Transcript Sacred Values and Taboos

Sacred Values and Taboos
Sacred or Protected Values
• What sorts of things do we hold sacred or
protected?
Sacred or Protected Values
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Life
The environment
Health
Religion
People do not accept tradeoffs on these
dimensions
Types of taboos
• Taboo tradeoffs:
– Accepting money to violate a sacred value
• Forbidden base rates:
– Racial equality forbids use of base-rate
information in looking at relationship between
race and crime
• Heretical counterfactuals
– We are uncomfortable discussing certain
possibilities.
Sacred or Protected Values
• Characteristics of Protected Values
– Engages the feeling of morality
– Requests to violate the value are met with outrage
– People are uncomfortable even discussing the
tradeoffs
– People have a sense that they are doing something
wrong by even entertaining an option
• Often must engage in a ‘purification’ process later.
Tragic vs. Taboo Tradeoffs
• Tetlock et al.
• A tragic tradeoff
– Robert can either save the life of Johnny, a fiveyear-old boy who needs a liver transplant, or he
can save the life of an equally sick six-year-old
boy who needs a liver transplant. Robert will
only be able to save one child.
Taboo Tradeoff
• Robert can save the life of Johnny, a fiveyear-old who needs a liver transplant, but
the transplant procedure will cost the
hospital $1,000,000 that could be spent in
other ways such as purchasing better
equipment and enhancing salaries to recruit
talented doctors to the hospital. Robert
could save Johnny’s life or he could use the
$1,000,000 for other hospital needs.
Judgments about people
• How does considering a potential taboo
tradeoff affect someone’s belief about a
person?
• How do we reconcile this with the fact that
we consider taboo tradeoffs all the time in
different guises?
– Laws do place a value on human life and the
environment.
Morality and business
• Some environmental legislation backfires
– Without legislation, companies may treat
environmental issues as a moral issue
– With legislation, they become a business issue.
• Is it cheaper to comply with a regulation or to fail to
comply and risk paying a fine.
Why do we have protected values?
• Protected values are like mental accounting.
• We have conflicting goals.
– Often the protected value is about a long-term
goal
– Short term goals are more tempting
– We have protected values to provide a policy
for making certain kinds of decisions.