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Ethics and Stochastic Processes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Russell Hardin
Russell Hardin
Affiliation:
Political Science and Philosophy, University of Chicago
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Extract

There is some irony, and perhaps a bit of gallows humor, in opening a paper in this volume with the claim that “applied ethics” is a misnomer. Yet that claim is true in the following sense. What we need for most of the issues that have sparked the contemporary resurgence of moral and political theory is not the application of ethics as we know it, but the revamping of ethics to make it relevant to the issues we face. It is in our concern with major policy programs that ethics and political philosophy are most commonly rejoined to become a unified enquiry after a nearly complete separation through most of this century. Yet, ethical theories may be shaken to their foundations by our effort to apply them to policy problems. I do not propose to revamp ethics here, but only to show that much ethical theory cannot readily be applied to major policy problems.

There are at least three important characteristics of major policy issues in general that may give traditional moral theories difficulties. First, such issues can generally be handled only by institutional intervention; they commonly cannot be resolved through uncoordinated individual action. Theories formulated at the individual level must therefore be recast to handle institutional actions and possibilities. Second, major policy issues typically have complicating strategic interactions between individuals at their bases. Third, they are inherently stochastic in the important sense that they affect large numbers with more or less determinable (or merely guessable) probabilities. C. H. Waddington calls such issues instances of “the problem of the ethics of stochastic processes.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1989 , pp. 69 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1989

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References

1 Waddington, C.H., The Ethical Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967; first published 1960), p. 17.Google Scholar The term “stochastic processes” is somewhat loosely used here. It originates from a Greek root meaning “proceeding by guesswork” or, literally, “skillful in aiming.”

2 Hardin, Russell, Morality within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

3 See Sun, Marjorie, “The Vexing Problems of Vaccine Compensation,” Science, vol. 227 (March 1, 1985), pp. 1012–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4 Roberts, Leslie, “Change in Polio Strategy?”, Science, vol. 240 (May 27, 1988), p. 1145.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

5 ibid.

6 Koshland, Daniel E. Jr., “Benefits, Risks, Vaccines, and the Courts,” Science, vol. 227 (March 15, 1985), p. 1289CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Encyclopedia Britannica 15th ed., s.v. “Boylston, Zabdiel.”

7 For example, vaccination against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) may cause 50 cases of permanent brain damage among 3.5 million children vaccinated. But in populations that have elected to drop such vaccination, as Japan and the United Kingdom did during the 1970s, death rates were reportedly worse. See Sun, p. 1012.

8 Foot, Phillippa, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 19–32, esp. p. 19.Google Scholar

9 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, “Imposing Risks,” in Rights, Restitution, and Risk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 173–91, at p. 185.Google Scholar

10 ibid., p. 183.

11 For this and other reasons, especially the problem of strategic interaction in producing good results, basing moral theory on some notion of a “kind” of action verges on incoherence. See Hardin, Morality within the Limits of Reason, pp. 68–70.

12 Fenner, Frank, “Smallpox, ‘the most dreadful scourge of the human species’: Its global spread and recent eradication – Part 2,” Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 141 (December 8 and 22, 1984), pp. 841–46, esp. p. 843.Google Scholar

13 Sun, p. 1013.

14 Kant, Immanuel, “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives,” ed. and trans. Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and other works on the Theory of Ethics (London: Longman's, 1909, 6th edition; German original first published 1797), pp. 361–65, at p. 365Google Scholar, final emphasis added.

15 Matson, W.I., “Kant As Casuist,” ed. Wolff, Robert Paul, Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), pp. 331–36, at p. 336.Google Scholar Matson says further, “Surely no one will undertake to defend Kant's conclusion. Hence, if that conclusion really follows from his theory, then that theory is convicted of absurdity or worse “ According to student notes of his university lectures, a younger Kant held less consistent, more humane views on lying under duress. See Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis, Infield (New York: Harper, 1963), pp. 226–29.Google Scholar

16 One might try to bring the problem of vaccination under Kant's principle of benevolence. That principle is not conceived to address stochastic problems such as those in which the ostensibly benevolent action may benefit some but harm others, but rather to address essentially determinate problems such as those in which one's benevolent action has a clear and de facto sure benefit for a particular person or persons.