drug war, utilitarianism
By Scott Sumner
I'm increasingly of the view that most of the great evils of human history result from the tendency of people to think in terms of "us and them", instead of "all 7.3 billion of us." That includes the past mistreatment of indigenous peoples, slaves, Jews, Roma, gays, landlords, capitalists, immigrants and many other groups. It's the flaw in imperialism, racism, nationalism, theocracy, fascism, feudalism, communism and lots of other isms. Except utilitarianism, which treats everyone's well being as having equal worth.
Consider the following intro to a recent Atlantic story:
Kevin Simmers is a former police sergeant in Hagerstown, Maryland. During his tenure as a narcotics officer, he aggressively pursued drug arrests—especially those related to heroin. "I believed my entire life that incarceration was the answer to this drug war," Simmers says in a new documentary from The Atlantic.
Then his 18-year-old daughter, Brooke, became addicted to opioids.
In the short film, Simmers shares the personal tragedy that led to a radical transformation in his ideology. "I did everything wrong here," he admits. "I now think the whole drug war is total bull****."
Could you imagine this anecdote with "bank robberies" replacing drug crimes? Me neither. So this is not just about a cop's views being biased by personal considerations. Policemen don't suddenly favor legalizing bank robbery just because their daughter gets caught up in the activity.
This is just another example of the "us and them" problem. As long as the drug addicts were seen as "them", Kevin Simmers had no reservations about locking them up. As soon as it was his daughter, he could see that these were real people, with real feelings.
When considering whom to vote for, the first thing I do is to consider the candidate's stance toward utilitarianism, not their views on specific issues. Do they think in terms of "we", or do they divide society up into good guys and enemies. Well-intentioned policy mistakes by "we-focused" people can be fixed; bad intentions by "us and them" people are much more dangerous.
Categories: Economics of Crime Moral Reasoning
Nov 18 2018 at 3:43pm
Good post. I'm not personally a utilitarian, but I would prefer that my politicians behaved that way. Unfortunately I can't think of many that fit that description, but maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention.
Kevin Erdmann
Smithee
What does this lead you to think about animal rights? If the history of moral progress has proven that, as time goes on, we expand the circle of things we're willing to care about, doesn't it seem that the next big step is to care about animals? Do you think our great-grandchildren will look back at us in horror?
Nov 19 2018 at 7:46am
Nice observation.
Matthias Goergens
Nov 19 2018 at 10:39am
Gwern has some good argumentd against this platitude.
https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle
What is Roma?
Fortunately, one ism that is not subject to your criticism of isms is libertarianism. It doesn't have this flaw. You need not be a utilitarian to avoid thinking in terms of "us and them." Consistent libertarians do it all the time because they grant, not that everyone's well-being has equal worth, but that everyone has the same rights.
Plato's Revenge
Roma is one of the names the people otherwise known as Gypsies use for themselves. I think it simply means "Man" in their language
equal rights are a great (the only?) way to operationalize equal worth
Smithee, I agree.
David, The Roma are also known as Gypsies.
I am afraid to ask. Does capitalism create divisions which promote an "us versus them" thinking?
Not in theory from 30,000 feet, but on the ground.
And in libertarianism, overt racism and ethnocentrism is tolerated. Some might say divisions would be promoted if, say, private bus companies have sections of their bus which are reserved by race. Bars and restaurants and exclude patronage by signage.
I happen to prefer free markets, but I have concluded that theories and ideologies become theologies in the real world.
Every division among people is a possible basis for "us versus them" thinking. Capitalism doesn't "create" or render important any more divisions than socialism.
Ahmed Fares
Well, except for the little problem that evil does not exist.
"Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue." —Franz Kafka
Incidentally, Kafka was Jewish. And while he did not live to see the Holocaust, having died in 1924, he would have been quite familiar with the Jewish pogroms and purges. And yet he wrote this.
I agree that thinking in terms of "us and them" or "us vs. them" is a problem. I don't know if we'll be free of this thinking any time soon. For example, I've noticed in social media young adults criticizing Trump for engaging in this type of thinking. Yet they never notice they engage in the same pattern of behavior when they latch onto beliefs that baby boomers or the establishment are to blame for the ills of the world. Nor were they ever bothered by Bernie's rhetoric blaming non-white foreign workers for job woes even though this rhetoric sounded like something that could have come from Trump or Bannon. For young adults, an "us vs. them" mentality is only a problem if they don't like the criteria used to decide who goes into which groups. Yet, they are just as willing as Trump to embrace some criteria to place people in a "them" category as a target for their anger.
E. Harding
Nov 18 2018 at 10:51pm
"Could you imagine this anecdote with "bank robberies" replacing drug crimes?"
"So this is not just about a cop's views being biased by personal considerations."
"Well-intentioned policy mistakes by "we-focused" people can be fixed; bad intentions by "us and them" people are much more dangerous."
