1. This isn't an objection to anything in the article, only a meta-point about how much it matters. Some questions don't matter, and, as a result, some technically false statements about those questions don't really *need* correcting. Suppose it's true that the total value of some groups is higher than other groups, and that this is true in the context of racial groups (where 'racial groups' is understood loosely enough to satisfy philosophers who are, say, social constructivists about race); even so, I'm skeptical that the question 'are Asian Americans more valuable than white Americans?' matters any more than the question 'do people with an odd number of freckles matter more than people with an even number of freckles?'. Just as we will never, in fact, face a trolley problem regarding people with an odd number of freckles or an even number of freckles, we will never face a trolley problem wherein we're forced to choose between two racial groups. Some false assertions don't matter either: suppose someone falsely claims that people with odd freckles are necessarily worth the same as people with even freckles. Presumably, even if all false beliefs are intrinsically disvaluable, this one doesn't matter very much, especially if its isolated from other aspects of the person's belief system that are practically relevant. You might wonder whether, in the race context, Kershnar's conclusions have any practical import. I suggest they have none. Regardless of which groups contain the most value, all groups members are sufficiently valuable that they have rights, deserve respect, etc. You might wonder whether his conclusion has distributive implications vis-à-vis the allocation of scarce medical resources. But presumably, race is just a very loose proxy for the sum of someone's value, which can basically always be more accurately figured out by considering them individually. (You might charitably interpret Murray et al. to be saying that all groups matter equally *in all senses that matter practically*.)
2. I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result; but I'm a little suspicious of some of the empirical claims in terms of how they relate to wellbeing. E.g., if Asian Americans do better in schools, it's not clear why this means that they'd have more knowledge, as opposed to merely more academic knowledge or knowledge how to do well in tests. And there wasn't an argument for why academic knowledge is more intrinsically valuable than other types of knowledge one might acquire instead. (Similarly, I wonder about the strength of the putative correlation between IQ and knowledge, as opposed to some particular class of knowledge. Unless there is an argument singling certain sorts of knowledge out, it seems like there's a lot of work needing to be done to do this kind of group level comparison well. [And, who would want to do that?]).
3. Similarly, I have questions - though not objections - about some of the other claims. E.g., if white people get divorced more, does that strongly correlate with less time spent in love? You might think that many people who don't divorce due to cultural pressure are stuck in loveless marriages, and might be getting more love if they divorced.
4. Otherwise, I found the more theoretical claims about wellbeing pretty plausible, though I'm fairly uncertain about this stuff.
The correlation between IQ and general knowledge is well-established, to the extent that some IQ tests use general knowledge tests as a component of measurement, and general knowledge is used as a proxy for IQ in some cases. Of course, "general knowledge" is in a strange way itself a particular class of knowledge, but to me it strains credulity that "general knowledge" wouldn't correlate with total knowledge.
On 3, I agree with the generalization about divorce and love raise questions, and in particular ones for which I do not have strong evidence.
My thought was that marriage often seems to accompany love. I don't have evidence for this claim, merely anecdotes. And data is not the the plural of anecdote. Sadly, this is not my line.
Also, perhaps the above correlation is explained by who gets married rather than marriage itself. Or perhaps something other than marriage explains the correlation.
Here, though, are three ways in which the argument might matter.
First, if the following theory of racism is true, then the above argument falsifies it, or at least requires that it be more precisely stated.
One person has a racist attitude regarding a second person if and only if
(a) the first has race-based antipathy toward a second (antipathy) or
(b) the first believes that because of the second’s race, the second is inferior to a reference class (value).
Second, the way some IQ researchers such as Charles Murray and Noah Carl try to defuse criticism - by changing the focus to virtue-based moral value - is mistaken.
Third, some of those who attacked Nathan Cofnas, Joshua Katz, and Amy Wax likely thought that they were either commenting on people's moral worth or that their writings had implications for it. The above argument addresses this issue.
You say the following, "I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result ... ."
First, if this is true in philosophy, then the field has a real problem. If serious scholars are scared to look at factors that purportedly predict measures of success and well-being, this is a problem for a field that depends on unrestricted discussion.
Second, this fear will - and probably has - spread to other areas. I am not sure if the following is a case of this, but the attempted cancellation of some of those working on transgenderism or their work - for example, Alex Byrne, Carole Hooven, Abigail Shrier, and Kathleen Stock - chills further discussion of this topic.
