16 ms·

An underrated idea: the priority view

159 points by akbarnama 5y ago

wpietri 5y ago
My main take-away from this is that political philosophy must not spend much time with actual data if this is the level of numeric discourse. The models they use for very complicated decisions like the one described seem just crashingly unsubtle from this.
steve_g 5y ago
This is an interesting way to think about why utilitarianism doesn't alway comport with our moral intuitions. But I was really hoping this article would be about a user interface for business applications.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  ...or a To Do list app with a priority view.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
This seems like simply another version of utilitiarianism, but with a nonlinear utility function.
- onos 5y ago
  It seems that the priority view may feel intuitive because humans fail to internalize that the diminishing returns are already baked into utility gained from some benefit and they are trying to insert it a second time.
- flaviojuvenal 5y ago
  And lack of knowledge about Prospect Theory.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    How does prospect theory apply to the scenario as proposed?
    - flaviojuvenal 5y ago
      The article states: "you might consider a small amount of happiness for someone who is depressed to have more moral value than a larger amount of happiness for someone who is already fairly happy". For me this looks like the prospect theory curve: the depressed friend is at a loss, so you assign greater value to their happiness gains, regardless of the real utility.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I agree although you could turn it on its head and say it's also a good example of how utilitarianism loses its explanatory power because it can explain away anything just by changing the utilities. The problem with utility has always been in defining the utilities.
k2xl 5y ago
I don’t agree with the premise of applying numbers in these hypothetical trolly level like situations. Humans aren’t numbers, and you could never calculate a utility value or predict with certainty what would happen if you make a choice to make these hypotheticals useful in my opinion. But playing along, while moving to the suburbs or city is a common decision to make for families, I would argue that the priority view is the same as utility. The priority raises the value/score itself. Let’s say hypothetically you could go out to dinner to help talk a depressed friend out of suicide or you could go to a once in a lifetime meeting with an investor to pitch him on a startup idea about helping prevent suicides. Now i would argue the decision is a bit more murky. In one you have a probability of helping prevent one suicide in short term and in a other you have a probability of helping prevent multiple suicides in the long term.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  That is the whole point of moral philosophy, to try to both model how humans make moral decision and help us make better moral choices. To just wave away the work of hundreds of philosophers over hundreds of years with "it's murky" ... maybe philosophers already understand that.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I don't understand what's murky about your hypothetical as proposed. Go help the depressed friend. Even if you successfully pitched the startup to the investor the utility gained ultimately is indeterminate vs. the very immediate and real utility gained from a successful suicide (presumably permanent) prevented. Your example though is good to illustrate the fallacy of "end justifies the means" type thinking. When you suppose the outcome (talking to the investor leads to the startup being created which then presumably prevents suicides) for one scenario but not for the other the entire thing is meaningless. With these types of scenarios you can see the error by applying one scenario and overlaying it on the other: 1. Talk a friend out of a suicide who does (2) 2. Engage in a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity for suicide prevention. Clearly 1 includes 2, so 2 is the answer. You might say that's not the scenario you posed, which is true, but I'd counter and say that's the issue with contrived examples to begin with.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
ITT, utilitarians discover diminishing marginal utility.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  Surely that doesn't apply here, given the utility numbers we're assuming? Rather, it's presumed to be priced in already.
  - recursivedoubts 5y ago
    Rather, I think this is utilitarians struggling to "price in" an obvious observation about society and moral reasoning. Which is, of course, ridiculous, since there is no such thing as general utility, but this is utilitarians we are talking about, unfortunately.
    - sprucevoid 5y ago
      A general utility claim: One person suffering from the severest form of migraine is bad. Two persons suffering from the severest form of migraine is twice as bad. Here's another: one person suffering from the severest form of migraine is worse than one person experiencing a mild itch.
      - recursivedoubts 5y ago
        Yeah, that's wrong. The suffering is subjective and calling it "twice as bad" is spurious. This is one of the core errors of utilitarianism, the idea that "utility" can be objectively measured and compared between different humans, and thereby, treat moral reasoning like a math equation.
        sprucevoid 5y ago
        The suffering is only subjective in the sense that a particular migraine is generated in a particular brain where only one person, me the subject, has direct experience access to it. But migrains and brains are biological processes in a physical world. My brain is't magically different from other brains so I can reason to the conclusion that a maximally severe migraine in another person's brain is equally awful and bad. Both my brain and theirs are part of the world and the states of our brains partly constitutes how good or bad the world is at a particular time. A world with two severe migraines is twice as bad as a world with only one.
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
The terminology chosen is terrible, "priority" in this context is self referential and doesn't mean anything. All those (equality, utility, ...) are strategies to define the priority in the face of scarcity or competing requirements, so to call one of them "priority" is nonsense. The author is basically saying that: - Equality strategy is to prioritize decreasing differences. (OK) - Utility strategy is prioritizing maximizing the sum total of a set utility function. (OK) - Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!)
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  > Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!) From the article: "Parfit’s answer is that we might value priority, which is prioritising the well-being of the worst off."
kwhitefoot 5y ago
This is surely a fairly highly rated idea. At least where I live now and where I come from (at the time I lived there) it was regarded as more important to raise the standard of the poorest students than to raise the standard of the top performers for instance. At least when I was in primary school my teachers spent more time with those who found studying difficult than those of us for whom it came easy. It was made clear to me as a high achiever that help was always available but, as it was clear that I could work on my own, that I was expected to do so. It also surely accords with the Marx's slogan: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs[1]" Perhaps this idea isn't so popular as it used to be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
- cousin_it 5y ago
  It's interesting because neither helping the strongest students, nor helping the weakest, has any reason to be maximally beneficial to society. From pure utilitarian point of view, we should first help those students who would get the most benefit per hour of help. That probably means the middling ones who just need a hand to get them over a hurdle, not the checked-out ones and not the superstars.
  - onos 5y ago
    That’s a great, practical point. One anecdote about smart kids though: i knew a number of very smart boys growing up who got bored at school and checked out for that reason, and life didn’t work out great for them - nor did society benefit from the very positive productivity they might have been capable of. I think they’d have done better with appropriate challenges.
    - slx26 5y ago
      I always talked about ideas since I was a kid and got lots of applauses, but no one ever bothered to actually take my hand and try to explore with me. I didn't simply get bored, I ended up in complete social isolation. In my personal case, neglection actually runs deeper and beyond the educative system, but if you fail to "get people on board", any other metric will be irrelevant.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Read like the parable of the lost sheep from the Bible: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?”
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  “hey! no, you idiots: the least of these, god dammit!!” is the plaintive cry of all the prophets, about half the psalms, and a fair bit of the new testament.
paganel 5y ago
> Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. The thing is that day-to-day life doesn't provide those "scores" when it comes to humans and their interactions, life is not a video-game (even though we certainly do try our best at transforming it into that). Writing down that one could assign scores in such a scenario is normative, i.e. we take for granted that such scores are possible and, even more (that's what makes it normative, imo) we somehow impose on the reader the notion that he/she should regard this score-setting as a fact of life, as normal, at the limit that the reader herself should join the game of assigning scores to human actions.
- vincnetas 5y ago
  I think this is inevitable when you try to abstract and systematise anything. You cant think about big and complex things will all details in mind. You abstract. Same way you don't see a person in front of you as collection of millions cels. You see it as an entity.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >You abstract. The danger is that you end up with a "perfectly spherical cow" that you base your arguments then on, and your abstraction-based results then have no bearing whatsover to the real world.
    - vincnetas 5y ago
      I'm not saying that you must follow your abstractions blindly. At the end you must always test your theory against reality and adjust if reality contradicts your assumptions.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Such scores are clearly possible. If you define a one-dimensional scale you can project everything onto it. Clearly you lose a lot of information in doing so, but if your scale is "overall utility" of some kind and that utility is the only thing you care about, then of course you can do it. In principle anyway - you can't actually calculate someone's utility. It's a thought experiment.
rjrodger 5y ago
Is this not equivalent to medical triage? Those who will die anyway, and those who will live anyway, get no immediate treatment (apart from morphine). Those who will not survive without treatment, get the resources. Thus: move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do just fine in life. Have dinner with the depressed friend, because the happy friend will enjoy the concert anyway. Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism.
- visarga 5y ago
  Maybe the gifted teenager by getting priority early on would be able to better support his brother later in life. Parents aren't going to be around in old age.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > Have dinner with the depressed friend [...] Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism. Well, the problem is specifically stated as the concert having higher total utility.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  > move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do just fine in life Why would you make this assumption though.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
Maybe prioritarianism is similar to increasing average log-utility... A sort of social Kelly criterion [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
numeromancer 5y ago
> "Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80,..." Argument discarded.
- notinty 5y ago
  Lots of people are getting hung up on the measurement. The key word is "imagine" y'know.
  - numeromancer 5y ago
    Imagine that the Imagination Quotient is a number between 0 and 1, with 0 being the inability to imagine even what you're looking at, and 1 representing the ability to imagine a real thing unseen in full detail. The Imagination Quotient required to imagine that someone's utility is 80 is would be an proper imaginary number.
    - notinty 5y ago
      I can't even imagine the Imagination Quotient required for some social scores.
visarga 5y ago
Am I right to conclude that priority view applied to college admissions would mean favouring the worst students, because they have the largest marginal utility?
- deleted 5y ago
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coldtea 5y ago
>There is also a catch in the hypothetical - let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the suburbs. Nagel’s view is this: if you say that you would live in the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are not a utilitarian (at least in all circumstances), but rather an egalitarian. You value the equality of the boys more than you do maximising the overall levels of well-being. The very idea that there is some measusable "utility" to compare in the two cases, independent from your moral values and sentiments, is inane. >Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. What that "utility" unit would measure? Money they can make for you? Their pontential on their own? Their future contribution to society (in what terms? monetary? intellectual?)? Any other of 500 factors (perhaps combined)? What if you don't want to help build a society that neglects the needs of disabled people because of their lesser contribution, and thus your utility function - ie. your desired goal maximization includes helping the disabled son? In the examples, it is assumed that ulility == favoring gifted son, which means the utility function you'll use is taken for granted (and the whole thing is presented as only a matter of whether you value utility or not).
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
  I have ambiguous feelings about that example, not sure if I'm just being woke. It does feel a bit stereotypical to use a disabled child as the first example of someone with lower utility. You wouldn't think of starting an example with a gifted son and a black son.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Utility is a fundamental concept in decision theory. Arguing it cannot exist is the opposite extreme to arguing that homo economicus, with superhuman evaluative strategies and no gaps in rationality, exists. People can compare their current situations to relative improvement, and often those are transitive (though not always). So in most reasonable cases the mathematical axioms needed for utility to be defined exist in a reasonable way, allowing for comparison through a formalized utility function. One can certainly mathurbate themselves with utility, and many do, but ultimately utility is a discussion to simplify communication (instead of primitives) about why people make preditible choices. It extends pretty quickly to revealed preferences. Of course, asking where preferences come from in the first place is a third rail.
howscrewedami 5y ago
I'm having issues understanding this: > let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the suburbs. Everything's okay so far. But then he says this: > Nagel’s view is this: if you say that you would live in the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are not a utilitarian Didn't the author just say moving to the suburbs creates more utility in total?? And now he's saying moving to the city is what creates more utility?
- notinty 5y ago
  Yeah I had to reread it a few times, it's just a mistake. Of course maybe the kid being more accessible to doctors might increase the doctors' utility, but that's not what he meant.
- samglover97 5y ago
  Author here, thanks for catching that error.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jonahbenton 5y ago
I wish very much that explainers of of this kind NOT center around exemplars on the individual level. In practice there is no applicability of political philosophy on the individual level, only absurdity. Where there is some value to this work is at scale policy. One's only hope for fairness, equity- any qualities of importance- depends on modeling and quantifying. All models are wrong but in these cases it is incumbent to try to make them as useful as possible.
- eluusive 5y ago
  OTOH, maybe politicians shouldn’t be trying to meddle in the wellbeing of individuals beyond providing access to infrastructure and policing?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    There is room for more systemic improvement than that, surely. Or do you count education, social safety net, basic healthcare as infrastructure?
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    How do we measure "should" or "shouldn't" there? Answering whether you're right or wrong requires looking at the alternatives and seeing whether political programs that go beyond infrastructure and policing create a better world. There are arguably answers from all over the world that they do: universal healthcare and education are obvious ones.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  An ethics for society is pointless as society has neither subjectivity nor moral agency. You may as well draw up a system of ethics for the weather. All ethics is individual ethics, as individual subjectivity is the only subjectivity, and individual moral agency is the only moral agency.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    So call it an ethics for society's leaders. They do have moral agency, but we expect them to channel their individual subjectivity in a certain way.
eluusive 5y ago
Seems fine until you do this kind of stuff over “identity groups.” This view taken beyond an individual level seems to be the cause of the current negative social situation.
rovingEngine 5y ago
