On the victim’s side, even a teen who is conscious of being the victim of bullying might feel ashamed to admit it. But it’s actually more complicated than that, because once we move out of the realm of bullying as simple physical assault, the difference between psychological bullying and more innocuous types of ribbing or reciprocal verbal aggression ultimately comes down to how the teens themselves feel about it. So a teen who denies being “bullied” and appears to shrug off various kinds of social animosity as just “drama” is not necessarily in denial about the independent, objective fact that they really are being bullied. Rather, insisting on adopting the attitude that they’re on equal footing with their aggressors (and so not bullied) may be a primary determinant of whether or not this is, in fact, the case. We all know, of course, that there’s often a sharp disconnect between internal feeling and external performance: We pretend to be unruffled by remarks that, in reality, cut deep. But we also know that these are hardly totally separate domains: Telling yourself that you don’t care what those jerks say about you is often part of the process of actually ceasing to care what those jerks say about you—or at least, ceasing to care much. On the victim’s side, then, psychological bullying is hard to quantify, because “bullying” is not always an observer-independent natural fact: Denying that you are being bullied is sometimes a means of making it true that you are not (successfully) bullied—though when that gambit fails, it may prevent some students from seeking necessary help from adults. Call this the Bullying Heisenberg Effect.

On the aggressor side, as boyd observes, part of the problem is that nobody likes to think of themselves as a bully, and so the teens who are dishing it out find other descriptions that minimize the harm they do. More than that, however, because bullying is so often a social phenomenon, it may literally be impossible to evaluate whether “bullying” is happening at the level of the individual agent—even for the bullies themselves!

As regular readers know, I’m fond of invoking a thought experiment from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers.” Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”

As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.

One reason “cyberbullying” may present special problems is that the Internet and social networks dramatically increase the realistic number of people who can pile on a single victim in a short period of time. Each aggressor might rationalize their own part in the distributed bullying as just one or two comments, though the victim perceives an overwhelming assault when these are all combined. For an analogy in the physical world, we can look to street harassment, which is enabled by the high volume of anonymous, brief public interactions characteristic of urban environments. Some men, of course, engage in vulgar and intimidating speech that anyone would consider harassing in itself. But often, the harassment is a distributed phenomenon. Many of us would not particularly mind a single stranger yelling out “Hi, gorgeous” or “You look good today!” once every other month—and I’ve seen men (inexcusably obtuse, to be sure, but not obviously malicious) react with genuine surprise when such remarks are not welcomed as compliments, not realizing they’re the tenth person in as many blocks to volunteer a similar comment to the same woman.

It may be hard to stamp out bullying, then, not just because victims are often unwilling apply the label to their own experience, but because individual aggressors can plausibly—even if somewhat disingenuously—deny that their individual actions qualify. Insofar as it may be counterproductive to encourage the victims of psychological bullying—cyber or otherwise—to consciously identify themselves as such, the more fruitful strategy may be encouraging teens on the aggressor side to be better Kantians, as it were—to imagine whether each mean offhand remark would qualify as “bullying” if it were multiplied by a dozen daily interactions, day after day, week after week.

Ronald Dworkin is probably the most prominent living liberal political philosopher in the United States. Unsurprisingly, he favors a national system of universal healthcare. But at a philosophical level, Dworkin also very clearly holds exactly the same position a lot of viewers seem to regard as not simply wrong, but self evidently monstrous when it was ascribed to Ron Paul (or at least Republicans in the audience) after the recent Tea Party debate. That is, Dworkin believes that if someone enjoys a fair share of social wealth and resources, and makes a free and informed choice about the level of health coverage and care they wish to purchase, then justice is satisfied when they receive the care they have chosen to pay for (either directly or by way of insurance). If it turns out that someone then needs care beyond what they chose to purchase under these conditions, it is not morally incumbent on society to provide that care. If you want to be melodramatic about it: Society (or at least the government) should “let him die.”

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course: Go read chapter 8 of Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin’s major work of political (as opposed to legal) philosophy. As he makes clear there, he believes government should provide some level of universal coverage under conditions where wealth and genetic luck are unjustly distributed, and the difficulty of becoming properly informed about the state of medical care and relevant statistics is so great. But he also reasonably he rejects a general “rescue principle” for healthcare—the principle that society must never “let someone die” or go without care if there is money in the public coffers to intervene—as “useless,” “preposterous,” and one that “no sane society” would adopt. The correct standard for what kind of coverage a society should provide, he argues, is given by trying to figure out what kind of health insurance policy and coverage most members of a particular society would choose if they were well informed and had whatever fair share of social resources is specified by general principles of economic justice. (Those principles might specify that people just born with unlucky ailments are independently entitled to a larger share; Dworkin is mostly thinking here about people who begin life reasonably healthy and will require different levels and types of care over time owing to the vagaries of life.)

Most people, Dworkin acknowledges, would reasonably forgo coverage for many types of risks or treatments, preferring lower premiums and greater present consumption. He suggests, for instance, that most reasonable people under his idealized conditions would not find it worthwhile to purchase coverage that would support their indefinite sustenance in a persistent vegetative state, or heroic and expensive interventions likely to extend life by a few months in old age.

In a society where Dworkin’s background conditions are met:

[H]owever health care is distributed in that society is just for that society: justice would not require providing health care for anyone that he or his family had not purchased. These claims follow directly from an extremely appealing assumption: that a just distribution is one that well-informed people create for themselves by individual choices, provided that the economic system and the distribution of wealth in the community in which these choices are made are themselves just.

Now, again, Dworkin’s premise all along in this argument is precisely that our society does not meet his background conditions, requiring government to supply care as a kind of second best. In our far-from-ideal world, he writes, the government should simply “construct a mandatory coverage scheme on the basis of assumptions about what all but a small number of people could think appropriate, allowing those few who would be willing to spend more on special care to do so, if they can afford it, through supplemental insurance.” In Dworkin’s view, then, if someone needs medical care that the modal informed consumer would not have chosen to cover under conditions of economic justice, that patient should get that treatment if and only if he has chosen to purchase supplemental insurance. If he has not chosen to purchase that coverage, there is no moral requirement for the public to provide it. Or again, if you still want to be melodramatic, society should “let him die.”

