The war in Gaza does come with some pretty extreme tail risks, in terms of worst case scenarios for a wider war that might result. This isn't why most people are so obsessed with it, but I think it does provide a rational justification for caring a lot about it.
Since the author is a utilitarian, shouldn’t he be estimating quality adjusted life years instead of raw lives? If smoking kills old people and war kills young people, the raw numbers may not be what is important.
This article estimates 142 million life years lost annually due to smoking. To equal that, the average war victim would need to lose roughly 1,000 life years:
assuming not & generously assuming the average war victim loses 75 quality adjusted life years, the smoker's remaining life years must be 1/13 as valuable on average
People have been legislating against smoking for decades now. It is kind of funny to read an undergraduate write that no one cares about the issue other than him.
69% of people in the UK who have ever smoked have given up. It is entirely within the bounds of the human will to give up. Now when social scientists look at the effects of second hand smoke the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of it is due to people inhabiting homes with smokers. These people choose to die of smoking, albeit their partner's smoke, meaning, they cannot be said to be 'unfairly killed without choosing to smoke'. The same goes for people who walk into pubs full with smoke.
I’m against a tobacco ban and not a smoker either. Many substances kill people annually but aren’t banned. The public cannot be 100% protected from the adverse risk involved with their lifestyle choices.
There exist possible reasons that Gaza may be more important politically than smoking from a utilitarian standpoint, and simply comparing the numbers of people affected is not enough to settle the issue.
For example, if Gaza is an issue where “criminals” will get away with their crime unless the US steps in and makes the conflict resolve “the right way”, then failing to bring the criminals up justice is a step towards anarchy and more common conflicts. Global cooperation on things like global health rely on peace between nations.
It’s even possible that normies understand this intuitively. “We can’t let them get away with their aggression! Then we can’t work together!”
The above example isn’t the only possible justifiable utilitarian reason to care more about Gaza than smoking. The people who write essays on the subject possibly have stronger reasons, and if you’re going to write essays saying that they care about the wrong things, you may want to ask them for how they justify themselves.
(I expect that a more thorough investigation of the motives people have for caring about Gaza more than cigarettes would find that you are right that they don’t have great reasons. I’m just bothered you didn’t look into effects beyond X > Y.)
But they work within the bounds of established cooperative expectations and laws.
Punishing the person who kills one victim with an ax is a higher priority than punishing the person who indirectly kills ten by selling them cigarettes.
Where's the "inflection point"? How many more people have to die indirectly for something to be more urgent, immediate, salient than a reference murder with a baseline weapon?
Great question! Unfortunately, figuring this out for real would require a lot of in depth economics and sociology.
I approve of the nationwide manhunts for serial murderers, even though they are expensive. $50 million for three deaths (Unabomber investigation cost, according to Claude) is a lot, and I don’t know how much of that spending really helped. But I think it would be a bad idea to put no effort into catching him so we can send more money to fight malaria.
I don’t approve of media frenzies around random shootings and complete neglect of air quality, car crashes, etc: far more important crises.
in some sense we let people do what they feel/think their calling is. some people really want to be prosecutors, detectives, doctors, some want to defend the innocent, some want to help the least fortunate, some want to help their neighbors, some want to go to the most remote and neglected corner of the Earth, and some people just want to spend time with their family or hobbies or whatever.
and then some people, like Mr Bulldog wants to - I think, - turn that knob in the folks in this last group. so that they might also find something a bit more altruistic. be it crustacean or hominid welfare.
and probably these higher-order phenomena (like media frenzy, advertising, minimum age regulations) are where we should apply some collectivist thinking, because this is where we are the furthest from our intuitive sense of "what makes sense".
this is a HORRIBLE argument. stupefying. do you actually maintain that tobacco company owners are responsible for murdering the people who die due to tobacco related illnesses? and this is directly comparable to bombing a school? i guess my next question would be, do you know anything about moral philosophy?
your entire argument is predicated on the following premise: most of the people killed by the tobacco industry are not significantly culpable. this is obviously false. 1) the overwhelming majority of people who smoke are aware it is both addictive and harmful to their health and persist despite this knowledge. 2) addiction does not negate all culpability (or even most) for a fully voluntary behavior, even if the addiction is acquired "as a minor". its a shitty argument.
