Let’s have another paradox from Saul Smilansky’s book Ten Moral Paradoxes. This one is really depressing. Say you consider yourself to be in the bottom 50% of your profession. You’re a doctor, detective or (ahem) philosophy professor. (Actually, hardly anyone actually thinks their below average, but try to put yourself in those shoes.) Absurd as it may seem, there’s a good case to be made that you should retire. On Smilansky’s rather liberal understanding of what counts as a paradox, that’s paradoxical.
What is a paradox, really? Is there a paradox whenever a surprising conclusion can be supported by good arguments? Is it a paradox that….lots of money doesn’t make you a whole lot happier? That severe disabilities don’t make you a whole lot more miserable? (Both seem to be shown by recent happiness research.) When I think of “paradox” I think of gems like Zeno’s proof that there’s no such thing as motion. There you’ve got an evidently false conclusion supported by a seemingly sound argument. Spend an afternoon trying to “solve” that paradox, and you’ll nearly go mad. The retirement paradox isn’t mind-bending in the same way.
But let’s not worry (I suggest) about what counts as a grade A paradox. Smilansky has a pretty compelling case that all us below-average workers (let’s pretend that’s you and me, though of course we know better) should spare the world our feeble efforts. True?
OK, first a bunch of qualifiers. We should retire provided that there’s a good supply of job applicants ready to take our place, and provided it won’t cause us any “exceptional” hardship. If you’re a below-average doctor and can go to work at your uncle’s business doing above average bookkeeping, you should.
But why? For reasons that will appeal to Utilitarians. Giving your place to another doctor will result in more disease prevented, more disease cured. You’ll decrease “bad” in the word and increase “good.” But also for reasons that will appeal to others. You went into the profession because of your dedication to health, right? So isn’t it a matter of personal integrity for you to step aside and let a better health-promoter take your place?
If Smilansky’s right that below average professionals should retire (under the conditions mentioned) it does clash with other assumptions we normally make. We can’t all be above average. Aren’t the lower 50% actually rather admirable to remain dedicated to their professions despite receiving less praise, fewer laurels, lower pay, etc? When you choose a career, should your potential for success really loom so large? Isn’t there an admirable sort of idealism involved when someone goes after a medical degree, philosophy degree, or whatever it might be, without being a stand-out, top-performing star?
If it were true that the lower 50% should retire, it really would be quite surprising.
Update: I added “under the conditions mentioned” to stress the qualifiers. The idea is not that every single bottom-half professional ought to retire…which would be not just surprising but impossible.
The ‘paradox’ assumes one’s professional worth is measured relative to colleagues. However in many jobs all that really matters is that you reach a predetermined level of skill or competence - which may be quite high (e.g., surgeons) or fairly low (e.g., politicians*). Any performance above that mark is great, but not essential.
In jobs where the bar is set very high (resulting in, say, 90% failing to reach the required standard) being slightly above average is not good enough.
*just kidding
Maybe the real paradox is that it can’t be done. Particular people can retire, but as you say, we can’t all be above average. People retiring does nothing to get rid of the below-average 50% - so why bother?
Paul, I’d like to be convinced, but isn’t it true that some surgeons do much better than others? Even if they must meet a very high standard to stay in the profession, some will save more lives, etc. So even if the lower 50% are excellent, shouldn’t they step aside and make room for people who are even more excellent? At least, I think that’s SS’s claim.
Ophelia, The “qualifiers” are relevant–IF there’s a good supply of job applicants. If lower 50% workers thought they should retire, the supply of job applicants would gradually get used up. Then there would no longer be the obligation to retire, and the lower 50% folks could think “better me than nobody.” I imagine some fields are like that today. School teachers, I take it, should not retire, even if they are lower-50%. There’s nobody to take their place.
It’s always been a favourite mantra of mine, after having had a bad experience with a doc, to say, ‘Well, half of all doctors pass out in the bottom half of their class.” Which is strictly true. And, as Ophelia points out, if we failed more of them, if would still be true, and then, if we failed even more.
Perhaps, if a doctor hasn’t laid waste to the whole community, they’re better off having him/her than no one at all. Yes, I know, that’s part of the puzzle, that someone will be there to take your place. But you can never be sure. He/She might only stay a year or so. And if they’re really better, they’ll probably get better offers too.
I’m beginning to have a bad feeling about Smilansky’s idea of paradox. The last one wasn’t, at least I don’t think it was. But I’m pretty sure this one isn’t either.
