Multiplicative Factors in Games and Cause Prioritization

TL;DR: If the impacts of two causes add together, it might make sense to heavily prioritize the one with the higher expected value per dollar.  If they multiply, on the other hand, it makes sense to more evenly distribute effort across the causes.  I think that many causes in the effective altruism sphere interact more multiplicatively than additive, implying that it's important to heavily support multiple causes, not just to focus on the most appealing one.

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Part of the effective altruism movement was founded on the idea that, within public health charities, there is an incredibly wide spread between the most effective and least effective.  Effective altruists have recently been coming around to the idea that at least as important is the difference between the most and least effective cause areas.  But while most EAs will agree that global public health interventions are generally more effective, or at least have higher potential, than supporting your local opera house, there's a fair bit of disagreement over what the most effective cause area is.  Global poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, and movement building/meta-EA charities are the most popular, but there are also proponents of first world education, prioritization research, economics, life extension, and a whole host of other issues.

Recently there's been a lot of talk about whether one cause is so important that all other causes are rounding errors compared to it (though some disagreement over what that cause would be!).  The argument, roughly goes: when computing expected impact of causes, mine is 10^30 times higher than any other, so nothing else matters.  For instance, there are 10^58 future humans, so increasing the odds that they exist by even .0001% is still worth 10^44 times more important that anything that impacts current humans. Similar arguments have been made where the "very large number" is the number of animals, or the intractability of a cause, or moral discounting of some group (often future humans or animals).

This line of thinking is implicitly assuming that the impacts of causes add together rather than multiply, and I think that's probably not a very good model.  But first, a foray into games.

Krug Versus Gromp

Imagine that you're playing some game against a friend.  You each have a character--yours is named Krug, and your opponents' is named Gromp.  The characters will eventually battle each other, once, to the death.  They each do some amount of damage per second D, and have some amount of health H.  They'll keep attacking each other continuously until one is dead.

If they fight, then Krug will take H_g / D_k seconds to kill Gromp, and Gromp will take H_k / D_g seconds to kill Krug, with the winner being the one who lasts longer.  Multiply through by D_g*D_k, and you get that the winner is the one who has the higher D*H--what you're trying to maximize is the product of damage per second, and health.  It doesn't matter what your opponent is doing--there's no rock, paper, scissors going on.  You just want to maximize health * damage.

Now let's say that before this fight, you each get to buy items to equip to your character.  You're buying for Krug.  Krug starts out with no health and no damage.  There are two items you can buy: swords that each give 5 damage per second, and shields that each give 20 health.  They both cost $1 each, and you have $100 to spend.  It turns out that the right way to spend your money is to spend $50 buying 50 swords, and $50 buying 50 shields, ending up with 250 damage per second, and 1,000 health.  (You can play around with other options if you want, but I promise this is the best.)

The really cool thing is that your money allocation is totally independent of the cost of swords and shields, and how much damage/health they give.  You should spend half your money on swords and half on shields, no matter what.  If swords cost $10 and gave 1 attack, and shields cost $1 and gave 100 health, you should still spend $50 on each.  One way to think about this is: the nth dollar I spend on swords will increase my damage per second by a factor of n/(n-1), and the nth dollar spent on shields will increase my health by n/(n-1).  Since all I care about is damage * health, I can just pull out these multiplicative factors--the actual scale of the numbers don't matter at all.

This turns out to be a useful way to look at a wide variety of games.  In Magic, 4/4's are better than 2/6's and 6/2's; in League of Legends, bruisers win duels; in Starcraft, Zerglings and Zealots are very strong combat units.  In most games, the most powerful duelers are the units that have comparable amounts of investment in attack and defense.

Sometimes there are other stats that matter, too.  For instance, there might be health, damage per attack, and attacks per second.  In this case your total badassery is the product of all three, and you should spend 1/3 of your money on shields, 1/3 on swords, and 1/3 of caffeine (or whatever makes you attack quickly).  In general most combat stats in games are multiplicative, and you're usually best off spending equal amounts of money on all of them, unless you're specifically incentivized not to (e.g. by getting more and more efficient ways to buy swords the more you spend on swords).  In general, when factors each increase linearly in money spent and multiply with each other, you're best off spending equal amounts of money on each of the factors.  Let's call this the Principle of Distributed Power (PDP).

Multiplicative Causes

So, what does this have to do with effective altruism?

I think that, in practice, the impacts of lots of causes multiply, instead of adding.  For instance, I think that a plausible way to view the future is that expected utility is X * G, where X is the probability that we avoid existential risk and make it to the far future, and G is the goodness of the world we create, assuming we succeed in avoiding x-risk. By the Principle of Distributed Power, you'd want to invest equal amounts of resources on X and G.  But within X there are actually lots of different forms of existential risk--AI, Global Warming, bioterrorism, etc.  And within G, there are lots and lots of factors, each of which might multiply with each other--technological advancement, the care with which we treat animals, ability to effectively govern ourselves, etc.  And the PDP implies that our prior should be to invest comparable resources in each of those terms.

