Some people are made happier by gaining wealth. Others enjoy gaining status. Some prefer experiencing peace; others excitement.
For many people, happiness (or, in economics terms, ‘utility’) depends on the wellbeing of those around them.
And for some people, happiness depends on certain other people not being happy.
And that last thing is a problem.
Imagine we have Alice and Bob. Alice is a hardworking cabbage vendor. Bob is poor and hungry.
In this case, Bob’s utility will likely go up if he steals some cabbage from Alice, because it will help resolve his hunger. But Bob isn’t doing that because he wants Alice’s utility to go down. If given an alternate option which gets Bob the same utility but does NOT hurt Alice, Bob (if Bob is like most human beings) will happily take it.
In fact, since Alice’s cabbage probably provides much more utility to Bob (since he’s starving) than to Alice (since it probably only generates her $1 of profit), there are ways for both people to profit if things are organized well enough.
For instance, Bob recovers enough energy from eating the cabbage that he’s able to work, and generates $5 of income in the first day, after which he pays $2 to Alice. In this case, Alice ends up $1 richer than if she hadn’t let Bob have the cabbage, and Bob ends up $3 richer and one cabbage less hungry. This is a silly, unrealistic example, but it serves to illustrate the point – when two utility functions are merely coincidentally in conflict, it’s almost always possible for a smart enough ‘central planner’ to coordinate things such that both people end up better off.
Now imagine Charlie and David. Charlie hates David. Every time Charlie seems David happy, it tears him up, until finally he decides he has had enough. Charlie takes a baseball bat and smashes up David’s car, just to see the look on David’s smug face when something finally doesn’t go his way.
In this scenario, Charlie didn’t smash up a car because he enjoys car-smashing so much. If offered a scenario where he got a free car to smash up without hurting David’s wellbeing, Charlie would turn it down. The damage to David was the point.
That means there is NO WAY for a central planner, no matter how clever or wise, to arrange something that increases both Charlie and David’s utility. Any increase to David’s utility would, by definition, upset Charlie, so he’d refuse any arrangement that led David’s utility to be increased.
(In the real world, most versions of Charlie have other things they care about, so a central planner might be able to buy him off that way. But for now, let’s stick with a model of Charlie who, even if he won the lottery, would still be pissed if the end result was that David was even a little better off. If you don’t believe this is a realistic description of any people, well, ignorance is bliss and I wish you the best in it.)
Charlie is, relative to David, a utility minimizer.
Why does this matter? Well, because “utility minimization” is the correct way to codify “harm” in The Principle of Freedom.
It feels appealing to define “harm” as “anyone losing out on their utility.” And indeed, the government should strive to take positive actions (rather than negative, or restrictive, actions) which increase everyone’s utility. But attempting to restrict any action which causes anyone to lose out on utility just ends up in paralysis – at best.
Specifically, in the case of Alice and Bob, such a government might declare “stealing from Alice lowers her utility, so it’s unconscionable under any circumstances.” But would we really stand by that if it turned out Bob was a desperate child minutes away from starving to death, and this law resulted in policemen stopping the theft and watching Bob pass away before they could get him other food?
On the flip side, we could say “stopping Bob from obtaining the cabbage is severely lowering his utility, and it’s only slightly hurting Alice, so we should let him steal since he’s the one suffering far more.” But this also doesn’t really scale properly. Maybe Alice actually worked far harder on those cabbages than we realize, or it was her great-grandmother’s favorite cabbage passed down through generations, or something. (Again, silly examples, but you get the point.)
The broader result here is that, if you attempt to ban hurting anyone’s utility at all, you inevitably are forced to actually pick which people get to be happy and which people have to suck it up and be sad.
I don’t want the government to be in the business of picking which people get to live happy on the backs of which other people’s suffering. Among other things, this is a massive violation of The Principle of Improvement – if I would have been a “winner” in a government-less world, but the government decides that you deserve to be the one who is happy and I deserve to be the one who suffers, then what reason do I have to believe in or endorse this government as serving me?
So the correct way to operationalize The Principle of Freedom is to say that the role of the government is to:
- Prevent any action which is driven by a term in someone’s utility function which minimizes some other person’s utility.
- Take additional actions which are beneficial or neutral to all citizens (not negative to any of them.)
This is the “No Utility Minimizers” rule.
Between Alice and Bob, as we stated before, it’s possible for a central planner (the government) to leave both people better off – so why would we accept something less? The government’s role must be either to help Bob (or Alice) or to back the heck off; the government has no business choosing to intervene only to rearrange who the winner is, or worse, cause either to suffer more.
But between Charlie and David, there is no way for any government to actually leave both people better off. We have no choice but to choose a winner. And it turns out it’s much better for society if we choose to prevent Charlie from minimizing David’s utility, even if that leaves Charlie unhappy.
Why? Aside from basic moral decency, we have to ask which kinds of utility functions we want to incentivize. Because yes, people can change their utility functions, and certainly over generations they will evolve, and so we need to pick rules for our government which lead in a good direction.
If we pick rules that favor Charlie, then over time, we’ll have more and more Charlies, and they’ll all be picking fights with each other. Over time, the government will no longer be able to be “generally good for its citizens”, because it will mostly be assigning winners (between Charlies and their enemies), and this either results in a few “Charlies” winning all the time (and everyone else hating the government), or each “Charlie” winning sometimes and losing other times (and everyone hating the government.) There’s no path to a happy society where we tolerate utility minimization.
On the other hand, if we generally discourage utility minimization, we eventually end up in a world where conflicts absolutely still exist – but they can generally be resolved to the benefit of all. This is a world that has the possibility of continued growth and improvement and beauty.
Did you catch that this post is actually not just about legislation, but politics?
There will be people on the “other side of the aisle” fighting for things you disagree with. Perhaps even fighting for things you find reprehensible.
It’s absolutely permitted to fight for your own causes. Sure, that will incidentally hurt your opponents if you win, but you’re not doing it to make anyone suffer, you’re doing it because you believe strongly in your political position being for the best.
Except some people, some of the time, do choose to take the actions designed more to make their opponents suffer than to actually enable their political causes. Some people even revel in the feeling of “getting one over” on their opponents, and derive deep satisfaction from seeing someone who disagreed with them suffer.
And I say, with all the careful consideration and measured words I can – fuck that.
Not “fuck those people.” We all have the potential to be one of those people, especially after we’ve just taken a blow or are having a hard day. People make mistakes.
But anyone who leans into that feeling? Who defines their identity based on their opponents rather than what they actually want to fight for? Regardless of what they are fighting against, regardless of what good they might incidentally do – that mindset is poisonous, and we need to get rid of it.
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