A Stitch in Haste

Steve Landsburg’s latest Slate piece, on Terri Schiavo and respecting or disregarding the wishes of the dead (or not dead, or not quite dead), is generating quite a buzz. See the posts, and comments sections, at Asymmetrical Information, Catallarchy, Outside the Beltway and Marginal Revolution.

I have two problems with Landsburg’s “a corpse is just another resource” thesis, (three if you include its straightforward offensiveness). First is his less-than-a-sentence glossing over of why his argument is tautologically invalid:

Suppose there is a segment of the population who wants to censor, oh, say, the radical thought of William Saletan. Many of us get a lot of pleasure from reading Saletan, but the anti-Saletanians would get (let us suppose) far more pleasure from banning him. Once we've agreed on an appropriate way to measure that pleasure, a strict cost-benefit analysis might argue for a ban from which a libertarian would recoil.

But Landsburg knows damn well that there is no way to measure pleasure across individuals. Interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible. I can make intrapersonal utility comparisons for myself (e.g., I prefer a Snickers Bar over a Milky Way bar; I prefer a dime over an issue of the New York Times), but between two people who both like Snickers Bars it is meaningless to ask who “prefers” the Snickers Bar more or who would get “more utility” from the Snickers Bar. So, since there can be no “appropriate way to measure that pleasure” (Landsburg’s term), the whole rest of his thesis (i.e., that a “cost-benefit analysis” over whether to censor Saletan, or who “values” Terri’s body/corpse more) is nonsense.

The second criticism I have is an error or omission on Landsburg’s part – another reason why we respect both the dead (i.e., corpses) and the wishes of the dead. I made a similar argument in a previous post on animal cruelty.

While it is correct that, “animals have no rights” (i.e., they are living but non-human) and “corpses have no preferences” (i.e., they are human but non-living), we nevertheless show them “respect” because not to do so imposes externalities on living human beings. In other words, we are not so much respecting animals and corpses so much as we are respecting ourselves by not disgusting each other through tasering pigs or using corpses as crash-test dummies. The pig doesn’t count. The corpse doesn’t count. But I count and you count.

Now circle back to Terri Schiavo. Since interpersonal utility comparisons are meaningless, we cannot, as Landsburg proposes, somehow “measure” whether Michael Schiavo or Terri’s parents would derive “more utility” from the control of Terri’s corpse. Neither can we “maximize social welfare” by repackaging Schaivo’s corpse as a “resource” to one or both sides. We can, however, directly observe the externalities to society that are generated whenever we hear tales of disrespect for the dead.

Despite the fact that Landsburg calls himself a “libertarian,” he seems to have quite a penchant for central planning (e.g., my previous post). One of the worst tricks central planners use is to invoke false interpersonal utility comparisons (remember the monstrosity known as the “social welfare function” from your basic economics class?). The notion that playing fast and loose with the dead somehow “maximizes social utility” is both anti-social and anti-utility.

And it’s definitely not libertarian.

POST SCRIPT: You saw the story about corpses as crash dummies – but did you see this?