The real world is a lot messier than the battle between Krug and Gromp.  One of the big differences is that the impact of work on most of these causes isn't linear.  If you invest $1M in global warming x-risk maybe you reduce the odds that it destroys us by .01%, but if you invest $10^30 clearly you don't decrease the odds by 10^28%--the odds can't go below 0.  Many of these causes have some best achievable outcome, and so at some point you have to have decreasing marginal utility of resources.

Another difference is that we're not starting from zero on all causes.  The world has already invested billions of dollars in fighting global warming, and so that should be subtracted from the amount that's efficient to further spend on it.  (If you start off with $100 already invested in swords, then your next $100 should be invested in shields before you go back to splitting up your investments.)

In practice, when considering causes that multiply together, the question of how to divide up resources depends on how much has already been invested, where on the probability distribution for that cause you currently think you are, and lots of other practicalities.  In other words, it depends on how much you think it costs to increase your probability of a desired outcome by 1%.

But as long as there are other factors that multiply with it, a factor's importance transfers to them as well.  Which, in some cases, is a fact long ago discovered: the whole reason that x-risk is important is because of how immensely important the future is, which is equally an argument for improving the future and for getting there.

None of this proves anything.  But it's significantly changed my prior, and I now think it's likely that the EA movement should heavily invest in multiple causes, not just one.

I've spend a lot of time in my life trying to decide what the single most important cause is, and pissing other people off by being an asshole when I think I've found it.  I also like playing AD carries.  But my winrate with them isn't very high.  Maybe it's time to build bruiser.

Being a Utilitarian, Part 2: Conventional Charities

This is the second post in a series on actually being a utilitarian in the world; for the first post, look here.  Also, for a more theoretical series on utilitarianism, look here.

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So, say that you're a utilitarian, and you're wondering what to do with your life.  (Even if you're not a utilitarian but are wondering what to do with your life, most of this will apply.)  What should you do?  What, in the current society, can an individual do to make the world a better place?  And what causes should you care about?

Is there anything you can do with your life to make the world a better place?

Being a Utilitarian, Part 1

I've written a series of posts about the different types of utilitarianism arguing for aggregate, classical, act, one-level utilitarianism.  I haven't, however, talked at all about what it would mean to be a utilitarian in the real world.

In the real world, obviously, you aren't faced with a series of trolley problems or utility monsters.  If you don't think about it very much, you might conclude that utilitarianism isn't actually useful because you can't calculate the total utility of each possible action.

However, as it turns out, utilitarianism can be useful even if you don't know the exact state of the universe.

In future posts I'll examine thornier, more wide-reaching issues, but for now I'll just talk about one issue--the first issue that I actually thought about in utilitarian terms.  For people familiar with utilitarianism it probably won't be that interesting or revolutionary, but it's a good way to remind yourself that just because a theory is complicated doesn't mean approximations can't be useful.  (It also parallels an argument Peter Singer has made on the subject.)

Newcomb's Decision

This post is partially a continuation of my previous posts on utilitarianism, and partially on philosophy in general; mostly, it's my two cents on one of the odder parts of consequentialist debate: decision theories.

Newcomb's Paradox

You, a mere mortal, encounter P, some super smart alien.  Or maybe it's a supercomputer, or maybe a god; versions of the paradox differ on this.  P comes up to you and says: "I have a deal for you.  I'm going to give you two boxes--box A, and box B.  Box B is transparent, and you can see $1,000 in it.  You can't see what's in box A.  I'm going to give you two choices.  The first is to take box A--you get whatever is in it.  The other choice is to take both boxes--you get box A, plus the $1,000 from box B."

So, you ask, why don't you take both boxes, getting the free $1,000?  Well, says P, there's a catch: "I have predicted whether you will take one box or two boxes."  (Or maybe I've simulated all of the atoms in the universe, or maybe studied your psychology, or maybe something else--versions of the paradox differ in how P knows how many boxes you're going to take.  But however he knows it, you believe him; maybe he has, in the past, predicted everyone who's taken this challenge successfully.)  "So I know what you're going to do", says P, "and before you arrived I decided how much money to put in box A.  If I predicted that you were going to take only box A, I put $1,000,000 in it.  Otherwise--if I predicted that you were going to take both boxes--I left box A empty."

"So", says P, "How many boxes do you want to take?"

Utilitarianism, part 6: To do, or not to do

This is the sixth post in a series about utilitarianism.  For an introduction, see the first post.  For a look at total vs. average utilitarianism, see here.  For a discussion of act vs. rule, hedonistic vs two level, and classical vs. negative utilitarianism, see here.  For a response to the utility monster and repugnant conclusion, see here.  And for a look at whether to count lives not yet in being, see here.


