Ethical Altruism is notoriously self-disregarding; striving to fulfill
others' (strangers') interests even if it's done at the expense of oneself.
An act is morally admissible if its consequences carry more benefits
(over harms) to everyone except
the agent.
Ethical Egoism is notoriously self-obsessive; striving to fulfill
one's own interests even when doing so comes at the expense of everyone else. An
act is morally admissible if its consequences carry more benefits (over harms) only to
the agent.
Utilitarianism is self-inclusive and
other-regarding. Everyone's interests have equal weightiness in proportion to
their respective situation. Agents impacting a certain state of affairs don't rule themselves out
and freely accommodate their own interests into the final harms/benefits distribution.
But you know all this. Or at least you should.
Ethicists seeking to settle on the most
sensible of the three overwhelmingly end up with some sort of utilitarian calculus. Nothing surprising about that, considering the competition. Moral masochism vs. moral sadism vs. moral impartialism. Not exactly the hardest choice in the world. Impartiality all the way.
Neophytes
hear this and conjure a utility-minded agent who must approach each and every case
as A New Beginning with antecedent factors treated as though they're
divorced from normative considerations. Lately I've been running into this misconception, and have maybe even contributed to it through last year's
enthused endorsements of moral particularism... so here I'll explain why antecedent-undermining
decisional-procedures have the potential to be counterproductive to concrete utilitarian
ends. This holds no matter the specific flavor and sub-flavor of utilitarianism being adhered to. If a decision-procedure is heavily contemporaneous and minimally anterior, it goes on to be lopsided in its assessment of the breadth of each individual life. In doing so, it feasibly overlooks individualistic wholeness; a cardinal component of impartial-concern. Realizing this, the prudential utilitarian can frequently proceed with altruistic or egoistic precepts and still minimize disutility (or maximize utility, if you're into that sort of thing) without falling into the moral quicksand of self-disregard or self-absorption. Call this lenience situational altruism and situational egoism, contra refractory altruism and refractory egoism.
Hang on, how can altruism or egoism, as characterized above, ever
be conducive to negative (or positive) utilitarian tenets? Moreover, wouldn't admitting as much spell
doom for the intellectual blueprints behind the Effective Altruism movement? Quite the contrary, once you envision the agent as partaking in a situational but panoramic game of tug-of-war.
Suppose you're stuck in an elevator at your
workplace. There are four people stuck in the same elevator with you. All four
of them are from a different department. The emergency callout button isn't
working. Cursed installers. The weekend just started, and no one's in the
building as the firm encourages employees to leave early on Fridays. Something about Corporate Culture pop-research indicating that it boosts morale. At any rate, each of you forgot to recharge your respective gadgetry throughout
the day, so everyone's phone is battery-depleted and useless at this point. You
yelled. You screamed. You pounded on the elevator's door, its floor and its ceiling. You
tried ripping apart the ceiling to make your way to the roof. All of it for naught. Seems like you're all spending the next 48 to 72 in this dusky elevator. Worryingly huddled up
together. You do your best to start thinking less melodramatically; 72 hours does sound like a stretch. 48 to 60 seems about right. To be sure, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of this resulting
in a tragedy, just severe annoyance, stress and an irredeemable waste of a perfectly
good weekend.
It's been an hour. The five of you are already
hungry. Noon's lunch break seems like a lifetime ago for all of you. You
discuss this amongst yourselves. As luck would have it, you're carrying five slices of
pizza, having bought a full pizza for takeout during lunch. You only had
three slices then, planning to have the rest over the weekend. Now it appears
you'll be having the rest of it tonight, considering your lack of non-pizza options.
Lucky you. But how many slices should
you have? The only person with any
food in the elevator is yourself. Your co-captives travel light, which begs the
question; who had the biggest lunch? Was it you with the three slices? Was
it George from Corporate? How about Jim from Corporate? Or maybe it was April
from Corporate? Now that you think of it, it was probably Bill from Corporate.
He's the fattest, so he must've had the biggest meal.
Next thing you know, questions of this manner find their way
into the conversation. Turns out all four of them had meals indistinguishable in
size and calories from your three slices. Every indicator points to the five of
you being equally hungry at present. Each of you pulled a long day at the
office and it's well past 1900 hrs now. George, Jim, April and Bill have money on
them and are happy + eager to compensate you for the four equally-sized slices.
Is this everything readers need to know in order to
conclude that it would be unethical of you to refuse to sell four (of your
five) slices to the individuals stuck in this elevator with you? In a nutshell,
no. There's plenty more for readers to ask.