Minors are less culpable than adults; selling tobacco, alcohol, et cetera to them should be penalized. They are a protected class. Voluntary transactions among consenting adults are a separate, rather more libertarian, issue.
Yeah that's more comparable, but it doesn't really drive the same point. There are 19,000 deaths due to second hand smoke per year in the US (1) vs 44,000 deaths in the Isreal-Hamas war in 13 months (2).
Globally, Matt's right. Second hand smoke is a much bigger cause of death (880,000 deaths per year (3)). But again, feels like apples and oranges when comparing global SHS deaths to a more localized conflict. It feels a little better to compare interest in all current world conflicts vs. Interest in gobal deaths due to SHS, but even that doesn't seem right.
this essay is a good study in why utilitarianism is completely insane and leads to obviously morally abhorrent logical conclusions. that said, i dont actually think utilitarianism is being correctly applied here.
1) If a smoking ban would work, that would be great. But heavy-handedly outlawing substances usually comes with side effects that are oftentimes worse than the substance itself.
2) You can’t neglect in your calculus the enjoyment people derive from smoking too. This is hard to calculate, but smoking is enjoyable for a lot of people.
3) Most people have the intuition that the harm coming from personal choices is less bad than the harm coming from aggression by others. If I understand that smoking, sky diving, racing cars, etc. increase my risk of death, but choose to do it anyway, and then die; that is less bad than an aggressive neighbor killing me. Adults in general should have the liberty to decide how they treat their own body and health (with caveats of course).
4) The war in Gaza might be popular right now, but the anti-smoking movement has gotten a lot of attention. Don’t forget to integrate over time.
5) In economics you will learn that comparative advantage is more important than absolute advantage. Similarly, a lot of individuals may feel like at the margin their individual voicing about whatever issue they care about is more important than some other bigger-number issue.
"Most smokers start when they are minors and actively want to quit"
If they want to quit, then they will quit. They only really want to want to quit. But such a meta-want can sometimes be cultivated in various ways until the want appears.
What do you want? and What do you want to want? generate rather different lists. Iterating further is... hard: what do you want to want to want? The best I can do parsing this is What would your ideal self want? Do?
If someone wants to want something, then he probably would want to want to want it if he were to think about it. We probably cannot see so far as to know what our ideal self would want.
I generally agree with the point you're making here, but disagree about the specifics of the examples. Wars are dangerous in ways that aren't accounted for in their death toll: they make it harder to build functioning healthcare services, hamper economic growth, and damage the environment in ways that indirectly can cause many deaths. Smoking does have negative indirect effects (say, smoke breaks lower economic productivity), but I'd hazard a guess that war's indirect effects are much worse.
The thing that matters most in the world, in terms of maximizing wellbeing, is ensuring that a future comes about where the universe is tiled with neural matter stimulated to be in a constant state of supreme pleasure. Compared to this, every current human conflict, strife, or affliction is marginal. Convincing the powers that be to direct humanity towards a hedonium-maximizing future is the single greatest cause to be currently focused on, against which every other issue pales in comparison.
In terms of what we can do at the present, we should use research in neuroscience to explore what the physical correlates of positive qualia are, towards the end of eventually creating a state of matter that experiences maximum positive emotion per unit mass. Progress in neuroscience and philosophy of mind can instruct us as to what physical structures are capable of experiencing qualia, so that we can figure out what we have to construct in the first place (human neurons wired to be perpetually happy? Digital minds, if we find that they can experience emotion? Or something more fundamental, if it turns out simpler structures can experience qualia, such as a mass of molecules that are innately happy?) Philosophy of mind will be important because we need to know whether the built structures truly feel happiness, so solving the hard problem of consciousness will be a hurdle that will need to be overcome (personally, I lean towards panpsychism, which suggests every state of matter has qualia associated with it, and that hedonium therefore might consist of a simple state of matter that structurally feels happy). Research should also be directed towards developing machines that can convert inert matter into any desired structure at the nuclear, elemental, and molecular level, so that we can begin progress towards constructing the machines that would convert the universe's matter into hedonium (in whatever form it ends up taking). This would likely involve nuclear fusion, since the majority of the universe's mass is hydrogen and helium that would likely need to be fused into heavier elements to construct the hedonium out of. We would also need to develop machines that could somehow extract the matter from stars, since that's where the majority of this hydrogen and helium would be located. So a significant portion of the present day research should be towards the engineering advances needed as prerequisites for constructing such machines. Taking all of this into account, being able to actually convert the universe into hedonium is something that likely won't be possible until the far future, but there are still avenues of research and development (namely the ones previously listed here) that we can pursue in the present to bring its advent about quicker.
