Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Decisions of Value

NOTE: Edited because I was wrong.

V = Worth of a Value
D = Quantity of Danger of Injuring/Violating the Value
L = likelihood of the danger occurring

If L1(D1V1) > L2(D2V2), then mitigate V1 damage over V2 damage; if L1(D1V1) <>2V2), then mitigate V2 damage over v1.

A few months ago a good friend asked me about how far to go when one believes in something. I've been told, more than once, that I tend to take an extreme view of things. My first and second years of law school, my theory was that if I worked myself to death, well, at least I had been working hard.1

About halfway through my second year, things changed. I became more social and had a roommate. I hadn't realized how unhappy I was before, and my increased sociability introduced a level of temperance. They (whomever "they" are) say "all things in moderation."

Of course, how can we possibly take a value in moderation? Unless we live in a world of moral relativism, wherein Truth is absent, values are absolutist.2 It is all-too-easy to dismiss such statements as mere zealotry, pontificated paragons lacking practicability. But there are absolute values -- that is, values which retain their worth in all circumstances. Most poignantly, and nearly universally, there is the paramount value of life. There are situations, however, where we see it as necessary to take a life (for an extreme example, where a terrorist is about to detonate a bomb inside a school filled with children). Here, the result is justified and imperiled by the same value: while we took a life to protect life, we still took a life. An apparently utilitarian, but not, approach is to show that the value of the lives saved outweighed the value of the life lost.3

Such an example is far too easy -- after all, no ethical system can stand if it cannot withstand universalization. What do we do, for example, when a plane is on its correct heading towards Chicago, but without radio contact (did the radios go out, or has the plane been overtaken)? Ought the plane be shot down to protect Chicago's citizens, or should the authorities wait for fate's conclusion?4 Enter, I propose, my above equation. The question is thus clearer: is the danger of the plane having been overtaken, and the consequences resulting from the likelihood of that danger, greater than the danger that the plane has merely lost radio contact and that hundreds of lives will be ended? Thank God is not to me to make those calls.

The formulaic nature of my formulation suggests that a numerical value should be attached, and a desktop calculator should make the decision. There are two problems with this: first, how does one quantify the quality of the value of another's life, much less hundreds of others? The very nature of values, especially when competing, makes such a task impossible. Easily, who am I to judge the value of another's life? More difficultly, is the value of a research doctor, on the cusp of curing cancer, greater than that of the woman who has just swallowed a bottle of qualudes with a stiff gin & tonic?5 Most troublesome, however, is the fact that life, as an absolute value, is inherently irreducable to a number. Put simply: to say that Esmeralda Elaine Jacobson's life is worth 14, whilst Samuel Sunnington's life is worth 19 lacks any sort of methodology.

The second difficulty comes from the gut: it is morally abhorrent to assign different worths to others' lives.6 Life is more than numbers and math.

But these difficulties are ultimately irrelevant. The formula is meant as a method to clarify the muddled moral morasses in which we all too often find ourselves. These are the considerations which we take into account when faced with ethical dilemmas, but by separating the cognitive processes, I believe the solution may be more clear, more resolute, and more methodological.7

There is a final difficulty with this system, however: its resolutions appear to be extreme. There ethical dilemmas wherein we must choose one defined course of action or another (is capital punishment moral or not); there are also ethical dilemmas where a number of solutions, possibly infinite, exist. In the former cases, the solution should work well. To avoid the excess of extremity in the latter cases, however, the correct course of action is to take those actions where L1(D1V1) = L2(D2V2):
all things in moderation.

Please tell me, what do you think?

1. One night after a movie, I asked friends to drop me off at school so I could get back to work. It was 11:30 p.m.; at one point I spent 3 days at school, awake throughout, because I had work to tend to -- I was sent home by a friend in front of whom I fell asleep in the middle of speaking a sentence.

2. Which reminds me of my favorite Non-Sequitur ever: "Obvious Man," the intellectual superhero, points out that the phrase "there are no absolutes" is itself an absolute statement.

3. The utilitarian approach, resulting likewise, would argue that the happiness (or utility) of the lives saved outweigh the sadness resulting from the life lost. Our approach is not utilitarian, because it is valuing the lives themselves rather than the utility resulting therefrom.

4. We will not here, yet, discuss fate. Take the word for how I mean it.

5. Of course, this question might be answered by the equation.

6. Of great internal distress is the fact that logic does not present an eternal solution to all problems. The paths of logic can lead to absurd and revolting solutions. Some things feel wrong. I have been working to resolve these two systems for years, and have not yet found a solution. Neither can alone be correct, because they cannot be universalized. This is a recognized fault in my argument above, which I am working to settle.

7. I also suspect that this may be a way to decide what to have for dinner. I have, of course, been accused of going to analytical extremes.

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