Also, note that I'm now putting page breaks in the middle of my posts so that you can see more than one on the front page...
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I'm going to start off by making a note about something slightly different from the content of this post.  Earlier, I defined a philosophy as a preference ordering on all possible universes; the ordering had to be transitive, reflexive, etc.  Basically, a philosophy is something that compares any two possible universes;  in other words, it tells you which options are the best (if you have complete information, that is).  Perhaps for you a philosophy is something different.  Maybe it's something that compares some situations but doesn't say anything about other comparisons.  Maybe it's a binary function that calls all actions either morally permissable or impermissable.  Maybe it is a framwork to look at actions that doesn't necssarily tell you which are best, but instead some other difficult to define properties of them.  Probabily it's a mechanism to justify your current way of life.  Anyway, if you don't think a philosophy should be a preference ordering on possible universes, there's probably very little I can do to convince you, just as if you think faith is more important than evidence or that gut instincts are more important that statistics in baseball there's probably little I can do to convince you.  But from now on I am using that definition, and will look critically upon philosophies that fail to create a preference ordering.

Act and Omission

Anyway, there is a large debate in philosophy about whether taking an action should be treated asymetrically from failing to take an action--the act/omission distinction.  There are many phrasings of the problem, but here is one of the more famous ones: the trolley problem.  The trolley problem is a thought experiment in which you, the actor, are near some trolley tracks.  The tracks split, and past the split there are currently five people tied to one of the tracks, and three tied to the other.  You're standing next to the lever which controls which path the trolley takes; in the first version of the problem the lever is currently such that three people will do, and in the second version of the problem the lever is currently such that the trolley will run over and kill the five people.  A trolley is coming.  You have time to pull the lever, if you want, but not to untie any of the people.  In the first version it's pretty clear you don't pull the lever--not only are you causing the death of five people, but you're only saving three by doing it.  But how about the seond version?  Do you pull the lever and switch the trolley, kiling three other people, or not do anything and let the first five people die?  That is, do you act, or not?  And should morality treat the omission of action, which results in two extra deaths, the same way it would the action of killing two people?  In other words, are these two scenarios the same?  Does it matter which way the lever is currently pointing?

Utilitarianism, part 5: Who Counts?

This is the fifth post in a series about utilitarianism.  For an introduction, see the first post.  For a look at total vs. average utilitarianism, see here.  For a discussion of act vs. rule, hedonistic vs two level, and classical vs. negative utilitarianism, see here.  For a response to the utility monster and repugnant conclusion, see here.

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Another question that sometimes gets asked about utilitarianism is: who, exactly, is included in the calculation of world utility when evaluating possible scenarios?  People alive now?  People who would be alive then?  People who will live no matter what?  This is a question which is also often bundled into total vs. average utilitarianism, but I've already written on that here, and, I hope, demonstrated that average utilitarianism doesn't work.  I've also attempted to refute the "repugnant conclusion", the most commonly leveled criticism against total utilitarianism, with the "Sam is Great" rule here.  So I will assume that no matter what group of  people counts, the correct thing to do with them is to total up their utility in order to evaluate a scenario.

The first thing to note is that total utilitarianism naturally handles the somewhat unpleasant question  of whether dead people matter, and if so at exactly what point someone is "dead": dead people have zero utility and so won't affect the total utility of the world anyway.  You should include them in the calculation the whole time, but it will stop mattering once their dead enough to not feel any pain or pleasure.

Not Yet Living

The most common form of not counting some people in utilitarian calculations is generally called prior-existance utilitarianism, which states than when calculating the utility of possible universes you should only include people who are already alive, i.e. not people who will be born sometime between the current time and the time that you are analyzing.  There are a number of variants on this, but the central idea is the same: there are some people who shouldn't yet count for evaluating the utility of future scenarios.

This idea, however, has two damning flaws.  To understand the first flaw, look at the following scenarios.

The Future Pain Sink

There are currently ten people in the world W, each with utility 1 (where 0 is the utility of the dead).  You are one of the ten, and trying to decide whether to press a button which would have the following effect: a person would be born with -10 utility for the rest of their life, which would last for 100 years, and you would gain 1 happiness for a year.  (If you like, you can imagine a much more realistic version of "pressing the button" which results in short-term pleasure gain in return for an increase in unhappy population, but for the sake of reducing complications I will stick to the button model.)  Do you press the button?  Well, if you are a prior-existence utilitarianism, you would do it: you don't care about the not-yet-existing person's utility.  You would prefer the button-pressed universe to the non-button-pressed one, because the ten existing people would be net happier, and so you would press the button.  But then the new person comes into being, and you value its utility.  And now you prefer the universe where you hadn't pressed the button to the one where you had, even though you haven't yet gotten any of the positive effects of the button press.  You disagree with your past self, even though nothing unexpected has happened.  Everything went exactly as planned. In fact, your past self could have predicted that your future self would, rationally, disagree with your current self on whether to press the button.

The Once King

Now, say that you're the king of an empire, the only empire on earth.  You could manage your grain resources well, saving up enough for future years, encourage farming practices that preserve the soil, and reduce carbon emissions from anachronistic factories--in short, you could make some small short term sacrifices in order to let your kingdom flourish in fifty years.  But the year is 1000, and so no currently living people are going to be able to survive that long except yourself (being a king, you have access to the best doctors of the age).  And so, even though you're a utilitarian, you don't plan for the long term because it'll help people not yet born.  But then fifty years pass and your kingdom is falling into ruin--and all of your subjects are suffering.  And so you curse your past self for having been so insensitive to your current universe.

