Egalitarianism requires quantification

Adding up the number of lives saved respects dignity more than focusing on the particular vibes of the people involved

A lot of people say that trying to use numbers in ethics is a form of hyper-rationalism that has made the world worse. Someone recently accused me of using “technocratic reason” in trying to quantify the lives saved by different charities. People talk as if it’s reactionary or colonialist to try to quantify lives saved without referring to particular details of those lives.

I think it’s the opposite. If we want to be good egalitarians, we need to rigorously quantify what we do, and try our best to ignore the specific personalities and abilities of the people saved by charitable giving. Full opposition to quantification is inherently inegalitarian.

There’s a separate critique that adding up lives saved ignores systemic injustice. I agree that this is a big risk, but this post is about whether we ought to try to quantify at all, not the mistake of quantifying without knowing the full picture. I talk about systemic injustice at the end of this post.

My claim in this post is simple. If you are committed to these two principles:

• Everyone should be treated as having equal worth to everyone else. Everyone is equally deserving of the most support and protection we can provide for them.

• Everyone has innate dignity and deservingness regardless of their particular personalities or abilities.¹

Then you also need to consider the specific boring numbers involved in your ethical decisions and act on what the numbers say. This conclusion follows from those premises.

Here I’m using “egalitarianism” to only mean “treating people as equals.” I like Will Kymlicka’s definition of egalitarianism from Contemporary Political Philosophy: an Introduction:

A theory is egalitarian in this sense if it accepts that the interests of each member of the community matter, and matter equally. Put another way, egalitarian theories require that the government treat its citizens with equal consideration; each citizen is entitled to equal concern and respect. This more basic notion of equality is found in Nozick's libertarianism as much as in Marx's communism. While leftists believe that equality of income or wealth is a precondition for treating people as equals, those on the right believe that equal rights over one's labour and property are a precondition for treating people as equals. So the abstract idea of equality can be interpreted in various ways, without necessarily favoring equality in any particular area, be it income, wealth, opportunities, or liberties…. Not every political theory ever invented is egalitarian in this broad sense. But if a theory claimed that some people were not entitled to equal consideration from the government, if it claimed that certain kinds of people just do not matter as much as others, then most people in the modern world would reject that theory immediately.

Egalitarianism is an inherently mathematical outlook. It says that despite the particular facts about each person, everyone counts for the same value. Each person’s value equals each other person’s value.

To make my point, I’ll use an extreme thought experiment: the very special boy.

The very special boy

You’re a doctor who’s just received a new patient, let’s call him Bob. Bob was just in a terrible accident and is going to die if he doesn’t receive 4 different vital organs. As luck would have it, you have 1 of each vital organ available in the hospital, but you also have 4 other people who will each die if they don’t each receive a different one of the organs.

You can allow Bob to die, or allow 4 others to die and give all the organs to Bob.

You sit back and think about two values you hold dear:

• Everyone should be treated as having equal worth to everyone else. Everyone is equally deserving of the most support and protection we can provide for them.

• Everyone has innate dignity and deservingness regardless of their particular personalities or abilities.

Allowing the other 4 people to die would imply that Bob is 4 times as valuable as each of them. You couldn’t learn more details about Bob or the other people that would make saving Bob worth 4 times as much as the other people, because the details of people’s lives don’t take away from or add to their inherent dignity.

Suddenly, the head of the hospital comes in, and says he’s just learned something important: Bob isn’t just anyone, he’s a very special boy. He’s cool and interesting and with it. He has a neat vibe. More importantly, the other patients who are going to die are kind of boring and lame. One woman has never been much fun at parties. One of the other guys tried and failed to be an actor. While they would be missed, more people would miss Bob.

What would your reaction to this be?

I’m not religious, but I feel a sense of religious revulsion at this way of talking about people.

Why is this way of talking wrong? I claim it’s because it violates the two principles of egalitarianism. Whether someone’s interesting or boring to us personally should have no bearing on whether we save their lives. Our perception of their personalities, and their personal life choices, doesn’t affect their inherent human dignity.

Now imagine that this situation happens twice. There are now 2 Bobs in the hospital and 8 other patients. Does it now become okay to let the other patients die to save the 2 Bobs? It doesn’t seem like anything relevant has changed. Each person still has equal dignity, and the specifics of their lives don’t affect their inherent equal value.

