Moral Coasianism

The Devil's tears count for something, even if he stays the devil

Epistemic status: inviting you to peer into the twilight blog where I do my best to help my liberal readers explore the alien recesses of my conservative mind through my usual poor, strained writing style, only where the far more confusing and offensive nature of the content makes it likely unbearable.

I think all preferences deserve equal consideration based on how their satisfaction or dissatisfaction will affect global well being. You don’t think this. Let me explain.

Here’s a fun first date question: should Hitler go to heaven? The idea is that he can’t hurt anyone in heaven and no one on Earth even knows whether heaven exists or who gets in or why. So what harm can come of letting this guy be happy for eternity instead of suffering? What good could come from him suffering instead? Seems like mere wrath on your part to deny him.

If you’re with me so far, I wonder if you would be up for relaxing the constraint that there’s literally no cost to sending Hitler to heaven even slightly. You saw something of value in giving someone eternal bliss even if they were the least deserving. Would you be up for stubbing your toe to open the pearly gates? I would. Even for the least deserving person.

Maybe we can add some texture though. Heaven is quite personalized for Hitler. No one gets harmed, but he gets to act out his antisemitic anger and indulge all kinds of Nazi fantasies. It’s still great for him, but his soul isn’t meaningfully reformed. I think this is a great loss, but better than nothing, certainly better than hell, and still worth the toe stubbing.

The basic issue is this:

1. Increasing happiness and welfare is good, perhaps terminally good

2. People’s happiness often depends on having their preferences satisfied

3. People often have preferences which, if satisfied, would reduce others’ happiness, but by less than it increased happiness for the preference-holder

An innocuous, non-imaginary case is: more people want to live in a given city than there are houses for them; new housing would satisfy them, but new housing means building a building that blocks a current resident’s nice view

In this example, it seems like there is no way to make everyone happy, either someone loses a view or someone doesn’t get a house. It’s a simple tragedy of our finite material world. So what does this have to do with Hitler?

Well some people have preferences explicitly about the experience of others. I get no material benefit from motorcycles being banned in Albuquerque. I’ve never been, I’ll probably never go, but I want them banned all the same. I hate motorcycles. It’d make me happy just to know that this was the case. Not so for the motorcyclists, but perhaps there are few enough of them and many more people like me such that my happiness wins out.

You can see how a preference about other people’s recreational activities is the first step on a slippery slope to preferences about other people’s mere existence. One reductio on utilitarianism is that the utilitarian objection to the Holocaust is that there weren’t enough Nazis.

Ronald Dworkin distinguished these two types of preferences as internal preferences (preferences about one's own life, goods, and opportunities) and external preferences (preferences about how others should live or what they should have). He claimed the latter were not the proper subject of moral concern and most people – agreeing that we needed a heuristic to avoid harm – said that seemed like a fine place to draw a line. Job done.

Unfortunately, I have bad news about the harm-causing-ness of discounting people’s felt-interests to zero in your moral calculus. In the first place, all interests are “felt interests.” Welfarism is about subjective experience. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you can wish it away (pause to reflect on the irony here). You have reduced welfare and hurt people’s feelings. If those people count, you, as a welfarist, claim to care about their feelings.

Dworkin’s rule achieves a net decrease in overall happiness and a net increase in misery, but allowed you as a moral theorist to sidestep a thorny question, so… success? This ultimately just endorses retribution: someone broke a rule that uncomplicated my moral analysis, therefore I prefer that they suffer. Oops. But at least they started it. We all know that’s a reliable moral axiom.

The view I want to expound on more is that the problems with this move go beyond mere hypocrisy. In practice, discounting people’s external preferences can straightforwardly backfire and make the internal-preferences-only world worse. Moreover, there are some questions where we implicitly recognize that respecting offensive views is more productive and others where we don’t. I think the world gets better more often when we do the former instead of the latter.

Negative Polarization

Much of what I’ll write here has an overtone suggesting we need to take external preferences as fully given, set in stone, and make eternal rules that govern society around those preferences. That is not my claim. I think rules should adapt to the social-political environments they govern and those environments change over time. So should the rules.

