Why I am a progressive

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Anyway, on to business.


Today I’m going to do something a little different. It might seem
like an odd digression into philosophy and ethics, but it comes
back around to politics. In fact, it explains my core political
orientation about as well as anything can.


I’m going to explain why I hate the Trolley Problem.


The Trolley Problem and its variants


The Trolley Problem is a famous “thought experiment” in ethics.
It traces back to philosopher Philippa Foot, who first wrote
about it in 1967, but in the years since there have been dozens
upon dozens of variations, in both the philosophical literature
and the popular press.


You’ve probably heard some version. The most basic goes like
this: There’s an out-of-control railcar hurtling toward five
people who are tied to the track. You’re next to a switch that
could divert the car to another track, but on that track is a
single worker who would be killed if you do. What do you do?


Variations are endless. What if the person on track two is your
son? What if the choice is between five people you know to be
murderers and one good person? What if the choice were made from
a switch house where you couldn’t see any of the people?


The point of these thought experiments is to probe your
intuitions and principles. Is it better to do nothing and allow
five deaths or to take affirmative action that leads to one
death? Does the difference between acting and refraining from
acting matter? Does the number of lives matter? Etc.


The recent development of autonomous vehicles has brought the
Trolly Problem back into popular consciousness yet again. If
robots are going to be driving, how will they make these
decisions? Will they be utilitarians, maximizing the number of
lives saved at every juncture, or Kantians, refusing to knowingly
sacrifice one life for another? Presumably however we program
them. So maybe we have to decide after all.


The Trolley Problem served as the basis for a fan-favorite
sequence on the show The Good Place:


And of course, times being what they are, it has inspired all
manner of memes.


Despite its enduring appeal, the Trolley Problem is Bad. It is
misleading about moral decision making and, more importantly,
misleading about how to improve moral decision making.


It’s not moral principles but moral agents that matter most


Some of you know that I spent several years in the late 1990s
getting an MA in philosophy and then starting on (but not
finishing) a PhD. Anyone who studied analytic philosophy — as I
did, at least at first — has spent lots of time with thought
experiments.


I spent a semester reading the pinnacle of pure intellectual
gymnastics, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which is full of
thought experiments moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and
otherwise. The book is revered in the field, considered one of
the great philosophical works of the 20th century, and it
completely turned me off. It’s one of many things that led me
away from philosophy entirely.


As the Trolley Problem is structured, you, the moral agent, have
an utter paucity of knowledge about the situation. You don’t know
why you’re there, any of the people involved, any history, any
detail. All you know is, one life or five lives.


The problem is designed to make the agent (the decider)
invisible, to isolate the decision itself away from embedded,
embodied experience. Which is fine, if you’re just having a
think. But discussing the ideal ranking of moral principles is
like discussing Kant’s noumena, the thing-in-itself. No human can
directly perceive it and wouldn’t know if they had, so there’s an
angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin aspect to it.


All we have are the perceptual and analytic tools available to
us, so we should focus on improving them. If you want
trolley-style decisions made better in the real world, in real
societies, you’re much better off focusing on agents than on any
set of final principles.


How to be a good trolley decider


Consider if you ended up in the Trolley Problem in real life. How
would you make a good decision in that situation?


Ideally, you would be coming to it with a history; you’d know how
you got there and something about how situation developed, who
the other people are, why they hell they’re tied to the track,
etc. You’d have a good sense of how fast the railcar is traveling
and the force necessary to stop it. You’d have a good sense of
the chances of success of various options: flagging down the car
or the man working on the tracks, finding something to throw on
the tracks, jumping on the track yourself. You’d know whether the
people tied to the track are real or dummies, whether you’re
being tricked.


You’d also need the ability to make a quick decision in extremely
difficult circumstances. You couldn’t let your fear or
over-analysis paralyze you (as happens to Chidi in Good Place).
You’d need the ability to keep your cool, to maintain some
emotional distance from the situation, to rapidly consider the
options from different perspectives, to notice if there are other
non-obvious alternatives.


