Against Walking

I am steelmanning a weird position entirely outside the Overton window

I enjoy playing devil’s advocate. I think people don’t realize just how easy it is to play devil’s advocate on various issues, and to make creative arguments for crazy conclusions. To prove this, in this article, I will argue against walking. Walking is immoral!

The paralysis argument

The argument is roughly as follows—every time a person drives their car or moves, they affect whether a vast number of people exist. If you talk to someone, that delays when they next have sex by a bit, which changes the identity of the future person. Thus, each of us causes millions of future people’s identities to change.

This means that each of us causes lots of extra murderers to be born, and prevents many from being born. While the consequences balance out in expectation, every time we drive, we are both causing and preventing many murders. On deontology, an action that has a 50% chance of causing an extra death, a 50% chance of preventing an extra death, and gives one trivial benefit is wrong—but this is what happens every time one drives.

One way of pressing the argument is to imagine the following. Each time you flip a coin, there’s a 50% chance it will save someone’s life, a 50% chance it will kill someone, and it will certainly give you five dollars. This seems analogous to going to the store, for trivial benefits—you might cause a death, you might save someone, and you definitely get a trivial reward. But it’s obviously wrong to flip a coin that will have a 50% chance of saving someone and a 50% chance of killing someone. Thus, so too is it wrong to talk.

Now you might just be a crazy consequentialist and think that you should flip the coin. But this is worrisome for a few reasons. First, as I’ve explained here, this type of deranged consequentialism is false. It implies you should kill people to chop them up and harvest their organs in an attempt to save two others, that you should feed your kids to a utility monster, and many more appalling conclusion. This is just nuts.

But, even if you are a utilitarian, as MacAskill argues in his book about moral uncertainty, you should take moral uncertainty seriously. It would be absurd to hold that the fact that an act has a high probability of being grossly immoral doesn’t count against the act. If we care about maximizing expected choiceworthiness, then we should take into account uncertainty. But if we take into account uncertainty, then we should assume pretty significant odds of walking being immoral—if we have a 10% credence in deontology, that’s still enough to dwarf the expected value of driving to the store or walking.

One way to get around this is to say that if some action will change the identity of future people and cause some act to occur, they have only consequentialist reasons not to do it. But this runs into seeming counterexamples. Suppose you know that driving will cause one extra death by changing traffic patterns, but it will prevent a serial killer from killing five. Driving seems fine there. However, if you have a deontological reason not to cause the extra death from driving but only consequentialist reasons to save the five victims of the serial killer, this would turn out wrong.

Similarly, if you're choosing between two actions, one will set off a complex chain reaction that kills one person in 40 years, and the other will cause someone to be born who will kill two people in 40 years, the second seems worse. However, if you have non-consequentialist reason not to do the first and only consequentialist reasons not to do the second, then the first would be worse.

Suppose that an act will cause a rock to fall one someone’s head killing them. It doesn’t seem to matter if the mechanism by which it will do this involves changing the identity of other humans. The fact that an act would cause a human to be born who will bring about a causal series of events that causes a rock to fall on a person gives just as strong a reason not to perform the act as the fact that it would directly, without changing future identities, cause a rock to fall on a person. Thus, this principle is decisively false.

One could reply by Moorean shifting—if deontology is true, walking is wrong, but walking isn’t wrong, therefore deontology is false—either that or the claim that deontology makes walking immoral is false. But this is a mistake. Imagine if every time you went outside, it had a 50% chance of causing a random person to be beheaded, and a 50% chance of preventing a random person from being beheaded. Going outside on a walk would clearly be immoral—except for exceptionally strong reasons.

The reason this is counterintuitive is because of a surprising fact. But the surprising fact isn’t a moral fact—it’s an empirical fact. Specifically, it’s that when you take small acts you cause and prevent extra deaths. The weirdness thus comes from empirical facts—so it shouldn’t count against the moral verdict.

It’s a strange fact about our world that walking outside involves risking death, while preventing similar death, for trivial reasons. But it’s an unassailable moral verdict that risking a death, while preventing similar death, is wrong. We live in a very morally weird world and that unfortunately entails that we shouldn’t walk.

One could raise a demandingness objection, claiming that it’s too demanding not to walk. Morality can’t be this demanding. But I’m skeptical of this for a few reasons. First, there are significant issues with the demandingness argument, as I’ve argued here. Second, even if we recognize this, we should accept a strong prima facie case against walking. Third, we’d recognize that, even for a very poor person, it would be wrong to flip the coin that gives five dollars while having a 50% chance of causing, and a 50% chance of preventing, a death. Demandingness doesn’t apply to negative duties.

And we should be expected to be biased on this. We know that people have a normalcy bias—thinking that normal things are fine, as well as status quo bias—thinking that the status quo is just, as well as roughly a hundred other biases—just world, for example—that make their judgments here unreliable. Our support for walking is born, not out of reason, but out of the fact that the notion that we shouldn’t walk just sounds too damn weird! But weird-sounding things are often correct.

Every time you walk, you very plausibly cause a death. Think about that before your next midnight stroll.

Insects

We step on a lot of insects. We know that cars kill about 32 trillion insects each year in the U.S.. Even if we assume that walker only kill .1% as many, that’s still 32 billion deaths caused by walking. It seems wrong to, for trivial benefits, participate in a practice that kills 32 billion insects every year.

Insects can suffer and matter. The evidence for this is quite overwhelming. Even if we’re somewhat uncertain about this, we should assign at least a reasonable credence to it.

We don’t know how consciousness works. It may be that insects have just as rich consciousness as we do. Even if you think that the odds of this are .1%, then you still get the conclusion that walkers do things as wrong as snuffing out 32 million lives. Sure, maybe insects aren’t as important as people, but the harms of stepping on them seems so immense.

Imagine the torturous agony of slowly being crushed to death under a giant’s foot. This is the fate of the insects that we step on. This fate is so horrible that it’s worth avoiding, for precautionary principle reasons. We shouldn’t risk torturous harm to an insect for trivial benefits.

We also should, for reasons I described earlier, assign reasonable credence to deontology. But if we do this, then we should care about insects a lot more. Maybe insects do have rights, maybe they don’t. But if we don’t know whether insects have right, we should be very wary before stepping on them. If rights are opaque, we shouldn’t risk violating the rights of billions of beings, all for quite trivial benefit.

In this domain, we should have lots of uncertainty. Rights and consciousness are both mysterious. Thus, there’s a chance that stepping on insects is gravely wrong—like stepping on a human. But if this is true, then we should be very wary before risking stepping on them, and going for a walk.

Thus, deontologist or consequentialist, believer in rights or not, you really should stop walking. Walking is morally atrocious—maybe the worst thing you’re doing now.