What happens the next time the same thing happens? Am I, Bob, supposed to just “accept reality” no matter how many times Alice messes up and does a thing that harms or inconveniences me, and does Alice owe me absolutely nothing for her mistakes?
If Alice has, to use the phrase I used originally, “aquired a universal sense of duty,” then the hope is that it is less likely for the same thing to happen again. Alice doesn’t need to feel guilty or at fault for the actions, she just acknowledges that the outcome was undesirable, and that she should try to adjust her future behavior in such a way as to make similar situations less likely to arise in the future. Bob, similarly, tries to adjust his future behavior to make similiar situations less likely to arise (for example, by giving Alice a written reminder of what she was supposed to get at the store).
The notion of “fault” is an oversimplification. Both Alice’s and Bob’s behavior contributed to the undesirable outcome, it’s just that Alice’s behavior (misremembering what she was supposed to buy) is socially-agreed to be blameworthy and Bob’s behavior (not giving Alice a written reminder) is socially-agreed to be perfectly OK. We could have different norms, and then the blame might fall on Bob for expecting Alice to remember something without writing it down for her. I think that would be a worse norm, but that’s not important; the norm that we have isn’t optimal because it blinds Bob to the fact that he also has the power to reduce the chance of the bad outcome repeating itself.
HWA addresses this, but not without introducing other flaws. Our norms of guilt and blame are better at compelling people to change their behavior. HWA relies on people caring about and having the motiviation to prevent repeat bad outcomes purely for the sake of preventing repeat bad outcomes. Guilt and blame give people external interest and motivation to do so.
If Alice has, to use the phrase I used originally, “aquired a universal sense of duty,” then the hope is that it is less likely for the same thing to happen again.
This “universal sense of duty” didn’t prevent Alice from committing this mistake in the first place, so—in the absence of any credible signal to this effect, or specific action to ensure it—why, exactly, should we believe that it will prevent a re-occurrence?
Alice doesn’t need to feel guilty or at fault for the actions, she just acknowledges that the outcome was undesirable, and that she should try to adjust her future behavior in such a way as to make similar situations less likely to arise in the future.
Ok. But I don’t see that in the OP’s examples. If you acknowledge that Alice should adjust her behavior to prevent similar future situations, then we’re halfway there. But that is important; and it is a pre-requisite to any offer by Bob to also adjust his future behavior to prevent Alice from making similar mistakes.
The other half, however, is the notion of compensating the wronged party for one’s mistakes or violations of one’s obligations. You ignored that part of my question, but it’s at least as important as the other part. Do you not think that those who are at fault ought to (whenever possible) compensate those that have been harmed by their actions?
Edit: Corrected wording which erroneously implied that adrusi was the OP.
HWA addresses this, but not without introducing other flaws. Our norms of guilt and blame are better at compelling people to change their behavior. HWA relies on people caring about and having the motiviation to prevent repeat bad outcomes purely for the sake of preventing repeat bad outcomes. Guilt and blame give people external interest and motivation to do so.
What you seem to be vaguely gesturing towards, in your last sentence, but what really deserves to be named explicitly and confronted head-on, is the notion of incentives.
I have sometimes said that if you get nothing else from all the disciplines that study people and the patterns in which we interact—from psychology to sociology to economics to game theory—you should at least get this:
You get what you incentivize.
The notions of responsibility, obligation, fault, etc., are how we incentivize people to care about the consequences of their actions. Guilt and shame (and related emotions, such as outrage-at-betrayal) are the mechanisms, given to us by biological and socio-cultural evolution, that implement that caring in our minds—that place it firmly in ‘System 1’.
Your idea relies on people being saints. They’re not. You get what you incentivize.
I absolutely get that incentives matter. I also think that responsibility and accountability are important, and my proposal of “hwa” is not intended to suggest otherwise.
I will point out, however, that guilt/shame/punishment etc have additional incentive costs that are often unrecognized: they incentivize people to deceive each other and themselves. If I am navigating by avoiding punishment or avoiding guilt (an internalized form of social punishment) then I’m incentivized to avoid taking responsibility so as to avoid that punishment: both recognizing what I’ve done socially, because if I did then others would punish me, and also recognizing what I’ve done internally, because if I did then I would feel bad.
As you say: you get what you incentivize. And I want to build my relationships and my sense of self in such ways that deception is not incentivized. Therefore, taking a post-blame approach to responsibility.
“Hwa” does not assume that people are saints. It does, however, assume that they care. This is a decent assumption for most relationships, and if it’s not true, I recommend getting out of that relationship, whether business, romantic, or otherwise.
(This comment thread isn’t a context where it’s making sense to me to attempt to bridge all of the inferential distance that we’re working with here, but this response was something I could manage. I am going to continue to write on this subject, and I value the articulations of the gaps between my explanations and what-I-am-trying-to-say, as provided by Said and others.)
If I am navigating by avoiding punishment or avoiding guilt (an internalized form of social punishment) then I’m incentivized to avoid taking responsibility so as to avoid that punishment: both recognizing what I’ve done socially, because if I did then others would punish me, and also recognizing what I’ve done internally, because if I did then I would feel bad.