For those looking for more support (or criticism) for this way of thinking, the reasoning behind the priority view is quite similar to John Rawls’ arguments that people would adopt a maximin (making the least good outcome as good as possible) strategy when behind the “veil of ignorance” (imagining setting up a society in which you don’t know how advantaged or disadvantaged you’ll be). Here’s more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Like the "prisoner" example in the prisoner's dilemma, I feel this example adds a lot of baggage that makes things harder to understand or easier to misunderstand. If we boil it right down then would you give 11 points of utility to a random billionaire or 10 points to a random poor person. Most people would feel the 10 units would do more good, but I think by the terms of the setup, that's actually impossible since 11 is more than 10. But probably most people would give to the random poor person if we were talking about 100 dollars, not 100 util points, which presumably translates to many more utils for the poor person. I think many people would also be "prioritarians" because they think it maximise utility but this example confuses matters as there's second order effects on other people's happiness to consider. I get the feeling people will answer the second question when asked the first, though they're quite distinct, one is easily graspable and the other very abstract. If you try to convert back from slightly more util points for the rich person to cash then it might translate into "would you give a poor person .0001 of a penny vs give a rich person 100 dollars" where the utility of each is closer and the choice seems kind of irrelevant because neither really benefits. Once you scale it to something that the poor person would notice, you'd need to give many millions to the billionaire, at which point the diminishing returns kick in and so you end up with something absurd like give a poor person 5 dollars, versus give Billionaire 5 trillion, at which point you'd be creating so much extra utility out of thin air that some of it is maybe going to spill over to others (or lead to the Billionaire becoming King of the World and/or God and then have negative effects). Which still doesn't really shed much light on things as you're now imagining how all that extra util wealth will impact others in a complex sequence of utility impacts and transfers.
- geysersam 5y ago
  I think your analysis is correct for many people, myself included. Even though I know the premise of the thought experiment is that the gifted boy receives more utility, that is just too hard to believe to take seriously. Your billionaire example makes the situation more clean and less influenced by my inability to accept the facts of the situation. If choosing between giving Bezos $100 or some dude $0.00001 I would probably just give the $100. The even cleaner version of this problem is the utility monster mentioned in the article.
pavlov 5y ago
> “The suburbs has benefits for your gifted son - the levels of the crime in the city are fairly high, the cost of living is higher and so your home would be smaller, and so on.” What a strange argument. I realize it’s more of a thought experiment, but the benefits of a city’s cultural life are obviously greater for a gifted child than having more space at home. If you were a talented 15-year-old, would you prefer to live in Manhattan or a New Jersey suburb?
thirdplace_ 5y ago
My layman thoughts: The concept of utils as a common denominator for peoples value judgements or well-being is a dead-end. Economists use utils but that's only for working with ordinal preferences in math. I do think that ultimately, people are guided by consequences even when following strict principles. E.g. not negotiating with terrorists leads to better outcomes in the long run. Time is an essential component in these deliberations. Human action is decided by peoples' preferences. Preferences are a list of desired outcomes. They are ordinal. They are personal to each individual. Valuations can be thought of as moving up the list of desired outcomes. The most desired alternative has special names: goals and ends. Since preferences are ordinal they can't be summed. This gives rise to the concept of marginal utility and opportunity cost. Buying a pack of cigarettes is not irrational because preferences are subjective. Might regret it later though but that's simply you modifying your preferences. I would argue though that if you modify your preferences frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  > I would argue though that if you modify your preferences frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later. Would you say that someone who is constantly struggling with their body fitness versus what they would like the level to be be is irrational?
  - thirdplace_ 5y ago
    Yes that's my position. If you have a long-term goal of body-fitness but eat fast food each day then your long term goals are fluctuating wildly. Another possible description of this behaviour is high time-preference, which means your goals are more short-term rather than long-term. Maybe there is a better word for this behaviour than irrationality? We also are treading into difficult areas such as free will etc.
    - safanycom 5y ago
      Akrasia
andjd 5y ago
I realise that this is a thought experiment, so refuting the premise is besides the point, but . . . I feel the need to call out the casual assertion that > The suburbs has [net] benefits for your gifted son The zeitgeist has a knee-jerk belief that children are best raised in the suburbs, and I think it's important to assess that belief critically. Children can and do thrive in cities. To pick just one example children, especially teenagers, have a lot more agency and independence when they live in walkable neighborhoods with a robust public transit network. In the typical suburb, anything beyond playing with friends who live on the same street requires a parent to drive them around. This harms the utility of both the children and the parents.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  I actually think the housing situation in America is very directly linked to the teenage mental health crisis. From my personal experience, when I was under 18, my entire life revolved around school (which was 90% lectured by teacher and 10% socializing) and taking the bus home (the nearest other home was door-to-door ten minutes away), then being alone at home. The only other transit options was a bizarre after-school bus which took until 7 to get home or getting a ride from my parents. In such an environment, it makes sense kids would feel isolated and alone. In my present life my work/home/play is much more balanced. I have multiple social areas in walking distance from my apartment, the activities during the 'working hours' is a mix of learning, meetings, and productive work. I know I'm a data point of one, but I can't imagine living in the suburbs and NOT being depressed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rileyphone 5y ago
  I think this speaks to the failure of utilitarianism, at least in my mind - notions of "utility" are rooted in subjectivity and subject to chaotic forces in the future. Utilitarianism still remains useful as an ethical and executive framework, but one must be easily preempted by other ethical concerns as in the article, as well as aware of the inherent uncertainty in future outcomes.
mordymoop 5y ago
It is simply a mistake to use constructions such as “utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city”. Utility is first-person relative to the decision-maker. Your assessment of the utility of each outcome is dependent on your subjective preferences relative to the options. You, the decision-maker, do not, and cannot, know the subjective utility values that your two sons would assess to their own outcomes. Subjective utilities are not fungible, you cannot ask Son A how utility he expects and then compare that number with the answer Son B gives you. Thus, if you prefer A to B, yet you somehow wrote down that the utility of B is higher than A, you just made a mistake somewhere. Utility is just a scalar valued encoding of subjective personal preference. If you are using it in some other way, e.g. pretending that you are accurately measuring the subjective utility of your sons (rather than your own subjective preferences) than you are going to get weird and usually useless answers. Some people do use utility in such a way that they assign numbers to other people’s well-being, but doing this always leads to unresolveable paradoxes such as the Repugnant Conclusion, because it’s just not how people think and decide, nor should it be.
dotsam 5y ago
I have not read Parfit's paper, but in the article only the utilities of the gifted and disabled boys are considered and the utility of the parent is neglected. This gives a partial view, because the decision of a parent sensitive to utility will also need to account for the utility cost / benefit to themselves of the move (e.g. if they will decrease their own utility by feeling guilty about favouring one child's utility more than the other).
deleted 5y ago
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logicalmonster 5y ago
This might be a bit of an odd comment in this kind of thread, but when reading this article, the concept of the Priority View discussed here reminded me of an episode from the TV show Malcolm in the Middle. I definitely remember some of the plot details wrong, but I believe that one of the teachers hated Reese, a very dumb loser, and was purposely trying to fail him. So his brother Malcolm, a very gifted student, cheated on behalf of Reese to save him. They get caught, and the teacher presented Malcolm's mom with the choice of which child's future to save: either reporting Malcolm for cheating and possibly ruining the only one in the family with a bright future, or just failing Reese and letting a loser with no future get a head start on failing at life. She unhesitatingly said that she would sacrifice Malcolm to save Reese because Malcolm would land on his feet and be ok no matter the circumstance.