What you do
know is that George, Jim, April and Bill work in corporate. All of them make
good bank. They enjoy what they do, and the sky's the limit. You, on the other
hand, have been stuck in the mailroom for over a decade now. You work hard.
You're punctual. You have an upbeat attitude. Great customer service skills. And
yet, no promotion in sight. You were there when George, Jim, April and Bill
started in the mailroom, and you were there when they left for bigger and
better things in the same company. Was it simple meritocracy? Maybe, for April
and Jim at least. George and Bill, meanwhile, got ahead thanks to Nepotism 101.
Unlike them, you have no friends in any of the right
places, and resultantly never develop a habit for sliding your image
into the good graces of the right people, even though you see the CEO on a
daily basis. He always greets you with niceness, but you know that's no reason to
slimily contrive extended conversations and shoehorn self-bolstering add-ons into said
talks. Chatter only, no manoeuvring. No occupational boosts, but you wake
up every day and like who you see in the mirror. Is that reward enough though, as folk parables would have it? Not
exactly. You're tired of the mailroom. You're tired of the chump change. Your
purchase power is at an all time low. You need a raise. You deserve a raise. George, Jim, April and
Bill keep getting raises. Like clockwork. New shiny cars and clothes every
year, shortly after each new promotion. It's obvious.
It's past time for some unabashed bluntness; you're bitter. You have a right to be,
and not just a "in the privacy of my
own mind, I'm calling foul" type of a right, but a full-blown Cognitive Right. The sort of right you
applaud vanguards and iconoclasts with. You are bitter as fuck, and it's justified. Set aside
amateur psychology's puerile attempts to delineate benign vs. non-benign envy.
You're not envious in the first
place, you're silently outraged and have been skirting around admitting it to
yourself. It's been a decade long slow-burn, culminating in tonight's
predicament. Fears of falling into the Ressentiment
defense-mechanism bias is probably why you shied away from recognizing it for so long. Now it
dawns on you; just as people understand that "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you" it's also not Ressentiment if you've really been screwed over with fuck-all in the way of justification.
No longer will you allow western
ethos to senselessly bitter-shame you out of your justly held appall. Starting
now, you're letting yourself feel that bitterness. Embrace that contempt.
You seem to have done everything right, but have nothing to show for it except occupational ossification. Impartial
observers might even say you've worked harder and smarter than all four of your
co-captives, and would've made for a better corporate candidate.
Worse yet, George, Jim, April and Bill all seem to
have fulfilling personal lives, while your social circle has gradually shrunk into next-to-nothingness. It's virtually non-existent these days. You are, by all accounts, a
more interesting person than the four of them. You're knee-deep into the most
captivating subcultures. You discuss big ideas and propose feasible solutions
to some of the most grievous problems facing the world. They enthusiastically discuss their workout routines, good vs. bad
restaurants, clubs, bars, the local scene in general, Top 40 Radio, Reality TV,
various soaps and sitcoms with post-pavolvian laugh-tracks. They genuinely enjoy
this, and it reinforces their extroverted Social Butterfly inanities.
And so, on reflection of all these
non-stuck-in-elevator inequities where your cohorts tower over you, shall I repose the
original question? Should you sell them the four slices? If you do, you're left
with the one slice; one measly slice which you'll eat at some point tonight
because you're all worked up and sleep is just not in the cards for you. There's
no way you're not eating at least one of your five slices tonight. It's quite
the hunger now. The type of hunger that makes time pass slowly, the last thing you need. Same goes for your fellow captives though, and they tell
you as much. They want the four slices and are all but waving $20 bills at you.
You keep telling them you'll have to think about it. You truly don't want to be left
sliceless after tonight and spend all of Saturday and Sunday hungry... very
hungry... starving perhaps. Why should you? More importantly, why should they be
entitled to your good fortune? For once, the Cosmic Misfortune ratios steered less
toward you and more toward them. For once, you have an opportunity to
capitalize on blind forces.
Oh, but what of utilitarian decisional-procedures?
It's not a trick question. What of
them? Understand that there is no anti-utilitarian gotcha to this setup. The pro-utility, anti-disutility answer is here to be found,
and it circles back to a recounting of cosmic slights to see how they stack
up during the course of everyone's lifetime. Once you privilege the farsighted
backlog over the nearsighted backlog, you as the hopeful maximizer
of axiological goodness and minimizer axiological badness are within reason
to act in accordance to
all that history. Bring yourself up as much as
possible, because you'll still wind
up further the red than the four of them stand to.