Third, if - as some researchers assert - IQ is a reasonably strong predictor of many important aspects of life, at least compared to some of its competitor predictors, we lesson the value of policy discussions by ignoring intelligence. Here is an example of a case in which an excellent philosopher thinks it's relevant to immigration.
"I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result; but I'm a little suspicious of some of the empirical claims in terms of how they relate to wellbeing"
Imagine saying something analogous about literally any other topic on earth and you should see the problem here.
I think the framing here makes it sound more controversial than it is. What would be controversial, I take it, would be to say that it is better for good things to happen to Asians than to whites. The claim here, put more precisely, seems simply to be that Asians have better lives. Sure, that seems right enough. The problem is that saying that Asians are more valuable makes it sound like you might be saying the former, when the claim is really the latter.
The desert point complicates this a little, but if you really do think value should be desert adjusted, then this implication shouldn't be very surprising anyways. I mean, pick whatever gerrymandered group you want of people with more desert and this implication just falls out.
I suspect we agree on this. If intrinsic goodness is equal to the product - or perhaps a much more complex mathematical relation (https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/1/18) - between well-being and desert, then if, on average, group A has greater well-being and desert than group B, group A is probably going to be more intrinsically valuable than group B.
This will be true for gerrymandered groups. For example, fans of Game of Thrones and fans of Jersey Shore.
I basically agree yes. My point was simply that "intrinsic value" gives connotations of some kind of inherently greater worth beyond the contingent quality of someone's life--at least to me. But given the definitions you provided, I think your argument is more or less correct.
When race-and-IQ people insist that their claims don't imply that certain racial groups are less valuable than others, what they seem to be trying to say, I think, is that their claims don't imply that certain racial groups are less worthy of respect than others--specifically recognition respect (rather than appraisal respect). They expect that their audience will infer that they think their claims about group IQ differences provide reason to treat groups differently (and not equally well), because that is the common racist view. So they try to cancel that implicature by adding that their empirical claims don't have normative or evaluative implications. If that's the right reading, then when the race-and-IQ people talk about people's equal value, they're not talking about something like people's overall utility, but rather about their moral considerability.
Let's say that appraisal-respect tracks total value, and that recognition-respect tracks right-stringency (or, perhaps, the strength of some other deontological requirement).
The justifier-justified metaphysical principle applies to right-stringency and, hence, recognition-respect.
For example, let's assume that moral responsibility (or, perhaps, autonomy) justifies rights. The same pattern will be true if an interest justifies rights.
If A were to be twice as morally responsible as B, then, other things being equal, A's right would be twice as stringent as B's right. The same is true if right-stringency depends on the the responsibility-justifier regarding a particular act, a particular situation, or a class of acts involving the actor or person toward whom he acts.
In addition, if the race-and-IQ people were addressing claims of recognition-respect, I would have thought that they would have discussed right-stringency or some other deontological requirement rather than desert, virtue, how God would value people, and so on.
If you want to go down this line, you should consider:
(1) the amount of sleep people need. People who need less sleep have more opportunities for valuable experiences.
(2) to what extent differences in mental capabilities are due to "software" (i.e. smarter people are able to execute more effective mental processes) versus "hardware" (i.e. smarter people are able to execute more mental processes in the same amount of time). Someone with a faster processing speed presumably experiences pleasant events for a subjectively longer time, which naively would increase the value associated with those events.
I gather you are arguing that someone's life goes better if he has to sleep less - and so has more valuable experiences - or if he processes information faster - and so has greater intensity of pleasures. I agree. I also think that is one person is happier due to genetics, he also has a life that goes better for him.
Holding desert constant, these things would increase the intrinsic value of a person's life.
Compelling philosophy as always from Kershnar. Steve, do you have anything to say on dynamics introduced by the possibility of someone being quite valuable as an individual but not so valuable as part of a group, or vice-versa? If that's common, a lot about who's valuable is context-dependent.
Thank you for the kind comment, and also the superb point.
A person's intrinsic value and extrinsic value often do diverge.
For example, a person whose life goes poorly for her might have more children than a woman whose life goes well for her. As a result, the former has greater extrinsic value and, perhaps also, greater total value.
I think this is also a great point about context. The context will affect a person's contribution to others' lives and, so, strongly affect their extrinsic value.
I am guessing that in most cases, a person's extrinsic value outweighs his intrinsic value, so things like reproduction matter a lot toward someone's total value.
