The transatlantic divide

This article from Reuters interested me, partly because I fit in to that class of young Europeans who are quietly confident that Europe has got it right and America doesn't. To some extend I'm happy to concede that my view of what constitutes 'right' has been informed by the fact that I am a European. I expect free at the point of use healthcare and good public services, I dislike inequality and I value personal freedom far more than economic freedom. These are clearly not universally European values but I suspect that it is statistically more likely that I hold them than for an equivalent person in the US. Our values obviously shape the states we live in but equally the states we live in help mould our values.

Nonetheless there are a couple of reasons that I think, different priorities aside, that Europe (by which I don't necessarily mean the EU) does indeed come out on top. First of all there are some values that are fairly universal. In terms of basic indicators such as crime levels and population health the US lags a long way behind Europe. The Atlantic Review suggests that the murder rate in the US is 6 times that of Germany. Life expectancies are also pretty consistently higher in Northern and Western Europe than in the US. Admittedly the differences are quite small¹ , but given the vast US spending on healthcare one should really expect to have things the other way round.

The second reason is diversity. Nations within Europe do things differently in a sense that just can't be true of US states. With a 2 hour train from London I can be in a place with a different language and a different system of government, healthcare and education. I can cross from one coast of the US to the other and never see really substantial differences in any of these things.² I think that one of the greatest problems the US faces is its tendency towards cultural and intellectual isolationism, because of the vast differences within the continent Europe is never at quite the same risk.

There is a flip side to this coin, without a spectacular amount of integration and loss of diversity Europe will never become a true superpower, but frankly I'm not convinced that we should want to be one.

¹ Mostly a matter of 1 or 2 years, although being born in Iceland gives you a whole 3.6 years over a US counterpart.

² Education perhaps being an exception to the rule.

A utilitarian approach to home births

This article caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly I think the input from the National Childbirth Trust is a classic case of letting rights dialogue get in the way of discussion of the real problems. Saying that expectant mothers should have the same rights as any other patient misses the fact that they are really two patients. It also begs the question of whether other patients should have a right to refuse treatment that is good for them. We wouldn't allow a mother to intentionally harm herself or her child at the point of birth, why should we allow her to do so by picking the wrong kind of treatment?

Secondly if we do try and deal with this issue in a utilitarian way we encounter some pretty fundamental issues within utilitarianism itself. Obviously we want the utility maximising outcome. At first glance this seems pretty obvious, home births are bad, we need less homebirths. When we try and construct a more complicated rational behind that thought we start running in to problems.

Some might suggest that the a big problem for utilitarians (or consequentialists¹ in general) is that the article shows how difficult it is to make empirical calls on problems. We have a study which might mean that we're inadvertently causing lots of infant deaths here in the UK, or it might just mean that the medical services of the USA are bad at providing care for at home births. This has a massive bearing on the course of action that we're going to proscribe. Of course that's bad and it might mean we make what is ultimately the wrong decision but it doesn't impact on our philosophical stance much. We should still make our best attempt at maximising utility, even if we know we'll fail sometimes because of bad information.

So let's assume for the sake of argument that the study really does reveal something about the risks of home birth, what problems remain?

Problem 1:

What do we mean by utility? Do we mean pleasure or the absence of pain? Perhaps we mean both but in that case we have to work out how to weigh the two against one another. Or we might suggest some other measure entirely, a common one is preference satisfaction. In this case we don't try to impose our view of what someone's utility is, we let them decide what they want and then try to make sure that happens. This brings us on to...

Problem 2:

Whose utility counts? If we were talking about the preference satisfaction of two identical humans the weigh up would be pretty simple. Human A wants to undergo the birth in familiar surroundings, Human B wants to survive the birth. I feel safe in saying that Human B's preferences win by a pretty large margin. Unfortunately we really have no idea what Human B's preferences are because babies are bad at both forming and communicating preferences about medical procedures. Peter Singer suggests that the preferences of unborn babies really don't matter much at all because they can't actually form them. I'm inclined to think we might make preference decisions on the baby's behalf given the normal animal impulse to survive but we're certainly getting in to quite speculative territory here.

