Among the many things that philosophers disagree on, one of the debates that I find interesting is the debate between actualists And Possibilists. Roughly speaking, the possibilists believe that you should do the best possible action you could take, while the actualists think it’s best to do what you want Actually do it given your imperfections, even if it is technically possible for you to do better. Consider this scenario to try to work out the disagreement.
I’m in a tennis match with Bob, and Bob beats me handily. I’m hot-headed and have a terrible temper, and I’d really like to hit Bob over the head with my tennis racket, but of course that wouldn’t be good. Let’s say there are three possible ways things could go.
In the best-case scenario, I approach the net, shake Bob’s hand and congratulate him on a good game, just like a good sport. A less than ideal scenario is that I rush off the tennis court in a huff. And worst case scenario, I’ll go up to Bob and hit him in the head with my tennis racket. Let’s just say I know myself and my temper well enough to be sure that if I go near Bob now, I will give in to my anger and hit him upside the head. It’s metaphysical possible for me not to do this, but in practice this is what I will do. Should I approach the net?
The possibilist would say that as best I could possible If I walked up to the net and shook hands like a good sport, I would have to go to the net. The actualist says that given the facts of my personality and weakness, I can do the best Actually what I do is walk off the field in a hurry, so I’m not allowed to approach the net.
This debate often plays out in discussions of utilitarian and consequentialist ethics. Suppose a philosopher named Seter Pinger concludes that if you don’t take the best-paying job you can find, work as many hours as possible before collapsing, and donate every cent you need to provide yourself with the barest subsistence, then Are you morally no better than a serial killer? And let’s suppose that, given certain plausible features of human psychology, if you require people to meet this standard, they will eventually feel overwhelmed and not donate to charity at all. However, if you instead argue that people meet a more moderate standard, such as taking the Give what we can If they make a pledge and donate 10% of their income to effective charities, the real outcome will be more money given and more lives saved. If Pinger a possibilityhe will make people work like madmen and live like monks. If Pinger a topicalisthe will induce people to take the above-mentioned pledge.
Although he does not use this terminology, Scott Alexander seems to describe himself as an actualist this after. He accepts that much of what happens in the meat industry is morally unacceptable. He also says that he ‘tried to be a vegetarian for a long time’, but that he found it ‘very difficult’ and that he ‘kept giving up’. But then, instead of being a vegetarian, he decided to follow what he called “a more lax rule,” namely: “At home I cannot eat any animal other than fish, but in restaurants I can eat meat (except chicken). I have largely I was able to stick to that rule and now I eat much less meat than before.”
A possibilist would say that Alexander should give up meat altogether, while an actualist would say that Alexander should stick to his lax rule. In a very timely vein, Alexander says, “If I’m right that this is the strictest rule I can live by, then I’m not sure who benefits from reminding me that I’m scum. Deny me the right to feel good when I make my half-hearted attempt at virtue, and I will simply make no attempt at virtue, and this will be worse for me And worse for animals.”
This gap seems to me very much like a difference in the way people think about what government should do – there is also a possible and an actualist gap here. For example, I once wrote about how Bernie Sanders claimed that if the government raised a $100 billion tax on Bill Gates, the government could “end homelessness and provide safe drinking water for everyone in this country” and that Gates “ would still be a multi-billionaire. ” Sanders is talking very much like a possibilist here – he claims that government could produce the best results possible reaching $100 billion would be very good, the government should actually take that $100 billion.
My criticism of his claim, on the other hand, was that I followed a slightly more currentist line. After all, I said, “If Sanders is right about the cost of ending homelessness, the federal government could completely end all homelessness in America with just 1.7% of what the federal government already spends in one year.” Yet I notice that homelessness has not yet been eradicated.
It’s worth noting that Sanders did not claim that the federal government could end homelessness and provide clean drinking water to everyone at a cost of $100 billion. per year. He claimed that both problems could be completely solved with one one time costs of 100 billion dollars. So according to Sanders, the government could possible have used their enormous resources to end homelessness dozens of times, but that hasn’t happened yet Actually done for various reasons. But at the same time, he believes that the government taking on another $100 billion in taxes should be evaluated, and not on the basis of what practice shows the government will do. Actually do, but on what he thinks is the best thing the government can do possible do, according to his ideal standard.
In another afterScott Alexander evaluates the prospect of taxing billionaires in an attempt to get good results, also taking something very similar to the actualist perspective:
Two of the billionaires whose philanthropy I respect most, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, have done a lot of work on criminal justice reform. The organizations they fund found that many innocent people languish in jail for months because they do not have enough money to pay bail; Others plead guilty to crimes they did not commit because they need to get out of prison in time to go to work or care for their children, even if it gives them a criminal record. They funded a short-term effort to help these people post bail, and a long-term effort to reform the bail system. One of the charities they donate to is The Bronx Freedom Fundfound that 92% of suspects without bail will plead guilty and receive a criminal record. But if enough bail support were granted to go to trial, more than half would have all charges dropped. This is exactly the kind of fight against mass incarceration and breaking the cycle of poverty that everyone says we need, and it’s working very well. I have donated to this charity myself, but of course I can only give a small part of what Moskovitz and Tuna manage.
If Moskovitz and Tuna’s money flowed to the government instead, would it achieve the same goal in a more democratic, more publicly run way? No. It would amount to locking these people up, paying more prosecutors to trick them into pleading guilty, and more prison guards to abuse and harass them. The government is already spending $100 billion – seven times the combined fortunes of Tuna and Moskovitz – on maintaining the carceral state every year. This completely dwarfs any trickle of money spent on undoing the damage of the carceral state, even if such a trickle exists. Kicking Tuna and Moskovitz out of the picture will not ensure that bail reform happens in a civilly responsible manner. It just ensures that all the money goes to making the problem worse – rather than the current situation where the vast majority of money goes to making the problem worse, but a small amount also goes to improving it.
It seems to me that there is probably a strong overlap in the extent to which people find the actualist line of thought persuasive, and their tendency to view public policy decisions through the lens of concepts such as public choice economics, or to evaluate economic regulation with the theory of ‘ regulatory capture’ as opposed to the ‘public interest’ theory of regulation. Just as James Buchanan described public choice as evaluating politics without romanticism, actualist philosophers believe that behavior should be guided by a similarly unromantic view of human nature.