-
Website
http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle -
Original page
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/02/22/moral-duties-in-contexts-of-partial-compliance/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
Maybe it's because I'm biased, but it seems like advertising that you thought the best way to individually address the problem of distributional unfairness was to send more of your money to the government is so facially stupid that it wouldn't be very popular.
Many would view it as a dunce cap, not a badge of honor.
Somehow, arguing that we should all have to do this obscures things enough to allow people to think they're being noble.
I don't believe that Farrell is being honest (in more ways than one). It wouldn't be hard to set up a fund that people could contribute to, that would transfer pledged money to the government only if N dollars were contributed. I suspect that Farrell, and most people, wouldn't contribute to such a fund either. I think that the attractiveness they find in higher taxes is precisely that it forces many unwilling people, people who disagree with them on the merits, to pay. Otherwise, they think it's just as stupid as we do.
Sigh, this is true, but isn't it a bit sad that views should clump like this?
I presume Megan is saying: If you think that you have a moral obligation to help the poor, to refrain from eating meat and to reduce CO2 emissions, then do what you think you should do. I will makeup my own mind whether I follow your example.
I presume Henry is saying: It is unfair that I should be burdened with a disproportionate share of the cost of doing these things while you carry on as if you don't have a care in the world.
It seems to me that Henry only has point if Megan secretly shares his values and is attempting to free-ride on his sense of moral obligation.
It wouldn’t be hard to set up a fund that people could contribute to, that would transfer pledged money to the government only if N dollars were contributed. I suspect that Farrell, and most people, wouldn’t contribute to such a fund either.
In fact Pledgebank
http://www.pledgebank.com/
is a scheme a bit like this. I've certainly made and kept various pledges to contribute to schemes via Pledgebank, conditional on others doing likewise. Since I'm a person relevantly like Henry F - in being like him a Crooked Timber contributor - I suspect your "I suspect" is wide of the mark.
Sorry. This is just incorrect. At the time of your choice, all of the relevant chickens have already been killed. And your choice not to eat one tonight will have no detectable effect on demand (won't depress the price of chicken meat) and so will not induce lower future chicken meat production.
It's easier to advocate that everyone pay *higher* taxes, if everyone is already paying *some* taxes. But an unprecedented regulation of everyone's personal habits is a much more remote (and therefore less worthy, for now) goal.
In other words, it isn't so much a matter of inconsistency--they support coercion in principle--as it is a prioritizing of their (political) goals.
Anyway -- what I was going to say -- with respect to, if only there were some kind of tax patriot armband you could wear to show that you donate to the government: damn, but there's all kinds of nice stuff you can have to show that you don't!
I sort of don't get where Will's coming from on vegetarians. As a vegetarian (married to someone who isn't), well, I don't not eat meat out of some moral calculus over demand and pricing and who lives. I don't eat meat over a moral calculus of, it personally bothers _me_, and I guess it doesn't bother other people in the same way, and, well, lots of stuff is like that (sometimes in the other direction). I suspect for most vegetarians that's the issue. I mean, you could argue that my not breaking into my neighbor's house and stealing his wallet has no real effect on crime statistics too. But it just would bug me so I don't do it. The tax case is necessarily different: you're already talking about large-scale concerns of what you want _society_ to look like.
Were your pledges really to give money to the government to address some issue?
Or, were they for some private actions?
If it's the latter, then I think my suspicion is still uncontradicted.
Either way, it's uncontradicted by anything like the scale we're talking about unless a large percentage of higher-tax advocates are contributing to such pledges.
You wrote, "At the time of your choice, all of the relevant chickens have already been killed. And your choice not to eat one tonight will have no detectable effect on demand (sic) (won’t depress the price of chicken meat) and so will not induce lower future chicken meat production." And of course, that's right, practically.
I don't remember the exact wording, but Mises wrote hat in a free market every penny gives a right to vote, meaning that consumers decide what gets produced by their buying and abstention from buying. Assuming they buy that, would hardcore Austrians (or at least Misesians) have to disagree with your analysis about the consumption of that one chicken?
I haven't thought this through, but it occurred to me that, if we're going to bring in the assumptions of some of these other groups, maybe we ought to ID some of the assumptions of people closer to us on the political spectrum, and see where that leads us.
It is the other 9,999,999 people involved, many of them against their will, who bring the total up to $10,000,000x.
It is also misleading to suggest that everybody is paying the same $x.
A more plausible description of what's *really* going on might be this: a larger number of people, who pay, on average, less than x (and who might even end up with a net profit on the deal) coerce a smaller number of people, who pay, on average, more than x, into "doing the right thing."
