Moral Calculus
Feb. 10th, 2011 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupSo you're allowed to steal bread to feed your starving children. And you're probably even allowed to steal bread to feed yourself. But rarely are "steal bread" and "children starve" your only options. For example, I think we can all agree that if the choices are "steal bread", "children starve" and "spend eight hours in a cubicle for a reasonable wage while your children are well cared for", you're morally obligated to pick door number three. The same would not be be true of "steal bread", "children starve", and "cut off foot in exchange for one loaf of bread". But there's a whole range of intermediate options that aren't so clear cut. What if the only day care available is neglectful? Abusive? What if you need to work 16 hour days to buy everything you need- can you stop after 10 and steal the rest? What if you need 23 hours? What if there's only a 1% chance you'll lose your foot in the work? 10%? Are you obligated to prostitute yourself? If there are two breads of equal nutritional value and your kids prefer the more expensive one, are you allowed to steal that, or must you go for the cheapest possible bread?* Take out a loan? How high must the interest rate be before you're allowed to steal? And that's before we include uncertainty in the model.
Obviously there's a really easy analogy to welfare here, but that's not actually the motivating example. I can't share it for several reasons, but I like to solve the general form of equations anyway. So this is an open call for suggested rules (or rules you think definitely don't apply), and why you think they're good (or bad) rules. Please include as much explanation of your thought process as possible.
To start us off, here are my ideas: you're not obligated to give up capital to get consumable goods (so no cutting off your foot)**, you are obligated to take any choice that's better than the best option of the person you're stealing from, and you are obligated to keep damage to a minimum- so you can steal bread, but you can't break a window to do it unless your kids are actually-that-second-starving, because that's a huge amount of destruction for a small benefit. They're not perfect rules- all jobs have some risk (albeit sometimes really 1st world risks), we as a society have decided to compensate for riskier jobs with more money, and that's not going away. Enough people work as coal miners that I'm prepared to say it's an option you must choose before stealing, but I don't feel good about it. I also have some problems with the way the second rule will tend to punish the better off bakers, which could be damaging in the aggregate, and I consider it necessary rather than sufficient- even if all bakers are fantastically wealthy, if you have the option of a decent job, you're not allowed to steal.
*Technically, bread is nutritionally void and you should really steal an apple, but I went with the classic phrasing.
**I went back and forth on "stealing bread" versus "stealing medicine" as an example. It makes a difference, because bread is a consumable and medicine, arguably, is building capital, which means that forcing someone to cut off a finger to buy medicine is more okay than forcing them to cut off a finger to buy bread, although not necessarily okay enough. There is an additional complicating issue in that bread is sold on a pretty narrow profit margin, while most of the cost of expensive drugs is the intellectual property***, and thus the actual cost inflicted on the drug company is pretty minimal, compared to the benefit you receive.
***Don't have space to get into here, but long story short: I'm fine with drugs having a limited run of being very expensive, in order to incentivize the creation of new drugs.
Obviously there's a really easy analogy to welfare here, but that's not actually the motivating example. I can't share it for several reasons, but I like to solve the general form of equations anyway. So this is an open call for suggested rules (or rules you think definitely don't apply), and why you think they're good (or bad) rules. Please include as much explanation of your thought process as possible.
To start us off, here are my ideas: you're not obligated to give up capital to get consumable goods (so no cutting off your foot)**, you are obligated to take any choice that's better than the best option of the person you're stealing from, and you are obligated to keep damage to a minimum- so you can steal bread, but you can't break a window to do it unless your kids are actually-that-second-starving, because that's a huge amount of destruction for a small benefit. They're not perfect rules- all jobs have some risk (albeit sometimes really 1st world risks), we as a society have decided to compensate for riskier jobs with more money, and that's not going away. Enough people work as coal miners that I'm prepared to say it's an option you must choose before stealing, but I don't feel good about it. I also have some problems with the way the second rule will tend to punish the better off bakers, which could be damaging in the aggregate, and I consider it necessary rather than sufficient- even if all bakers are fantastically wealthy, if you have the option of a decent job, you're not allowed to steal.
*Technically, bread is nutritionally void and you should really steal an apple, but I went with the classic phrasing.
**I went back and forth on "stealing bread" versus "stealing medicine" as an example. It makes a difference, because bread is a consumable and medicine, arguably, is building capital, which means that forcing someone to cut off a finger to buy medicine is more okay than forcing them to cut off a finger to buy bread, although not necessarily okay enough. There is an additional complicating issue in that bread is sold on a pretty narrow profit margin, while most of the cost of expensive drugs is the intellectual property***, and thus the actual cost inflicted on the drug company is pretty minimal, compared to the benefit you receive.
***Don't have space to get into here, but long story short: I'm fine with drugs having a limited run of being very expensive, in order to incentivize the creation of new drugs.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 03:24 pm (UTC)I mean, anyone who is starving is going to try to steal bread. Anyone who bakes bread is going to try to keep someone from stealing it. Their interests are simply not aligned. It's stupid to say that the person "should" steal the bread, because that implies that the baker "shouldn't" prevent people from stealing the bread. What morality tries to do is resolve conflicting interests, but you're only ever going to make two people unhappy; they're always going to conflict. Why bother trying to resolve it?