The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really
decide* what kind of girl she is.
The question actually isn't very interesting at all, because the it suggests there is still a choice to be made. In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price. The price may be a million dollars, saving a hundred people's lives, getting revenge or another non-monetary reward, but there is a price. Already before the million-dollar question, we know that we may assume she definitely is 'that kind of girl'. Almost every girl, and every guy, is 'that kind of girl', because they will trade their affections for what the other party offers. Be it under the guise of love or not.
Going into a business negotiation thinking either you or them are deontologists is selfdeception that will hinder you in your negotiations.
"Going into a business negotiation thinking either you or them are deontologists is selfdeception that will hinder you in your negotiations."
Maybe. But in practice, it might be a simplifying assumption that either you or them are "deontologists" in the context of the negotiations because there is nothing you have to offer that has any chance of budging their position.
In other words, she may be that kind of girl for a million dollars, but you don't have a million dollars.
True. Also, I've seen a number of negotiations broken off over pride--offers were made that were deemed "offensive." Don't be misled by treating everyone as "consequentialists" or you are very likely to step on a pride booby trap and cause the other party to sever negotiations. So in a practical sense, your simplifying assumption makes a lot of sense.
eh, I think in this case, 'pride' is really the other party saying 'this negotiation is not worth my time'. I know a while back I got some interest in someone buying out prgmr.com. Well, I listened to them, and they wanted to offer me a years revenue. I refused, of course, and broke off negotiations, but then I did some research, and come to find out, in my industry, that's a pretty average price.
Why would anyone sell a company that's doubling every 6 months for a year's take? it seems quite irrational to me. But, like I said, it's normal for this industry. Now, knowing what I know now, my answer wouldn't change, I mean, the other party (and the market) obviously placed a dramatically lower value on my company than I did, but if I knew this was fair market value, I'd have said no to their initial feeler before hearing their offer. Of course, I'll sell, for a price... but my price is so far above the 'fair market value' of the company that for all practical purposes, you can think of me as being completely unwilling to sell.
I mean, like everyone, I have my price, but I really, really like my company; my price is a /whole lot/ higher than one year's take.
so, uh, yeah; I think a lot of times breaking off negotiations upon hearing an 'offensive' offer is the result not of a wounded pride but of a clear misunderstanding of the market value of the good at hand by one or both parties.
If I'm willing to sleep with you for a million bucks and no less, if you offer me $100, it's probably not worth my time to try to talk you up. In that case, assuming that you are unable or unwilling to pay me the million bucks, there is /no difference/ between me being willing to sleep with you for a million bucks, and me not being willing to sleep with you for any amount of money at all.
While I can't think of an instance where I've seen this myself, I remember my real estate agent warning me about this when I was buying my first house. Some buyers will simply not consider any offer you make if your first one is so far below what they are asking that they consider it insulting.
Agreed. Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price.
You say:
In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.
And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.
I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.
I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn't believe that I have a million pounds to offer.
When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey - but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).
Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don't know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.
More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.
For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.
In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).
This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn't a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.
I find this fascinating -- your reply and the parent to your reply (@Confusion) actually gave a lot of clarity to what I think on the matter.
I'm 5 years out of college and I think my position has changed significantly since then. Until probably a year out of college I only thought very abstractly about questions like this and believed there was a large class of problems for which there is no price.
Until a year or so after I graduated, I think I believed that most people (hookers excluded) wouldn't offer sex at any cash price. I always thought those transactions generally HAD to occur masked as "I'll buy you some beers/some dinners/we'll date/any time or cash value exchange in return for sex"
My more recent experience with regards to your experiment is almost the exact opposite of your findings. I'm consistently shocked by how LOW a price people are willing accept for all manner of tasks, including sex.
Not to sound way too shady, but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined. Or maybe I've just met way sluttier girls since graduating. The price for most men is basically zero.
I'll also say there's likely some sort of phase transition here where the answer to "what kind of girl she is" is dependent on some socioeconomic indicator. Hypothesis: Money and status buy people a LOT of self importance and stricter adherence to a moral code. People don't have to bend their espoused morals unless faced with tough questions.
Re your experiment:
- saying and doing are different, especially since the question seems to have been explicitly phrased as an exchange of sex for money. there are all sorts of ways to phrase the question where sex is understood but without actually saying it.
- £1MM is doesn't even feel like a real number to most students. hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
Like @Confusion, I now generally believe there's a price for everything. If it can be measured in dollars, thats an easy question to answer. The hard questions are those that are measured in things money can't buy.
but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined.
I have a theory about this actually. Do you have any specific data r.e. what "prices" were accepted?
My theory is that below a certain margin (I never tested this you see) then it becomes a different matter. At , say, £10,000 you are trading your body, it is transaction. You are gaining the money.
At a certain lower bound it switches to being simply an incentive. "I'll buy you dinner if you'll sleep with me after". i.e. it sweetens the deal.
I very much doubt that anyone, if offered $100 right here right now would take you up on the offer (but, then, I've never tested it)
honestly, I think most girls would sleep with someone for way less than 1 million. i think one very important missing ingredient is a clause stating that her decision will remain anonymous and no one will ever find out about the transaction, ever.
That actually doesn't surprise me, given the work of Dan Ariely. He's done similar experiments (but not with sex; with people doing some silly task on the computer) and found that people would do better on the task if their reward was a gift, like chocolate, then if there was a comparative dollar amount. The difference disappeared if he referred to it as "$5 worth of chocolate" versus "$5."
We think about getting paid with money differently than we think about getting paid with gifts, for some reason.
I'd consider writing an informal paper about it - but unfortunately it was a bit hacky and basically just followed our thoughts. So there is no way it would stand up to peer review properly.
I have the notes somewhere so I will try and dig them out and write something up (this was all done from memory plus a short type up I did at the time)
Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price.
This is ridiculous. The question does make her uncomfortable, but not because of the question itself. She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it. She may have even thought about her "price" for letting a man fuck her. The problem is she knows the limits on what she's supposed to say and how she's supposed to present herself, and here's this clueless jerk trying to force her beyond them. She's playing the game, navigating social rules, and he isn't even acknowledging the tight spot he's put her in. In fact, he's simultaneously relishing her discomfort and resenting her for feeling that way. What does she do? To get through the situation as easily and harmlessly as possible, she either denies the legitimacy of the argument or names absurdly large amounts of money.
To really get a woman's price, she'd have to be assured of discretion. And her price would, ultimately, be affected by her confidence in the assurances of discretion offered. Her price for prostituting herself openly would be much higher, though not as high as the price she's willing to admit to in the original joke or the experiment you describe. After all, in the experiment, she pays the price of advertising her willingness to have sex for money without actually getting the money. A million pounds buys a lot of honesty -- what were you offering? Even with the check, you haven't established a credible offer. The woman would have a lot of doubts that would be difficult to overcome. Is it a scam? Why me? Does this guy want to hurt me or humiliate me? Is this a mean-spirited prank organized by one of my exes? From her point of view, it's vanishingly unlikely to be a genuine offer. She's thinking, "If I even give this guy a chance to prove his bona fides, I'll probably be putting myself at risk." After all, even if he actually has a million pounds in his checking account, he's still more likely to be a killer than a guy who pays a million pounds for sex. Just sayin'. She's not stupid. And if the guy is serious, the onus is on him to prove that he understands her reservations and to think of some way to reassure her. Her initial response shouldn't deter him.
Anyway, to depart from your experiment and get back to the conversation in the joke as it's usually told -- no longer talking about your experiment -- it's a typical conversation for socially incompetent young geeks who are frustrated by all the social taboos, who suspect (partly correctly) that everyone around them is screwing like rabbits, and who are so painfully frustrated about not being able to talk about it that they make fools of themselves beating their heads against the wall of taboo with rational arguments instead doing something that might actually clear the way to frank conversation, such as cultivating trust and intimacy. (Gosh, I just might be speaking from experience here.)
So the whole thing resolves to a guy making a girl uncomfortable and taking her refusal to be outré for stupidity. That's pretty dickish. Especially when the point is to make yourself look smart in comparison. I have NO idea why Feynman liked this joke, except that maybe he used it as a racy line-crossing move when chatting up women, in which case the logic itself is kind of beside the point. I supposed he knew the right moment to push it. Or maybe he just knew his audience. But that would make him a bit of a misogynist, since he would know -- admit it -- that the chief delight of this story for most people is not whipping it out Feynman-style at just the right moment when a woman is ready to let down her barriers. The chief appeal for most is getting the last laugh on a woman who wouldn't let you past her facade of propriety. Why would he stoop to that kind of pandering?
Anyway, the original word game breaks down if you examine it just a little. If I'd bake a loaf of bread for a million dollars, am I a baker?
If I'd do your taxes for a million dollars, am I a tax accountant?
If I'd write a book for a million dollars, am I a writer?
If I'd change your oil for a million dollars, am I an auto mechanic?
If I'd teach a yoga class for a million dollars, am I a yoga instructor?
So is she a prostitute? Clearly not. Is she a whore? Well, yeah, quite often she is, in the sense that the word "whore" in any language usually means a woman whose sexual activity makes the speaker feel bad in some way.
But don't worry about this line of reasoning, or any other, being used against you when you whip this gem out at a party, because the response will divide between a couple of straight-up misogynists enthusiastically backing you up and a majority who just distance themselves from you, possibly by scoring points off you in some irrational way that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the point you're trying to make, because people are STUPID and more interested in playing STUPID SOCIAL GAMES than actually THINKING. So your point is unchallenged! Unrefuted! Whoohoo! (Sarcasm aimed at the original joke and at my teenage self, not personally at you.)
She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it.
A reasonable point; except you've asserted that and I'm not sure it's true. Do you have any data to back up the theory? Because one of the things that became clear to me was people hadn't really and truly considered it; there was a lot of thinking going on.
I realise the experiment was flawed; and we tested too few people to really make any definite observations.
However the aim was not to present it as a serious offer; but as a thought exercise. Once over the "wtf is this guy asking me" moment at the start we spent quite a while with each person (in private) discussing his/her thoughts. This made it a little more solid.
I agree with the idea that the joke is idiotic; clearly it is just misogynist crap (or, very occasionally just a racy joke - I've pulled it out maybe once to rescue a date :)).
It doesn't matter how many people you test, because you can't establish a credible offer of that much money. Can you describe a situation that you could actually set up in which a woman would think she was more likely to get a million pounds than to get dragged into a basement, tortured, raped, and murdered? Of course both of those scenarios would be far outside chances compared to the chances that somebody was just trying to play a humiliating joke on her or steal her identity.
