I mentioned recently the gratuitously violent nature of lots of philosophical examples. Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also alluded to by Eric Tam in his criticism of one of my earlier posts

Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.

I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.

Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
Read More »

One of the big questions in the debate over economic growth is whether it enhances human happiness. One of the sources of information commonly used in this debate is derived from answers to questions of the general form ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?’. This and similar questions have been asked in many countries and over a period of some decades. The ‘stylised facts’ (this is economists’ jargon for the generally accepted summary that characterised the data) are that at any given time and place, people with high incomes are, on average, happier than those with low incomes, but that there’s not much difference between poor countries and rich ones and no significant trend in happiness levels over time.

This evidence has been used to support two kinds of claims
(i) Growth in economic output has been offset by losses in other, equally important sources of happiness such as clean environments or social cohesion
(ii) People’s happiness is primarily determined by their relative position rather than by absolute levels of consumption

I don’t want to debate the merits of these claims right now, but to point out that data of the kind I’ve described is of no use in assessing them. Starting with the second claim, some sort of relative assessment is forced on respondents by the form of the question. The only sensible way to answer the question is to assign 10 to the happiest people you know or can imagine, and compare yourselves to them (the point at which you would consider yourself better off dead arguably provides a natural zero).

So, if I go from a place where everyone is gloomy and depressed to one where everyone is happy (and adjust so that I no longer think about the gloomy people I used to know) my stated score is likely to decline. This will be true even if I’m actually happier myself – apart from the fact that I’m altruistically happy that other people are happy, I just find that gloomy people get me down. That is, the form of the question makes it look as though people are concerned about their relative position, even if they’re not.

So, if the measure provided is inherently local and relative, it can’t be used for comparisons over time or between groups of people with different reference points.

Jason Soon recently cited a piece by Richard Layard in which he tried to bolster the status of claim (ii) by observing that the results of happiness surveys were consistent with ‘objective’ measures obtained by brain scans. This argument doesn’t work, at least in the absence of time-series measures of brain scans. All it shows is that self-reported assessments of happiness give a local and relative answer consistent with the local and relative answer given by brain scans.