Among the many things about which philosophers disagree, one of the debates I find interesting is the debate between actualists and possibilists. Roughly, possibilists believe you should engage in the best possible action you could, whereas actualists think you should do the best thing you will actually do given your imperfections, even if it’s technically possible for you to do better. To try to see the disagreement play out, consider this scenario.
I’m engaged in a tennis match with Bob, and Bob handily beats me. I’m a hothead with a terrible temper, and I really want to smack Bob over the head with my tennis racquet, but of course that would be bad to do. Let’s say there are three possible ways things can go.
In the best scenario, I approach the net, shake hands with Bob and congratulate him on a good game like a good sport. A less than ideal scenario is that I storm off the tennis court in a huff. And the worst case scenario is that I go over to Bob and whack him over the head with my tennis racquet. Let’s say that I know myself and my temper well enough to be sure that if I go near Bob right now, I will give in to my anger and whack him over the head. It’s metaphysically possible for me to not do this, but in practice this is what I will in fact do. Should I approach the net?
The possibilist would say that since the best thing I could possibly do would be to walk up to the net and shake hands like a good sport, I should approach the net. The actualist says that, given the facts of my personality and weakness, the best thing I will actually do is walk off the court in a huff, so I should not approach the net.
This debate often plays out in discussions of utilitarian and consequentialist ethics. Suppose a philosopher named Seter Pinger concludes that if you don’t take the highest paying job you can find, work as many hours as you can before you collapse, and donate every penny beyond what you need to provide yourself with the barest of subsistence, then you’re morally no better than a serial killer. And let’s suppose that given certain plausible features of human psychology, if you demand people live up to this standard, they’ll end up feeling overwhelmed and just not donate to charity at all. However, if you instead argue people live up to a more moderate standard, like taking the Giving What We Can pledge and donating 10% of their income to effective charities, the actual result of this will be more money given and more lives saved. If Pinger is a possibilist, he will push people to work like madmen and live like monks. If Pinger is an actualist, he will push people to take the aforementioned pledge.
Though he doesn’t use this terminology, Scott Alexander would seem to describe himself as an actualist in this post. He accepts that much of what goes on in the meat industry is morally unacceptable. He also says he “tried being vegetarian for a long time” but that he found it “really hard” and that he “kept giving up” on it. But then, rather than being vegetarian, he decided to follow what he called “a more lax rule,” namely, “I can’t eat any animal besides fish at home, but I can have meat (other than chicken) at restaurants. I’ve mostly been able to keep that rule, and now I’m eating a lot less meat than I did before.”
A possibilist would say Alexander should give up meat altogether, whereas an actualist would say Alexander should stick to his more lax rule. In a very actualist vein, Alexander says “if I am right that this is the strictest rule I can keep, then I’m not sure who it benefits to remind me that I am scum. Deny me the right to feel okay when I do my half-hearted attempt at virtue, and I will just make no attempt at virtue, and this will be worse for me and worse for animals.”
This divide strikes me as being very similar to a difference in how people consider what the government should do – there is a possibilist and actualist divide here too. For example, I once wrote about how Bernie Sanders claimed that if the government levied a $100 billion tax on Bill Gates, the government “could end homelessness and provide safe drinking water to everyone in this country” and Gates “would still be a multibillionaire.” Sanders is talking very much like a possibilist here – he claims that since the best results the government could possibly achieve with $100 billion would be very good, the government in fact should take that $100 billion.
My criticism of his claim, on the other hand, was to take something more like the actualist line. After all, I said, “if Sanders is right about the cost of ending homelessness, the federal government could completely end all homelessness in America with just 1.7% of what the federal government already spends in a single year.” Yet I notice that homelessness has not been eliminated.
It’s worth noting that Sanders didn’t claim that the federal government could end homelessness and provide clean drinking water to everyone at a cost of $100 billion per year. He claimed that both issues could be completely solved with a one time cost of $100 billion. So, by Sanders’ lights, the government could possibly have already ended homelessness scores of times over with its vast resources, but has not actually done so for various reasons. Yet at the same time, he thinks the government taking another $100 billion in taxes should be evaluated, not on the basis of what real-world experience shows the government will actually do, but on what he thinks is the best thing the government might possibly do, according to his ideal standard.
In another post, Scott Alexander evaluates the prospect of taxing billionaires to try to produce good results, where he also takes something very much like the actualist perspective:
Two of the billionaires whose philanthropy I most respect, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, have done a lot of work on criminal justice reform. The organizations they fund determined that many innocent people are languishing in jail for months because they don’t have enough money to pay bail; others are pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit because they have to get out of jail in time to get to work or care for their children, even if it gives them a criminal record. They funded a short-term effort to help these people afford bail, and a long-term effort to reform the bail system. One of the charities they donate to, The Bronx Freedom Fund, found that 92% of suspects without bail assistance will plead guilty and get a criminal record. But if given enough bail assistance to make it to trial, over half would have all charges dropped. This is exactly the kind of fighting-mass-incarceration and stopping-the-cycle-of-poverty work everyone says we need, and it works really well. I have donated to this charity myself, but obviously I can only give a tiny fraction of what Moskovitz and Tuna manage.
If Moskovitz and Tuna’s money instead flowed to the government, would it accomplish the same goal in some kind of more democratic, more publicly-guided way? No. It would go to locking these people up, paying for more prosecutors to trick them into pleading guilty, more prison guards to abuse and harass them. The government already spends $100 billion – seven times Tuna and Moskovitz’s combined fortunes – on maintaining the carceral state each year. This utterly dwarfs any trickle of money it spends on undoing the harms of the carceral state, even supposing such a trickle exists. Kicking Tuna and Moskovitz out of the picture isn’t going to cause bail reform to happen in some civically-responsible manner. It’s just going to ensure that all the money goes to making the problem worse – instead of the current situation where the overwhelming majority of money goes to making the problem worse but a tiny amount also going to making it better.
It seems to me that there is likely a strong overlap with how much one finds the actualist line of thought persuasive, and their proclivity to view public policy decisions through the lens of concepts like public choice economics, or to evaluate economic regulation with the theory of regulatory capture as opposed to the public-interest theory of regulation. Just like James Buchanan described public choice as evaluating politics without romance, actualist philosophers think behavior should be guided by a similarly unromantic view of human nature.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Sep 5 2024 at 4:42pm
I think your examples are both compelling and realistic, and find myself firmly in the actualist camp for all of them. Yet, I imagine another skilled writer could likely come up with other examples that would put me on the possiblilist side.
I work with startups for a living, which by it’s nature means I’m likely to be an optimist, because despite the overwhelming failure rates, I’m still willing to sink a lot of effort into a new company and believe that it will somehow buck the odds. I probably take a little of that (probably) misguided optimism with me to the world of government and policy.
However, there’s another lesson from startups that I’d like to see more of in government, and that’s the idea of experimentation. A recent episode of Eco talk with Mike Munger talked about Pigou and others from the Cambridge school who advocated for this approach. But, what they didn’t talk about (and an area I would also be interested in hearing more of from Public Choice adherents) is how we could better align incentives in policy to encourage exploration, experimentation, and (most importantly) cancelling the things that don’t work.
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 5 2024 at 8:46pm
Indeed, one can come up with thought experiments where possibilism, rather than actualism, seems to generate the intuitively correct moral prescription. Part of what I’ve found from the literature is that it depends on the delta among the different options. You can prime judgments against actualism when the difference between the best and second best is huge and the difference between the second best and worst is minor. Possibilism, by contrast, looks worst in scenarios where there is little difference between the best and second best outcomes, but the difference between the second best and worst is huge. So, for example, in the tennis example, possibilism comes off as even worse if instead of merely whacking Bob over the head, I would bludgeon him to death. This highlights what I think is the strongest objection to possiblism – what philosophers generally call the “worst possible outcome” objection. That is, possibilism seems to suggest you have a moral obligation to take an action that will bring about the worst possible results, even when that worst result is incredibly awful.
The strongest objections to actualism (to me, anyway) are the not-demanding-enough objection, and the bad-behavior objection. Briefly, the former points out that according to actualism, you can be genuinely relieved of the responsibility to carry out normal moral obligations simply due to you having a vicious moral character. But that seems wrong – why should your disposition to behave badly mean you are free from moral obligations the rest of us would face? (I don’t mean you are a morally vicious guy Dylan!) So it seems like actualism lets agents off the hook too easily – if you’re simply disposed to not do the right thing, no matter how easily you could do it, as long as you’re actually not going to do it actualism lets you off the hook. The second, somewhat related objection, the bad-behavior objection, says that actualism can mean you gain a moral obligation to do terrible things. So let’s say after my tennis match with Bob I’m so angry that I want to bludgeon someone to death. And if I do so, I will let off all my steam and I won’t hurt anyone else. But if I don’t do that, I’ll just stew over it to the point where tomorrow I’ll be so angry that I’ll kill someone is a very slightly more painful way. So the best possible thing I could do is kill nobody, the best thing I’d actually do is kill one person, and the worst thing I could do is kill someone slightly more painfully. According to actualism, I would incur a moral obligation to murder someone – but that just seems wrong, and possibilism seems to generate the correct moral prescription, even if I’ll ignore it.