I'm also guessing that for a few people, although probably not most of us, their work-related contribution will be significant.
Before we can analyze questions like “do lives have equal value” we have to clarify what this means - how would an answer to this question affect our real-world decision-making? The answer would have to be something like “if we have a policy X that will save a set A of people, and a policy Y that would save a set B of people, and we can only choose one, then we should choose X iff the sum of the values of people in set A is greater than the sum of the values of people in set B.” So let’s use this as a starting point.
The framing of the essay in terms of differences between races seems designed to be provocative, but it isn’t the central point of the essay.
The essay primarily argues that (a) different people’s lives have different value (because people differ in praiseworthiness, virtue, and other things that make life valuable) and moves on to say (b) that because people of different races (on average) have different amounts of these things, then people of different races are (on average) differently valuable.
But there’s not really anything to be gained by framing it in terms of race here. Suppose you are making a decision where you know exactly who is in set A, and who is in set B. Then you don’t need to care about their race, you can just evaluate them based on their own qualities. I think we can agree that people should be judged based on who they are, not based on other people who happen to share a race with them. The only time when that would be relevant is if you had a decision like “should I save 1,000 white Americans, or 1,000 Asian-Americans” and this is the only information you have about the two groups.
** It’s not clear how you would actually incorporate “differences in value” into any sort of analysis in a consistent way. **
Let’s say you were actually in the situation above. How would you use that in your analysis? Obviously in a real situation you wouldn’t have exactly the same number of people - maybe the choice is between 1,200 white Americans and 1,000 Asian-Americans. So you would want to know “is the average Asian-American worth more than 1.2 times that of a white American?” And nothing in the essay even begins to figure that out. The essay does include equations that include terms like “objective-list goods” and “praiseworthiness” - but that doesn’t really help because we have no agreed-upon method of measuring and weighting those things. Things that some people think are virtues, others don’t think are virtues at all.
Even if you did try to incorporate some sort of “differing value of life” index into your calculations, it seems clear to me that (a) there are just so many degrees of freedom in how to construct that index, that it would be easy to fudge it to get whatever answer you wanted, and (b) it’s likely that the public would misinterpret “group A is 20% more valuable than group B; we should be willing to pay 20% more per person to help an A rather than a B” as “we hardly need to care about group B at all”. After all, most people aren’t very good at statistics, and aren’t paying that close attention to these kinds of things. Especially since the people in group A will have a strong selfish incentive to frame it the second way. Given that these sorts of cost-benefit analyses generally have huge error bars anyway, such that cases where the decision is close enough to the margin that these extra considerations are relevant is probably one where you don’t have enough information to say either way regardless, it just doesn’t seem worth it to include that.
(There is a metric that is sometimes used in policy evaluation, called the WELLBY (well-being adjusted life year), which is based on what well-being the subject rates their life on an 0-10 scale. For instance, if you have a population with an average well-being of 5, and you can choose to (a) give them medicine which will save 100 of them, or (b) give 1,000 of them lots of amenities, then you should choose (b) if the amenities will bring their rating up to 5.5. So WELLBYs are sort of like Kershner’s suggestion, but narrower to make them actually possible to measure.)
** Usually what you care about is the *marginal* value of an intervention, not the *absolute* value of a life. **
Let’s say you’re considering an intervention that will give more education to either (a) 1,000 white Americans, or (b) 1,000 Asian-Americans. Then the total value of the intervention is not the values of the beneficiaries’ lives. The value is the amount of additional value the intervention adds. For instance, if you think the value of education has diminishing marginal returns, then if Asian-Americans already have more education, that means that their lives are more valuable but additional education will add less value.
Again, this is the kind of subtlety that the public (and even many policy analysts!) might find difficult to understand. Just in general, whenever you’re doing this kind of analysis, adding more factors to your model means you take more things into account, but also adds more ways to make mistakes and more assumptions that might be wrong, so it’s often better to keep your analysis simple.
** There’s a different framing that I think gets at the core issue better. **
The essay does include a lot of things that seem controversial (e.g. value = well-being * desert? So if somebody’s “desert” score is negative, that means we should make their well-being as horrible as possible? Or in general the discussion about what makes life valuable - I don’t think there’s any one answer there that everyone agrees on.)