In a society that did satisfy Dworkin’s background ideal of economic justice—a society not perfectly egalitarian, but clearly far more so than our own—it follows from his argument that someone who made a free and informed choice to purchase less coverage than most also need not be provided by society with additional care. Our own society, of course, does not meet Dworkin’s background conditions. But Wolf Blitzer’s thought experiment at least arguably does satisfy them, if we take the liberty of reading his stipulation that the imagined patient “makes a good living” to imply that the person enjoys an economically just share of social resources, and has made the choice to forgo coverage after informed deliberation.

So under appropriate conditions—clearly not satisfied for very many poor Americans, but at least arguably satisfied within parameters of Blitzer’s hypothetical—the most prominent living liberal philosopher gives pretty much the same answer as Ron Paul: People should bear the consequences of their freely assumed risks, and “society”—or at least the government—should let them.

“But,” I hear the indignant cry, “Dworkin still advocates universal healthcare as a matter of public policy!” Well, yes. But you don’t pose stripped down, idealized, and unrealistic hypotheticals about single individuals to answer complicated public policy questions. You use them to get at very elementary moral principles. If the question is really about what kind of complex institutions should be established by statute in light of all we know about healthcare markets, reducing it to a single decision about how to respond to one imaginary person is obtuse. If the point is to reveal underlying principles, then those are valid or invalid independently of how they interact with other moral or political principles, or empirical considerations, to generate a real-world policy view.

Anyone who thinks Ron Paul’s answer to the hypothetical is appalling and outrageous, then, should direct some appalled outrage at Dworkin, because he gives exactly the same answer within its artificial, stipulated parameters. If Paul is a ghoul but Dworkin’s cool in virtue of their different policy positions outside the conditions of the hypothetical, then those who see Paul’s view as appalling should acknowledge that the reaction to the Blitzer thought experiment is an irrelevant red herring, and what matters is (say) Paul’s awful views on economic justice, where he pretty clearly does differ from Dworkin. Then at least everyone can work up a righteous lather about the correct issue.

“A healthy, 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: You know what? I’m not going to spend 200 or 300 dollars a month for health insurance, because I’m healthy; I don’t need it,” [moderator Wolf] Blitzer said. “But you know, something terrible happens; all of a sudden, he needs it. Who’s going to pay for it, if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?

“In a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him,” [Ron] Paul replied. Blitzer asked what Paul would prefer to having government deal with the sick man.

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said. ”My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not before —”

“But he doesn’t have that,” Blitzer said. “He doesn’t have it and he’s — and he needs — he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?”

“That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.,” Paul said, repeating the standard libertarian view as some in the audience cheered.

“But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die,” Blitzer asked.

“Yeah,” came the shout from the audience.

I don’t have very strong or well-formed views about the appropriate shape of American health care policy, and I’m generally pretty happy to live in a society where someone who collapses in the street gets care without the need for a credit check first. At the same time, I doubt these kinds of stripped-down thought experiments, useful though they often are for clarifying principles or moral intuitions, are especially illuminating on questions of public policy.

Some very roughly predictable number of people will die each year from skiing accidents or drowning in natural bodies of water. Should “society” just “let these people die”? Obviously anyone who happens to be present when someone is drowning ought to intervene to save them, if they can, and we’d call anyone who just sat on the beach watching a ghoul.  But some people will, predictably, die because nobody is around to save them. So “society” (meaning, in this case, state governments or the federal government) could try to prohibit anyone from engaging in these risky activities, or fence off most bodies of water, and post lifeguards at all the others. We don’t intervene before the fact—by prohibiting unsupervised swimming and similar risky activities—in part because even if we thought it were enforceable, we think people should be free to take risks. We don’t post lifeguards everywhere, partly because it would be costly and infeasible, but also partly because it seems unreasonable to force everyone to foot the bill for risks others have chosen. (Some people, of course, do not really “choose” to go without insurance in a meaningful sense, and we could have a separate argument about what “society” owes those people, but the person in Blitzer’s example pretty clearly doesn’t fall into that category.)

The fact that people aren’t intuitively horrified by “letting die” in this situation is almost entirely a function of how the question is framed. If we ask whether to prohibit everyone, collectively, from unsupervised risk-taking before we know who will be fine and who will be harmed or killed, the intuition that adults ought to be allowed to take risks usually seems to win out. When we ask what we ought to do about a particular individual, where “society” is effectively put in the role of the bystander at the lake, a principle of rescue usually seems to win out: Of course you shouldn’t sit idle! For the kinds of ethical dilemmas we face as individuals, that’s fine, but when it’s posed at a policy level, we effectively face both situations simultaneously, and so need to reconcile conflicting intuitions that didn’t appear to conflict when we considered them at the level of individual choice and obligation.

A lot of people seem to think that just triggering the “bystander” intuition provides some kind of moral clarity, because again, what sort of ghoul doesn’t share that intuition? But this is just a way of ignoring a real moral tension between intuitions, in effect by blowing one horn of a dilemma more loudly, not a serious attempt to grapple with it. From the synoptic perspective of policy, whenever we are committed to affording adults the freedom to take serious risks, we are effectively committed to “letting” some people die. Almost nobody is actually prepared to endorse the level of compulsion or precautionary supervision (which avoids direct coercive prohibition by socializing the cost of chosen risk) that would eliminate such cases, which means now we’re just haggling price. We’re all prepared to “let people die” in a huge number of cases; the interesting question is which ones and why, not whether.