Problem 3:

What's actually wrong with death? Given the problem with preferences we might fall back on an alternative utility definition. Perhaps we could use hedonic utility, that is maximising the pleasure and minimising the pain of the individual. This generates another set of problems entirely though. We think that a home birth increases the baby's risk of death by 0.1% but how much negative hedonic utility is that. Dying is normally quite painful but if we just take in to account the direct pain that dying causes we undervalue how big a problem it is. Imagine I were to slip you a poison that caused you to fall in to a blissful sleep and then die peacefully. That wouldn't actually register on our hedonic scales at all because you didn't suffer any actual pain.

We can get round that by saying that dying minimises your future utility. Unfortunately that's also a bit shaky, partly because it assumes that everyone is, on balance, going to have a pleasurable future life and partly for other reasons we'll ignore at the moment.

Problem 4:

Should we even be interfering in the first place? Some forms of utilitarianism are direct, that is they seek to directly affect the best outcome in each case. On the other hand we might seek a morality that is to some extent indirect. That is it recognises we can't agonise over every single event and therefore lays down some kind of rule of thumb. This might be that births should, if at all possible occur in a hospital or it might be that the decision should be left up to someone directly involved. Perhaps the mother. After all who is better placed to weigh up the risks to both the baby and herself?

Anyway that's by no means an exhaustive list of the problems we might encounter trying to deal with the issue, but it does give an idea of the lines of thought that various utilitarians have explored in an attempt to deal with practical ethical issues. Hopefully I'll be able to explore some of them in more depth in future posts.

¹ Consequentialism is the overarching moral or political theory to which utilitarianism belongs. It argues that consequences are what define the morality of acts, for example murder is wrong because it has the bad consequence of someone dying. It stands opposed to deontological ethical theories which argue that certain acts are intrinsically wrong or right, thus murder would still be wrong even if it had good consequences (to use a particularly hoary example let's say you murdered Hitler). As I said Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism, specifically it's consequentialism where the only consequence that matters is how much utility you create.

Justice for all?

A number of policy changes from the coalition¹ has prompted some debate on criminal justice over the last few weeks. Sadly as is so often the case with this particular area of policy a lot of it has been infantile.

Fortunately though it does kick up some interesting issues for me to begin this blog on. The policies in question have included a possible end to ASBOs and a new approach to imprisonment. There's also been quite a lot of coverage on two somewhat related stories, 'parties for prisoners' and the rearrest of John Venables.

The thing that continuously draws my attention is that public policy and the surrounding dialogue largely fails to put any weight on the well being of criminals. In fact just using the phrase “well being of criminals” seems even to me a trifle odd, so well conditioned are we to the assumption that the plight of a criminal is unimportant. From a rational perspective though it seems odd that we pay such scant regard to the lives of so many people.

Just take a glance at some of the news coverage I've already mentioned. In particular the coverage of imprisonment policy changes. There's considerable discussion of whether more or less prison is good for society at large, but no-one ever mentions the idea that perhaps imprisoning less people might be good for those who don't have to endure the horror of prison. One might expect that from Michael Howard or the Labour party who advocate locking significantly more people away but even Ken Clarke who advocates a lower use of prison terms doesn't dare to mention the impact on prisoners.

Naturally there's always a conflict between the interests of prisoners and the rest of society, and I think, in common with most other people, that punishments ought to be reasonably severe for the purpose of preventing crime. Where I differ is that I think that the harm to society that punishments prevent ought to be weighed against the harm they do to criminals.

