Case vs Rule
For Truth and Efficiency and Against Torture
Torture
A terrorist has planted an atomic bomb in New York City, set to go off at midnight. The police have caught him but do not know where the bomb is. They torture him until he tells them, locate the bomb, disarm it, save a million lives.
That is an example of an imaginary situation where it seems clear that the use of torture is justified, one sometimes offered in defense of real-world torture, such as water boarding. The answer to the argument that many people, myself among them, find convincing distinguishes between case and rule:
I don't trust government agents to abide by any reasonable set of restrictions on torture so don't believe they should be empowered to use it at all. (Comment in a recent thread online)
There might be rare cases where the use of torture is justified but a rule permitting torture is not, since there is no way in practice of limiting it to only those cases.
It is not a new problem. Under the law of the Visigoths, the earliest of the Germanic law codes that has survived, torture of a defendant was only permitted if there were facts of the crime that an innocent defendant would not know. A confession was only accepted if it included such facts.
It is an elegant solution to the problem, one we still use in judging confessions made under pressure, but there is one problem with it; the interrogator knows the relevant facts. If he wishes to convict the defendant, all he has to do is leak the facts to him when nobody else is around and use torture to compel him to include them in his confession.
"Where did you leave the body?"
"In the lake"
*Smack*. “Liar, where did you leave the body?
"In the dump"
*Smack*. “Stop lying, where is the body?”
"In the bog"
"Ah, now we're getting somewhere. And when did you leave it in the bog?"
(another commenter in the same thread)
Concealing the Truth
In an old blog post I argued that while people who say they don’t believe in evolution are usually on the right, people who act as if they don’t believe in it, hold beliefs inconsistent with its implications, are often on the left. One commenter offered the answer that I suspect many think but few have the honesty to say — that my claim about the implications of evolution was true but that people on the left were correct to pretend they were not, since admitting those implications — most obviously that the distribution of abilities was likely to be different in men than in women, since evolution optimizes for reproductive success and men and women play different roles in evolution, and might well be different in different races — would have bad consequences.
as a general moral matter, i think a truth whose propagation is more harmful than good probably ought to be suppressed. e.g. if i discovered how to build a super-strong bomb capable of destroying the world but giving rise to no benefit, suppressing it seems like the right thing to do. that's an extreme example, but i think the principle is general."
The example is convincing. My response is to distinguish two different questions:
1. Could there be truths that would be better hidden?
The answer has to be yes, as in the bomb example.
2. Is it desirable for people to decide which truths should be suppressed and suppress them?
If the principle is accepted, the consequence is not only the possible suppression of truths that ought to be suppressed. It is also the suppression of truths that ought not to be suppressed by people who think they should be. Perhaps worse still, as people come to realize that the authorities say what they want listeners to believe whether or not it is true, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out what is true.
All of us rely, for most of our beliefs, on second hand information. The more willing people we rely on are to tell us what they want us to believe instead of what is true, the lower the quality of that information. I like to sum up that problem by blaming Doctor Fauci for the fact that half the Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. They know, if they pay attention, that he has lied to them about Covid, has repeatedly told them what he wants them to believe rather than what he believes is true. He is at least as high status a source of information as the news media which tell them, accurately so far as I know, that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims of election fraud, so why should they believe them?
Taking it to a more technical, and more personal, level, I have spent quite a lot of time and effort looking at the literature on climate related issues, found work supporting the current orthodoxy in reputable, even high status, sources that is either incompetent or fraudulent.1 I conclude that no such work can be trusted until I have carefully examined its analysis and sources. That is a lot of work, in some cases beyond my ability. In my own writing on the subject2 I try to limit myself to arguments that an intelligent reader can check for himself — because I cannot expect my readers to trust me any more than I trust Nature or the authors of climate science textbooks. The willingness of academics to produce, in what they regard as a good cause, propaganda masquerading as science largely destroys the division of labor in the search for truth.
Economic Efficiency
They keep coming to us with questions: "Should we have a tariff?" "Should we have rent control?" We answer, "Should? Economists don't know anything about 'should;' go talk to a philosopher. If you have a tariff, such and such will happen; if you have rent control, . . ." "No, No" they say "We don't want to know all that. Is it good or bad?"
The economist finally answers as follows:
I have no expertise in good and bad. I can, however, define something called efficiency that has the following characteristics. First, it is an important part of what I suspect most of you mean by "good." Second, economics helps answer the question of whether a change leads to greater efficiency. Third, I cannot think of any alternative measure closer to what you want that also has the second characteristic. (From my Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life)
Economic efficiency is increased by a change whose summed value to those affected, defined as the amount they would pay to get the effect (positive) or prevent it (negative), is positive. That would correspond to an increase in total utility if a dollar represented the same amount of utility to everyone affected — but it almost certainly does not.3
How, from the standpoint of a utilitarian such as Alfred Marshall who invented the idea (what modern economists call an increase in efficiency Marshall called an economic improvement), can you justify using economic efficiency to answer the questions economists are being asked, to judge what changes are good or bad?
The answer, both mine and Marshall’s, is again the case vs rule distinction. In any particular case — the standard example is a change that benefits a rich man by a hundred dollars, injures a poor man by ninety — an increase in economic efficiency might be a decrease in total utility. But unless there is some reason to expect most decisions to be ones for which the gainers value money less than the losers, a rule of making changes that increase efficiency, avoiding ones that decrease it, can be expected to raise total utility.
If we replace the utilitarian criterion of increasing total utility with the Pareto criterion — a change is a Pareto improvement only if it benefits someone and harms nobody — we can still argue for efficiency provided that there is no reason to expect the same person to consistently be the loser. Sometimes I lose and you gain, sometimes I gain and you lose, but if all the changes are ones for which total gain is larger than total loss it is likely that, averaged over many changes, both of us gain.
Hence the shift from case to rule provides at least a plausible defense for the use of economics, economic efficiency, to answer the philosophical questions we are being asked.
Past posts, sorted by topic
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I discuss this point in more detail in an old post.
My past posts on climate issues.
The main problem with the Noble Lie is that only a Philosopher King can know or sure that it is, indeed, noble. I have not, in my 77 years, noticed a surfeit of Philosopher Kings. In truth, we seem to suffer from a rather severe deficiency of such. OTOH, we certainly have a surplus of people who claim to be offering Noble Lies while apparently profiting themselves from the Lie.
As for evidence of stolen elections, I think the "trout in the milk pail" might be the Detroit 2020 vote (with which I am intimately familiar) with 107% of the adult population casting ballots. Not of the "eligible voters" (including those eligible but not registered) but of everyone over the age of 18 in the city. I regard that as strong circumstantial evidence.
The fact is not that there is no evidence but that no court ever allowed a case to be presented in which evidence could be proffered. And of course vote fraud exists. I grew up and livd in Illinois for over 50 years, and it's sure easy to find there. Sometimes some low level sort even gets tried and found guilty.
So the correct question is "How much fraud is there in X election?" We never know because for some odd reason no forensic examinations of potential vote fraud occur.
The paradox of believing in evolution which amuses me is that evolution-deniers usually have multiple children, who they will raise to succeed in competitive ventures such as football. The median person with a "Darwin" fish on his car will have zero or one children, and the child will be sheltered from any selective activity.