On the other hand, there are people who should retire, or at least find another vocation. I’ve met them. But this isn’t a paradox. It’s just good sense, and most of us, though we do tend to wobble towards self-deception, do know when we really can’t do the job. Not always, of course, and then hopefully being sacked or ignored will give you a hint. Of course, there are incompetents who keep getting promoted until they find something they can actually do well!
I’m already retired, so it can’t mean me.
Eric says “half of all doctors pass out in the bottom half of their class’. It is strictly true if we use the median as a measure of average, and isn’t this true in all professions? Further, we need to separate the average (median here) from standards. Even if 50% were in the lower half, the standards could mean they are all fairly competent. We might also ask if being in the top half of any university class is a good measure of competence in the profession itself—other skills (not measured in education) may contribute to success (such as good interpersonal skills, caring for cleints rather than money, etc?)
I’d also be surprised if it were true that the lower 50% (half of everyone in every profession) should retire.
After all, this would seem to require that those people could either be replaced with higher quality people or that the remaining 50% could do what they were doing before in addition to doing the work done by everyone that retired.
As Ophelia indicates, the real paradox seems to be different from the alleged paradox: if the bottom 50% should retire, then each such retirement cycle would create a new bottom 50% who should retire. Eventually we’d be down to one person in each profession-the top of the field (and the bottom, too). Hopefully, that person would not have to retire his/her bottom 50%.
As I say, there are qualifiers. He’s not making a universal claim to the effect that anyone who is in the bottom half of their profession should retire.
As I said above–
Take the philosophy profession today. There is a huge supply of job applicants. Say I am at the 20th percentile, ability-wise and I could support myself in another way. Under those conditions, SS says I should retire. Whoever takes my place has a 4 to 1 chance of being more proficient than me. Although not a universal claim, that limited claim is certainly very surprising….if true.
I don’t buy into it, because people mediocre at their jobs can conceivably accomplish the job that someone who can do the job very well.
e.g. Imagine I’m teaching an introduction to philosophy course. Now the majority of my students are not philosophy majors, but rather people taking it to fulfill academic requirements. Most of them will forget the content of the course regardless of how good the professor is. Now I may not be the best professor, but I am very entertaining. So while these students are in my charge, I entertain them brilliantly with relationships to popular culture, and analogies that compare getting pregnant to being burglarized. Haven’t I increased the happiness of more people, without decreasing anything?
Another example… I’m the owner of a McDonalds… and I have the choice between the world’s best Fry Cook, and the teenager who just walked in the door. Really, is hiring the best Fry Cook going to significantly increase the happiness of people as opposed to the competent or even mediocre fry cook?
I think I would agree with Smilanski when it came to certain jobs like Doctoring… Mediocre doctors may kill many people, and they rightly ought to retire and find a new line of work.
The philosophy example might have some clout (as well as being amusing)….
The fry cook example doesn’t necessarily have force unless that’s really a profession–the sort of thing people do because of a commitment to some value.
Also, he does exempt bad professions from his point. If your profession is being a hit man, it would actually be better if you were in the lower half of the profession. Well, at least if bad hit men never hit anyone. If they actually hit bystanders a lot, that would be another story.
Jean, I still don’t understand. Why is this sort of thing being called a paradox? I know it’s a non-standard use of the word, but when does a non-standard use cease being a use at all? And in what way is studying this book a good introduction to philosophy? (That was part of the come on, wasn’t it?)
This is Prof’s web site at Haifa
http://philo.haifa.ac.il/faculty_pages/smilansk.htm
The basis of the book chapter I would suppose is no.30 on the list of online publications.
That the lower 20% of the ‘dangerous’ professions ought to retire. The thrusting underclass of aspirants has a pool that contains the full range of talent thereby the duffer’s replacement would be 4 times more likely to be from a higher percentile. If the criteria for accessing excellence remained the same then you ought to get an improving profession as a whole but if it changes over time then the self-devouring aspect of the algorithm if that’s what it’s called would become marked.
There is an assumption about the uniformity of the tasks in a profession. It forgets the natural winnowing of the wheat from the chaff, the kicking upstairs, the Japanese way i.e. give them nothing to do. The most gifted people often consider themselves to be stupid whilst the ‘good timekeepers’ swan about in an ecstasy of self-appreciation. In any profession or calling people find their natural level based on ability and ambition. One has heard of child prodigy underachievers and also of the limpets on the rock of tenure who may be publishing lots of papers with 3caret gems at their heart. They may be excellent teachers though or Docs with a wonderful bedside manner.