What I’m concerned with is an attitude towards people, problems, and civic life that we take up when we discount ugly external preferences to zero. My worry remains even though I hope and expect all the laws we make ignore external preferences in practice. In fact, giving more regard to external preferences in our debates and dispositions about rules may ultimately give them less force in the final rules themselves.

Abstractly, if you premise a political debate on your opponent’s belief being being utterly repugnant and fit only for punishment or deprogramming of the people who act on it, you had better be sure that belief is functionally pathological *and* that almost everyone durably agrees that it is. Anything less than that and the politics of fear and threat will build a coalition on the other side, garner sympathy from relatively neutral parties, and potentially make the thing you most hated ascendant. In particular, people on the other side of a given issue will see *you* as the one with the external preference (about the shape of their minds and hearts) and do what they can to combat and suppress your persecution of them.

As a concrete example (the details of which I do not want my argument to depend upon): I suspect trans advocacy is a case where discounting the interests of transphobes to zero has caused considerable harm. I imagine many trans advocates expressing *revulsion* at the idea that they should consider such interests. I think they believe that the kindest thing to be done with the transphobic is to convert them to trans acceptance against their current self-conception and that this is a starting point to social discourse.

Against this backdrop, people have advocated for interventions that cut broadly across many aspects of life (more culturally than legally, but people often experience these quite similarly): bathroom rules, emails signatures, name badges, educational curricula, how you speak (pronouns), and who may compete (and win) in women’s athletics. On the scale of a human life, this all happened very quickly and a common response to criticism of these changes was to castigate it as the equivalent of abject racism.

Now many of these interventions are not only being rolled back, but prohibited by politicians who’ve scored political points from the backlash. What’s worse in my view is how this has shaped people’s conception of politics as more purely about conflict between groups over scarce power rather than collective problem-solving. It will be hard to advocate for trans people in the future without being suspected of supporting the old overreach.

I think the not-discounting-to-zero version of trans advocacy would go better in many ways. Perhaps I was too young and naïve at the time, but I think the fight for marriage equality was much more tolerant of people’s discomfort with homosexuality and feels like it produced a more durable change for that reason. For one thing, advocates focused on a single, narrow change: the issuance of marriage licenses; for another, the whole discourse felt like it gave a large amount of relative weight to curiosity: how do people become gay?, is it nature or nurture?, how do gay couples have kids?, etc. felt like more askable questions than their trans-equivalents a decade later. My sense was that there was a relative focus on humanizing gay people rather than demonizing homophobes. Indeed, Claude’s very woke-filtered take on Will & Grace is telling:

Here, the show’s great failing is that it was too effective at driving acceptance of homosexuality at the expense of browbeating people with morality tales about homophobia.

On the philosophy scheme then, the trans person’s preference is internal and the transphobe’s is external. Gender identity is a material, morally-neutral fact of the world: what does your hair, body, and clothing look like. In contrast, a belief you hold about what someone else does on a morally neutral topic is morally-charged: something you can be right or wrong about. And if you’re wrong about something like this, your interest warrants no consideration.

My claim in this essay is yet another level of abstraction higher: giving or not-giving consideration to someone’s morally charged view is itself a morally-charged view. And on my telling, dismissing someone’s morally charged interests out of hand is worse than giving those interests at least some weight.

At this point, reader, you have correctly induced that this is an infinite regress, as one can morally consider a preference like the one reflected in my argument here, and consider this claim about that claim, and so on. My take is that feelings are feelings and opinions are opinions. Our options are thus: (1) we can be nihilists or egoists and give no weight to anything that isn’t exactly what we individually prefer; (2) we can give consideration to views at every level of abstraction; or (3) we can draw a line as to which levels of abstraction are worthy of consideration and which are not. My argument here is that a consistent impartial welfarist ought to do (2), weighing the feelings of others based on how strongly they feel those feelings and taking into account the relevant externalities (i.e. to relevant internal interests), which may sometimes be smaller in aggregate than the external interests.

Now perhaps you (my pro-trans readership) answer: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing! To trans people, their gender identity is of enormous internal concern – they’re constantly aware of and worried about their self-image and how others directly and incorrigibly perceive them. To the transphobe, their transphobia is a passing concern, when it comes up on the news or they have a brief, rare encounter with trans people, they have some brief negative reaction, but quickly get back to their comfortable lives without giving this a second thought.

