A phenomenon that I am very alert to is that of justifying our side doing something wrong by saying that the other side does it. (Is there a name for this?) For example, someone left a comment on this site that implied that it made sense for blacks to treat police with disrespect, because police treat blacks with disrespect. Another common example is defending trade barriers as “retaliation” for another country’s trade barriers.
If blacks retaliate for racist treatment by resisting arrest or threatening police, this is likely to make things worse, rather than better. If we retaliate for trade barriers by putting up trade barriers, this is likely to make things worse, rather than better.
I would say that when you do something bad and, when asked to justify it, all you can come up with is “the other side did it to us,” then you are pretty desperate to rationalize your actions. If your program spits out “Our side is entitled to commit atrocities,” there is a bug in your logic somewhere.
It’s called tu quoque.
Whataboutism.
Tit for tat
Dumb and dumber.
Ha, good one!
Game theory terms—win-win, win-lose, and lose-lose—are useful here, referring to the possible outcomes of a dispute involving two sides, and more importantly, how each side perceives their outcome relative to their standing before the transaction. Almost all exchanges are win-win, the most rational result for both parties, from a simple waving of hands in greeting to complex trade deals. As for “If your program spits out ‘Our side is entitled to commit atrocities,'” there certainly is “a bug in your logic somewhere” … and probably an ideology present that doesn’t recognize logic.
Game theory provides a useful way to look at ethical choices since it which avoids a lot of the unsolvable problem with irreconcilable priors of different values.
One is in a long-term game with many iterations and a fluid, dynamic, and uncertain situation of shifting relative strength.
If you want to preserve a situation in which participants are deterred from trespassing on each other’s key interests, then there is a usually a narrow range of ‘strategically correct’ reactions to such provocations that if mutually expected by all players incentivizes maintenance of peace in something analogous to the ‘Nash Equilibrium’.
Many of our deepest social-psychological instincts and impulses have their origin in the evolutionary mental firmware that calculates the solutions to these game-theoretic problems which are adaptive to social needs of coordination and rivalry, and many of our strong moral and ethical impulses emerge out of those intuitions.
One trouble (among many) is that the constellation of strategically correct sensitivities and reactions doesn’t line up well with the kind of stories we like to tell each other about how to rationalize or judge those reactions, and it also conflicts with other impulses and instincts, especially since human beings are split into two groups with distinct reproductive strategies which are pre-verbal, and pre-intellectual and cannot be tidied up by any concoction of a pleasingly perfect ethical framework.
Heck, forget tidying up, these are gigavolt-charged third-rail topics about which it is totally impossible even to have an honest conversation, ironically due to the strategically correct move being totally disproportionate outrage if anyone even broaches the subject.
But one result of all this is that while most ethical systems recoil at “double standards”, making ethical conclusions on the basis of “Who, Whom?” and social status is a common and quite natural tendency. There is a general set of defenses, excuses, and rationalizes for every kind of transgression of deontological rules, principles, or even just intuitive moral heuristics, and in each case one must make a judgment call as to whether the justification is credible and sufficient to excuse the behavior.
Depending on one’s social position and relative power, the strategically correct decision about half the time is usually to accept the excuses from high status and/or helpful friends, and to reject them from low status and/or harmful enemies. That why some people don’t really care about whether something is ethically ‘correct’ on some metaphysical level or epistemically ‘true’, but mostly on who is doing it to whom and what that signals about relative status and power.
Because given their social and reproduction strategy in life, that is the strategically correct thing to do for people who are mostly on the sidelines of major contests and need to be able to identify the superior player and then justify siding with the winner. That looks like a single standard instead of a double standard, because the ugly details are laundered through plausibly justifiable differing opinions and judgments about exceptions. And so long as you allow exceptions and don’t have a ‘zero-tolerance’ regime, or hand off all your decisions to an automated algorithm, there is no way to avoid this problem with human beings.
What about people who are not on the sidelines but actually involved in the contests, tournaments, games, and so forth? They have a different Nash Equilibrium set of harmonious strategies, which is to establish a rigid set of rules known to everyone and by which the game is played and pecking order established, and to which one must reference to justify behavior and allocate status and wins and losses.