- sg47 5y ago
  Reese would have failed regardless. Not sure saving him in this instance would have made a difference. In fact, letting him fail early might have been better.
- n4r9 5y ago
  Ah I remember that one, the point was that the teacher was giving Reece bad grades no matter what he submitted. This became clear when he cheated by handing in something that Malcolm had written and still got an F (I think). Lois demanded he give Reece a good grade or she'd out him, even if it made Malcolm look bad, because Malcolm would do fine in life either way. That show had some great plotlines.
- AvocadoCake 5y ago
  Your memory is very close. Here is the relevant scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-uZztJEcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-uZztJEcQ
jolux 5y ago
Isn’t this just Rawls’s theory of justice? That the inequalities that exist in a society should be arranged to benefit the people who have it worst?
- dsizzle 5y ago
  They do seem similar in that they attempt to address shortcomings in utilitarianism but Rawls seem to reject the utilitarian framework in favor of justice whereas this is more of a tweak.
  - jolux 5y ago
    Ah, yes. The utilitarian angle is important, Rawls is more of a deontologist.
    - ucarion 5y ago
      Section 3 of the linked Parfit article touches on the notion that Rawls's distinction is mostly one of framing, not of actual recommendations: "Third, Rawls regards Utilitarians as his main opponents. At the level of theory, he may be right. But the questions I have been discussing are, in practice, more important. If nature gave to some of us more resources, have we a moral claim to keep these resources, and the wealth they bring? If we happen to be born with greater talents, and in consequence produce more, have we a claim to greater rewards? In practical terms, Rawls's main opponents are those who answer Yes to such questions. Egalitarians and Utilitarians both answer No. Both agree that such inequalities are not justified. In this disagreement, Rawls, Mill, and Sidgwick are on the same side." That said, to your original point, Rawls does espouse maximizing for the least well-off ("maximin"). The "priority view" doesn't need to be so extreme. It can simply be biased toward improving the lot of the badly-off, rather than putting an absolute priority on the worst-off member of the population. They are definitely related, but it's muddled by Rawls's (somewhat inconsistent) rejection of a consequentialist framing.
mgraczyk 5y ago
This article gets at the basic idea of a subfield of economics called "welfare economics". The general problem is, how do you combine individual well-beings into an aggregate to make decisions that affect multiple people? We can also answer questions like "Given certain assumptions about bargaining outcomes (nash equilibria etc) what aggregation function will rational actors come to on their own?" This article presents a "priority view" as a contrasting moral view to "pure utilitarianism" and wonders why the view hasn't caught on outside of moral philosophy. The answer is that it has, and outside of philosophy we have models of aggregate utility that subsume both of the moral views in the article. This was a very active field from the 1930s-1970s, and now most of the interesting work here IMO is done in the cryptocurrency space (trying to find ways to prevent forks or incentivize participants to be pro-social). The two points of view described in this article are just two specific "social welfare functions" we could optimize for. There are many others. The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function (maximize the minimum individual utility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining The "pure utilitarianism" view is not a bargaining solution, but it's known as the "Benthamite" social welfare function (maximize the sum of individual utilities).
- jpfed 5y ago
  I'm curious about whether anyone has studied using the harmonic mean (or at least, the reciprocal of the sum of reciprocals) as a way of aggregating utilities. I haven't had time to research this, but the thought repeatedly occurs to me as I have kids that are gifted in a school district that is especially concerned with the gap in achievement between the highest and lowest performers. I can't shake the feeling that what they really should want is a measure that prioritizes helping the lowest performers but does not consider the performance of the highest performers to have literally negative value, and the harmonic mean fits that bill.
- sprucevoid 5y ago
  > The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function No, that is a common misunderstanding, especially understandable here since some of OP's formulations also conflate the two. If you're an econ person a good text that puts the prioritarian view in context is Matthew Adler's 2020 Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. I'd also recommend that book to anyone here who claimed e.g. "we can't compare across persons!" but who is open to reading a case against that claim.
benlivengood 5y ago
Priority can be mathematically stated as maximizing the minimum expected utility across a set of people's utility functions instead of maximizing the additive or average expected utility. It still suffers from the utility monster who can make trivial inconveniences as numerically terrible as the worst life imaginable for other people, dragging the world down to a merely comfortable level for everyone else, which may frustrate the desire to thrive and grow in those other people. It caps the effect at not letting anyone else be worse off, which seems desirable over alternatives. It potentially leaves a lot of good on the table to avoid the risk of a lot of harm. It sounds like a good initial optimization strategy until we figure out how to unify disparate agents' utility functions into a global optimization problem if that turns out to be possible.
glitchc 5y ago
The article feels like a very wordy way of saying that it may be better to optimize the overall utility than individual utility. Social welfare captures this notion in economic theory and maximizing social welfare is often a cited motive for macroeconomic policies.
sdrabing 5y ago
This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.
pkdpic 5y ago
> Prioritarianism, or the priority view, is a view within ethics and political philosophy that holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well-being across all individuals with extra weight given to worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism resembles utilitarianism. From Wikipedia, just for context...
artfulhippo 5y ago
Supporters and resistors of the utilitarian framing of benefits of (sub)urbanity are both being over-simplistic. Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis. In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of others). So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of one's ability to predict the future.
rackjack 5y ago
Isn't this related to proportionality? Giving somebody with only $1 another dollar increases their wealth by 100%. Giving somebody with $1 million another two dollars increases their wealth much less, proportionally.
tshaddox 5y ago
> There is also a catch in the hypothetical - let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. I think that stretches credulity too far, so a utilitarian shouldn’t be expected to accept the far-fetched assumption. Imagine if it said “let’s assume that depriving your disabled son of food for a week and giving the extra food to your gifted son would increase total utility, would you do it?” Or “let’s assume that giving $1 from a poor person to a billionaire would increase total utility, would you do it?” You don’t get free reign to make ludicrous assumptions and expect me to agree to them to prove that I’m a utilitarian.
splittingTimes 5y ago
"the utility monster: one person receives much more utility from each unit of resource they consume than anyone else does. For a utilitarian, it follows that every resource ought to be directed towards the utility monster in order to maximise total utility." That is exactly the reality people see day by day in their work life/ business environment. If you have a business unit that creates more return per unit resources input than another one, the former is always favored. Our whole society fetishizes efficiency, constant improvement and economic growth/success that it has entered into all parts of human life and interactions. So it is no wonder that the more moral priority view has and never will gain mainstream application, as it goes against the grain of the current ideology.
kvee 5y ago
Is there some threshold of utility that people should have beyond which prioritarians would not or should not feel a need to give utils to a person? Sort of like "make at least $XX for the place you live to be happy"? If we assume there is, would a prioritarian view be to get people to that threshold, and then just utilitarianism?