To which I answer: maybe so – I don’t know your heart and individuals surely differ. But really? Your gut reaction is that if transphobia were a more intense and widespread condition, plaguing the minds of its sufferers hourly, you would seriously consider telling trans people to tone it down or consider the triggering effect they might have on such people? If so, I’m sorry I made you read this far. We might have an empirical disagreement I don’t feel qualified to resolve, but I’m glad we’re on the same conceptual page.

Coasianism

For those of you not open to the possibility of some external preference mattering more in aggregate than a conflicting internal preference, I think this is a clash between idealism and realism. Internal preferences like gender identity feel raw and visceral: like direct contact with reality. External preferences are mere ideas: the kind of thing that floats around in your head for a while, changing shape, and hopefully ending up as something different that best comports with the good life.

While I also feel this distinction between the visceral and mere ideas, it’s clear to me that both are changeable. One is just harder to change than the other. Or I should say both are quite hard to change in absolute terms, and the biggest difference is in how costly it is to have lost the deep and visceral ideas. It feels less like changing your mind and more like changing who you are. Of course with things like race and perhaps gender identity too, it’s not merely that this feels less like a choice, but rather that it’s not even conceptually useful to try to frame it as a choice.

Therefore, the ideal world – where we can all change ourselves at will to be the people we most want to be and where everyone is happiest overall – is a world where we sacrifice external preferences that conflict with internal ones. Even if there were far more offensive preference holders than people whose identity would be offended by the preference, the external preference holders wouldn’t mind the change, because their best self is ~morally perfected. Since internal preferences don’t have a moral dimension, they’re much more a matter of who and what you are rather than a general virtue to be cultivated. Something to be the subject of care and acceptance rather than something to train or adapt to better serve others.

The problem is that in the actual, non-ideal world, changing minds is extremely difficult and costly. You’re very likely to fail or have your plan outright backfire if you set full-and-immediate conversion as your measure for success. Here, you need to be conscious of empirical constraints and the cost of a given plan to make the world better. It may well be better to keep the peace between incompatible external and internal preferences, or at least be marginally more tolerant of the external preferences.

The specific cost to be conscious of is the cost to the external preference holders of not getting their way. In political and (I argue) moral terms, these costs matter because we simply don’t have ground truth on what is correct outside of our felt-convictions, yet we have to reach a collective answer on how to resolve conflicting convictions. Pragmatically speaking, you ought to be kind to devils and even make them happy on their own terms if that’s the least costly thing to do.

Here, my mind goes to the Coase theorem – the idea that in deciding what to do about an ongoing harm, it doesn’t necessarily matter who controls the right to act or not-be-acted-upon. If two parties can bargain, you can give the right to either of them and they will agree on the same outcome in both cases. If a factory owns the right to pollute a neighborhood and the residents value non-pollution more, they can buy the right from the factory. If the residents have the right not to be polluted, the factory won’t be willing to pay enough to compensate them for its harms and so won’t incur the liability by polluting in the first place.

Despite our sentiments about pollution, Coase makes clear at the top of the paper that this problem is reciprocal. It is a problem born of the factory and the residents colliding in the same place at the same time. The same sets of people existing in two separate geographies would have no conflict. We often picture the factory in scenarios like this as arriving late and disturbing the peace of a pre-existing neighborhood, but it’s just as easy to imagine a residential developer coming in and wanting to build next to the factory that had operated in relative isolation for decades. The point is that there is some best thing to do on this tract of land and we all have an interest in figuring it out within the constraints of our conflicting desires, and it doesn’t matter how those desires came to be. From where we collectively sit, the desires are before us and we can either try to crush and suppress desires we don’t care for (and have our opponents do that to us), or we can negotiate.

Living in a society

I think dynamics like the one I’m drawing out here live at the heart of the good society. We’re all liberal pluralists until someone crosses a line and we retreat to our idealism and dogmatism about the common good that we thought we were all pursuing. Negative polarization quickly sets in and things devolve.

