The Expanse
Recently I finished watching the latest season of the Sci-Fi series The Expanse. Let me say first of all that I highly recommend the show. It follows the crew of a small ship (the Rocinante) as they navigate around the solar system having various adventures and solving a great mystery about a new alien technology.
One way to understand the show is like a series of moral dilemmas, like a string of Trolley Problems made possible by the sci-fi elements. In fact, one of the reasons I think Mercedes doesn’t really like sci-fi is that the moral dilemmas are often kind of impractical. For example, someone might have to choose between saving themselves and saving humanity.
How often do we find ourselves in situations like that? Not very often. So a show with one such situation after another can be a turn-off for someone more interested in real-world issues. But I like it.
In some cases the show kind of stacks the deck so you know which side the characters should choose. For example, one of the characters (Bobby) is in the military and they are constantly faced with the question of whether she should follow orders or her own conscience.
Spoiler alert: the show isn’t really big on following orders.
Moral Process
If it isn’t big on following orders, you might conclude that the only alternative is to decide for yourself. But often they play in a middle ground. For example, in one episode, one of the crew of the Rocinante is tasked with doing something really important, and then that crew member makes a decision to do something else without telling anyone. Needless to say, the rest of the crew is really upset, and it takes a long time for them to learn to trust each other again.
Both the concept of following orders, and making decisions together with your crew are examples of moral process (as opposed to moral content). Thus, even though the show doesn’t seem to be a fan of following orders, it really likes the idea of making decisions together with a small group.
And guess what? I think they’re right. For me, the big distinction between following orders and working things out with a crew is the size of the decision making body. As I have argued many times before, I think certain functions of our brain are limited to social groups of a certain size.
With a small group we can work things out based on trust, personal influence, friendship, commitment, etc. When the group gets too big these things don’t work anymore and we are forced to fall back on more abstract methods like large scale democracy. In a large scale democracy, our vote isn’t really going to have significant impact on the outcome, it is just part of an aggregated decision making procedure. So we don’t feel as much ownership of the decisions, and it comes down to just “following orders”.
If congress decides to declare war, raise taxes, or ban lead in gasoline, it might be a good or bad thing, but I don’t really feel personally responsible for the decision one way or another. My influence wasn’t really significant enough for that. I think the moral distance between an individual and the law is one of the things that justifies the concept of civil disobedience. If the law (or your military commander) says one thing and our conscience says another, follow your conscience.
Small Group Decisions
Okay, so what about making decisions in small groups? What if your conscience says one thing, but your team wants to do something else? To me, this is a more complicated situation. There is a lot of value in committing ourselves to a group, and then working out moral decisions together. Basically, I think it is possible to build a moral decision making unit that is greater than any single individual.
In order to do this, the group needs to be small enough that each individual feels a moral responsibility for the action. Each member of the groups needs to have something like veto power if they absolutely see no gray area in the decision, and giving everyone veto power quickly diminishes the decision making effectiveness as group size increases. Also, it takes a lot of mutual trust to make something like this work, and it is too difficult to maintain the requisite level of trust in a large group.
Positive and Negative Actions
Raising the veto issue takes us back to the Trolley Problem mentioned above. Basically, you are on a train that is about to run into 5 (or x) people tied to the tracks. If you change course, you will kill 1 other person.
A pure consequentialist would argue that you need to change course. However, some moral systems argue that there is a moral distinction between letting something happen (i.e., like letting the train run over 5 people) and causing something to happen (i.e., changing course and killing the other person).
In general, I am pretty sympathetic to the consequentialist approach here. But what if making a distinction between positive and negative actions is necessary for our moral process? It might make sense to give everyone in a group a veto over positive actions, but it doesn’t really make sense to give everyone in the group the power to unilaterally commit the group to positive actions.
Why? The first thing that comes to mind is that positive actions are “scarce” whereas negative actions are not. That is, we can perform an infinite number of negative actions at a time, but we are limited in number of positive actions we can take. Giving everyone veto power is like giving them the power to cause negative actions. Since we can perform as many negative actions as we want (i.e., we can refrain from doing everything at the same time), giving everyone this power doesn’t immediately lead to a contradiction. But as soon as you give even two people the power to choose positive actions unilaterally, they can choose contradictory actions.
Of course, sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between positive and negative action. For example, suppose I am an executioner and I start swinging my arm to lop off someone’s head. Does stopping my arm now count as a positive action or a negative action?
