Suppose a trolley is heading towards five people, and you can redirect it towards one. But the trolley needs to go up a hill before it can roll down it to hit the five people, and your best estimate of its probability of making it up the hill is 1/4. On the other hand, if you redirect it, it’s a straight path to the one person, who is certain to be killed. Do you redirect? Expected utilities: − 1.25 lives for not redirecting and − 1 lives for redirecting.
Or suppose you are driving a fire truck to a place where five people are about to die in a fire, and you know that you have a 1/4 chance of putting out the fire and saving them if you get there in time. Moreover, there is a person sleeping on the road in front of the only road to the fire, and if you stop to remove the person from the road, it will be too late for the five. Do you brake? Expected utilities: − 5 lives for braking and − 1 − 3.75 = − 4.75 lives for continuing to the fire and running over the person on the road.
I think you shouldn’t redirect and you should brake. There is something morally obnoxious about certainly causing death for a highly uncertain benefit when the expected values are close. This complicates the proportionality condition in the Principle of Double Effect even more, and provides further evidence against expected-value utilitarianism.
I wonder if one couldn't use this to construct a fairly general argument against modern warfare. In real-world cases, it is certain that war will kill and maim a great many innocent people, along with a whole host of other harms (e.g. innumerable grieving families left behind, massive destruction of property, long-term souring of international relations, and so on). And given the difficulty of predicting the long-term consequences of war, it is virtually impossible in most cases to say with any confidence that the on-balance effect of war will even be positive, let alone that it will be significantly positive. (Indeed, it seems right to say that most wars have on-balance negative consequences; this certainly seems to be the view taken by the last few Popes.) Even foreign affairs experts have a dreadful (barely better than chance) track record with respect to predicting the long-run effects of major policy decisions (Bryan Caplan cites Tetlock's Expert Political Judgement on this point).
ReplyDeleteSo in a typical case of war, we have a situation in which we are guaranteed to inflict a great many horrific harms (including the deaths of many innocent people), while the overall expected utility is highly uncertain (and probably even negative on average). This seems like a good argument in favor of Catholics maintaining a general anti-war stance.
I should note that this argument are not original: Bryan Caplan often makes a very similar argument (see his piece "The Common-Sense Case for Pacifism"), as (I think) does David Carroll Cochran (though I've not read enough of his work to know for certain).
Also, the situation will be even worse if we accept the considerations in your post "Double effect and causal remoteness." For note that the harms of war (e.g. people being killed by bombs with their families left to grieve, property being destroyed, and so on) are typically more immediate than the potential benefits. (Consider e.g. the Korean War, in which the United States killed innumerable people and destroyed much of North Korea for the sake of preventing a communist takeover of the South. Surely the immense harms of that war were causally less remote than the benefit of preventing the Southerners from having their rights violated by the communists.)
ReplyDeleteThat line of thought feels wrong to me in the case of WW II. I think a case can be made that tens of millions of lives would have been saved if everyone in Europe surrendered to the Nazis: there were 80 million lives lost in WW II, while I'm guessing that the number of people that would have died in unrestricted Nazi genocide would have been less than half of that. However, the result would have been a vast and evil empire, founded on an unprecedented scale of genocide and slavery, corrupting the moral compass of people for generations, with vast cultural destruction. I think such moral and cultural destruction needs to be taken into account.
ReplyDeleteThat said, what to make of the probabilities? After all, if you don't surrender to Hitler, there is still a significant probability that he will win--and that seems to be the worst of both worlds: you get the vast harms of war, and then you have the evil empire anyway. Perhaps, though, the cultural and moral destruction would be less, because of the social memory of resistance?
I also think that intuitively there is something to be said about the justice achieved directly, rather than remotely, by fighting back. You stop one invader. That seems an act of justice in and of itself, apart from further consequences.