The former group than congratulates itself on its moral superiority to the latter group.
Rinse, spin, repeat.
Suppose there were a delicious food product called Soylent Bleen, which is made out of dead people from a defined class -- say, those born between August 23 and September 22.
You enjoy the product, but lament with appropriate intensity that Virgos are being killed to make it. The same collective action problem obtains. Should you only abjure eating SB only, say, if your threshold at Pledgebank is met? Or isn't there some further argument that no matter what others may do, eating SB is just morally wrong (in a way that, say, withholding nontaxed disposable income from the government isn't)?
(a) I'm not sure I buy actually buy the empirical claim here. Neither a small effect nor a small probability of a small effect is actually a zero effect. It's just a small effect.
(b) More importantly, it's kind of hard to even think about getting other people to make some sort of sacrifice like this if you're not willing to make it yourself. The greatest benefit of being vegetarian/carbon neutral or whatever (assuming you buy the initial reasoning) is that you might prompt other people to follow your lead. Your own contribution will necessarily be minimal, but that's not necessarily the point.
About (a), if the market is big enough, I'm completely sure of it. A single individual's choice in isolation will be completely lost in the noise of normal fluctuations in demand (caused by a sale in a close substitute, e.g.).
About (b), yes. But be careful not to beg the question. If the reason to do it is to signal to others in a way that may help shift a consumption norm over time, then exactly the same reason applies to a voluntary tax. It may make no sense to do it in isolation, but if doing might inspire others to do it, then you should. And so Henry is wrong.
I can't speak for "a lot of people" but I'm a progressive tax advocate/vegetarian/minimizer of my carbon footprint and the reasoning behind my advocacy of higher taxes for the rich hinges mainly upon the fact that they both utilize more and benefit more from the services that government provides. On the other hand, my vegetarianism/environmentalism stems from fear of impending ecological disaster. I don't know if any of this constitutes a motivation towards what you call "distributive justice", but my reasons for the positions I take just don't engender the kind of cognitive dissonance or moral imperative that you claim I should feel.
Besides, Bush's tax cuts for the rich are set to expire in a few years and every plastic bag I use will take 1000 years to decompose. Feel free to do the math on that if you like.
Thanks, excellent answer. Clearly, I am wrong to think that I have a moral relationship to an individual chicken. So this _is_ a collective action problem -- thanks for showing me how this is so.
I drafted an answer that was more or less what conchis wrote. I'll respond to your answer to him. "A single individual’s choice in isolation will be completely lost in the noise of normal fluctuations in demand (caused by a sale in a close substitute, e.g.)." Yes, my effect on demand will not be noticed. Does that mean it does not exist? In the long run, do we not expect the price to respond to the actual demand for chickens, not the perceived demand for chickens? (So I am now talking about the practice of vegetarianism, not the decision to eat chicken tonight.) And, so, smoothing over my lifetime, won't I exert a small, unmeasurable, but non-zero force of (say) 1 chicken / week on the suppliers?
It seems like this is a different collective action problem than, say voting. The chance that my vote will affect a binary outcome is more or less nil. But the slaughter of chickens is not an all or nothing event.
Of course there's noise, and of course its likely to be bigger than any change you induce. But that doesn't change the fact that you've still shifted the center around which the noise is distributed.
Assuming (plausibly) that supply changes at all in response to demand, it seems to me that such responses could either be continuous or have discontinuities. In the continuous case the effect of your action is obvious: small but not nonexistent. On the other hand, if there are discontinuities in response, this does indeed mean that most of the time your action will have no effect, but it also means that in a small proportion of cases it can have an effect if it helps make it over the discontinuity threshold: that is, you've got a small probability of a somewhat larger effect.
As I said before, neither a small effect nor a small probability of an effect is identical to no effect. Rather, no effect seems to me to be an asymptotic approximation that never applies in actual (finite) markets. By and large it may be a useful approximation, but I'm not convinced it is here, and I'm not sure you should be either.
This brings another thought to mind. A relationship exists between "tax rage" and government policy--that is, some citizens become more reluctant to pay taxes because government redistributes it to poor people. Does this mean that campaign contributions in a way look like voluntary higher tax payments?
This already exists in several forms and people do contribute to government in this way. The best examples are the contributions people make to state universities -- for which people receive recognition of various kinds, including buildings and even entire schools named after them if the contributions are large enough:
http://www.bus.umich.edu/RossB-SchoolGift/