The framing of this issue that I like is the following:
- Let’s say that Alice loses her legs in an industrial accident, so she has a harder time walking around, playing sports, and doing all sorts of other things she enjoys.
- Clearly something of value is lost there, right? If you think that nothing of value is lost, then you have to say that there is no point in trying to prevent such accidents, which seems obviously wrong.
- But if something of value is lost, then by definition it seems like “Alice post-accident” has less value left in her life than “Alice pre-accident.”
It turns out that this sort of situation actually does occur in policy analysis. One method that is used is “DALY”s (disability adjusted life year) and it works like this. Each condition has a “disability weight” that is between 0 and 1, that represents how bad that condition is relative to being dead. So for instance if the weight for blindness is 0.2, that is saying that if a sighted person’s life is worth 1, then a blind person’s life is worth 0.8. In other words:
1,000 people becoming blind is as bad as 200 people dying
1,000 blind people dying is as bad as 800 sighted people dying
Note the trade-off here in this formulation. If you raise the disability weight for blindness, then you are saying that (1) saving people from blindness looks better, but also (2) saving already blind people from death looks less good.
There isn’t an obvious way around this. Let’s say that an advocate for blind people argues that “saving 1,000 people from blindness is worth more than saving 200 people from death” but also that when deciding who to save from death, blind people aren’t worth less than sighted people. Then consider the following cases:
(a1) 1,000 people become blind, (a2) 150 sighted people die
(b1) 1,000 blind people die, (b2) 950 sighted people die
Let’s say that if a1 is chosen, the victims in b1 are the people who just got made blind by a1.. In this case the advocate would have to say that (a1) is worse than (a2), and (b1) is worse than (b2). But adding it up, (a1 + b1) has only 1,000 people dying, and (a2 + b2) has 1,100 people dying, so clearly (a2 + b2) is worse.
Thank you for the great comment. I mostly agree with you. I especially agree with you that policy should focus on marginal contribution.
In terms of nothing to be gained in framing it in terms of race, it is relevant for the following reasons.
(1) Some race and IQ researchers deny the above way of valuing people in defending themselves against the charge of racism.
(2) Some analyses seem to say that one type of racism involves a valuation error regarding racial groups.
As far as policy, here are two purported attempts to show how IQ relates to large-scale policies. I take no position on whether these arguments succeed.
These attempts are distinct from the above value-based theory.
I also think the QALYs - or WELLBYs or DALYs - are useful way to consider tradeoffs for policies, especially if we can convert a QALY into a single metric (for example, dollars or utils).
I'm wondering if we disagree on anything you say above. I suspect we don't, but perhaps I'm missing something.
I don’t think well-being is a very good indicator of intrinsic value, in fact I’m skeptical of the concept as a whole (in the sense that it seems that all things with human-like sentience are equally intrinsically valuable). To illustrate the point, it doesn’t seem plausible that there is a scenario where killing two people who are otherwise identical to but each half as happy as a single person isn’t way worse than just killing the one.
The extrinsic part of his argument, though, is (regrettably) pretty compelling. It intuitively seems that killing someone like Einstein would be worse than killing a random homeless person.
Consider if God were thinking of creating one of two worlds.
(1) The first world consists of one million people, each of whom has an ecstatic life (very positive well-being).
(2) The second world consists of one million people, each of whom has a miserable life (very negative well-being).
I suspect God would think that the first world is better than the second because the lives of the people in the first world go better than the lives of the people in the second world.
This is particularly true if the one million were the same people in both worlds.
Still, I suspect God would prefer the first world even if the people in the two worlds contained completely different people.
I think this is intuitive evidence that well-being is part of intrinsic value or - if one denies that people deserve things - a basis for intrinsic value.
Would Professor Kershnar be so kind as to comment on what his theory entails about the comparative value of other demographic groups? For example, what does his theory entail about Black or Latino Americans? Jewish Americans?
Ok, as promised:
1. This isn't an objection to anything in the article, only a meta-point about how much it matters. Some questions don't matter, and, as a result, some technically false statements about those questions don't really *need* correcting. Suppose it's true that the total value of some groups is higher than other groups, and that this is true in the context of racial groups (where 'racial groups' is understood loosely enough to satisfy philosophers who are, say, social constructivists about race); even so, I'm skeptical that the question 'are Asian Americans more valuable than white Americans?' matters any more than the question 'do people with an odd number of freckles matter more than people with an even number of freckles?'. Just as we will never, in fact, face a trolley problem regarding people with an odd number of freckles or an even number of freckles, we will never face a trolley problem wherein we're forced to choose between two racial groups. Some false assertions don't matter either: suppose someone falsely claims that people with odd freckles are necessarily worth the same as people with even freckles. Presumably, even if all false beliefs are intrinsically disvaluable, this one doesn't matter very much, especially if its isolated from other aspects of the person's belief system that are practically relevant. You might wonder whether, in the race context, Kershnar's conclusions have any practical import. I suggest they have none. Regardless of which groups contain the most value, all groups members are sufficiently valuable that they have rights, deserve respect, etc. You might wonder whether his conclusion has distributive implications vis-à-vis the allocation of scarce medical resources. But presumably, race is just a very loose proxy for the sum of someone's value, which can basically always be more accurately figured out by considering them individually. (You might charitably interpret Murray et al. to be saying that all groups matter equally *in all senses that matter practically*.)
2. I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result; but I'm a little suspicious of some of the empirical claims in terms of how they relate to wellbeing. E.g., if Asian Americans do better in schools, it's not clear why this means that they'd have more knowledge, as opposed to merely more academic knowledge or knowledge how to do well in tests. And there wasn't an argument for why academic knowledge is more intrinsically valuable than other types of knowledge one might acquire instead. (Similarly, I wonder about the strength of the putative correlation between IQ and knowledge, as opposed to some particular class of knowledge. Unless there is an argument singling certain sorts of knowledge out, it seems like there's a lot of work needing to be done to do this kind of group level comparison well. [And, who would want to do that?]).
3. Similarly, I have questions - though not objections - about some of the other claims. E.g., if white people get divorced more, does that strongly correlate with less time spent in love? You might think that many people who don't divorce due to cultural pressure are stuck in loveless marriages, and might be getting more love if they divorced.
4. Otherwise, I found the more theoretical claims about wellbeing pretty plausible, though I'm fairly uncertain about this stuff.
The correlation between IQ and general knowledge is well-established, to the extent that some IQ tests use general knowledge tests as a component of measurement, and general knowledge is used as a proxy for IQ in some cases. Of course, "general knowledge" is in a strange way itself a particular class of knowledge, but to me it strains credulity that "general knowledge" wouldn't correlate with total knowledge.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608005000385
My failure to know this is evidence of a low IQ
Amos:
On 3, I agree with the generalization about divorce and love raise questions, and in particular ones for which I do not have strong evidence.
My thought was that marriage often seems to accompany love. I don't have evidence for this claim, merely anecdotes. And data is not the the plural of anecdote. Sadly, this is not my line.
Marriage seems to correlate with greater happiness (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/marriage-may-be-key-happiness). So, being divorced or unmarried would seem to correlate with less happiness. If happiness is pleasure, then it is distinct from love.
Also, perhaps the above correlation is explained by who gets married rather than marriage itself. Or perhaps something other than marriage explains the correlation.
Best,
Steve K
Amos:
Great point on 1. I largely agree.
Here, though, are three ways in which the argument might matter.
First, if the following theory of racism is true, then the above argument falsifies it, or at least requires that it be more precisely stated.
One person has a racist attitude regarding a second person if and only if
(a) the first has race-based antipathy toward a second (antipathy) or
(b) the first believes that because of the second’s race, the second is inferior to a reference class (value).
Second, the way some IQ researchers such as Charles Murray and Noah Carl try to defuse criticism - by changing the focus to virtue-based moral value - is mistaken.
Third, some of those who attacked Nathan Cofnas, Joshua Katz, and Amy Wax likely thought that they were either commenting on people's moral worth or that their writings had implications for it. The above argument addresses this issue.
Best.
Amos:
Great point on 2.
You say the following, "I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result ... ."
First, if this is true in philosophy, then the field has a real problem. If serious scholars are scared to look at factors that purportedly predict measures of success and well-being, this is a problem for a field that depends on unrestricted discussion.
Second, this fear will - and probably has - spread to other areas. I am not sure if the following is a case of this, but the attempted cancellation of some of those working on transgenderism or their work - for example, Alex Byrne, Carole Hooven, Abigail Shrier, and Kathleen Stock - chills further discussion of this topic.
Third, if - as some researchers assert - IQ is a reasonably strong predictor of many important aspects of life, at least compared to some of its competitor predictors, we lesson the value of policy discussions by ignoring intelligence. Here is an example of a case in which an excellent philosopher thinks it's relevant to immigration.
