“Stubborn Attachments” by Tyler Cowen (2018)

1.

Cowen’s book makes a case for, and traces out the consequences of, a low discount rate for the welfare of future generations.

Suppose time machines were freely available and cheap. Then we would pretty much know the (assume, immutable) time horizon allotted to our civilisation the way we know the boundaries of the continents. Just as we do not discount the lives of the people who live by the sea, we would be loathe to discount the lives of the people who live close to the time horizon. It is true that those living close to the time horizon would have less rewarding lives because they cannot savour the bright futures of their progeny. This reduction in welfare affects the horizon people directly, however; there is no reason to double-count this reduction by explicitly discounting their welfare. Similarly, while the lives of the horizon people will not be remembered fondly by post-horizon people (of which there won’t be any), this omission is already accounted for in the (nonexistent) utilities of the post-horizon people.

The book makes three heroic assumptions: values cannot be derived from preferences, human rights are irreducible concepts, and faith is indispensable. All three are unnecessary for the book’s thesis.

Why assume that values do not come from preferences? One can justify many an atrocity by simply postulating that it is good for you. Furthermore, certainly the philosopher who postulates values has preferences over values. Why deny a nonphilosopher the right to nominate his values?

Rights (e.g., the right of a born baby to live or the right of the old to be taken care of) can be derived from incentive considerations, incentives to trust each other and cooperate toward the betterment of the world included. Of course, rights can be useful approximations, rules of thumb that capture robust properties of the maximisation of some grand objective. But, in this case, rights are not irreducible; their relative merits can be analysed rigorously.

What’s faith? Even if one were to accept the book’s assertion that one should have faith (or, at any rate, stupid people should have it, for, allegedly, they cannot motivate themselves to care enough about future generations by the power of rational thought alone), what is this faith? And who is in charge of it? The same philosopher who is in charge of values? And who is this philosopher accountable to? If we take a coherent mathematical argument and then suppress all equations, we do not call it “faith”; we call it Keynes’s General Theory. The reader is free to trust Keynes, be skeptical of Keynes’s reasoning, or scrutinise and challenge his reasoning. While trust in Keynes, as trust in any expert, is acceptable, blind faith damages the society in the long term.

Book’s occasional departures from consequentialism are puzzling. If an urn has red and blue balls, and we do not know how many of each, then we might admit to having no good argument for betting on one colour over the other in a fair bet. But if a dog gets its leg broken if you bet on red but not on blue, perhaps it is better to bet on blue. Ditto when being torn while deciding which beach to send the attacking troops to. All this ambiguity can make it harder to choose, but to acknowledge ambiguity does not require one to abandon consequentialism.

2.

Putting future generations on equal footing with present generations (which is the right thing to do unless future generations resemble octopi and superintelligent robots more than they resemble us) not only introduces certain moral obligations toward those generations but also justifies our taxing them. We want the future generations to be rich, so that we could tax them more. One way to tax future generations is to bequeath them the riddles (such as the climate change) that we find too costly to think about in return for bequeathing them the tools (such as a larger and better educated population and a larger body of scientific knowledge) to tackle these riddles.

3.

Foregoing the primacy of individual preferences in moral philosophy handicaps our ability to reason about the following question, raised towards the end of the book: Why care about nondomesticated animals and to what extent? (The emphasis on the nondomesticated betrays the limits of the author’s commitment not to derive morality from preferences.) One may further wonder: If we ought to care more about smarter animals, should we also care more about humans with a higher IQ? And should we care even more about superhuman silicon-based intelligence? Maybe. Maybe not. In the absence of a compelling theory, we should just rely on individual preferences, aggregated in some manner. It is true that this approach is inherently speciest because it is grounded in consulting human preferences, not animal preferences. But then any theory that humans will ever construct will be speciest in this (tautological) sense of having originated with humans; there is no escape.

One may also ask whether one ought to expect common interspecies morality, say, between humans and octopi. That is, should we expect humans to put the same relative weights on the welfare of humans and octopi as octopi do? If not, should we be compelled to conclude that either humans or octopi, or both, are immoral? And if it is not immoral for humans to overweigh the welfare of humans and for octopi to overweight the welfare of octopi, is it then perfectly moral for short people to overweigh the welfare of short people, and for tall people to overweight the welfare of tall people? In politics, we can confort ourselves by believing that Conservatives advocate a conservative agenda not because they believe that the interests of Conservatives should come first but because they believe that the Conservative agenda is more correct. With short and tall people, it is hard to tell the same story.