Not the case. The important thing is always to support the candidates who will protect you and people like you and who are your friends. Else your back will be crushed by the tide of impoverished rent-seekers.
Harding, Can you link to an article discussing policemen coming out in favor of legalizing bank robbery, murder, car theft, or other such crimes? Thanks.
Aren't there many instances of policemen covering-up for their fellow officers and favoring lenient sentences for fellow policemen convicted of crimes? Last year, Alex Tabarrok blogged about cards issued to family members of policemen, which they can present when they've been pulled over for traffic violations to be let off without a ticket. Isn't this essentially what the whole concept of "the thin blue line" is? Many law enforcement officers are against breaking the law until their fellow cops are the ones found breaking the law.
It's still "us vs them" thinking, of course, so it doesn't jeopardize your overall point in the slightest. But this certainly does happen.
Police may protect and favor each other, but that doesn't mean that they believe those crimes should be legalized. If Simmers's daughter robbed a bank, he might try to protect her from prosecution, but that wouldn't mean that he wanted to legalize bank robbery.
Many people break laws even though they agree that those activities should be illegal. A burgler does not steal because he thinks burglary should be legal.
Thanks. That's a good reply, and sounds right to me.
I don't think that cards to get out of speeding tickets count. If the war on drugs can be recognized as an unproductive waste, then a police officer might also reasonably believe many traffic stops to be unfair revenue-generating activities. (And the police officer might indeed have firsthand knowledge that this is so!) Thus, the police officer could perceive themselves as reasonable in working to undermine their effect.
Now, I would agree with you that such a police officer would be unethical/immoral, since excluding the police officer's family just means that more revenue has to be unfairly generated from the rest of society. (This also applies to any attempts to justify tax evasion on grounds that taxes are bad; you're not fixing the problem, just putting more burden on the rest of society.) However, this is just run-of-the-mill unethical behavior on the part of the police officer, not the police officer changing how they perceive the morality of traffic tickets/speeding, and is thus not analogous to the story of Simmers that was posted.
Yes, you're right. I think between your reply and BC's I stand happily corrected. Thank you.
Scott – you continually use the term utilitarianism for "things that I like". I personally don't believe this, but it is reasonable to argue that it is better to stigmatize drug users so that less people use drugs and this overall improve human happiness (i.e. the disutility of the stigmatized people is outweighed by the positive utility of less people using drugs). So I don't see this as a utilitarian argument – in fact this is one of the big problems I and many people have against utilitarianism – it is usually not possible to have a clear answer on what is the highest utility option. I personally am not a moralist at all – I don't believe that there is any consistent moral ethical framework as morality is simply arguments about preferences many of which are hard wired thanks to genes, but my preference is for something like libertarianism – basically setting a very high bar on interfering in other people's lives. This seems to me to what you really believe as well.
I agree, I don't see anything about utilitarianism that necessitates what appears to be Scott's position. Indeed, utilitarianism is perfectly consistent with nationalism (e.g., Yoram Hazony defends nationalism on essentially utilitarian grounds), communism, etc. While it would be unfair to say utilitarianism necessarily leads to such "us vs. them" ideologies, it does not appear to be true that utilitarianism precludes them, as Scott suggests.
But there really are many 'uses' and 'thems.' These aren't mere ideological constructions. People do genuinely have divergent interests and values that are bound to conflict, sometimes violently.
Even in the most crystalline case where you really can identify the most 'utilitarian' policy, where policy A leaves 1 million dead and policy B leaves 2 million dead, and you pick A, do you expect that 1 million people to see themselves as part of "we?" Is it really irrational or wrong for them to see themselves as an "us" up against a "them?"
Many conflicts are surely ideological in nature, but many (I think maybe most) trace back to 'real', irreconcilable conflicts in material interests or core values. I think the "we" is often illusory.
I think the whole point of moral principles are to provide guidelines for dealing with such conflicts. "Us" vs "them" thinking arises when people switch their principles depending on which side their people are on. In your example, someone might have a utilitarian moral philosophy that says pick A, or have some type of deontological philosophy that says pick B (depending on what the specifics of A and B are), and both of those could work as long as they are prepared for sometimes being on the losing side. The problem is when people apply one set of principles when their people are the one million and a different set when their people are the two million.
What I'm arguing is that, even if people accept the principles at the beginning of the 'game', even while it allows for the possibility that might lose, once they find themselves losing, they will (if the loss is high enough) abandon the principles, or the 'rules', of the game. For example, if a region of a country is hit by a terrible famine, even hitherto law-abiding, conscientious citizens who respected private property rights before the famine will likely sooner raid their neighbors property, violating the principles of the system, than let their families starve. So, conflicts of material interest will tend to lead to adversarial relationships between groups even when everyone agrees, a priori, on the principles, because even the most principled people will tend to defer to their interests rather than their principles in extreme circumstances.