159 points by akbarnama 5y ago

My main take-away from this is that political philosophy must not spend much time with actual data if this is the level of numeric discourse. The models they use for very complicated decisions like the one described seem just crashingly unsubtle from this.

steve_g 5y ago

This is an interesting way to think about why utilitarianism doesn't alway comport with our moral intuitions. But I was really hoping this article would be about a user interface for business applications.

hungryforcodes 5y ago
...or a To Do list app with a priority view.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

This seems like simply another version of utilitiarianism, but with a nonlinear utility function.

onos 5y ago
It seems that the priority view may feel intuitive because humans fail to internalize that the diminishing returns are already baked into utility gained from some benefit and they are trying to insert it a second time.
flaviojuvenal 5y ago
And lack of knowledge about Prospect Theory.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  How does prospect theory apply to the scenario as proposed?
  - flaviojuvenal 5y ago
    The article states: "you might consider a small amount of happiness for someone who is depressed to have more moral value than a larger amount of happiness for someone who is already fairly happy". For me this looks like the prospect theory curve: the depressed friend is at a loss, so you assign greater value to their happiness gains, regardless of the real utility.
derbOac 5y ago
I agree although you could turn it on its head and say it's also a good example of how utilitarianism loses its explanatory power because it can explain away anything just by changing the utilities. The problem with utility has always been in defining the utilities.

k2xl 5y ago

I don’t agree with the premise of applying numbers in these hypothetical trolly level like situations. Humans aren’t numbers, and you could never calculate a utility value or predict with certainty what would happen if you make a choice to make these hypotheticals useful in my opinion. But playing along, while moving to the suburbs or city is a common decision to make for families, I would argue that the priority view is the same as utility. The priority raises the value/score itself. Let’s say hypothetically you could go out to dinner to help talk a depressed friend out of suicide or you could go to a once in a lifetime meeting with an investor to pitch him on a startup idea about helping prevent suicides. Now i would argue the decision is a bit more murky. In one you have a probability of helping prevent one suicide in short term and in a other you have a probability of helping prevent multiple suicides in the long term.

Ensorceled 5y ago
That is the whole point of moral philosophy, to try to both model how humans make moral decision and help us make better moral choices. To just wave away the work of hundreds of philosophers over hundreds of years with "it's murky" ... maybe philosophers already understand that.
endisneigh 5y ago
I don't understand what's murky about your hypothetical as proposed. Go help the depressed friend. Even if you successfully pitched the startup to the investor the utility gained ultimately is indeterminate vs. the very immediate and real utility gained from a successful suicide (presumably permanent) prevented. Your example though is good to illustrate the fallacy of "end justifies the means" type thinking. When you suppose the outcome (talking to the investor leads to the startup being created which then presumably prevents suicides) for one scenario but not for the other the entire thing is meaningless. With these types of scenarios you can see the error by applying one scenario and overlaying it on the other: 1. Talk a friend out of a suicide who does (2) 2. Engage in a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity for suicide prevention. Clearly 1 includes 2, so 2 is the answer. You might say that's not the scenario you posed, which is true, but I'd counter and say that's the issue with contrived examples to begin with.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

ITT, utilitarians discover diminishing marginal utility.

randallsquared 5y ago
Surely that doesn't apply here, given the utility numbers we're assuming? Rather, it's presumed to be priced in already.
- recursivedoubts 5y ago
  Rather, I think this is utilitarians struggling to "price in" an obvious observation about society and moral reasoning. Which is, of course, ridiculous, since there is no such thing as general utility, but this is utilitarians we are talking about, unfortunately.
  - sprucevoid 5y ago
    A general utility claim: One person suffering from the severest form of migraine is bad. Two persons suffering from the severest form of migraine is twice as bad. Here's another: one person suffering from the severest form of migraine is worse than one person experiencing a mild itch.
    - recursivedoubts 5y ago
      Yeah, that's wrong. The suffering is subjective and calling it "twice as bad" is spurious. This is one of the core errors of utilitarianism, the idea that "utility" can be objectively measured and compared between different humans, and thereby, treat moral reasoning like a math equation.
      - sprucevoid 5y ago
        The suffering is only subjective in the sense that a particular migraine is generated in a particular brain where only one person, me the subject, has direct experience access to it. But migrains and brains are biological processes in a physical world. My brain is't magically different from other brains so I can reason to the conclusion that a maximally severe migraine in another person's brain is equally awful and bad. Both my brain and theirs are part of the world and the states of our brains partly constitutes how good or bad the world is at a particular time. A world with two severe migraines is twice as bad as a world with only one.

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

The terminology chosen is terrible, "priority" in this context is self referential and doesn't mean anything. All those (equality, utility, ...) are strategies to define the priority in the face of scarcity or competing requirements, so to call one of them "priority" is nonsense. The author is basically saying that: - Equality strategy is to prioritize decreasing differences. (OK) - Utility strategy is prioritizing maximizing the sum total of a set utility function. (OK) - Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!)

Ensorceled 5y ago
> Priority strategy is prioritizing priority. (WTF!!!) From the article: "Parfit’s answer is that we might value priority, which is prioritising the well-being of the worst off."

kwhitefoot 5y ago

This is surely a fairly highly rated idea. At least where I live now and where I come from (at the time I lived there) it was regarded as more important to raise the standard of the poorest students than to raise the standard of the top performers for instance. At least when I was in primary school my teachers spent more time with those who found studying difficult than those of us for whom it came easy. It was made clear to me as a high achiever that help was always available but, as it was clear that I could work on my own, that I was expected to do so. It also surely accords with the Marx's slogan: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs[1]" Perhaps this idea isn't so popular as it used to be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

cousin_it 5y ago
It's interesting because neither helping the strongest students, nor helping the weakest, has any reason to be maximally beneficial to society. From pure utilitarian point of view, we should first help those students who would get the most benefit per hour of help. That probably means the middling ones who just need a hand to get them over a hurdle, not the checked-out ones and not the superstars.
- onos 5y ago
  That’s a great, practical point. One anecdote about smart kids though: i knew a number of very smart boys growing up who got bored at school and checked out for that reason, and life didn’t work out great for them - nor did society benefit from the very positive productivity they might have been capable of. I think they’d have done better with appropriate challenges.
  - slx26 5y ago
    I always talked about ideas since I was a kid and got lots of applauses, but no one ever bothered to actually take my hand and try to explore with me. I didn't simply get bored, I ended up in complete social isolation. In my personal case, neglection actually runs deeper and beyond the educative system, but if you fail to "get people on board", any other metric will be irrelevant.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Read like the parable of the lost sheep from the Bible: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?”

hprotagonist 5y ago
“hey! no, you idiots: the least of these, god dammit!!” is the plaintive cry of all the prophets, about half the psalms, and a fair bit of the new testament.

paganel 5y ago

> Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. The thing is that day-to-day life doesn't provide those "scores" when it comes to humans and their interactions, life is not a video-game (even though we certainly do try our best at transforming it into that). Writing down that one could assign scores in such a scenario is normative, i.e. we take for granted that such scores are possible and, even more (that's what makes it normative, imo) we somehow impose on the reader the notion that he/she should regard this score-setting as a fact of life, as normal, at the limit that the reader herself should join the game of assigning scores to human actions.