Too many variables and a too narrow definition of the good to be persuasive as a desideratum.
OK, full disclosure on why I am discussing this book (since Eric wants to know).
I’ve been thinking for a while it would be fun to have a “book club” at TP, as is done at many other philosophy websites. But there are some difficulties. It’s not at all obvious anyone will read the book I suggest. So it needs to be something that lends itself to discussion for non-readers. It has to be presentable in quick posts of the type I write here.
On the other hand, if people do buy the book at my recommendation, it had better be suitable for people with anywhere from no background in philosophy to a lot. Plus, it needs to be worth my own time.
This book fills the bill. It was recommended to me by an ethicist friend. It has been very favorably reviewed. The reviews say it’s interesting for both beginners and “professionals.” It’s already been a “book club” pick at other philosophy websites. The author says the chapters can be read in any order.
As to SS’s concept of paradox. In the intro. he says there are different kinds of paradox. The familiar very zingy ones like Zeno’s paradoxes are “falsidical.” They consist of an apparently false conclusion arrived at from apparently true premises by apparently good reasoning. The moral paradoxes SS talks about are “existential” he says. The conclusions are apparently false, but actually true.
Is this a sloppy new notion of paradox? I’m not sure, but I just had a look at the website MR linked to, and it says Sainsbury’s book on paradoxes, 3rd edition, has a section on SS’s moral paradoxes. Apparently paradox experts don’t scoff at this sort of thing.
In any event, what’s really the interest of these things? I’m not sure it’s the label “paradox” as opposed to the reasoning and conclusions. At the back of the book a chapter goes into this, but I haven’t read it yet.
Aha, the man himself, talking about his book. When I have time, I plan on listening.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/14400
heh all of this talk about paradoxes led me to think about a couple of my favorite paradoxes that to some degree arn’t paradoxes in the traditional sense:
The Toxin Paradox: A extremely rich man offers you a million dollars to form the intention of drinking a toxic substance. It won’t kill you, but you know it will make you very ill for a short while. But here’s the rub. All you have to do is form the intention at midnight tonight to drink the substance at noon the next day… whether you actually drink the toxin is irrelevant. So long as you can form the intention to drink, then you get the million. Is this possible?
Moore’s Paradox: “It is raining and I do not believe it” and similar sentences of the form “P and I do not believe P” according to Moore are paradoxical statements. One could never assert any of these sentences meaningfully…. however, you could assert sentences very similar to them quite meaningfully.
I don’t think either of these are paradoxes in the traditional sense… But then again, neither are Zeno’s paradoxes in the strictest sense. (I think of a paradox as an claim that cannot be assigned a truth value.) Zeno’s paradoxes are just good reductio ad absurdum arguments…. But I rarely hear about reductio ad absurdum arguments today referred to as a paradox.
Jean,
Isn’t it wonderful that today we don’t have to worry about paradoxes like this? If patients know that a doctor is not very good, then they will naturally seek out better doctors making room for new, better doctors to come onto the scene. If some patients choose to still go to the bad doctor, it means that either there is something about the doctor’s services that patients find valuable, or the doctor has somehow tricked the patients (in which case the problem is deceit, not really paradoxical at all).
There is no need for a professional to compare themselves to others in their field. Either their services command a fee on their own merits, or they do not. Even if they do retire out of concern for consumers, doing so will increase demand for services making it easier for less qualified individuals to gain entry into the profession. Even if doing so does drive up prices and attract more qualified professionals, inevitably these individuals are being enticed away for other fields where they might have made just as much, if not more of a contribution.
The important thing for maximizing the consumer’s benefit ultimately has less to do with the providers’ attempts at maximizing utility as it does with consumers’ knowledge about the providers. Sometimes everyone benefits most when everyone takes care of themselves.
Wayne, Wikipedia has a good entry about what paradoxes are. I’t’s a term surely open to more than one definition. I have a cute book of paradoxes by Martin Gardner, which talks about them as magic tricks. You a say a bunch of reasonable stuff and then (poof) out of that you get something crazy sounding. Like you want to know how magic was done, you want to figure out if the craziness is illusory, or the reasonable stuff wasn’t really reasonable. It shouldn’t be the case that from reasonable beginnings you wind up in a crazy place. I think SS’s view is that in ethics you just do.