Annoyingly, some view this as a conflation on
my part as pertains to utilitarian vs. egalitarian metrics, so let me be
clear; I'm unsympathetic to any form of egalitarian (comparative) analysis of
value/disvalue. The face value inference pointing in egalitarian directions only registers if you're ignorant of, or if you
underestimate the effect of, Diminishing
Marginal Utility. Adjusted to a farsighted grasp of general life
satisfaction vs. dissatisfaction, in lieu of Specific Product Consumption, DMU has it that not only would you do well to
retain the five slices, doing so would benefit the overall state of affairs you're connected to on account of you playing axiological catch-up. No one will starve to death because you capitalized on this one opportunity. No one is
going to be stuck in that elevator for weeks or months. Everyone will be out by
Monday, and of the five of you, you are the last one who needs additional
hardship in the grand scheme of things. You're more deserving of a break, and
hunger does not a break make. So diminished marginal utility, under this configuration and subcontext, offers
inegalitarian reasons that are egalitarian-seeming to the uninitiated, because it
surfacely seems like you're engaging in comparative metrics and reaching
conclusions atop that overview. But it's more to do with a game of corporate
musical chairs. They got all the corporate marbles and levelled you down in the
process, generating net harm. So, if nothing else, hang on to your Pizza
In Elevator bronze-prize. It's nontrivially yours, even if it drags them
down.
After all, were you ever entitled to Bill's or
April's or Jim's or George's seemingly neverending bouts of fortuitousness? Did
they ever think to ask? Did it even occur to them to try putting in a good word
for you? Y'know, even out the fortune-to-misfortune ratios a bit? Nope, they
just went about their business; their narrow-minded, uninteresting, mind-numbing verbal-cockroach type business... and now they expect your help; your slices; your tinge of unearned fortune. You're roughly the same age as them and your utility score is
well below theirs. It's nonnegotiable. They can afford to be levelled down a tincture. You can't. So
soak up this relatively lucky break.
Utility, in cases like these, relies on the agent's outright
refusal to be a moral chump. It entails a willingness to fight fire with fire
via an egoist-seeming
decision-procedure. In an environment where your contemporaries play by "You gotta look out for number one!"
cultural maxims, your failure to adapt to their rules will only inflate
global disutility. Panoramic disutility.
"...Well, there's five slices, and five of us,
so... it's only fair, right?" says Bill, ever so meekly.
You say nothing in return and indulge some
thought-mode insults "Go fuck yourself Bill, you parasitic nepotistic
inconsiderate shitstain of a human being!".
Felt good. Maybe you'll say it out loud if
he keeps pestering you.
It's now Sunday afternoon and you've just had your
fifth and final slice. Finger licking good! You'll be out in less than 16
hours, if the upcoming Monday is anything like a normal Monday, which by all
accounts will be the case. You
now look over at them... they're disappointed in you, but too starved to
verbally condemn you for hording the slices. Monday morning comes soon enough, and you're all freed on cue. They try giving you the silent treatment for a few days, but it all blows over before you know it.
A year goes by. You receive a promotion, having
played by a somewhat more self-interested set of rules ever since the elevator-entrapment tipping point. All of a sudden, you
have money to spare. Additional promotions follow, as you've only become more
cutthroat in your dealings with competitor colleagues; effectively elbowing out
some of them from being promoted.
Another year passes, and you're swimming in spare
cash by this stage. You make it a point not to donate any of it to the locals, for they
are still recipients of western fortuitousness. No, you will instead spend the remainder of
your working life donating a handsome percentage of your annual income to the global poor
via EA, for they are still victims of Cosmic Unfortunateness. You select
reliably cure-minded charities over bandaids-for-more-bandaids ones.
You are now the situational altruist, the
situational egoist, and the ultimate methodological utilitarian all rolled into one. The surest way to pull it off, in a society where your competitors are socialized
to craftily look out for number one, is to indulge in the same against them. Neglect them and their interests. Your non-competitors
will thank you for it.
***
Disclaimer: Of course, no one is limited to
choosing between the above three consequentialist calculi. There are
non-altruist, non-egoist, and non-utilitarian alternatives available on the telic menu. One-dimensional
consequentialists may find this trivial, and that's precisely why everyone should
shun one-dimensional consequentialism in favour of multi-dimensional consequentialism
so that no agent ends up glued to a utilitarian calculus in outlier-type configurations where a
distinctly prioritarian calculus suffices in bringing about a more
humane result.
More on Prioritarianism in future posts.