vincnetas 5y ago
I think this is inevitable when you try to abstract and systematise anything. You cant think about big and complex things will all details in mind. You abstract. Same way you don't see a person in front of you as collection of millions cels. You see it as an entity.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >You abstract. The danger is that you end up with a "perfectly spherical cow" that you base your arguments then on, and your abstraction-based results then have no bearing whatsover to the real world.
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    I'm not saying that you must follow your abstractions blindly. At the end you must always test your theory against reality and adjust if reality contradicts your assumptions.
IshKebab 5y ago
Such scores are clearly possible. If you define a one-dimensional scale you can project everything onto it. Clearly you lose a lot of information in doing so, but if your scale is "overall utility" of some kind and that utility is the only thing you care about, then of course you can do it. In principle anyway - you can't actually calculate someone's utility. It's a thought experiment.

rjrodger 5y ago

Is this not equivalent to medical triage? Those who will die anyway, and those who will live anyway, get no immediate treatment (apart from morphine). Those who will not survive without treatment, get the resources. Thus: move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do just fine in life. Have dinner with the depressed friend, because the happy friend will enjoy the concert anyway. Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism.

visarga 5y ago
Maybe the gifted teenager by getting priority early on would be able to better support his brother later in life. Parents aren't going to be around in old age.
michaelt 5y ago
> Have dinner with the depressed friend [...] Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism. Well, the problem is specifically stated as the concert having higher total utility.
DarylZero 5y ago
> move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do just fine in life Why would you make this assumption though.

evrydayhustling 5y ago

Maybe prioritarianism is similar to increasing average log-utility... A sort of social Kelly criterion [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

numeromancer 5y ago

> "Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80,..." Argument discarded.

notinty 5y ago
Lots of people are getting hung up on the measurement. The key word is "imagine" y'know.
- numeromancer 5y ago
  Imagine that the Imagination Quotient is a number between 0 and 1, with 0 being the inability to imagine even what you're looking at, and 1 representing the ability to imagine a real thing unseen in full detail. The Imagination Quotient required to imagine that someone's utility is 80 is would be an proper imaginary number.
  - notinty 5y ago
    I can't even imagine the Imagination Quotient required for some social scores.

visarga 5y ago

Am I right to conclude that priority view applied to college admissions would mean favouring the worst students, because they have the largest marginal utility?

deleted 5y ago
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coldtea 5y ago

>There is also a catch in the hypothetical - let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the suburbs. Nagel’s view is this: if you say that you would live in the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are not a utilitarian (at least in all circumstances), but rather an egalitarian. You value the equality of the boys more than you do maximising the overall levels of well-being. The very idea that there is some measusable "utility" to compare in the two cases, independent from your moral values and sentiments, is inane. >Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. What that "utility" unit would measure? Money they can make for you? Their pontential on their own? Their future contribution to society (in what terms? monetary? intellectual?)? Any other of 500 factors (perhaps combined)? What if you don't want to help build a society that neglects the needs of disabled people because of their lesser contribution, and thus your utility function - ie. your desired goal maximization includes helping the disabled son? In the examples, it is assumed that ulility == favoring gifted son, which means the utility function you'll use is taken for granted (and the whole thing is presented as only a matter of whether you value utility or not).

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
I have ambiguous feelings about that example, not sure if I'm just being woke. It does feel a bit stereotypical to use a disabled child as the first example of someone with lower utility. You wouldn't think of starting an example with a gifted son and a black son.
tomrod 5y ago
Utility is a fundamental concept in decision theory. Arguing it cannot exist is the opposite extreme to arguing that homo economicus, with superhuman evaluative strategies and no gaps in rationality, exists. People can compare their current situations to relative improvement, and often those are transitive (though not always). So in most reasonable cases the mathematical axioms needed for utility to be defined exist in a reasonable way, allowing for comparison through a formalized utility function. One can certainly mathurbate themselves with utility, and many do, but ultimately utility is a discussion to simplify communication (instead of primitives) about why people make preditible choices. It extends pretty quickly to revealed preferences. Of course, asking where preferences come from in the first place is a third rail.

howscrewedami 5y ago

I'm having issues understanding this: > let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the suburbs. Everything's okay so far. But then he says this: > Nagel’s view is this: if you say that you would live in the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are not a utilitarian Didn't the author just say moving to the suburbs creates more utility in total?? And now he's saying moving to the city is what creates more utility?

notinty 5y ago
Yeah I had to reread it a few times, it's just a mistake. Of course maybe the kid being more accessible to doctors might increase the doctors' utility, but that's not what he meant.
samglover97 5y ago
Author here, thanks for catching that error.
deleted 5y ago
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jonahbenton 5y ago

I wish very much that explainers of of this kind NOT center around exemplars on the individual level. In practice there is no applicability of political philosophy on the individual level, only absurdity. Where there is some value to this work is at scale policy. One's only hope for fairness, equity- any qualities of importance- depends on modeling and quantifying. All models are wrong but in these cases it is incumbent to try to make them as useful as possible.

eluusive 5y ago
OTOH, maybe politicians shouldn’t be trying to meddle in the wellbeing of individuals beyond providing access to infrastructure and policing?
- tomrod 5y ago
  There is room for more systemic improvement than that, surely. Or do you count education, social safety net, basic healthcare as infrastructure?
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  How do we measure "should" or "shouldn't" there? Answering whether you're right or wrong requires looking at the alternatives and seeing whether political programs that go beyond infrastructure and policing create a better world. There are arguably answers from all over the world that they do: universal healthcare and education are obvious ones.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
An ethics for society is pointless as society has neither subjectivity nor moral agency. You may as well draw up a system of ethics for the weather. All ethics is individual ethics, as individual subjectivity is the only subjectivity, and individual moral agency is the only moral agency.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  So call it an ethics for society's leaders. They do have moral agency, but we expect them to channel their individual subjectivity in a certain way.

eluusive 5y ago

Seems fine until you do this kind of stuff over “identity groups.” This view taken beyond an individual level seems to be the cause of the current negative social situation.