The problem with both of these scenarios, and in general with prior-existence utilitarianism, is that your utility function is essentially changing over time: its domain is the set of living people, a set which is constantly changing.  And so your utility function will disagree with its past and future selves; it will not be consistent over time.  This will give some really weird results, like someone repeatedly pressing a button, then un-pressing it, then pressing it again, etc., as your utility function goes back and forth between including a person and not including them.  Any morality had better be constant in time, or it's going to behave really weirdly.

The second flaw is much simpler: why don't you care about future generations' happiness?  Why did you think this would be a good philosophy in the first place?  Why would you be totally insensitive to some people's utilities because of when they're born?  Their happiness and their pain will be just as real as the current peoples', and to ignore it would be incredibly short-sighted, and a little bit bizarre, like a bad approximation to attempting to weigh your friends' utilities more than strangers'.

Friends and Family (and Self)

Speaking of which, the other common form of valuing people differently comes in valuing people close to you more (call it self-preferential utilitarianism).  So, for instance, you might weight your own happiness with an extra factor of 1,000, your immediate family's with a factor of 100, and your friends with a factor of 10, or something like that.

Let me first say that there are of course good practical reasons to generally worry more about your own utility, and that of close friends and family, than that of strangers: it's often a lot easier to influence your own utility than someone you've never heard of before; you can easily have significant control on your own life and the lives of those close to you; and maintaining close relationships (and living a reasonably well off life, at least by global standards) can help to prevent burnout.  But this is all already built into normal utilitarianism; to the extent that the utilitarian thing to do is to make people happy by talking to them and hanging out with them it's naturally going to be the case that this is best done with friends because you already have an established connection with them, you know that you'll get along with them, and it'd be difficult to find a random person and have an interesting conversation with them.  Once again, it's important to make sure not to double count intuitions by explicitly adding a term for something that is already implicitly taken care of.

Even if you are undeterred by this and want to weigh friends, family and self more than strangers, as a philosophy this is going to run into more problems.  First, to the extent that your friend base changes over time you could run into the same problems as prior-existence utilitarianism has with non-constant utility functions.  Second, it has the weird property that two people will disagree about what the right thing to do is even if they have the same information and see the same options for how the universe should be.  Third, as a consequence of this everyone being an optimal friend-preference utilitarian would, in many circumstances, be dominated by everyone being normal utilitarians.  The easiest example of that is the prisoner's dilemma.  Say there are two people in the world, A and B; each have a button they could press that would make them 1 util happier but cost the other 2 utils.  If both are self-preferential utilitarians they would both push the button, leaving both worse off than if they had both acted as normal utilitarians--even by self-preferential utilitarian metrics.  That is to say, everyone following self-preferential utilitarianism does not always lead to the optimal self-preferential outcome for everyone, and can in fact be dominated by other strategies that everyone could follow.  Now that's not a problem with a way to describe people's motivations behind their actions, but it seems a bit weird to endorse a philosophy that produces sub-optimal results by its own measure.  Fourth, there comes the sticky question of exactly what weights each person gets, and how that's decided.

All of these problems, in the end, come from the fact that self-preferential utilitarianism took utilitarianism and added an arbitrary, hard to define, non-universal, non-constant in time wrench into it.  This is the downfall of many flavors of utilitarianism; I've made similar points about average utilitarianism, negative utilitarianism, and high/low pleasure utilitarianism.  Like with average utilitarianism, in the end in some sense the problem with self-preferential utilitarianism is that it's not normal utilitarianism.

The astute observer will note that there is another divide in utilitarianism that would fit well under this title.  But it deserves quite a bit more space than this, and so it will have to wait until a later day.

The Utilitarian Boogeymen

This is my fourth in a series of posts on utilitarianism.  The first is an introduction.  The second is a post on average vs. total utilitarianism.  The third is a post on act vs. rule, classical vs. negative, and hedonistic vs. high/low pleasure utilitarianism.

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This post is a response to various objections people often claim to utilitarianism.

The Repugnant Conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion (or mere addition pradox) is a thought experiment designed by Derek Parfit, mean as a critique of total utilitarianism.  The thought experiment goes roughly as such:  Suppose that there are 1,000 people on Earth, each with happiness 2.  Well, a total utilitarian would prefer that there be 10,000 people each with happiness 1, or even better 100,000 people each with happiness 0.5, etc., leading eventually to lots and lots and lots of people each with almost no utility: in fact, for any arbitrarily small (but positive) utility U, there is a number of people N such that one would prefer N people at U utility to a given situation.  This, says Parfit, is repugnant.

I would argue, however, that this potential earth--with e.g 1,000,000,000 people, each with 0.015 utils of happiness, is far from a dystopia.  First of all, it is important to realize that this conclusion only holds as long as U--the happiness per person--remains positive; when U becomes negative, adding more people just decreases total utility.  So, when imagining this potential planet it's important not to think of trillions of people being tortured; instead it's trillions of people living marginally good lives--lives worth living.

