Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
In Batman Begins,
Batman is fighting with the villain
on a crane that is careening toward a crash.
Batman bests the villain,
but just when he has the chance to end him,
he says, "I won't kill you,
but I don't have to save you."
Batman then swoops off, leaving the villain to his certain death.
He could have delivered the lethal blow,
but instead, he lets the villain die.
And to moviegoers, this makes him appear more noble,
yet Batman's intent and the consequences -
there he is -
are the same.
Why does it matter whether he kills by action or inaction?
We tend to think
that morality is all about how bad someone's behavior is,
how bad are the consequences?
did someone intentionally cause harm?
But our morality is full of puzzles;
it is inconsistent and often wasteful.
Why?
One reason is that much of our morality
is shaped by what other people are likely to think.
A lot of our morality is shaped
by what has plausible deniability in the eyes of others.
Plausible deniability is uncertainty about a person's fault.
To see why plausible deniability matters,
consider an investigation
into the death of someone who's killed in one of two ways:
A rival pushes him off of a ladder,
or the rival, standing nearby, fails to stabilize the ladder as it falls.
If the rival pushes him, his intentions are pretty clear,
but if the rival fails to stabilize the ladder,
there's more uncertainty - perhaps he didn't see the ladder falling.
Harm caused by inaction leaves less evidence of intentional harm
than harm caused by taking action.
Harm caused by inaction has more plausible deniability.
People are less likely to agree on fault.
To see why this is important,
consider what would happen in our investigation of the latter death.
If one of the investigators thinks that the rival is guilty,
but the others all disagree,
this is unlikely to go well for our rogue investigator.
If he goes ahead and punishes anyway,
he's going to look like a bully terrorizing the innocent;
the others may even punish him for punishing.
There is benefit to being on the same page as other people
about who has done something wrong and deserves punishment.
Even if our rogue investigator has some special information
that the rival really is guilty,
he has little incentive to punish him if the others are unlikely to agree.
This is important
because it provides an incentive for us to say the behavior is less morally wrong
if it has plausible deniability.
We may even evolve or learn outside of conscious awareness
to genuinely feel and believe that behavior is less morally wrong
if it has plausible deniability.
Harm caused by inaction has more plausible deniability
than harm caused by taking action.
When Batman lets the villain die,
his intent is less clear than had he delivered the lethal blow,
and this might be why we make such a large moral distinction between the two.
Just consider our laws.
They tend not to require people to help, but they certainly punish active harm.
Most of us would abhor the idea of murdering a child
but think nothing of buying things we don't need, like lattes or vacations,
with money that we could have spent
on life-saving food, medicine, or malaria nets for children.
Philosophers have found ways
of taking advantage of the difference between action and inaction
to create tricky dilemmas,
like the classic trolley problem.
Would you divert a trolley headed towards five workmen
onto a track that only has one?
This is only a dilemma because you have to choose
between killing one person by taking action
and killing five people by failing to act.
In our research, we gave people one of two scenarios:
A man either switches a trolley headed towards his new car
onto a track that has a repairman stuck,
or he fails to switch the trolley,
which is headed towards the repairman onto the track with his new car.
In both cases, his intentions are pretty clear.
He looks at the repairman for a long time and at his new car for a long time.
And in both cases,
the train ultimately breaks the repair man's leg.
But when we asked people how morally wrong his behavior is,
those who read about him switching the trolley, taking action,
say that it's less morally wrong
than those who read about him failing to act.
We find the same thing when we ask how many years in prison he deserves.
This is consistent with other research
on the difference between action and inaction,
and it makes sense.
Punishment benefits from being on the same page as other people.
And harm caused by inaction leaves less evidence;
it has more plausible deniability,
so people are less likely to agree on guilt.
One way to test
whether plausible deniability is key to these results
is to see whether the difference between action and inaction gets smaller
when plausible deniability matters less.
This is a common trick that researchers use,
and this is what we did next:
We contrasted moral wrongness and punishment,
asking people how much they feared the man, disliked him,
and thought he was selfish.
How much we fear someone, dislike them, or think they're selfish
has less to do with punishing them
and more to do with whom to avoid and whom to befriend,
which we can do largely on our own;
we don't need to be as worried about what other people think,
and so plausible deniability,
this key difference between action and inaction,
matters less.
And we found that with fear, dislike, and selfishness,
it mattered less whether the man caused harm by taking action, in red,
or failing to act, in blue.
Another situation where plausible deniability matters less
is with our family members.
With our family, we care less what other people think
and more about consequences.
We evolved to care about consequences with our family
because we share genes with them,
and so we expected that with family,
it wouldn't matter so much
whether consequences were caused by action or inaction.
And we found that more people
were willing to push a family member wearing a heavy backpack
in front of a train
to save five family members
than were willing to push a stranger to save five strangers,
despite the fact that pushing a family member in front of a train
had to be even more horrifying to imagine.
Failure to act is one way to hide behind plausible deniability;
strategic ignorance is another.
Strategic ignorance is when we actively avoid finding out information
that would lead us to behave less selfishly.
For example,
some people may avoid being tested for sexually transmitted infections
so that they can continue having unprotected sex
without knowingly passing anything on to another person.
Strategic ignorance is a way of acquiring plausible deniability.
It's difficult to be held accountable
for consequences that we don't know about.
In our research, we gave people one of two stories
about Jen the graduate student.
Jen contracts chlamydia and passes it on to a partner.
But in one version, Jen gets tested
and knows about the chlamydia when she passes it on.
In the other version, she avoids testing
even though there's a free clinic offering testing
right near where she lives.
When we asked people how morally wrong Jen's behavior was,
people who read about Jen avoiding testing
said that her behavior was less immoral and deserved less punishment.