M. Harris, I think in a lot of fields you’re right. Nobody has to commit professional suicide because some sort of weeding process is in force. The thing is, academia is quite different. Once a person has tenure, they can spin their wheels for another 30 years without being in any danger. So professors seem to have special duty to retire….if SS is right… and assuming all of his qualifications. (Plenty of applicants, no exceptional hardship from retiring, etc.)
Paradoxes aside, if there is a book club, wouldn’t it be a good idea to select books that are readily available everywhere. Even if I order a book from Amazon (which is expensive, given the international shipping costs), it takes 3 weeks to arrive. Given that there are people who live far from bookstores which sell new philosophy texts in English and who do not have access to university libraries, wouldn’t it be preferable to select philosophical classics for a book club?
Here the prof is being tackled by some of his peers with bone-crushing excuse mes.
http://ethics-etc.com/2007/09/26/some-questions-about-moral-paradoxes1/
They are having the same trouble with his notion of paradox as us and also there is rejection of the surdogenic power of paradox in relation to morality as a whole
For myself I find nothing alarming in the idea of beneficial retirement but what I do find to be a paradox is that having none but really brilliant people working for you is a bad idea. After all it was that group that invented the instruments that made sub-prime mortgages profitable. Ordinary dullards would have kept to the well trodden paths of standard defalcation. The top firms that took the cream of the talent were the first to crash and burn. This is just an impression of mine and is to be taken well salted.
Amos, Well, I’ve been a tyrant about this, I admit. I have suited myself, but tried to also suit the medium of a non-academic blog, the folks who often comment here, etc. The problem about availability didn’t occur to me, unfortunately. Reading classics…hmm. Sometimes that appeals to me, but I confess that at this very moment it doesn’t.
MR, I will look at the link. I think his notion of a paradox is rather loose, but I find that as I read the book I get the hang of it. Reasonable stuff leading logically to something crazy and absurd, but true. That’s the structure of his paradoxes. I’ll be interested to see what the peers say about it.
Surdogenic! Apt to generate absurdity?
Defalcation?
Jean,
You raised a good point in the case of tenure. While there may be some good reasons for keeping the tenure system, I agree that a tenured professor who is past their prime may in some cases be doing everyone a favor by retiring early (the labor market has being artificially suspended, we must substitute individuals’ judgments). This probably depends somewhat on the professor’s field, and it’s complicated by the fact that tenure carries with it a gatekeeper function that is separate from their productivity. Presumably they are putting a large part of their experience towards increasing the productivity of those around them, but it does carry with it the unfortunate effect of making it possible for some to rest on their laurels to the detriment of everyone else.
Jean,
I tend to think that one’s professional abilities are dynamic and not static as is “wrongly” presupposed in the argument. “Bad” doctors can become better as well as “good” ones can become worse. Imagine doctors retiring and then called back because their peers retired too!!! Also, we are not obliged to accept utilitarianism as a universal moral theory. On the other hand if we do buy into utilitariansim we could conclude that we would decrease the overall happiness of those who would retire without really wanting to. How then could we calculate if we’done more right than wrong? Bentham’s calculus seems like a bad joke…Another false presupposition is that human societies are systems that could be controlled and fixed in a mathematical-percentile way. There are numerous historical examples that refute this notion.
I think that professional societies do actually check their members’ abilities to an acceptable degree, although things could be improved. The proposed retirement sounds to me as a hidden totalitarian view.
>>When I think of “paradox” I think of gems like Zeno’s proof that there’s no such thing as motion. There you’ve got an evidently false conclusion supported by a seemingly sound argument. Spend an afternoon trying to “solve” that paradox, and you’ll nearly go mad.
I had never heard of this before and so I looked it up. From my understanding based on what I read, Zeno thought that since if a person misinterpreted his closing speed at an object with said persons personal speed and compared this to a third parties observation of that persons visible speed, and there was a discrepancy, motion must be an illusion? He never really accounts for common sense, which is that closing speed is also contingent on the speed and direction of which that you are closing on.
My personal question to you is why he would have never considered that? It just seems like your thinking would have to be absolutely broken not to arrive at that conclusion immediately.
I mean, it’s not even something I would stop to question, ponder, or consider paradoxical. It’s elementary mathematics and physics.
I wouldn’t call this a paradox. A person who refuses to retire given the qualifications presented is simply selfish. I don’t use that word in a derogatory manner, but that’s the only truth there is to this question. We could discuss the rights of an individual to fufill their own personal desires and the consequences those decisions have on others, but at that point we’re no longer discussing the paradox of the individual, but instead the collective opinion of everybody else, who is likely just as selfish. :)