Sugar and chemicals in food kill far more people than smoking. How about banning those and fining or legally prosecuting agribusiness and pesticide companies?
Sugar, maybe. Pesticides? Can you link some sources, I only found one that estimates ~11 000 deaths. (Which is still crazy fucking high for farm workers.)
Careful with advocating AV as the future of personal transport. While it may save lives (once the tech challenges have been solved), encouraging everyone, even those who don't drive, to take a personal car everywhere is going to result in a measurably worse urban environment. And I don't think we ignore road deaths because they are boring: we ignore them because we fucking love driving everywhere so we accept the cost! And there is literally no other option for lots of places in N America to get around.
The war in Gaza does come with some pretty extreme tail risks, in terms of worst case scenarios for a wider war that might result. This isn't why most people are so obsessed with it, but I think it does provide a rational justification for caring a lot about it.
Since the author is a utilitarian, shouldn’t he be estimating quality adjusted life years instead of raw lives? If smoking kills old people and war kills young people, the raw numbers may not be what is important.
This article estimates 142 million life years lost annually due to smoking. To equal that, the average war victim would need to lose roughly 1,000 life years:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(24)00166-X/fulltext
Quality adjusted?
assuming not & generously assuming the average war victim loses 75 quality adjusted life years, the smoker's remaining life years must be 1/13 as valuable on average
Scott Alexander was right. Matt Yglesias is indeed the Übermensch.
People have been legislating against smoking for decades now. It is kind of funny to read an undergraduate write that no one cares about the issue other than him.
69% of people in the UK who have ever smoked have given up. It is entirely within the bounds of the human will to give up. Now when social scientists look at the effects of second hand smoke the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of it is due to people inhabiting homes with smokers. These people choose to die of smoking, albeit their partner's smoke, meaning, they cannot be said to be 'unfairly killed without choosing to smoke'. The same goes for people who walk into pubs full with smoke.
I’m against a tobacco ban and not a smoker either. Many substances kill people annually but aren’t banned. The public cannot be 100% protected from the adverse risk involved with their lifestyle choices.
Externalities should be priced in. People should buy vice quotas. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence )
10 lashes for selling to a minor, though, maybe; grr...
There exist possible reasons that Gaza may be more important politically than smoking from a utilitarian standpoint, and simply comparing the numbers of people affected is not enough to settle the issue.
For example, if Gaza is an issue where “criminals” will get away with their crime unless the US steps in and makes the conflict resolve “the right way”, then failing to bring the criminals up justice is a step towards anarchy and more common conflicts. Global cooperation on things like global health rely on peace between nations.
It’s even possible that normies understand this intuitively. “We can’t let them get away with their aggression! Then we can’t work together!”
The above example isn’t the only possible justifiable utilitarian reason to care more about Gaza than smoking. The people who write essays on the subject possibly have stronger reasons, and if you’re going to write essays saying that they care about the wrong things, you may want to ask them for how they justify themselves.
(I expect that a more thorough investigation of the motives people have for caring about Gaza more than cigarettes would find that you are right that they don’t have great reasons. I’m just bothered you didn’t look into effects beyond X > Y.)
But the tobacco companies are also criminals--in the moral sense--that kill millions of people.
But they work within the bounds of established cooperative expectations and laws.
Punishing the person who kills one victim with an ax is a higher priority than punishing the person who indirectly kills ten by selling them cigarettes.
But our arms sales to Israel also fall within the bounds of established cooperative expectations and laws.
I had intentionally been referencing both sides of the argument at once in my earlier comments because I really don’t know much about foreign policy.
It’s good to see you move beyond X > Y in analyzing the broader impacts of the issue.
