Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

We can also see this radical uncertainty as supporting a new enchantment with human life and choice; we can accept that most or all of our actions will have consequences we cannot possibly predict. On average these consequences will be positive, just as average economic growth is positive, but we will always wonder about the future consequences we

Third, we should be very cautious in our attitudes about specific policies. Even if we succeed in taking true aim at what we think are the best courses of action, the chance that we are right on the specifics—even if the chance is as high as possible—is still not very high. It’s like trying to guess at the origin of the universe. The best you can d

Common sense morality Common sense morality holds that we should work hard, take care of our families, and live virtuous but self-centered lives, while giving to charity as we are able and helping out others on a periodic basis. Utilitarian philosophy, on the other hand, appears to suggest an extreme degree of self-sacrifice. Why should a mother te

As argued above, a sustainable increase in economic growth, properly understood, will boost many plural values in the medium and long runs. To be sure, some people will be worse off, and some values, in the short to medium run, will not be favored. In these respects, aggregation problems do not disappear. Nonetheless, the competing options do not g

Imagine that your chance of being right is three percent, and your corresponding chance of being wrong is ninety-seven percent. Each opposing view, however, has only a two percent chance of being right, which of course is a bit less than your own chance of being right. Yet there are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re pro

The main point is simply that if the gains to the future are significant and ongoing, those gains should eventually outweigh one-time costs by a significant degree, and they will likely carry along other plural values as well.

Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.

Martin Luther King Jr. brought much good to the world with respect to both justice and long-term economic growth. It would be fair to say that King did the right thing in choosing to pursue higher ideals rather than playing golf all day, even though he lost his life in doing so. The same can be said of Gandhi. Nonetheless, such obligations to sacri

The key point is this: even if you’re not convinced that Napoleon really mattered, you don’t and indeed can’t really know this. There is a real chance that Napoleon being born, rather than a different child from a different act of conception, fundamentally changed world history. So in terms of expected value, it remains the case that small acts can