Sentiment, Calculation, and Prudence

 

Some engineers eventually become managers, and managers not only of engineering projects but of entire companies or even public organizations.  The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a spotlight on the question of how those in charge should allocate scarce resources (including technical resources) in the face of life-threatening situations.  And so I would like to bring you a brief summary sketch of three ways to do that:  two that are widely applied but fundamentally flawed, and one that is not so well known but can actually be applied successfully by ordinary mortals like ourselves.

 

None of this is original to me, nor to Robert Koons, the philosopher who describes them in a recent issue of First Things.  But originality is not usually a virtue in ethical reasoning, and in what follows, I'll try to show why.

 

In the 1700s, the Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and David Hume devised what Koons calls a "difference-making" way of coming up with moral decisions.  The way this process works is best described by an example.  To properly assess an action or even the lack of an action, you must figure out the net difference it makes to the entire world.  Koons uses the example of a homicidal maniac who, if left to himself, is bound to go out and kill three people.  Suppose you know about this maniac: you can either do nothing, or choose to kill him.  If you do nothing, three people die; if you kill him, only one person dies.  Other things being equal, the world is a better place if fewer people die, so the logic of difference-making says you must kill him.

 

That's an extreme example, but it vividly illustrates the rational basis of two popular ways of making moral decisions involving public health.  Let's start with the commonly-heard statement that every human life is of infinite value.  Few would dare to argue openly with that contention, yet if you try to use it as a guide for practical action, you run into a dilemma.  Even something as simple as your driving a car to the grocery store exposes other people to some low but nonzero chance of being killed by your vehicle.  If you take the infinite value of human life seriously, you will never drive anywhere, because infinity times (whatever small chance there is of running over someone fatally) is still infinity.

 

Koons calls one way of dealing with this dilemma "sentimentalism."  He's not talking about people who watch mushy movies, but the fact that the sentimentalist, in the meaning he uses, abandons logic for emotion and settles for life more or less as it is, but feels bad whenever anybody dies.  Such people exist in a constant state of deploring the world's failure to live up to the ideal that every human life is of infinite worth, but otherwise derive little moral guidance from that principle in practice.

 

The more hard-headed among us say, "look, we can't act on infinities, so if we put a finite but large value on human life, at least we can get somewhere. " Applying the difference-making idea to human lives valued at, say, a million dollars, allows you to make calculations and cost-benefit tradeoffs.  Engineers are familiar with technical tradeoffs, so many engineers find this method of moral decision-making quite attractive.  But one of many problems with this approach is that it requires one to take a "view from nowhere":  there are no boundaries to the differences a given decision makes, other than the world itself.  Again, if we try to be truly logically consistent, calculating all the differences a given life-or-death decision makes is practically impossible.

 

At this point Koons calls Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to the rescue.  Operating under the umbrella of the classical virtue called prudence, Koons asks a given person in a given specific set of circumstances to judge the worthiness of a particular choice facing him or her.  He sets out four things that make a human act of choice worthy:  (1)  whether the human is applying rational thinking to the act, rather than random chance or instinct; (2) what the essential nature of the act is; (3)  what the purpose or end of the act is; and (4) what circumstances are relevant to the act. 

 

Unlike the difference-making approach, which imposes the impossible burden of near-omniscience on the decider, judging the worthiness of an action doesn't ask the person making the decision to know everything.  You simply take what you know about yourself, the kind of act you're contemplating, what you're trying to accomplish, and any other relevant facts, and then make up your mind.

 

In this process, some decisions are easy.  Should I kill an innocent person, a child, say?  Item (2) says no, killing innocent people is always wrong. 

 

Here's another situation Koons uses, but with an example drawn from my personal experience.  You walk outside your building past a bicycle owned by a person you really hate (call him Mr. SOB) and would like to see out of the way.  You notice that someone who hates Mr. SOB even more than you do has quietly disconnected the bike's brake cables, so that unless Mr. SOB checks his brakes before he gets on his bike, he will ride out into the street with no brakes and quite possibly get killed.  If you decide to say or do nothing, you have not committed any explicit act; you have simply refrained from doing anything.  But item (3) says your intentions in refraining were evil ones:  you hope the guy will get killed on his bike.  In this case, not doing anything is a morally wrong act, and you are obliged to warn him of the danger. 

 

And in less extreme cases, such as when public officials decide how to trade off lockdown restrictions versus spending money on vaccines or public assistance, the same four principles can guide even politicians (!) to make decisions that do not require them to be all-knowing, but do ask them to apply generally accepted moral principles in a practical and judicial way.

 

Of course, judiciousness and prudence are not evenly distributed virtues, and some people will be better at moral decision-making than others.  But when we look into the fundamental assumptions behind the decision-making process, we see that the difference-making approach has fatal flaws, while the traditional virtue-based approach using prudential judgment can be applied successfully by any individual with a good will and enough intelligence to use it.

 

Sources:  A much better  explanation of these approaches to moral reasoning can be found in Robert C. Koons's original article "Prudence in the Pandemic" which appeared on pp. 39-45 of the October issue of First Things, and is also accessible online at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/prudence-in-the-pandemic.

Biotech in Agriculture: Blessing or Curse?

