THE MORAL EMPTINESS OF UTILITARIAN THINKING.

The way economists express it is, "there is one too many 'greatests' in 'greatest good for the greatest number.'"  Robin Koerner of the Foundation for Economic Education puts it this way.

Utilitarianism is the moral philosophy that says that a good or right action is one that does the most good for the most people. One of the fundamental problems with it is illustrated by asking a simple question: if we can save 10 lives by killing one person and donating his organs to 10 others, shouldn’t we do so? There’s a reason the answer is “no.” Yet, in its response to COVID-19, many jurisdictions are happy to risk huge damage to the physical and material health of many people to save others.

There's a class of hypothetical exercises called "trolley problems" that get people to get beyond the sentiment to the tragic vision.

The classic exemplar considers whether you’d flip the points on a train track to send a trolley loose from a train that was going to kill three people on its current course down another track where it will kill only one. If you flip the points, then the moral upside is that you saved three-minus-one-equals-two lives net; the moral downside is that you were directly responsible for killing a man.

Mr Koerner distinguishes the canonical trolley problem from the shelter-in-place orders in an intriguing way.

To make it a better fit to the situation we find ourselves in under the threat of COVID-19, we need to mention that the people standing on the train tracks within the sound of the oncoming trolley are not without agency. They all know the trolley is coming; they can use whatever choices they have to get off the tracks, and most (although not all, it is must said) have the ability to do so.

Whereas those who are scared of contracting COVID-19 can take precautions, the people who lose their jobs or homes on account of government-imposed measures have no say in what is happening to them. If restaurants in my home city of Seattle were to remain open, no one would be forced to frequent them and expose themselves to the associated risk. All concerned—proprietors, workers, and customers—would have a choice in that. On the other hand, the minimum-wage server who is laid off or the business owner who can’t cover his costs has no means of protecting herself.

The distinction he draws is incomplete: if I understand the risks of exposing myself to contagion, or of being a vector, and stay away from restaurants and coffee houses, haven't they suffered the loss of my business just the same way as if the governor of Illinois has ordered me to stay away?  Yes, the proprietor of the business is operating under fewer constraints and can choose to stay open or reduce hours or cut prices or what have you, all choices the governor has taken away.  It's not clear, though, that an emergent response to a plague will end better than a managed response to a plague, although the incompetence of the managers matters, bigly.

Mr Koerner weighs those possibilities in his essay, ending here.

If the answer is “no,” then to return to our trolley problem, how can the government even tell on which set of tracks the smaller number of people, or the less vulnerable people, are standing—and down which they think they should send the trolley?

Let us make a final modification to the coronavirus trolley analogy: you won’t be flipping the points; the government is doing that and you’re one of the people on the track. The government action you support is likely a function of which track you think you’re stuck on—and that will depend on your personality, physical health, financial health, and other factors.

What's interesting, and perhaps encouraging, about the reaction of public intellectuals is that logic appears to be trumping ideology.  Consider, first, Swarthmore's Timothy "Easily Distracted" Burke, first expressing skepticism about the class of trolley problems.

I’ve always seen a certain style of thought experiment in analytic philosophy and psychology as having limited value–say for example the famous “trolley problem” that asks participants to make an ethical choice about whose life to save in a situation where an observer can make a single intervention in an ongoing event that directs inevitable harm in one of two directions.

The problem with thought experiments (and associated attempts to make them into actual psychological experiments) is that to some extent all they do is clarify what our post-facto ethical narrative will be about an action that was not genuinely controlled by that ethical reasoning. Life almost never presents us these kinds of simultaneous, near-equal choices, and we almost never have the opportunity to reason clearly in advance of a decision about such choices. Drama and fiction as well as philosophy sometimes hope to stage or present us these scenarios either to help us understand something we did (or was done to us) in the confusion of events, or perhaps to re-engineer our intuitions for the next time. What this sometimes leads to is a post-facto phony ideological grandiloquence about decisions that were never considered in their actual practice and conception as difficult, competing ethical problems.

We'll come back to that later: the role of drama or fiction or speculative philosophy might well be to learn from past situations how better to respond when history rhymes, or perhaps better so, to avoid getting there in the first place.  First, though, note that the professor, no libertarian he, expresses a sentiment similar to that of Mr Koerner.  "This is too important to leave to the meritocratic leaders of civil institutions and businesses, too important to be left to the various elected officials and authoritarian bureaucracies, too important to be deferred to just one kind of expertise."  It's not quite "bet on emergence," but it's no endorsement of Wise Experts combining Platonic and Solomonic Wisdom for a (nonexistent) Common Good, either.  There's more than a little Tragic Vision in his argument.