Let's say that each time we lock away a thief we prevent future crime, both by deterrence to other potential criminals and by physically preventing that individual from re-offending whilst in prison. Let's imagine that there actually was some way to reduce the harm of crime and the harm of punishment to a single unit, we'll call it a utility unit. Let's also imagine hypothetically², that locking one thief away for five years prevents 10 utility units of crime, while doing 5 utility units of harm to the thief. Clearly in this case prison seems like a decent option, we salvage a positive five units of utility for society. Finally let's imagine an alternative prison scenario, that we sentence the thief to a draconian 15 years in prison. This salvages 15 points of utility that would otherwise have been lost to crime but inflicts 15 points of utility harm on the thief, in other words society as a whole gains nothing from it. Clearly we should prefer to prevent 5 utility units of harm than to prevent nothing.

The conclusion of our little thought experiment is that there is a limit to how long thieves should be locked away for. Hopefully a lot of people agree with this already. The point of difference though is that most probably have an idea that a certain length of punishment is 'just' or 'fair' or 'proportional to the crime' and that that's why we shouldn't just let minor criminals rot in jail. I say that these things aren't any better than rules of thumb, what we should really care about is how the punishment effects everybody and by everybody I really do mean everybody. Criminals just as much as law abiding citizens.

That this is true, that the utility of a criminal is just as important as that of each of the individuals he threatens is axiomatic for utilitarians that is, to paraphrase some quite clever people, we hold this truth to be self evident. Maybe you're not convinced and therein lies the problem with any axiom. I'd be happy enough though just to ask you to think about why it isn't, why any group of people should ever count for less than any other group of people, whatever they've done. If you can't answer me that, then maybe you'll concede that we need to give far more thought to how we treat those who break society's rules.

¹ For the benefit of anyone to whom this doesn't swiftly become obvious I'm writing from the UK. I think the kind of issues I discuss will be relevant to a lot of places worldwide but those without regular exposure to British news might want to make use of my links if they want a handle on any of the issues' backgrounds.

² Clearly we don't have and never could have access to these kind of statistics or units of comparison in real life, I only present them here because it allows us to better envisage a situation and thereby tease out the underlying dilemma.

Introduction

Well welcome to this, my first tentative attempt at writing a blog. The basic idea is to blog about current affairs. So far so simple. Unfortunately news wasn't the only blog subject getting kicked around the inside of my head at the time I picked a subject. I also wanted to do a proper philosophy blog¹, a food blog and perhaps a travel blog. The compromise that emerged was a current affairs site with a particular philosophical slant that occasionally (or mostly, we shall see) digresses on to the not unimportant topic of things to eat. If nothing else it'll be unique.

The philosophical slant in question is utilitarianism. I don't want to talk about philosophy in too much depth in this blog, partly because it deserves a level of attention to detail that I can't give it right now, but I think it's worth giving a brief utility intro.

Basically utilitarianism is the philosophical position that we can reduce the morality of all actions down to a single thing, their utility value. Actions that do good are morally good, actions that do bad are morally bad, irrespective of the type of action. A murder that saves the lives of millions more is actually a morally good action, irrespective of what some might consider to be the inherent wrongness of murder.

Of course this gets more complicated when we examine it in depth. What do we really mean by utility? Do we mean pleasure or perhaps the absence of pain? Maybe we should let people decide upon their own utility and simply service their preferences.

We're about to fall over a precipice of complicated and ultimately inconclusive argument so I'll cut straight to the simplified version of my own perspective. Firstly I think we should seek courses of action based on their outcomes and not vague assertions about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts. That means I'm open to any course of political action which can be shown to be the most expedient in achieving utility.

Secondly 'human rights' don't actually exist anywhere except inside our heads. That's not to say we shouldn't accord people rights, some rights are very important, but they are just legal constructs. The concept of innate rights, the idea that we would have rights irrespective of whether they were recognised by the rest of society, is in Jeremy Bentham's memorable words, nonsense upon stilts.

Having uttered the phrase 'politically expedient' and denied rights exist I now probably sound like some crazed right wing loon, yet I'm actually extremely liberal. That shouldn't really come as a suprise, after all I'm following in the philosophical tradition of J.S. Mill. Anyway I've rambled for far too long here so if you need further convincing or explanation I suggest you wait for some actual posts.

¹ By which I mean a blog discussing more technical philosophical issues for a narrow academic audience.