You’d need to be alert, well-rested, well-fed, not distracted,
attuned to circumstances — what the man on the tracks is doing,
how securely the other people are attached to the tracks, whether
the ground and tracks are wet and slippery, the speed of the
railcar, the age of the equipment, etc. And finally, you would
need to be motivated to do the right thing.


To make the best possible decision, you would need to be
perfectly informed, acting based on prosocial motivations and a
perfect temperament, in control of yourself and thinking with
perfect clarity.


In other words, what we’d want operating in a real-world case of
the Trolley Problem is not the perfect set of principles, but the
perfect moral agent — the best possible decision-maker.


That’s my answer to the Trolley Problem and all similar thought
experiments: the right decision is whatever decision the best
possible moral decision-maker would make in the situation.


Of course, there is no such moral superagent. No one in this
world, making real decisions in real circumstances, has a perfect
temperament or is ever perfectly informed or thinking with
perfect clarity. The default, in fact, is harried people making
thoughtless decisions based on crude heuristics and mental
models.


But the crucial point is that we can be better or worse
decision-makers, closer or farther away from the ideal described
above, and we have a pretty good idea what it takes to help
people get closer. (More on that below.)


One thing that doesn’t seem to help is a well-developed set of
ethical principles. A 2014 research paper surveyed the empirical
evidence collected by studies of various moral behaviors and
found “no statistically detectable difference between the
behavior of ethicists and non-ethicists.”


In any real-world situation, good decision-making is enabled less
by abstract principles than by temperament and discernment, i.e.,
self-possession and wisdom. The person who takes in the most
information, can see the situation through the appropriate lens,
and can act on priorities amidst pressure and uncertainty will
likely make the best decision.


Whether we’re seeking better real-world outcomes (as I am) or
seeking better answers to longstanding moral questions (as the
Trolley Problem is), the right strategy is the same: get help.
Try to make society fertile for the development of better moral
agents. They will have better answers than we do.


How to encourage the growth of better moral agents


In his seminal 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Princeton
psychologist Daniel Kahneman made a distinction between system 1
(S1) thinking and system 2 (S2) thinking.


Kahneman describes S1 as “fast, automatic, frequent, emotional,
stereotypic, and unconscious” — what are more colloquially known
as “gut reactions.”


S2 is “slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, and
conscious,” closer to what we tend to conceive of as thinking —
taking a step back, slowing down, consciously assessing and
reasoning.


Very crudely speaking, you can think of S1 engaging the amygdala,
the brain’s basic pleasure/pain, attraction/revulsion centers,
and S2 engaging the frontal cortex, the centers of symbol
manipulation, self-reflection, and conscious calculation.


The amygdala is prior to the frontal cortex, both evolutionarily
speaking and in biological priority. Long-term thinking requires
a basic level of safety, an S1 system quiet enough to let S2
work. The more threat looms, the more we, like all biological
creatures, prioritize the immediate security of our bodies, our
families, our tribes, our borders.


We know that stress and privation make S2 thinking more
difficult. For a superb introduction to this work, listen to Ezra
Klein’s podcast interview with Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford
neuroscientist and primatologist who has studied the intersection
of stress and poverty. (Seriously, take an hour, it will change
how you think.)


Sapolsky’s work is varied and fascinating, but the recurring
theme is that, in modern human societies, it’s expensive to be
poor — cognitively, emotionally, and physically. Poverty, hunger,
and social marginalization lead to stress, exhaustion, anxiety,
and ill health.


Stress is a biological emergency reaction, an elevated heart rate
and flood of hormones designed for short-term anticipatory threat
response. But it is now experienced as a constant background
state in response to chronic threats that have no immediate
solutions, to corrosive long-term effect. Sapolsky calls being on
the lower end of America’s social and economic totem pole a
“psychic sledgehammer.” Under those blows, it is difficult to
undertake the “slow, effortful” cognitive processes necessary for
long-term plans or Olympian moral decision-making.


And our vulnerability to circumstance traces all the way back to
before our birth. Stress hormones and nutrition in pregnant
mothers shape the neural pathways of the fetus in the womb. The
crucial weeks, months, and years after birth shape basic neural
and hormonal response patterns that persist for life.


