The reversal test eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 656-679

  Bostrom, Nick ^a   Ord, Toby ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; COGNITION; DECISION MAKING; EMPIRICAL APPROACH; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; ETHICS; GENETIC ENHANCEMENT; GENETICS; HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH; HUMAN; INTELLIGENCE; LIFE EXPECTANCY; MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH; PHYSIOLOGY; REVIEW; RISK ASSESSMENT; SOCIAL CHANGE; UNCERTAINTY;

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; EMPIRICAL APPROACH; HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH;

BIOMEDICAL ENHANCEMENT; CHOICE BEHAVIOR; COGNITION; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; ETHICAL ANALYSIS; GENETIC ENHANCEMENT; HUMANS; INTELLIGENCE; LIFE EXPECTANCY; RISK ASSESSMENT; SOCIAL CHANGE; UNCERTAINTY;

EID: 33749185884     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/505233     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. In parallel to affirming deontological side constraints, one might also hold that the value of a state of affairs depends on how that state was brought about. For instance, one might hold that the value of a state of affairs is reduced if it resulted from a decision that violated a deontological side constraint. When we discuss the consequentialist dimension of ethical or prudential decision making in this article, we mainly set aside this possibility.
2. See, e.g., Thomas Gilovich, Dale W. Griffin, and Daniel Kahnenian, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. For a good introduction to the literature on status quo bias and related phenomena, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Choices, Values, and Frames (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4. Gilovich et al., Heuristics and Biases.
5. Independent of the issue of status quo bias, there is evidence of a durability bias in affective forecasting, which leads people to systematically overestimate the duration of emotional reactions to future events; see, e.g., Gilovich et al., Heuristics and Biases, 292ff.
6. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, "Status Quo Bias in Decision Making," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1 (1988): 7-59.
7. Raymond S. Hartman, Michael J. Doane, and Chi-Keung Woo, "Consumer Rationality and the Status Quo," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (1991): 141-62.
8. The work of Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their collaborators has convinced many economists that the standard economic paradigm, which postulates rational expected-utility maximizing agents, is, despite its simplicity and convenient formal features, not descriptively adequate for many situations of human decision making.
9. The exact nature and the psychological factors contributing to status quo bias are not yet fully understood. Loss aversion - the tendency to place a greater weight on aspects of outcomes when they are represented as "losses" (rather than, e.g., forfeited gains) - seems to be a significant part of the picture (James N. Druckman, "Evaluating Framing Effects," Journal of Economic Psychology 22 [2001]: 91-101).
10. It has also been suggested that omission bias may account for some of the findings previously ascribed to status quo bias. Omission bias is diagnosed when a decision maker prefers a harmful outcome that results from an omission to a less harmful outcome that results from an action (even in cases where presumably no moral deontological constraints are involved; liana Ritov and Jonathan Baron, "Status-Quo and Omission Biases," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5 [1992]: 49-61).
11. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice," Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453-58.
12. For a review of more recent confirmations of this framing effect, see, e.g., Druckman, "Evaluating Framing Effects."
13. R. Thaler, "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice," Journal of Human Behavior and Organization 1 (1980): 39-60.
14. B. J. McNeil, S. G. Pauker, H. G. Sox, and A. Tversky, "On the Elicitation of Preferences for Alternative Therapies," New England Journal of Medicine 306 (1982): 1259-62.
15. See, e.g., Søren Holm, "Genetic Engineering and the North-South Divide," in Ethics and Biotechnology, ed. A. Dyson and J. Harris (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47-63;
16. Gregory S. Kavka, "Upside Risks: Social Consequences of Beneficial Biotechnology," in Are Genes Us? The Social Consequences of the New Genetics, ed. C. Cranor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 155-79;
17. George J. Annas, Lori B. Andrews, and Rosario M. Isasi, "Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations," American Journal of Law and Medicine 28 (2002): 151-78;
18. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002);
19. Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002);
20. Michael Sandel, "The Case against Perfection," Atlantic Monthly 293 (2004): 51-62. For some of these, such as Leon Kass, it is sometimes difficult to discern to what extent the objection refers to the (narrow) effects of the intervention or to the mere fact that intervention and control is exercised. We partially address objections regarding the degree of control in Sec. V.
21. Holm, "Genetic Engineering and the North-South Divide," 60 and n. 9.
22. Kean Birch, "Beneficence, Determinism and Justice: An Engagement with the Argument for the Genetic Selection of Intelligence," Bioethics 16 (2005): 12-28, 24.
23. See, e.g., Ainsley Newson and Robert Williamson, "Should We Undertake Genetic Research on Intelligence?" Bioethics 13 (1999): 327-42;
24. James Hudson, "What Kinds of People Should We Create?" Journal of Applied Philosophy 17 (2000): 131-43;
25. Mark Walker, "Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy," Journal of Evolution and Technology 10 (2002), http://jetpress.org/contents.htm;
26. Nick Bostrom, "Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective," Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (2003): 493-506;
