Seconds Thoughts About Counterfactual Impact as an Ethical Standard

(Positive Srdjan) An argument I read years ago when first hearing about EA goes something like this.

• many people think that becoming a doctor is really morally good
• this actually is much less true than commonly assumed because the impact of becoming a doctor is fairly low
• yes a doctor saves many lives, but if you don’t become a doctor that doesn’t mean that the people you would have saved die. Rather it means that the place you would have taken at medical school is taken by someone else. In effect, the whole stack of applicants below you is shifted one place up.
• hence your impact if you work as a doctor is not the number of lives you save, but rather the extra lives you save vs the counterfactual world where someone else with extremely similar grades had taken your place.

I always found this argument persuasive. Of course there are counterarguments that poke at the calculus. It could be the case that moving the whole stack ranking down has a significant overall effect or that you as an EA doctor would be especially effective. Still, the core insight that what matters morally is counterfactual impact was interesting and seemed obvious.

(Negative Srdjan) What about drug dealers?

Let’s say the market for drug dealers is fairly efficient. By becoming a drug dealer, you only marginally change things. Or what about being a concentration camp guard in WW2. If you don’t do it, there’s an endless supply of soldiers who want to not go to the eastern front who would take the job. Your counterfactual impact by doing it is super low or maybe even zero. So it’s completely morally fine, right?

(Positive Srdjan) Hmmmmmm. So this get’s tricky. You’re right that there’s a clear difference here between the consequential impact of an action and the amount of moral blame/praise we assign for it. Many things we would ordinarily find good/bad seems to not really make sense under a consequential moral framework. I can think of a few different ways to resolve this:

1. Pure vs practical ethics. Counter-factual impact is the correct true moral standard for judging behaviour and choices and the one you should use when making decisions about what to do. Other norms (doctor good, concentration camp guard bad) are useful social norms to have. They encourage people to do pro-social things and lead to better equlibria. e.g: If we shame anyone who is a concentration camp guard, we get less concentration camp guards.
2. There’s a difference between judging moral acts and judging people. When judging which act is correct, counter-factual impact is fine. When judging people, we don’t just care about terminal impact. Otherwise attempting to poison someone but instead putting vanilla in their food would not be bad. Instead we care about assessing a persons character and their propensity to behave in various ways in the future. The kind of person who does certain things: e.g: becoming a firefighter, becoming a concentration camp guard, tends to be better/worse. Hence these actions are useful signals. The whole doctor/guard intuition mismatch is just the result of confusing two different questions: what’s the right act vs what does a given act tell you about someone’s character.
3. Our deontic moral intuitions are just wrong and being a concentration camp guard is fine if you’re not doing additional harm
4. Our consequential moral intuitions are just wrong and acts can be really bad even if the outcomes are net zero or positive
5. The “goodness” of an act is combination of various different moral values we hold. So partly determined by consequences, partly by other considerations.

I’m leaning most towards 5 but I think 1 and 2 offer some interesting avenues of exploration. E.g: how does ethics work when your actions have nonlinear effects on other agents (e.g: Act X has +50 utility if only you do it, but -50 if more than 50% of people do it). When doing things, in the real world how much of the actual impact comes from the direct outcome of the decision vs the effect sticking to or defecting has on overall norm stability?

(Negative Srdjan) Either way, I think that one thing is clear here. If you suspect that being a concentration camp guard is morally problematic, or that paying 5$ to kill a person who would be executed anyway the same hour is not great, maybe you should be a less quick to accept the EA argument for counterfactual impact.

(Positive Srdjan) I don’t know. For the examples you give I agree but I feel like there’s a lot of cherry-picking going on here. Yes in extreme cases you maybe shouldn’t do things that are deontologically bad or defect from agreed-upon equlibria. But the vast majority of decisions in real life aren’t like that. Most decisions are mundane and do not involve any serious moral transgressions. If you’re deciding between working on management consulting vs being a doctor, where to give your money or any other of the 99% of decisions you make that don’t involve starting a coup/killing babies, then the counterfactual-impact standard is probably the one I would advise you to go with.

Also, a question here is what is the average person like? If we lived in a world of committed act-utilitarians, then maybe I would be happy to advocate for more deontology. I think the reality is the opposite. Most people lean far too far towards act deontology and don’t really consider or understand the counterfactual impact of their actions. Hence the advice to consider that impact more is probably net benificial.