Life isn't Sacred

Consequentialists value life and agential interventions in the ordinary kind of way

Inspired by some of Robin Hanson’s writing on the sacred, I’ve been thinking about how the concept relates to ethical theory. My suspicion: a major crux in ethics concerns whether we see people as sacred. Consequentialists don’t, whereas it seems like non-consequentialists do, to varying extents.

Exorcising numbers with holy water

Valuing Life

Most things have their value contingently, and are comparable in value to other things, allowing tradeoffs to be made between them. Consequentialists extend this sort of thinking to life itself: it can be good, bad, or neutral, and there’s no great difficulty (at least in principle) in making tradeoffs between different lives (e.g. in trolley cases when we can save some but not all).

Contingent value: Peter Singer, in Practical Ethics, famously argues against “the sanctity of human life” as propounded by many religious thinkers. Those “sanctitists” oppose euthanasia, for example, whereas prosaic humanistic ethics acknowledges that continued life, when filled with suffering, may be bad and so shouldn’t generally be forced on people against their will.

Comparable value: Many people hate the idea of moral tradeoffs. “You can’t put a price on life,” is a deplorably popular slogan. “Human life has infinite value,” is another. “Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,” is the philosopher’s version of this silliness. I’ve long been baffled by why so many deontologists seem to conflate comparability with fungibility as applied to persons, when nobody would make this mistake with respect to other values (e.g. comparing separate artworks, and sacrificing some to save others). One possible answer: they implicitly regard life as sacred, which both (i) disallows tradeoffs, and (ii) obstructs clear thinking on the topic.

At any rate, a distinctive feature of consequentialism is that it treats the value of life as an ordinary sort of value—typically very high in magnitude, but subject to all the usual kinds of tradeoffs and aggregation. Non-consequentialists resist this. (E.g., Kantians speak of “dignity” as a kind of sacred value, beyond mere “price”. As a skeptic about all things sacred, I’ve never had a clue what they’re talking about.)¹

Agential Interventions

Agency allows us to intervene in the world to bring about preferable outcomes. If the light switch is off when you’d rather it were on, you can flick the switch to change its state. If a trolley is on route to hit five when you’d rather it were on the side track with only one victim, you may be able to switch that too. In general, the question of what you should do reduces to the question of what you should prefer from amongst your available options. This is the ordinary sort of practical reasoning that consequentialism embodies.

Non-consequentialists, again, resist this. In Trolley Footbridge, the only way to save five lives is if the man on the footbridge falls through a trapdoor onto the tracks, stopping the train early. It would undeniably be better for the train to only kill one person, so we may pray for a gust of wind to blow the switch that opens the trapdoor; but you, dear agent, had better not do the switching (we’re told).

There’s something very mysterious (it seems to me) about the way that non-consequentialists disallow instrumentally desirable actions in this way. It seems to treat agential activity as something outside of the natural world. We all agree it’d be great if the switch were knocked by natural causes, but human agency is somehow excluded from that category.

Consequentialists, by contrast, see human agency as a natural cause much like any other, and worth exercising whenever there are causal gaps we should prefer to be filled. It is distinctive in some ways, of course: moral agents may be praiseworthy or blameworthy in a way that merely natural causes are not. Other agents may disrespect us, by failing to take our interests adequately into account when deciding how to act. But then why isn’t it precisely one’s failure to switch to the more desirable state that is seen as blameworthy and disrespectful (of the equal intrinsic value of the five)? Deontological verdicts involve further seeing agency as transformative—changing what is desirable—in a way that seems entirely unmotivated to me.

But perhaps this feature of deontology is more explicable if agency is sacred. For the sacred demands purity, and must remain free of the touch of corruption. Pursuing an overall good end via pro tanto bad means is simple instrumental rationality for we profane ones; but if agency is sacred, that same action may instead be viewed as “letting evil into your heart”: a moral corruption that stains the entire act, robbing it of all positive moral value, despite every appearance of being net-positive (in profane terms).

Conclusion

Such moral mysticism seems nonsensical to me, which I think is a big part of why I’ve never felt the slightest attraction to deontology. I haven’t offered any argument against sacred ethics here; I’m more just noting that (i) it seems pretty weird, and (ii) it may nonetheless help to make sense of the dispute between consequentialists and deontologists. I’d be especially curious to hear from deontologists whether they agree that their moral perspective implicitly draws on notions of sacredness (along the lines suggested above), or whether they see things differently.

1. For another example: opponents of QALYs often implicitly assume that all life-saving interventions are equally worthwhile, no matter the duration or quality of the life-extension that they provide. I’ve never understood how anyone could seriously believe that, but perhaps this, too, reflects an implicit attribution of sacredness on their part?