The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics and the Exploitation Problem

If everyone ‘exploited’ opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people’s suffering at the same time, we’d all be better off.

In one of my favorite blog posts of all time, Jai writes: 

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

He goes on to provide some examples, such as Uber using surge pricing to increase the supply of taxis during peak demand times or: 

On March 11th, 2012, the vast majority of people did nothing to help homeless people. They were busy doing other things, many of them good and important things, but by and large not improving the well-being of homeless humans in any way. In particular, almost no one was doing anything for the homeless of Austin, Texas. BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. Each of these 13 volunteers chose this over all the other things they could have done that day, and benefited from it – not a vast improvement, but significantly more than the 0 improvement that they were getting from most people.

The response?

“It sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia. But it’s absolutely real — and a completely problematic treatment of a problem that otherwise probably wouldn’t be mentioned in any of the panels at South by Southwest Interactive.” [subtitle of a Wired article describing the event]

There wouldn’t be any scathing editorials if BBH Labs had just chosen to do nothing – but they did something helpful-but-not-maximally-helpful, and thus are open to judgment.

Jai finishes the post with the following conclusion: 

But what if – what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better. If everyone did that, the world would be a vastly better place. If everyone “exploited” opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people’s suffering at the same time, we’d all be better off.

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Imagine that a stranger named George needs $1,000 to pay for surgery to prevent himself from going blind. Is there a moral obligation for you to give George the money? Most people say no, you don’t owe this stranger anything.

Alternatively, you could propose to George that he work in your widget factory that happens to be down the street from him. The conditions in the factory are bad, the hours are long, and the work is mind-numbingly boring, but you will pay him $10 every day. After a hundred days straight of working, George will be able to afford the surgery he needs. Should you make the deal, thereby exploiting George’s labor and condition to make a profit on the widgets?

George, lacking alternatives, wants to accept this offer. In the absence of working in your sweatshop, he will go blind. Most people, however, would say that exploiting George’s labor is wrong and would prefer not to purchase widgets produced by your sweatshop even though they are the cheapest widgets around.

This is the Exploitation Problem: as explained by Joe Horton at the University College London:

We seem to think both that (1) it is permissible for you not to help the stranger, and that (2) it is wrong for you to exploit the stranger. These claims together imply that (3) you ought to let the stranger go blind rather than exploit him, even though he would much rather be exploited. Some people find this implication very counterintuitive.

I am one of those people who find this counterintuitive; so counterintuitive, in fact, that something must be wrong here.   

You can disagree with (1) quite reasonably. Perhaps the most famous refutation of (1) is Peter Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment in his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972): “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” Likewise, Singer argues, if it doesn’t cost you much to prevent something bad from happening anywhere in the world, you should do it. He argues that people ought to donate the majority of their incomes to effective charities; holding onto wealth is equivalent to avoiding saving the drowning child to save your clothes from being muddied.

Most people, myself included, do not live this way. I find Singer’s arguments quite persuasive, but let’s put them aside for now in favor of the practical reality that most people don’t act how they should, while acknowledging that the fact that most people don’t act in the way that they should does not diminish the fact that they still ought to act in the way that they do not (try and say that 5 times fast…).  

Granting (1), we are left to disagree with (2), that it is wrong for you to exploit the stranger. If you take a consequentialist view, it seems unacceptable to accept (3), that you ought to let George go blind rather than exploit him. But it also seems self-evident that it is wrong to exploit George, which in this case can be defined as an unfair distribution of the benefits of the transaction. 

I find myself thinking about and agreeing with Jai: “If everyone ‘exploited’ opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people’s suffering at the same time, we’d all be better off.” 

In my mind, what is most important is that the overall state of the world is better, exploitation or otherwise. Furthermore, opportunities to “exploit” act as incentives for people to come up with prosocial solutions to tricky problems. Sure, it leaves a slightly bad taste in your mouth to exploit George’s labor since he needs money to pay for this surgery. But you know what leaves a worse taste in my mouth? George going blind. 

Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the principals to which the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is attributed. 

The ideal solution to this problem would be (4) to pay George a higher wage, to improve the safety conditions of the factory, and to have George work reasonable, humane hours. Switching from thought-experiment land to the real world: why don’t factory owners do this? Is it possible? Can factory owners improve conditions? Are they simply greedy, bad people or are there structural factors at play?

These questions are big ones, and I will address them in another post.