(I once wrote a long article on the centrality of luck to human
life. It’s a good one!)


From the womb on, everywhere is the same basic pattern: insofar
as a person feels safe and nurtured, they can more easily develop
higher order and longer term thinking. Conversely, hunger,
stress, and privation cause heightened threat response and a
shrinking of horizons. That’s true whether it’s a fetus bathed in
stress hormones or an adult marginalized in a society with low
trust.


Life is composed of dozens of small decisions every day,
decisions in which conflicting interests and principles must be
resolved, long-term benefits, personal and social, weighed
against short-term desires. To maximize the net welfare of
society, which ought to be our goal, we need to improve those
decisions, incrementally, at the margins, bit by bit.


We do that by creating better moral agents, which we know how to
do. We make sure that everyone has their basic needs cared for;
that every family expecting a baby receives prenatal care and
basic childcare training; that every family with a new child
receives time off from work and regular nurse visits; that every
child has access to quality public education, from pre-school
through college; and that every adult receives adequate health
care and housing. We create a compassionate, law-bound society
that incentivizes prosocial behaviors. These are the kinds of
things that create the necessary foundation for widespread S2
thinking.


Progressivism is about bringing more of humanity into service


And this, at a fundamental level, is why I’m a progressive. It’s
not that I think I’ve figured out the perfect society or the
correct way to live. It’s that I believe we can get better at it
— better at living, better at society, better at peace and
equitable, sustainable prosperity.


The best way to improve is to recruit as much help as possible,
to get the maximum number of minds and hearts involved. The more
we lift people up out of poverty, precarity, discrimination, and
stress, the more we unleash their minds on longer term problems
and non-zero-sum, cooperative solutions.


The more minds we have applying themselves to our collective
trolley problems, the more likely we are to get good answers.


The Trolley Problem attempts to isolate moral intuitions from the
messiness of human experience, but integrating those intuitions
and principles into human practice is the whole ballgame. It’s
what matters. Being good, acting for the greatest good of
humanity and the biosphere, is a practical skill, not a fixed
body of knowledge or set of rules. It’s something we do together,
not as isolated moral agents next to rail switches. And it’s
difficult. It involves building and defending a complex social
and economic infrastructure. We accomplish it, if at all, by
paying closer attention to human experience, not abstracting away
from it.


Thinking about philosophy led me out of philosophy


Over the course of his career, one of my favorite philosophers,
Richard Rorty, basically thought his way out of philosophy. He
started in analytic philosophy, moved to American pragmatism, and
ended up doing something like social and political commentary.


I won’t try to summarize or speak for Rorty, who is a towering
and complicated figure, but my intellectual arc was, in its own
modest way, more or less the same.


What philosophical pragmatism captures is that, whether it’s
ethics, metaphysics, consciousness, or personal identity,
Ultimate Truth doesn’t and can’t matter to us. We can’t
experience it directly. We wouldn’t know for certain if we had.
All we can experience is one another and our endlessly varying,
conflicting ideas about the right perspectives and frames through
which to view evidence and events. Our only real metric for
comparison is which perspectives and frames work better to
navigate the world (“work better” being the heart of pragmatism).
No god or revelation is going to come along and settle those
endless arguments.


The real work is just figuring out how we can live together in
something approximating peace and harmony, how we can improve our
collective circumstances even in light of our inescapable
differences. Abstract thought experiments can’t answer those
questions; they are questions of practice, of incremental
improvement, the strong and slow boring of hard boards.


I like to think that what I’m doing today is, in some small way,
engaging with those real-world problems, helping to bore the
boards. It is immeasurably more satisfying than sitting in a room
contemplating imaginary dilemmas.


The only trolleys I care about these days are the ones that serve
transit-oriented development.


Thanks for reading this far, y’all! That was long and nerdy. You
deserve some dogs.


Here’s Forest, majestically/goofily surveying his grandfather’s
back yard.


And here is Mabel engaged in her new favorite activity: staring
contemplatively into the fire.


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