Slightly tangentially, even if we stick to the example of the 30-year-old needing medical treatment—I note that very few people are quite as vocally outraged that we routinely let people in even this precise situation die, so long as they’re people in other countries. So if our 30-year-old is in Utah, and neither his friends, nor his family, nor the government of Utah are prepared to foot the bill for his treatment, we’re supposed to regard it as just obviously morally monstrous that the federal government would not step up to the plate. From California to Maine, it’s our responsibility because he’s one of us. But if he’s in Mexico, or Kenya? We might think it’s awful, or hope someone will volunteer their assistance, but most of us don’t seem to think it’s just obviously our collective political obligation to intervene.

There are a lot of obvious practical considerations one might invoke to explain why we treat the cases differently, but if you think the fundamental moral issues are illuminated with optimal clarity by thought experiments where we just zoom in on these individual cases, then there’s no getting around the fact that (American) society is “letting people die” in huge numbers, provided they had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of a border. Whatever the practical relevance of those people’s nationality, it has no bearing whatever on their basic moral status. If we insist on framing the question as a “bystander problem,” then the nationality of the fellow drowning in the lake should be morally irrelevant. The only salient facts are that we could do something, and whatever other players might be capable of acting aren’t, in fact, doing so.

One respectable and consistent way to deal with this is to infer that we ought to be spending vastly more money on foreign aid to billions of people around the globe who are vastly worse off than almost all of our fellow citizens. Another is to conclude that the “bystander” frame is not actually that helpful when evaluating questions of public policy or collective action.

Finally, and I know I’ve harped on this before, but I think discourse about issues of public health would be immensely improved if we just ditched the misleading phrase “saving lives,” which grossly oversimplifies the actual choices and problems we really face. Death is non-negotiable, so no lives are ever really “saved”: Our actual choice is typically whether to take an action which, at cost C, has probability P of increasing lifespan by time T with quality Q, relative to all the other actions we could take. Until we have infinite resources, then for some array of values for those variables, the federal government is going to have to determine that the expected value of the intervention doesn’t justify obligating the public to bear its cost—though a particular patient’s state or family or friends or church might weigh things differently and decide to foot the bill themselves. What sets describe the morally acceptable ranges for C, P, T, and Q? And how far outside the “correct” ranges do you have to fall to be a moral monster?

Here’s the difference, very roughly, in case this sounds like semantic hairsplitting. To say someone deserves X is to say that X is in some sense an appropriate or fair reward in light of that person’s morally virtuous qualities or conduct. To say that someone is entitled to X is just to say that the person has a just claim to X, without any implied commitment to some deeper claim about their moral merit. One could fill a book trying to spell the difference out in a rigorous way, but I’ll assume it makes intuitive sense to most people at the conceptual level, whether or not we agree on the proper application of each term. But to pick examples I think folks would generally agree with: someone who makes a heroic effort to stop a purse snatcher might deserve a reward without being entitled to any particular amount (unless the law has created some kind of “Samaritan bounty” to incentivize this sort of thing), while someone who wins a raffle or lottery doesn’t deserve the prize money (they didn’t do anything special relative to everyone whose number didn’t come up) but is nevertheless entitledto it, insofar as the organizers promised that amount to a ticket purchaser chosen by some specified procedure. If we wanted to be cute about it, we could say desert is about your due, and entitlement is about what you’re due.

Again, without trying to make a very rigorous case in the span of a blog post, I think political and policy discussions should concentrate on what people are entitled to, rather than on necessarily muddy attempts to determine (and embed in law) what people morally deserve. For one, the latter question is likely to implicate contested and metaphysically fraught ideals of virtue and (to use the Rawlsian jargon) “conceptions of the good” between which a liberal state ought to be neutral. How morally meritorious is a particular occupation? In what sense do people “deserve” their natural capacities, or the dispositions and habits inculcated into them as children? And of course, absent a sort of happy Liebnizian coincidence, desert will often tend to be in conflict with other sources of entitlement—such as what people have freely agreed to, or what would incentivize more wealth creation—which means making desert a criterion will often involve sacrificing other (I’d say less dubious) values. In case my suspicious progressive readers are inclined to read this as some kind of sneaky attempt to rig the debate in favor of libertarian principles of economic justice, I should note that I’m not seeking to rule out any particular view about what people might be entitled to—maybe including very generous government benefits. I always find it strange and slightly grating, actually, when people say that people “deserve” healthcare or a good education or some minimal standard of living: Usually, the claim being advanced is that these are things we morally ought to have just because we are persons (or at least members of a particular society that can afford these benefits), which seems like the ultimate case of something that is not “deserved.” Language gets tricky here: We sometimes talk as though the only options are that people “deserve” X, or alternatively they are “undeserving of” X, implying that they ought to be denied it. As I hope is clear, though, I assume people will often be entitled to things they don’t deserve—like the two working eyes I was just fortunate enough to be born with.

My impression, incidentally, is that the facially similar economic views of libertarians and conservatives are often distinguished by the extent to which they rely on appeals to desert. Libertarians generally have two broad types of reasons for favoring a free-market system, which countenances potentially quite large inequalities, without a great deal of redistribution: First, they think the incentives and decentralized coordination this system produces generate much more wealth for the society as a whole over the long run. Second, they think it’s an important way of respecting people’s free choices and agreements (given, of course, a bunch of controversial assumptions about the conditions under which a choice counts as “free” and the scope of our rights over physical stuff, as opposed to the added value human effort imbues that stuff with).

Conservatives will say those things too, but it seems to me they’re far more likely to rely heavily (primarily?) on the idea that wealth is a deserved reward for hard work, ingenuity, prudence, and whatever other virtues they ascribe to the rich—while the poor must similarly deserve their lot by dint of being lazy, dissolute, and so on. (I occasionally get the impression that certain progressives hold a kind of antimatter version of this rather Calvinist view, with wealth a symptom of intrinsic vice and poverty a sign of the elect—which seems at least as implausible as the conservative version.) To the extent this view is wrong, it has the morally ugly effect of salting with blame a wound acquired through misfortune or injustice—but also of introducing incendiary judgments of personal virtue into a discussion where they’d best be left aside. It’s easy for arguments about incentives to blur into moralized rhetoric about “rewarding” virtue or vice, but we might have a slightly less debased political discourse if we could talk about economic policy without having to commit to a view about the personal virtue or moral worthiness of different groups of people.

