Utilitarianism

You have the idea that death is something bad that will happen to you in the future. That is why you hold my view to be depressing. As for accuracy, there is no description that is more accurate than that life is the process of dying. But you can flip it and say; death is the process of living. Does that sound equally depressing?

You see, when you give me definitions that involve phrases like "up to a certain point in time" there has to be more to it. What point in time. Can you decide? When do you start dying?

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You have the idea that death is something bad that will happen to you in the future. That is why you hold my view to be depressing.

We all do to some extent. Why do we cry for those who died, why do I not want to die today or tommorrow? If life is the process of dying then it wouldn't matter to me if I die right now, but it does.

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As for accuracy, there is no description that is more accurate than that life is the process of dying. But you can flip it and say; death is the process of living. Does that sound equally depressing?

Your statement implies purpose, and that is one reason why I don't like it.

There is a start and an end point yes, but to call the whole process between the two point a process of ending is too paradoxical.

Whatever, it's all about semantics probably anyways.

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Re: Utilitarianism

val wrote:

Bentham's utilitarianism, was centered in the "greatest happiness to the greatest number". He refused to consider any criteria to qualify the action in itself, because the validity of that action was depending on its results.
If the result of an action brings greater happiness for the large number, the action is good.
That leads us to serious problems. If slavery brings greater happiness for 90% of citizens of a country, does that mean that is good to enslave the other 10%?

Not if the displeasure to the slaves with the conditions of their slavery is sufficiently great to outweigh the pleasure to the slaveholders from enslaving people. Judging by the parties' willingness to pay, that was indeed the case with slavery in the ante-bellum South. To my knowledge, after slavery was abolished, it proved impossible to recreate the kind gang-labor based agriculture that had been so profitable to slaveholders before the war. Under freedom of contract, the former slaves were unwilling to continue working under these conditions for any wage the former slaveholders were willing to pay them. Bentham would have seen this as empirical evidence that slavery was unjust.

While I'm at it, I would also like to submit a case where Bentham reaches a very impressive defense of minority rights by applying his theories. In Offences Against One's Self, he argued for legalizing homosexuality, on the grounds that homosexuals, however destructive one might find their behavior, was destructive to themselves only, not to anybody else. In 1785, when Bentham made that argument, homosexual sodomy was punishable by hanging, so his conclusions must have seemed extremely far out at the time. For a modern analogy in terms of far-out-ness, think something between legalizing heroin and legalizing murder. Today, of course, Bentham's far-out argument looks pretty mainstream, as well it should. And those who argued that government ought to uphold morality and protect people against themselves look barbaric and inhumane now -- as well they should, too. The application of that result to the modern "war on drugs" is left as an excercise to the reader.

val wrote:

Because of the Holocaust, jews received a state, a nation. That makes Holocaust good?

Not according to utilitarianism, again using willingness to pay as a proxy for utility. If you value the life of every jew killed in the holocaust at $5 million -- about the value you get empirically -- Israel's GDP would be an order of magnitude too low to even pay the interest on that 'investment'. It strikes me as very unlikely that this is a price Israelis would be willing to pay for the pleasure of living in Israel. Founding Israel did not justify the holocaust -- and utilitarian calculus does not find that it did.

val wrote:

A liberal government reduces taxes, to assure the "happiness" of the majority of the citizens - no matter the minority becomes reduced to extreme misery.

What empirical evidence do you have that "extreme misery" was more common in nightwatchman states like 19th century Britain than in comparable big-government states like, say, 19th century Prussia? Was it sufficiently more common to justify Prussia's shortfall in average income?

val wrote:

Bentham's philosophy is the "other side" of liberal economists, like Smith. In both cases, a justification for the most extreme forms of capitalism.

Bentham advocated a nightwatchman state, and Smith argued for at least some interventions by the government. Both positions were less extreme than that of their contemporary William Godwin, who was not a utilitarian, but who did argue for a much more radical capitalism with no government at all -- the kind we would now call "anarcho-capitalism".

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Cyracuz wrote:

I see it this way: Life is the process of dying. If life is good, how can death not be? They are inseparably linked.

Cyracuz, to say that life is the process of dying, and therefore if life is good so is death, is a bit like saying: if you walk for long enough, you will fall over. Therefore walking is the process of falling over. Therefore if walking is good (because it gets you somewhere), then falling over is good.

The winning of a game of chess and the losing of a game of chess are inseparably linked. If winning a game of chess if good, how can losing a game of chess not be?

