What if these two had really been able to cooperate over the long haul? Thankfully, that wasn't in their makeup.
Okay, before we dive into this week's rather difficult thought experiment, it's going to help to have a little data about the sheer magnitude of horror that occurred during World War II. According to various accounts by historians, the total casualties of the WWII conflicts have been calculated as:
That's a total of 70-85 million deaths! For the 29-31 million civilian deaths due to military activity and crimes against humanity, this includes deaths from: strategic bombing, German war crimes, Japanese war crimes, population transfers in the Soviet Union, Allied war crimes, and Holocaust victims. The number of victims in that last subcategory "depends on which definition of the Holocaust is used. The number of Jewish victims is somewhere over 5 million or even over 6 million, [but] ...a research project conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimated that 15 to 20 million people died or were imprisoned during the Holocaust." So even for the worst known Holocaust estimates, more than twice as many other people died over the course of the war. For those like myself who were born after this period in history and have been relatively untouched by any wars at all, I imagine it's impossible to actually comprehend the sheer terror that goes with all these numbers, but this week's thought experiment asks if things could or should have been otherwise.
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The emissary had been sent by Hitler under the utmost secrecy. If the British ever tried to reveal the nature of his mission publicly, Berlin would deny all knowledge of the trip and denounce him as a traitor. But that would surely not be necessary. No one could see how Churchill could refuse the deal he had to offer.
Hitler knew that Churchill wanted to avoid needless casualties. Both leaders realized that a conflict between the two nations would cost countless thousands of lives. But war could be averted. Hitler was offering guarantees that, once the Final Solution was completed, no further offensives would be launched and only insurgents within the lands he occupied would be killed. That would certainly mean there would be fewer lives lost than if Britain attempted to liberate France and overthrow the Nazi regime in Germany.
The Führer was sure this would appeal to the leader of the country that had invented utilitarianism. After all, who could prefer a course of action that would lead to more deaths over one that would lead to fewer?
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 295.
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In his own discussion of this thought experiment, Baggini further complicated things by asking us to consider these issues too:
Although no such mission was in fact undertaken during the Second World War, Hitler did believe at various points that Britain would accept a peace deal that would allow him to keep the territories he had conquered. There are many, especially those who lost relatives in the concentration camps, who would shudder at the mere thought of such a deal. ... If you share this response, then think very carefully about how you judge the morality of other wars. ... For example, anti-war campaigners are quick to point out that it is estimated that in the first year after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, around 10,000 civilians had been killed. However, Saddam Hussein is believed to have killed 600,000 civilians during his time in power. In response, there are those who argue that UN sanctions, not Saddam's regime, were responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. And many more numbers are traded in an attempt to justify or condemn going to war.
All this seems to assume that if a war costs more lives than it saves, then it is morally wrong. But on this logic, it is easy to imagine a scenario, such as the secret offer of a deal from Hitler, which would have made it better for the allies to have left Europe to fascism. Even if we factor out the Holocaust, there are still reasons to prefer bloody liberation to bloodless toleration. People choose to risk their lives for their ideals because they think some values are more important than mere survival. Hence the saying it is better to die a free man than live as a slave. The morality of war is a thorny issue and one that cannot be resolved by simplistic totting up of lives lost and lives saved.
In some sense, I think Baggini ends with a straw man here. I don't really believe that anyone could be such a naive utilitarian as to simply total up deaths on each side of a ledger and use that to declare a morally correct path. For a much better nuanced and considerate sort of utilitarianism, reader Disagreeable Me described his reaction to this thought experiment with some excellent comments after I posted it on Monday. He said:
The idea of allowing the Nazis to continue the holocaust unopposed is viscerally distasteful, but as a consequentialist I would have to side with whichever option caused the least harm. It's not clear that allowing the Nazis to win would cause the least harm however.
1) They're probably not to be trusted, especially not in the long term
2) The harms caused by their Reich might well outweigh any benefit from avoiding war
3) Allowing this regime to exist might well normalize its odious ideology and allow such ideas to spread, causing harm elsewhere.
I don't think it's right to expect a utilitarian to simply total the number of lives lost on the two sides of a decision. Quality of life and well-being matters too. I think the world we have now is likely to be a far better place than it would have been had Hitler won the war, or at least won the right to stay in power.
As such, I suspect it would be the wrong thing to do to accept Hitler's offer. But I can't be sure of that, and so I will accept the implied criticism of consequentialism -- that in some scenarios, with the right tweaks to matters of empirical fact, it might turn out that the best thing for a utilitarian/consequentialist to do would have been to tolerate Hitler, which would seem to make consequentialism potentially abhorrent.
