Ethics and economics

I've seen a few post on the internets recently on the links between ethics and economics. Barefoot Bum discusses the prisoner's dilemma, Chicago Dyke talks experimental economics, and Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias (that's the place where the amazing Eliezer Yudkowsky blogs) argues morality is overrated, and that moral philosophers need to pay more attention to economics.

I find it all worth reading, as perhaps the most interesting moral problem I've come across is economic in nature, or at least game-theoryish. One of the main positions in modern/contemporary ethics is consequentialism, traditionally understood as the idea that whether an act is right or wrong depends on the consequences. However, other variants have been proposed, such as rule-consequentialism: an act is right if it accords with rules that, if generally followed, would have good consequences.

One criticism of rule-consequentialism that's been around for awhile is that the rule-following is senseless, that it would have us follow rules that don't make any sense. I recently got my thinking on that question kick-started by reading the anthology Morality, Rules, and Consequences (previous notes here). Much of what's in the essays I find puzzling. Shelly Kagan, for example, goes on at some length about "evaluative focal points," ends up endorsing something that looks a lot like traditional "act" consequentialism, though she says people who've endorsed the view thinking themselves act consequentialists aren't really act consequentialists. Kagan makes good actions determined by consequences of the act itself, but also insists upon the existence of good rules, which have no clear relevance to our conduct.

The interesting defense of rule consequentialism, the more I think of it, is Riley's. As I described it in the notebook post: "Riley insists that some rules only produce good consequences as rules generally followed, and may not produce the best results in individual cases." His example is secretly killing for spare organs to save several times as many lives: it might produce the right consequences in occasional cases, but as a general practice (even a general practice in only the cases where it really has good consequences) it would undermine trust, having overall negative effects on society. If you're uncertain about this case, I suggest thinking about voting: one vote, it seems, makes no difference, so you can stay home at benefit to yourself and harm to no one, in that sense promoting the greater good. But if nobody votes, that's a bad thing. What are you to do?

The relevance of economics and game theory is that this is the sort of situation that economists try to model all the time, and they do so with great sophistication. They typically assume selfish players, but some of the problems of interest arise even in agents dominated by altruism: both the killing-for-organs case and the voting case can be set up in a way as to be entirely other-directed. It seems to me that if you really want to say something siginficant on these debates in ethical theory, you should try to make use of the very best economics and game theory we have.