Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Another rather stupid article by Slate economist Steven Landsburg (it happens to be about Schiavo, but that's not why it's stupid). He once wrote an article advocating the death penalty for computer worm writers, which I took to be a tongue-in-cheek self-parody of simplistic cost-benefit analyses, but now I'm not so sure -- Keys, maybe you could start a campaign among economists to get him off Slate, because he's giving you guys a bad name. Here's an excerpt from his latest piece:
"If you promise me that my estate will go to my daughter instead of some random stranger, I'll work more and consume less—which means everyone else can afford to work less and consume more... That's a good reason to promise you'll enforce my will, and it's also a good reason to keep that promise, so people will believe such promises in the future.
On the other hand, I see far less reason why you should let me dictate, say, the disposal of my remains. I might have strong preferences about the matter, but once I'm gone, those preferences are quite irrelevant, and while I'm alive, your promise to enforce those preferences is unlikely to change my behavior in any socially useful way."
Why is this stupid? For one, it implicitly analyzes the value of preference-satisfaction in terms of believing that one's preferences are satisfied (which comes out in his dismissal of the preferences of the dead per se and his separation of reasons to make a promise and to keep a promise). Any of the well-worn thought experiments against simple-minded utilitarianism (e.g.Nozick's Experience Machine, which shows that there is something dissatisfactory about believing one's preferences are satisfied even though they are not) begin to reveal the problems with such a view, viz. that it rests on an extremely narrow theory of value, which has absurd consequences, e.g. that one doesn't have reason to keep promises unless it has beneficial consequences in the narrow Landsburgian sense. ¶ 5:40 PM
"If you promise me that my estate will go to my daughter instead of some random stranger, I'll work more and consume less—which means everyone else can afford to work less and consume more... That's a good reason to promise you'll enforce my will, and it's also a good reason to keep that promise, so people will believe such promises in the future.
On the other hand, I see far less reason why you should let me dictate, say, the disposal of my remains. I might have strong preferences about the matter, but once I'm gone, those preferences are quite irrelevant, and while I'm alive, your promise to enforce those preferences is unlikely to change my behavior in any socially useful way."
Why is this stupid? For one, it implicitly analyzes the value of preference-satisfaction in terms of believing that one's preferences are satisfied (which comes out in his dismissal of the preferences of the dead per se and his separation of reasons to make a promise and to keep a promise). Any of the well-worn thought experiments against simple-minded utilitarianism (e.g.Nozick's Experience Machine, which shows that there is something dissatisfactory about believing one's preferences are satisfied even though they are not) begin to reveal the problems with such a view, viz. that it rests on an extremely narrow theory of value, which has absurd consequences, e.g. that one doesn't have reason to keep promises unless it has beneficial consequences in the narrow Landsburgian sense. ¶ 5:40 PM