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/4/2/274
Best.
"I've never spent a minute looking into race/IQ research because everyone who ever has seems to have been made worse off as a result; but I'm a little suspicious of some of the empirical claims in terms of how they relate to wellbeing"
Imagine saying something analogous about literally any other topic on earth and you should see the problem here.
Great point.
I think the framing here makes it sound more controversial than it is. What would be controversial, I take it, would be to say that it is better for good things to happen to Asians than to whites. The claim here, put more precisely, seems simply to be that Asians have better lives. Sure, that seems right enough. The problem is that saying that Asians are more valuable makes it sound like you might be saying the former, when the claim is really the latter.
The desert point complicates this a little, but if you really do think value should be desert adjusted, then this implication shouldn't be very surprising anyways. I mean, pick whatever gerrymandered group you want of people with more desert and this implication just falls out.
Dear Silas:
Thank you for your point.
I suspect we agree on this. If intrinsic goodness is equal to the product - or perhaps a much more complex mathematical relation (https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/1/18) - between well-being and desert, then if, on average, group A has greater well-being and desert than group B, group A is probably going to be more intrinsically valuable than group B.
This will be true for gerrymandered groups. For example, fans of Game of Thrones and fans of Jersey Shore.
Best.
Thank you for the reply!
I basically agree yes. My point was simply that "intrinsic value" gives connotations of some kind of inherently greater worth beyond the contingent quality of someone's life--at least to me. But given the definitions you provided, I think your argument is more or less correct.
When race-and-IQ people insist that their claims don't imply that certain racial groups are less valuable than others, what they seem to be trying to say, I think, is that their claims don't imply that certain racial groups are less worthy of respect than others--specifically recognition respect (rather than appraisal respect). They expect that their audience will infer that they think their claims about group IQ differences provide reason to treat groups differently (and not equally well), because that is the common racist view. So they try to cancel that implicature by adding that their empirical claims don't have normative or evaluative implications. If that's the right reading, then when the race-and-IQ people talk about people's equal value, they're not talking about something like people's overall utility, but rather about their moral considerability.
Dear Jonah:
Fantastic point, but I respectfully disagree.
Let's say that appraisal-respect tracks total value, and that recognition-respect tracks right-stringency (or, perhaps, the strength of some other deontological requirement).
The justifier-justified metaphysical principle applies to right-stringency and, hence, recognition-respect.
For example, let's assume that moral responsibility (or, perhaps, autonomy) justifies rights. The same pattern will be true if an interest justifies rights.
If A were to be twice as morally responsible as B, then, other things being equal, A's right would be twice as stringent as B's right. The same is true if right-stringency depends on the the responsibility-justifier regarding a particular act, a particular situation, or a class of acts involving the actor or person toward whom he acts.
In addition, if the race-and-IQ people were addressing claims of recognition-respect, I would have thought that they would have discussed right-stringency or some other deontological requirement rather than desert, virtue, how God would value people, and so on.
Best.
Extraordinarily Based
If you want to go down this line, you should consider:
(1) the amount of sleep people need. People who need less sleep have more opportunities for valuable experiences.
(2) to what extent differences in mental capabilities are due to "software" (i.e. smarter people are able to execute more effective mental processes) versus "hardware" (i.e. smarter people are able to execute more mental processes in the same amount of time). Someone with a faster processing speed presumably experiences pleasant events for a subjectively longer time, which naively would increase the value associated with those events.
Andrew:
Thank you for your comment.
I gather you are arguing that someone's life goes better if he has to sleep less - and so has more valuable experiences - or if he processes information faster - and so has greater intensity of pleasures. I agree. I also think that is one person is happier due to genetics, he also has a life that goes better for him.
Holding desert constant, these things would increase the intrinsic value of a person's life.
Best
I shall wait to see Amos’ response. I may have a good deal to say about this.
Compelling philosophy as always from Kershnar. Steve, do you have anything to say on dynamics introduced by the possibility of someone being quite valuable as an individual but not so valuable as part of a group, or vice-versa? If that's common, a lot about who's valuable is context-dependent.
Dan:
Thank you for the kind comment, and also the superb point.
A person's intrinsic value and extrinsic value often do diverge.