I agree with almost all of this. You can't expect unreasonable Nazi's to maintain reasonableness to you. The origins of the ideas that led to the Holocaust were abhorrent, based on falsehoods, and utterly destructive, so they could easily have led to further searches for more victims once the Final Solution failed to yield a desirable final result. In some ways, this is what Britain and the U.S. saw when bombs began to land on their shores. Thankfully, however, what the allied forces saw even more clearly, was that they could do something about it. They had the potential to win. Had they not felt so, they probably would have been forced to tolerate Hitler. I don't think that necessarily makes consequentialism abhorrent. I just think it makes consequentialists realistic when trying to balance survival against ideals. Sometimes it is better to live to fight another day. This is largely what the world had to do with Stalin and Mao—the West had to wait them out while the consequences of their behaviors crippled their societies to the point that revolution (in the form of Soviet collapse or managed change in China) was inevitable.
So to answer the thought experiment directly, more deaths over the short term may be preferable to more misery and death over the long term, although empirically it's not very easy to know the difference ahead of time, and I personally am very glad I have never been asked to be one of the short term sacrifices. I'm not a consequentialist alone, but I do think evolutionary ethics points the morally striving person towards actions that promote the consequence of life surviving over the long term. How do we get there? I'll close this week by just noting my thoughts on this from my paper on morality:
Fortunately, life has already been selected for figuring out ways to balance the concerns that individuals and groups must take into account. It’s only recently that we’ve discovered this (recent in comparison to the field of philosophy anyway), but research in fields such as game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and neuroscience has shown us that humans and other animals have natural dispositions to act for the common good of their kin, social group, species, and ecosystems, and even over evolutionary timeframes. Under certain circumstances, organisms will be social, cooperative, and even altruistic. Using terms such as kin altruism, coordination, reciprocity, and conflict resolution, evolutionary theory has explained why and how some organisms care for their offspring and their wider families, aggregate in herds, work in teams, practice a division of labor, communicate, share food, trade favors, build alliances, punish cheats, exact revenge, settle disputes peacefully, provide altruistic displays of status, and respect property. All of these behaviors clearly lead to prolonged survival for the groups of individuals that exhibit them.
We can learn from these and other examples of what has worked in the past to generalize about how we as a species must move forward into the future. What traits do we currently believe will lead to survival over the long term? Suitability to an environment. Adaptability to changes in the environment. Diversity to handle fluctuations. Cooperation to optimize resources and reduce the harm that comes from conflict. Competition to spur effort and progress. Limits to competition to give losers a chance to cooperate on the next iteration. Progress in learning, to understand and predict actions in the universe. Progress in technology, to give options for directing outcomes where we want them to go. These are the virtues and outcomes we must cultivate to face our existential threats and remain determined to conquer them. Traditional moral rules supporting concepts such as charity, honesty, freedom, justice, etc., may also lead us toward these survival traits, but make no mistake that this is the end goal of morality toward which we are headed. We know this now.
Next up...the final thought experiment. Who'd have thought I'd survive to make it this far!
- 21-25 million military deaths from all causes
- 29-31 million civilian deaths due to military activity and crimes against humanity
- 19-28 million civilian deaths due to war related famine and disease
That's a total of 70-85 million deaths! For the 29-31 million civilian deaths due to military activity and crimes against humanity, this includes deaths from: strategic bombing, German war crimes, Japanese war crimes, population transfers in the Soviet Union, Allied war crimes, and Holocaust victims. The number of victims in that last subcategory "depends on which definition of the Holocaust is used. The number of Jewish victims is somewhere over 5 million or even over 6 million, [but] ...a research project conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimated that 15 to 20 million people died or were imprisoned during the Holocaust." So even for the worst known Holocaust estimates, more than twice as many other people died over the course of the war. For those like myself who were born after this period in history and have been relatively untouched by any wars at all, I imagine it's impossible to actually comprehend the sheer terror that goes with all these numbers, but this week's thought experiment asks if things could or should have been otherwise.
--------------------------------------------------
The emissary had been sent by Hitler under the utmost secrecy. If the British ever tried to reveal the nature of his mission publicly, Berlin would deny all knowledge of the trip and denounce him as a traitor. But that would surely not be necessary. No one could see how Churchill could refuse the deal he had to offer.
Hitler knew that Churchill wanted to avoid needless casualties. Both leaders realized that a conflict between the two nations would cost countless thousands of lives. But war could be averted. Hitler was offering guarantees that, once the Final Solution was completed, no further offensives would be launched and only insurgents within the lands he occupied would be killed. That would certainly mean there would be fewer lives lost than if Britain attempted to liberate France and overthrow the Nazi regime in Germany.
The Führer was sure this would appeal to the leader of the country that had invented utilitarianism. After all, who could prefer a course of action that would lead to more deaths over one that would lead to fewer?
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 295.
---------------------------------------------------
In his own discussion of this thought experiment, Baggini further complicated things by asking us to consider these issues too:
Although no such mission was in fact undertaken during the Second World War, Hitler did believe at various points that Britain would accept a peace deal that would allow him to keep the territories he had conquered. There are many, especially those who lost relatives in the concentration camps, who would shudder at the mere thought of such a deal. ... If you share this response, then think very carefully about how you judge the morality of other wars. ... For example, anti-war campaigners are quick to point out that it is estimated that in the first year after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, around 10,000 civilians had been killed. However, Saddam Hussein is believed to have killed 600,000 civilians during his time in power. In response, there are those who argue that UN sanctions, not Saddam's regime, were responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. And many more numbers are traded in an attempt to justify or condemn going to war.
