The politics of life & death

What, if anything, is wrong with the Kaldor-Hicks principle? This is the question raised by Chris Whitty’s argument that the benefits of reopening schools outweigh the costs of doing so.

Even if we suppose that this is factually correct - which it might not be – it does not follow that it is right to reopen schools. As David Hume said, we cannot derive “ought” from “is”.

Which is where the Kaldor-Hicks principle comes in. It says that a policy change is an improvement if the beneficiaries of it could compensate the losers and still remain better off – even if compensation is not actually paid. This idea fills the Humean gap between the statements “the benefits of reopening schools exceed the costs” and “schools should reopen”.

Which leads to the question I started with. I fear there are two problems with it, one philosophical, the other psychological.

The psychological problem is that it’s very easy to glide from “the benefits exceed the costs” to “the benefits are high: the costs are low.” Johnson might be guilty of this when he says the risk of getting Covid-19 in schools is "very small"; he forgets that a small chance of a nasty event is something to be avoided. On the Today programme this morning Tory MP Huw Merriman went further, declaring schools to be safe.  

Brexit gives us another example of this. Many Leavers – especially those whose media profile is disproportionate to their cognitive skills - have gone from “the benefits of Brexit outweigh the costs” to downplaying any costs at all.

Rather than face tricky, marginal decisions we exaggerate benefits and understate costs. Psychologists call this the choice-supportive bias.

The philosophical problem arises from the fact that the winners and losers from reopening schools are different people. Children win by getting a better education, but school staff and their families lose because they face a higher risk of catching Covid-19. And even a small extra risk across tens of thousands of people adds up to a few certain deaths. How is it legitimate to impose death upon some so that others benefit, especially when they are not being compensated for that risk?

There’s a long tradition which says it is not. John Rawls objected that the Kaldor-Hicks principle (which is just a refinement of classical utilitarianism) “does not take seriously the distinction between persons.” And from a different perspective, Robert Nozick wrote:

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up (intentionally?) To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, and no one is entitled to force this upon him. (Anarchy, State and Utopia, p32-33).

Reopening schools is, however, not the only example of the government ignoring Rawls and Nozick’s objections. The awarding of A levels did the same thing. Until the government over-rode it, Ofqual graded students not just on the basis of their own abilities but on the basis of their school’s past performance. As Frances says, “the algorithm did not treat people as individuals. It reduced them to points on a curve.” It too did not take seriously the distinction between persons.

In truth, policy often does this. And the costs it imposes are often not just pecuniary as they are with taxes or Brexit. Fiscal austerity and benefit sanctions killed thousands of people so that the media could get the sense that the public finances were under control. And wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed tens of thousands in the hope of benign regime change.

Such decisions are not always the result of bad policy (not that bad policy is always avoidable). Whenever a local authority decides not to reduce a speed limit it is in effect imposing a higher risk of death or injury so we can benefit from greater convenience on the roads. As Tom says, “at government level, everyone’s a utilitarian.”

Even in a liberal democracy, people are sometimes killed for the greater good. Rather than face this fact and think about it seriously, governments simply forget Rawls and Nozick’s objections.

Which brings us to a problem. Whilst we accept this in some contexts, we rail against it in others. Here’s James Bloodworth on the “useful idiots” who defend repressive regimes:

What is contemptible is the relegation of other human beings to pawns in the supposed historical process. The latter results in people uttering glib phrases about “omelettes not being possible without broken eggs” when bouts of mass killing threaten to undermine a favoured cause.

For me, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was as much an attack upon classical utilitarianism – the idea that some should suffer or die for the greater good – as it was upon Soviet communism.

There is, then, an inconsistency here. Sometimes we accept deaths for the greater good and sometimes we don’t*, preferring to pretend that we cannot put a price on human life even though we often must.  

This is not to accuse anybody of hypocrisy. Very few of us apply moral principles consistently (and perhaps we shouldn't). The brute fact is, though, that politics is sometimes a matter of life and death. This fact is like the first Mrs Rochester: we’d like to lock it away and forget it, but we cannot.

* I’m not sure this can be resolved merely by the fact that critics of the Soviet Union were in fact objecting to the ideal of communism rather than its implementation.

Comments

[Chris Purnell]

In wartime it's often asserted that people 'should' make sacrifices for others. Maybe they are awarded medals but they are making the decision. An imposed sacrifice of the kind that opening schools implies is something else altogether. Your piece is an insightful statement of that and is very welcome.

[phoenix_rising]

@Chris Purnell

"...but they are making the decision. An imposed sacrifice of the kind..."

The decision to join the military is still an imposed sacrifice when you consider that the type of people joining the military have limited opportunities. This from the New York Times:

"Some 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States military are people of color. But the people making crucial decisions, such as how to respond to the coronavirus crisis and how many troops to send to Afghanistan or Syria, are almost entirely white and male."

