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Response to Thought Experiment 50: The Good Bribe

4/15/2016

4 Comments

 
Picture
Faced with a dilemma? How do you choose?
Sorry I'm a day late with this week's thought experiment. About a week ago I received a request to write an article for a magazine I've contributed to in the past and I've been extra busy prepping that piece for yesterday's deadline. So, is it okay if I put forth a crappy effort here in return for the really polished and important argument I'm publishing elsewhere? I've been so preoccupied I've practically forgotten what this week's thought experiment is even about, so let's read it now as a reminder and then see if it affects my conundrum.

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     The Prime Minister liked to think of himself as a 'pretty straight kind of guy'. He genuinely despised corruption and sleaze in government and wanted to run a cleaner, more honest administration.
     Something had happened, however, that presented him with a real dilemma. At a Downing Street reception, a businessman known for his lack of scruples, but who did not have a criminal or civil conviction against him, took the PM aside. Whispering conspiratorially into his ear, he said, "Many people don't like me and don't respect the way I run my affairs. I don't give a damn about that. What does annoy me is that my reputation means I'll never be honoured by my country.
     "Well," he continued, "I'm sure you and I can do something about that. I'm prepared to give £10 million to help provide clean water for hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, if you can guarantee me that I'll be knighted in the New Year's honours list. If not, then I'll just spend it all on myself."
     He slapped the PM on the back, said, "Think it over," and slipped back into the crowd. The Prime Minister knew this was a kind of bribe. But could it really be wrong to sell one of this country's highest honours when the reward would be so obviously for the good?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 148.
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Right. So this is a pretty clear case of attempted quid pro quo, where:

quid (this) = a good thing (giving £10M to help people in Africa)
pro (for)
quo (that) = a bad thing (honouring a person with a bad reputation)

The experiment then is essentially asking what bad can we do in order to get a good outcome. In other words, can the ends justify the means? We could spend some time debating how good knighthoods actually are, or how beneficial more development money in Africa would really be. That might be expected to change the math a bit, since a lot of good for a little bad is surely a better bargain than the other way around. But is that the right way to look at this?

The most common ways that traditional moral philosophers talk about this kind of issue depends on which type of ethics they ascribe to. For the utilitarian who wants to tally up the consequences of the actions and determine which decisions contribute "the greatest good to the greatest number," the deal for the knighthood seems to be a good one. For a virtue ethicists concerned with honour and integrity, the Prime Minister ought to reject the offer out of hand as a violation of important principles. These two moral camps disagree so we can't yet come to a decision.

What, then, would an evolutionary ethicist say? For moral dilemmas in general, I try to evaluate the long-term consequences of actions as to whether they lead toward or away from the long-term survival of life. That's my universal definition of good, so that's always the ultimate test of whether a choice is right or wrong. In this scenario, if you evaluate it in the short term as if it were a one-off event with no other consequences, then to me the help for Africa would be worth the perception of offering one questionable knighthood. Over the long term, however, there is a real risk that the sleazy businessman would expose the details of his transaction, hoping to show that everyone was corrupt like him, which would threaten to take down the whole inspirational edifice of the government's system of honors. That might also do lasting harm to the fabric of trust that binds a society together, making it quite possible the country would lose far more than £10M from future foreign aid budgets. As the great writer and philosopher Montesquieu said:

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles."

So to me, the Prime Minister ought to reject the offer as it stands. However, the reason he should do so—the fact that a baldfaced quid pro quo would be a threat for the long-term—hints that an alternative solution might be the best of all. If I were the PM, I'd tell the businessman that his assumption is wrong that he could be honoured by his country without being honoured by the people of his country. Governments are of the people, by the people, for the people, (to think "the country" is something separate is a category error), so if the businessman is truly serious about receiving honours from the government, then he should go ahead and donate the money to Africa, and we would see where those actions took him with respect to the opinion of the people of England. (Having lived in the UK for five years now, and seeing the system of honours mainly reserved for the province of the rich and famous, I suspect the businessman could get his way eventually without demanding any backroom dealings. But who really knows?) In other words, the choice of the quid for the quo is a false one since one doesn't have to be caused by the other, even though they may be correlated and follow one another.