Where's the "inflection point"? How many more people have to die indirectly for something to be more urgent, immediate, salient than a reference murder with a baseline weapon?
Great question! Unfortunately, figuring this out for real would require a lot of in depth economics and sociology.
I approve of the nationwide manhunts for serial murderers, even though they are expensive. $50 million for three deaths (Unabomber investigation cost, according to Claude) is a lot, and I don’t know how much of that spending really helped. But I think it would be a bad idea to put no effort into catching him so we can send more money to fight malaria.
I don’t approve of media frenzies around random shootings and complete neglect of air quality, car crashes, etc: far more important crises.
How do you choose a tradeoff?
in some sense we let people do what they feel/think their calling is. some people really want to be prosecutors, detectives, doctors, some want to defend the innocent, some want to help the least fortunate, some want to help their neighbors, some want to go to the most remote and neglected corner of the Earth, and some people just want to spend time with their family or hobbies or whatever.
and then some people, like Mr Bulldog wants to - I think, - turn that knob in the folks in this last group. so that they might also find something a bit more altruistic. be it crustacean or hominid welfare.
and probably these higher-order phenomena (like media frenzy, advertising, minimum age regulations) are where we should apply some collectivist thinking, because this is where we are the furthest from our intuitive sense of "what makes sense".
I've never seen an employee of a tobacco company force customers to light their cigarettes.
this is a HORRIBLE argument. stupefying. do you actually maintain that tobacco company owners are responsible for murdering the people who die due to tobacco related illnesses? and this is directly comparable to bombing a school? i guess my next question would be, do you know anything about moral philosophy?
I do not think that you read the article very carefully. I addressed this worry at length.
your entire argument is predicated on the following premise: most of the people killed by the tobacco industry are not significantly culpable. this is obviously false. 1) the overwhelming majority of people who smoke are aware it is both addictive and harmful to their health and persist despite this knowledge. 2) addiction does not negate all culpability (or even most) for a fully voluntary behavior, even if the addiction is acquired "as a minor". its a shitty argument.
Minors are less culpable than adults; selling tobacco, alcohol, et cetera to them should be penalized. They are a protected class. Voluntary transactions among consenting adults are a separate, rather more libertarian, issue.
so like, we should make laws prohibiting minors from buying these things??? that would be ridiculous! oh wait. we have those.
As others already said, tobacco companies generally do not force people to use their products (at least in the US - I'm not sure about elsewhere).
On the other hand, a civilian injured in Gaza did not necessarily have the choice to be in that situation.
Seems like a bit of an apple and oranges situation when trying to compare the two. However, your overall point was not missed.
Matthew already covered your point about innocent civilians when he talked about secondhand smoke deaths.
Yeah that's more comparable, but it doesn't really drive the same point. There are 19,000 deaths due to second hand smoke per year in the US (1) vs 44,000 deaths in the Isreal-Hamas war in 13 months (2).
Globally, Matt's right. Second hand smoke is a much bigger cause of death (880,000 deaths per year (3)). But again, feels like apples and oranges when comparing global SHS deaths to a more localized conflict. It feels a little better to compare interest in all current world conflicts vs. Interest in gobal deaths due to SHS, but even that doesn't seem right.
(1) https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/health-effects/secondhand-smoke
(2)
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-11-20-2024-5da3ce43df8662fe9eeab4ad804bdc0f
(3)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2762812
this essay is a good study in why utilitarianism is completely insane and leads to obviously morally abhorrent logical conclusions. that said, i dont actually think utilitarianism is being correctly applied here.
1) If a smoking ban would work, that would be great. But heavy-handedly outlawing substances usually comes with side effects that are oftentimes worse than the substance itself.
2) You can’t neglect in your calculus the enjoyment people derive from smoking too. This is hard to calculate, but smoking is enjoyable for a lot of people.
3) Most people have the intuition that the harm coming from personal choices is less bad than the harm coming from aggression by others. If I understand that smoking, sky diving, racing cars, etc. increase my risk of death, but choose to do it anyway, and then die; that is less bad than an aggressive neighbor killing me. Adults in general should have the liberty to decide how they treat their own body and health (with caveats of course).
4) The war in Gaza might be popular right now, but the anti-smoking movement has gotten a lot of attention. Don’t forget to integrate over time.