Anyway, this discussion is, I think, off the topic of utilitarianism.

Cyracuz wrote:

djbt, I understand what you mean by "live" now. But does utilitarianism take into account that many people don't know what they find pleasurable and painful? Of course some know to some extent, but we are remarkably ignorant on the subject most of us.

I cannot see how a person wouldn't know if something were pleasurable or painful. I can see that I person might not be able to tell if something were good or bad for them in the long run, but that is a different thing. If you were to put your hand into a fire, I'm sure you would be in no doubt you were feeling pain, even if it were cleansing a wound and so beneficial in the long run.

On the "feeling better than no feeling" point, imagine this: You go to the dentist to have a tooth removed. The dentist asks you if you want anaesthetic. The anaesthetic would give you no feeling in your mouth. Do you want it? Or is the feeling of a tooth being pulled from your mouth better than no feeling in your mouth? I would say that the feeling of a tooth being pulled is worse than no feeling.

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Thomas, I am interested in how you performed the 'utilitarian calculus' you mention. Could you go through it in more detail?

Is it related to the type of calculations used in the article you linked to? Because the reasoning in that article seemed rather suspect to me.

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djbt wrote:

Is it related to the type of calculations used in the article you linked to? Because the reasoning in that article seemed rather suspect to me.

Utilitarianism and maximizing economic efficiency is identical if one assumes that (a) willingness to pay is a good measure of ones utility, and (b) everyone has the same utility for each extra dollar of income. Of course, there is no philosophically compelling reason to define utility in terms of (a). But it has the advantage that willingness to pay is observable and determines what happens, while utility in the abstract doesn't. The assumption in (b) runs into problems when you're looking at transfers between people whose marginal utility of income is different: poor to rich, askets to materialists, and so forth. So the rule "maximize economic efficiency" isn't the same as "maximize aggregate utility", but it's pretty good as a first approximation.

You say the reasoning in the article seems suspect to you. Can you elaborate?

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Re: Utilitarianism
Thomas

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Not if the displeasure to the slaves with the conditions of their slavery is sufficiently great to outweigh the pleasure to the slaveholders from enslaving people.

Does that mean that, when that displeasure is not sufficiently great to outweigh the pleasure of the slaveholders, slavery is morally fair?
You see, this is the problem with utilitarianism. Bentham could not say, according to his own theory, that slavery is always, no matter the consequences, a bad moral choice.

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Not according to utilitarianism, again using willingness to pay as a proxy for utility. If you value the life of every jew killed in the holocaust at $5 million

I refuse to value an human life in money.

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What empirical evidence do you have that "extreme misery" was more common in nightwatchman states like 19th century Britain than in comparable big-government states like, say, 19th century Prussia? Was it sufficiently more common to justify Prussia's shortfall in average income?

None. Does that mean that extreme misery is morally good if it was identical in Britain and Prussia, or even superior in Prussia?

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Bentham advocated a nightwatchman state, and Smith argued for at least some interventions by the government. Both positions were less extreme than that of their contemporary William Godwin, who was not a utilitarian, but who did argue for a much more radical capitalism with no government at all -- the kind we would now call "anarcho-capitalism

I think you are trying to validate utilitarianism by giving examples of more radical capitalistic theories. But that only shows there are worst theories, not that utilitarian philosophy is acceptable. In that perspective, I also could compare Stuart Mill moral and political philosophy with Saint-Simon, Bakunine, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Engels.

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Re: Utilitarianism

val wrote:

Quote:
Not if the displeasure to the slaves with the conditions of their slavery is sufficiently great to outweigh the pleasure to the slaveholders from enslaving people.

Does that mean that, when that displeasure is not sufficiently great to outweigh the pleasure of the slaveholders, slavery is morally fair?

Yes -- in the framework of utilitarian calculus, that's what it means. For example, in colonial America, many immigrants auctioned themselves off into indentured servitude to pay for the passage from Europe. (If I am correctly informed, typical timescales were 2-3 years of indentured servitude for a one-way ticket.) I am not aware that Bentham himself commented on the issue, but his theory predicts that this practice was fair game. I'm not sure if I support that prediction wholeheartedly, but I do find it defensible.

val wrote:

You see, this is the problem with utilitarianism. Bentham could not say, according to his own theory, that slavery is always, no matter the consequences, a bad moral choice.

Neither does any other political philosophy, unless you let it play the semantic trick of not calling it slavery. Semantics aside, the draft is slavery with a time limit. So is jury duty. Still, few schools of political philosophy have a problem with either. They only get rid of that contradiction by insisting that these things not be called slavery. Perhaps, then, the distinctive feature of utilitarianism is that it is at least being honest about qualifying its rejection of slavery.

val wrote:

I refuse to value an human life in money.

Yet in your daily life, you trade off bits and pieces of your life for inferior pleasures all the time: Each time you enjoy one more potato chip at the cost of increasing your risk of heart attack; each time you cross a street, risking that some car might run into you, to say hello to a friend you see on the other side; each time you decide whether to buy your car with an air bag or without one; the list goes on and on.

val wrote:

Does that mean that extreme misery is morally good if it was identical in Britain and Prussia, or even superior in Prussia?

No -- only that contrary to your intuition, Britain's 19th century, laissez-faire nightwatchman state, with its utilitarian underpinnings, was morally a pretty good political system compared to its alternatives, as judged by the extent of extreme misery each of them produced.

val wrote:

But that only shows there are worst theories, not that utilitarian philosophy is acceptable. In that perspective, I also could compare Stuart Mill moral and political philosophy with Saint-Simon, Bakunine, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Engels.

As it happens, Mill's and Smith's theories were pretty similar -- and much more successful, in material as in moral terms, than those of Bakunin, Marx, and friends.

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No, walking is not the same as falling over. You can sit down. Can you take a break from life?

We cry when loved ones die partly because we're taught to do so and partly because we will not get to see them again. It is a totally selfish grief. Claim any religion or none at all, reason it through and you will get the same result. Selfish.

I am saying that life is the process of dying, and this does imply purpose. The whole purpose of your life is to end. This is beyond anyone's control.

Think about trees. Do they reach their heights according to their potential or according to the limits set by gravity? We know it's both. Similarly, when you reach the prime of your life it is a result of being born and the fact that you will die one day.

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val wrote:

And the example I gave about Holocaust had the purpose to show how difficult is to establish what are, exactly, the consequences of an action.

One way to escape that is to notice that Bentham is proposing utilitarianism as a "principle of morals and legislation". He wants to use it for designing moral and legal rules. You cannot know how a rule will work itself out every single time it is applied, but you can know, with some confidence, how it will play out on average, and how predictably it will play out that way.

For example, if Alice loves Bob, Clara loves Bob much more than Alice does, and Bob prefers Alice to Clara by a slight margin. In this case, the rule "let people choose their own partners" does not produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Total happiness would be maximized if Bob ended up with Clara, but under freedom of association, he does end up with Alice.

The case is different if you average over the preferences of millions of people. On average, the Alices will love Bob just as much as the Claras do, so total happiness depends only on whom Bob chooses. The utilitarian way of finding the best rule, then, works on average, but not in every single case.

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Re: Utilitarianism

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many immigrants auctioned themselves off into indentured servitude to pay for the passage from Europe. (If I am correctly informed, typical timescales were 2-3 years of indentured servitude for a one-way ticket.)

No. Not a fair game. If someone sells himself in a situation of necessity he is not free tho choose. Choosing between dying of hunger or being a slave is not, in my point of view, a choice. And that example you gave shows exactly the levels of inhumanity utilitarianism can reach.

About slavery: we can refuse it, in any situation. For one single reason: the slave is not free. He is not even a person.
To take freedom, dignity, humanity, to someone, is to take what makes that person an human being. Slavery is always wrong.

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Yet in your daily life, you trade off bits and pieces of your life for inferior pleasures all the time: Each time you enjoy one more potato chip at the cost of increasing your risk of heart attack; each time you cross a street, risking that some car might run into you, to say hello to a friend you see on the other side; each time you decide whether to buy your car with an air bag or without one; the list goes on and on.

I am a smoker. But when I smoke I have the hope that I will not die of it. We all know we are mortal, but no one really believes in his own personal death until it comes. We try not to think of it. We can negotiate situations of more or less security, but we are not dealing with our own death.

And, Thomas: British system in XIX century was good to whom? Moral to whom? And even if life conditions were good -and they weren't-, why would that make the system more moral than others? Because of the results?
You see, you are supposing the truth of the theory - utilitarianism - even when you try to demonstrate it's validity.

About the other theories opposed to utilitarianism, you must see them at the time, not now. Because they had deep influence in our own society, even if it is by reaction.