Addendum: The justly ridiculed Tasini v. HuffPo suit might be a good case study in the pitfalls of blurring the distinction. Do the folks who contributed free content to the site–presumably because they wanted a high-profile platform to promote themselves and/or their ideas–”deserve” a share of the profit the site earned? Geez, I don’t know. Tasini’s own filing shows that the vast majority of his posts didn’t attract many comments or retweets, and he was an otherwise pretty obscure political candidate and author, so the odds are decent that he got more out of the arrangement than HuffPo did. But we could argue about who deserves what forever. The question of what everyone is entitled to, by contrast, is pretty dispositively settled by the fact that he agreed to write blog posts without pay, and then freely chose to produce a couple hundred of them anyway.

Addendum II: Since John Holbo clearly didn’t believe me when I said this wasn’t some kind of Trojan Horse libertarian argument, let me be a little more explicit: Aside from not being dependent on our assessment of the moral merit of particular individuals or groups, “entitlement” as I’m using it here is really meant to be neutral between a pretty wide variety of positions about distributive justice. What people are entitled to could be determined by (a set of more specific rules conditioned by) John Rawls’ difference principle. Or Ronald Dworkin’s “equality of resources.” Or everyone could be entitled to precisely equal shares of social output, if that’s how you like to roll. I, of course, do not roll thus—but that’s not baked into this particular distinction.

Also, I hoped it would be obvious that I didn’t intend to use “entitled” in a purely positive or descriptive way (though I can see how the examples I picked might give that impression), since of course we’re partly talking about debates over what the law should be—a question where asking what someone is legally entitled to is, of course, pointless. I have my off moments, but I’m not a total halfwit.

I have to say I find this evidence against moral nativism pretty convincing, just as I find it convincing evidence against moral objectivism. Another reason I’m skeptical, at least of moral objectivism, is the following thought experiment. Say you had an unlimited amount of money and time to persuade the chief of some Amazonian tribe of an objective scientific claim that the best evidence suggests is true. Say, that the earth revolves around the sun, or some other basic scientific claim. You can conduct scientific experiments, sit with him in the library going over the literature, and argue with him for 1,000 years. No matter what the starting point of his knowledge and beliefs, you should eventually be able to convince him of the truth as best as the evidence indicates, after all, its demonstratable knowledge.

He contrasts this with moral beliefs—and in particular, moral beliefs involving gods, which seems like an especially inapt example to pick. After all, for any sufficiently determinate description of “God” or “gods,” either there exists some entity corresponding to the description, or there doesn’t. It is an “objective” question, in the sense there has to be some fact of the matter, quite independently of what we can prove or learn about it. And yet, of course, there is not exactly universal agreement on the topic—despite rather more energy (alas) having been devoted to such questions than to scientific inquiry. Conversely, whether the truth of a particular scientific claim is “demonstrable” is often a pretty contingent matter, depending on the state of technology, and on the forms of “proof” or “demonstration” your interlocutor is culturally conditioned to accept as valid. You expect me to trust your “telescope,” an obvious product of demon magic?

It might be objected that morality at the most abstract or fundamental level is not empirical in the same way, and therefore ought to command universal assent. But even in the realm of pure reason, there’s a world of difference between what is “demonstrable” in principle and what can actually be demonstrated to anyone. There are purely deductive truths of advanced theoretical mathematics that require years of grueling study to grasp—and I mean, just to understand what is being claimed, never mind proving it—and are probably just plain beyond the cognitive capacity of many (most?) people with any amount of study. We assume they’re not talking nonsense because the rest of us can at least understand the elementary components from which the advanced theory is built, and because it does appear to enable them to build stuff that mostly works. It would be pretty unfortunate if morality were like this—if there were correct moral principles whose unassailable proofs were simply too complex to be understood by or persuasive to most people—but I don’t see how the possibility can be ruled out.

One might complain that insofar as “morality” is supposed to motivate action and coordinate the behavior of groups, no system too abstruse to actually provide reasons to most members of a community should qualify. I’m sympathetic to the point in practice, but unless the idea is to just stipulate relativism by building it into the definition of “morality,” it’s still consistent with the claim that the principles would be (objectively) binding on a community capable of formulating and understanding them. In any event, I suspect the proportion of the population that have personally reasoned through the underlying logic of the norms they follow is probably not much greater than the proportion who understand how their iPhones work.

Finally, as with religion, it’s worth making the obvious point that institutions and people that hold power in any particular culture have a pretty potent incentive not to be persuaded of any moral claim that would undermine that power or destabilize the status quo. What ought to really be astonishing is just how much consensus we do see emerging over the long run, even when powerful interests are strongly motivated to reject (and encourage others to reject) an argument that ultimately wins out.

More generally, and returning to Will’s post, I don’t think the plausibility of relativism is affected all that strongly by whether we think there’s a “native moral capacity,” whatever that amounts to. One ought to be careful here: There’s clearly some sense in which morality is “relative” to our intrinsic capacity to be morally motivated. We don’t say wild animals act “wrongly” when they harm people, because we don’t think they’re moral agents—which is to say, they’re biologically incapable of regulating their actions on the basis of reasons and norms (though they might be susceptible to simple training). But I think that’s probably about the level at which this is relevant. For the reasons suggested above, the fact of cultural disagreement about norms just doesn’t seem hugely significant. In a sense, to articulate a moral principle is precisely to acknowledge that we are not biologically constrained from acting otherwise. A species wired so as to be neurologically incapable of consciously lying would have no occasion to develop a concept of “honesty” or regard it as a virtue. Obviously there has to be some hook in the way our brains are structured that provides some kind of general basis for moral reasoning, but I wouldn’t give too much weight to the extent it turns out more specific content is hardwired as opposed to learned.