For example, a person whose life goes poorly for her might have more children than a woman whose life goes well for her. As a result, the former has greater extrinsic value and, perhaps also, greater total value.
I think this is also a great point about context. The context will affect a person's contribution to others' lives and, so, strongly affect their extrinsic value.
I am guessing that in most cases, a person's extrinsic value outweighs his intrinsic value, so things like reproduction matter a lot toward someone's total value.
I'm also guessing that for a few people, although probably not most of us, their work-related contribution will be significant.
Thanks again,
Steve K
** Preliminaries **
Before we can analyze questions like “do lives have equal value” we have to clarify what this means - how would an answer to this question affect our real-world decision-making? The answer would have to be something like “if we have a policy X that will save a set A of people, and a policy Y that would save a set B of people, and we can only choose one, then we should choose X iff the sum of the values of people in set A is greater than the sum of the values of people in set B.” So let’s use this as a starting point.
The framing of the essay in terms of differences between races seems designed to be provocative, but it isn’t the central point of the essay.
The essay primarily argues that (a) different people’s lives have different value (because people differ in praiseworthiness, virtue, and other things that make life valuable) and moves on to say (b) that because people of different races (on average) have different amounts of these things, then people of different races are (on average) differently valuable.
But there’s not really anything to be gained by framing it in terms of race here. Suppose you are making a decision where you know exactly who is in set A, and who is in set B. Then you don’t need to care about their race, you can just evaluate them based on their own qualities. I think we can agree that people should be judged based on who they are, not based on other people who happen to share a race with them. The only time when that would be relevant is if you had a decision like “should I save 1,000 white Americans, or 1,000 Asian-Americans” and this is the only information you have about the two groups.
** It’s not clear how you would actually incorporate “differences in value” into any sort of analysis in a consistent way. **
Let’s say you were actually in the situation above. How would you use that in your analysis? Obviously in a real situation you wouldn’t have exactly the same number of people - maybe the choice is between 1,200 white Americans and 1,000 Asian-Americans. So you would want to know “is the average Asian-American worth more than 1.2 times that of a white American?” And nothing in the essay even begins to figure that out. The essay does include equations that include terms like “objective-list goods” and “praiseworthiness” - but that doesn’t really help because we have no agreed-upon method of measuring and weighting those things. Things that some people think are virtues, others don’t think are virtues at all.
Even if you did try to incorporate some sort of “differing value of life” index into your calculations, it seems clear to me that (a) there are just so many degrees of freedom in how to construct that index, that it would be easy to fudge it to get whatever answer you wanted, and (b) it’s likely that the public would misinterpret “group A is 20% more valuable than group B; we should be willing to pay 20% more per person to help an A rather than a B” as “we hardly need to care about group B at all”. After all, most people aren’t very good at statistics, and aren’t paying that close attention to these kinds of things. Especially since the people in group A will have a strong selfish incentive to frame it the second way. Given that these sorts of cost-benefit analyses generally have huge error bars anyway, such that cases where the decision is close enough to the margin that these extra considerations are relevant is probably one where you don’t have enough information to say either way regardless, it just doesn’t seem worth it to include that.
(There is a metric that is sometimes used in policy evaluation, called the WELLBY (well-being adjusted life year), which is based on what well-being the subject rates their life on an 0-10 scale. For instance, if you have a population with an average well-being of 5, and you can choose to (a) give them medicine which will save 100 of them, or (b) give 1,000 of them lots of amenities, then you should choose (b) if the amenities will bring their rating up to 5.5. So WELLBYs are sort of like Kershner’s suggestion, but narrower to make them actually possible to measure.)
** Usually what you care about is the *marginal* value of an intervention, not the *absolute* value of a life. **
Let’s say you’re considering an intervention that will give more education to either (a) 1,000 white Americans, or (b) 1,000 Asian-Americans. Then the total value of the intervention is not the values of the beneficiaries’ lives. The value is the amount of additional value the intervention adds. For instance, if you think the value of education has diminishing marginal returns, then if Asian-Americans already have more education, that means that their lives are more valuable but additional education will add less value.
Again, this is the kind of subtlety that the public (and even many policy analysts!) might find difficult to understand. Just in general, whenever you’re doing this kind of analysis, adding more factors to your model means you take more things into account, but also adds more ways to make mistakes and more assumptions that might be wrong, so it’s often better to keep your analysis simple.