Robert EV
For example, if a region of a country is hit by a terrible famine, even hitherto law-abiding, conscientious citizens who respected private property rights before the famine will likely sooner raid their neighbors property, violating the principles of the system, than let their families starve.
We currently operate in nations with "don't let people starve" as a very high principle. It currently trumps private property rights for most people as most people are in favor of being taxed to support WIC, or are in favor of tithing to churches and charities for this purpose, or are in favor of directly giving.
Now if this causes a conflict with a neighbor, then it's likely that the neighbor doesn't subscribe to this commonly held moral policy (i.e. the neighbor is a selfish asshole), or the neighbor fears starving themselves (i.e. you're right in that some people defer to their interests rather than their principles).
Great post. I think many (even almost all) human moralities could work if they were applied evenly to "us" and "them." Even something like nationalism could be good if meant that each country agreed to live according to its own culture and pursue its own interests within its own borders with international disputes solved according to neutral international principles.
The problem is that some ideologies are more prone to us-and-them thinking than others. In practice, nationalism never means the above; it always means "my country can interfere in yours but yours can't interfere in mine." Utilitarianism is attractive because it seems in practice less vulnerable to this trap, but it is not immune either—many people will try to justify their elevation of "us" over "them" on utilitarian grounds even when those grounds are patently absurd (such as the argument that freer immigration would hurt poor countries by brain draining them).
"do they divide society up into good guys and enemies"
What if they divide the world into privileged vs. victims, haves vs. have-nots, or oppressors vs. oppressed? According to Arnold Kling's three-axes model, two of the three axes are us vs. them: civilized vs. barbarians and oppressors vs. oppressed.
The war on drugs looks inexplicable to me. If I cared for neither God nor man I would be against it on the basis of the cost to me of prison and enforcement, and if I'm a humanitarian I would say the enforcement is cruel, and yet it exists and is well supported by voters.
When you vote you should think if you saw your neighbor do some particular illegal thing and you would not call the police on them, either the punishment is too harsh or the thing should be completely legal.
I think attitudes toward the war on drugs may simply reflect a difference between how people think about legality and illegality. 'Illiberal'-minded people think of legality almost as a seal of approval of the action in question. Libertarian-minded people, on the other hand, think, 'should people who do this be arrested and locked in a cage or have their property confiscated?' Arguably, most people think in the latter terms when it comes to people they know personally, but in the former terms when thinking abstractly.
I think many policy issues could be resolved (admittedly, in a much more libertarian manner) if people could be convinced, when considering whether a law or regulation should exist, to ask, "should people who do this be locked in a cell or have there property taken?"
I'm not sure why utilitarianism implies equal weighting. Surely some people enjoy life more than others… if we're maximizing total utility, we need to assign higher weights to those individuals, right? Likewise, wouldn't utilitarianism suggest that we should prefer higher-producing individuals over lower-producing individuals?
If we could only find a wholly WE candidate!!! But since we cannot, we are stuck with which one has a narrower definition of his "us."
I respectfully disagree with the fundamental premise of this article: that we should weigh all 7.3 billion people equally when deciding what to do. Obviously, we do not do that in practice: when we see a stranger collapse on sidewalk, we don't do a utilitarian calculation of "Well, I could spend 10 minutes helping this person get to a hospital, or I could spend 10 minutes writing a mailing a check to help Yemeni starvlings."
So what are we really talking about here? Politics, obviously, and American politics in particular. That is, we are not seriously discussing dissolving all nation states, are we? Because that is the implication. The reason for being of all nation-states is to stand as a barrier between the citizens, the "us", versus the ROW, the "them".
But what would that even be like? Some sort of anarcho-capitalist utopia? Nope. Why? Property rights, property rights, property rights. And meanwhile, under an anarchic system, nationalist uprisings would spontaneously erupt everywhere, and we are back to square one.
So what is really being argued is that American policy should not be directed for what is best for the greatest number of American citizens, but rather for the 7.3 billion. Which begs the natural question the skeptic will ask: "Who among the American citizens would benefit from such a policy arrangement?"
And the answer staring everybody in the face is the American elites, broadly defined to be that 1/3 of the citizenry that has a college degree and whose unemployment rate is below 2%, and who are making above average incomes.
Why? Well, because if the goal is to help out the 7.3 billion, rather than the 330 million, then a twin policy of open immigration combined with radical, unilateral free trade suggests itself. Such a policy will help promote export oriented growth in the developing world, poor immigrants can find a better life in the USA, and their remittances will help out their families who remain behind.
And, of course, here is the beauty part: the 1/3 elite portion of the American citizenry will realize a big fat consumer surplus due to cheap imported goods, and cheap labor, both foreign and domestic.
Meanwhile, the 2/3 (2/3 is a majority) of the citizenry who do not have college degrees and comprise the working class of this country will see their real standard of living either decline, or at best, stagnate as their lives drift to the global average equilibrium.
But hey, it is for the best, right?
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