Seeking Radical Deontology

Status quo harms should motivate reform

I’ll be presenting a couple of talks at the PPE Society conference in New Orleans later this week (I’d be delighted to meet any readers there—feel free to shoot me a message if you’ll be in attendance). One, on ‘Insatiable Beneficence’ (for a panel on ‘The Duty to Rescue’), draws on familiar themes from past posts like Imperfection is OK and Facing up to the Price on Life. The other, on ‘Killing by Obstruction’ (for the panel ‘Against Conservatism in Research Ethics’), explores a new idea…

Distinguish:

• Principled deontology, which gives extra weight to causing harm (compared to merely allowing a detriment or “failing to benefit”); versus

• Status quo bias, which gives extra weight to harms resulting from change (compared to harms or detriments inherent in the status quo).

When the status quo involves agents causing immense harm, we should expect principled deontologists to be at least as cognizant of the moral case for reform as utilitarians (who give no such extra weight to caused harm vs allowed detriments).

Curiously, we don’t so much seem to observe this. For example, pretty much all utilitarians agree that factory farming is abominable and we should work (whether through diet or donations) to mitigate its harms and eventually abolish the practice. Seemingly only a minority of deontologists agree. (Not that many explicitly disagree, I take it; most just don’t want to think about it, let alone do anything about it.)

A simple explanation: most people don’t have principled moral views. They live and breathe conformity and status quo bias. By default, they’re categorized as “deontologists”, as they certainly don’t like consequentialism. But they wouldn’t actually like principled deontology either. They like conforming to the status quo, and dislike change. Unfortunately for them, any principled view is going to demand radical changes when the status quo involves such immense harm.

An invitation to principled deontologists: Join utilitarian reformers in holding harmful practices—across the board—to stand in urgent need of reform, even when they are familiar components of the status quo.

Recognizing Coercive Interference

People often fail to recognize coercion when it’s built into the status quo. Three corrective examples:

(1) Michael Huemer rightly notes that immigration restrictions are a form of harmful coercive interference, and hence ought to trigger heightened deontological scrutiny. People too often imagine that borders constitute a “natural” impediment, such that while it would be generous for us to lend a helping hand (or free airplane ticket), it’s also fine for us to refrain and leave the global poor where they are. This misses that genuine inaction on our part would leave them free to make their own way into our country. But of course we don’t allow that. We positively enforce the border, threatening and pushing them back, interfering in ways that make them vastly worse off.

(2) G.A. Cohen insightfully argued (‘Freedom and Money’, pp. 13-14):

A property distribution just is… a distribution of rights of interference. If A owns P and B does not, then A may use P without interference and B will, standardly, suffer interference if he attempts to use P. But money serves, in a variety of circumstances (and, notably, when A puts P up for rent or sale), to remove that latter interference. Therefore money confers freedom, rather than merely the ability to use it, even if freedom is equated with absence of interference.

… The only way you won’t be prevented from getting and using things that cost money in our society—which is to say: most things—is by offering money for them.

So to lack money is to be liable to interference, and the assimilation of money to physical, or even mental, resources is a piece of unthinking fetishism, in the good old Marxist sense that it misrepresents social relations of constraint as people lacking things. In a word: money is no object.

I take this to establish that “taxation is theft”-style propertarianism is conceptually confused. The justification for property rights must be pragmatic, and accordingly the rights should be designed with whatever limitations would best serve the overall good.

(3) In early 2020, Regini Rini wrote a piece of public philosophy which framed ending lockdown as a “utilitarian” proposal, violating rights to life for the “greater good” (of the economy). This struck me as getting completely backwards how a principled deontologist should have viewed the situation. As I wrote at the time:

What’s so curious about the current situation is that it already involves widely-accepted rights violations (suppressing rights to autonomy, freedom of movement and association) in the form of lockdowns imposed for the sake of the “greater good” of public health. We are sacrificing the economically and socially vulnerable (and making everyone moderately miserable in myriad smaller ways) in hopes of [protecting] the medically vulnerable. So there can be no principled moral objection to taking care to ensure that this really is the better outcome, and that we aren’t disastrously violating rights without even securing a net benefit.

Utilitarianism recommends lockdowns if and only if they pass cost-benefit analysis. Principled deontologists should have had a higher bar for justifying such extreme coercion, not a lower one. Alas, most philosophers appearing in my social media feeds at the time seemed to follow Rini in finding it “abhorrent” to even consider the question. (There are few clearer signs of moral self-indulgence than rejecting cost-benefit analysis in favor of raw emoting.) But if you recall any non-utilitarian philosophers speaking out at the time about the difficulty of justifying lockdowns on deontological grounds, please point me in their direction!

Varieties of Radical Deontology

Non-maleficentrism

Whereas beneficentrists are symmetrically concerned with doing good and avoiding/reducing harm, non-maleficentrists are centrally concerned with the “reducing harm” side of the coin. Still, people do so much harm that there’s plenty of room for common cause here with beneficentrists!

As we saw above, people often struggle to recognize status quo harms. We mistake “social relations of constraint” for part of the natural order, and then imagine that attempts to change that order deserve heightened deontological scrutiny. Principled deontologists should be horrified by this, and urgently want more revisionary work in the vein of Huemer and Cohen, to help us to see through the illusions to the true relations of harmful interference in our society.

Coercion so familiar it seems a part of the natural order

In short: ordinary attributions of causing versus allowing harm are deeply confused on many high-stakes topics, so principled deontology stands to have radical implications once we see things aright. This first variety of radical deontology joins forces with utilitarians and other beneficentrists at least in (seeking out and) opposing status quo harms. Significant examples include: