Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Something that’s even stranger about that argument, to me, is that, if one person is made better off in a scenario and someone else is made worse off, it’s not the case that it’s forbidden to do the thing where one person was made worse off. It simply makes it incommensurable with the other scenario. So you simply can’t say whether it’s better or worse, I think, on this view. It doesn’t lead to the conclusion that I think people want, which is that you should be unwilling to harm one person to benefit a large number of people elsewhere. You simply can’t say whether it’s better or worse, and so all bets are off, and indeed, it’s, in a sense, permissible. Has that argument occurred to you? Sure. It’s always instructive to look at how people behave as parents or maybe how they vote in a department when they’re dealing with their colleagues. And they’re some form of consequentialist in all those cases. If you take the intuitions they’re using in these smaller decisions and just build them up onto a larger scale, I think the logic of consequentialism is very, very hard to escape. And when people say, “Oh, I’m a deontologist. Kant is my lodestar in ethics,” I don’t know how they ever make decisions at the margin based on that. It seems to me quite incoherent that deontology just says there’s a bunch of things you can’t do or maybe some things you’re obliged to do. But when it’s about more or less — “Well, how much money should we spend on the police force?” Try to get a Kantian to have a coherent framework for answering that question, other than saying, “Crime is wrong,” or “You’re obliged to come to the help of victims of crime.” It can’t be done. Yeah, it’s a somewhat boring moral vision where we’re just prohibited from doing a bunch of stuff, and then doesn’t really have much more to say.…

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