For personal reasons, I pay more attention than I might otherwise to doings in Omaha, Nebraska (a niece of mine lives there).  As I write this, they're enduring a blizzard with up to 50-MPH winds, temperatures near zero, and up to a foot of snow coming down.  Most of them, that is.  The governor, on the other hand, a Republican named Pete Ricketts, is at the Agricultural Outlook Forum outside Washington, DC participating in a panel discussion of biotechnology in farming. 

In a brief interview that appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, Ricketts painted a glowing future of apples that don't turn brown, salmon that grow faster, and other developments that will feed an increasing population.  Almost in the same breath, he admitted that the public's view of genetic engineering is skeptical, and environmental groups criticize large-scale farming for the effect it has on climate change.  The panel that Ricketts was scheduled to participate in at the forum is called "The Evolving Regulatory Landscape and Adoption of Precision Agriculture." 

Biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, are specialized topics that most people know a little bit about, but only a few people know a lot about.  In such cases, the few who know a lot have both the privilege and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.  But wisdom in one person's view may be folly to another.

The tension that Gov. Ricketts pointed out in his interview with the Omaha World-Herald involves two camps or lines of thought.  For simplicity, we'll call them biotech optimists and biotech pessimists.  The optimists, which evidently include the Governor and his fellow panelists at the forum (a biotech scientist and two biotech-firm executives), believe that biotech will improve agriculture and make good-quality food more available.  We should bear in mind that increasingly, farming these days is big farming:  large corporations operating huge spreads with highly mechanized processes that employ fewer people all the time per unit of product made.  That's just the definition of increased productivity, and it's a driving force behind biotech and most other production-oriented businesses these days. 

The biotech pessimists are a more varied group.  They are no doubt responsible for a good bit of the regulatory landscape mentioned in the forum's title.  Some of the reasons for regulation are protection of endangered species, abatement of water and air pollution (have you ever driven within a few hundred yards of an old-style pig farm?—you'd remember it if you did), and prevention of unlikely but devastating disasters that might happen from genetic engineering experiments gone wrong.  The positions of such pessimists range from mild (horse-trading adjustments to regulations in cooperation with biotech industries) to extreme (abolishing all genetic engineering from the planet), but they are united in their opposition to simply letting biotech optimists do whatever they want, with no restrictions whatsoever.

In a well-running democracy, these opposing interest groups make their opinions and facts known and reach a compromise in cooperation with legislative bodies—a compromise that both allows useful advances in biotechnology and avoids the worst harms that can result from it.  Whether this democracy of ours is running that well is a question for another time.

A factor that has to be added to this mix in recent years is the increasingly international nature of all trade, including trade in farm commodities.  One hard fact that Gov. Ricketts mentioned is that Nebraska's farm income for 2018 is expected to be the lowest since 2002, and one factor in that decline is the downward pressure on prices due to international free trade in farm products.  Adam Smith's invisible hand is at work here, making sure that in an ideal world of free trade, the price for each commodity is established by the most efficient producer worldwide, leading to an overall maximum efficiency.  Mathematically, the principle is irrefutable, but mathematics takes no cognizance of nations, cultures, customs, or traditions.

The biotech optimists tend to be on Adam Smith's side, if for no other reason than if we don't take the next step in biotech improvements, somebody else will and they'll undercut us productivity-wise.  In other words, if we don't beat them at their own game, we lose.  The pessimists would step in and question the propriety of the whole game. 

Without farming, we wouldn't have civilization at all—no universities, no cities, no modern conveniences, no science, and no people—well, almost no people, by comparison to what the globe supports now.  Any nation with a considerable land mass suitable for farming is going to have to deal with the question of how that farming is conducted:  whether it is protected from adverse influences such as foreign competition and excessive regulation that would threaten its existence, or whether it is left to fend for itself, which in a democracy gets increasingly difficult as the number of people directly and indirectly supported by farming dwindle.  If you read agrarians such as Wendell Berry, you will conclude that in the U. S., we have largely taken the latter course, treating farming increasingly like we treat the military:  as the sole preoccupation of a few specialists we need pay no attention to, as long as they do for us what we want. 

But such neglect is a recipe for long-term disaster.  Taking any group of people for granted—farmers, soldiers, engineers, even politicians—is to treat them as means, and not ends in themselves:  human beings like us who deserve attention, justice, and mercy.  I do not have all the answers, or even a few of them, regarding how much biotechnology is enough.  But farmers perform an increasingly neglected service to us all, whether here or abroad.  And I hope that we don't sacrifice farming communities for the sake of free trade, or freedom from genetically-modified crops, or any other ideal shibboleth that looks good on paper, but would wreak havoc among people we may never meet, but upon whom we depend for every bite we put in our mouths. 

Sources:  The Omaha World-Herald carried the article "Ricketts joins panel on farming biotechnology during D. C. visit, calls for productivity, innovation" on Feb. 22, 2019 at https://www.omaha.com/news/nation/morton/ricketts-joins-panel-on-farming-biotechnology-during-d-c-visit/article_d6e45688-f4f4-545b-b624-b8dafcddad9f.html.  The Agricultural Outlook Forum's website is at https://www.usda.gov/oce/forum/.