck!
New substack on utilitarian ethics: Good Thoughts
That’s odd! Is it possible that you clicked this commenter’s profile (or a blogroll link) by mistake? If anyone else is having this issue, let me know and I’ll try looking into it further.
EAs often have creative ideas around education, and it would be very exciting to see experiments in these areas.
Yes! I would love to see more experimentation in this area, e.g. EA home/micro/un-schooling pods.
Thanks Peter!
Right, I agree that beneficence should be impartial. What I had in mind was that one can combine a moderate degree of impartial beneficence with significant partiality in other areas of one’s life (e.g. parenting). Thanks for flagging that this didn’t come through clearly enough.
re: “central life project”, this is deliberately vague, and probably best understood in scalar terms: the more, the better. My initial aim here is just to get more people on board with adopting it as a project that they take seriously. I don’t think I can give a precise specification of where to draw the line. But also, I don’t really want to be drawing attention to the baseline minimum, because that shouldn’t be the goal.
Having looked into it more, I gather that after subscribing, you’re presented with the list of other substacks that I recommend, and a highlighted option to subscribe to them (selected by default). It’s bad form on substack’s part that the button to decline (“maybe later”) is not so prominent, so you may be led to accidentally over-subscribe to other newsletters. Sorry about that!
(Though it’s easy enough to unsubscribe at any time, at least.)
Yes, I’m well aware that homeschooling is an immense amount of work—especially if doing it as an individual household. That’s a big part of why I’d be so excited to see more experimentation with “pods” or small clusters of (educationally aligned) households. This might involve group homeschooling (which would still be significant work on the part of the parents, but would see non-trivial efficiency gains over each family going solo). Or it might involve “micro-schools”, where they hire teachers to do the bulk of the work, in an informal/alternative setting with tiny class sizes that allow for genuinely individualized learning. (My wife has actually looked a fair bit into the logistics of such an idea. I could probably share some details in a future post if there was interest.) Or there might be other possibilities I haven’t considered, that could secure many of the benefits of “fully homeschooling” with less of the costs.
Anyway, I’m glad that the traditional school system is working out well enough for you and “most parents” that you know. But it’s not for everyone, and it would be really helpful for those of us who are committed to alternative education to have more and better options. (Even if you, personally, are no longer interested in those options.)
Leveling-up Impartiality
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.
Hi Rohin, thanks for your comment. Can you clarify where you thought I was assuming that claim? I didn’t intend to make any claims about what government is *supposed* to do. Rather, I claimed that (1) philanthropic spending can do more good than typical government spending, which gives us reason to want to incentivize philanthropic spending, but that (2) many people worry about the anti-democratic / inegalitarian effects of such incentives, which we can avoid by having the incentives take the form of philanthropic *vouchers* (that empower everyone equally) rather than tax deductions (which mostly empower the wealthy).