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Re: Utilitarianism

val wrote:

Quote:
many immigrants auctioned themselves off into indentured servitude to pay for the passage from Europe. (If I am correctly informed, typical timescales were 2-3 years of indentured servitude for a one-way ticket.)

No. Not a fair game. If someone sells himself in a situation of necessity he is not free tho choose. Choosing between dying of hunger or being a slave is not, in my point of view, a choice. And that example you gave shows exactly the levels of inhumanity utilitarianism can reach.

What alternative moral and legal rules would you propose to solve the problem? And why do you think they would have been morally preferable?

val wrote:

Quote:
Yet in your daily life, you trade off bits and pieces of your life for inferior pleasures all the time: Each time you enjoy one more potato chip at the cost of increasing your risk of heart attack; each time you cross a street, risking that some car might run into you, to say hello to a friend you see on the other side; each time you decide whether to buy your car with an air bag or without one; the list goes on and on.

I am a smoker. But when I smoke I have the hope that I will not die of it. We all know we are mortal, but no one really believes in his own personal death until it comes. We try not to think of it. We can negotiate situations of more or less security, but we are not dealing with our own death.

You can hope you will not die of smoking in the sense of dropping dead right now. But you know you are giving away bits of your life expectancy. The conceptual difference is small. If you think otherwise, it's probably because you wouldn't let me shoot you if I paid you $5 million for it. But this doesn't prove that your life is infinitely valuable to you, as you might think it does. It only shows that you have no way of collecting, and that money is useless to a corpse.

val wrote:

And, Thomas: British system in XIX century was good to whom? Moral to whom? And even if life conditions were good -and they weren't-, why would that make the system more moral than others? Because of the results?

Yes. On what basis are you claiming that life conditions weren't good -- compared to what the realistic alternatives were, given the state of technology at the time?

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Re: Utilitarianism
Thomas

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What alternative moral and legal rules would you propose to solve the problem? And why do you think they would have been morally preferable?

Again, you are basing your position in terms of "solving a problem". But the question is: should we have a moral code and face problems with it, or create a moral code to solve this problem or that problem?
There are always solutions. The Holocaust was a solution. Nazis had two many jews in the concentration camps. Gas chambers were a solution.
But it was a bad solution. And it would be a bad solution no matter what the results were.
The same with slavery. Slavery can be a solution. In fact, it was. And it was a bad solution. Not because of the results, but because slavery is morally unacceptable.
You see, you are asking me if I see a better solution, because you are thinking in terms of results. It is normal, since you are a modern utilitarian. But, since I have other moral perspective, I have only this answer: slavery is always the worst solution. I don't care if a man eats better being a slave that being a free man. It is wrong to enslave someone, no matter the conditions and the results.

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Re: Utilitarianism

val wrote:

Again, you are basing your position in terms of "solving a problem". But the question is: should we have a moral code and face problems with it, or create a moral code to solve this problem or that problem?

Let me make sure I understand what you're saying. Given is a situation where some poor Europeans can either starve, or go to America, be slaves for 2-3 years, and then get on with their lives. This situation is a fact of technology and population, so moral philosophy provides no means of escaping it. Are you really saying: 'I would like to see those people stay in Europe and starve, rather than compromise my moral stand against slavery'? If that's what you're saying, and it looks that way to me, why is this position morally superior to 'when facing a choice between two evils, let people choose for themselves which evil they hate less'? It's terribly easy to have a noble-minded, fact-independent moral code and then ask other people to die for it. It just doesn't strike me as persuasive ethics.

val wrote:

The Holocaust was a solution. Nazis had two many jews in the concentration camps. Gas chambers were a solution.
But it was a bad solution. And it would be a bad solution no matter what the results were.

Then why did you bother arguing, in your very first post to your thread, that applying utilitarianism to the holocaust may lead to the wrong result that it was justified by the creation of Israel (which it doesn't)? Why did you bother arguing that when utilitarianism is applied to 90% of the population enslaving the other 10%, this leads to the wrong result that this is just, when in general it doesn't lead to that result? It seems to me that you were making pretty confident predictions on what a utilitarian judgment would be, and these predictions turned out to be false. It was only after this when you argued that the problem with utilitarianism is that it cannot produce absolute condemnations.

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Re: Utilitarianism
Thomas

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Are you really saying: 'I would like to see those people stay in Europe and starve, rather than compromise my moral stand against slavery'?