rovingEngine 5y ago

For those looking for more support (or criticism) for this way of thinking, the reasoning behind the priority view is quite similar to John Rawls’ arguments that people would adopt a maximin (making the least good outcome as good as possible) strategy when behind the “veil of ignorance” (imagining setting up a society in which you don’t know how advantaged or disadvantaged you’ll be). Here’s more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Like the "prisoner" example in the prisoner's dilemma, I feel this example adds a lot of baggage that makes things harder to understand or easier to misunderstand. If we boil it right down then would you give 11 points of utility to a random billionaire or 10 points to a random poor person. Most people would feel the 10 units would do more good, but I think by the terms of the setup, that's actually impossible since 11 is more than 10. But probably most people would give to the random poor person if we were talking about 100 dollars, not 100 util points, which presumably translates to many more utils for the poor person. I think many people would also be "prioritarians" because they think it maximise utility but this example confuses matters as there's second order effects on other people's happiness to consider. I get the feeling people will answer the second question when asked the first, though they're quite distinct, one is easily graspable and the other very abstract. If you try to convert back from slightly more util points for the rich person to cash then it might translate into "would you give a poor person .0001 of a penny vs give a rich person 100 dollars" where the utility of each is closer and the choice seems kind of irrelevant because neither really benefits. Once you scale it to something that the poor person would notice, you'd need to give many millions to the billionaire, at which point the diminishing returns kick in and so you end up with something absurd like give a poor person 5 dollars, versus give Billionaire 5 trillion, at which point you'd be creating so much extra utility out of thin air that some of it is maybe going to spill over to others (or lead to the Billionaire becoming King of the World and/or God and then have negative effects). Which still doesn't really shed much light on things as you're now imagining how all that extra util wealth will impact others in a complex sequence of utility impacts and transfers.

geysersam 5y ago
I think your analysis is correct for many people, myself included. Even though I know the premise of the thought experiment is that the gifted boy receives more utility, that is just too hard to believe to take seriously. Your billionaire example makes the situation more clean and less influenced by my inability to accept the facts of the situation. If choosing between giving Bezos $100 or some dude $0.00001 I would probably just give the $100. The even cleaner version of this problem is the utility monster mentioned in the article.

pavlov 5y ago

> “The suburbs has benefits for your gifted son - the levels of the crime in the city are fairly high, the cost of living is higher and so your home would be smaller, and so on.” What a strange argument. I realize it’s more of a thought experiment, but the benefits of a city’s cultural life are obviously greater for a gifted child than having more space at home. If you were a talented 15-year-old, would you prefer to live in Manhattan or a New Jersey suburb?

thirdplace_ 5y ago

My layman thoughts: The concept of utils as a common denominator for peoples value judgements or well-being is a dead-end. Economists use utils but that's only for working with ordinal preferences in math. I do think that ultimately, people are guided by consequences even when following strict principles. E.g. not negotiating with terrorists leads to better outcomes in the long run. Time is an essential component in these deliberations. Human action is decided by peoples' preferences. Preferences are a list of desired outcomes. They are ordinal. They are personal to each individual. Valuations can be thought of as moving up the list of desired outcomes. The most desired alternative has special names: goals and ends. Since preferences are ordinal they can't be summed. This gives rise to the concept of marginal utility and opportunity cost. Buying a pack of cigarettes is not irrational because preferences are subjective. Might regret it later though but that's simply you modifying your preferences. I would argue though that if you modify your preferences frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later.

jstummbillig 5y ago
> I would argue though that if you modify your preferences frequently, you are indeed an irrational person. E.g. buying a pack of cigarettes and always regretting it later. Would you say that someone who is constantly struggling with their body fitness versus what they would like the level to be be is irrational?
- thirdplace_ 5y ago
  Yes that's my position. If you have a long-term goal of body-fitness but eat fast food each day then your long term goals are fluctuating wildly. Another possible description of this behaviour is high time-preference, which means your goals are more short-term rather than long-term. Maybe there is a better word for this behaviour than irrationality? We also are treading into difficult areas such as free will etc.
  - safanycom 5y ago
    Akrasia

andjd 5y ago

I realise that this is a thought experiment, so refuting the premise is besides the point, but . . . I feel the need to call out the casual assertion that > The suburbs has [net] benefits for your gifted son The zeitgeist has a knee-jerk belief that children are best raised in the suburbs, and I think it's important to assess that belief critically. Children can and do thrive in cities. To pick just one example children, especially teenagers, have a lot more agency and independence when they live in walkable neighborhoods with a robust public transit network. In the typical suburb, anything beyond playing with friends who live on the same street requires a parent to drive them around. This harms the utility of both the children and the parents.

SQueeeeeL 5y ago
I actually think the housing situation in America is very directly linked to the teenage mental health crisis. From my personal experience, when I was under 18, my entire life revolved around school (which was 90% lectured by teacher and 10% socializing) and taking the bus home (the nearest other home was door-to-door ten minutes away), then being alone at home. The only other transit options was a bizarre after-school bus which took until 7 to get home or getting a ride from my parents. In such an environment, it makes sense kids would feel isolated and alone. In my present life my work/home/play is much more balanced. I have multiple social areas in walking distance from my apartment, the activities during the 'working hours' is a mix of learning, meetings, and productive work. I know I'm a data point of one, but I can't imagine living in the suburbs and NOT being depressed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rileyphone 5y ago
I think this speaks to the failure of utilitarianism, at least in my mind - notions of "utility" are rooted in subjectivity and subject to chaotic forces in the future. Utilitarianism still remains useful as an ethical and executive framework, but one must be easily preempted by other ethical concerns as in the article, as well as aware of the inherent uncertainty in future outcomes.

mordymoop 5y ago

It is simply a mistake to use constructions such as “utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city”. Utility is first-person relative to the decision-maker. Your assessment of the utility of each outcome is dependent on your subjective preferences relative to the options. You, the decision-maker, do not, and cannot, know the subjective utility values that your two sons would assess to their own outcomes. Subjective utilities are not fungible, you cannot ask Son A how utility he expects and then compare that number with the answer Son B gives you. Thus, if you prefer A to B, yet you somehow wrote down that the utility of B is higher than A, you just made a mistake somewhere. Utility is just a scalar valued encoding of subjective personal preference. If you are using it in some other way, e.g. pretending that you are accurately measuring the subjective utility of your sons (rather than your own subjective preferences) than you are going to get weird and usually useless answers. Some people do use utility in such a way that they assign numbers to other people’s well-being, but doing this always leads to unresolveable paradoxes such as the Repugnant Conclusion, because it’s just not how people think and decide, nor should it be.

dotsam 5y ago

I have not read Parfit's paper, but in the article only the utilities of the gifted and disabled boys are considered and the utility of the parent is neglected. This gives a partial view, because the decision of a parent sensitive to utility will also need to account for the utility cost / benefit to themselves of the move (e.g. if they will decrease their own utility by feeling guilty about favouring one child's utility more than the other).

deleted 5y ago

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logicalmonster 5y ago

This might be a bit of an odd comment in this kind of thread, but when reading this article, the concept of the Priority View discussed here reminded me of an episode from the TV show Malcolm in the Middle. I definitely remember some of the plot details wrong, but I believe that one of the teachers hated Reese, a very dumb loser, and was purposely trying to fail him. So his brother Malcolm, a very gifted student, cheated on behalf of Reese to save him. They get caught, and the teacher presented Malcolm's mom with the choice of which child's future to save: either reporting Malcolm for cheating and possibly ruining the only one in the family with a bright future, or just failing Reese and letting a loser with no future get a head start on failing at life. She unhesitatingly said that she would sacrifice Malcolm to save Reese because Malcolm would land on his feet and be ok no matter the circumstance.

