In a previous post, I argued for the irrationality of voting. I have since discussed this issue with a number of people and brought up analogous collective action problems where individual action is irrational, like carbon emissions reduction, and contrasted them with problems where individual action is a moral imperative, like meat-eating.

Is it wrong not to vote?

• The cost of voting is non-zero. Say it takes thirty minutes of your day to go and vote. You could instead spend that time making money in order to donate to charities that save lives, or simply doing something pleasurable with your time.
• The chance that your vote will be the deciding vote is infinitesimal. (In the case of U.S. presidential elections, this is compounded by the electoral college because it must be both that your state has the deciding electoral votes and your vote is the deciding vote in your state.) If the margin was more than one vote, you could have stayed home and nothing would be different.
• The difference in outcome between your preferred candidate and the alternatives is not at all a life-and-death matter. If you vote in your economic interest, the personal economic cost to you of an unpreferred outcome is probably at most only a few thousand dollars in extra taxes. Even if you are a compassionate person who votes based on social issues without regard for your economic interests, it’s not as if the worse candidate is going to kill a bunch of people (well, maybe they will, but it’s hard to predict, and this possibility also only occurs when the electorate is very large, and thus the chance of your vote being the deciding vote correspondingly more infinitesimal). The difference in outcome, to your life, or the life of anyone you care about, is very much finite (except in exceptional cases, like when only one candidate supports the legality of a life-saving treatment that you need).

It is plain to see that voting is usually irrational. In only the rarest intersections of small voter pools and high stakes outcomes is it rational, and most of the elections that people vote in today are not such cases. You could even make a case that voting is wrong, because you could use the time you spend voting to make money to donate to charities that save lives, but this is not a case I want to argue, because the demandingness objection to such attempts to take utilitarianism to its logical conclusions is something that is central to most people’s belief systems because it makes it possible to accept the cognitive dissonance of living in comfort without donating all of your excess wealth to humanitarian organizations when hundreds of millions of people are starving. So, I don’t want to talk about that; all I wish to establish is that not voting is not wrong.

Is it wrong not to reduce your personal carbon footprint?

I believe that global warming is one of the two most important challenges that humanity will ever face. The failure of humanity to act in the past two decades as it has become increasingly certain that we are creating a hellish future for ourselves is emblematic of everything that is wrong with humanity, and it is an existential imperative that we as a species figure out how to stop emitting greenhouse gases.

And yet, I can’t rationally justify personally limiting my carbon footprint. I do it anyway by not eating meat and not driving a car, somewhat incidentally but also because of self-image and conscience. But I couldn’t say to a person who lives a lifestyle of carbon excess that what they are doing is wrong.

• If I gave up carbon-expensive luxuries, my life would be less comfortable. Large warm houses, private cars, plentiful meat and electric appliances are all nice things that people won’t usually willingly give up.
• If I reduced my carbon footprint, it would have barely any effect on the future suffering of anyone. I comprise perhaps one billionth of the current anthropogenic carbon emissions. If I personally prevent a few more tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, what does it really accomplish? It means that the temperature will end up, say, .0000001 degrees lower than it would have been. Any affect that this will have on anyone is so small that it doesn’t even outweigh the decrease to my comfort.

Is it wrong to eat meat?

Just to contrast the collective action problems of voting and global warming with a problem where individual action is a moral imperative, consider vegetarianism. I am a vegetarian myself, not because of some idea of animal rights or human virtue, but because it follows from a simple utilitarian argument.

• The production of any meat that I am likely to have access to involves a life of endless suffering for the animal. If you don’t believe this, just read or watch any of the media that has come out on the subject of factory farms since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975.
• Needless animal suffering is bad. No one has seriously claimed since the 1600s that animals aren’t sentient beings with rich inner lives, the ability to feel pain and pleasure, happiness and fear. There is a gradient of sentience, and I won’t take issue if you argue that a fish is equivalent to a rock as far as ethics is concerned, but for a cow, I certainly will.
• The pleasure I derive from the taste of meat is less than the suffering involved in its production. (That doesn’t even consider the fact that it’s a pretty crummy ethical philosophy to consider the interchangeability of your happiness and another’s suffering on anything approaching a 1-to-1 ratio.)
• Economic reality is such that, by my not buying meat, a substantially corresponding reduction in the production of meat will occur. This is not at all an obvious, and I am not an economist, but I believe it is true. If a million or a thousand people dropping out of the meat market would affect production, then it can be shown by induction that one person doing so must also affect it, otherwise there would be no way for a million people to do so. The precise amount of suffering that I prevent may depend on the elasticity of meat and how consistently I abstain, but I am confident that it is roughly equal to the suffering of one factory farm animal’s life.

I’m not sure how relevant the vegetarian argument is to the point I’m about to make, but it’s useful to see that not all problems are collective action problems.

What is to be done?

People have a stunning inability to think rationally about these questions. People have told me that the above arguments justifying non-voting and personal inaction with regard to global warming scare them, because they seem excessively individualistic. In fact, I am considering the problem from the most collectivist perspective imaginable, the future of humanity itself, and it is the people who refuse to see that acts like voting are fundamentally unable to solve our problems who scare me.

The instinct to irrationally cooperate is the product of millions of years of evolution that rewarded groups whose members cooperated, but also tolerated a certain number of free-riders. People cooperate selectively, but competition is the dominant driver of human advancement. We now face existential risks that require complete cooperation across the entire human species to avoid. Collective action problems have been solved before by totalitarian goverments, but totalitarianism is bad and tends not to last. Humanity must figure out how to get everyone to cooperate without being forced to, how to replace competition with cooperation as the dominant mode of human affairs.

