Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives - Hardcover

Grant, Ruth W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691151601 ISBN 13: 9780691151601

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Incentives can be found everywhere - in schools, businesses, factories, and government - influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth W. Grant is professor of political science and philosophy and a senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. She is the author of John Locke's Liberalism and Hypocrisy and Integrity.

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"Strings Attached offers a fascinating tour of the history, morality, and unintended consequences of the modern obsession with using incentives to change behavior. Exploring cases from plea bargaining in criminal courts to paying students to earn good grades, Grant compellingly argues that using material incentives to get people to do things they otherwise would not raises important and previously unexamined questions about ethics, power, and character."--Lynn Stout, University of California, Los Angeles

"This remarkable book asks some deceptively simple questions: With what norms should we judge the use of incentives? How can we compare incentives to coercion and persuasion? With characteristically lucid prose and a productive blend of theory and case studies, Ruth Grant illuminates an often neglected arena of inquiry. At a time when philosophers advocate 'libertarian paternalism' as an alternative to coercion and governments deploy 'conditional cash transfers' as instruments of social policy, Grant's reflections could hardly be more relevant."--William Galston, The Brookings Institution

"Moving comfortably from Plato, modern philosophy, and organizational science to plea bargaining, medical research, and IMF loans, this impressive book lays bare some of the ethical complexities raised by the use of incentives in various social and political contexts. A comprehensive look at an underanalyzed topic, this book is a pleasure to read."--Alan Wertheimer, National Institutes of Health

"Strings Attached does a great job of exploring what needs to be considered when thinking about the ethics of incentives. Grant argues that choice and volition are not enough to answer ethical objections to the use of incentives, because not all choice and volition reflect the freedom and autonomy we aspire to. Policymakers and social scientists need to pay attention to this significant work. Thorough and accessible, it will be widely discussed and have a big impact."--Barry Schwartz, author ofThe Paradox of Choice

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"Strings Attached offers a fascinating tour of the history, morality, and unintended consequences of the modern obsession with using incentives to change behavior. Exploring cases from plea bargaining in criminal courts to paying students to earn good grades, Grant compellingly argues that using material incentives to get people to do things they otherwise would not raises important and previously unexamined questions about ethics, power, and character."--Lynn Stout, University of California, Los Angeles

"This remarkable book asks some deceptively simple questions: With what norms should we judge the use of incentives? How can we compare incentives to coercion and persuasion? With characteristically lucid prose and a productive blend of theory and case studies, Ruth Grant illuminates an often neglected arena of inquiry. At a time when philosophers advocate 'libertarian paternalism' as an alternative to coercion and governments deploy 'conditional cash transfers' as instruments of social policy, Grant's reflections could hardly be more relevant."--William Galston, The Brookings Institution

"Moving comfortably from Plato, modern philosophy, and organizational science to plea bargaining, medical research, and IMF loans, this impressive book lays bare some of the ethical complexities raised by the use of incentives in various social and political contexts. A comprehensive look at an underanalyzed topic, this book is a pleasure to read."--Alan Wertheimer, National Institutes of Health

"Strings Attached does a great job of exploring what needs to be considered when thinking about the ethics of incentives. Grant argues that choice and volition are not enough to answer ethical objections to the use of incentives, because not all choice and volition reflect the freedom and autonomy we aspire to. Policymakers and social scientists need to pay attention to this significant work. Thorough and accessible, it will be widely discussed and have a big impact."--Barry Schwartz, author ofThe Paradox of Choice

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Strings Attached

Untangling the Ethics of IncentivesBy Ruth W. Grant

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15160-1

Contents

Preface............................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................xvONE ? Why Worry about Incentives?.............................................1TWO ? Incentives Then and Now The Clock and the Engineer.....................14THREE ? "Incentives Talk" What Are Incentives Anyway?........................31FOUR ? Ethical and Not So Ethical Incentives..................................45FIVE ? Applying Standards, Making Judgments...................................60SEVEN ? Beyond Voluntariness..................................................123EIGHT ? A Different Kind of Conversation......................................133Notes..............................................................................141References.........................................................................171Index..............................................................................189

Chapter One

Why Worry about Incentives?

Express traffic lanes are set aside during rush hour for cars with more than two passengers. A will stipulates that a daughter will inherit only if she agrees to be a stay-at-home mom. West Virginia pays married couples on welfare an extra $100 per month, funded by a federal program to promote marriage. The government authorizes tax deductions for charitable contributions. Companies pay schools to install soda machines or televisions in their lunchrooms. Schools pay students when they get good grades. A prominent economist suggests that the government tax calories in order to reduce obesity. Legislators in South Carolina discuss a proposal to reduce prison sentences for inmates who donate organs. A soup kitchen feeds the homeless only if they attend a church service first. Cities across America offer large tax breaks to entice businesses to relocate. A donor funds college courses on the condition that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is on the reading list. A state legislator suggests paying poor women $1,000 to have their tubes tied while others debate making welfare conditional on the use of the Norplant contraceptive device. All of these are real examples, and the list could be multiplied endlessly.

Increasingly in the modern world, incentives are becoming the tool we reach for when we wish to bring about change. In government, in education, in health care, in private life, and between and within institutions of all sorts, incentives are offered to steer people's choices in certain directions and to bring about desired policy outcomes. So what? you might well ask. Where is the ethical issue here?

From a certain point of view, there is none. Incentives could be viewed as a form of trade. A person is offered something of value to him or her in exchange for doing something valued by the person making the offer. If the offer is accepted, both parties are better off according to their own lights. If that were not the case, and the benefit being offered were not sufficient, the offer would be rejected. This looks like a trade, and a trade is inherently ethical. It is a voluntary transaction that will occur only if both of the parties involved believe that they benefit from it. Thus, trading is free and rational and, for that reason, it can be considered an ethical relation between persons.

Nonetheless, all incentives and disincentives are not alike. We do recognize bribery and blackmail as wrong even though both can be described in neutral terms as situations in which a simple trade takes place: how much is it worth to a customs official to let his duty slide and ignore a smuggling operation? How much is it worth to one person to know that another will not reveal his criminal past?

But are these cases really the same as our trading your two apples for my three oranges? How can we justify distinguishing between legitimate incentives and disincentives on the one hand, and bribery and blackmail on the other? Viewing incentives as simple trades will not get us very far in answering that question.

Moreover, the question is broader than that: there are incentives and disincentives that we might judge illegitimate that nonetheless cannot be classified as bribery or blackmail. The use of incentives in public policy often leaves people with vaguely defined ethical qualms. I expect that some of the examples in the opening paragraph elicited some discomfort in you. What do those "gut reactions" tell us? Should some incentives elicit ethical concerns? How do we make sound ethical judgments in the gray areas?

We often meet these issues in everyday life. Some cases are clear. Most people do not object to rush hour express traffic lanes for multi-passenger cars, for example; most people do condemn actions like bribing a judge. But many cases are not so easily agreed upon. In North Carolina, at one time, a licensed driver of high school age could lose that license temporarily if he were failing a course. On hearing of this regulation, my young daughter said, "That's a good idea." My teenage son said, "That's blackmail!"

Examples in the realm of politics are equally controversial. Environmental policies allow companies to buy and sell pollution credits—but does treating pollution as a commodity distort the moral claim that supports its regulation in the first place? The federal government routinely shapes state policies through the use of federal grants in areas it certainly could not constitutionally regulate by federal law—but is this an illegitimate encroachment of power or not? State and local governments offer benefits to businesses to relocate in their area—is this a use of public resources for the public good or an unfair advantage for new businesses? None of these are examples of bribery or blackmail, but all involve the use of incentives in ways that some people find unprincipled and others find perfectly justifiable.

What is the ground of the moral sensibility that so often finds the use of incentives offensive? Some people object, for example, to offering incentives to encourage participation in medical research. In their view, participants ought to be willing volunteers committed to furthering the research enterprise. Otherwise, they are being objectified, used like lab rats for other people's purposes. On the other end of the spectrum of moral sensibilities are those who don't even condemn blackmail. A blackmailer who asks for something in exchange for refraining from revealing an extramarital affair is only threatening to tell the truth, after all. What is wrong with threatening to do something that is perfectly acceptable to do?

The question of the ethics of incentives goes to the heart of a longstanding confrontation between two sorts of moral attitudes. The first might be called the "moralistic attitude," according to which the quality of character of the members of society ought to be a central public concern. Since societies can only function at their best if their members, especially their leaders, are capable of virtues like self-restraint, personal sacrifice, and public responsibility, matters of motivation and character formation are critical for politics. The contrasting view I will call the "economic attitude" or the "Mandevillian attitude." The latter refers to Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691151601
• ISBN 13: 9780691151601
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland