As someone severely "disabled", in practical ways, by multiple sclerosis medical interventions I find that your argument isn't how the real world works. First off, I was extremely healthy and greatful for majority of life. I'm well educated, worked hard, contributed quite a bit to "society". Volunteered, donated money, etc. Live in a state that hates the disabled, provides no help or follows laws even. However loves medicaid recipients that get huge amounts to remodel homes. Get modified cars, free health care even ultra expensive interventions that don't help them. But provide big dollars and control to an entire slate of people. But we who pay our own way can't even have useable restrooms.
So it may be easy to put it in the term of people who've never had to deal with disability, but is that reality? Or a nice sounding doctrine that is impossible to honestly quantify because of so very many variables?
I'd likely agree that states should (in many cases) do more to accommodate the disabled (though I'd need to know more empirical details to have much confidence either way). If we listed all possible interventions in priority ordering, governments spend a LOT of money on things that I expect should be ranked lower than disability accommodations. So I think a broadly optimizing perspective can support a view in this vicinity.
The main practical verdict I'm defending in this post is just that it's reasonable (and not unjust discrimination) for a philanthropist to prioritize life-saving donations to help the global poor over donating to help Americans with disabilities. You can agree with this even if you think that states should generally be doing more for their disabled residents.
1) I agree that welfarist considerations can probably explain why it is wrong, collectively, for employers to engage in rational discrimination and why we ought to outlaw this [though I think the case for this is stronger if we hold that certain types of hedonic "benefits" to discriminating groups do not count as boosts to their welfare]. Unless we're doing some kind of rule-consequentialism, it's not as obvious to me that welfarist considerations can explain the injustice of individual employers engaging in rational discrimination on their own. It's not hard to imagine an employer, especially prior to the enactment of anti-discrimination laws, who faces a choice between e.g. (i) hiring a woman and losing a large amount--more than would be gained by the woman--due to angry customers and (ii) refusing to hire the woman to appease the customers and making her worse off, but keeping the business of the customers. I think many people would call this a case of unjust discrimination even if the economic or other admissible benefits of sex discrimination substantially outweigh the costs.
2) Just want to flag that the term "disparate impact" is also a legal term whose definition is much narrower than in this discussion [and is actually closer to your own view?]. At least in the U.S. a successful defense to a charge of disparate impact is for the defendant to show that it was justified in making the choices that it did. If a theme part operates on weekends and has a rule that all employees must be available to work Saturdays, there is no disparate impact liability on employees who are Jewish or Seventh-Day Adventists since the rule is reasonable. The fact that an agent disproportionately harms members of a protected class doesn't mean that there's a disparate impact in a legal sense. I know that you're not talking about the law--just found the use of the term a bit off-putting
re: 1, I think the force of calling it "unjust discrimination" is best understood as suggesting that there ought to be a universal law against it. At least, it would seem pretty unreasonable to demand that the only non-sexist business owner in the state must shoot themselves in the foot by making a hire that their social context guarantees will turn out to have negative value for their business! What's really needed there is a systemic solution (and welfarist considerations can explain this important fact).
It seems like “unjust” is supposed to be tied to some notion of desert.
For example, imagine Bob Billionaire and Joe Janitor and Joe Janitor’s wife Wendy. Bob Billionaire is an investor who was born with a keen eye for value but other than that is a terrible person who abuses his family and does not give to charity. Joe Janitor and wife Wendy are a lovely churchgoing couple who are kind and decent. If Bob Billionaire is alone swimming east and the janitor couple are swimming west, I suppose you have to save Bob Billionaire (the taxes alone on his billions are worth several VSLs per year). But can we at least call this is unjust? He doesn’t deserve it!
A reasonable response might be to say that saving the janitor couple would be unjustly discriminating against the unknown interests who benefit from Bob Billionaire’s investing skill.
But I can press you further and say that Bob Billionaire, as a selfish billionaire, lives a much better life than Joe Janitor. So even ignoring the interests of anyone else, if you had to choose between saving Bob Billionaire or Joe Janitor, even flipping a coin would be “unjustly discriminating against” Bob Billionaire and his greater interests. It seems like we are perverting the definition of justice at this stage.