What do you think? When do ends justify means for you? Hopefully, my own dilemma of putting forth a crappy effort here in return for a better effort elsewhere has also proven false, but maybe you have other alternatives for the PM that you would like me to have considered. Let me know if you have a chance. I'll honour you any way that you want.
4 Comments
John A. Johnson link
4/17/2016 02:16:10 pm

Fortunately for your audience, you are such a good thinker that even your crappy efforts are pretty good.

I don't disagree with anything in the analysis, which seems sensible enough to me. What the analysis does for me, though, is to raise more questions. As an evolutionary psychologist, I remain fascinated and curious about how one commonly evolved human species can end up with seemingly irreconcilable positions such as utilitarianism and virtue ethics. One of my taken-for-granted assumptions as an evolutionary thinker is that our sense of morality, in general, has promoted human survival and reproduction. I therefore speculate that all the different major moral positions (utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontological morality, skepticism) probably serve some kind of adaptive function. (Obviously I am not referring to these positions as formal schools of thought, but, rather, ordinary feelings, thoughts, and intuitions about moral rules, motivations, and behavior.) An evolutionary ethical thinker is uniquely positioned to inquire about the adaptive, life-promoting properties of holding various ethical stances.

Another question that I have pondered before and was reminded about here is, how can any version of consequentialism be useful, given the uncertainly of outcomes from our choices? I regard an evolutionary take on morality to be a form of consequentialism, because what we are concerned with are the consequences of behavior for the long term survival of life. We can suspect that certain actions will lead to certain consequences. However, as you say, "But who really knows?"

Finally, the discussion of evolutionary ethics raised another question about your position that has been gnawing at me. When you suggest that the long-term survival of life defines what as good, do you equate the value of all life forms? If it became clear that the continued existence of human beings would end up destroying all of the life on the planet while a decision to not reproduce and therefore end our species would preserve life on the planet, would it be good to choose self-extinction?

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@EdGibney link
4/18/2016 10:10:13 am

--> Fortunately for your audience, you are such a good thinker that even your crappy efforts are pretty good.

Ha! I'm going to take that as a compliment. : )


--> As an evolutionary psychologist, I remain fascinated and curious about how one commonly evolved human species can end up with seemingly irreconcilable positions such as utilitarianism and virtue ethics. ... I speculate that all the different major moral positions (utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontological morality, skepticism) probably serve some kind of adaptive function. ... An evolutionary ethical thinker is uniquely positioned to inquire about the adaptive, life-promoting properties of holding various ethical stances.

This is a great question and area for exploration. I saw a great book review this week that prompted me to consider this as well. I think you'll find the review fascinating. It looks at C. Daniel Batson's new book "What's Wrong with Morality?: A Social-Psychological Perspective"

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/66148-whats-wrong-with-morality-a-social-psychological-perspective/#.VxAzS1yY9pQ.twitter

I imagine you'll know his past work, but in this one Batson "is descriptive through and through. It doesn’t matter to him which normative theory, if any, is true, or how principles feature in the true theory. Look around and you’ll see that humans do have moral principles, standards, ideals, etc., and do claim that these should guide our actions. But then we keep screwing it up. We value fairness, but we cheat. Batson just wants to know why that is. Philosophers of all theoretical orientations should want to know, too."

For me, I explain moral "failings" and the different camps of moral normative theories as what happens when the aim of moral outcomes drifts (aimlessly) along the spectrum of life. As a reminder, I regularly point out E.O. Wilson's biological categories that describe *all* of biology, which means *all* of life. From bottom to top, you have:

(1) Biochemistry → (2) molecular biology → (3) cellular biology → (4) organismic biology → (5) sociobiology → (6) ecology → (7) evolutionary biology.