Here’s the catch. These two ethical constellations, built into human nature, cannot be harmonized or reconciled. You have to pick one, or one has to win out, or you end up in a mess.
You can’t have a working system of protocols of interaction and social ethics without Aumann common knowledge and accurate expectations of how people will react, just like you can’t have good traffic conditions if you mix people from different driving cultures together, because no one can guess what the other drivers will do and how they will react. On the fundamentals,”there can be only one.”
The really ugly truth is that only one of these systems turns out to be useful for and compatible with fair treatment, equal justice under law, and the expansion of knowledge via civil discourse, that is, only one is able to form the basis of a stable and high functioning civilization. But not everybody is naturally wired to like that one, and you can’t talk the differently-wired others into it. These two groups are at war, but not a war of attrition, because there is too much fraternization with the enemy.
the short version of Handle
Tit for Tat with some forgiveness is the best known strategy for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma
Note that Arnold posits that police generally subject blacks to racist treatment, a dubious proposition. Police forces include large numbers of blacks. Few police want to be subjected to accusations of this nature. Blacks commit a hugely disproportionate level of crime, especially violent crime; if police are especially careful and defensive around blacks that is not racism, it is common sense. It is easy to characterize such special precautions, because the treatment is differential, as “racist” when it is not.
As for the retaliation point, it depends on what is meant by “doing something wrong.” Observing extra precautions around a population that has a high incidence of criminal activity is not something wrong.
Thucydides-
1. Arnold never posited that police generally subject blacks to racist treatment. Read his post carefully again.
2. “Observing extra precautions around a population that has a high incidence of criminal activity is not something wrong.”
Well, “extra precautions” is carrying a lot of weight here, isn’t it? And yes, it is wrong.
What if you were a white guy, but you came from Chicago? You would have been part of a population that has a high incidence of criminal activity. What if your kid got caught with some weed, and the cops, seeing on his license that he was from Chicago, got a bit too rough, and it went sideways? Too bad your kid didn’t get the white suburban treatment for drugs, huh?
Being part of any huge population group is irrelevant to any judgement of any kind, especially by the cops.
How about men?
Not necessarily a rhetorical question, but if someone says, “yes, police should never treat men as if they are more likely to be violent than women,” I am a bit skeptical of whether they really believe it, and if many people do believe, then there should be a lot more outcry over certain disparities than there is.
Also, “any huge population?” I don’t think you’re making the strongest case against racial profiling. Unemployed people are a huge population, and membership to that group is a perfectly valid variable to consider when deciding whether to give someone a loan. Perhaps you’re implying immutable characteristics.
If a cop walks up to a citizen and they are large and powerfully built, the cop may be unsettled that they face someone who might be able to overpower them if they are not careful.
But that does not make that citizen one iota more guilty, and if that cop takes extra precautions for their own benefit, they must take on the added burden of that caution to not violate that person’s rights.
Also, as to your question about “any huge population?” and the unemployed. It does not matter that the unemployed is a huge population. That is irrelevant.
What is relevant is whether that one individual can pay the loan back, and if they themselves do not have the ability to prove an income source to do that, that is relevant.
So if you have a relevant trait that makes you part of a group, and you are discriminated against because of the trait, then that is OK. If you are part of a huge group, and that group has a higher incidence of a trait, but it is not evident that you do personally, that is not OK.
The conditions 1) “if you have a relevant trait that makes you part of a group” and 2) “If you are part of a huge group, and that group has a higher incidence of a trait” are effectively identical, because the “relevant trait” (being a criminal, being unable to pay back a loan) is almost never identifiable (if it were life would be a lot easier) so other traits predictive of that trait are used as proxy variables. You shouldn’t need positive evidence that a particular unemployed person is personally unreliable in order to charge him a higher interest rate. As an individual, you probably know nothing about him one way or the other. The fact that, ceteris paribus, an unemployed person is less likely to pay back a loan is enough to warrant the higher interest rate.
Additional considerations may be warranted for agents of the state, but not necessarily for private citizens engaged in voluntary interactions imo.