Suppose we grant the WWII case (if any modern war was justified, it was that one), would you agree that the aforementioned line of thinking will rule out more typical wars (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.)? In WWII, there was a global power which was fairly expressly intent on conquering Europe and brutalizing its people. Given that, perhaps we can say that it was justified to judge that the foreseen consequences of a Nazi victory were sufficiently bad to be worth preventing by war. But it seems that we can't plausibly say this with respect to e.g. a communist victory in Korea (however bad communist rule is, and no doubt it's quite bad, it won't rise to the level of a contingent-wide Nazi genocide). At the very least, it seems like this argument might imply that the standards for a just war are much higher than we ordinarily think. But I'm open to being convinced otherwise :)
DeleteAlso, it's worth considering the more remote consequences of war. To steal an example from Bryan Caplan, it's plausible that the rise of Mao in China would not have happened without an Allied victory in WWII, and that resulted in the deaths of many millions (along with the corruption of their moral compasses, the spread of Maoist ideology, and so on). I'd like to be convinced that this line of thought is wrong ("WWII was a just war" seems pretty intuitively obvious).
DeleteHi Dr. Pruss, is there a way to contact you for a question? I got one question left on my mind to be a fully believer, I don't want to write my question to the writings which are contextually different than what I wanna ask.
ReplyDeleteEmail. :-)
ReplyDeleteThank you Dr. Pruss, is it the public email of yours, the Baylor University one or do you have any other email to contact you?
ReplyDeleteThe public one works. That's why it's public. :-)
Delete1. My knowledge of 20th century American wars, other than WW II, is insufficient to make a judgment.
ReplyDelete2. I wonder if there weren't a lot of cases over the centuries prior to the 20th where an invaded country should have surrendered. For instance, while Napoleon was unjustly conquering, I don't know that there was proportionate reason for the various countries attacked by him to fight back. He was an unjust conqueror, but as far as I know his regime was not significantly worse than the regimes in place in countries he conquered.
3. That said, I've long thought that it throws a wrench into pacifist arguments when we note that a purely defensive war can also be thought of as a law-enforcement action. The official military actions of a typical invading force constitute crimes such as murder, armed assault, theft, etc., and that's just the official military actions. It is a state's job to defend its citizens against criminal activity within its borders, by violence if necessary. Thus there is a strong prima facie reason to fight back. Of course, alas, there can be times when law enforcement has to capitulate to a criminal.
4. I don't think we need to worry about unpredictable things such as the evils from the rise of Mao. I think we can reasonably say: Waging the war has various unpredictable consequences for centuries to come, and not waging the war has various unpredictable consequences for centuries to come, and we need to bracket both, because they are unpredictable.
(Likely a majority of married people in 10th century Germany were ancestors of Hitler. If any one of these people found a different mate, or no mate, Hitler wouldn't have existed, and 20th century history would have been very different. But when choosing a mate, one doesn't need to consider vast unknown world-political effects 10 centuries down the road.)
5. We also need to consider deterrent issues. Having a policy of armed resistance to invaders obviously deters invaders. Any country with a nasty neighbor that adopted a policy of instant surrender would likely find itself surrendering within a few months. Now, even if a peaceful takeover by some nasty neighbor is less bad than a war with that neighbor (and this will depend on how nasty the neighbor is; Hitler's Germany vs. Napoleon's France, say), no invasion at all is even better. We might then try for some utilitarian-style calculus of policies. Over some fixed time period (say, 50 years), a policy of peaceful surrender would have near-certainty of loss of sovereignty to a nasty neighbor; a policy of fighting back would have, maybe, a 3/4 chance of peace and maintenance of sovereignty, a 1/8 chance of a victory in war, and a 1/8 chance of defeat in war. Most countries bordering Putin's Russia have not been invaded, but I bet that any that aren't already close allies of his would be instantly invaded if they had a policy of peaceful surrender.
This raises difficult moral problems, which people (like you) who know more about the ethics of war have presumably thought more about than I. I'll do a blog post on one of them soon.