As whole organisms, we no longer have moral emotions (survival mechanisms where choice is possible) in realms 1 through 3, but we do have the ability to choose (through some combination of nature x nurture) whether we value: 4 organismic biology (the self); 5 sociobiology (another person, your family, a subculture, a nation); 6 ecology (a species, a habitat); or 7 evolutionary biology (all of it over the longest time period possible). I see moral failings and different moral camps arising when we take smaller shorter term views where larger longer term views would be better, i.e. when rational self interest has made a mistake about which inclusive "self" you are considering. How does this happen? Generally, competition drives shorter and shorter outlooks. You can't concern yourself with the long-term survival of a temperate forest region if you can't find a way to feed your family. Social influences can convince us to value one in-group above all others, even though that's not right from an objective outsider point of view. And ancient biological urges left over from evolution can drive shorter-term decisions as well, such as when one listens to sexual urges (level 3) to the detriment of family needs (level 4). I think it's clear that morality must consider all life (level 7) if it's to be comprehensive, but that doesn't make it easy to always do so, and our scientific inquiries have only very recently uncovered information about level 7. And because evolution works over thousands, millions, and billions of years, the fact that humans have erred by valuing levels 4, 5, or 6 as paramount for their moral aims, doesn't mean that the consequences of those errors have fully shaken out yet. It's becoming pretty apparent that our current path is wrong, but we still (hopefully) have time to correct our moral vision.

--> Another question that I have pondered before and was reminded about here is, how can any version of consequentialism be useful, given the uncertainly of outcomes from our choices?

Another great question! The scientific method does help us build some certainty about consequences. But Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" is the best thing I've read about the way forward when consequences are unknown. Taleb notes how successful organisms have made it through evolutionary history while dealing with this inability to predict the future: successful organisms made lots of small, isolated trials until a winner emerged. Big bets on existentially risky strategies always lose over the millions of iterations in evolutionary timescales no matter how "improbable" a bad outcome seemed at the start. Note that this is the objection to current GMO food policy in the US. The science may (for the sake of argument) tell us that GMOs are highly unlikely

Reply
@EdGibney link
4/18/2016 10:27:06 am

(Shoot! Apparently there's a word limit to replies on here that I went over and lost the end of my comment. Let me try to finish my thoughts as I originally did...)

...The science may (for the sake of argument) tell us that GMOs are highly unlikely to hurt us, but philosophically we are taking too big a bet on them with the way GMOs have penetrated the entire food system. Where is the possibility to opt out of the experiment and make it a safe and limited trial? I don't mean to wallow in this contentious debate, but this is a good example of what I'm talking about. For many others concerning the difference between fragility and robustness, see Taleb's book.

--> Finally, the discussion of evolutionary ethics raised another question about your position that has been gnawing at me. When you suggest that the long-term survival of life defines what as good, do you equate the value of all life forms? If it became clear that the continued existence of human beings would end up destroying all of the life on the planet while a decision to not reproduce and therefore end our species would preserve life on the planet, would it be good to choose self-extinction?

Another literally vital question! I actually just wrote about this in the current cover article for Humanist magazine. You can read it in full here:

http://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2016/features/human-humanism-isnt-enough

Basically, species do get some extra weight of consideration based on how they add or detract from the whole "life in general" project, if that is at all knowable. For example, we are the only current species who could save us all from an asteroid strike so we get some extra consideration for that. On the other hand, a potato bug that is about to drive potatoes to extinction (followed quickly by the extinction of itself without a habitat) is a species that could be justifiably exterminated before it had a chance to take the potato out with it. Are we such a species? Not yet. At least not with certainty. I did write a thought experiment in my article though that did present us with such certainty, and then yes, in that scenario I do believe it would be "right" to self-exterminate for the benefit of our extended kin. But please read the article before judging that idea. Up until the point we are certain we can't survive along with the rest of life we should continue to try to do so.

Great questions, John! Thanks for pushing me on these important points. Let me know if you have other thoughts I may or may not have considered. I definitely enjoy hearing your perspective.

Reply
John A Johnson link
4/18/2016 06:09:38 pm

Thank you for your additional thoughts and links to further resources! I feel like I hit the jackpot with my questions. Lots of good extra food for thought.

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