EconTech

Certainly there are people who fall into line with James’ description here, but plenty of people DO have issues with the way bombing campaigns are conducted. There is a literature on the issues he presents, though he seems to be ignorant of that literature. Debates on casus belli and jus in bello would be a good place to start and are centuries old. There is also significant matters of controversy in defining civilian versus military targets, e.g. how to classify a water processing plant that feeds clean water to both civilians and for military applications (guess the US position on this). The outcomes of those debates, and the resultant decisions in choosing  That plenty of people, most of whom have not thought deeply about these issues, comes to an inconsistent conclusion is not surprising and, more importantly, does not mean that the rejected position is acceptable rather than the accepted position being unacceptable. Basically, the argument he makes is: If X, then Y. X, therefore Y, yet X is not universally accepted, and questions about it are not covered by mainstream media. Not to mention that there is no discussion of intentionality and how we treat different intentions differently (e.g. negligent homicide versus pre-meditated murder).

Of course, James has made this exact same mistake on his post on the Bias Against Torture, my comments on which appear to not have made it into the backlog, so I will reiterate quickly here. The huge flaws, over which there is a ton of protest, in particular over the issue of rape, do not justify other flawed systems. It is rather well documented that guards use rape, or the threat of, to help control subsets of prisoners. I don’t find this any more (or less) acceptable than torture and believe those guards should be prosecuted. Alas, there is little political gain in pursuing such issues. The same If X… scenario above is repeated here (or rather, it was originally here, and repeated above).

Both of these posts also ignore the issue of the choice of values. Unless he makes the claim that there is a purely rational basis upon which to choose our values (something that people have been trying unsuccessfully to prove for hundreds of years), then it is hard to talk about a ‘value bias.’ We want our values to be consistent, sure, and when conflicts in them occur, it is a strong indication that we need to restructure things to make them consistent. But when there is a conflict, it does not necessarily mean the conflict does not exist, and we can wish away one side of the conflict and be done with it. It may be, after going through our structuring of values, that we see no conflict, that some action is actually acceptable that we didn’t think so earlier, or that something is unacceptable that we previously thought ok.

I don’t have a problem with disagreement over issues (see, e.g. my questioning of prediction markets), but I expect higher quality analysis coming out of Overcoming Bias, and these two posts fail miserably in that regard. I wonder if this is another example of inadequate ethics training in economics curricula.

Acceptable Casualties

Imagine that one month after the 9/11 attacks the U.S. conducted a massive bombing campaign against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.  Further assume that (1) the U.S. knew Bin Laden was well hidden and so the attacks would have no significant chance of killing him, (2) the U.S. military had estimated that about 5,000 innocents would die because of the bombings and indeed around 5,000 innocents did die, and (3) the bombings were conducted mainly to deter future terrorist attacks against the U.S.  Such a bombing campaign would have been widely supported in the U.S.  Most Americans would assign the moral blame for the civilian deaths to Bin Laden.

But now imagine that instead of conducting a bombing campaign President Bush ordered the assassination of Bin Laden’s closest relatives.  Assume that 500 people were killed including all of Bin Laden’s parents, grandparents, children, uncles, aunts, and first cousins who were alive on 9/11.  President Bush, lets assume, announced that although those killed were innocents their deaths were necessary to deter future terrorist attacks against the U.S.  My guess is that for ordering such assassinations Bush would have been impeached, removed from office and sentenced to either death or life in prison.

The relative expected responses to the bombing campaign and assassinations seem inconsistent because fewer innocents would die with the assassinations and the assassinations might well have a greater deterrence effect on future terrorists.  We would be less bothered by the bombings, I suspect, because we could claim that we didn’t want the innocents to die.  But if we estimate that X number of innocents will die because of a military strike, why should it morally matter whether we actually wanted these X people to perish?

Posted by James Miller