Quite so, which is why we have very strong moral intuitions that such deception constitutes defection—even betrayal. It’s also the reason why ‘integrity’ is seen as a virtue (and one of the highest virtues, at that).
Under “HWA”, it seems to me, there is indeed no incentive for deception, but only because there is no incentive to take responsibility. That’s a textbook case of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
“Hwa” does not assume that people are saints. It does, however, assume that they care. This is a decent assumption for most relationships, and if it’s not true, I recommend getting out of that relationship, whether business, romantic, or otherwise.
Again: quite so, and I second the recommendation. But just as we have laws to keep honest people honest, we have incentives to keep people caring who care to begin with—because most things that both matter and that we can affect happen on the margin, not at the tails. And more: show me a person for whom incentives make no difference, and I will show you a saint.
I refer again, as I did in my earlier comments, to your own examples. In what way is Alice taking responsibility for her actions? Does she make restitution, and does she even recognize that she ought to do so? Does she take credible, costly steps to ensure that the transgression will not re-occur? If she does neither of these things, then in what what sense can she be said to have taken responsibility?
The notion of “fault” is an oversimplification. Both Alice’s and Bob’s behavior contributed to the undesirable outcome, it’s just that Alice’s behavior (misremembering what she was supposed to buy) is socially-agreed to be blameworthy and Bob’s behavior (not giving Alice a written reminder) is socially-agreed to be perfectly OK.
You’re missing a critical point:
Alice’s behavior is socially agreed to be blameworthy, because there exists a social norml that Alice had the obligation not to behave as she did. Bob’s behavior is socially agreed to be perfectly OK, because there exists a social norm that Bob had no obligation to act otherwise than he did.
Crucially, these are pre-existing norms, of which both Alice and Bob were aware—not any sort of arbitrary, post-hoc judgments.
A person, such as Alice, is at fault when she violates an obligation that she knows she has, or acts otherwise than she knows she should (where ‘should’ means “acknowledges an obligation to behave this way”).
We could have different norms, and then the blame might fall on Bob for expecting Alice to remember something without writing it down for her.
No. We couldn’t. The norm is: did Bob have an obligation to do X, and did he violate that obligation by failing to do X? Then Bob is at fault. Otherwise, he is not. That is what fault is.
The reason Alice is at fault here isn’t arbitrary, and the judgment of fault is not itself, directly based on some arbitrary norm. Alice had an obligation—which she has acknowledged that she had, and which she knows that she violated. That constitutes fault. If she had not had this obligation—that would be different.
We could have different norms for who has what obligations. That is irrelevant to the matter at hand, because whoever has whatever obligations, the fact is that they are known in advanced and (in your examples, and in most similar real-life cases) acknowledged after the fact. That means that changing the norms concerning who has what obligations cannot change my analysis of the situations.
the norm that we have isn’t optimal because it blinds Bob to the fact that he also has the power to reduce the chance of the bad outcome repeating itself.
Indeed, Bob does have this power. The question is, why does it fall to Bob, to use said power? Why not Alice? And if Alice does not give a satisfactory answer to this question, then it seems to me that Bob also has—and will (or, at least, should) give serious thought to using—another power that he has: the power of not associating with Alice henceforth, having written her off as an unreliable, untrustworthy person, lacking in integrity or a sense of fairness or justice.
If Alice has, to use the phrase I used originally, “aquired a universal sense of duty,” then the hope is that it is less likely for the same thing to happen again. Alice doesn’t need to feel guilty or at fault for the actions, she just acknowledges that the outcome was undesirable, and that she should try to adjust her future behavior in such a way as to make similar situations less likely to arise in the future. Bob, similarly, tries to adjust his future behavior to make similiar situations less likely to arise (for example, by giving Alice a written reminder of what she was supposed to get at the store).
The notion of “fault” is an oversimplification. Both Alice’s and Bob’s behavior contributed to the undesirable outcome, it’s just that Alice’s behavior (misremembering what she was supposed to buy) is socially-agreed to be blameworthy and Bob’s behavior (not giving Alice a written reminder) is socially-agreed to be perfectly OK. We could have different norms, and then the blame might fall on Bob for expecting Alice to remember something without writing it down for her. I think that would be a worse norm, but that’s not important; the norm that we have isn’t optimal because it blinds Bob to the fact that he also has the power to reduce the chance of the bad outcome repeating itself.
HWA addresses this, but not without introducing other flaws. Our norms of guilt and blame are better at compelling people to change their behavior. HWA relies on people caring about and having the motiviation to prevent repeat bad outcomes purely for the sake of preventing repeat bad outcomes. Guilt and blame give people external interest and motivation to do so.
This “universal sense of duty” didn’t prevent Alice from committing this mistake in the first place, so—in the absence of any credible signal to this effect, or specific action to ensure it—why, exactly, should we believe that it will prevent a re-occurrence?