5) In economics you will learn that comparative advantage is more important than absolute advantage. Similarly, a lot of individuals may feel like at the margin their individual voicing about whatever issue they care about is more important than some other bigger-number issue.
"Most smokers start when they are minors and actively want to quit"
If they want to quit, then they will quit. They only really want to want to quit. But such a meta-want can sometimes be cultivated in various ways until the want appears.
What do you want? and What do you want to want? generate rather different lists. Iterating further is... hard: what do you want to want to want? The best I can do parsing this is What would your ideal self want? Do?
If someone wants to want something, then he probably would want to want to want it if he were to think about it. We probably cannot see so far as to know what our ideal self would want.
No, this does not overlook the (confused and mistaken) theory of akrasia: https://jclester.substack.com/p/akrasia-weakness-of-will-and-libertarianism
I generally agree with the point you're making here, but disagree about the specifics of the examples. Wars are dangerous in ways that aren't accounted for in their death toll: they make it harder to build functioning healthcare services, hamper economic growth, and damage the environment in ways that indirectly can cause many deaths. Smoking does have negative indirect effects (say, smoke breaks lower economic productivity), but I'd hazard a guess that war's indirect effects are much worse.
The thing that matters most in the world, in terms of maximizing wellbeing, is ensuring that a future comes about where the universe is tiled with neural matter stimulated to be in a constant state of supreme pleasure. Compared to this, every current human conflict, strife, or affliction is marginal. Convincing the powers that be to direct humanity towards a hedonium-maximizing future is the single greatest cause to be currently focused on, against which every other issue pales in comparison.
Have any policy suggestions to that end?
In terms of what we can do at the present, we should use research in neuroscience to explore what the physical correlates of positive qualia are, towards the end of eventually creating a state of matter that experiences maximum positive emotion per unit mass. Progress in neuroscience and philosophy of mind can instruct us as to what physical structures are capable of experiencing qualia, so that we can figure out what we have to construct in the first place (human neurons wired to be perpetually happy? Digital minds, if we find that they can experience emotion? Or something more fundamental, if it turns out simpler structures can experience qualia, such as a mass of molecules that are innately happy?) Philosophy of mind will be important because we need to know whether the built structures truly feel happiness, so solving the hard problem of consciousness will be a hurdle that will need to be overcome (personally, I lean towards panpsychism, which suggests every state of matter has qualia associated with it, and that hedonium therefore might consist of a simple state of matter that structurally feels happy). Research should also be directed towards developing machines that can convert inert matter into any desired structure at the nuclear, elemental, and molecular level, so that we can begin progress towards constructing the machines that would convert the universe's matter into hedonium (in whatever form it ends up taking). This would likely involve nuclear fusion, since the majority of the universe's mass is hydrogen and helium that would likely need to be fused into heavier elements to construct the hedonium out of. We would also need to develop machines that could somehow extract the matter from stars, since that's where the majority of this hydrogen and helium would be located. So a significant portion of the present day research should be towards the engineering advances needed as prerequisites for constructing such machines. Taking all of this into account, being able to actually convert the universe into hedonium is something that likely won't be possible until the far future, but there are still avenues of research and development (namely the ones previously listed here) that we can pursue in the present to bring its advent about quicker.
States increasing sin taxes would be a good start
Yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
Sugar and chemicals in food kill far more people than smoking. How about banning those and fining or legally prosecuting agribusiness and pesticide companies?
Sugar, maybe. Pesticides? Can you link some sources, I only found one that estimates ~11 000 deaths. (Which is still crazy fucking high for farm workers.)
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/roughly-180000-deaths-worldwide-linked-to-sugary-drink-consumption/
https://centrepsp.org/media/blog/how-pesticide-poisoning-became-a-global-health-problem/
Second-hang smoke is one of those typos the spellchecker is gonna miss, alas.
Careful with advocating AV as the future of personal transport. While it may save lives (once the tech challenges have been solved), encouraging everyone, even those who don't drive, to take a personal car everywhere is going to result in a measurably worse urban environment. And I don't think we ignore road deaths because they are boring: we ignore them because we fucking love driving everywhere so we accept the cost! And there is literally no other option for lots of places in N America to get around.