Effective citizenship

I have been working on a book with this title. I have a contract from Oxford University Press, and the book is now undergoing final review. It may change quite a bit before it is published. But here is the current list of chapter abstracts. I will need to submit a list like this (attempting to follow strict instructions, sometimes at the expense of clarity) with the final text. Feel free to ask for more.

Many serious problems affecting nations, regions, and the planet are the result of bad government or the lack of any relevant government. Populism leads to unsustainable budgets. Nationalism and other sorts of out-group devaluation lead to destructive conflicts and to lack of cooperation. Quasi-religious, essentialist, and moralistic doctrines reinforce laws and practices that harm out-groups (such as homosexuals) gratuitously. These harmful policies depend on the support of large numbers of citizens. Many citizens do not think well about political issues or how they use the little power they have individually. They accept parochial and moralistic principles without serious examination. They accept fallacious arguments and exhibit other biases. These problems can be reduced by actively open-minded thinking (AOT), which also helps in evaluating sources of information, and policies. AOT involves testing possible conclusions by looking for arguments against them, and avoiding high confidence in the absence of good reasons. Thus, effective citizens (who actually exist) have the virtues of cosmopolitanism (universal beneficence), anti-moralism, and acceptance of actively open-minded thinking (AOT) as a standard. Effective citizenship is consistent with a version of utilitarianism that takes our motivation as a fact that limits what we could do.

Keywords: voting, parochialism, actively open-minded thinking, moralism, utilitarianism, politics

Chapter 1: Introduction

Several problems, listed, result from bad government. These include world poverty, war, inequality within and between nations, anarchy, populist economic policies, isolationism, and unsustainable use of resources. These problems can be understood as arising from the psychology of citizens. We need research on how voters think and how thinking can be improved. Much research now is devoted to effective altruism, but that is insufficient. Government is needed even for altruism to be effective. Effective citizenship can be justified by a form of utilitarian theory which takes motives as constraints on options. In can be supported by social norms. Pessimism about democracy is unwarranted. We have reason to think that better thinking can matter.

Keywords: effective altruism, utilitarianism, democracy, government, anarchy, social norms

Chapter 2: Social norms for citizenship

Although critics of democracy argue that it doesn't work, it still seems better than the alternatives, and it could be better still if elections were designed differently and if certain standards were understood to apply to citizenship, in the form of social norms, that is, principles that are endorsed by some group, on condition that others in the group also endorse them. Three such norms are cosmopolitanism (impartial beneficence), anti-moralism (opposition to the imposition of unsupportable quasi-religious principles on others), and actively open-minded thinking (AOT). AOT involves looking for reasons why a tentative conclusion might be wrong, and avoiding overconfidence. These norms can be seen as virtues, each paired with corresponding vices, such as parochialism, moralism, myside bias, and overconfidence. Other utilitarian virtues are relevant, such as moderate altruism.

Keywords: social norms, democracy, culture, virtues, vices, cosmopolitanism, actively open-minded thinking, parochialism, myside bias, overconfidence

Chapter 3 General psychological biases as counter-norms

Research finds departures from the three virtues, on the average, but individuals differ greatly and some people show little or no biases. Parochialism, the vice opposing cosmopolitanism, can be dramatic: some people are willing to tolerate large numbers of losses to foreigners for the sake of equivalent gains to a small number of compatriots. Some think parochialism is a moral duty. But many people favor cosmopolitan voting, and still others think they should vote for their individual self-interest. Myside bias is a general category for several different biases, many of which are found to correlate with misbeliefs and questionable beliefs, such as conspiracy theories. Intolerance of uncertainty can cause overconfidence and acceptance of overconfident claims by sources. Single mindedness is another vice opposed by AOT.

Keywords: cognitive biases, parochailism, myside bias, overconfidence, single mindedness

Chapter 4: Deontology and the role of fallacious logic

Richard Hare's argues that moral judgments about what to do in a given situation are prescriptive (like commands, not like propositions that could be true or false) and universal (applying to anyone in exactly the same situation). Many common deontological arguments can then be seen as logical fallacies. In experiments reported elsewhere, subjects are presented with arguments for deontological choices that make things worse. (If the choices do not do that, they do not conflict with utilitarianism.) Subjects vary in their ability to recognize fallacies in these arguments, such as deficiency (missing premise), or over-general principles. Deontological rules tend to be simple, hence not universal and likely to have exceptions. Subjects with high AOT scores do better on this task, possibly because they are generally more inclined to think about thinking.