[ltr]

August 26, 2020

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 328,846)
Deaths   ( 41,465)

Notice the ratio of deaths to coronavirus cases is 12.6% for the United Kingdom.

[ltr]

August 26, 2020

Coronavirus

Israel

Cases   ( 108,054)
Deaths   ( 875)

Deaths per million   ( 95)

———————————–

July 4, 2020

Coronavirus

Israel

Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)

Deaths per million ( 36)

Having apparently approached a containing of the coronavirus, the Israeli government incautiously opened schools and businesses, and the result is a persistent community infection level that has now reached 108,054 cases in the small country as compared to 84,996 through all of mainland China.

[ltr]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/world/europe/germany-schools-virus-reopening.html

August 26, 2020

Schools Can Reopen, Germany Finds, but Expect a ‘Roller Coaster’
With nations determined to return to in-person learning, many will have trouble matching Germany’s formula: fast and free testing, robust contact tracing and low community spread.
By Katrin Bennhold

[Jim]

Will keeping kids off school for another six to nine months matter very much?

On the one hand we have screamers declaring children's education will be ruined. Well will it, we have only had a half-hearted attempt at remote teaching and it was during school holidays. The private schools seem to have managed, probably due to parental pressure - they are paying and a pull factor from the schools - they don't get paid if nothing happens.

Seems to me much more could be done. But there are problems of motivation and keeping children paying attention. Remote teaching also exposes the very poor quality of housing for a fair slab of our children as well as poor quality of life for many poorer people. Embarrassing and expensive to deal with. Handing out free laptops and providing free broadband seems a small cost compared to all the other disasters we face.

But is the educational output so good and effective anyway. A large slab of our elite jobs are educated in the private sector or we import them. Robotics and AI are likely to replace humans, business is restructuring - we don't need many of them. Uneducated children are strictly a government problem for next week and next year and the next decade but probably don't cost much or the costs are well spread around. Less need for 'chalk-fodder'.

Then there is pressure from the Right to get back to work and the schtick that teachers are lazy lefty blighters lolling around common rooms reading the Staggers. The real balance is 'can we afford a few dead teachers?'. Children seem unlikely to die from Covid and getting children back is the focus in the media. What is not addressed is the far more probable cause of trouble - adults. But getting children back also releases their parents to go back to whatever work they were/can do. So we take the risk of a few dead teachers and cleaners and support staff.

[Graeme]

Isn't the whole of socialist and Marxist "analysis" based on the premise that you can and must ignore the individual and treat them as amorphous chunks of humanity? You do it yourself when you bang on about twaddle such as people being motivated by class hatred.

[Ralph Musgrave]

The value of each human life should now be put at about zero. Reason is that the environmental costs of each extra human looks like being catastrophic: i.e. each extra human being living now will quite likely lead to at least one extra human death in fifty or a hundred years time when climate change gets really serious.

[Paulc156]

@Graeme..."Isn't the whole of socialist and Marxist "analysis" based on the premise that you can and must ignore the individual and treat them as amorphous chunks of humanity?"

Well no. "...society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." The German ideology.
...whereas capitalism gives us the opposite. 'there is no such thing as society...' Maggie.T,

[Paulc156]

@Ralph Musgrave
Global population is projected to be in decline during the latter part of this century in any case...but really it's population growth in the advanced/rich economies that threaten us vis a vis 'climate change', because that's where the consumption is concentrated. And to the extent that development of coal and oil plants in India and China are developed it's nurtured with western sourced investment and the target is to produce for export to western consumers!
It's primarily in the global South where the mass of population growth is and their consumer impact on climate is relatively tiny. Furthermore we know how to reduce pop' growth through poverty alleviation and education, primarily of women.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387807000855

So it might be fairer to say the value of each life on environmental considerations alone should be negative in the per capita wealthiest states and positive in the third world! And that negative value could be transformed by other measures open to us.

[D]

Maybe I'm being a bit simple here. But is the alternative, keeping schools closed, not also to impose costs some for the benefit of others?

(Costs of children not going to school for benefit of those not die-ing from covid)

Personally, I think you need to give people choice. Parents whether to send their kids or have them attend online, and teachers whether to teach in class or online.

[Dipper]

what would your genes prefer to happen?

(from a comment in a book that in Kenya older women look for fruit further away from the village (and hence more dangerous) than younger women, because granny's genes would rather granny was eaten by a lion than granny's children)

[Postkey]

Some critics of the Soviet Union were in fact objecting to its implementation of 'communism'?

"In Britain Nina Temple, the general secretary of the Communist Party; declared that the Socialist Workers Party was right, Russia is not socialist but state capitalist. That was as if the Pope declared that God doesn’t exist . . . "

https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/cliff/works/1997/xx/50years.htm

[ltr]

August 27, 2020

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 330,368)
Deaths   ( 41,477)

Notice the ratio of deaths to coronavirus cases is 12.6% for the United Kingdom.