I’m not necessarily claiming that one’s interests should be weighted by desert or other Rawlsian notions of fairness. I’m just not sure an equal weighting should be called “just”.
Yeah, in the instrumental case you're doing it for the sake of the downstream beneficiaries, not for Bob himself.
But I like your next challenge. It does intuitively seem very unfair to treat Bob's advantages in life as a reason to advantage him over Joe *even more* (by preferentially saving him). I wonder how best to systematize this intuition without getting absurd results like flipping a coin between saving children vs 90 year olds, or humans vs chickens. Maybe we bracket certain *kinds* of (socially contingent) advantages, while treating biological differences like age and species as legitimate to consider? Would it make a difference if Bob's wealth were truly deserved, so the idea is just to bracket *undeserved* advantages? I'm not really sure what to think about the case.
Worth flagging that I still don't think any concern along these lines would justify prioritizing disabled Americans over the global poor, at least. But it may be that a slightly different systematic account would be a better way to secure this verdict. Thanks for the comment!
Timely post for me, as I've just been to a talk about DCEA (distributional cost-effectiveness analysis) in health economics and I'm trying to work out what I think about it all.
I share your view that inequality does not ground a moral objection to optimisation. I also agree that in an ideal world we'd include externalities associated with targeting specific groups in our optimisations, but that this is very hard in practice.
Wondering what you think about proposals to incorporate population-elicited inequality aversion parameters into social welfare functions?
I'd need to hear more details, but my gut reaction is to be dubious of the idea, since I don't think inequality has intrinsic significance. (Could be fine to consider as a heuristic in many cases though.)
Yeah, I wonder if it could be a reasonable heuristic to capture intuitions about instrumental costs of inequality. These parameters are actually notoriously hard to elicit though (vary a lot between people and studies) so I'm not sure it's a great solution.
As someone severely "disabled", in practical ways, by multiple sclerosis medical interventions I find that your argument isn't how the real world works. First off, I was extremely healthy and greatful for majority of life. I'm well educated, worked hard, contributed quite a bit to "society". Volunteered, donated money, etc. Live in a state that hates the disabled, provides no help or follows laws even. However loves medicaid recipients that get huge amounts to remodel homes. Get modified cars, free health care even ultra expensive interventions that don't help them. But provide big dollars and control to an entire slate of people. But we who pay our own way can't even have useable restrooms.
So it may be easy to put it in the term of people who've never had to deal with disability, but is that reality? Or a nice sounding doctrine that is impossible to honestly quantify because of so very many variables?
I'd likely agree that states should (in many cases) do more to accommodate the disabled (though I'd need to know more empirical details to have much confidence either way). If we listed all possible interventions in priority ordering, governments spend a LOT of money on things that I expect should be ranked lower than disability accommodations. So I think a broadly optimizing perspective can support a view in this vicinity.
The main practical verdict I'm defending in this post is just that it's reasonable (and not unjust discrimination) for a philanthropist to prioritize life-saving donations to help the global poor over donating to help Americans with disabilities. You can agree with this even if you think that states should generally be doing more for their disabled residents.
1) I agree that welfarist considerations can probably explain why it is wrong, collectively, for employers to engage in rational discrimination and why we ought to outlaw this [though I think the case for this is stronger if we hold that certain types of hedonic "benefits" to discriminating groups do not count as boosts to their welfare]. Unless we're doing some kind of rule-consequentialism, it's not as obvious to me that welfarist considerations can explain the injustice of individual employers engaging in rational discrimination on their own. It's not hard to imagine an employer, especially prior to the enactment of anti-discrimination laws, who faces a choice between e.g. (i) hiring a woman and losing a large amount--more than would be gained by the woman--due to angry customers and (ii) refusing to hire the woman to appease the customers and making her worse off, but keeping the business of the customers. I think many people would call this a case of unjust discrimination even if the economic or other admissible benefits of sex discrimination substantially outweigh the costs.
