13 The Immoral Preference Objection - Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests by Jason F. Brennan, Peter Jaworski. #democraziacomeespressione #predictionmarket #cassandrerispettate #ilsacroprezzato #bimbiprezzati #assicurazionevita
As we discussed in Chapter 7, an information market is a stock market in which people place bets on whether certain events will occur.Read more at location 2877
Sandel was especially vexed by the proposed Policy Analysis Market, which would have allowed people to make bets on things like wars and terrorist attacks. In his view, these information markets commodify life and death,Read more at location 2882
If you place a large bet that a terrorist attack will occur tomorrow, you might thereby acquire an immoral preference that the attack occur.Read more at location 2886
The Immoral Preference Objection In information markets, people sometimes bet that certain bad things will happen. If a person bets that a bad thing will happen, she will come to have a stake in that bad thing happening, proportional to the size of the bet. If a person comes to have a stake in a bad thing happening, she will come to prefer that that bad thing happen, proportional to the size of the bet. To prefer that a bad thing happen shows flawed character; a perfectly virtuous person would not have such a preference. If an environment or context induces a person to have worse character, it is corrupting. Therefore, information markets are corrupting.Read more at location 2890
It’s not quite a conceptual argument—it does rely upon empirical claims—butRead more at location 2897
Advocates of information markets agree and assume that placing a bet gives people a stakeRead more at location 2899
In response, we begin by noting that a similar kind of objection can be raised outside of information markets.Read more at location 2907
An oncologist tells a patient, “You should get your affairs in order. You most likely have only a few months to live.”Read more at location 2908
An economic forecaster (on television, working for government, or working for an investment firm) predicts that there will be a severe recessionRead more at location 2909
An executive tells the board that the company is likely to suffer $20 million in lossesRead more at location 2911
A weather forecaster predicts that the hurricane will cause $10 billion in damageRead more at location 2912
A parent tells her daughter that drinking an entire bottle of booze will give her a hangover and make her sick.Read more at location 2913
An intelligence officer briefs the president that he expects terrorist attacksRead more at location 2916
A government professor tells his students that unless they study, they will get bad grades.Read more at location 2919
In each of these cases, a decent person would prefer ex ante that the bad thing not occur.Read more at location 2925
However, in virtue of having made the prediction in public or in front of others, the person making that prediction acquires a stake in being right, and thus acquires a stake in that bad thing happening. In each of these cases, the people making the prediction are supposed to be experts,Read more at location 2926
Soi-disant experts who continually make false predictions can lose their status,Read more at location 2929
Philip Tetlock did a long-term study of experts’ ability to make predictionsRead more at location 2935
He found that they were typically not much better than chance. Many experts, especially foreign policy experts, find Tetlock’s results embarrassing.Read more at location 2937
Sandel could just agree with these points, but then respond that the problem is that information markets will draw more people into the inherently corrupting prediction game.Read more at location 2946
Consider, for instance, life insurance. We now expect responsible spouses or parents to buy life insurance. But many people opposed life insurance, when it was invented, because they believed it would be corrupting.Read more at location 2951
So, by buying life insurance, I corrupt my wife, in the sense that I weaken the strength of her desire that I live.Read more at location 2969
Sure, it reduces the strength of people’s preferences for good things, but it isn’t thereby automatically corrupting.Read more at location 2973
The market here corrupts, if we want to call it that, only in the sense that it reduces the instrumental value of someone’s life. Life insurance doesn’t change the intrinsic valueRead more at location 2975
Sandel might worry that when we bet on death, the instrumental value of death might trump the intrinsic value of life.Read more at location 2986
Here we turn to the work of moral psychologist Dan Ariely.5 Dan Ariely’s main research finding is that most people will lie, cheat, and steal on the margin, but only if doing so is compatible with them thinking of themselves as overall good people.Read more at location 2993
If saints get an A+ in ethics, the average person wants a B. This person will lie a bit here and there, compatible with having B-level character,Read more at location 2998
People placing bets in information markets already believe that bad things will happen—they wouldn’t bet otherwise.Read more at location 3001
Sandel might be surprised to learn that there’s empirical evidence that putting a monetary price on a person’s life, whether through life insurance or through damages awarded in a wrongful death tort case, can cause us to see people as possessing greater intrinsic value.Read more at location 3014
Similarly, if my kids get sick and die, I’ll save money in the long run. How should that figure into life insurance for children?Read more at location 3020
Sociologist Viviana Zelizer, in her book Pricing the Priceless Child, says that these became important questions in the late 19th century. Children started working less (on the farm or in factories). They thus stopped being economic assets to their parents and started being net economic burdens.Read more at location 3021
How should life insurance deal with their deaths? As Zelizer documents at length, what happened was that, in deciding to put a price on children’s lives, people started to think of children as “priceless,”Read more at location 3024
The current attitudes we have towards children—seeing them as in some way sacred—developed as a result of trying to price childrenRead more at location 3026
putting a price on things is sometimes the very thing that makes us come to see those things as priceless.Read more at location 3028
Note: METTERE UN PREZZO E LA VERITÀ