Keywords: deontology, utilitarianism, Richard Hare, fallacies, metacognition, actively open-minded thinking, ideal observer

Chapter 5: Self-interest vs. altruistic motivation

From the perspective of an ideal observer, rational moral judgments combine the preferences of everyone affected as if they were conflicts within one person. The option set for decisions may be limited by motivational constraints. Such limitation avoids the criticism that utilitarianism creates infinite or impossible obligations; they are just not part of the option set. This limitation also affects utilitarian conclusions about social dilemmas - in which several people face a choice pitting self-interest against the common good - other public-goods problems, and voting. Voting may be irrational if voters care only about themselves, or even if they care about their nation, but rational if voters are cosmopolitan, with equal altruism toward all (or even with some insensitivity to numbers). The motivational limitation also affects the use of the generalization test ("What if everybody did that?") and the veil of ignorance as reasoning devices.

Keywords: motivation, self-interest, altruism, generalization test, veil of ignorance, ideal observer, voting, social dilemmas, public goods problems

Chapter 6: Voting and charity

The effective altruism movement has focused on charity, so it is worth asking whether voting can also serve the purpose of promoting good outcomes. MacAskill once suggested that swing-state voting in the U.S. can be as effective as a large contribution. Brennan and Freiman dispute this claim. But voting can be effective. Voting to impose a rule that forces cooperation in social dilemmas can be especially powerful when the cost of spontaneous cooperation is too high but the cost of voting to impose a rule is much lower. And the threat of punishment may be sufficient enforce the rule without much punishment actually happening. Improved voting rules can make effective citizenship more powerful, and people have other ways to influence policy, such as contributing to campaigns (which is also a form of charity).

Keywords: Brennan, Freiman, cooperation, punishment, voting, socially responsible consumption, campaign contributions

Chapter 7: Heuristics and biases in charity and voting

Both voting and charity are subject to various decision biases, some of which are common to both activities. Charity suffers from diversification bias, evaluability of consequences, and identifiability of victims. Both activities are subject to parochialism, and to prominence of the most salient attribute. Parochialism in voting is exacerbated by a feeling of disloyalty when voting considers effects on outsiders. A few people engage in "expressive voting" without considering consequences, e.g., when the better candidate loses because a few have voted for a third-party candidate who could not win. Some people consider redistribution to be "forced charity" and are opposed to it. Individuals differ in all these effects, and effective citizens should be able to resist these distortions.

Keywords: voting, charity, expressive voting, forced charity, evaluability, prominence effect, diversification bias

Chapter 8: Beyond voting

Direct democracy is not useful for many issues, when voters lack the time and ability to make good judgments. Representative democracy helps, but that is one way among others of getting public input on decision making. Others include modification of election rules, such as proportional representation, ranked choice, approval voting, "deliberative democracy", and formal decision analysis done with a group of "stakeholders". Methods of eliciting preferences may also be useful such as conjoint analysis or budget games. Different types of decisions should be made in different ways. For example, decisions that need to be made quickly should be made by a single person or a small group (as in the military). Some decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis, others by application of a rule. Commensurability of attributes is often a problem in the more formal methods, but need not be so serious.

Keywords: direct democracy, proportional representation, deliberative democracy, decision analysis, conjoint analysis, commensurability, ranked choice, approval voting

Chapter 9: Parochialism and nationalism

Parochialism is the neglect of effects on out-groups.  Parochialism, and its manifestation as nationalism, could be reduced by AOT, since much of it is unjustifiable. A variety of experiments and other studies have demonstrated parochialism, and it has several mutually compatible explanations, including the illusion that helping your group helps you. It is often seen as a moral duty. It can be reduced by approval voting, or by individual role-taking. Harm to outsiders from action is seen as worse than failing to prevent the same harm. Thus, reframing harm as an action rather than an omission might reduce parochialism. Presenting insiders and outsider as equally entitled to our concern also has a certain appeal.