I think I already answered that question. If someone has to face slavery or starving, there is no possible moral choice.
And I am not judging History. We are dealing with examples, with the "what happened" and not "what should have happened". Because, in fact, we are talking about a moral system here and now, even if it was created 200 years ago.
The problem is: can we say that slavery (the concept of slavery, not only this or that case) is morally bad or must we see the results of a specific action of slavery in order to have a moral definition?
I reject your question because it implies already an answer: if they didn't sell themselves they would starve, so slavery was morally good in that case.
But my perspective is different: the concept of slavery is always morally wrong. And the concept of a society where people starve to death is morally wrong. We cannot say that if slavery prevents you to starve, slavery becomes morally good.
If I was in the situation of starving to death or sell myself, I probably would choose to sell myself. But would that be a moral choice? I don't think so. We can only make moral choices if we can decide in freedom.

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val wrote:

But my perspective is different: the concept of slavery is always morally wrong. And the concept of a society where people starve to death is morally wrong. We cannot say that if slavery prevents you to starve, slavery becomes morally good.

I do not think utilitarianism does say this. It says that if slavery prevents you from starving, it is less morally bad. Earlier I used the analogue of high and low. Consider a very deep canyon. Deep in the canyon is a small hill. Looking down from outside the canyon, one might think: "We cannot say that, because the top of the hill is above the floor of the canyon, that the top of the hill is high". But clearly the top of the hill is more high, or less low, than the floor of the canyon. We can say this without saying whether the top of the hill is high or low. Similarly, we can say that slavery is morally more good, or less bad, than starving to death, without saying whether slavery is morally good or bad, and being able to say this seems to me to be useful in the making of moral decisions.

val wrote:

If I was in the situation of starving to death or sell myself, I probably would choose to sell myself. But would that be a moral choice? I don't think so.

This perhaps isn't a moral choice. But if you had to choose whether someone else lived in slavery or starved to death, it would be a moral choice, and saying that both are always wrong would not help you make a decision (although I imagine you would, like a utilitarian, look for other, more good/less bad, options).

val wrote:

We can only make moral choices if we can decide in freedom.

I'm not sure what do you mean by 'freedom'. Could you give me an example of someone making a decision in freedom?

Thomas wrote:

Utilitarianism and maximizing economic efficiency is identical if one assumes that (a) willingness to pay is a good measure of ones utility, and (b) everyone has the same utility for each extra dollar of income. Of course, there is no philosophically compelling reason to define utility in terms of (a). But it has the advantage that willingness to pay is observable and determines what happens, while utility in the abstract doesn't. The assumption in (b) runs into problems when you're looking at transfers between people whose marginal utility of income is different: poor to rich, askets to materialists, and so forth. So the rule "maximize economic efficiency" isn't the same as "maximize aggregate utility", but it's pretty good as a first approximation.

This is not a point of view I have come across before, thanks. You state that this system uses willingness to pay as a measure of ones utility. It was my understanding that utilitarianism was concerned with the utility of something to people, not the utility of a person, as seems to be the concern in this system. Is this a fair assessment?

Thomas wrote:

You say the reasoning in the article seems suspect to you. Can you elaborate?

I am new to, and so still grappling with, this concept, so forgive me if I am missing the point.

The first thing that struck me was that, when talking about buying an extra percent, no time scale or frequency of incidence was mentioned. If I were asked how much I would pay for one percent less chance of dying in an accident, I'd want to know how often I am likely to have the accident in question. If it's every day, I'll pay all I can for every percent up to 100%, if not I'll likely be dead in 100 days... If it's once in my life, I'll pay less, at least in part because I might need the money for other things which might shave a percent of something that might cause me to die.

As I see it there are two things we can spend money on: (a) quality of life, and (b) likelihood of staying alive. The article seems to suggest that the higher (a) is, the more one will spend on (b). But this only tells us something about a persons situation, not the value of their life. If it seems to say that likelihood of staying alive is worth more the higher (a) is, then it also says that quality of life is less important the higher (a) is. So, if future generations' likelihood of staying alive is worth more, then their quality of life must be worth less. This seems to me to balance out to say that all lives are worth the same:

If person x has high (a) then we should spend more money on increasing (a) and less on increasing (b). If person y has low (a) we should spend more money on increasing (a) and less on increasing (b). The question is only whether the money should be spent on increasing likelihood of staying alive, or increasing quality of life. The worth of the life is the same.