It cannot be that saving the most lives imaginable from the impact of the pandemic is of such ethical importance that the destructiveness of the sudden collapse of the world economy is unimportant. It cannot be that business as usual–already deformed by inequality and injustice–must march forward over the deaths caused by the unconstrained, unmanaged spread of COVID-19.

Where any of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding, there is no Business as Usual.

This has to be something that people decide, and that people are part of deciding. For myself, I think that we will have to put a limit on lockdowns and quarantines and that limit is likely to be something like June or July in many parts of the United States and Europe. We can’t do this through December, and that is not about any personal frustration with having to stay at home for that length of time. It’s about the consequences that duration will wreak on the entirety of our social and economic systems. But it is not anything that any one of us can decide for ourselves as a matter of personal conscience. We the people have to decide this now, clearly, and not leave it to CEOs and administrators and epidemiologists and Congressional representatives and well-meaning governors and untrustworthy Presidents. This needs not to be a stampede led by risk-averse technocrats and managers towards the path of least resistance, because there’s a cliff at the end of all such paths. This is, for once, an actual trolley problem: no matter what we do, some people are going to die as a result of what we decided.

I think he's being optimistic about people being patient until mid-summer, simply consider Our President's hope of restarting something resembling normal life in parts of the country by Easter.

Former education secretary William Bennett along with Seth Leibsohn make a similar point about the tradeoff.

Today, to paraphrase the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, we have engaged in the volitional destruction of the economy and caused unbridled panic over a number we don’t know we will reach but most think will not surpass the combined annual death toll of the regular flu and annual traffic deaths, to say nothing of opioid deaths.

We are being disproportionate. The measures being undertaken now will have far-reaching and potentially disastrous consequences. We need to be attentive to isolation as potentially more dangerous than normal life, leading to more suicide, more opioid abuse and more domestic abuse – endemics we have waged other “wars” on. We will soon start to see the consequence of lost wages. And the elderly, who are most at risk for their physical health are also now most vulnerable from the economic consequences as their nest eggs and retirements evaporate.

What, a sane society needs to ask, is the national fatality rate of the disease and what is the result of losing everything else? As of now, we believe the first number is 1.2 percent. That is, if you catch this virus and if you test positive, your odds of dying from it are 1.2 percent. And if you are under 60, much less than that. We have no idea of the results of losing everything else.

As the economist Steve Moore wrote us: “We have gone from a crisis from an act of nature to a crisis that is manmade from the stupidity of shutting down our economic engines. I don’t know how serious this virus will be but I do know if the economy stays paralyzed for another month the carnage will be in the trillions of dollars. The health impact alone from bankruptcies, unemployment and isolation could be worse than the disease.”

Put another way, the policy makers are throwing a switch without complete knowledge of what is at risk on either track. But everybody can see the pressure on intensive care wards and emergency rooms in the big cities: when the gunshot victims and casualties of car crashes come in on a normal weekend, at least the medical staff is not at risk.

It is to "re-engineering our intuitions," though, that I wish to return.  These trolley problems have always bothered me, particularly if it's a runaway empty railcar, as there's this little thing called splitting the switch.  That's a pain in the you-know-where for real or model trains, but in the hypothetical, that rules out anybody being run over.

The challenge, though, dear reader, is in recognizing that the situation, while foreseeable, is poorly foreseen.  Consider a lengthy essay by Ed Yong in The Atlantic.  "A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility."  Indeed, and we've had previous warnings that dangerous stuff lurks out there.

There's something, though, about humans putting themselves in a position where they think they're in a trolley problem, although it often comes expressed as a binary choice.  But, thinking back four years, to the supposed "Flight 93 election," how was it back then that presidential selections had deteriorated to the point that a cuckoldess and a reality-show entertainer could capture the nominations of what were supposedly serious political parties?  Likewise, today, how is it that public health had deteriorated to the point that avoiding the various -isms and -phobias, or not being intolerant of "do your own thing" (or perhaps relying on enough Lysol and penicillin to make it go away?)  mattered more than recognizing that plagues are still loose on the land?