Still many people have the intuition that 1,000,000,000,000, people at happiness 2 (Option A) is better than 1,000,000,000,000,000 people with  happiness 1 (Option B).  But I posit that this comes not from a flaw in total utilitarianism, but instead from a flaw in human intuition.  You remember those really big numbers with lots of zeros that I listed earlier in this paragraph?  What were they?  Many of you probably didn't even bother counting the zeros, instead just registering them as "a really big number" and "another really big number, which I guess kind of has to be bigger than the first really big number for Sam's point to make sense, so it probably is."  In fact, English doesn't even really have a good word for the second number ("quadrillion" sounds like the kind of think a ten year old would invent to impress a friend).  The point--a point that has been supported by research--is that humans don't fundamentally understand numbers above about four.  If I show you two dots you know there are two; you know there are exactly two, and that that's twice one.  If I show you thirteen dots, you have to count them.

And so when presented with Options A and B from above, people really read them as (A): some big number of people with happiness 2, and (B): another really big number of people with  happiness 1.  We don't really know how to handle the big numbers--a quadrillion is just another big number, kind of like ten thousand, or eighteen.  And so we mentally skip over them.  But 2, and 1: those we understand, and we understand that 2 is twice as big as one, and that if you're offered the choice between 2 and 1, 2 is better.  And so we're inclined to prefer Option A: because we fundamentally don't understand the fact that in option B, one thousand times as many people are given the chance to live.  Those are entire families, societies, countries, that only get the chance to exist if you pick option B; and by construction of the thought experiment, they want to exist, and will have meaningful existences, even if they're not as meaningful on a per-capita basis as in option A.

Fundamentally, even though the human mind is really bad at understanding it, 1,000,000,000,000,000 is a lot bigger than 1,000,000,000,000; in fact the difference dwarfs the difference between things we do understand, like the winning percentages of the Yankees versus that of the Royals, or the numbers 2 and 1.  And who are we to deny existence to those 900,000,000,000,000 people because we're too lazy to count the zeros?

I have one more quibble with Parfit's presentation of the thought experiment: the name.  Naming a thought experiment "The Repugnant Conclusion" is kind of like naming a bill "The Patriot Act" so that you can call anyone who votes against it unpatriotic.  I'm all in favor of being candid about your thoughts, but do so in analysis and discussion, not in naming, because a name is something that everyone is obliged to agree with you on.

By the way, I'm naming the above thought experiment the "if-you-disagree-with-Sam-Bankman-Fried-on-this-then-you-probably-have-a-crush-on-Lord-Voldemort conclusion", or "Sam Is Great" for short, and would appreciate it if it were referred to as such.

The Utility Monster

The Utility Monster is the other of the two famous anti-utilitarianism thought experiments.  There are a few different version of it running around.  All of the versions revolve around a hypothetical creature known as the Utility Monster.  In some versions it gains immense amounts of pleasure from torturing people--more pleasure than the pain they feel--and in others it simply gains more pleasure than others from consuming resources, e.g. food, energy, etc., and so the utilitarian solution would be to allow it all the resources, while the rest of humanity either withers off or continues a greatly diminished existence.

There's something that seems intuitively wrong about giving all societal resources to one utility monster, but what's going on here is really the same thing as the intuition behind negative utilitarianism:  because it's so much easier to make someone feel really bad (e.g. torture them) than really good, no normal person would come close to being able to gain from consuming the world's resources anything close to the losses associated with seven billion tortured people.  In fact if you took a random person and gave them unlimited resources, it's unlikely they'd be able to make up for a single tortured person (especially given the lack of basically any happiness gained from income above about $75,000).  In order to make up an additional factor of seven billion, the utility monster in question would have to be a creature that behaves fundamentally differently from any creature we've ever encountered.  In other words, in order for utilitarianism to disagree with out intuitions and endorse a utility monster, the situation would have to be way outside the set of situations we have ever encountered.

And, in fact, it would be a little bit weird if the optimal decisions didn't disagree with our moral intuitions in weird-ass situations, because our intuitions are not meant to deal with them.  This is a phenomenon frequently seen in physics: when you get to extreme situations outside of the size/speed ranges humans generally interact with, our intuitions are wrong.  It seems really weird that if you travel the speed of light you don't age relative to the rest of the universe, but that's because our intuitions were developed for 10 mile per hour situations, not for the speed of light.  It seems really weird that objects do not have well defined positions or velocities but are instead complex-valued probability distributions floating through space, but that's because our intuitions weren't developed to deal with electrons.  It seems really weird that snapping a piece of plutonium into smaller pieces can destroy a city, but it can.

Long story short, utility monsters are generally really bad bargains even for a utilitarian, and trying to work around it is just double-counting this effect (like negative utilitarianism double counts our intuition that it's harder to be really happy than really sad).  And when a utility monster really is the utilitarian option, you're in a really bizarre situation that we shouldn't expect out intuitions to work in any way.