I used global warming as an example, but this is a more general problem that humanity must solve. If we instituted a global carbon tax, it would solve one manifestation of the problem, but not the problem itself. For instance, we would still be killing each other in unnecessary wars that benefit political and religious leaders and the owners of the military-industrial complex at the expense of everyone else. The rich would still be exploiting the poor while every poor person dreams of becoming rich.

How many people collectively have decision-making power over a large enough portion of the global economy (say 30%) that they could force the entire global economy to stop emitting greenhouse gases? I’d guess it’s a relatively small number, maybe 10,000. Global warming could be solved if these people got together in a room and agreed to a binding contract, or to tell political leaders to institute regulations. But until then, these people have a strong incentive to agitate for global warming inaction, and will only act once they see that the consequences will be full-blown within their and their children’s lifetimes, and even then, since any individual only controls a fraction of a percent of the global economy, they will be acting out of conscience, not self-interest. By then, it will be far too late.

We must develop a mechanism to make cooperation among the entire human species rational.

Edit: Some interesting discussion arose on Facebook, including Peter Singer weighing in via email.

Investors have exchanges for lots of things, like stocks, currencies and commodities.  They place buy and sell orders indicating what they want to exchange and at what price, and the exchange automatically executes a transaction whenever compatible buy and sell orders are outstanding. (I’m not an investing geek, so forgive me if this is somehow wrong.)

Why don’t we have a general exchange for every kind of good that can be bought and sold?  Why should I have to search Google, Amazon, some price comparison site or Craigslist when I want something, often coming up empty-handed, when I could just place a buy order for it on a global exchange, and have the exchange find the optimal seller, if one exists, based on price, proximity, reputation, etc., transfer them my money, and tell them to mail me my item?

One might object that everyday goods aren’t like financial instruments. There’s an infinite number of kinds of goods, and the instances of one kind of good are going to differ from each other slightly or significantly in various ways that are of concern to the buyer.  This is all true, but I don’t think it’s a barrier to automated trading.  You’d just need an agreed-upon taxonomy of goods and an ontology for describing them.  Then, buyers can state the type and minimum attributes of what they want and sellers can state the type and attributes of what they have.  The exchange executes a transaction, optionally taking into consideration factors like how good the seller’s reputation is and how long it will take to ship.

Voila, Semantic Market.

Inspired by this prompt, I’m going to publicly state some random politically incorrect beliefs of mine.

• Beliefs that aren’t rationally justified should be roundly ridiculed if the person who holds them asserts even their slightest applicability to a real problem.  Irrationality is not just silly, it is dangerous and the number one thing holding back human progress.

  (This isn’t intended to be an epistemological assertion about the merit of rationalism or empiricism. It’s a pragmatic assertion about everyday life.)

• Disregard the law.  At various times and various places, within the recent past, female rights of any kind, drinking alcohol, freedom of religion, the right to live if you happen to be of a certain ethnic group, and homosexuality have all been severely punished under the law.  Many not immoral things, notably drug use (the criminalization of which, if you think about it at all, amounts to thought-crime), remain illegal even in the most free countries, and many immoral things, such as state-sponsored murder (i.e. war), are legal.

  Morality is not a collective endeavor.  Even if the state has pragmatic reasons to outlaw some things, it doesn’t reflect their moral status.  The only defensible meta-ethical stance is for each individual to come to their own reasoned conclusions about what is moral and what is not, and then act according to them, considering the law only with regard to the risk and severity of punishment for breaking it.

  A high percentage of people who think legal=moral causes totalitarianism.  It is the duty of every good citizen to disobey unjust laws to prevent this.

• Voting is stupid.  The paradox of voting is uncontroversially true.  Unless you are voting in a local election with perhaps a hundred voters, if you really consider the difference (to your, or anyone’s, life) between your preferred outcome and the other possible outcomes, in combination with the infinitesimal chance that your vote will be the deciding vote (which is the only time your vote could be said to have mattered), it never warrants spending a few hours of your time to vote.

  You might say, “but if everybody did that, democracy wouldn’t work.”  Well, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant to what one person should do. Have fun blindly heeding your evolved instinct toward group cooperation, aided by “civic duty” groupthink, uttering platitudes like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. I will enjoy my Tuesdays and say that if you vote, you can’t complain, because you consent to the status quo.

• People are not born equal.  Some people are better at some things than other people no matter how how much the other people try, and there is also no a priori reason to suspect that this fact doesn’t extend to groups of people. Some incontroversial examples include: Ashkenazi Jews are almost a standard deviation more intelligent, on average, than average; East-Africans are better at running marathons; and among both geniuses and the mentally retarded, men are more common than women.

  I know that oftentimes environment can actually explain most differences between people, even those listed above.  But to hold as an article of faith that people are identical in ability, is stupid.  People evolved in different environments, and will be good at different things.  And there is genetic variation among all individuals.  It’s a shame that people like Larry Summers and James Watson get fired for even questioning the politically correct orthodoxy.

  By the way, this is in no way a normative statement about whether people should be treated equally.

  (Not to mention, you know, the inequality of being born into wealth or poverty.)

That’s all for now.  You can’t judge me unless you do this too. And if you don’t have any controversial beliefs, it’s probably a bad sign.