Big Moral Stakes

Big Moral Stakes
by Joseph Rowlands

There are many people who believe that a cost/benefit analysis is not appropriate for certain moral choices. There is a fear that if an option were viewed in that way, it would lead to behaviors that are widely viewed as immoral. Instead, they desire a kind of moral rule that prevents any weighing of options and demands obedience.

One example of this is the use of force. If you were presented a situation where using violence to get your way was an option, you might weigh the options and choose the violence. It might be the best option. The fear is that this would be a very common situation.

Consider one example offered by someone who rejects cost/benefit analysis approach. His fear is that you might kill someone if you thought you might gain from it, like if that person had a wallet full of cash. You might argue that you shouldn't kill someone because there is a harmony of interests and we benefit from trade, cooperation, etc. But the fear is that you will conclude you can get more from this particular person through murder than you could through possible exchanges.

I think there's a confusion here, though. The confusion is about how you should weigh your various options. In this example, the weighing was between the benefit from murder against the benefits of improbable future trading. But this doesn't capture all of the stakes.

One of the biggest stakes ignored is that if you murder someone, it completely and utterly changes your life. No longer can you expect to live peacefully within society, pursuing your own interests and allowing others to pursue theirs. When you murder someone, you discard your place in society and become an enemy of civilization. You will be hunted down, arrested, and punished.

This kind of cost is different from most normal costs. If you gamble your weekly salary, you can lose all of that money, but you are essentially still in a position where you can continue your life and grow. A cost may be a setback, even a large one, but you can still move in the right direction.

The cost of murdering someone destroys your ability to live normally. If you run from the law, you will always be on the run or in hiding. If you are captured, you will be imprisoned for a significant amount of time and forever after labeled a felon, marking you as someone untrustworthy and potentially dangerous.

In a sense, these costs are just like any other costs. They're just significantly larger. But there's another way to look at them. Other costs merely set you back. These big costs fundamentally change your life, potentially ruling out the possibility of ever recovering.

There are other moral choices that have similar effects, although to a lesser degree. Consider the matter of trust. If you violate someone's trust, that trust is wiped out and it may not be able to be replaced. The cost of betraying someone or lying about something important has wide reaching effects. Not only can you destroy a relationship without any chance of fixing it, but other people who weren't harmed may learn of it and treat you accordingly. Trustworthiness is a quality that can take a long time to build, and can be utterly destroyed beyond repair with a single act.

The moral effects are so significant that's it's easy to see why people would feel that they should be protected by moral rules or intrinsic values. You should have a rule that say to always keep your word. Or you should treat the lives of others as an intrinsic value. These seem appropriate because the stakes are so high, and the impact on your life is so profound, that its difficult to even imagine cases where it would make sense to act that way.

But this recognition is fully compatible with the cost/benefit analysis approach. It makes no sense to view costs and benefits in a narrow way so that these major effects are ignored. It makes no sense to say that if you murder someone for their pocket change, it was better than the alternative of going and getting a job. It makes no sense to say that betrayal or dishonesty is useful if you get something good out of it.

These focus only on mundane costs and benefits. The cost measured in the murder example is the cost of having to get a job. But it completely ignored the catastrophic consequences of murdering someone.

When we recognize those costs, the tradeoffs are clear. In no normal situation is it a good idea to murder people. The costs are too outrageously high. Any values gained will almost certainly be trivial in comparison. Similarly, the cost of losing your trustworthiness is also significant. It shouldn't be thrown aside just because it seems easier to lie about something. It should be treated as a significant value, and one that if lost may never be regained. These costs are permanent limitations on your life.

A related view is that if you think you can get away with it, meaning nobody will find out that you did it, then maybe it makes sense to take one of these actions. Maybe it's alright to kill or steal or lie if you won't get caught. The "prudent predator" view of morality suggest that it is in your self interests to act these ways if you think you won't get caught.

One problem with these views is that they still underestimate how drastic these consequences are. It treats them as ordinary costs, and so suggest that it makes sense to weigh the probability of getting caught. But the costs are truly enormous, so much so that they're a different in kind. Your potential is forever limited. Your life permanently diminished. The costs aren't just setbacks, which can be overcome with more time. The costs are a permanent limitation or distortion of your life.

Since these costs are so high, these aspects of morality are usually viewed as moral rules or intrinsic values. They end of creating an impression about morality that it deals with these kind of scenarios only. It views morality as a set of rules that must be obeyed, and a restriction on your choices to reign in dangerous instincts.

We don't need to treat these as intrinsic values or moral rules. We don't require blind obedience. Weighing costs and benefits is fine, as long as we recognize how big these potential costs are. And by recognizing the costs, we can see that acting morally is not a sacrifice. Avoiding killing, stealing, lie, or betraying aren't sacrifices we make in order to call ourselves moral. Avoiding them is a rational response to the overwhelming costs that can occur if you act improperly.

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