The key here is that the current situation (me swinging my arm) is based on a previous decision (starting to swing my arm). So does reversing a previous decision count as a veto or a new action? I think you could have a consistent system either way, but it something that should probably be agreed upon in advance.
Family Budget
One example where many people need to make decisions together is the family budget. At one point I remember making the suggestion to Mercedes that we both had to agree before we bought anything significant. Mercedes’s response was that this was an unequal decision because she always wants to buy things and I never do.
So giving us both veto power effectively gives me exactly what I want and prevents her from getting what she wants. So in that sense, it isn’t really neutral. Of course, giving both of us the power to spend gives her exactly what she wants (or gives me an inventive to buy things just to prevent her from doing so).
Is there any way around this conundrum? In our case, we ended up breaking the budget into different portions with different control mechanisms. Basically, Mercedes has complete control over a portion, I have complete control over a portion, and we both have joint veto over another portion (more or less).
The reason I bring up the budget thing is that in this case, there is a pretty clear distinction between positive actions (spending) and negative actions (not spending). But still giving everyone veto power might not be a neutral act.
Divide and Choose
So perhaps it is possible to come up with a divide and choose solution. You remember the the story about how a parent wants two kids to share a cake equally, so they make the first kid cut the cake and the other gets the first pick?
Divide and choose isn’t always the most efficient solution. What if half the cake is chocolate and the other is vanilla, but neither knows the other’s preferences. Divide and choose gives the divider an incentive to cut the cake in two equal pieces from his perspective…but if they have different preferences they could get a better solution if they each agreed to give each other the kind they liked better.
In any case, let’s say our cake is the decision making process. Let’s break it up into a few different parts:
- defining the neutral/negative action (i.e., the base budget)
- proposing a positive action (i.e., ad hoc spending)
- veto the positive action
Now suppose one persons job is to cut this decision making process into two pieces (one piece will have two parts, and the other by itself). Here are the possible ways to break it up:
- 1) A: define/propose; B: veto
- 2) A: define/veto; B: propose
- 3) A: propose/veto; B: define
So when it comes to the budget (and assuming we can’t break the budget itself up for a moment) how would I break it up if Mercedes got to choose her piece?
As mentioned above, Mercedes is much more likely to propose new spending, and I like to veto ad hoc spending. If I don’t split up proposal and veto, Mercedes will spend all the money (or I will be forced to spend all the money by defining the default budget so there is no excess/savings). So I need to split up proposal and veto powers.
If I split things the first way, Mercedes would choose define/propose and I would be left with veto. If I split the second way, Mercedes would probably choose propose (so at least she has a chance of getting some ad hoc spending), so I would be left with define/veto. Note that proposal power is stronger than veto power since it includes an implicit veto (i.e., by not proposing something).
I prefer define/veto over veto alone, so I would split things the second way. The result may favor me because I like to veto, but at least among these three options it is probably the most fair result.
Non-budgetary Decisions
One of the reasons I brought up the whole budget thing is that it shows how in a group decision making process, people don’t always have the same roles. In the budget context, it probably makes sense for Mercedes to propose new spending, and for me to veto. In other areas of life, the opposite is probably true.
When it comes to big family decisions, I am more likely to propose non-default actions than Mercedes, and she is pretty conservative about making changes. So in that case, it makes more sense for Mercedes to define the default, and then veto changes. If I want to do something different, I need to convince her first.
This convincing process can definitely slow things down, but I think there is a lot of value in it. In many contexts, I am more likely to see valuable new opportunities, and Mercedes is more likely to sense threats. If we both respect the other’s contributions to the overall family welfare, we are generally stronger for it.
This is now an explicit part of our relationship understanding. I agree not to take any major actions Mercedes isn’t ready for, and she agrees to be open to things I propose. By explicitly articulating the value in the other person’s approach, it is easier for me to have patience when I don’t immediately get to act how I want. Also, by waiting until Mercedes is convinced, I am less likely to make big mistakes.
So, to summarize, in many cases the decision making procedure is almost as important as the value systems behind our decisions. We can often make better decisions (and feel more confident about our decisions) if we our decision making procedure involves other people. However, humans are not really equipped to take ownership of decisions made in groups that are too large. In small groups, different people involved in the process may have different roles, but there needs to be a balance of power.
