Taboo Trade-offs

Taboo Trade-offs: Defective Intuitive Economist or Principled Defender of Sacred Values?

Since the times of Adam Smith, scholars have commented on people’s reluctance to acknowledge certain value trade-offs and their occasionally fierce opposition to the very notion of a unified utility metric on which people weigh certain values against others. Traditional cognitive explanations emphasized the difficulty of working through apple–orange comparisons that cut across qualitatively different dimensions of value. This explanation is, however, inadequate from a social-functionalist perspective. Interdimensional comparisons can be difficult, but they are not typically cause for moral outrage. We do not usually find it shameful to admit that we make trade-offs between money and the wine or meat or leisure time that we consume. Indeed, it is not only acceptable to think in complex compensatory terms about one’s household budget; we expect, even require, such trade-offs of all competent, self-supporting adults in competitive-market economies (Becker, 1996).

Tetlock et al. (1996) argue that opposition to reducing all values to a single utility or monetary metric runs deeper than mere incommensurability; it is rooted in constitutive incommensurability – a concept that plays an important role in both modern moral philosophy (Raz, 1982) as well as in classic sociological theory (Durkheim, 1925/1973). The guiding idea is that our commitments to other people require us to deny that we can compare certain things quantitatively. To transgress this normative boundary, to attach a monetary value to one’s friendships or to one’s children or to loyalty to one’s country, is to disqualify oneself from certain social roles, to demonstrate that one does not have the faintest idea of what it means to be a true friend or parent or scholar (“You just don’t get it”). We experience constitutive incommensurability whenever treating values as commensurable subverts one of the values in the trade-off calculus; to compare is to destroy. Merely thinking about certain trade-offs degrades one’s standing as a moral being. Durkheim expressed the same sentiment in more sociological language when he observed that in both “primitive religious” and “advanced secular” societies, people ascribe a transcendental quality to the fundamental values of their social order. It is as though they need to believe that these values are infinitely important and cannot be compromised. Durkheim warned us not to be surprised, therefore, when even sophisticated citizens of secular societies tenaciously resist treating sacred values as objects of utilitarian calculation. Their attitude is less one of market calculation than it is one of believers to their God, a stance of absolute faith that imposes an “aura” or “mysterious barrier” around social morality. This Durkheimian perspective leads us to expect that violations of sacred values reliably provoke both outrage and cries for punishment. Secular–sacred trade-offs are not just cognitively perplexing; they are morally disturbing.

The cited studies test several predictions from this intuitive-theologian (or, if one prefers, principled-politician) analysis:

1. Secular–sacred trade-offs – such as proposals to attach dollar values to lives or to auction babies for adoption – trigger moral outrage, which is a composite reaction that includes anger, contempt, and punitiveness toward those willing even to consider such proposals. By contrast, secular– secular trade-offs – such as proposals to exchange money for goods and services that are widely regarded as permissible commodities in our society – are judged routine, and sacred–sacred trade-offs (e.g., the lives of one group against another; one promise in conflict with another) are judged to be tragic (Fiske & Tetlock, 1997; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green & Lerner, 2000).

2. Secular–sacred trade-offs are taboo in the primal Polynesian sense that they possess the power to contaminate previously respected decision makers and acceptable proposals as soon as it is discovered that the secular–sacred boundary has been breached. The analysis predicts less condemnation when such proposals are presented with vague deontic or utilitarian rationales – “In principle or on balance, X is the right thing to do” – than when they explicitly attach monetary values to human life, national honor, or other sacred entities (Tetlock et al., 2000).

3. The longer observers believe a decision maker contemplated a taboo trade-off (which pits a sacred value, such as the lives of children, against a secular one, such as medical costs), the more punitive the dispositional attributions to the decision maker, even if the decision maker winds up doing the “right thing” and affirming the sacred value. “Mere contemplation” contaminates, even controlling for decision outcome. By contrast, the longer observers believe a decision maker contemplated a tragic trade-off (which pits one sacred value against another – for instance, the lives of one group of children against another group), the fairer and wiser the decision maker is thought to be, no matter which outcome is chosen (Tetlock et al., 2000).

4. When subjects are led to believe that they have committed a taboo trade-off, they often engage in acts of moral cleansing to reaffirm their social identities as virtuous beings (Tetlock et al., 2000).

Taboo trade-offs are but one subset of a large class of proscribed forms of social cognition. Tetlock et al. (2000) documented two other forms:

1) Forbidden base rates – which could provide actuarial justifications for differential insurance premiums or police scrutiny as a function of race or ethnicity – threaten the images that Americans – especially liberal Americans – have of themselves as racially egalitarian. Decision makers who use such base-rate information stand condemned (in much the same way as those “guilty” of taboo trade-offs); decision makers who discover that they have inadvertently used such information quickly seize opportunities to engage in symbolic acts of moral cleansing that reaffirm their social identities as racially fair minded.

2) Heretical counterfactuals – which imply that the lives of founders of religious movements were the product of chance and contingency, just like the lives of ordinary mortals – provoke sharp condemnation from the faithful. Not surprisingly, this is the modal reaction of Christian fundamentalists to counterfactuals that imply the mutability of key events in the Biblical narrative of the life of Christ, for example: “If Joseph had not believed Mary’s account of how she became pregnant, he would have left her, and Jesus would have grown up in a single-parent household and formed a very different personality.” Perhaps more surprisingly, fundamentalists who are not given a social opportunity to distance themselves from heretical counterfactuals by condemning the source of the propositions are especially likely to engage in moral cleansing – in this case, via reaffirmations of commitment to their churches.