Should we celebrate bin Laden's death?

Osama bin Laden was murdered while resisting detainment by the U.S. armed forces. Of course, when President Obama authorized the "raid" on bin Laden's hideout he knew that bin Laden would be killed with high probability. If not, the U.S. would kill him by the death penalty.

Opponents of the death penalty are responding with some sense of outrage. You see it on Facebook and Twitter where "murder is never the answer even for Bin Laden" is the slogan by chanted.

I don't understand that.

First, isn't it good to murder people responsible for 3,000 deaths? Isn't it more likely that a political leader will sentence 3,000 people to death if he thinks that the worst that will happen is that he will be sent to a nice jail in old age, rather than be killed? (The incentive effects are more complicated, but I just want death penalty opponents to acknowledge that the death penalty may save lives. In fact, if you ask most people for their prior on this question, most people implicitly believe the death penalty saves lives.)

Second, murdering bin Laden made a lot of people, esp. in the US very happy. Twitter lit up in celebration and fans at stadiums across the country cheered. The net utility, any way you measure it, was probably positive when you consider that bin Laden was a miserable old man, likely to die soon anyway, so the utility loss from the murder was low, while the benefits were small but for hundreds of millions of people.

Now, I should stop. I know a lot of people will reply "but that is exactly why the utilitarian calculus is wrong. It's actually a famous example." The famous example is that, suppose an innocent man were going to be killed so that a rowdy mob will gain utility. Suppose they gain more utility than he loses. Here the mob has 300,000,000 members in it, give or take, and the innocent man isn't innocent, but its similar. But that's the catch: utilitarianism isn't wrong.

We kill innocent people so that lots of people can gain small sums of utility on a daily basis. Consider highway safety. If we lowered the speed limit it would force people to drive slower and thus there would be fewer fatal crashes. But we choose not to lower the speed limit because we would rather have a few people die than have everyone commute for an extra 10 minutes every day. When two economists, Orley Asherfelter and Michael Greenstone, quantified the dollar value we place on a human life, it was something like $500,000. Now let's consider the Osama case. We are willing to let an innocent American die in a car crash so we can each get to work faster and we'd be willing to collectively pay $500,000 for the privilege. That is completely moral. But if I could collect a dollar from half of Americas (surely I could) to murder Osama, showing that his death is worth at least $150,000,000 or 300x as much, and knowing the cost of his death is not as bad because he isn't innocent and he is old and will die soon anyway, it's immoral.

In summary:

Moral: killing an innocent child on the highways so everyone has as shorter commute
Immoral: killing a mass murdered to generate 300x as much joy

Whose theory of ethics doesn't make sense?

And to answer the question in the title: The best response to any situation is to make the best of it. You can't change the fact that he's dead and sucking the joy out of the event for others or sulking in misery isn't helping anyone.

Random Thought

Here's a thought on why it's so hard to think about trade-offs between health and happiness: people think about different risk very differently depending on the situation. An increased chance of death from 4% to 5% this year is very different from an increase from 1% to 3%. Or consider:

Fishermen (think "Deadliest Catch") have a 1.1% chance of dying on-the-job each year (granted that's not really an increased risk of dying by quite 1.1%) and they make about $13 an hour, which is next to no premium over many other unskilled laborers. But suppose they make $5 more per hour and work 2000 hours a year more than someone at Wal-Mart. That means they'd being compensated for the risk by $10,000.

Now consider that you've been impressed into the English army for an amphibious landing in France. Your risk is dying that day is 2% (ignore non-fatal injuries) and they say they'll let you go after they establish a beachhead. How much would you be willing to escape 2% chance of sudden death? If they above scenario is any guide (or this valuation from speed limits) you should be willing to pay about $20,000 but no more.

Tradeoffs

I'm an unabashed utilitarian--of sorts. I think that all there really is to life is having a happy life, and I'm partial to definition of happy that focus on moment to moment feelings, as opposed to satisfaction when you reflect on memories. (More on the two types in this old post.)

One tradeoff that can comes up for utilitarians is between length and life and happiness during it. Is a better life one with more total happiness? More average happiness? We see this trade-off come up with sinful goods, like drugs, alcohol, and high-fat foods. Suppose you really would be happier if you drank 5 drinks every night. Would you be willing to trade ten years of your life (live to 67 instead of 77) so you could be 1 unit happier on a ten point scale?

That is a bad example because it rests on a mistaken premise. Becoming an alcoholic almost certainly isn't a road to bliss, nor are drug abuse or gratuitous gluttony.

But are there any good, relevant examples of a tradeoff where your risking your health for a clear gain in happiness?

The one that got me thinking about this is not fit for print.

Sandel on Justice

Sandel's TED talk on improving policy debate. His big idea is that we spend too much of the time asking the wrong questions because we ignore the fundamentals. We should ask "what is the purpose of universities?" before we ask who they should admit (affirmative action). I think it's a good talk.

But I have two big problems with philosophers and both apply to Sandel. When Sandel asks the audicence about the Supreme Court case they end up in a situation where A says letting a disabled golfer use golf cart would not give him an unfair advantage. B says that it would. A's only response is, to paraphrase, "I believe it wouldn't as an article of faith." In situations like this our thoughts should jump to "why don't we do an experiment and find out?" The facts are almost always absolutely essential to a debate, even after it has been framed properly.

The second problem is that Sandel says "musical performance isn't just [about] mak[ing] . . . us happy, but to honor and recognize . . . excellence." For decades this kind of virtue ethic has been in vogue. I understand appeal--consequentialism brings too many unsavory paradoxes. But isn't it obvious, when you really stop and think, that act utilitarianism is the only sensible ethical system?

This debate has an analog in economics. Sometimes people don't behave like the homo economicus would. We take that as evidence that some economic models are bad. Fair enough. But it's also evidence that a lot of people make stupid choices. Utilitarianism doesn't predict people's intuitions AND it shows people have bad intuitions.