Actions Have Consequences, Actors Have Virtues

And ne'er the twain shall meet

First, thank you to those who read and shared our first post “Gerrymandering Power”. In particular, we want to thank Yassine Meskhout, who inspired us to make a Substack in the first place, and who generously shared our post on Substack and Twitter.

This post is structurally similar to our last: we identify a flaw in online discourse and explore it. Specifically, we demonstrate that actions and actors are not judged by consistent rulesets, which can generate unwarranted inferences when pundits flip-flop between the two in an unprincipled way.

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Introduction: John and Jane

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. In fact, let’s begin with two, adapted from Thomas Nagel’s essay “Moral Luck”:

• John drives to a bar with the intention of getting drunk. After 7 beers he decides to call it a night, and hops in his car to drive home. John knows he’s drunk and he knows drunk driving is wrong, but he chooses to drive drunk anyway. On his way home, John approaches an intersection where a child is waiting to cross the street. John misses a red light and barrels forward towards the child, who has just stepped off the sidewalk. Miraculously, John just barely misses the child and never even notices they were there. He gets home and goes to sleep.

• Jane drives to a bar with the intention of getting drunk. After 7 beers she decides to call it a night, and hops in his car to drive home. Jane knows she’s drunk and she knows drunk driving is wrong, but she chooses to drive drunk anyway. On her way home, Jane approaches an intersection where a child is waiting to cross the street. Jane misses a red light and barrels forward towards the child, who has just stepped off the sidewalk. Jane clips the child with her car, killing them instantly, but never even notices they were there. She gets home and goes to sleep.

These two thought experiments show a tension between virtue ethics and consequentialism as practiced by everyday individuals and our legal system. John and Jane are psychologically similar; both make the same choices and take the same actions. But for the exact position of the child — whom neither John nor Jane notice — they would be identical in every respect. Yet Jane would likely receive a much harsher punishment in our legal system than John. Both are surely guilty of something, but Jane killed a child and John didn't.

Dall-E-3’s attempt at drawing moral luck. Not bad!

The difference between John and Jane is one of luck. Neither has control over the position of the child. They only control their own behaviour which, as we’ve stipulated, is identical. John and Jane are, we propose, equally bad people. Yet in the eyes of the law Jane is probably worse than John. Put another way, John and Jane as actors are equally bad, but John and Jane’s actions are not equally bad. We want to hone in on this difference

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We f*cking love science

Science is awesome when it agrees with us. There’s ample evidence to suggest that people are judged by different moral standards that actions.

Uhlmann et al. (2015)¹ propose what they call a “person-centred approach to moral judgment”. To simplify a great deal, human beings act like little virtue ethicists constantly trying to figure out the character of those around them. Actions are evidence of a person’s characteristics, and we pay a great deal of attention to the link between intent and action in order to determine the quality of a person.

The difference in how we judge acts and persons sometimes results in what Uhlmann et al. (2015) call “act-person dissociations”, which is where our judgements of acts lead us to one conclusion, and our judgement of persons lead us to another. A classic example is Jonathan Haidt (1993)’s famous moral dumbfounding experiments. In these experiments, participants are asked to judge whether a particular action is wrong. A classic case is the masturbatory chicken: suppose a man purchases a raw chicken carcass at the grocery store, uses it to masturbate, cooks it, then eats it. Is what the man did wrong? Most participants have a gut intuition that this is so. However, upon reflection, many will grudgingly admit that the action isn’t wrong per se, but it is super disgusting and they wouldn’t want to be friends with the man. In other words, they judge the action as harmless, but have doubts as to the actor’s character.

NSFW

To summarize, thought experimental evidence and literal experimental evidence both suggest that actions and actors are treated according to different standards. When considering actions we tend to have consequentialist concerns — how harmful is the act? When considering actors we tend to have virtue ethics concerns — how good is the person in question? The decision to judge an action or an actor therefore matters a great deal for forming an opinion of a situation. This can be exploited.

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In which we talk about Israel and Palestine again because we hate ourselves

If you remember our last post — or if you have passing familiarity with the platform formerly known as Twitter — you’ll be aware that Israel and Palestine are in the news these days. As of November 4th, 2023, a primary battleground between Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian supporters is the extent to which Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion of Gaza are justified. Those in the Pro-Israel camp say a war is justified to rid the world of Hamas, and those in the Pro-Palestinian camp say a war is unjustified because of the mass casualties on one side of the picture. Those in the Gaza refugee camps are probably trying to avoid airstrikes, but with a side benefit of being blissfully unaware of most Twitter discourse.

Here’s a common graph posted by the Pro-Palestinian side:

To the best of our knowledge, these numbers are approximately true, though there’s some issues with it². Minor quibbles aside, even the most ardent Pro-Israel partisan will admit that Palestinians currently suffer drastically more deaths and injuries than Israelis, have for virtually the entirety of the history of Israel, and likely will until the situation is somehow resolved.

What does this tell us about the actions of Israel and Palestine? Clearly, Israel’s actions are more harmful in total. This could either be because any individual Israeli action causes much more harm to Palestinians, because Israeli does many more harmful actions to Palestinians, or some combination of the two.