In any case, this begs the question of why there isn’t a big #MaleLivesMatter movement, considering that sex is both an even better predictor of being shot by police and there is a larger disparity that can’t be explained by confounding variables. Either a lot of people are hypocrites, or they accept that an innocuous, immutable trait can be reasonable basis for discrimination if it is sufficiently predictive behavior, and the threshold lies conveniently between the race coefficient for crime rates and the sex coefficient for crime rates (which aren’t generally that far apart).
Mark Z
…the “relevant trait” (being a criminal, being unable to pay back a loan) is almost never identifiable…
1. We don’t predict if someone is a criminal. We prove it in a court and we do that all the time.
2. Financial institutions are subject to public accommodations laws. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that financial institutions may not use race in a predictive way either.
We can argue semantics all day about this, but generally financial institutions narrowly check within the claims of the core value proposition.
Norms dictate that it is reasonable to demand that you prove the capacity to make your payments at the time of the loan, and larger, riskier loans are secured against assets.
If you still insist this is predictive, I can only say that we have a number of constructions that extend into the future and so far, our society expects good faith.
The use of prediction, especially using non-direct measures, in public accommodation is increasingly going to be a very divisive problem. AI makes it easy, but it is a hugely dangerous proposition. No good comes from institutional prediction.
I was talking about financial institutions using unemployment as a predictor, not race, as an example of a relevant group-based inference. And it’s inevitable when making judgments (such as whether to give a loan, or which neighborhoods to allocate police resources to) that we have to make judgments based on averages. I think it’s naive to pretend we go through life treating each person as a unique Sartrean individual without considering correlations between characteristics they possess and other traits or behaviors. What social norms do is cordon off certain axes from such considerations in many circumstances, but ignoring general characteristics is not a consistent norm, it’s just considered normal in most cases so we don’t notice.
And it’s clearly not true that nothing good comes from ‘institutional prediction.’ It’s used by employers to find more productive employees, by police to allocate resources to areas where policing is more needed, to more effectively match consumers with goods. It cannot be argued that all of our judgments – including many useful or necessary judgments – are based on strictly individual characteristics. If people who committed previous crimes were no more likely to commit crimes in the future we wouldn’t give them such harsher sentences, for example.
You can argue in some cases there are costs that exceed the benefits, but to insist there are no benefits is to pretend humans are magically exempt from the laws of statistics.
Isn’t the potential for retaliation necessary as a deterrent? Mutually assured destruction with respect to nuclear attacks is the cornerstone of Western civilization.
And counter-suing someone who sues you in court appears to be a widely accepted legal strategy.
I am not sure trade is a good example. Free-traders like to blame the USA first for other countries trade retaliation. Generally, if the USA retaliates against country A for its trade barriers, and then country A counter-retaliates, the free traders will blame the counter-retaliation on the USA. The tactic here appears to be to eliminate any leverage the USA may have in negotiating for more trade opportunity. No, no, the free trader will respond, the WTO will adjudicate trade disputes. But the WTO has no real ability to enforce its decisions, so once again it is heads-I-win, tails-you-lose for those who prioritize free access to cheap stuff over other values.
Imagine China launching its nuclear missiles while simultaneously broadcasting a message that retaliation is evil. That is what we encounter so often. Providing consequences to bad behavior is not necessarily a bad thing.
For example, the anti-police mayor of New York City, without legal authority, painted provocative and racially exclusionary messages across the streets. People have retaliated by dumping paint on the messages. The mayor has responded by tasking police to guard the messages. Most recently Guilet Dita Germanotta was arrested for paint dumping. https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/woman-arrested-for-defacing-blm-mural-outside-trump-tower/. Heel or hero?
Of course retaliation is not the optimal response to provocation in all situations.
The real question here is how free men of conscience should respond to the installation of demented demagogue Joe Biden in the office of the president following an election that will feature blast ballot mailing (not at all the same thing as absentee ballots) based on voter rolls that are not properly maintained as required by law, widespread voting by ineligibles, a voting tabulation process that will take months, a substantial share of ballots being invalidated on questionable, and possible deployment of the armies of lawyers who have already been hired? In short an election with no integrity that will not meet even minimum standards of legitimacy.