The question a woman's brain is really engaged with in these scenarios is, "What's the safest way to deal with this situation?" That applies even if she actually knows you and is a modern liberal woman, because she's got to walk a line between seeming prudish or dishonest and triggering the insecurity thats lurk in every male breast.
[Edit: sorry for all the unacknowledged edits; since HN has no "preview" button I just post and edit.]
because you can't establish a credible offer of that much money
Of course you can; that is pretty easy to do. (also you might note we tried a lot more credible monetary amounts as well).
Can you describe a situation that you could actually set up in which a woman would think she was more likely to get a million pounds than to get dragged into a basement, tortured, raped, and murdered?
This is something of a strawman... because clearly it all depends on the individual and how they perceive a situation. But it seems reasonable to suppose you can ask the person (as I did) to visualise a situation where they were receiving a serious offer (a lot of phsyc testing uses this premise).
"What's the safest way to deal with this situation?"
When I said bartering I should point out it wasn't actively bartering over the idea of sex; it was a discussion about the ideas and this concept of a "price". Or in opther words it was explained what the point was. Most said it was an interesting thought experiment.
So where your seeing this as the individuals thinking "oh crap, this crazy person is saying really weird/scary things" that was not the situation. We used the opening line as a gambit to provoke this idea of a "price".
I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.
EDIT: it's worth pointing out this is less about establishing what cash amount people want for having sex with you than about getting people to discuss a social idea that is almost certainly frowned upon, but which could make them rich via minimum effort/skill. We could have tried something like.. would you kill for £1 Million - but there were strong reasons against that (sex itself is not frowned on (just paid-for), where murder is. Sex is more interesting because there is a divide between how men and women react to it).
If you say that the whole point was to provoke people to think, and not to glean any information about what they would actually do, I'm fine with that. However, I'm skeptical that women would devote much thought to the imaginary situation that will never happen when they were in a real situation where they were being asked to discuss their sexuality. It's kind of like you've never seen or heard a goat before, so you walk up to someone with your pet tiger on a leash and ask them to do an impression of a goat. You're going to get an impression calculated not to excite the tiger, without much thought to what a goat looks and sounds like.
I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.
As a kid I had multiple conversations in different groups of guys where the question of having sex with another guy for money came up, so I think I can vouch for guys. Even in groups of guys who weren't particularly intimate and didn't trust each other, you'd get exchanges like, "Dude, you are so in love with that guy you would suck his duck." "Fuck you, I'm not sucking anybody's dick." "So you wouldn't even for a million dollars?" "You saying you wouldn't? What are you trying to hide?"
As for girls, girlfriends have told me about giggly conversations they had with their friends when they were thirteen. The question naturally arises from the question of whether you would marry a gross old guy who had billions of dollars -- and that's something that all young girls talk about. It's an irresistible mixture of horror and fantasy. Start altering that story and you're only two or three steps from outright prostitution. (Amusingly, in the one story I remember pretty well, the question posed was, "Would you have sex with a guy for a million dollars, even if you didn't love him?" I guess to thirteen-year-old girls, love is the factor that makes everything okay or not okay, even prostitution.)
Another reason is how people reacted to the movie Indecent Proposal with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson. It wasn't an alien idea for most people. Anytime people talked about it, they seemed to be picking up the threads of conversations from a long time ago. Of course, people are a lot less likely to talk about it with people they don't trust, especially when the intent seems to be hostile or transgressive.
I suspect what you're talking about is something entirely different... because they are just jokey/giggly conversations with no real meaning (there are all sorts of social pressures that set your price, for example).
Have you, as an adult, considered your price? My suggestion is few people have.
I've thought about it enough to know that I don't have a single price. The price depends on attraction, how much I like and trust a person, assurances of discretion and safety, etc. My "ideal" price is zero; I sleep with people for free all the time. Above that, it gets complicated. For example, I can think of a certain girl who's extremely unattractive, abrasive, not very bright, always hard up, and likes me a lot. I definitely wouldn't do her for free; I've been tested on that extensively. $500 would be enough. However, she's in debt, she's a friend of some friends, and she can't keep her mouth shut. Everybody would despise me for taking that much money from this girl who's struggling personally and financially. There's no good price for that example, but it's the most likely example I could come up with in real life. If I imagined she was better-off, $500 would be plenty for ninety minutes of work (including drive time, chit-chat, etc.)
This is an interesting, and IMO uncommon, response. Thanks for the honesty! :)
You're right social constraints are going to modify each condition; many people sleep with others in sympathy, for example.
If I imagined she was better-off, $500 would be plenty for ninety minutes of work (including drive time, chit-chat, etc.)
That's an interesting figure; because it is roughly how much a prostitute would be paid (I use that example only because it is the most readily available price for sex we have). So, possibly, there is an inherent social value for non-free sex we subscribe too.
My "ideal" price is zero; I sleep with people for free all the time
This syncs almost exactly with the response most men gave in our survey
Yeah. I realized after writing that it might appear to mean "in what ways have you changed" but I really did mean "how did you affect change in your life?"
First, strangely enough, the internet helps. Things I have to get off my chest, but which I know will make me look strange or cranky or childish, can come off in relative anonymity. (And when I do get them off my chest, people respond more frankly, which helps.)
Second, I always knew there was something wrong with me socially, and I had the vague intention of improving at least as early as junior high. At first my ideas were pretty vague, and my progress depended on a trickle of new ideas from the pop science reading I did. Evolutionary psychology helped me see social relationships through ideas I already understood. It was always popularized hand-in-hand with a really bleak and brutal view of life (the perception that EP was just the paranoia of sexually insecure men, dressed up in scientific language, was probably created by some of the books I read) so it may have hurt more than it helped. Still, I started to get some insight into my limitations in high school. Then the book Emotional Intelligence came out around the time I graduated, and I read it cover to cover several times. It was just a self-help book, but it instantly clicked with me and gave coherence to a lot of half-formed ideas I had. It gave me an agenda of concrete items I could improve on. I remember there was a little section about how savvy kindergarten-age kids approached other children that actually helped me make friends in college.
Third, when I went to college I got a frame of reference for how normal, well-adjusted people who were informed and liberal would act. Back in high school I really couldn't parse out which differences between myself and everybody else were due to me being better-informed, more critical, and more liberal and which differences were due to me being socially retarded. Not only did I not really like the people around me, which made my social problems a lot more understandable than I realized at the time, I was literally afraid to emulate anybody around me because I might pick up customs that would make me look stupid when I finally broke out into the "real" wold. College released me from that. It's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like, and whom you would like to be like.
Fourth, I realized that I had some emotional issues that were interfering with the proper functioning of my social skills. I.e., I'm a lot more socially competent when I feel good about myself. Trying to be social while you hate yourself is like trying to boot a computer with an inadequate power supply. Taking care of your emotions makes everything else easier.
Thank you very much for the insights. Your style of writing, and I suspect thinking, resonates very strongly with me. If you wrote a book, I would buy it. I have a few more questions, and answers to them would not go unappreciated.
Would you still recommend Emotional Intelligence? In regards to #4, well, would you feel comfortable describing this in more detail? For example, in which ways is it easier or more difficult to be socially competent when you hate or don't hate yourself, and how have you managed to feel more confident about yourself? Finally, if you could recall the anecdote about the kindergarten kids, that'd be useful.
The reason I ask these questions is because, like you said, it's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like and whom you would like to be like. Granted, I barely know you, but in terms of people on the internet that respond intelligently to questions, you rank pretty high.
I would still recommend Emotional Intelligence. I haven't been keeping track of new books, so there may be better or more up-to-date books, but Emotional Intelligence is a good place to start. It's simple and concrete. The part about young kids making friends is a good example. Goleman describes how a kid approaching a group of other children playing observes what the other kids are doing, joins the group quietly, and mimicks what the other kids are doing. The child is careful to fit into the vibe of the group, and he lets the other kids lead and direct the activity. Later, after establishing himself in the group, he might assert himself more.
That example got my attention because it was counterintuitive. It sounded like a really passive and loserish way to fit in, the kind of approach that would guarantee you would be looked down on and pushed around. I had heard that kind of advice before, but to me it always sounded like, "Look, you're a loser. Here's the easiest way to get along as a loser in society." I wasn't interested in that at all; I wanted to be respected. But according to Goleman the compliant approach was the approach taken by the most socially successful kids. The kids who took less harmonious approaches encountered rejection and exclusion, turning many of them into wallflowers or bullies. Well, being humble and compliant was a much more productive (and less stressful) approach for me, and I could rest assured that I was establishing myself the way a respectable somebody ought to, and my demeanor would not automatically classify me as a pathetic nobody. Wielding power in a group is a different skill, but it turns out to be founded on sensitive to the group just like cooking is founded on the skill of tasting food.
As for #4, Emotional Intelligence drilled into me that empathy was the basis of social understanding, and that we use ourselves as a model of how other people think and feel. We project our own assumptions and feelings onto other people. I got pretty good at using that method to see my own shortcomings through other people's eyes. What I didn't immediately appreciate is that if your view of yourself is warped in any way, including in a negative way, you will misunderstand your social interactions with other people. For example, if you don't like yourself, you'll never really understand that other people like you. Hating yourself is a cognitive handicap, and what's worse, it selectively makes you blind to the best things in life. You're blind to the value you have to other people, blind to the respect other people have for you, and blind to romantic opportunities. That actually offends people who don't know you (who take your obliviousness as rejection) and frustrates your friends, who do understand. I thought devaluing myself would give me a safety margin against accidental antisocial behavior, but it actually made my antisocial behavior worse.
I was a little late figuring out how I irritated other people with my lack of sensitivity, but I was REALLY late -- I mean decades late -- figuring out that other people like and appreciate me. I'm still working on it. Thanks for your contribution ;-)
(it's not worth noting but i'm going to do so anyway: we know what kind of guy he is before we know what kind of girl she is, but no one even points that out. we focus on her because she's indecisive?)
I have a problem voting for a comment that is entirely in brackets. Feels it could cause a divide by zero problem if the bracketed part doesn't count thus rending the comment to be of infinite value per character.
In business you are rarely forced to murder or whore yourself out. You are, however, constantly faced with changing your direction, compromising your vision or similar, all for some potential upside and downside. That's the nature of business, and trying to tie it to moral questions doesn't do justice to the line of reasoning one should employ.
Of course you should be moral, but most business questions aren't a question of morality, but of direction and the most appropriate path to achieve your objectives.
I'm sure the managers at BP that choose to forego certain safety measures completely recognize themselves in this line of reasoning. Which immediately illustrates how dangerously false it is.
Companies are amoral (not to be confused with immoral) entities that will not necessarily act in the people's best behavior. If companies act in a morally acceptable way, it is because of the individual employees that together make morally acceptable choices. Every business question is a question of morality, because you can always choose to commit fraud, cheat someone or act in an otherwise immoral fashion. Sometimes you won't do that for fear of customer or supplier retribution. Often you won't do that for fear of the law. But sometimes, you just shouldn't do it, because it has possible consequences you should never risk.
No one at BP is individually responsible for the current calamity. The more responsibility is spread over multiple layers of decision making, the less responsible individuals feel and the less moral their behavior will be. Not because they are immoral, but because the pressure to act as is best for the company is strong enough to suppress moral qualms. No 'evil' individual made the immoral decision that lead to the accident. It was a large number of people that each made slightly immoral decisions, the cumulative result of which is now the largest ecological disaster in US history.
This is the essence of the problem of libertarianism and complete free market capitalism. This is why we need a government to regulate capitalism.
In general I agree, but I struggle with a moral/immoral distinction being so black and white. BP weren't drilling for kicks, there /were/ safety measures in place, there's a balance between safety and cost - no rig in the world is 100% safe and nor could it be without the cost of oil going up. The effect of oil prices going up is people losing their jobs and even lives.
Accidents happen, maybe because we veered too far towards profit, maybe because we encountered a black swan, but we learn from them and do our best to mitigate them, then we go back to treading the fine line of cost and safety.
That being said, the US Gov should have learned from disasters like Piper Alpha and separated it's own safety and cost structures in respect of the oil industry long ago. Not having done so before now is, to me, inexcusable.
This is one of the reasons why you have to start talking about governance in these situations. Businesses should have governance strategies. They probably mostly do for finance, or safety, or similar, but they should also have governance strategies in place for ethical/social/cultural impact as well. Things like risk assessment or technology assessment can help here, but they're just part of a wider strategy needed to really nut out all the potential problems and benefits associated with the decision being made.
Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle, EU commission-funded technical research projects need to follow strict ethical and social governance programs, and the commission is directly funding more research into how to more effectively govern these sorts of endeavours (rather than simply relying on "ethical codes" or "ethics checklists"). It's only a few steps up from that to regulating more widely across Europe (but obviously they need a playground to test in first! and the billion+ euro research Framework Programmes are a pretty good one for that).
I can't really see the US going for this sort of thing though, to be honest, even though it'd most likely prevent things like the BP catastrophe :(
> Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle
The precautionary principle can't be satisfied. Also, its application is extremely political. For example, it should applied to folks who might become parents.
Note that the precautionary principle is typically invoked by folks who don't don't have much skin in the game and don't understand what their costs and benefits are.
Note that regulation is the best example of systemic risk not to mention the inevitable corruption.
This is not to say that "ethics codes" are good and effective.
Yeah, but you missed the second half of my sentence :) It's not the only thing they do, and it's certainly not the whole of a good governance mechanism. I do agree with you about the PP, but it's a move in the right direction, at least they have awareness of the issues that need to be addressed. There is no silver bullet, but they can (hopefully) work toward something that works most of the time.
On the other hand there is a quote: "Once you have to write your code of ethics down, you have already lost." Unfortunately, I not only don't remember the source, I can't even remember the context.
BP was too. The blowout preventer was damaged in a previous accident. The Transocean contractors wished to stop and get the well under control, but they were overruled by the BP manager at the site. Is it any wonder that when you continue drilling while the blowout preventer is damaged, there's a blowout?
Surely the analogy for some of us would be "Would you sell your startup to microsoft for X". Logically and from a business perspective it may make sense to do so, but it's a hard pill to swallow for many I'd bet.
But if Jerry Yang had sold Yahoo in 2008 then shareholders wouldn't be left holding a company today that is worth less than half what MSFT offered, would we?
But that was an emotional decision, and he made the wrong one.
Actually, whoring in terms of violating your "core values" is extremely common in business. Not talking making canned dolphin meat here, but if you have a core value about providing excellent customer service, but your biz partners don't like the expense... death by a thousand cuts you go.
Consulting is especially like this, if you want to build the best damn thing you can, consulting is usually at odds with that core value. Consulting is as much about placating the client's ego as anything else.
Violating your core values for money will lead to a death-spin of post hoc justification and misery, so it's rarely worth it.
That said, I don't think sleeping with someone for money is a moral question, and the example is indeed misogynistic.
It is the characterisation of moral systems as either 'deontological' or 'teleological' which I find invalid, thus undermining the usefulness of this here debate.
In the articles terms, you could be moral according to the category of your actions, or according to the consequences of your actions. The first one ignores reality ('whatever happens, don't lie'), and the second one negates judgement ('the right action depends on the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences, and the consequences of... ad infinitum' an endless, useless subjectivism). They can be sidestepped by applying judgement according to reality and a measurable standard of value, eg. self-interest. You could call this contextual or objective morality.
Consequentialism encompasses all value systems that incorporate consequences to any degree at all. So your "applying judgement according to reality and a measurable standard of value" system is actually consequentialist.
A thought: if someone offered me a trillion dollars to kill a person, I would get trillion-dollar loan, invent brain-uploading and emulation technology with it, copy the person into the machine, and then kill them.
To put that more simply: past a certain point, the idea of marginal value in a cost/benefit analysis breaks down, because the benefit "changes the game." (That is, creates a discontinuity in the valuation curve.) A million dollars "changes the game" of your life. $100 doesn't.
It's never clear to me why people answer thought experiments like this in this manner. The point of the question "would you kill someone for a trillion dollars" is to tease out an answer to an underlying philosophical question, such as, "is the act of killing as we know it a moral absolute wrong, or is it merely an act with great negative utility that can be compensated by sufficient positive utility?"
Yes, there are always creative ways to avoid really answering the question (such as doing a brain upload, as suggested), but these answers do nothing to answer the underlying question, which is what the thought experiment is really trying to get at.
And I've always ignored that sort of question—there's no such thing as morals or utility, really, only what animals are programmed to think in their animal brains. Robotic arms don't care when other robotic arms die—and neither do we. Paperclips don't care about increasing in number, even if someone is trying to make it so. What we have to ask is not "what does the universe say about right and wrong?" (because the answer is "nothing") but rather "what do our minds say about right and wrong?"—that is, "what is the human utility function?"
The problem with that, of course, is that even within our species, we have many different (and mutually-exclusive!) utility functions; sociopaths, for example, calculate theirs noticeably differently. So, it still ends up turned into a problem of cultural meta-ethics. That is, it's no longer a matter of "who do we shun and revile?" but "how do we get along?" or perhaps "do we want to get along?" (Which brings me to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/)
That's not really a reason to avoid answering the question either. Regardless of the mechanism by which your mind arrives at the answer (be it animal instincts, brain chemistry, whatever), you are indeed capable of coming up with an answer, and even if you believe the answer says nothing about the universe in general, it still says something about you and your own mind. And I'm fairly interested in knowing what your mind--and the minds of other people--have to say about these sorts of questions.
To be a little more clear, your answer (yes or no) is of little value to me. What I really want to know is why you answer yes or no--is it because of some general principle you're applying, because of a gut instinct, because someone told you to say that, or something else?
EDIT: Based on the reply below, I'm not being clear. There are lots of reasons I'd like to know your reasoning process, beyond trying to generalize it to people in general. Among other things, I'd like to know whether I should be worried about going to dinner with you (particularly if your answer is "Sure, I'd kill for even just a dollar").
But that's a question for neuropsychology, isn't it? The question of what is good for an individual person won't be solved by conversation and introspection, because people are, on average, very bad at understanding themselves and the reasons for doing the things they do (they indeed have reasons to give, but these reasons rarely stand up as falsifiable hypotheses for predicting future actions, so they're mere rationalizations and should be discarded.)
Instead, the question of what an individual cares about will be solved by coming up with a technique to look at a person's brain and tell them, definitively, what values they care about at that moment in time. Anything said about individual ethical belief until then is just sophistry.
The answer may come from other places than neuropsychology. We as carriers of values live and evolve in an ecosystem where the values of those around us and how they fit with ours matters. Maybe we can derive some evolutionary stable strategies representing moral laws from a swarm of agents constantly playing Prisoner's dillema and games with other rewards against each other.
But the mechanisms by which we play those games will be evident in the brain, and the games themselves will be evident in our expectation-program memory. (I'm assuming here that sufficiently-advanced neuropsychology will be able to analyze the "software" running on each brain, not just the firmware, but even if that field ends up with a different name, that's what I'm talking about here.)
We may be able to model some sort of "objectively-good" cooperative-evolutionary game-players using mathematics, but those models would not necessarily represent us; there's nothing that says we're even evolutionarily stable as a species over the long term ;)
there's no such thing as morals or utility, really
Just to counterpoint the frenzy of moral nihilism and relativism I suspect will appear, I respectfully disagree, I'm a moral universalist, i.e. morals do exist, moral judgements can be true or false.
But I also realize that this is a question of philosophical faith, and arguing about that is usually pretty futile. :)
1. Given the laws of physics, could you derive your morality?
2. If we didn't exist, and in our place were an alien species that, say, ate their babies[1], would that make the universe contain less utility as a whole?
[1] The same story I linked to above: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/. Who is in the right? Do we have the "moral imperative" to destroy the baby-eaters? Do the third species have a moral imperative to destroy us?
1) No, the only way to get my morality is by asking me. As for whether or not a specific moral judgement is true or not, no, you can't derive that from the laws of physics either. What an incredibly boring universe that would be if that was the case.
2) You're asking me to sum up and compare the values of two complete civilizations? That's a pretty tall order. Also, in one of the alternatives I wouldn't exist, that's a lot less utility right there.
You just said you were a moral universalist—that goes against the concept of there being a "your" morality. Either morals are universal (in which case, you don't need a specific living being to ask in order to figure them out), or they're, at least in some part, subjective. Further, you seem to be explicitly arguing against yourself with the "in one of the alternatives I wouldn't exist" statement—what system of universal morals would privilege your existence over the existence of someone who is better in every way, except for not being you?
What I said above was that "morals or utility" are subjective to an individual—which agrees with your point. I said "and thus don't really exist" because the definitions for epistemic morality or universal utilitarianism require them to be universal—and they're not, so they don't exist as defined. (And a system that accepts subjective morality is usually just called "ethics", by the way.)