I Don Care About Morality

One of the more common responses I get to utilitarianism is some combination of "well screw morality", "you can't define happiness", and "the universe has no preferred morality".  And all of these are, in a sense, true: in the end it's probably not possible to truly define happiness, and the universe does not have a preferred morality.  And all of these things are fine things to use to reject utilitarianism, as long as you wouldn't have any objections to any possible universes, including ones in which you and/or other people are being tortured en mass for no good reason.  But as soon as you say that it's "wrong" to steal or torture or murder, you've accepted morality; as soon as you say that it's bad to be racist or sexist or you have political positions you've accepted morality.  You can't have it both ways.

Please, sir, can I have some more?

Perhaps the most common response I get to utilitarianism, however, is a combination of two statements.  The first, roughly speaking, is "then why aren't you just high all the time?"; the second, roughly, is "then why aren't you in Africa helping out poor kids?"  Yes, these two statements are contradictory; and yes, I often hear them together, at the same time, from the same people.  I'm going to ignore the first statement because it's just wrong, and instead  focus on the second.

Imagine that you lived in a universe where the marginal utility of your 5th hour of time after work was greater volunteering at a soup kitchen than hanging out with friends.  (It's probably not too big a stretch of your imagination.)  Well, it's probably also true of the fourth hour after work.  And the third...  At some point you might start to loose sanity from working/volunteering to much and/or your productivity might significantly decline, but until that point it seems that utilitarianism says that if you've decided that some of your time--or money--can be better spent on others than on yourself, well, then, why not more of it?  Why not all of it?

I'm going to write much more on this later, but for now I have two points.  The first is that this, truly, is why people aren't utilitarians: in the end what scares people most about utilitarianism is that it encourages selflessness.  And the second point is that it would be really weird if a philosophy held that selfishness was good for the wold.  Yes, of course dedicating some of your life to making the world a better place is good, and of course donating more is better.  Defecting on prisoner's dilemmas is bad, and cooperating is good.

I don't, of course, believe that everyone does or ever really will act totally selflessly and totally in the interest of the world, but to argue that they shouldn't is sacrificing an almost tautologically true statement in an effort to reclaim the possibility that you're acting "well enough".

Next up: taking issue with decision theories.

Utilitarianism, part 3: Classical, Act, One Level

This is part three in a series of posts on utilitarianism.  For an introduction, see part one.  For a discussion of total vs. average utilitarianism, see part two.

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In this post I'm going to address a number of divisions in utilitarianism that don't require quite so much space as total vs. average utilitarianism.

High/low pleasure vs. Hedonistic utilitarianism

High/low pleasure or two-level utilitarianism is the thought that some forms of pleasure are intrinsically better than others, independent of their function for society.  Hedonistic utilitarianism rejects this claim.

But why invent this distinction in the first place?  In general adding new rules to a philosophy should be looked upon critically: they often just serve as ways for people to save themselves from the consequences of their beliefs, and this is a perfect example of it.  I cannot help but note that in high/low pleasure utilitarianism, the "higher" form of pleasure--the more important one--is intellectual pleasure, and that it is a philosophy invented by intellectuals.  It would be like if I created "Starcraft utilitarianism", which is like normal utilitarianism but pleasure gained playing the Starcraft II computer game is weighted more heavily--a relatively transparent attempt to justify my current activities as worthwhile.  This is not to say, of course, that intellectuals are bad for the world--much of society's advancement is due to them--but they should have to justify their work and lifestyle on their own merits, not by inventing philosophies that arbitrarily favor what they do with their life.

This is all, of course, putting aside the issue of defining what exactly an intellectual pursuit is.

I am a hedonistic utilitarian.

Act vs. Rule utilitarianism

Act utilitarianism is what you usually think of as utilitarianism: the philosophy that you should try to maximize utility.  Rule utilitarianism, roughly, states that when evaluating a rule--for instance, a possible law, or maybe a standard like "bike to work instead of driving" (depending on the particular interpretation of rule utilitarianism), you should evaluate the rule on utilitarian grounds..  It suffers from two quite obvious flaws.  First, what exactly is a rule?  If it's defined as a possible algorithm to follow, then it just reduces to act utilitarianism (e.g. take the set of "rules" designed to produce actions corresponding to the set of possible universes).  Otherwise it's going to be impossible to define rigorously, or even semi-rigorously.  Second, why would you think that utilitarianism would be good for evaluating laws, but not everyday decisions?

This is not to say, of course, that whenever you have to make a decision you should get out a pen and paper and start adding up the utility of everyone in the world.  In many everyday situations the act utilitarian thing to do is to create a (not fully well defined) rule and follow it in unimportant situations to save your brain power for more important things.  When I try to decide how to get to campus I don't spend time calculating the marginal effect that my driving would have on traffic for other drivers; I assume it'd probably make it worse, and that that'd probably decrease their utility.  I also don't calculate the effect on global warming, etc: instead I understand those are all things that incentivize biking over driving, and so as a general matter just bike to campus and spend my time and brain power thinking about much more pressing issues that the world needs to confront, like Tim Lincecum's ERA.  Similarly I would generally be in favor of laws that incentivize biking over driving so as to discourage defections on prisoner's dilemmas, so long as the laws were well designed.  But this is not an argument for rule utilitarianism as a philosophy, just that sometimes it would argue for similar things as act utilitarianism.