The explanation for any specific hardwired moral intuition would always be a function of its contribution to our inclusive fitness under mostly hunter-gatherer conditions. Again, we don’t bother talking about “moral principles” unless we’re quite capable of not acting in accordance with them. Given that, having a biological account of widespread moral intuitions could easily make relativism seem more appealing. “It’s just another kind of hardwired cognitive bias; to the extent I’m capable of training myself to overcome that bias, why should I care what was conducive to survival and reproduction a million years ago? Conditions are very different now, and in any event, I have lots of priorities other than inclusive fitness.” The biological account would then serve a kind of Mannheimian “unmasking” function: It would explain why certain rules and mores seem very intuitively plausible or appealing, but in a way that saps the intuition of its reason-giving force. Learning about the biological basis of optical illusions doesn’t make us any less prone to regard them as illusions, after all.

None of this, of course, counts as a refutation of relativism—but it is a reason to suspect the question isn’t really amenable to being decided at this level of abstraction. Human beliefs on all sorts of topics have varied wildly across time and cultures. Sometimes the beliefs are all “locally” correct, sometimes everyone’s confused, and sometimes one or a few groups have got it (more approximately) right. The test is ultimately to look at the arguments. To the extent it’s worth staking out a position in general terms, I tend to think the “relative or objective” question is actually poorly formed, as I hint above: The interesting question is “relative to what, and in what ways?”

Supposing there’s a genuinely universal moral principle prohibiting “fraud” or “cheating,” you need a lot more detail about mores and expectations in a particular culture to know what it actually requires in practice. And even the “universal” principle is necessarily dependent on a whole slew of very general facts about the sort of beings we are—capable of certain forms of reasoning and representation, with interests capable of being promoted or being harmed, and so on. (Stick insects engage in a kind of “deception,” but it has no moral dimensions.) Debating the “objectivity” of “morality” in general just doesn’t seem that fruitful. You need to get into the weeds and see whether a particular moral claim is supported by reasons that should have force for everyone—and if it seems they should, look at what actually accounts for the disagreement. There’s no bird’s-eye-view shortcut that’s going to save us the trouble of actually looking at the specific arguments.
Addendum: I see one trackback link describing this post as a good defense of relativism, which isn’t quite what I thought I was writing… but maybe these things are relative. In all seriousness, though, this is one of the problems I was pointing up above: People use “relativism” as shorthand for a whole array of very different claims, some quite strong, others so weak as to seem indisputable.

It may, of course, be true in some very narrow sense that the particular contours of some specific religious morality, including various dietary and sexual taboos, would not have much appeal without the support of the body of religious doctrine that gave rise to them. But when it’s used more broadly—as I think it normally is—to encompass within “morality” any set of principles that bind us to treat other people with some basic level of decency and kindness, I’ve always regarded this as a bizarre and chilling sentiment that ought to make us seriously doubt the character of anyone who utters it. Because insofar as it tacitly makes a claim about people’s incentive to behave morally, it amounts to an admission that the speaker simply cannot fathom why someone would treat others with consideration and respect (if it didn’t seem to be in their self interest to do so) absent an omniscient being brandishing a heavenly carrot and the stick of damnation.

In Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous schema of moral development, it betrays a mind stuck at stage I or II, conceiving the “bindingness” of moral injunctions purely in terms of personal reward and punishment. That sounds to me less like a proper morality than like a substitute for it, meant to elicit decent behavior from people presumed to be too wicked to restrain themselves without some external sanction, some watchful policeman. Insofar as such people exist—children mostly start out this way, on Kohlberg’s account—one supposes it’s just as well to have such fallback measures, but I’m always a little astonished when people shamelessly identify themselves as belonging to that group.

The key point I want to make here is that when major party activists put the guilt-trip on supporters significantly to their left, they engage in what looks like very fallacious reasoning. The point is that a voter considering a protest vote against the Dems from the left has three options on election day:

First, stay at home
Second, vote for their minor party or abstain
Third, vote Democrat

And the thing is that the major party activist has to steer them between the Scylla and Charybdis of the first two choices, both of which might superficially look more attractive than voting for a candidate you don’t support. To do so, they need to make two contradictory arguments.

Obviously the problem to overcome in getting you to drag your ass (note American spelling) down to the polling station is the Paradox of Voting. Which isn’t really a paradox; it could more accurately be titled “The Actual Extremely Low Expected Value Of Voting”. This requires an appeal to your civic sense of duty; remember Martin Luther King, etc. In other words, they need you to see it as your duty to society to vote, or alternatively to see your vote as an important form of political expression.

However, once your ass is duly dragged and you’re in the voting booth, the last thing they want you to do is your civic duty (which would be to vote for the candidate you think is the best; that’s how voting systems work, strategic or tactical behaviour is a pathology of a badly designed system) or political expression (which also wouldn’t have you voting for their guy). Once you’re there, they want to argue in purely instrumental terms – you have to vote for the Democrats because if you vote for your minority party, you have no chance at all of being the marginal voter.

I considered the same quandary way back in 2004, and maybe it’s worth revisiting now. This is a problem that generalizes far beyond voting to a whole class of collective action problems or “tragedies of the commons” that have something like the following structure: There’s a system in which each individual’s rationally self-interested choice is what we’ll call the “defect” option—don’t bother to vote, overgraze the pasture, pollute, whatever. Moreover—and this is a difference from the traditional prisoner’s dilemma—holding everyone else’s choices constant, no individual’s choice to defect makes a difference to the collective outcome. My voting won’t change the outcome of the election; my constraining my livestock’s consumption won’t prevent the pasture from being overgrazed; my factory isn’t going to measurably effect the scope of climate change.