27. see also Jonathan Glover, What Sort of People Should There Be? (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1984);
28. Anjan Chatterjee, "Cosmetic Neurology: The Controversy over Enhancing Movement, Mentation, and Mood," Neurology 63 (2004): 968-74;
29. M. J. Farah, J. Illes, R. Cook-Deegan, H. Gardner, E. Kandel, P. King, E. Parens, B. Sahakian, and P. R. Wolpe, "Neurocognitive Enhancement: What Can We Do and What Should We Do?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5 (2004): 421.
30. Richard J. Haier, Rex E. Jung, Ronald A. Yeo, Kevin Head, and Michael T. Alkire, "Structural Brain Variation and General Intelligence," Neuroimage 23 (2004): 425.
31. Compare Nick Bostrom, "Transhumanist Values," in Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. F. Adams (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophical Documentation Center, 2004).
32. Compare Nick Bostrom, "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards," Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (2002), http://jetpress.org/contents.htm.
33. See, e.g., Melinda A. Roberts, "A New Way of Doing the Best That We Can: Person-Based Consequentialism and the Equality Problem," Ethics 112 (2002): 315-50. Note that the idea of person-affecting ethics is not simply that what is good for one person may not be good for another. That the good for a person may partially depend on her preferences and other personal factors can of course be admitted by consequentialists who reject the person-affecting view.
34. Glover, What Sort of People Should There Be?
35. However, in general, if the proposed change in a parameter is very large, the Reversal Test will tend to give a less definite verdict. This is because there is less prima facie implausibility in supposing that a larger interval of parameter values contains a local optimum than that a smaller interval does.
36. Alternatively, one could speculate that the direct enhancement of cognitive ability would set a different kind of precedent than either the "therapeutic enhancement" to compensate for a natural brain-damaging factor or the subsequent increase in cognitive ability that results when the natural factor disappears. But this speculation would have to be justified. If the idea is that direct cognitive enhancement would lead to further cognitive enhancement, it would have to be shown that (1) this is significantly more likely to result from direct cognitive enhancement than from therapeutic enhancement followed by a natural increase and (2) that further cognitive enhancement would be bad. But consider an iterated application of the Double Reversal Test: a series of disasters occur in which neurotoxins are released, each followed by a therapeutic enhancement to preserve the status quo and a subsequent elevation of cognitive ability when the neurotoxin disappears. At the end of the series, average cognitive ability is at a much higher level than it is today. Is there any point in this series where the brain damage ought not be compensated for by a therapeutic enhancement, or where it would be better to prevent the ensuing rise by preserving the brain-damaging factor?
37. Those (if any) who hold the opposite view should also address, e.g., whether the world would be better if nobody had access to expensive AIDS treatments, given that such treatments are not currently available to everybody. Or, to take a case more closely related to the one at hand, whether it would have been better in the past if nobody had been taught to read given that only elites had access to education. And considering that literacy is still far from universal, especially in the poorest countries, would it be better if nobody in those countries (or in developed countries?) were given this kind of cognitive enhancement unless and until everybody gets it? In such cases surely, le mieux est l'ennemi dubien.
38. There is a specific limitation when it comes to using the Reversal Test to address the issue of inequality. For the potential users who are already privileged in the status quo, the options of increasing the parameter and of decreasing it are opposites in terms of both equality and cognitive benefits. This allows our argument above to go through. However, for those who are at the average level of welfare in the society in the status quo this is not the case. While the options of increasing or decreasing cognitive ability will have opposite effects in the cognitive realm, both of these options will decrease social equality when applied to such a person. This is because in this situation any change to their well-being will create inequality: the equality of society is at a local optimum with respect to their welfare.
39. The Reversal Tests may sometimes appear to have less power to change opinion on matters of economic policy than on matters of human modification. If this is so, it might indicate that status quo bias is less pervasive in intuitions about economic policy, perhaps because we are more experienced in thinking about changes in economic policy than about changes in human nature.
40. President's Council on Bioethics (U.S.), Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, foreword by Leon Kass (Washington, DC: President's Council on Bioethics, 2004), 224.
41. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, 2004, 224 Ibid.
42. This example is not meant to be realistic. In the real world we have reason to celebrate the trend of increasing average height, as it is associated with beneficial developments resulting from improved nutrition. It is extremely implausible that the inconveniences of an increasing population height could ever be significant enough to outweigh the inevitable medical risks and costs of intervening to halt this trend (even setting aside important side constraints such as respect for individual autonomy).
43. Julian Savulescu, "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children," Bioethics 15 (2001): 413-26.
44. See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, The future of Human Nature (London: Blackwell, 2003).
45. Sandel, "The Case against Perfection."