Keywords: nationalism, duty, self-interest illusion, omission bias, approval voting, role-taking

Chapter 10: Moralism, paternalism, manipulation, freedom

Moralism, as defined here, is a vice, but we need to distinguish moralistic imposition from justified paternalism and other forms of manipulation, and more generally violations of freedom.  Nudges are an example of attempts to influence choices. Sunstein argued that they are manipulative if they lead to impulsive decisions, but this is not necessary. An alternative view is that nudges are not manipulative when they increase overall expected utility. Manipulation would thus be deception leading to harm. From a utilitarian perspective, freedom is beneficial for some decisions but not others, and paternalism can be good, or it could turn into moralistic intrusion. These questions arise in the design of laws as well individual choices. Examples considered include free movement across borders, or euthanasia of infants.

Keywords: moralism, paternalism, manipulation, freedom, nudges, deception

Chapter 11: Functions of government

Utilitarianism, which justifies effective citizenship, can also be applied to types of policy questions that most governments face. For one thing, governments can efficiently solve social dilemmas by rules that force cooperation with the threat of punishment, and cooperation in the second-order social dilemma of supporting such rules is less costly than cooperation in the first-order dilemma. Governments can also provide public goods, such as police protection, education, and infrastructure. They can increase total utility by redistributing goods, helping those with less at the expense of those with more. Taxation, insurance, provision of necessary goods, and social insurance are all tools for redistribution. Inequality deserves special attention because it is international as well as national, raising the possibility of world government. Redistribution over time, between present and future, is relevant too, if we knew which way it should go.

Keywords: redistribution, second-order social dilemmas, public goods, taxation, insurance, inequality, world government, discounting

Chapter 12: Education

In the early 1980s, Luis Alberto Machado introduced a program to raise the intelligence of the Venezuelan people. Richard Herrnstein, who had argued that IQ was largely genetic, agreed to help set up the program and its evaluation. It worked, but we don't know why. Machado himself seemed to agree that simply improving memory, mental speed, etc., would just make irrational thinkers be irrational more quickly. But changes in cognitive style, AOT in particular, might help and might also lie behind various other observed effects of education. AOT can be taught. Another thing that might help make people more effective citizens is a little training in decision analysis, particularly concerning the use of probability. The difficulty of understanding decision analysis is overrated. Even a child can understand the main lessons.

Keywords: education, intelligence, Luis Alberto Machado, Richard Herrnstein, IQ, actively open-minded thinking, decision analysis, probability

Deja Vu about vaccines

An artlicle in the Guardian provides an excellent summary of the legal situation for vaccines,  RFK Jr says he'll 'fix' a vaccine program.

The entire situation, as it existed 35 years ago, inspired our paper 

• Baron, J. & Ritov, I. (1993). Intuitions about penalties and compensation in the context of tort law. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7, 17-33

Kennedy himself seems to be subject to all these biases, including omission bias. He is unwilling  to look at overall numbers because he regards harms from action (side effects) as orders of magnitude (at least) worse than harms from failing to vaccinate (disease).

The legal system could help if it held to a standard of negligence based on overall benefit vs. risk (the Hand rule, roughly), but it shows some of the same biases.

Why cutting life-saving foreign aid could look bad even to people who don't care much about foreigners

 The full list of cuts in the rescission is not yet clear. The money for AIDS prevention seems to be spared. But it is clear that some of the cuts will be for programs that directly or indirectly save lives and reduce serious illness (including severe malnutrition).

In the following paper, I report an asymmetry for domestic/foreign and act/omission. People are not very concerned about failing to help foreigners. But they are much more upset by direct harm to foreigners through action. This was, of course, in a specific experimental context that was not the same as real life.

However, if this finding is general, the rescission bill must be seen as an action. It stopped the flow of money that would have continued if nothing was done. It is not the same as failing to provide sufficient aid when it is needed. That is often tolerated, if only because it is easy to think that there are so many such needs relative to our capacity to help. (Here "our" means the U.S., but it could apply more generally to the rich world.) But cutting off life-saving aid is like pulling the plug on a respirator, that is keeping someone alive. It is actively killing some and harming others. The fact that we don't know just who our victims are does not seem to be something that would count as an excuse in people's minds.