Now imagine that there are only 2 other patients. Should we sacrifice 2 people to save Bob? Again, it violates the two principles of treating everyone equally and ignoring their specific personalities and decisions in assessing their inherent dignity.

So it seems like no matter what number we choose, saving fewer people because we find their personal life situations more interesting and engaging is a violation of the basic egalitarian principle that people matter equally, and matter independently of their personalities and life choices.

So we arrive at a third rule that followed from the first two:

• We have a strong obligation to save more lives rather than fewer, and to ignore our personal reactions to the specific personalities and decisions of any of the people involved.

I see failing to do this as basically the same as choosing to save Bob over the “less interesting” other patients. It’s not just a harmless alternative decision. It’s a brutal disregard of egalitarianism and an elevation of some people above others. It leaves me with the same religious sense of evil that the original Bob situation does.

If egalitarianism is correct, we should see allowing 4 people to die instead of 1 as being exactly identical to allowing 3 people to die instead of 0. If everyone has equal worth, these numbers need to matter in our decisions.

Numbers and dignity

Some people talk as if adding up numbers of lives saved robs people of dignity. It’s reducing people to “just numbers in a spreadsheet.”

This is completely backwards. The only way to fully respect human dignity is to respect it regardless of the specific life circumstances of the people you’re considering. No matter what people do with their lives, their fundamental human dignity remains the same, and it’s their fundamental dignity we need to consider when thinking about saving their lives. One way to think about this is to assign everyone in the world a “dignity score” of exactly 1. No one’s dignity score budges based on anything they do or the specifics of their lives. Therefore, when we’re considering the number of lives to save, and are choosing between 10 people or 2 people, nothing specific about the personalities or choices of anyone involved can change the fact that on one side there are “10 dignity points” and on the other there are “2 dignity points.” To say anything different implies that some people are inherently more valuable than others. Therefore, treating people as numbers in a spreadsheet is the only way to fully respect their inherent human dignity. Doing anything else implies that the dignity of different people can differ based on their specific decisions and circumstances. To ignore the spreadsheet is to ignore what the principle “everyone is equally deserving and has inherent dignity” is telling you about the situation.

Spreadsheets are an egalitarian’s best friend.

When people mean to criticize systemic injustice

Sometimes when people say that we can’t quantify numbers of lives saved, they’re not saying that we can’t claim that all people are equal. Instead, they’re saying that the underlying problems that are causing the deaths in the first place are not being addressed by what we’re doing, and merely adding up lives saved misses the deeper reasons why poverty exists. Another similar criticism could be that some people are victims of societal injustice, and deserve special treatment.

I think both are good points on their own. Egalitarianism doesn’t imply that we should allow people to steal and then treat them as perfectly equal after. The person who stole needs to give back the resources. In the same way, if people have been the victims of brutal systemic injustice, we need to make amends for that. Just reporting numbers without the details of the injustice masks an injustice that’s happened.

However, neither point tells us to never use numbers. Someone criticizing systemic injustice still believes the numbers matter; they just think the specific numbers I’m using don’t capture the full picture of what’s happening or what will continue to happen if we do nothing. If people want to say that a method of analyzing a problem is missing key details of how that problem came about, they can just say that directly without implying that we shouldn’t aim to be egalitarian.

This objection comes up less often than I expect. In conversations about this, I often find myself as the one arguing for donations to GiveWell, which primarily serves some of the poorest people in the world. The people I’m talking with are often arguing for donations to local American charities instead, and often charities that don’t even attempt to help poor people specifically. I’ve found that these people are the ones most likely to say “Oh isn’t trying to quantify the lives saved just Western technocratic reason?” The people with systemic critiques of the way the global economic system works are more likely to say “Just reporting the number of lives saved misses the reason these people are poor in the first place” and what follows is usually a really useful discussion for both of us.

1. There are exceptions you can make here, like if you have the choice to save a 10 year old or a 100 year old’s life, saving the 10 year old saves way more total life-years. Let’s just assume this is a reasonable range and we want to value the lives of people who like chess and the people who like Nintendo and the people who like painting equally. Another example would be choosing to save the life of an active serial killer who’s going to immediately run out and kill more people, but in that case the problem isn’t that we’re using numbers, we’re just missing the full picture of how many lives will be lost.