Michael Munger
Sep 6 2024 at 12:18pm
Great question, Dylan! The answer is FEDERALISM, combined with a robust 10th amendment interpretation that limits the commerce clause and other provisions of the constitution from interpreted in a way that prevents states from being able to experiment.
If we have bad, or just inert, policies at the national level, we are stuck. But states can be the “laboratories of democracy” (though that phrase comes from Brandeis asking states to think of new ways to nullify restrictions on regulation!).
But that’s the Public Choice answer, long advocated by James Buchanan: let the states try different things, and there will be both movements among states toward better policies, AND mimicry, where good policies can be adopted by other states without paying the same experimentation costs of discovery.
nobody.really
Sep 5 2024 at 5:40pm
Nice exposition about the distinction between actualism and possibilism.
I often wonder how rigorously to focus on philosophical distinctions. The recent discussion “A Question for Anti-Utilitarians” prompted my latest ruminations, wherein Scott Sumner asks whether libertarianism and long-run utilitarianism lead to the same outlook—an endlessly fascinating question. This forced me to reflect that I tend to embrace utilitarianism, even though I acknowledge that no one actually has a utilitometer by which to measure and aggregate the intersubjective (social) utility of various policy alternatives. I figure we basically rely on an intuitive sense of empathy, faulty though it may be, because I doubt the feasibility of alternative perspectives. (Though I give Pierre Lemieux credit for admirably promoting his case.)
In the context of the current discussion, I wonder if possibilism is merely naive actualism—that is, a philosophy that argues that certain ideal behavior is possible because it’s built upon a stylized understanding of human beings. Actualism may reflect a fuller understanding of the real-world constraints that human beings face, and thus reflects TRUE possibilism. And I surmise that Kevin Corcoran wants the reader to reach this conclusion—and by analogy, to reach a new understanding about the relationship between liberalism and public choice theory: Specifically, perhaps liberalism reflects a naïve (“romanticized”) understanding of people’s interactions with government, whereas public choice reflects a fuller understanding of the real-world constraints that human beings face, and thus reflects TRUE liberalism. If this was Kevin Corcoran’s thesis, the message arrives loud and clear.
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 5 2024 at 9:00pm
That wasn’t actually my thesis at all – I’m terrible at Straussian esoteric writing! That said, I do find your extracted thesis rather interesting, and I’ll imagine I’ll be spending some time pondering it going forward. So, thank you for that!
Cody Boyer
Sep 5 2024 at 6:30pm
I’m pretty firmly in the actualist camp, but I think it’s helpful to think of this as something that’s not static, but dynamic. With respect to personal behavior, I definitely think it’s more helpful in the short term to be an actualist, but over the longer term, what exactly “being an actualist” means might change. A person concerned about animal cruelty might cut out some meat from their diet as a start, but perhaps they find that after they’ve adjusted their eating habits, found good vegetarian recipes, etc., they’re capable of more than they originally thought. This might be described as actualists should try to push themselves towards the possibilist frontier.
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 5 2024 at 8:56pm
What you suggest is actually pretty close in spirit to what the philosopher Travis Timmerman calls “hybridism,” which as the name implies offers up a hybrid version of actualism and possibilism. The short version of this is that when we are evaluating the “criterion of rightness” as philosophers call it, we should be possibilists. That is, moral responsibilities and obligations should be set by the best thing we can possibly do. On the other hand, we are flawed and imperfect agents and this is a fact with important practical relevance which we should account into our decision making. So at the level of day-to-day practical moral oughts, we should act like actualists. Under hybridism, we might end up doing things that are wrong in order to prevent us from doing a greater wrong, but those actions are still wrong and deserving of censure – hybridism doesn’t relieve agents of their moral obligations in a way the “not demanding enough” objection to actualism suggests. So hybridism lines up with what you described very well as actualists trying to push themselves towards the possiblist frontier.
steve
Sep 5 2024 at 11:02pm
You talk about this as it relates to government and it’s a decent argument. However, I think if this were applied more generally we probably dont get major innovations. No Wright Brothers, no heart transplants, no Columbus even.
Steve
Robert EV
Sep 7 2024 at 5:21pm
There are pro-government examples as well that I think would have fleshed this thesis out a bit more. The interstate highway system being one of them.
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