For an individual you can make those proclamations, but individuals don't operate in a vacuum. There is such a thing as morals and utility in a society. There is value in participating in a society. Therefor, there is value is having individual morals and calculating the utility of actions at least on a societal level.
Right—that's, effectively, the difference between "cultural meta-ethics" and "moral relativism." What I'm saying is that, on an individual level, ethics is a problem that will be completely solved by neuropsychology: once we find out our particular utility function, we just have obey it optimally. Thus, Ethics as a field of endeavor should drop that kind of individual-level moral quandary, and focus on inter-societal quandaries, since that's what we'll really need to figure out—how to handle, and interact with, societies that have different utility functions than our own (including the ones we end up creating ourselves using genetic engineering, AI, and so forth.)
Humans are not inherently expected utility maximizers, they're bounded agents with little capacity for reflection. Utility functions are great and all, but in the words of Zack M. Davis, "Humans don't have utility functions."
But the morals of a society are not constant. They are a function of the morals of the individuals living in a society. What was perfectly acceptable in the 12th century is barbaric now. In a century or two we will seem barbarians to our descendants. (And they will still be saying that their generation lost all morals and humans will soon die out.)
Irak, the SUV vehicles, the bullying in schools, people parasiting the welfare system, the predatory banking practices, all those things seem barbaric to me.
Iraq: seems short-sighted to me. We don't tend to judge past civilisations based on one war.
SUVs: maybe, but I would say our continued reliance on oil in general rather than SUVs in particular.
Bullying: could be.
Parasites on the welfare system: not convinced. The fact we have a welfare system will be judged favourably I expect.
Predatory banking practices: pass, not sure.
It's hard to imagine what things it will be--their values may be very different from ours. I'd say oil reliance, over population, the gulf between the rich and the impoverished, but these things are all too obvious. I suspect we'd be surprised by what we're judged badly for.
The example in the article is a good example how such thought experiments are sometimes turned into jokes for bored misanthrope/misogynist/latent homosexual men. At first, the situation could be interpreted as an exchange of a years of happy life for sleeping with somebody she considers attractive and would probably sleep with anyway. This problem then is turned into what would be her price if she slept with men for a living.
If this is your understanding of philosophy, I'd say you're misusing philosophy for dealing with personal problems.
If you're going to invent scenarios, you should invent realistic one's. For example, I'm fairly confident that you couldn't solve the problem of brain duplication for a trillion dollars. The NIH budget in 2010 was ~32 billion which isn't close to a trillion, but it's a lot closer to a trillion than we are to duplicating a brain.
On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your proposed actions. For me, personally, I wouldn't want to "influence" (vaguely kill, but also any of these "duplication" scenarios) someone else's mortality for any amount of money.
You could cure a lot of cancer for $1 trillion. By turning the offer down, are you sure you're not "influencing" someone else's mortality? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. I don't have an answer.)
So, I did say "any amount of money", not any amount of lives. I do think it's morally okay to trade one life for many (definitely ambiguous in terms of amounts because I don't feel like trying to figure that one out). In fact, I don't think you could justify war without also justifying this moral decision so I don't think it's very rare even if people don't often think about it.
You couldn't replicate memories and consciousness though. And cloning involves a long lead time since we only know how to clone embryos. So from your family and friends' perspective, it would be like you died, since they're not going to enjoy the company of your clone for a few decades and even then it won't have your memory or much of your personality.
The important word in my analogy was "invent." Given that the technology exists, lots of other things would happen—an emulation could be plugged into arbitrary "sensory" inputs, so a simulated universe could be created for it; that simulated universe would seem like an inviting prospect for those that do not wish to continue a life that mostly consists of sitting around on the Internet anyway, so more people (first-adopters) would upload as well, even if their "real" bodies continued separately; the large number of ems would provoke discussions of em rights, which would lead to internationally-funded medical programs to create two-way bridges between our reality and the simulations... and so on.
That's what I mean by "discontinuity": you can't give a cost-benefit analysis to something like a trillion dollars, because one trillion-dollar investment can completely alter the course of civilization with its knock-on effects.
Well, you're making decisions about someone else's mortality. Maybe they wouldn't want to live forever with everyone else that they knew dying? Maybe they would want to have a physical existence in the form of a human body. You're denying them that.
I think the parent's phrase "sufficient technology" was meant to be interpreted as more than my "brain uploading and emulation"—i.e. an infinite Matrix landscape, synchronized with a doorway in the real world, that would gradually quantum-de-/re-materialize them as they progressed further into or out of it, so that, on the outside of the door, they were real people made of real matter, but ten or fifteen feet inside they were completely virtual. Assuming a wide-enough door, you could bring in your house, your car, whatever else you'd like, and bring them out again if you wanted to live a mortal life. (But, if you got your leg blown off in reality, you could always go in and, sufficiently digitized, apply a patch from a record of your previous body and walk back out, good as new.)
The problem with speculative fiction is that it needs a technological conflict. Worthwhile utopias don't do that.
The rest of the word might hesitate to consider the person "not dead" when their body, their instantly recognizable human feature, has been taken away from them.
If your morals are based on principle, then no matter who the person was, your decision would remain the same.