• Baron, J. (2012). Parochialism as a result of cognitive biases. In R. Goodman, D. Jinks, & A. K. Woods (Eds.), Understanding social action, promoting human rights, pp. 203–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

If I am correct, then, politically, those who want to point out the callousness of the Trump administration might do well to focus on this issue, despite the fact that, otherwise, foreign aid is not a political winner.

The dark triad of citizenship: parochialism, moralism, and closed-mindedness.

I have seen lots of arguments that political polarization is the result of intolerance on both sides, and those of us opposed to MAGA supporters (those who accepted the ideology, most of whom voted for Trump) should try to understand them and look for common ground.

My view is that voters are thinking people, and many are thinking very badly, to the point of being immoral. Personality psychologists have a concept of the "dark triad" of personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. What holds these together is that they are explanations of behavior that is fundamentally "malevolent", i.e., immoral. The study of the dark triad is about the study of immorality.

I take the same attitude toward MAGA supporters. I have no interest in finding common ground with them any more than with wife beaters. I do want to understand them better, from a scientific point of view, in hopes of reducing their numbers in the future.

Most MAGA supporters were not good citizens. I have, in several papers (summarized in "Social norms for citizenship", https://muse.jhu.edu/article/692751/pdf) outlined what I take to be the norms required for citizens to make democracy work for the greater good. These include cosmopolitanism, anti-moralism, and actively open-minded thinking (AOT). The absence of these constitutes a dark triad for citizenship: parochialism, moralism, and closed-mindedness.

On parochialism, I have argued that voting is not worthwhile if all you care about is self-interest, or even narrow national interest, although it is worthwhile if you care enough about everyone affected in the world now and in the future. My latest attempt to publish a paper clarifying this argument was rejected from a philosophy journal roughly on the grounds that it was nothing new. Other philosophers write papers on the question of whether nationalism is as bad as racism. So far as I can see they have not come with a good argument that nationalism (properly defined and distinguished from various benign forms of national pride) is less bad. Yet the question seems not to occur to many voters.

At a minimum, people outside of a precisely defined circle of "Americans" should get some consideration. This includes potential immigrants and those they would leave behind. It strikes me as strange that much of the support for MAGA ideology comes from self-professed Christians, who seem to define that in terms of opposition to abortion -- only ambiguously supported in the Bible -- while ignoring the very explicit demand to help those who suffer, worth quoting from Matthew 25 (NIV):

[The King will say] "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'"

On AOT, before one acts in a way that affects others, it seems reasonable to think just a little about whether you are choosing the best option. Thinking in this case involves looking for reasons why you might be wrong. Sometimes this requires looking at what others have to say. It seems that MAGA voters upset about the price of food and housing reasoned simply that these came under Biden, so Trump would solve the problems. They did not ask how he would do that, or what Biden did to create the problem. If they had asked, and looked how Trump's proposals were covered in news sources, they would find good arguments that these proposals would likely make the situation worse.

Moralism, as I have used the term, is the attempt to impose questionable moral principles on others who question or oppose those principles on rational grounds. The principles are often justified on the basis of appeal to religious authority that must be assumed on faith to be correct. The principles may concern both behavior and motivation. Opposition to homosexuality, for example, often takes the form of regarding both homosexual behavior and homosexual desires as immoral. Such principles must be followed even when the consequences of following them, for the frustration of harmless desires, are clearly worse. Moralistic principles are often at the center of political movements toward theocracy. Islamism in Iran is the clearest example, but the same tendency is found in Indian Hindutva and, notably, American Christian nationalism, which is part of the MAGA coalition.

Just as the dark triad traits overlap and reinforce each others, the three dispositions I have listed do the same, as do their positive reflections. Education for AOT could lead people to question the moral relevance of nationality, or at least make them more receptive to questions from others. And it could reduce their confidence in moralistic doctrines, given their weak foundation. Questioning of parochialism and moralism as principles could, if properly presented, serve as examples of reflective thought in general and thus encourage AOT.