The tension is that we obviously need to have uncrossable lines. We can’t tolerate sadists and abusers’ complete freedom of action. The way we identify what counts as true sadism or abuse worthy of sanction, though, has to do with weighing the overall costs and benefits of those sentiments. In general, we tolerate extreme rudeness, emotional cruelty, hucksterism, and infidelity as legal matters, though these examples seem starkly non-political compared to the trans example above. Perhaps that’s my claim though, that people’s feelings (and related actions) in various social contexts should not be the ground of intense political repression unless we achieve a strong enough consensus against the relevant feelings and behaviors. Murder and rape are truly pathological and agreed as such, so we utterly refuse to tolerate rapists and murders and suppress them violently. Not so for cheaters, peddlers of misinformation, and many private actions motivated by racism.

The natural response is “how are civil rights movements supposed to ever get off the ground if it’s illiberal to advocate for them while they’re a minority view?”

I think you can still build movements and change society while giving regard for the attachment people feel to views you oppose. I am not trying to foreclose possibilities by accepting the opinions of others as immutable moral constraints. I am asking you to regard the views of others as constraints at all, to place some weight on them before assuming they have no value and framing your project as crushing them at all costs a la Hitler in real life. If the good society in your view entails changing people’s hearts, then set out to change people’s hearts the way you would in a personal context: with charitable debate and by getting their buy-in to modest improvements. This is in contrast to seeing them as a worthless [political] enemy to be defeated. No one has been legislated into being a better person. More often that sews the seeds of backlash.

In fact, I think explicitly highlighting these costs to people’s perhaps-repugnant sensibilities as costs – and costs you take seriously – gives your opponents an opportunity to reflect on how much of this is really about them personally feeling offended by someone else’s conduct. Maybe they realize they don’t like having to acknowledge that part of themselves and so take an extra step to clarify that, no that shouldn’t be the issue here. In doing so, they might – subconsciously or not – feel less personally attacked and take a step towards the object level, where your arguments are better.

To reframe this all slightly for my audience: you know there are vastly more clear and important issues than trans about which you do not strut, pronounce incontrovertible moral authority, and discount the views of your opponents to zero. Tens of billions of innocent creatures suffer and die horribly at the hands of your friends and neighbors every year. My sense is that on this issue, despite its much higher moral stakes (perhaps because of its much higher moral stakes), people who care about animals are not so sanctimonious and are willing to update on their experience and recognize their minority position.

For decades, vegan advocates moralized, protested, and splattered fake blood on people to approximately zero effect. While that still happens, a second wave of animal advocates has sought compromise with the vast majority of omnivorous people: ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns for modest welfare improvements and meat alternative development aimed at serving omnivores’ interests in cheap, tasty, and convenient food. Arguably, these approaches have made more progress faster and are actively laying the foundations for a more profound shift in public opinion as an alternative food system appears less exotic to more people.

I imagine most of my vegan/vegetarian readers do not shun or castigate their own omnivorous friends and family, nor is the only progress they’ll accept complete personal conversion and support for totally dismantling factory farming. I think they’ve discovered that it’s wise to be patient and respectful with omnivores, to take small wins when you can and be grateful for their consideration.

I think it is much easier to see this as the path forward when you’re in a 2% minority compared to when you’re in a 40% minority, but I think it holds true as the right disposition to hold all the way until you’re in a 90% majority, and probably past that point as well. In fact, I think a lot of liberals find this quite easy to do when they’re in strong majorities. Here, I’m thinking of their concern for the treatment of criminals, even very serious ones. Yes, I suppose it’s not trying to relate to the desire to murder itself, but there is a desire to value the person behind a murder and help them personally recover and lead a life worth living. That’s indicative of something in this direction. Pedophilia is probably a starker example: many people are quite happy to treat it as a disease or sometimes even not-that, and are comfortable thinking that there should be no punishment for having urges that aren’t acted upon here, or would tolerate/support truly virtual child porn, etc.

We all know about the tendency to dehumanize our enemies political and otherwise, but it is one of those classic phenomena that is easy to see in others, but hard to see in oneself. All of our righteous fury is justified and it’s our enemies who’ve crossed clear moral lines. They literally desire for people to suffer and for us to live in a world that’s further from the ideal! Surely at least those preferences, less the people who hold them, can be dismissed. I say no. We should always bet on the hypothesis that we’re more confused than we think and there are pragmatic reasons to seek partners everywhere and give others our full respect whether we prefer they get it or not.