The problem is that no one cares about this question. No, really. No one cares about the relative harm of Israeli or Palestinian attacks. Pretty much no Israeli or their allies would ever dispute this, and certainly no Palestinian or their allies ever would. Why, then, does this image pop up with startling regularity? Because people want to move from an action-based perspective on the conflict, which is fundamentally consequentialist, to a person-based perspective on the conflict, which is fundamentally rooted in virtue ethics. The tricky part is they don’t want you realizing that.

Consider the raw fact of this graph for a moment. Is this enough information to judge who its worse in the current conflict? Intuitively, you might think yes. Upon further consideration, there’s some easily-available counter-examples:

• Was Germany the victim in WW2 because their civilian death counts were much higher than the death counts of Britain? Approximately 70,000 Brits died during the blitz bombing, whereas 2,000,000 German civilians died in bombings like what happened in Dresden. Ben Shapiro went viral for a debate at the Oxford Union where he made this exact point. We’re not the biggest fans of Ben but he’s correct here: raw civilian death counts do not necessarily determine the morality of a given side

• Suppose a woman is being brutally assaulted by a man. Unbeknownst to the man, the woman has a concealed carry permit, so she takes her gun out and shoots him³. There are more deaths on the man’s side than the woman’s, so should we side with the man? Of course not — he was the aggressor and the woman was acting in self defense. The raw number of deaths on either side don’t really matter for determining who’s in the right here.

So in the case of Israel and Palestine, raw casualty counts are insufficient for determining who is in the wrong. It could very well be that Israel is in the wrong — and we’d argue that the vast discrepancy in casualties does make this more likely, though not certain. However, more data can re-contextualize these arguments. For example, consider statistics on rocket fire between Israel and Gaza:

This graph admittedly only covers a narrow window of time, but other data we’ve seen replicates this general pattern: Hamas fires a lot of rockets into Israel, often at civilian targets. Israel fires a lot of rockets into Gaza, often at what they claim to be military targets (but that’s hard to verify based on a big smoking crater where an apartment building used to be).

This graph, and others like it, make the Pro-Israel case for why the disproportionate casualty counts don’t matter: yes, Israel has fewer casualties, but not for a lack of Hamas trying. Every rocket intercepted by the iron dome is presumably targeted at civilian populations in a nearby kibbutz or at cities like Tel Aviv. On this perspective, Hamas is like John in our first thought experiment: their actions would, but for factors outside of their control (the iron dome) result in mass civilian casualties. If Uhlmann et al. (2015) are right, we should be judging them by their intentions and efforts, rather than the mere consequences of their actions.

Adam later deleted this tweet. Not because he believes the comparison was wrong, but because he had questions about the accuracy of the Ukrainian numbers

This style of flip-flopping between action-centred and person-centred judgments of situations is how we get comparisons like the above — Israel’s assault on Gaza is compared to Russia’s assault on Ukraine by mere virtue of the casualty and fatality count. By now, we hope you agree that this is a slippery mode of argumentation. One could conceivably believe that the Russian assault on Ukraine is an unjust war on the merits, but that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a just war, and thus come away with totally different inferences about the badness of these respective wars even if casualties and fatalities were identical.

Adam Tooze is not alone — here’s a small window into the various graphs that are being posted on Twitter:

Note that these numbers are also subject to Temporal Gerrymandering, because when you decide to start counting matters. A Pro-Israel partisan could post death counts that start at October 7th and stop at the 10th, though this would be a pretty obvious case of biased reporting.

In short, there is a large mass of people posting raw casualty and fatality numbers as a way to sway others to one particular side in this conflict. While these numbers are suggestive, it’s important to not accept them at face value and to critically think about what can be learned from them. Are you judging actions, or are you judging actors? One is easy. The other is hard.

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Thanks so much for reading! Smash that like button, subscribe to our Substack, and share this with your friends. Everyone wants more Israel and Palestine discourse in their feed — they’ll definitely thank you.

Leave a comment if you want to yell at us, OR if there’s topics about contemporary discourse you’d be interested in hearing our take on, OR if you simply want to tell us how brave and brilliant we are for agreeing with you. We don’t care, we’re a scribbly little cartoon character trembling with barely-contained rage.

1. By the way, check out David Pizarro’s very good podcast “Very Bad Wizards”. We may be trembling mad, but the trembles subside listening to his and Tamler Sommers’ soothing voices.

2. This graph starts at 2008, probably because that’s when Israel conducted operation Cast Lead in response to a massive barrage of rockets fired from Hamas targeting Israeli civilian centres. Israel got the Iron Dome in 2011, and since then has had even fewer casualties than they already did prior to 2008. Cutting off the graph at 2008 means you miss the Second Intifada, where many hundreds of Israeli civilians died due to an epidemic of suicide bombings, some of which were conducted by children. The two sides look even more disproportionate due to the inclusion of casualties (or injuries), the bulk of which are driven by injuries inflicted by Israel during the 2018-2019 march of return, where 100k+ Palestinians protested at the Gaza border. You can read the Wikipedia page to get a sense of how those casualties were inflicted and the IDF’s stated justifications.

3. This is not some wild hypothetical — this, and events like it, do happen with depressing regularity.