All this seems to assume that if a war costs more lives than it saves, then it is morally wrong. But on this logic, it is easy to imagine a scenario, such as the secret offer of a deal from Hitler, which would have made it better for the allies to have left Europe to fascism. Even if we factor out the Holocaust, there are still reasons to prefer bloody liberation to bloodless toleration. People choose to risk their lives for their ideals because they think some values are more important than mere survival. Hence the saying it is better to die a free man than live as a slave. The morality of war is a thorny issue and one that cannot be resolved by simplistic totting up of lives lost and lives saved.
In some sense, I think Baggini ends with a straw man here. I don't really believe that anyone could be such a naive utilitarian as to simply total up deaths on each side of a ledger and use that to declare a morally correct path. For a much better nuanced and considerate sort of utilitarianism, reader Disagreeable Me described his reaction to this thought experiment with some excellent comments after I posted it on Monday. He said:
The idea of allowing the Nazis to continue the holocaust unopposed is viscerally distasteful, but as a consequentialist I would have to side with whichever option caused the least harm. It's not clear that allowing the Nazis to win would cause the least harm however.
1) They're probably not to be trusted, especially not in the long term
2) The harms caused by their Reich might well outweigh any benefit from avoiding war
3) Allowing this regime to exist might well normalize its odious ideology and allow such ideas to spread, causing harm elsewhere.
I don't think it's right to expect a utilitarian to simply total the number of lives lost on the two sides of a decision. Quality of life and well-being matters too. I think the world we have now is likely to be a far better place than it would have been had Hitler won the war, or at least won the right to stay in power.
As such, I suspect it would be the wrong thing to do to accept Hitler's offer. But I can't be sure of that, and so I will accept the implied criticism of consequentialism -- that in some scenarios, with the right tweaks to matters of empirical fact, it might turn out that the best thing for a utilitarian/consequentialist to do would have been to tolerate Hitler, which would seem to make consequentialism potentially abhorrent.
I agree with almost all of this. You can't expect unreasonable Nazi's to maintain reasonableness to you. The origins of the ideas that led to the Holocaust were abhorrent, based on falsehoods, and utterly destructive, so they could easily have led to further searches for more victims once the Final Solution failed to yield a desirable final result. In some ways, this is what Britain and the U.S. saw when bombs began to land on their shores. Thankfully, however, what the allied forces saw even more clearly, was that they could do something about it. They had the potential to win. Had they not felt so, they probably would have been forced to tolerate Hitler. I don't think that necessarily makes consequentialism abhorrent. I just think it makes consequentialists realistic when trying to balance survival against ideals. Sometimes it is better to live to fight another day. This is largely what the world had to do with Stalin and Mao—the West had to wait them out while the consequences of their behaviors crippled their societies to the point that revolution (in the form of Soviet collapse or managed change in China) was inevitable.
So to answer the thought experiment directly, more deaths over the short term may be preferable to more misery and death over the long term, although empirically it's not very easy to know the difference ahead of time, and I personally am very glad I have never been asked to be one of the short term sacrifices. I'm not a consequentialist alone, but I do think evolutionary ethics points the morally striving person towards actions that promote the consequence of life surviving over the long term. How do we get there? I'll close this week by just noting my thoughts on this from my paper on morality:
Fortunately, life has already been selected for figuring out ways to balance the concerns that individuals and groups must take into account. It’s only recently that we’ve discovered this (recent in comparison to the field of philosophy anyway), but research in fields such as game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and neuroscience has shown us that humans and other animals have natural dispositions to act for the common good of their kin, social group, species, and ecosystems, and even over evolutionary timeframes. Under certain circumstances, organisms will be social, cooperative, and even altruistic. Using terms such as kin altruism, coordination, reciprocity, and conflict resolution, evolutionary theory has explained why and how some organisms care for their offspring and their wider families, aggregate in herds, work in teams, practice a division of labor, communicate, share food, trade favors, build alliances, punish cheats, exact revenge, settle disputes peacefully, provide altruistic displays of status, and respect property. All of these behaviors clearly lead to prolonged survival for the groups of individuals that exhibit them.
We can learn from these and other examples of what has worked in the past to generalize about how we as a species must move forward into the future. What traits do we currently believe will lead to survival over the long term? Suitability to an environment. Adaptability to changes in the environment. Diversity to handle fluctuations. Cooperation to optimize resources and reduce the harm that comes from conflict. Competition to spur effort and progress. Limits to competition to give losers a chance to cooperate on the next iteration. Progress in learning, to understand and predict actions in the universe. Progress in technology, to give options for directing outcomes where we want them to go. These are the virtues and outcomes we must cultivate to face our existential threats and remain determined to conquer them. Traditional moral rules supporting concepts such as charity, honesty, freedom, justice, etc., may also lead us toward these survival traits, but make no mistake that this is the end goal of morality toward which we are headed. We know this now.
Next up...the final thought experiment. Who'd have thought I'd survive to make it this far!