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djbt wrote:

You state that this system uses willingness to pay as a measure of ones utility. It was my understanding that utilitarianism was concerned with the utility of something to people, not the utility of a person, as seems to be the concern in this system. Is this a fair assessment?

Yes, this is a fair assessment.

djbt wrote:

The first thing that struck me was that, when talking about buying an extra percent, no time scale or frequency of incidence was mentioned. If I were asked how much I would pay for one percent less chance of dying in an accident, I'd want to know how often I am likely to have the accident in question.

The probability of your dying of an accident depends, among other things, on the frequency of it happening. So the frequency is implicitly reflected in the probability of dying.

djbt wrote:

If person x has high (a) then we should spend more money on increasing (a) and less on increasing (b). If person y has low (a) we should spend more money on increasing (a) and less on increasing (b). The question is only whether the money should be spent on increasing likelihood of staying alive, or increasing quality of life. The worth of the life is the same.

Well, perhaps the best way to approach it is with examples. Imagine it's 1905, and a prophet who knows the work safety regulations of 2005 proposes to introduce them. Assuming that the workplace safety regulations are optimal given the value of a 2005 life, they will be grossly overblown given the value of a 1905 life, which was lower. They would have bought the 1905 people too much safety and too little progress towards being able to afford bug-free homes, water-cleaned toilets, and a local anaestesia to go with the root canal treatment at the dentists. As I understand your way of framing it, this tells us that people place a constant value on their life but have an increasing demand for safety as they get richer. Landsburg, who likes to provoke people, would say that people have a constant use for money, but their lives were worth less in 1905. It doesn't matter which variable you call constant -- the tradeoff chosen in the end turns out to be the same.

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val wrote:

Not because of the results, but because slavery is morally unacceptable.

Why is slavery morally unacceptable for you? Since you reject utilitarianism, it can't be because of all the pain and suffering that it causes.

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Thomas wrote:

As I understand your way of framing it, this tells us that people place a constant value on their life but have an increasing demand for safety as they get richer. Landsburg, who likes to provoke people, would say that people have a constant use for money, but their lives were worth less in 1905. It doesn't matter which variable you call constant -- the tradeoff chosen in the end turns out to be the same.

We seem to be in agreement here, then. In the example in Landsburg's article, it might not be worth my spending $7 million to save my paultry life while it would be worth it to save my grandsons, because it would be better for me to spend, say, $3 million improving my quality of life, and $4 million increasing the probability of me staying alive...

Thomas wrote:

The probability of your dying of an accident depends, among other things, on the frequency of it happening. So the frequency is implicitly reflected in the probability of dying.

So it's the probability of me dying at some time earlier than the longest I could possibly live (say, 100). This finds, presumably, that the lives of pre-teens are mostly worthless, since they have little money to spend on self-preservation, then value of life increases which age due to higher wages, but at the same time decreases due to there being less life left to live. Also, as I presume those with a 0% probability of surviving would pay more for a 1% increase than someone with a 99% probability of surviving, that the lives of those likely to die are worth more than those likely to live. Does this seem fair?

I am not sure how useful the statements of value in terms of currency are (though statements of value in terms of a percentage of money spent on preserving life might be better).

Thomas wrote:

djbt wrote:
You state that this system uses willingness to pay as a measure of ones utility. It was my understanding that utilitarianism was concerned with the utility of something to people, not the utility of a person, as seems to be the concern in this system. Is this a fair assessment?

Yes, this is a fair assessment.

Then it seems to me that this system is not utilitarianism, but another form of consequentialism. This system seems to judge the goodness of a consequence by the total worth of the people preserved minus the worth of those not preserved, rather than by total increase of pleasure minus the total increase of pain. Is this the system you are proposing?

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djbt wrote:

Thomas wrote:
The probability of your dying of an accident depends, among other things, on the frequency of it happening. So the frequency is implicitly reflected in the probability of dying.

So it's the probability of me dying at some time earlier than the longest I could possibly live (say, 100).

It seems I made a mistake in my first response. The thing you value about safety is the increase in your life expectancy, and I missed that your point was that an accident happening now has a different effect on your life expectancy than the same accident happening to you in 50 years. (Was this your point?) To account for this, you could model the value of your life to yourself as a function of age. The value could be $5 million today and sink to a few cents one second before you naturally die anyway. But this is, in Landsburg's language, one of "a few technicalities I won't go into here." A columnist can only say so much in 1500 words.

I suspect that your points that follow, and your doubts about the usefulness of the approach, follow from that misunderstanding.

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