Whether justified or not, I would argue that free men of conscience should not retaliate by resisting in the vile and corrupt manner of the anti-Trumpers. Instead, as democracy dies, let us rise above their sordid example by looking to the heroes of democracy who have gone before us. Let us reread Thomas Paine. Look to the vision, rhetoric, and non-violence of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Look to the courage of the demonstrators in Peking and Hong Kong.
Look to the underground schools of Roger Scruton teaching truth to counter the false ideology of the government schools. Look to the subversive theater of Vaclav Haval. To Charter 77. To how the noble Brazilians rose above their years of dictatorship. Indeed, even look back to the example of the great Tiradentes. This will be the way democracy rises up
Retaliation always has costs. Sometimes it is worth the costs to deter the undesirable conduct, sometimes not.
I often wondered as a teenager what a president might do if, let’s say, he suddenly learned that the Soviets had launched their entire nuclear weapon cache at the US and it was all about to hit in the next 10 minutes. Is it moral to retaliate once the deterrent is proven ineffective? Would a president even consider the moral question?
The British Prime Minister used to write the publicly unknown answer about whether to launch a nuclear counter attack if cut off from communications, in a sealed letter to the commander of their strategic submarine full of ICBMs. The submarine captain would open the letter and presumably follow orders. If the submarine comes back with no war, the letter is burned and no one ever gets to learn about the contents.
This is not the strategically correct answer per game theory analysis, as Schelling explained, in which when playing a game of chicken you must try to credibly and conspicuously signal commitment and minimize uncertainty and ambiguity, and one does this by cutting the brake lines, throwing out the steering wheel, and placing Tullock’s dagger on the dashboard.
So the strategically correct thing to do would be have a very public press event in which you write “nuke those bastards to hell!”, show it to the camera, seal the envelope and put it in the safe while wishing the submarine crew a bon voyage.
The only reason not to do this is having to balance against domestic political opposition, and pretend the answer might be no, but that the enemy could never be sure it wasn’t yes.
As for presidents, it’s probably just a question of personality.
In truth, I suspect you’re correct in that it’s mostly a lazy defense, giving very light cover for what they want to do in the first place.
There is a steelman of the argument, though: Moloch. “The competition is fierce enough that we are forced to emulate their tactics or die”. (I’m so happy I can link to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ again).
In my view one of the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drags on is that both sides continuously do exactly this. Their best arguments for their actions are all about pointing to how bad the other guys are. Probably a lot of other long running interethnic conflicts are the same way.
It goes back at least as far as Psalm 137: “Blessed be he who rewards you as you have rewarded us…”
In moral philosophy, some would argue that violence is wrong no matter what. The more mainstream position is that violence is justified for reasons of defense, deterrence, and retaliation or justice. This latter view is a form of “the other side did it to us”. The systems of police, justice, and military that exist in Western Civilization are all premised on this.
Bryan Caplan says that we shouldn’t have a military, even a defensive war is wrong. Michael Huemer says judificial incarceration is wrong. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I presume Kling has a much more mainstream position on those issues and supports a basic defensive military and local police forces. Therefore, Kling does support some form of “the other side did it to us” which is what the military and police are based on.
I’ve never heard Kling object to sanctions, which are trade barriers used to apply pressure. I’m not at all convinced that retaliatory trade barriers aren’t a reasonable tool to use.
> I would say that when you do something bad and, when asked to justify it, all you can come up with is “the other side did it to us,” then you are pretty desperate to rationalize your actions.
Counterpoint: when a bully is punching you in the nose, and you want him to stop, you don’t eschew violence just because “the other side is doing it.” You punch him back; do that enough times, and he *will* stop.
Some will argue nuance here, but the fact remains that if it’s “legal” tactics for one side, then it’s “legal” tactics for the other.
“Counterpoint: when a bully is punching you in the nose, and you want him to stop, you don’t eschew violence just because “the other side is doing it.” You punch him back; do that enough times, and he *will* stop.”
That may be the line your Dad told you (that’s what my Dad taught me anyway) but in truth, you better know who you are dealing with. Often that little chestnut works. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all and you get beat worse, or killed.