For all of  those reasons, I am an act utilitarian.

Classical utilitarianism vs. Negative utilitarianism

The terminology is a bit confused here, so to clarify by this I mean: what is the relative weighting of pain and pleasure?  Classical utilitarianism does not tend to make much of a distinction between the two (or, if you wish, weights them equally), whereas negative utilitarianism weights pain more heavily: sometimes just by an extra factor (i.e. h(p) = Happiness(p) - k*Pain(p) for some k > 1), and sometimes infinitely more, i.e. reducing suffering is always more important than increasing happiness.  Still others try to split the difference between these two types of negative utilitarianism and weight all pain above some threshold infinitely, while pain below it equally the pleasure.

The strictest form of negative utilitarianism is clearly silly; it implies that if anyone anywhere is suffering, than no pleasure for anyone anywhere matters; the threshold version also has this problem to the extent that the threshold is crossed.  In addition neither of these are likely to be linear.

So, I'll just look at the weakest version: that h(p), the happiness of a person, is Happiness(p) - k*Pain(p) for some constant k > 1.  There are a number of problems with this:

1) Are happiness and pain calculated separately for each person, or first added together?  I.e.: say p, at a given point, is feeling 10 utils of happiness and 20 utlils of pain, and say k=2.  Should you be calculating h(p = 10-20*2=-30, or h(p) = h(10-20) = k*(-10)=-20?  The problem with the first version is that it is not going to be linear in how you view an individual's emotions: if you consider all emotions about an upcoming interview as one set of emotions, and everything else as another set, you'll get a different answer than if you consider everything about their hunger as one set  of emotions and everything else as another.  So, let's say that you're going with the second version: then what you're really saying is that you care more about net unhappy people than net happy ones.

2) k is totally arbitrary; why is pain twice as bad as pleasure is good?  Why not 10 times?  Why not 1.001 times?  For that matter, why not 0.7 times?

3) Why do you care about pain more than pleasure in the first place?  The reason, I think, is that you're grabbing on to the following fact about people: it's a lot easier to be really really unhappy than it is to be really really happy; there is just about no experience in the world as good as being tortured is bad.  But that fact will already be reflected in classical utilitarianism; naturally someone who is being tortured will have much more negative utility than someone who won the lottery will have positive utility because that's how humans work, and so the correct actions will care about them more; introducing k is just double counting for that.

For all of these reasons, I am a classical utilitarian.

Utilitarianism part 2: Total, Average, and Linearity

This is the second in a series of posts about utilitarianism.  The first is here.  Before I get started, though, there's one definition I'd like to make: a philosophy is an algorithm that orders all possible universes from best to worst; the ordering has to be transitive, reflexive, and any two universes have to be comparable.

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One of the most contentious issues in intra-utilitarianism debates is how to aggregate utility between different people.  For the sake of this post I will put off discussions of negative vs. classical utilitarianism, high/low pleasure vs. hedonistic utilitarianism, and other distinctions within the measurement of one individual's utility; I'll discuss those in later posts.  I'm also going to postpone discussion of the repugnant conclusion to a later article, though it is relevant to this one.  So, for now assume we have some (as of now only relative) utility function h(p) which takes one person and spits out their utility, and we want to find some function H(w) which takes the world and spits out a utility of the world.

There are two canonical ways to construct H from h.  The first, total or aggregate utilitarianism, is to just total up the happiness of everyone: H(w) = Sum(h(p)) for all p in w.  The second, average utilitarianism, is to average h(p) for every person p: H(w) = (Sum(h(p)) for all p in w)/(population of  w).

Defining Zero

I define zero utility to be the utility of anyone who does not feel anything--for instance, a dead person.  For a longer description of why, see the bottom of the post*.

Problems with Average Utility

There are a number of problems that come up, though, if you try to use average utilitarianism.  I'm going to start by giving a few thought experiments, and then talk about what  it is about average utilitarianism that leads to these conclusions.

The separate planets distinction

First, say that you have to choose between two possible worlds: one with 10,000 people with utility 2 and 100 with utility 3, and another with just the 100 people with utility 3.  An average utilitarian would have to choose option two, even though it just involves denying life to a bunch of people who would lead reasonably happy lives.  But perhaps in greater numbers you could try to defend this; the world would have only really happy people in the second scenario.

Alright, then.  Say that that there are two planets, planet A and planet B.  The two planets are separated by many lightyears and neither are ever going to interact.  Planet A has 10,000 people each with utility 2; Planet B has 100 people with  utility 3.  You're a being who is presented with the following option: do you blow up planet A?  Say that you're relatively sure that if you let the planets continue their utilities will remain as they are now.  You see the problem, now.  This is a lot like the first scenario, but here clearly planet A is better off around; it's a happy planet that's not hurting anyone else.  But if you're computing average utility of the universe it's decreasing it, and an average utilitarian would want to blow it up.

