By Deepika Santhanakrishnan
Group decision making is a contentious topic in economics. More contentious than the ability to make and analyse choice(s) made in groups is, how to make the members of the groups take moral responsibility for the (undesirable) outcomes of their decisions. In view of this, there are two kinds of arguments within the economics’ circle. One says that even though the group has to take responsibility as a whole for the outcomes, none of the individual members can be made accountable for the responsibility. This is called the problem of no hands. Second, many of the individual members, a sub-group may be,are morally responsible and hence they collectively are responsible for the bad outcomes. This is called the problem of many hands. And, economists conclude that which of the two is appropriate depends on the case at hand.
However, moral philosophers have a different take on the issue. To motivate their perspective, (Braham and Hees, 2012) takes an example of the famous ‘Tragedy of Commons’ game in game theory. The game goes like this: There are ‘n’ farmers in a village, which has a common pasture where all the farmers bring their cows to feed on the grass. Every farmer knows that the more pastures his cow grazes, the more milk they produce and hence more revenue; but, if every farmer does this, then the fertility of the land goes down and eventually the land is exploited of its ability to produce any more. In case such a scenario is happening, economists often blamed the ‘marginal’ farmer, the farmer whose actions turned the fertile land into exploited land at the margin. So, the economists blame that guy at the margin and those guys who followed him in using the land with the moral responsibility for the disastrous outcome. They let go of the guys who grazed their cows before this marginal guy came in.
Whereas moral philosophers blame every guy whose actions were not taken for the betterment of society, and if they acted in a certain way that otherwise wouldn’t have spoilt the land, then each of those individuals is to be held morally responsible. The last sentence is a little heavy in description, to put it crisply, (Braham and Hees, 2012) call it the NESS test, wherein, if an individual had taken an action, the absence of which wouldn’t have resulted in the disastrous outcome, but still the agent didn’t undertake that action, then that individual(s) is to be held morally responsible. Their sense of action is broader than how economist model this game, in that, actions need not only to be about grazing or not grazing and by how much, but also the efforts that any farmer could take in framing a consensus amongst themselves, may be an informative poster he can put up near the pasture land, etc.,
In view of assessing an individual farmer’s action, let’s now turn to the topic of how to account for moral responsibility in individual choices. (Binder and Hees, 2015) have spoken about the ‘agency paradox’, wherein, even when an agent is a rational utility maximizing consumer and he chooses his best possible action, it may still be not possible to make him liable for the responsibility of bad outcomes[1].To circumvent this problem, they have used (Baigent and Gaertner, 1996) characterization of ‘Never choose the uniquely largest [2]’ element in saying that when a rational agent’s objective is to choose the second-best element from his/her budget set, then we may be able to account moral responsibility for the individual’s action in many cases, with the exception of hard choices. If a mother is asked at gunpoint to kill either her son or her daughter, the only two choices in her choice set [3], the choice she undertakes cannot be said to make her morally responsible for the outcomes. In which case, they conclude that we can use the ‘Never choose the uniquely largest’ characterization to show that the quality of the choice set that the agent faces is poor.
What both individual and collective moral responsibility results have in common is that, when there are reasonable alternatives that could have been taken, we can make the individuals and hence account for moral responsibility. These studies throw light on how collective decision making is done on let’s say when a team of officials representing various countries meet to discuss climate change issues,in a school parents-teachers meeting about the outcomes of their child(ren)’s education etc., While these examples exemplify the role of individual-collective nexus in accounting for moral responsibility, one wo(a)nders what Pranesh acharya would do when he reaches Durvasapura, for, he is an individual, contemplating his role in the society, or maybe the other way round, that he represents the society contemplating the role of an individual.
Notes:
[1] Their work assumes a one-on-one relation between actions and outcomes and that an agent undertaking an action for sure knows what the consequences of his actions would be.
[2] By making an agent choose his/her second best, we in essence are giving him/her (reasonable) alternatives from which choice (s)he may make.
[3] To be precise, it is her budget set.
References:
Baigent and Gaertner (1996), “Never choose the uniquely largest: A characterization”.
Binder and Hees (2015), “Moral responsibility in individual choice”.
Braham and Hees (2012), “An anatomy of moral responsibility”.