We found the same thing when we gave people stories
about Jen purchasing inhumane meat or clothing made with child labor.
People said that Jen was less immoral and deserved less punishment
when she avoided potentially damning information about her purchases
than when she found out this information.
But when we asked people how much they fear Jen,
we found something different.
People said that they fear Jen the same amount
regardless of whether she knew about the chlamydia or avoided testing.
This is exactly what we expected.
Plausible deniability matters less for avoidance than for punishment.
Unlike punishing Jen, people can avoid Jen on their own,
without having to worry so much about what other people think,
and so people fear Jen the same amount
regardless of whether she has plausible deniability or not.
Plausible deniability also plays a role when we're doing good.
Altruism is fortunately widespread, but it is often inefficient.
Inefficient giving
is giving without regard to having the greatest impact.
For example,
charities vary widely in how well they use our money,
but the charities that receives more donations
often fail to be the ones that do the most good;
for example,
in 2015, the animal rights charity rated most effective on CharityNavigator.com
raised 2.5 million dollars,
but the charity rated least effective for animal rights raised 12.8 million.
It is relatively easy to look up information
about different charities and their effectiveness online,
but most of us spend more time vetting our restaurant choices
than our charity choices.
We also have a tendency to feel moved to give to identifiable victims
rather than to help the greatest number.
In 1987, 18 month-old Jessica McClure spent 56 hours trapped in a well,
and the outpouring of support was so generous
that she inherited an 800,000-dollar trust fund when she was an adult.
If similar resources had been spent, for instance,
on preventive medicine for children,
hundreds of lives could have been saved,
but baby Jessica was an identifiable victim,
and so she received the funds.
One problem with trying to encourage people to give
in a way that has a greater impact
is it's often difficult to know how efficient a gift is.
It's much easier to simply know that someone gave.
Even if someone happens to know about the efficiency of our gifts,
others may not.
And efficiency is typically on a spectrum,
making it difficult for people to agree on what counts as efficient enough.
So for all these reasons,
if we give inefficiently, we have a lot of plausible deniability.
It's not at all clear that we don't care about the impact of our gift,
and so others are unlikely to care that we didn't give efficiently
even though we could have done more good.
In our research, we found
that people did reward others for donating
but not for donating more efficiently;
specifically, we found that people would pay some of their own bonus
to reward others who gave their small but meaningful bonus to charity
instead of keeping it,
but they rewarded them the same amount
regardless of whether there was a matching grant
multiplying their donations,
even though the multiplier went all the way up to 10.
And for those who chose not to donate,
there was no penalty for keeping money that would have been multiplied,
that could have been 10 times the benefit for charity.
We also found, similar to other research,
that people didn't donate more
when their donations would be multiplied by a matching grant.
Again, that could have been 10 times the benefit for charity.
But if instead of donating to charity,
people were given the chance to save for the future,
they did save more if their savings would be multiplied.
Similarly, we asked some people
how much of their income would they be willing to give up,
hypothetically,
to save a certain number of children from going hungry for a year.
For some it was one child; for others, five.
People asked about one child
were willing to donate the same as people asked about five,
about 10% in both cases.
But if instead of asking people about other people's children,
we asked them about their own family members,
we found something different.
Of course people are willing to donate more to help their family,
but what interested us
is that those asked about five family members
were willing to donate more than those asked about one.
We care more about having the greatest impact
when we have an incentive to.
When our own finances or our family is on the line,
these cases are less about what other people think.
In these cases,
plausible deniability matters less, and consequences matter more.
Plausible deniability in the eyes of others
shapes a lot of our morality.
There's benefit to being on the same page as others
about who to punish.
We don't want to be out on a limb
punishing someone who others think is innocent
and typically have little incentive to do so.
It is more difficult to agree
on harm caused by inaction than harm caused by taking action,
on strategic ignorance than knowing harm,
and on inefficient giving than not giving.
And so we see more harm caused by inaction -
people remaining strategically ignorant and people giving inefficiently.
One tragic case of harm caused by inaction
is when the British turned away a ship full of Jewish refugees
that was approaching Palestine during World War II.
Not wanting to deal with the political unrest that might occur,
they allowed the ship to land;
they encouraged it to be towed into dangerous waters,
where it was predictably torpedoed.
The British may not have fired the torpedoes themselves,
but 791 people were foreseeably killed nonetheless,
many of them children.
Harm caused by inaction, strategic ignorance,
and inefficient giving
can have serious consequences.
Millions of dollars in aid are wasted because they're used inefficiently,
and efforts to deal with the existential threats of our time may fall short -
such as climate change -
may fall short in part because people do what is common among their friends
and invisible to others
instead of what is most important.
Serious harm can come when leaders hide behind strategic ignorance
about potentially damning things
going on in their campaigns, governments, religious organizations, or businesses.
And failure to act can be catastrophic,
as with issues like global poverty and climate change.
What harm caused by inaction, strategic ignorance,
and inefficient giving show us
is that the things that get rewarded and punished
very often come to be the things that we feel are good and bad.
Even though what we think and feel
is the most immediate, intimate cause of our behavior,
it's in many ways shaped by incentives outside of us.
What this means is if we want to change behavior,
to encourage giving that has a greater impact,
and close moral loopholes,
like strategic ignorance and harm by inaction,
we need to change the incentives outside of us.
We need to do things like make the efficiency of our altruistic acts
visible, commonly known, and clearly defined
in cases where we see inefficient giving,
make the setup of institutions so that they are transparent by default
in cases where strategic ignorance could be dangerous,
and make positive action easy and rewarding
in cases where failure to act could be devastating.
If we change our incentives,
our moral feelings will likely follow.
Thank you.
(Applause)