Ok, you say, what if I just treat them as two different universes, average each individually, and then make decisions separately for them?  The thing is, I can vary scenarios to be between the two listed above: maybe there is one planet with two countries, A and B, with the same populations as the  planets in the above scenario.  Then what you do?  How about different families that live near each other but won't ever really interact that much?

The happy hermit

Alright, now say we're back to earth.  You've done some careful studying and determined, reasonably, that the average human utility is about 1.3 utils.  You go hiking and discover, in the middle of a rocky crevice, a hermit living alone in a cabin; no one has visited him for 50 years.  You talk to him about, and he seems reasonably happy.  You use your magic Utility Box and find out that his utility is at 0.8 utils: positive, though not as happy as the average human.  He enjoys his life in the mountains.  You have a gun.  Do you kill him (assuming that  it wouldn't cause you psychological harm, etc.)?  An average utilitarian would.

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Both of these thought experiments exploit the same flaw in average utilitarianism: it's not linear.  Here's what that means.  Say there's a universe U composed of two sub-universes u1 and u2.  H(U) does not equal H(u1)+H(u2).  What this means is that if you take a universe, its average utility will depend on how you split  it up when you're doing your math.  In the separate planets scenario, it mattered whether you considered the two planets, or countries, or families, together or separately.  In the hermit example, it mattered whether you considered the world as a whole or the rest of the world, and the hermit separately.

This is a rather fatal flaw for a philosophy to have; it shouldn't matter whether you consider non-interacting parts together or separately, and it also shouldn't matter exactly how much interaction it takes to be, you know, like, intertwined and stuff.

There's another way to look at the flaws with average utilitarianism, though: in average utilitarianism when you're considering the impact of someone on world utility, you look at not just how happy they are and how happy they make other people, but also how happy people are independently of them and would be whether or not the person in question existed, and how many other people there are.  In other words, as Adam once put it, in some sense the problem with average utilitarianism is that it's not total utilitarianism.

And so I am a total utilitarian.

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*If you're an average utilitarian it doesn't matter if you offset all utilities by a given amount; it won't change comparisons between any two options: if (Sum(h(p)) for all p in w1)/(population of  w1) > (Sum(h(p)) for all p in w2)/(population of  w2), then (Sum(h(p)+k) for all p in w1)/(population of  w1) > (Sum(h(p)+k) for all p in w2)/(population of  w2).  If you're a total utilitarian, though, it does matter.  So, what's zero utility?  In other words, what's an example of someone whose utility is completely neutral; who feels neither happiness nor pain?  A dead  person.  (Or, perhaps, an unconscious person.)  This leads to the natural zero point for utility: h(p)=0 means that p is as happy as an unfeeling and/or dead person; as happy, in other words, as a rock.  This definition turns out to be quite necessary.  If you put the zero point anywhere else then you have to decide which dead people to include in your calculations; they're providing non-zero utility and so will affect the utility of various possible universes.  Alright, you say, I won't include any dead people.  Well how about people in vegetative states with no consciousness, happiness, or  pain?  How about fetuses before they've developed the ability to feel pain?  How about a fertilized egg?  How about an unfertilized one?  How about someone who was shot by a gun and is clearly going to die and has lost all brain function, but it's not clear at what point the doctor standing around him is going to pronounce him dead?  The point is that all of  these people clearly don't contribute to the total utility of the world, and so shouldn't influence calculations; furthermore, exactly how we decide when someone is "dead" or "basically dead" shouldn't influence it.  So it is necessary to define h(p_d)=0 for any unfeeling and/or dead person p_d.

Note, also, that neither average nor aggregate care about the units used for happiness; multiplying all utilities by a constant doesn't change anything.  So, I'll measure utility in units of utils, though I'll generally omit unit labels.

Utilitarianism

While I wait for Basim code to run, I thought I'd write what will be the first of many pieces on ethics and doing what's right.  I'll get to more applied stuff later, but as a foundation I'm going to write a series of pieces on utilitarianism.

I am a utilitarian.  Basically, this means that I believe the right action is the one that maximizes total "utility" in the world (you can think of that as total happiness minus total pain).  Specifically, I am a total, act, hedonistic/one level (as opposed to high and low pleasure), classical (as opposed to negative) utilitarian; in short, I'm a Benthamite.  In future posts I'll argue for all of those choices; I'll also try to respond to the Repugnant Conclusion and the Utility Monster, and argue that Decision Theories are silly.

Before I delve into all of that, though, are there any particular arguments people want me to respond to--either well known attacks, or just things you've thought of?  Arguing for utilitarianism inevitably degenerates more into defending it from attacks and attacking other philosophies than actually articulating utilitarianism, partially because of how self evident of a philosophy it is.  So, if you have any questions, comments, complaints, arguments, or expressions of agreement, post them in the comments or send me an email, and I'll address them either in the comments or in a future post.

SBF

p.s.--If you're interested in checking out utilitarianism more, I highly recommend http://felicifia.org/.