sg47 5y ago
Reese would have failed regardless. Not sure saving him in this instance would have made a difference. In fact, letting him fail early might have been better.
n4r9 5y ago
Ah I remember that one, the point was that the teacher was giving Reece bad grades no matter what he submitted. This became clear when he cheated by handing in something that Malcolm had written and still got an F (I think). Lois demanded he give Reece a good grade or she'd out him, even if it made Malcolm look bad, because Malcolm would do fine in life either way. That show had some great plotlines.
AvocadoCake 5y ago
Your memory is very close. Here is the relevant scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-uZztJEcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-uZztJEcQ

jolux 5y ago

Isn’t this just Rawls’s theory of justice? That the inequalities that exist in a society should be arranged to benefit the people who have it worst?

dsizzle 5y ago
They do seem similar in that they attempt to address shortcomings in utilitarianism but Rawls seem to reject the utilitarian framework in favor of justice whereas this is more of a tweak.
- jolux 5y ago
  Ah, yes. The utilitarian angle is important, Rawls is more of a deontologist.
  - ucarion 5y ago
    Section 3 of the linked Parfit article touches on the notion that Rawls's distinction is mostly one of framing, not of actual recommendations: "Third, Rawls regards Utilitarians as his main opponents. At the level of theory, he may be right. But the questions I have been discussing are, in practice, more important. If nature gave to some of us more resources, have we a moral claim to keep these resources, and the wealth they bring? If we happen to be born with greater talents, and in consequence produce more, have we a claim to greater rewards? In practical terms, Rawls's main opponents are those who answer Yes to such questions. Egalitarians and Utilitarians both answer No. Both agree that such inequalities are not justified. In this disagreement, Rawls, Mill, and Sidgwick are on the same side." That said, to your original point, Rawls does espouse maximizing for the least well-off ("maximin"). The "priority view" doesn't need to be so extreme. It can simply be biased toward improving the lot of the badly-off, rather than putting an absolute priority on the worst-off member of the population. They are definitely related, but it's muddled by Rawls's (somewhat inconsistent) rejection of a consequentialist framing.

mgraczyk 5y ago

This article gets at the basic idea of a subfield of economics called "welfare economics". The general problem is, how do you combine individual well-beings into an aggregate to make decisions that affect multiple people? We can also answer questions like "Given certain assumptions about bargaining outcomes (nash equilibria etc) what aggregation function will rational actors come to on their own?" This article presents a "priority view" as a contrasting moral view to "pure utilitarianism" and wonders why the view hasn't caught on outside of moral philosophy. The answer is that it has, and outside of philosophy we have models of aggregate utility that subsume both of the moral views in the article. This was a very active field from the 1930s-1970s, and now most of the interesting work here IMO is done in the cryptocurrency space (trying to find ways to prevent forks or incentivize participants to be pro-social). The two points of view described in this article are just two specific "social welfare functions" we could optimize for. There are many others. The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function (maximize the minimum individual utility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining The "pure utilitarianism" view is not a bargaining solution, but it's known as the "Benthamite" social welfare function (maximize the sum of individual utilities).

jpfed 5y ago
I'm curious about whether anyone has studied using the harmonic mean (or at least, the reciprocal of the sum of reciprocals) as a way of aggregating utilities. I haven't had time to research this, but the thought repeatedly occurs to me as I have kids that are gifted in a school district that is especially concerned with the gap in achievement between the highest and lowest performers. I can't shake the feeling that what they really should want is a measure that prioritizes helping the lowest performers but does not consider the performance of the highest performers to have literally negative value, and the harmonic mean fits that bill.
sprucevoid 5y ago
> The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function No, that is a common misunderstanding, especially understandable here since some of OP's formulations also conflate the two. If you're an econ person a good text that puts the prioritarian view in context is Matthew Adler's 2020 Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. I'd also recommend that book to anyone here who claimed e.g. "we can't compare across persons!" but who is open to reading a case against that claim.

benlivengood 5y ago

Priority can be mathematically stated as maximizing the minimum expected utility across a set of people's utility functions instead of maximizing the additive or average expected utility. It still suffers from the utility monster who can make trivial inconveniences as numerically terrible as the worst life imaginable for other people, dragging the world down to a merely comfortable level for everyone else, which may frustrate the desire to thrive and grow in those other people. It caps the effect at not letting anyone else be worse off, which seems desirable over alternatives. It potentially leaves a lot of good on the table to avoid the risk of a lot of harm. It sounds like a good initial optimization strategy until we figure out how to unify disparate agents' utility functions into a global optimization problem if that turns out to be possible.

glitchc 5y ago

The article feels like a very wordy way of saying that it may be better to optimize the overall utility than individual utility. Social welfare captures this notion in economic theory and maximizing social welfare is often a cited motive for macroeconomic policies.

sdrabing 5y ago

This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.

pkdpic 5y ago

> Prioritarianism, or the priority view, is a view within ethics and political philosophy that holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well-being across all individuals with extra weight given to worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism resembles utilitarianism. From Wikipedia, just for context...

artfulhippo 5y ago

Supporters and resistors of the utilitarian framing of benefits of (sub)urbanity are both being over-simplistic. Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis. In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of others). So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of one's ability to predict the future.

rackjack 5y ago

Isn't this related to proportionality? Giving somebody with only $1 another dollar increases their wealth by 100%. Giving somebody with $1 million another two dollars increases their wealth much less, proportionally.

tshaddox 5y ago

> There is also a catch in the hypothetical - let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. I think that stretches credulity too far, so a utilitarian shouldn’t be expected to accept the far-fetched assumption. Imagine if it said “let’s assume that depriving your disabled son of food for a week and giving the extra food to your gifted son would increase total utility, would you do it?” Or “let’s assume that giving $1 from a poor person to a billionaire would increase total utility, would you do it?” You don’t get free reign to make ludicrous assumptions and expect me to agree to them to prove that I’m a utilitarian.

splittingTimes 5y ago

"the utility monster: one person receives much more utility from each unit of resource they consume than anyone else does. For a utilitarian, it follows that every resource ought to be directed towards the utility monster in order to maximise total utility." That is exactly the reality people see day by day in their work life/ business environment. If you have a business unit that creates more return per unit resources input than another one, the former is always favored. Our whole society fetishizes efficiency, constant improvement and economic growth/success that it has entered into all parts of human life and interactions. So it is no wonder that the more moral priority view has and never will gain mainstream application, as it goes against the grain of the current ideology.

kvee 5y ago

Is there some threshold of utility that people should have beyond which prioritarians would not or should not feel a need to give utils to a person? Sort of like "make at least $XX for the place you live to be happy"? If we assume there is, would a prioritarian view be to get people to that threshold, and then just utilitarianism?