One traditional way out of this—the Kantian option—is to say that everyone has a moral duty to act on the maxim that they could will universally. In other words: Figure out what course of action would be best if everyone acted that way, and do that. This is both intuitively appealing, and for some cases seems to work pretty well, at least in theory. You can figure out the sustainable level of grazing or emissions and some procedure—whether simple or complicated—for determining everyone’s fair share of the total, and say that’s the limit everyone ought to observe. Enforcement, of course, is another matter, and determining both the correct collective limit and the right mechanism for apportioning shares may be technically quite tricky, but the general shape of the solution is relatively straightforward.

With a case like voting, though, it’s another matter, because it’s a premise of the system that people are supposed to register their presumptively diverse opinions about which candidate or policy would be best. If you actually acted on the Kantian maxim in the voting booth—selected the candidate you genuinely believe to be best—you’d probably end up with a lot of people writing in a huge variety of names. You can, of course, argue that there’s some one best candidate, and selecting that person is the uniquely moral choice. But the premise of a democratic system is precisely that we don’t have a ready collective answer to that question—voting is the process by which we try to approximate an answer by aggregating people’s different opinions. And even if you think you know the ideal candidate, given this fact of disagreement, voting for thatperson can seem like “defecting” in another sense: Given that, realistically, the winner is going to be one of two (or occasionally three) contenders, the “cooperative” outcome is going to be the one where people with roughly similar views converge on a compromise candidate rather than one’s personal first choice. We can think, by analogy, of driving: It might be that for some obscure reason having to do with human physiology, a system in which everyone drives on the left side is actually slightly safer—but that doesn’t make it the moral thing to do if the local norm is to drive on the right!

Yet here’s the paradox Davies is pointing out. Once you start modifying your rule to take into account what everyone else is likely to do—asking what rule you can will given that, in fact, many or most people will not act on the rule you’d ideally universalize—it’s not clear where you stop. In other words, once you allow that your own action is contingent on the predictably non-ideal actions of everyone else, why aren’t you back where you started, acknowledging that your own vote almost certainly won’t affect the outcome, and so your optimal response is to stay home?

One way out of the paradox, of course, is to have a voting system in which everyone ranks as many candidates as they please, allowing everyone to genuinely act in the way they would universalize without generating a perverse result. (For the most part, anyway: As Arrow proved, no voting system can entirely eliminate perverse results.) But that’s not much help for someone trying to decide what to do here and now.

The solution I gestured toward in the 2004 post was a kind of quasi-universalization principle, where you don’t ask what rule you’d want everyone to act on, but rather what rule you’d universalize within a symbolic community of like-minded folks. Alas, the same problem recurs at this stage. Which is the relevant community? If you’re a progressive, and a relatively conservative Democrat is likely to win anyway, should your imagined caucus be left-of-center folks, or people more closely aligned who might register a protest vote without changing the outcome?

In a system of perfect transparency and frictionless negotiation, people could just actually negotiate this—arguably that’s what the point of the primary system is, and sites like Nader’s Traders back in the 2000 election took the idea a step further, though ran into legal difficulties. Still, in principle at least, it looks like a coordination problem that’s intractable as a matter of abstract moral logic may become manageable—thanks to the Internet—if we leverage the more general moral obligation to abide by commitments with actual negotiation. If that’s right, then maybe Davies gets it backwards when he says that the choice between abstaining, voting Democratic, or registering a third-party protest vote, is “up to the conscience of the individual voter to make.” Maybe, instead, the way to go about it is to begin with large communities of broadly shared ideals and abide by the rule governing the symbolic sub-communities that emerge from pre-electoral deliberation. In theory, even at the deliberative stage, you can run into rapidly alternating equilibria, or suboptimal but sticky ones, but since people aren’t all making simultaneous choices about which sub-community to align with, people can probably work it out in practice.

That’s be the best I can come up with, anyway; better thoughts welcome in the comments.

The empirical problem is this popular but stunningly stupid version of cost-benefit analysis that fails to seriously consider costs.  Which, I guess, makes it “benefit analysis.”  In other words, if it seems as though torture ever yields important and actionable intelligence more quickly than alternative methods, we’re supposed to take it for granted that this completes the necessary utilitarian analysis.  And this is just absurd. How does torture affect the willingness of enemy combatants to surrender? How much does it complicate our relations with allies? How many people does it help to radicalize against the United States? How many non-radicals does it leave sufficiently disgusted that they’re less motivated to assist the U.S. in fighting radicalism in their communities?  You’ll notice that torture-fans never really attempt to deal remotely seriously with any of these questions; they just babble inanities about how Fanatics Will Hate Us No Matter What. Which, of course, some will—but that’s hardly to the point, is it?

The conceptual mistake is to suppose that we’re faced with a binary choice between a pure consequentialism that just mechanically adds up all the yums and ouches or a kind of absolutist deontology that hews to a principled rule, and damn the consequences.  The point of invoking pacifism is to imply that if you want to consider any non-consequentialist moral properties of certain kinds of acts, you’re compelled by relentless logic to the most extreme possible position.  The thing is, pretty much nobody really thinks this way. Most people—the vast majority—will say it’s immoral to secretly chop up a healthy vagrant for organs to save five other people. We’re not just interchangeable tokens in some great social calculus, but individuals with individual rights that must be respected—rights that trump maximization of social welfare.  Except that if suddenly we’re sure we could save a thousand or ten thousand or ten million people by killing one innocent, most of us will at some point say, reluctantly, that it ought to be done after all.

This is supposed to be theoretically unsatisfying because it seems inconsistent—if the weight of the numbers can outweigh those supposed rights after all, what’s so special about ten thousand or whatever other number? Why not five? But the demand for consistency here is misplaced.  Our seemingly incoherent intuition here is grounded in the sense, which I think is correct, that consequentialist and deontic approaches both capture some sort of important moral truth, but that the two frameworks are (or have thus far seemed) incommensurable or incompatible in some deep way.  The best we can do is to say that sometimes one will seem more appropriate, sometimes another. But it’s pure question-begging to insist that the internal standards of one framework or the other be used to determine where that transition point between approaches lies.  That’s just tantamount to saying that the standard-setting framework is really paramount after all.  I prefer the position that’s less theoretically tidy if it has the advantage of not being obviously wrong: At some point the consequences are so extreme that you ditch rights talk and just count noses—but it’s not a point we often encounter, even in counterterror policy.