I believe/hope that I am the type of person who would not take anothers' life no matter what the circumstances because I want to be a person of principle. If there were some situation where I did take a life, then I am not the principled person I think I am.
Take the example of Google and their motto,'Don't be Evil'. It was a nice bit of marketing, but when the value of doing business with a repressive government was high enough, they and other company's apparently had no problems working with said governments to continue the repression of it's citizens.
Now, you may say, Google has left that country. But, it was not due to the moral repugnance they felt about repressing the citizens, but the fact they were under attack by agents/citizens of said government and felt it was no longer in their interest 'financially' to stay.
A bit out of topic, I think on the question of China many people have a black and white view of the situation...
In the case of google, they came to China but actually provided a less censored service than baidu (by writing in the search pages that some results were left out because of censoring thus attracting attention to it)... So in what way was their behavior evil?
Additionnaly, they never started any blogging service in China that would have put them in a situation where they had to give information to the government about political activists (unlike yahoo who gave such information)...
So, I don't think Google did anything evil in that case...
In what way did they trade freedom of speech?
Did people in China have more freedom of speech before they came to China? Could they have forced the chinese government to limit censoring?
Of course not... The only thing they could do and did is give another reliable search engine that censored less than their competitors...
No, I understand it required collusion with China to make it impossible to resolve Google.com to a different search engine. If they did nothing, folks could Google with the same engine the rest of us do. Try to remember, your ancestors may have fought and died to stay free. Google certainly did not extend themselves in any way to promote this ideal. This discussion here is probably not available in China.
That is utter hyperbole. Google never had the "freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people" to trade. They do not and probably never will have anything like that kind of power. I am far from a Google fanboy but if you're going to criticise them, please keep it reasonable.
That is reasonable. I'm simply asking them to not do business with a repressive government. Maybe, you don't think freedom of speech is important, but I do.
As for what kind of effect they could have: Google is an internationally recognized brand that is most certainly known in China (even without being the dominant search engine). Refusing to do business with China would be hard for the state-run media to explain away.
Of course, I think a lot of people really, really want to believe that Google is different from every single other multinational organization that has ever existed. It's not.
Facebook and Twitter are internationally recognized brand that are blocked in China... Explaining that away is no problem for the Chinese government.
I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black...
China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and I think it'll get better...
Now, as someone who lived in China before Google decided to move in the chinese market I can tell you that it was a great news to see them move... Before they were intermitently blocked by the Chinese firewall, a lot of queries were blocked so access to good search engines was not very good...
After Google moved to China, well they had to censor some of the results out but then they would point it out, and connection and access to google was much better...
So for me, it was a net benefit to see google move in China, and I hope that them moving out won't result in their being blocked again...
Google has ~24 billion in revenue. Twitter is harder to pinpoint but from the sources I've seen it's far less than 50 million. Facebook is somewhere around 400-550 million.
I guess my point is that they aren't even in the same stratosphere. Twitter and Facebook may be international recognized (and clearly I should have differentiated here), but they aren't in any way equivalent to a behemoth like Google.
Well they aren't the equivalent in term of revenues but Twitter, Facebook and Youtube (also banned in China after having been allowed at the beginning) are all as well known as Google to the average user...
Apart from that, Google's revenue doesn't give them any leverage on the Chinese government, mostly because they wouldn't ever back down on censoring as it would mean losing face...
Well said. I always thought it was odd that people cheered Google when they pulled out of China even though they only did that because the Chinese government was hacking them (most notably not becase the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech).
Terrible example, but the point that cost-benefit analysis is nonlinear is indeed valid. Suppose that instead of being offered money, you were threatened with losing it. This change is immaterial for small amounts, but highly relevant for large amounts (e.g. as the amount approaches your net worth/lifetime earning potential).
I think that what's wrong is the idea that a single decision, specially one involving sex and money, can determine 'the kind of person' you are. Extremely simplistic and unrealistic point of view.
I feel like the problem with this is that sleeping with someone for money is not inherently unethical, i.e. it hurts no one. Certainly, if you were to replace it with "kill a person", the spread of answers would change significantly.
Is it just me or is there someone going on a downvoting spree here? I've seen at least 8 comments at 0, and I only checked the thread twice. It's kind of weird, since there's quite a high karma threshold for downvoting.
Is that a good reason for downvoting all comments?
The example may be misogynistic, but the idea that the example is an example of is not.
Also, suppose that the genders were removed:
X: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
Y: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
X: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
Y: (outraged) “What kind of person do you think I am?”
X: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”
Now who is shown in a less negative light, X or Y? I'd say Y. Of course Y is also shown in a negative light.
When I first saw the comment threads, basically everything was voted down to 0. It now feels much more like a typical contraversial thread - lots of disagreement, and a few people who've gotten strongly downvoted. I have no problem with that, it's what I expect to see.
It just kind of pissed me off to see the vandalism of presumably one person downvoting everything on the page, because only people with quite a lot of karma can downvote.
I suspect that's also why I got voted up to 7 and then back down to 1 - because people are looking at the votes now see no issue.
The guy's main point is that you should decide which girl you are: the "Consequentialist" (relativist), or the "Categoricalist" (absolutist).
He said: "... I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question..."
This shows that he is the "Consequentialist" girl.
Going into a business negotiation thinking either you or them are deontologists is selfdeception that will hinder you in your negotiations.