Does It Matter If It Doesn’t Matter?
What's so wrong with acting normal
Jolted by a desire for control and speed, you stop commuting to class by bus and begin driving a car. You know it’s a bit heavier on the emissions side, but you’re just one person.
The next day, yearning for protein and social acceptance, you ditch your vegan ways and start purchasing a chicken every month. You accept it was probably brought to market unethically, but your individual purchases won’t change how many are produced either way. Markets aren’t precise enough to notice your good behaviour.
That weekend, becoming more and more disillusioned with your paltry impact, you like a series of posts shaming an employee at the Centre for Effective Altruism for privileging human welfare over insect welfare. Come Monday, the posts have gone viral and the employee’s been terminated.
But officer, you protest, I was only doomscrolling!
The month now coming to an end, you realize an election is underway and begin scrutinizing candidates. Suddenly you are struck by the realization that the incumbent is up 15% in the polls on a 6.7% margin of error. Voter schmoter, you wouldn’t make a difference.1
Hell, you think, why’d you ever quit making those offensive jokes you perfected in high school? Sure, it’s still sensible to not roll them out in public—but amongst friends? What, are you going to singlehandedly deteriorate society’s social norms?
After a night of debauched shoplifting, you come home and see the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals lying on your bedside table. Falling to your knees, your folly becomes clear—you had the wrong deontological principle! If only you had stopped to think what would happen if everyone acted as you did… a cooked planet, factory farming, unchecked politicians… you fool.
Tearfully, you say to your dog, “Even if my single action does not cause the problem, my participation endorses the principle that allows the problem to persist.”
Blinking back in Morse, he urges you to consider the rescue mission case:2
One hundred miners are trapped, and at least four people are needed for a rescue mission. Four volunteers are already on their way. You can either join them as a fifth or go singlehandedly rescue another ten miners elsewhere.
“Ah, you are trying to fool me into abandoning my newfound universalism,” you retort, quickly but unwittingly forgetting your Kant. “You think my principle calls for everyone to take the same act and go to rescue the one hundred, but actually I endorse acting to benefit everyone the most, so I say to rescue the ten.”
You endorse acting to maximize benefit, given the choices of everyone else. It’s still not clear why you would vote in an uncompetitive election or attempt to be an early-mover on emissions reduction or chicken consumption. Everyone else has placed you far enough from the threshold of making a difference that your actions wouldn’t lead to a benefit.
“Ermm actually, there’s at least a chance that voting or early-moving could tip the scales for my candidate or stop some chickens from being produced. So there is a positive expectation for those acts and they’d be endorsed by my principle—they aren’t useless.”
And tipping the scales on emissions reduction? Surely there’s a chance your act defeats the cumulative effects of climate change?
Frustrated, you trade-in your dog for a sycophant. Twiddling your thumbs, you think to yourself: “If it weren’t for me selling my car and going back to bussing, then we’d have less of a chance of staying below 3 C° of warming! Now if it happens, I won’t be culpable. I didn’t stand in the way of the fix—I helped.”
“Big outcomes hang in the balance of our collective choices; I can make progress toward a better outcome without a chance of being decisive; and this is reason-giving,” you continue. Unfortunately, a nagging voice carries on the argument inside the confines of your skull:
Well, how reason-giving is it? Surely if these are problems, then your reasons to make small direct individual contributions are outweighed by your reasons to endorse structural means. Campaign to price carbon or ban factory farming—but don’t twist your private life into knots trying to fight them solo.
You ponder this… is it true that if you advocate enough for emissions reduction you have a moral license to fly a private jet wherever and whenever you want? Or that by signing hallmark civil rights bills into law you earn the right to behave a little racistly?
“No, things don’t cancel at the act level in that way. Have some integrity. Your private life is the moral battlefield you’re best positioned to control, alright? I’ve got reasons to work on structural change and reasons to work on my individual change. If it’s wrong for everyone, it’s wrong for me!” You tell yourself, mustering once more some distant semblance of Kant.
Even if it doesn’t make a difference?
In a district of 35,000 voters, a full MoE-sized polling error would shrink the incumbents expected advantage to 560 votes. In a perfectly even race the chance that one vote is decisive can be approximated by 1 in sqrt(πN) (roughly 1 in 330 for N = 35,000). However, in our race, the chance of decisiveness given the polling error is roughly 1 in 42,500 or 0.00235%.
Quoted from Daniel Muñoz and Sarah Stroud, Ethical Theory: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments p. 14, but originally from Reasons and Persons p. 67.
Karma is always repaid.