From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 18:38:48 MDT
At 05:21 PM 7/17/2003 -0400, Wei Dai wrote:
> > In Miller's view, ethics is primarily about signaling, so whether the
> > ethical investments are well spent is largely irrelevant to his story. ...
>
>Education signals intelligence, and conspicuous consumption signals
>wealth. What does ethical investment signal? I guess it simultaneously
>signals wealth and belief in an ethical system. For the signal to work,
>the investments do have to be well spent, otherwise it only signals wealth
>and we already have ways to do that.
Not quite. People can signal a soft spot in their heart for certain causes
as long as it looks plausible that the money might be spent on the cause,
even if a closer examination shows that it doesn't have much effect.
I sent Mr. Miller the following comments:
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I just came across http://psych.unm.edu/faculty/moral_vision.htm
and found it to be thought-provoking. I've long been a big fan
of your mating mind story, but even so I suspect that your scenario
is very unlikely to happen. Let me try to explain why.
Ethical signaling seems to be mostly about signaling how a person
will later treat their spouse, children, and other associates.
People who show a soft spot in their heart for children and needy
folks around them may be expected to be similarly caring for your
children if you should mate with them. People who show themselves
to resist temptation to keep to their principles may be expected
to resist cheating on you to keep to their principle of not
cheating. And so on.
The most powerful such signals are *combinations* of resources
spent with personal context that is expected to trigger ethical
feelings. This is why volunteering is such much more popular as
an ethical signal than investing. If you spent time at the local
school, you show both that you give up resources and that you have
a soft spot in your heart for kids. If you do a charity jog you
show both that you give up resources and that you prefer to hang
around people like you (and that you are healthy).
Just giving money to an ethical investment, in contrast, says only
weak things about your personality and how your ethical feelings
react to your immediate context. Such investment mainly just shows
that you will give up resources for some abstract belief.
While I could imagine a transition to a situation where people spend
90% of their wealth doing ethical signaling, in that case I think
most of this would be spent via local volunteering and the like,
rather than via the elaborate division of labor that ordinary
investments rely on. The division of labor is good for production,
but mostly bad for ethical signaling.
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Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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