Ok. But I don’t see that in the OP’s examples. If you acknowledge that Alice should adjust her behavior to prevent similar future situations, then we’re halfway there. But that is important; and it is a pre-requisite to any offer by Bob to also adjust his future behavior to prevent Alice from making similar mistakes.
The other half, however, is the notion of compensating the wronged party for one’s mistakes or violations of one’s obligations. You ignored that part of my question, but it’s at least as important as the other part. Do you not think that those who are at fault ought to (whenever possible) compensate those that have been harmed by their actions?
Edit: Corrected wording which erroneously implied that adrusi was the OP.
What you seem to be vaguely gesturing towards, in your last sentence, but what really deserves to be named explicitly and confronted head-on, is the notion of incentives.
I have sometimes said that if you get nothing else from all the disciplines that study people and the patterns in which we interact—from psychology to sociology to economics to game theory—you should at least get this:
You get what you incentivize.
The notions of responsibility, obligation, fault, etc., are how we incentivize people to care about the consequences of their actions. Guilt and shame (and related emotions, such as outrage-at-betrayal) are the mechanisms, given to us by biological and socio-cultural evolution, that implement that caring in our minds—that place it firmly in ‘System 1’.
Your idea relies on people being saints. They’re not. You get what you incentivize.
I absolutely get that incentives matter. I also think that responsibility and accountability are important, and my proposal of “hwa” is not intended to suggest otherwise.
I will point out, however, that guilt/shame/punishment etc have additional incentive costs that are often unrecognized: they incentivize people to deceive each other and themselves. If I am navigating by avoiding punishment or avoiding guilt (an internalized form of social punishment) then I’m incentivized to avoid taking responsibility so as to avoid that punishment: both recognizing what I’ve done socially, because if I did then others would punish me, and also recognizing what I’ve done internally, because if I did then I would feel bad.
As you say: you get what you incentivize. And I want to build my relationships and my sense of self in such ways that deception is not incentivized. Therefore, taking a post-blame approach to responsibility.
“Hwa” does not assume that people are saints. It does, however, assume that they care. This is a decent assumption for most relationships, and if it’s not true, I recommend getting out of that relationship, whether business, romantic, or otherwise.
(This comment thread isn’t a context where it’s making sense to me to attempt to bridge all of the inferential distance that we’re working with here, but this response was something I could manage. I am going to continue to write on this subject, and I value the articulations of the gaps between my explanations and what-I-am-trying-to-say, as provided by Said and others.)
Quite so, which is why we have very strong moral intuitions that such deception constitutes defection—even betrayal. It’s also the reason why ‘integrity’ is seen as a virtue (and one of the highest virtues, at that).
Under “HWA”, it seems to me, there is indeed no incentive for deception, but only because there is no incentive to take responsibility. That’s a textbook case of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
Again: quite so, and I second the recommendation. But just as we have laws to keep honest people honest, we have incentives to keep people caring who care to begin with—because most things that both matter and that we can affect happen on the margin, not at the tails. And more: show me a person for whom incentives make no difference, and I will show you a saint.
I refer again, as I did in my earlier comments, to your own examples. In what way is Alice taking responsibility for her actions? Does she make restitution, and does she even recognize that she ought to do so? Does she take credible, costly steps to ensure that the transgression will not re-occur? If she does neither of these things, then in what what sense can she be said to have taken responsibility?
You’re missing a critical point:
Alice’s behavior is socially agreed to be blameworthy, because there exists a social norml that Alice had the obligation not to behave as she did. Bob’s behavior is socially agreed to be perfectly OK, because there exists a social norm that Bob had no obligation to act otherwise than he did.
Crucially, these are pre-existing norms, of which both Alice and Bob were aware—not any sort of arbitrary, post-hoc judgments.
A person, such as Alice, is at fault when she violates an obligation that she knows she has, or acts otherwise than she knows she should (where ‘should’ means “acknowledges an obligation to behave this way”).
No. We couldn’t. The norm is: did Bob have an obligation to do X, and did he violate that obligation by failing to do X? Then Bob is at fault. Otherwise, he is not. That is what fault is.
The reason Alice is at fault here isn’t arbitrary, and the judgment of fault is not itself, directly based on some arbitrary norm. Alice had an obligation—which she has acknowledged that she had, and which she knows that she violated. That constitutes fault. If she had not had this obligation—that would be different.
We could have different norms for who has what obligations. That is irrelevant to the matter at hand, because whoever has whatever obligations, the fact is that they are known in advanced and (in your examples, and in most similar real-life cases) acknowledged after the fact. That means that changing the norms concerning who has what obligations cannot change my analysis of the situations.
Indeed, Bob does have this power. The question is, why does it fall to Bob, to use said power? Why not Alice? And if Alice does not give a satisfactory answer to this question, then it seems to me that Bob also has—and will (or, at least, should) give serious thought to using—another power that he has: the power of not associating with Alice henceforth, having written her off as an unreliable, untrustworthy person, lacking in integrity or a sense of fairness or justice.