** There’s a different framing that I think gets at the core issue better. **
The essay does include a lot of things that seem controversial (e.g. value = well-being * desert? So if somebody’s “desert” score is negative, that means we should make their well-being as horrible as possible? Or in general the discussion about what makes life valuable - I don’t think there’s any one answer there that everyone agrees on.)
The framing of this issue that I like is the following:
- Let’s say that Alice loses her legs in an industrial accident, so she has a harder time walking around, playing sports, and doing all sorts of other things she enjoys.
- Clearly something of value is lost there, right? If you think that nothing of value is lost, then you have to say that there is no point in trying to prevent such accidents, which seems obviously wrong.
- But if something of value is lost, then by definition it seems like “Alice post-accident” has less value left in her life than “Alice pre-accident.”
It turns out that this sort of situation actually does occur in policy analysis. One method that is used is “DALY”s (disability adjusted life year) and it works like this. Each condition has a “disability weight” that is between 0 and 1, that represents how bad that condition is relative to being dead. So for instance if the weight for blindness is 0.2, that is saying that if a sighted person’s life is worth 1, then a blind person’s life is worth 0.8. In other words:
1,000 people becoming blind is as bad as 200 people dying
1,000 blind people dying is as bad as 800 sighted people dying
Note the trade-off here in this formulation. If you raise the disability weight for blindness, then you are saying that (1) saving people from blindness looks better, but also (2) saving already blind people from death looks less good.
There isn’t an obvious way around this. Let’s say that an advocate for blind people argues that “saving 1,000 people from blindness is worth more than saving 200 people from death” but also that when deciding who to save from death, blind people aren’t worth less than sighted people. Then consider the following cases:
(a1) 1,000 people become blind, (a2) 150 sighted people die
(b1) 1,000 blind people die, (b2) 950 sighted people die
Let’s say that if a1 is chosen, the victims in b1 are the people who just got made blind by a1.. In this case the advocate would have to say that (a1) is worse than (a2), and (b1) is worse than (b2). But adding it up, (a1 + b1) has only 1,000 people dying, and (a2 + b2) has 1,100 people dying, so clearly (a2 + b2) is worse.
Dear Athena:
Thank you for the great comment. I mostly agree with you. I especially agree with you that policy should focus on marginal contribution.
In terms of nothing to be gained in framing it in terms of race, it is relevant for the following reasons.
(1) Some race and IQ researchers deny the above way of valuing people in defending themselves against the charge of racism.
(2) Some analyses seem to say that one type of racism involves a valuation error regarding racial groups.
As far as policy, here are two purported attempts to show how IQ relates to large-scale policies. I take no position on whether these arguments succeed.
(1) Kit Wellman
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/4/2/274
(2) Jason Richwine
https://delong.typepad.com/pdf-1.pdf
These attempts are distinct from the above value-based theory.
I also think the QALYs - or WELLBYs or DALYs - are useful way to consider tradeoffs for policies, especially if we can convert a QALY into a single metric (for example, dollars or utils).
I'm wondering if we disagree on anything you say above. I suspect we don't, but perhaps I'm missing something.
Thanks again for the great note.
I don’t think well-being is a very good indicator of intrinsic value, in fact I’m skeptical of the concept as a whole (in the sense that it seems that all things with human-like sentience are equally intrinsically valuable). To illustrate the point, it doesn’t seem plausible that there is a scenario where killing two people who are otherwise identical to but each half as happy as a single person isn’t way worse than just killing the one.
The extrinsic part of his argument, though, is (regrettably) pretty compelling. It intuitively seems that killing someone like Einstein would be worse than killing a random homeless person.
Dear Josh:
Thanks for the interesting comment.
Consider if God were thinking of creating one of two worlds.
(1) The first world consists of one million people, each of whom has an ecstatic life (very positive well-being).
(2) The second world consists of one million people, each of whom has a miserable life (very negative well-being).
I suspect God would think that the first world is better than the second because the lives of the people in the first world go better than the lives of the people in the second world.
This is particularly true if the one million were the same people in both worlds.
Still, I suspect God would prefer the first world even if the people in the two worlds contained completely different people.
I think this is intuitive evidence that well-being is part of intrinsic value or - if one denies that people deserve things - a basis for intrinsic value.
Best.
Would Professor Kershnar be so kind as to comment on what his theory entails about the comparative value of other demographic groups? For example, what does his theory entail about Black or Latino Americans? Jewish Americans?