(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics is a term for an ethical theory that holds that you can become morally responsible for a situation by interacting with it. E.g. if you are aware that someone needs something, and you offer to help conditionally on them doing something for you, you are doing something wrong that a third party who never offered any kind of help isn't.

It's mostly a disparaging term, because the people who use it are mostly consequentialists*, and to a consequentialist the idea that someone who is doing something to help a bad situation is worse than someone who is doing nothing sounds very strange.

But most ethical intuitions people have are, in at least some situations, compatible with consequentialism. One of the things I have not seen discussed (which is of course not at all the same as it not having been discussed, and if you can point me to somewhere it has I'll be thankful) is a common rule that I think often woks out to be a subset of Copenhagen ethics: Do not profit from someone else's misfortune.

The consequentialist argument for that heuristic is fairly straightforward, and it is e.g. the same as the basic argument against for-profit prisons†: if you can get something out of someone else's bad situation, you have an incentive to cause them to be in a bad situation. If you make money out of prisons being full, then you have a reason to lobby for higher imprisonment rates.

Are there cases where this doesn't really make sense? Sure. If you really need a particular kind of medication that's currently hard to get and I'm a private individual who happened to stockpile some and I'm offering to sell it to you for way more than I paid for it, you would, probably, call me a jerk. I might well be a jerk. But not because I have any way of making you need medicine more or cause a shortage or anything.

One of the more common conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical industry is, indeed, that they (or someone else) have discovered a cure for some condition and are currently suppressing it, because it is more profitable to sell you drugs that you'll need to take all your life than a drug you take once. To the best of my knowledge this is not a thing that happens. But it is a thing people are very willing to believe of them, and not coincidentally the pharmaceutical industry is mostly defined by making money off your misfortune (and also evil in unrelated, non-conspiracy ways).

You also see this show up in general in critiques of capitalism, if lots of people have no alternative but to work for you and that lets you set wages much lower than otherwise then what happens when you have the ability to influence policy on welfare, etc.

I am not making a general argument for or against this heuristic. I think it applies sometimes and doesn't apply at other times, and I think it explains a lot of visceral reactions people have to things that are, arguably, an improvement over the alternative.

I don't really know what the point of this post is tbh. Thinking out loud I guess.

*and also mostly dislike the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? I don't actually know if that's true but it seems plausible.

†to pick something I think most people reading this would agree is bad.

Comments

[feotakahari]

“ The consequentialist argument for that heuristic is fairly straightforward, and it is e.g. the same as the basic argument against for-profit prisons†: if you can get something out of someone else's bad situation, you have an incentive to cause them to be in a bad situation. If you make money out of prisons being full, then you have a reason to lobby for higher imprisonment rates.”

Another approach: let’s say you have life-saving medicine, and you’re capable of selling it at a relatively low price without harming yourself.* If you sell it at a high price, people will still buy it, because spending is better than dying. However, they won’t have much money left over for anything else, and that will significantly decrease their utility. Selling the medicine is better than hoarding it, but it would still be even better to sell at the lower price, sacrificing a little of your utility to preserve a lot of the buyer’s utility.

*Whether this is actually true gets into complicated arguments about the economics of medical research.

[sigmaleph]

this is basically what I was getting at with the "I might well be a jerk" comment. this sort of thing can definitely be unethical, but for reasons that are unrelated to the general argument I'm talking about.

those reasons are also more straightforwardly accounted for if you're doing consequentialist reasoning. It's a first-order effect, not a second-order one (visible just by looking at how much better off I am vs how much better off you are, without considering which actions are incentivised in future situations), and so a heuristic telling you to account for it is less important.