To me it goes back to control. Who gets to decide what I do? Do I get to decide, or do other people usually dictate how I behave?
The reason you fight back is not that you will beat up the bully. Bully’s are generally bullying you because they can beat you up. The reason you fight back is because if the bully knows that everyone they pick on will fight back hard, being a bully is much less attractive.
> if the bully knows that everyone they pick on will fight back hard, being a bully is much less attractive.
Exactly. At the very least, when you punch the bully back, it makes *you* a less attractive target.
Jack Marshall’s web site ethicsalarms.com can help us out here.
His long list of “unethical rationalizations and misconceptions” is a contribution to the public good.
https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalizations-and-misconceptions/
The game is asymmetrical, the aggrieved party has more tuned responses than tit for tat.
Responses that level the playing field and lower costs. The cop has a gun and government license, confront him on a more equal ground, like court.
I think this is called “Moral Licensure”
No, self-licensing is when one thinks one has earned positive karma “metaphysical social-credit” points from being a “good person”, doing good works, etc. and therefore has earned a kind of get-out-of-guilt free card and is entitled to be a little bad on occasion without becoming a “bad person”. It’s kind of like people who give themselves ‘cheat days’ on hard diets or fitness programs.
That is the psychologically internalized version, but there is also the socially externalized version, in which one wants to violate a taboo, but needs an alibi. So one has to first behave or signal in a conspicuous manner that one is the kind of person who really believes in the taboo and who would never violate it, and then act in a way such that other people face an ambiguous situation with regards interpreting your actions and inferring your true motives. Since you have a potential cover story, and you have established your credential as a “good person”, they are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret that you are innocent and must have had non-taboo-breaking, permissible motives for your actions.
There is always a desperate demand for both these “virtue signals” and “socially acceptable excuses”, to add a little loophole flexibility to overly harsh and simplistic ideological requirements. Inventing them, picking up on them, and using them are fundamental features of human social psychology.
I’m with Handle. “Moral licensing” is clearly different. One of a couple of dozen different errors one can make.
That list of different “unethical rationalizations and misconceptions” at ethics alarms would keep me busy for at least an hour if I tried to read it. Don’t miss it!
Actually black hucksters have done very well since the 1960s. Riots, radical takeover of the academy and media, and the spread of white hatred masquerading as the anti-racism movement have advanced Orwellian logic and policies over the last half century. From a leftist’s standpoint, they’re winning. Even if riots tend to lead to a small backlash in the short run.
What you’re describing may be subtly different from tu quoque fallacy. It may be asserting the right to retaliate, and the defense of it may be made from game theory, where ‘tit for tat’ strategies are observed lead to the best outcome in repeated prisoner dilemma type games. That would be the argument for retaliatory behavior. “Make them taste their own medicine, that’ll get them to re-evaluate.”
I think this defense suffers from a couple flaws. First, the people one is ‘retaliating’ against are almost never the same as the ones who committed the original ‘crime’ either in war or in politics, so it’s not really morally appropriate, but also, since virtually everyone is a radical individualist when on the receiving end of guilt-by-association, that kind of non-specific retaliation tends lead to righteous indignation rather than de-escalation. And second, people aren’t usually rational (at least in a first order sense) agents when engaged in conflicts.
The man on this side accuses his opponent of having red hair. “What kind of scoundrel votes for a man with red hair?”
The man on the other side points out that his accuser has red hair also, but the moderator jumps in to scold the second man for engaging in whataboutery.
Not that anyone has any principled objection to red hair per se.
Red hair is good when we have it and bad when they have it, and it’s whataboutery to draw attention to the red-haired man for whom red hair is a rhetorical cudgel.
That’s why I stopped reading articles with “Whataboutery” in the headline.
The man on the other side isn’t justifying his red hair. He’s drawing attention to the disingenous justification used by his opponent in attacking him.
Both candidates have red hair. Having red hair isn’t a point against this man and not the other one. Both candidates have red hair.
It is called “turnabout is fair play.”
When political activists say: “You must vote for us because the other side is so bad,” I hear “We intend to escalate until we’re almost as bad…in our judgment, of course.”