2) Just want to flag that the term "disparate impact" is also a legal term whose definition is much narrower than in this discussion [and is actually closer to your own view?]. At least in the U.S. a successful defense to a charge of disparate impact is for the defendant to show that it was justified in making the choices that it did. If a theme part operates on weekends and has a rule that all employees must be available to work Saturdays, there is no disparate impact liability on employees who are Jewish or Seventh-Day Adventists since the rule is reasonable. The fact that an agent disproportionately harms members of a protected class doesn't mean that there's a disparate impact in a legal sense. I know that you're not talking about the law--just found the use of the term a bit off-putting
Thanks for clarifying the legal understanding!
re: 1, I think the force of calling it "unjust discrimination" is best understood as suggesting that there ought to be a universal law against it. At least, it would seem pretty unreasonable to demand that the only non-sexist business owner in the state must shoot themselves in the foot by making a hire that their social context guarantees will turn out to have negative value for their business! What's really needed there is a systemic solution (and welfarist considerations can explain this important fact).
It seems like “unjust” is supposed to be tied to some notion of desert.
For example, imagine Bob Billionaire and Joe Janitor and Joe Janitor’s wife Wendy. Bob Billionaire is an investor who was born with a keen eye for value but other than that is a terrible person who abuses his family and does not give to charity. Joe Janitor and wife Wendy are a lovely churchgoing couple who are kind and decent. If Bob Billionaire is alone swimming east and the janitor couple are swimming west, I suppose you have to save Bob Billionaire (the taxes alone on his billions are worth several VSLs per year). But can we at least call this is unjust? He doesn’t deserve it!
A reasonable response might be to say that saving the janitor couple would be unjustly discriminating against the unknown interests who benefit from Bob Billionaire’s investing skill.
But I can press you further and say that Bob Billionaire, as a selfish billionaire, lives a much better life than Joe Janitor. So even ignoring the interests of anyone else, if you had to choose between saving Bob Billionaire or Joe Janitor, even flipping a coin would be “unjustly discriminating against” Bob Billionaire and his greater interests. It seems like we are perverting the definition of justice at this stage.
I’m not necessarily claiming that one’s interests should be weighted by desert or other Rawlsian notions of fairness. I’m just not sure an equal weighting should be called “just”.
Yeah, in the instrumental case you're doing it for the sake of the downstream beneficiaries, not for Bob himself.
But I like your next challenge. It does intuitively seem very unfair to treat Bob's advantages in life as a reason to advantage him over Joe *even more* (by preferentially saving him). I wonder how best to systematize this intuition without getting absurd results like flipping a coin between saving children vs 90 year olds, or humans vs chickens. Maybe we bracket certain *kinds* of (socially contingent) advantages, while treating biological differences like age and species as legitimate to consider? Would it make a difference if Bob's wealth were truly deserved, so the idea is just to bracket *undeserved* advantages? I'm not really sure what to think about the case.
Worth flagging that I still don't think any concern along these lines would justify prioritizing disabled Americans over the global poor, at least. But it may be that a slightly different systematic account would be a better way to secure this verdict. Thanks for the comment!
Timely post for me, as I've just been to a talk about DCEA (distributional cost-effectiveness analysis) in health economics and I'm trying to work out what I think about it all.
I share your view that inequality does not ground a moral objection to optimisation. I also agree that in an ideal world we'd include externalities associated with targeting specific groups in our optimisations, but that this is very hard in practice.
Wondering what you think about proposals to incorporate population-elicited inequality aversion parameters into social welfare functions?
I'd need to hear more details, but my gut reaction is to be dubious of the idea, since I don't think inequality has intrinsic significance. (Could be fine to consider as a heuristic in many cases though.)
Yeah, I wonder if it could be a reasonable heuristic to capture intuitions about instrumental costs of inequality. These parameters are actually notoriously hard to elicit though (vary a lot between people and studies) so I'm not sure it's a great solution.
See e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6120144/