Contrast Megan’s approach, which seems to ask what people would want after they know that they’ll get sick in such-and-such a way. Now, if I have no other extremely attractive uses for my money,  it might well seem worth spending what I have remaining on a very low probability of extending my life by a month, which from that point of view will no doubt seem extremely valuable. It will almost certainly seem worthwhile to ask my insurer, whether public or private, to pay. But that doesn’t mean I would’ve chosen to cover that eventuality even with a perfectly clear understanding of how much I’d want it if and when it arose. Now, Megan is surely right that in the real world people don’t have this kind of clarity of understanding. Ex ante, we tend to underweight how highly we’ll value additional time late in life, but also to overweight the detrimental effect various kinds of disability would have on our happiness. But time bias cuts both ways. Someone who consumed a lot of resources or took on debt in early life will naturally wish they had more resources and less debt—and may well discount too heavily the now-distant past benefits they enjoyed. We have, I think, an unjustified tendency to regard inconsistency between earlier and later assessments of a tradeoff as evidence that the early assessment was colored by temporal bias, while the later one is more fully informed and so more objective. I’m pretty sure that’s a mistake; time bias can take the from of irrational regret as easily as prospective imprudence. Though I should caveat that I’m not sure the use  of “irrational” works here, as I’m not sure there’s some objective “view from nowhere” way of aggregating inconsistent judgments across time that would count as the benchmark of rationality.

Discussions of a right to care often come down to talk about “saving lives”—which has a certain air of cinematic finality to it. Zoom in and fade out on the kiss, and the last moment of the story lasts a celluloid eternity. Morbid as it feels to keep saying so, though, lives are never really “saved”—just shortened or extended by some finite amount. And a huge amount of medical care is about quality of life, not longevity. Sometimes those two goals are at odds, and the patient has to decide which is more important.  To reflect this, when bioethicists want to wade into the hard questions, they are inclined to talk not about “lives saved” but about QALYs (pronounced “Quallies”) or Quality Adjusted Life Years. And I think a great deal of clarity would be gained in discussions of health care if this way of talking became more widespread. Another distorting factor in discussions of health care, I think is the tendency to think of some individual in isolation and just reflect on what we feel we’re morally obligated to do for that person. On most progressive views, though, health is one of many competing goods to which people have positive entitlements, and each person’s right is constrained by the countervailing pull of the equally valid demands of others. So we always need to ask, not whether this person deserves to have his life “saved” (or extended or improved) but how to allocate resources across all the different moral claims on them.

If we switch from “lives saved” talk to QALYs talk, and if we preserve a holistic rather than a case-by-case perspective, I believe the distributive-justice-plus-paternalistic-constraint conception of the health care right becomes much more appealing. At the individual level, it’s easy to get lured into thinking in binary terms of a “right to life”: “Should this person live or die? Live, of course!”  If you’re looking at a system of entitlements in which QALYs are one kind of benefit, though, the question “what exactly does the right to health care amount to?” ends up looking quite different—something along the lines of “what is the value of a QALY, bearing in mind the opportunity cost of all the other purposes to which social resources might be devoted?”

Now, for all sorts of purposes, governments do actually have to assign universal dollar values to QALYs for, among other things, regulatory cost-benefit analysis. But I’m enough of a subjectivist that I just don’t think these questions have any general or abstract right answer—which is why the denial of an objective hierarchy of values played the role it did in the last post.  The value of longevity, mobility, education, and other goods we might think society ought to provide is the value they have to people. People can, to be sure, make mistakes—they can predict wrongly how happy they will be with a particular tradeoff, and if the mistakes are systematic and common, there may be an argument for paternalism. But these are mistakes relative to their own later assessments: There’s no external or objective standard for whether a college education or a hip replacement or any number of other goods is of greater value to someone. We focus on goods like health care because health is of enormous value and importance to almost everyone. (Whether much of the health care we consume actually provides any value turns out to be a shockingly open question.)  But the fact that health, in general, is a good doesn’t tell us how to weigh everyone’s competing claims to specific treatments providing specific increments of longevity or different types of quality of life against every other positive good people might have some right to. So–this is obviously an idealized account, not how actual governments work—the way we decide whether someone is entitled to social provision of the slightly-more-effective-but-much-more-expensive treatment or the second hip replacement or whatever requires weighing the benefit of expending resources on that against the other claims we might satisfy instead. Or, to be sort of stupidly simple about it, suppose you have a limited supply of painkiller and a ward full of people in different degrees of pain. You cannot answer, in isolation, how much of the painkiller this patient has a right to. You can only start to answer the question when you know what sort of pain everybody is in, how much good the drug will do them, and so on.

This need not just be a matter of utilitarian maximizing. It might be that some person has had a very bad life in general, so that fairness requires us to confer a benefit on him even if, at the same cost, we could provide greater benefits to others who have not endured such hardships over their lives as a whole. Alternatively, there might be some upper limit to how much any one person can draw on the common stock, even if the greatest net benefit still comes from spending the marginal dollar on them. I want to be neutral between the many different conceptions of fairness bioethicists defend and argue over. The point is that whatever your standard for weighing interpersonal claims, the question is inherently distributive. And because society is trying to provide a range of heterogeneous goods, and because the benefits conferred by health care are themselves heterogeneous (again, in the simple case, longevity and various aspects of quality), this means trying to compare diverse particular benefits in order to figure out how strong all these different-in-kind claims are on a common resource pool.

Now just for the sake of argument, again as an aid to conceptual clarification, assume away the motivation for paternalism: Suppose you have a society of people who can perfectly well assess their own long-term best interests. If the question of how much health care people are entitled to ends up being inherently distributive in the way I’ve described—if it depends on a judgment about how to fairly confer heterogeneous benefits on members of society given limited resources, where the individual’s subjective valuation is ultimately the only determinant of what counts as a benefit—what grounds could you have for saying that an individual has a right to consume X% of social wealth for the purpose of providing a health benefit, but no right to devote the same share to some alternative use that this person considers a still greater benefit? How to weigh diverse benefits between persons is an extraordinarily hard moral problem—and its intractability one reason I lean libertarian, incidentally. But if, arguendo, we suppose we’re dealing with people who are not subject to the various common biases that lead us into misjudgments about probability and future benefits, then we at least have one metric for determining which use of a given quantity of resources provide the greatest benefit to a single individual: The person’s own subjective report.

Now, certainly there are grounds for thinking it might be socially optimal to insist that people take their share of the common stock in the form of health care rather than other goods. Perhaps, for instance, we want people to stay healthy enough to keep working, or perhaps other people feel uncomfortable seeing people who are sick or disabled, even if the people themselves would be happier staying disabled and putting the cost of treatment to another use. But now we’re not speaking the language of rights anymore. My moral right to health care, on the usual way of speaking about individual rights, is a matter of how having it is good for me. And indeed, one common way of characterizing rights is as trumps against social optimization. So, to pick a clichéd example, we might say that someone has a right not to be chopped up for organs, even though five other people could thereby be saved—the individual right to life (or not to be killed, anyway) trumps the goal of optimizing the total number of lives saved.

There’s a lot going on here, so let me try to step back and provide an overview that disentangles the different issues in play here. There is an argument that even in a world of perfect distributive justice, people would not make wise judgments about how to use their fair shares, justifying intervention to direct more of those resources than some might choose to health care. But that is not, in the ordinary sense, an argument about rights—about what people may claim or demand as a matter of justice. It is an argument for why we should override people’s claims for their own long-term good. There are a variety of reasons we might think it is socially optimal in various ways—because of externalities or economies of scale or whatever—to have social provision of health care, and even to call this a legal right. But this, also, is not an argument about moral rights—about the claims each individual may press as a matter of justice. What we owe each member of society as a matter of right will be a function—we can debate which function, but some function—of the way a treatment is a benefit to that person. And within each person’s life, it is a matter of subjective assessment which use of resources provides the greatest benefit. If it is the benefit a treatment provides that grounds the individual’s claim, then if we agree to bracket all these other considerations in order to focus on this one narrow issue, it is hard to see how it could be that someone would be entitled to some share of social resources in the form of a health benefit, but not to use the very same quantity of resources for a different benefit. From which it follows that the underlying moral right cannot be to a health benefit, but to some share of resources insofar as this provides a benefit.

One way my earlier post may have gone astray is that, while I tried to stress that people’s fair shares may vary over time because the burdens they bear as a result of misfortune give them stronger claims, my approach may have made it sound as though I was imagining everyone as having some fixed quantity of resources they’re entitled to. Moreover, if we look at the way just shares would vary to compensate for bad luck, it may seem that this is a needlessly convoluted way of talking about it, because it ends up looking an awful lot like a right to care superfluously mediated by resources.  Consider someone who is born with a seriously disabling condition: On my account, in order to compensate for this, they may be entitled to a greater share so as to enable them to enjoy a quality of life more closely approximating that most others experience. But suppose one day somebody develops a relatively inexpensive treatment that will eliminate this disability. Now, of course, we would say that if they are still entitled to a greater share, it is only as much as would be required to supply the treatment. Isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying they have a right to the treatment?

I think it is not, because the key point is that people’s share claims may vary depending on—among other things—the way those shares contribute to quality of life. If we found some way to elevate people’s quality of life through means other than treatment, then the fair share might be what was required to bring the disabled individual up to the prevailing level by that other means, rather than through treatment. So if you’ll indulge me with another quite fanciful thought experiment: Imagine that at some point in the future, we have developed incredibly convincing shared virtual worlds like the one in the Matrix movies—except, you know, not run by evil robots. Suppose people end up happily and voluntarily spending large portions of their lives in these vivid worlds. Now, perhaps someone is born with an array of very serious physical disabilities that do not affect longevity, but seriously impair his ability to function and enjoy a decent quality of life in the physical world. There are, suppose, highly invasive and extremely expensive treatments that will mitigate these disabilities and restore some function in the physical world. But for much lower cost, we can provide access to these virtual worlds where many people live and work most of the time anyway.  Suppose that people with such disabilities are able to enjoy lives as good as anyone else if they have this access, and are happier than people who get the treatments and remain in the physical world. Does this person have a right against society to health care, or has society satisfied its obligations if this person is, by the alternative means of access to the Matrix, the person is provided with the same quality of life enjoyed by everyone else?

I know a lot of readers are thinking this sounds like airy-fairy hypothetical wankery; certainly it’s light years removed from the practical issues of the current health care debate. But these admittedly fantastical thought experiments, precisely because they take us away from the complex tangle of different issues that make those debates so thorny, let us focus more clearly on isolated moral questions.  Then, ideally, when we return to the real world, we have a better grasp on each of the individual strands in that tangle and can think more productively about the more practical issues—unlikely as that may seem.

I am acutely aware that this is all a bit muddled; ideally I’d sit down some time and rework all this in a clearer and more rigorous way. But I hope some of those who took issue with the previous post have at least a somewhat clearer sense of what I’m trying to get at. Note, for what it’s worth, that a progressive can probably accept this whole argument without thinking it makes much difference to the contemporary policy argument. None of this, in other words, necessarily has any direct implications for whether the public option or single payer or any other health care regime is a good idea. You can perfectly well say: “Well, forget about an abstract moral right to health care per se; our moral obligation for practical purposes is to provide people with more equitable access to health care than we currently do, and the reason is that it’s more socially optimal, or that people are entitled to share social resources in whatever way gives each a fair shot at a decent quality of life, or whatever other way you want to talk about it.”  And then we’ll have all sorts of other things left to debate.  But it will probably be a better, clearer debate.