Mistakes in the Best of the Best Value

Should we demand the best for the greatest price? (And, really, should the word “we” mean a numerical majority?) The Trolley problem in philosophy raised this issue. I was reminded of that in economist and philosopher Michael Munger’s interesting article, “Adam Smith Found (and Solved!) The Trolley Problem” (June 28, 2023), and in the following Econtalk podcast.

A specific approach to the Trolley problem was developed by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in a 1967 article. Imagine seeing a runaway wagon speeding down a steep road and about to crash and kill five men working on the track. But he is close to the switch that can divert the carriage to another track when only one man is working. None of the men saw the carriage coming. You are sure that if you change the track, only one will die instead of five. Should you change it, like the employee did?

If you answered yes, consider a similar problem (quoting from Munger’s article):

Five people in the hospital will die tomorrow if they do not receive, in order: (a) a heart transplant; (b) liver transplantation; (c) and (d) kidney transplantation; and (e) transfusion of blood of an abnormal blood type. There is a sixth person in the hospital who, by an amazing coincidence, looks exactly like the donor of the five of them. If the head surgeon does nothing, five people will die tonight, with no hope of living until tomorrow.

Assuming there is no legal risk (the government is run by charity workers who want the best at the highest cost and are interested in cost analysis), should a master surgeon kill a donor to harvest his organs and save five lives? To answer this question, most people may change their minds and refuse to abuse the use they supported in the previous Trolley crisis. Why?

Munger says that Adam Smith made another example of the Trolley problem in his 1859 book Theory of Moral Sentiments and they found a formula to solve it. Smith didn’t put it that way, but his solution points to the difference between intentionally killing an innocent person, which is clearly immoral, and allowing him to die for independent reasons, which is not necessarily immoral. Drowning someone to death is immoral, but not saving a drowning person may not be. Shooting an African child on purpose is murder; not giving $100 to a charity that could save his life is not a crime.

A recent argument by Philippa Foot (see Chapter 5 of her book Moral Issues: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy [Oxford University Press, 2002]) explains that the basic fundamental difference is “between initiating a destructive sequence of events and not interfering to prevent it” (this brief description of his full argument appears in the abstract of his article). More precisely, he writes:

A question that worries us has been asked if we are to blame for allowing people in Third countries to die of hunger as we can kill them by sending poisoned food?

Emphasizing the moral principle, the basic principle is that

Sometimes it is permissible to allow some harm to befall someone, even though it would be wrong to bring this harm to one’s own agency, by establishing or supporting a succession that brings harm.

In his 2021 book Knowledge, Truth, and Value, the libertarian-anarchist philosopher Michael Huemer also considers the Trolley problem and arrives at a similar solution, albeit in a very different extreme case. His philosophical approach is “intuitionism,” as the book’s subtitle suggests: A Common Sense Guide to Philosophy. (My second Regulation review, “A Broad Philosopher of Liberty, Reasonable and Rigorous,” gives a flavor of this book and his. The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Enforce and the Duty of Obedience [2013].)

Anthony de Jasay’s criticism of resource interaction as a reason for (coercive) government intervention is based on the simple economic observation that there is no scientific basis for comparing resources between individuals; for example, it makes no sense to say that saving five men saves “more help” than killing one. Aid declarations, he writes, “do not lie, they will always say so against your will.” (See my review of his Econlib We are against politics.)

What is certain is that utilitarianism, and certainly “practice utilitarianism” (as opposed to “rule utilitarianism”), does not work, except in the most extreme and unpleasant cases – such as “stealing Elon Musk $20 without realizing it and transferring money to someone a homeless person would create total assistance,” that is, Musk will lose less assistance than a poor person would gain. Even if this statement seems reasonable, we cannot predict the behavior of a single person, only general categories of events: maybe that homeless person will spend $20 to buy cheap alcohol, get drunk, and kill the mother and her baby, would be a second Beethoven. He might even be a useful monster, who gets more “gain” from his injuries than he loses. Even if a homeless person uses his $20 to buy a used copy of John Hicks Theory of Economic History, the story of his “gift” may spread and lead to billions of greedy people clamoring for a similar transfer from Musk. Or they may want $20 billion to go directly to the government to subsidize them.

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I have tried hard that DALL-E (latest version) represents a simplified version of Philippa Foot’s Trolley problem. Despite my detailed explanations, “he” couldn’t understand-which is really not surprising. Even the sight of a fork in the trolley line with five workers on one side and one on the other, he couldn’t stand it. Finally I asked him to draw a runaway wagon with one track and five workers in the middle. The images he produced were among his most impressive works, as you can see in the featured image of this post. Because of her poor performance, I mentally apologized to Philippa Foot (who died at the age of 90 in 2010) and instructed DALL-E to add to the picture “an elderly, noble woman (philosopher Philippa Foot) in deep thought and looking at the oncoming trolley .” In this simple task, the robot did very well.