We’ve done experiments where we give people the option to play a cooperative game with someone who endorses deontological morality, who says there are some rules that you just can’t break even if they have good consequences. We compare that to someone who’s consequentialist, who says that there are certain circumstances in which it is okay to harm one person if that will have better consequences. The average person would much rather interact with and trust a person who advocates sticking to moral rules.
What about the people who prefer it more strongly, are they more or less absolutist? I can think of a few misanthropic explanations for why pragmatists would keep absolutists around.
Well, sure. An genuine moral absolutist is predictable and won’t sell you out.
Consider a man on a business trip given the opportunity and thinking of cheating on his wife (who very much doesn’t want him to). He knows she would never find out. Well, why not? Wouldn’t it increase utility? A utilitarian consequentialist has to stretch things a long way and make some heroic and unwarranted assumptions about the nature of human psychology and relationships to try and argue that it wouldn’t.
It’s hard to trust a person who doesn’t feel a reliable moral impulse against betrayal and who feel compelled to stay committed to it despite personal cost and sacrifice.
Someone known to just add up pluses and minuses, and who will turn on you the minute the calculus switches sign, can’t earn that trust.
Said businessman cannot know for sure that his wife won’t find out. Is the marginal utility increase worth the cost of a divorce, loss of one’s companion in life, and estrangement from one’s kids?
Perhaps it could be said that a sufficiently humble consequentialist is indistinguishable from a deontologist?
What’s the old line about prostitution.
“We’ve already established what kind of woman you are, now we are just haggling over price.”
Great piece!
—
KAHNEMAN: I agree completely. How did that map onto deontology? You don’t need to think to get angry with somebody treating a stranger badly; that just happens to you. But to be deontological is something else—it’s a thought. Are those two highly correlated in practice?
CROCKETT: The fact that our work suggests indignation is a knee-jerk rule-based reaction that doesn’t consider consequences, suggests that it’s intimately tied to deontological intuitions. There’s been some interesting recent work, from my lab and Dave Rand’s lab at Yale, suggesting that having an uncalculated deontological response to moral violations signals to other people that you yourself are less likely to violate those moral rules. People find you more trustworthy if you are a moral stickler, if you say it’s absolutely wrong to harm one person even if it will save many others.
…
KAHNEMAN: If there were selective pressures, they were on emotion and action and not on philosophical positions.
—
In other words, its intuitional (emotional) consistency, rather then idealogical (intellectual) consistency that people look for.
—
CROCKETT: One current project is to try to understand how different social relationships make a cost-benefit calculation more or less desirable in a partner. One can imagine that you don’t want a spouse or a best friend who’s constantly calculating what they can get away with. We value loyalty in our friends and family, and loyalty is something that’s often at odds with consequentialism; however, in a leader—a president, a general, a surgeon—we may very well strongly prefer a consequentialist perspective.
That distinction comes from the fact that when we’re in close social relationships, the decisions that are going to impact us are preferential kinds of relationships. We want our partner or our best friend to put our needs and welfare above other people’s. When it comes to a leader who’s making decisions for a large population, we want to be treated equally to everyone else. If you’re just an average citizen, you probably wouldn’t expect the president to treat you differently than anyone else. Something we’re exploring is whether you prefer a consequentialist or a more rule-based morality in close family members versus more impartial relationships.
—
People don’t want to associate with someone that would be cruel to a specific refugee right in front of them, but they want a ruler who will implement immigration policy to ensure there aren’t a bunch of refugees right in front of them. We want people to be able to preserve their altruistic intuitions without presenting them with situations that cause those attitudes to lead to suicidal consequences.
It’s the job of leaders to parse through potential outcomes and make wise choices for the benefit of their people. However, this can only happen if the leaders themselves feel an intuitional attachment to the welfare of their own people, rather then merely to themselves and/or some Other.
—
CROCKETT: I think so, but you’ve hit on an important point. Now that you’ve raised this point, I’m wishing that instead of using the terms model-based and model‑free, I used the terms of goal-directed and habitual. These are other labels that essentially mean the same thing.
—
Consequentialism tells you how to maximize the outcome within a model. However, the models assumptions are a given, which restricts possible outcomes. To change the models assumptions, you need to change peoples habits, and open up new possibilities within the model.
A high trust culture is thus able to achieve things a lot trust culture can’t. Having a high trust culture requires people to exercise habitual moral intuitions that take on a deontological flavor, even if they aren’t always perfectly logically consistent. At the same time, trying to aim for perfect deontological consistency can lead to an erosion of the habitual moral intuitions at the base of a high trust society. We don’t want to take our deontological ideas so seriously they lead to Clown World outcomes that destroy what they were intended to grow.
Coming back to a common modern issue, mass immigration is meant to be an application of “higher” deontological principals, but instead it leads to the complete breakdown of high trust culture for reasons already discussed (not least of which that you importing a low trust culture/people). In the end you end up with less expansive/inclusive moral intuitions in society as people hunker down. At best you get passive aggressive “tolerance” and nihilistic indifference, which aren’t the same as expanded moral empathy. This can be seen most keenly in the actions of pro-globalist elites, which are often selfish, hedonistic, prideful, and spiteful (hence hating on the “bitter clingers”). The deontological principles supposedly embodied by extreme love of the “other” are mere window dressing and PR for their own personal moral collapse.
See “altruistic punishment”. Though interestingly, as with many studies psychological these days, the results of the original studies are being called into question.
See also this talk on the book the Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior:
http://www.jamesotteson.com/2012/09/he-said-it-david-rose.html
Most of trusting is predicting. If I have a coherent theory of mind and can predict with certainty what a person will do, many of the other details fall away. I can play the coordination game with great safety, even if the other person’s predictable actions are somewhat problematic in their particulars.