[Dipper]

@ ltr "but Expect a ‘Roller Coaster’"

Germany knows it has to open up but has no idea what will happen, so they say they 'expect a roller coaster', but what they mean is they have no idea. If there are very few hospitalisations and deaths (we hope) then they say 'see, we said it would be a roller coaster', and if, heaven forbid, they have a high rate of cases and hospitalisations, they say 'see, we said it would be roller coaster', so this statement is made to future proof the decision, not because they have any idea.

[ltr]

What I am finding just now is another wave of coronavirus infections spreading through Western Europe, including the UK. I take no general position about school openings, however openings in the UK must be done carefully indeed, and I would like to be assured enough care is and will be taken.

[Dipper]

@ ltr

'What I am finding just now is another wave of coronavirus infections spreading through Western Europe, including the UK.'

yes. And no-one dying from it or even in hospital.

I don't really understand why this is the case. It may be that what we are actually seeing is lots of false positives, or people who had it ages ago with some residual RNA. Or it may be that as societies we know we have to keep vulnerable people out of the way so it is spreading amongst young people only.

see https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-coronavirus-immunity-riddle (£) for some more thoughts

[ltr]

'What I am finding just now is another wave of coronavirus infections spreading through Western Europe, including the UK.'

Yes. And no-one dying from it or even in hospital.

I don't really understand why this is the case.

[ Though I have no response as yet, this is important for us to understand. ]

[ltr]

August 27, 2020

Coronavirus

US

Cases   ( 6,035,243)
Deaths   ( 184,422)

India

Cases   ( 3,384,575)
Deaths   ( 61,694)

Mexico

Cases   ( 573,888)
Deaths   ( 62,076)

UK

Cases   ( 330,368)
Deaths   ( 41,477)

France

Cases   ( 259,698)
Deaths   ( 30,576)

Germany

Cases   ( 240,558)
Deaths   ( 9,359)

Canada

Cases   ( 126,646)
Deaths   ( 9,098)

China

Cases   ( 85,004)
Deaths   ( 4,634)

[ltr]

August 27, 2020

Coronavirus   (Deaths per million)

UK   ( 610)
US   ( 557)
Mexico   ( 481)
France   ( 468)

Canada   ( 241)
Germany   ( 112)
India   ( 45)
China   ( 3)

[ltr]

Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 12.6%, 11.8% and 10.8% for the United Kingdom, France and Mexico respectively.

[Blissex]

«we exaggerate benefits and understate costs. Psychologists call this the choice-supportive bias.»

Ahhh cognitive biases. But that's just a bias only if the benefits and costs accrue to the same individual. If the benefits accrue to the individual making the case for a choice, and the costs to someone else, there is the "possibility" :-) that it is not an innocent cognitive bias, but a pursuit of self interest.

[Blissex]

To the other commenters: the topic of this post is *not* whether schools should reopen, but the point that public policy involves impersonally ruthless utilitarianism, that is sacrifice the few for the benefit of the many, and the people cynically agree to it when the chances of being among the few is low.

But the arguments abou that are weak, consider the the case of national service, where every citizen may be obliged to risk life in war. The better argument is that is entirely voluntary: being a member of a state involves benefits and costs, and if among the costs there is the obligation to risk life in war, that is voluntary choice as long as membership can be given up, of course not the day after getting called up for national service. As long as every citizen has the option to move to another country without national service, living in a country with that obligation or its potential is entirely voluntary.

Consider another case: quite a few people die every year in car accidents, so that other people have the convenience of going around in cars. That too is a voluntary choice, and via the political process everyone can vote for limitations and conditions that make car use safer, until the majority is satisfied of the trade-off, and those who don't accept it can opt out.

«Even in a liberal democracy, people are sometimes killed for the greater good.»

It does not have even to be a democracy, as long as opting out is possible, and vice-versa a democracy that forbids opting out can violate individual rights.

«Rather than face this fact and think about it seriously, governments simply forget Rawls and Nozick’s objections.»

So I don't see many reasons of *principle*, contrarily to Nozick's and Rawls' facile individualism as to why in a voluntary membership state (ideally a democracy, but not necessarily) selfish taxpayers should pay more taxes to prevent the deaths of poorer people from bad circumstances or lack of healthcare, or why teachers and parents have a greater right to safety from COVID-19 than children have to an uninterrupted education.

The real problems are in the utilitarian quantities involved, which are often incommensurable (often not even ordinal, never mind cardinal), yet somehow they must be balanced, and in particular in the risk of a dictatorship of the majority, or the disproportionate influence of a minority.

[Robert Weston]

There seems to be an unspoken assumption here about the precautionary principle, that any level of imposed risk is unacceptable, a principle nearly no one accepts when it comes to their own convenience(i.e. all those people insisting on lockdowns and masks that drive cars with internal combustion engines).