In sum, I think that a lot of Trump's support came from thinking that is wrong and immoral. This sort of immorality does not call for punishment but rather prevention.

 

Why Democrats are generally more consistent with utilitarianism

Recently I was asked about a study of politically tilted publications in the social sciences, including psychology. I started to look at my own publications. I realized that most of them are not political in the partisan sense, but many have concerned public policy issues. If they have had a tilt, it is strongly toward utilitarianism, but that is not a political party.

Given my current obsession with the looming U.S. election, I would like to say why I would support Democratic candidates at the national level even if Donald Trump were not a serious danger to the world. I think this view follows from utilitarianism.

The essence of the modern Democratic Party is still the views of F. D. Roosevelt. He thought it was the responsibility of government to improve the welfare of "the people", and these people even included foreigners. This view has been at the core of Democratic politics all along.

The role of government is justified in utilitarianism in several ways. First, government can solve social dilemmas by penalizing defectors. Much of the law is about these penalties. For example, the government maintains the institution of private property by punishing those defectors who try to steal or destroy it for personal benefit. But governments also establish environmental regulations, safety regulations, laws about disclosure, and so on. These regulations are sometimes controversial, and Democrats usually favor them. (Regulations can be excessive, and Republicans in the past had a useful function of trying to fix them.)

Governments also redistribute money from rich to poor (to varying extents). This improves total utility, up to a point, because money has more utility for the poor than for the rich. Once people spend about $100,000 per person on the basic necessities, additional spending tends to go toward luxuries that provide less utility per dollar.

Redistribution may be accomplished in many ways, including progressive taxation, direct handouts to some poor people (negative taxes), and direct provision of services such as health care, education and housing that provide the means for the poor to earn money themselves. Democrats favor these efforts.

Another redistributive function of government is more subtle, perhaps more a function of social norms than laws or regulations. It concerns the uses of labor. When the distribution of spending power is extremely large, the "rich" (those with lots of it) are free to spend money on goods and services that provide very little utility, since they have excess money once they have set up the basic things that everyone would want. With more redistribution, labor would be more efficient in terms of utility production, rather than production of "economic value." The latter is distorted. A $10,000 Rolex watch has over 25 times the economic value of my $35 Timex, and maybe more like 1.25 times the utility, if that. But that Rolex requires lots of labor, not just in the production facilities in Switzerland but also n the mining and selection of materials. We thus have hundreds of people, some with considerable technical skills, working to produce very little utility. The same may be said of tax lawyers who help rich people minimize their tax bills. Probably some of these people could do a lot more good as high-school teachers, or civil servants who craft the laws and regulations that the lawyers have to work around. With fewer rich people, and with a social norm of doing your share without shirking, and not being to much of a "pig" about the way you spend money, total utility would increase. Democrats tend to support this social norm, while Republicans tend to favor a norm of flaunting wealth.

The current Democratic party is less isolationist than the current Republican party. This was not always true. But isolationism in general means giving little moral weight to foreigners. Utilitarians are not the only ones who think that all people deserve something approaching equal consideration. The two big issues in the current election are global.

First is climate change. The U.S. cannot solve the problem on our own, but we can at least do our share and set an example for others. We are doing that, more or less. But Trump would remove us from all international agreements and repeal many of the laws and regulations designed to speed the energy transition from fossil fuels.

Second is Putin. Trump shows every sign of allowing Putin to win enough in Ukraine so that the Russian and Chinese people are convinced that that further efforts to build empires through military force are likely to succeed with bearable costs.

It is disturbing that these two issues play such a small role in the campaign. Voters say they are concerned about inflation, so opinion polls ask about inflation but not about climate or Ukraine, and news reports don't mention these as issues. And neither do the Democratic candidates. People get the idea that we are supposed to be concerned about local issues. But perhaps some of those undecided voters just haven't thought about the big world issues. It may seem difficult to decide who will do better at bringing down prices. But it is not difficult at all to decide how to vote if you care just a little about the rest of the world.

