As you may recall from yesterday, I asked whether an immortal would necessarily be considered a murderer, given that accidents happen sooner or later. Drive on the roads for a few million years, and you are likely to run over a pedestrian. A related question is whether we should prohibit such actions, such as driving for millions of years, if our rights theory forbids the imposition of high levels of risk on other people. Conversely, if we do not consider the immortal driver a murderer, we might face counterexamples where we cannot stop the repeated application of risk, when stopping such risks is an intuitively appealing thing to do, read the original post for more detail. The underlying dilemma is that once we consider an intertemporal perspective, can a theory of rights have a firmly grounded and intuitive benchmark for what counts as “too much risk”? Here are a few threads of the responses I received:
1. Sasha Volokh suggests that rights should be defined in terms of how much risk is acceptable to impose on a person in a given time period, not how much risk can be imposed overall through a longer period of time. This, of course, suggests that would-be aggressors can get away with misdeeds by spreading out their aggression over time probabilistically, I don’t think that Sasha would regard this possibility as a reductio on his view. An interesting question is whether the time dimension should be treated separately from the dimension of space, and if so why. What if you spread very small risks around a large amount of space, killing someone with near-certainty? Would this be less acceptable than spreading the risks through time?
2. Lawrence Solum raised the separate question of how risk-averse a would-be immortal would be or should be. If your life is eternal in the absence of accidents, perhaps you should never leave the house. I have offered separate comment on this interesting issue.
3. Daniel Davies (of CrookedTimber fame) wonders whether probabilistic concepts are always well-defined in the examples I consider. He cites the Austrians, and he could have cited the post-Keynesian economists as well.
4. Many of you, especially the lawyers, introduced realism and challenged the assumptions of the initial queries about automobile accidents and Russian roulette. On this I will defend the use of hypothetical philosophical thought experiments. They are supposed to be unrealistic and stark, to root out presuppositions in our moral intuitions that otherwise go unchallenged. Fully realistic examples, by their nature, often teach us fewer new things about how our intuitions work. One reader wrote to tell me that there are 13 auto-pedestrian fatalities every day, in case you are curious.
5. Economist and blogger Eric Rasmusen suggested that the correct answer could depend on how we discount time.
6. Many of you suggested that a rights theory had to be parasitic ultimately upon utilitarian concepts, and that we had to look to costs and benefits to determine what is an acceptable rights infringement. I agree with this conclusion, but two points: first, rights theory might end up falling off the map altogether. Second, utilitarianism has its own version of the problem. Should you join a firing squad to kill an innocent man, thinking that the fellow will die anyway, but you can donate your wages to charity? Derek Parfit multiplies related examples at length. So I am not willing to cite utilitarianism as a simple answer to the problem, rather it simply shifts the ground.
In sum, I still think that any rights theory is embarrassed when it tries to answer the question of how much risk is acceptable, and how we delineate “how much risk” one person is imposing on another. I’ve nonetheless learned a great deal from considering your responses.
Addendum: Notice that under many rights theories it matters whether one individual, spread through time, is the source of the risk, as opposed to “many drivers today” creating the same final risk to life. The idea that we have a rights violation when a given individual crosses a given threshold of risk gets us to that result. Some of you, of course, may view this as a reductio on a particular kind of rights theory. For a utilitarian, of course, risk is risk, no matter what the source, we need only look at outcomes.
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