How voters think about voting

In several papers, including one recent paper that has been rejected by several philosophy journals, I have analyzed people's approach to voting in terms of whether they consider the good of "the world" (cosmopolitan voting), their nation, or themselves. It seems that all three ways of thinking exist, perhaps even co-exist within the same person. I have argued that, for most people, voting out of self-interest alone is irrational, but cosmopolitan voting is usually rational if the voter cares somewhat about the good of other people. This argument is apparently not a great insight for philosophers, and that is why the paper keeps getting rejected. However, the rationality of cosmopolitan voting, and the irrationality of self-interest voting, are apparently not ideas that most voters, politicians and journalists have considered.

In looking at what people say about voting, especially "undecided" voters in the upcoming U.S. election, I see another classification of how people think about voting for candidates, cutting across the one just described. This distinction is based on what people attend to.

The stated or likely policies of the candidate are one focus of attention. Candidates state policies to appeal to voters who think this way. The stated policies are usually selected for appeal to voters rather than experts. Policies may still be valuable indications of a candidates general approach to issues. This strategy can be harmful when voters focus on some single issue, such as inflation, or support of Israel, as the basis of their decisions.

Another focus is the character of the candidate, especially at the traits that would make a good office holder, according to the voter. These are not necessarily the same traits that would make a good co-worker or spouse. These voters might feel that policy statements are not very predictive of what will actually happen, and it is better to choose the sort of person who can deal with unforeseen problems. For example, some Trump supporters think he will be "tough" with other countries (ignoring prior harmful effects of such toughness such as Iran's nuclear ambitions).

A third focus is blind empiricism. Voters look at how things were (for themselves, for their nation, or for the world, but mostly for themselves) under the candidate's previous administration, or that of the candidate's party. ("Things were better for me when Trump was in power.") In the long run, this strategy might be slightly better than chance at picking good candidates by any criterion. But I think it actually represents a kind of laziness, and unwillingness to consider either policies or character.

More generally, people don't seem to have given much thought to the question of how they should approach citizenship. This question is not part of the civics curriculum. The right to vote, which comes with citizenship, implies a duty to vote thoughtfully, and, more generally, to take responsibility for the actions of one's government. (The utilitarian justification for this principle of duty as a general social norm is clear.) For national elections, these actions affect residents of the nation, foreigners, and people not yet born.

"Children of a modest star"

 I do not have time to read many books these days. But I managed to finish "Children of a modest star" (Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman), which was highly recommended by a review in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado2345.  (The title is from a poem by W.H. Auden.)

I would say that it is about political theory, or political philosophy, but the authors draw on their extensive knowledge of intellectual history. They argue that the idea of the nation state as the main container of sovereignty is a fairly recent idea that is already under attack. This idea appealed to me because I have written a fair but about the vices of nationalism and the virtues of cosmpolitanism. But the book goes beyond this polarity by arguing for a principle of "subsidarity", which holds that problems should be handled by the lowest political subdivision capable of handling them, which is often sub-national. It still argues for a "planetary" level of government, with enforcement power, as necessary for such issues as climate change, preparedness for pandemics, and biodiversity.  It is not, and does not claim to be, a fully worked out plan for how things would work in the future it proposes. It presents a rough vision of where we should be headed, and even how we might get from here to there.

Within the community of card-carrying utilitarians, I have been suspicious of "longtermism" as recommended by William MacAskill and others. It is too easy to come up with some fantasy about the long-term future, like that of one person I knew who argued that practically all of our extra resources should be spent trying to find ways to stop a large asteroid from hitting the earth, since, if we don't solve this problem, it is inevitable that this will happen eventually. (I think that we humans now have the capacity to deal with this problem, although I don't know how large an asteroid we could deflect.) Thus, I have thought that the most sensible utilitarian approach to government is to look for incremental improvements in the situation, without worrying too much about their long-term effects, which are difficult to predict. It makes sense to reduce CO2 emissions even if it turns out that, in a few decades, we will use fusion power from a single site to pull CO2 right out of the atmosphere.

Still, I found the book an answer to the question: If you want to consider the long term future, what aspect of it is most relevant? The answer is to look at effects on governance.

The prose is incredibly good. Almost every page has something you put on a t shirt. Although you can read through the 215 pages of text as if this were simply a political manifesto without much anchoring in prior literature, it has 69 pages of footnotes at the end. All the ideas are credited to writings that inspired or preceded them.