Tag: Morality

The Righteous Mind Review

More and more in our political discourse, it seems that many of us are forgetting the value of disagreement. We definitely still like to argue against people who disagree, but the goal of those arguments seems to be more about winning than about learning. I’m right. They’re wrong. That’s the end of it. Jonathan Haidt, in his excellent book The Righteous Mind, offers a  counterpoint to this mindset. The book is a plea to “disagree more constructively,” to set aside our differences and find points of commonality, and, even when we do come to find irreconcilable moral or political disagreement, to recognize that the other side has value.

A series of metaphors guides the structure of the book. In the first section, Haidt argues that “intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.” To illustrate this point, he compares human thought to a small rider trying to guide a large elephant. Since the rider (the rational part of our brain) can do little to actually steer the elephant (our intuition), instead he just makes post hoc justifications for the elephants actions. In other words, in political and moral arguments, we usually come to the answer before we figure out the reason. Although we often claim to be forming our opinions based on a fair reading of the evidence, I think most of us can admit to sometimes simply looking for evidence that conforms to our preconceived judgements.

The second piece of the book argues that human morals are aligned across six “moral foundations:” care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Here he uses the metaphor of a tongue with six taste receptors. Liberals tend to focus on the care/harm and fairness/cheating axes while conservatives draw from all six. More importantly, Haidt draws on his own experience observing different cultures in India to argue that different moral systems make sense for different societies and different times. Some actions that seem morally repugnant (like eating your dog after it got hit and killed by a car) are actually somewhat difficult to explain in a consistent moral framework. They just seem wrong to us. The case for a universally correct moral standard, in Haidt’s view is quite weak.

Finally, the last section, and perhaps the one I found most interesting, talks about humanity’s tendencies towards group behavior. He describes humans as “90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.” Each of us generally acts towards our own self interest, but occasionally our “hive switch” is turned on and we act in the way that’s best for the group. He cites Emile Durkheim’s observation that being a member of a group can generate a “‘collective effervescence,’ which describes the passion and ecstasy group rituals can generate.” Haidt points to the feeling you get when you observe incredible views in nature, or participating in raves or sporting events, as examples of this Durkheimian hive switch being flipped.

He then extends this observation to explain people’s attachment to religious communities. “Religion is a team sport,” he quips as he notes the similarities between the “rituals” involved in cheering for a sports team (songs, superstitions, traditions, etc.) and those of religious groups. Although Haidt himself is atheist, he does not take the view of many atheists that religious people have simply been duped into believing. Instead, he sees religion as a natural way to get people to flip their hive switch and think in terms of groups. Religious societies have been more successful because they cause people to create moral, caring communities where individual benefits can sometimes be pushed aside in favor of group success. He writes. “If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it.” Instead, its best to see religion as a way to “suppress cheating and increase trustworthiness. Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow.”

Haidt presents each of these concepts in an incredibly convincing style. His arguments are well written and well researched. Even more, he does an excellent job at giving a fair shot to both sides of every argument. Although its clear he has his own biases (he is just a rider trying to control an elephant as well), I never felt that I wasn’t getting the full story on any of his points. Each conclusion he makes feels like one of careful deliberation, of considering the best work that has been done on an issue and providing a clear justification for agreeing or disagreeing. Haidt’s memories of how his own views were challenged or changed over time give the reader a look into his own inner intellectual struggle with these ideas and help provide a balanced view on many issues.

This balanced approach is especially apparent in the final section of the book where he discusses the “yin and two yangs” of American politics. The “yin” being points liberals tend to get right, and the two “yangs” being the best points of libertarians and conservatives. While I certainly have some room to quibble with his “liberal wisdoms” (focused on the benefits of regulation), he does a better job of defending the conservative and libertarian positions than many self described conservatives and libertarians could do themselves. Haidt could almost certainly pass an Ideological Turing Test, which cannot be said about most people of any political background.

I particularly liked his summary of the conservatives’ strength with the principle that “you can’t help the bees by destroying the hive.” He writes, “liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive.” Although this idea unfortunately seems to be losing its place at the center of the current Republican Party, I do think it is a good description of the foundation of conservative thought. Tradition, family, American values. Preserving the institutions that, for lack of a better term, made America great, is the main priority for conservatives. Policies that help individuals in the short run should be viewed with suspicion if they threaten to wear down these institutions in the long run.

Protecting the hive is also a distinctly Hayekian idea (even though he claims he was not a conservative). Hayek takes an evolutionary view of societal development. The institutions that have developed across history were not designed. We shouldn’t honor tradition and norms because people in the past were smarter or more moral than we are. But we should respect them because “the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any one man possesses” (The Constitution of Liberty). To challenge existing social structures requires a careful consideration of the reasons they developed and the consequences of removing them. These reasons are usually not obvious and we should therefore be wary of attempts to upend the status quo.

There is far more in the book than can be discussed in a blog post, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has trouble understanding where their political opponents stand (no matter what side they are on themselves). I strongly believe that it is as important to listen to what the other side has to say and not to pretend that those who disagree are just uninformed or unintelligent. As Haidt concludes in the final line of the book, “we’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.”

Equality, Value, and Merit

A common argument against absolute equality is that individuals should be paid based on merit. Should somebody who works 80 hours a week earn the same amount as somebody who sits on their couch and watches TV all week? Even the most ardent supporter of redistribution would have a hard time answering yes. One of the alleged benefits of a free market economy is that it does a pretty good job allocating resources to those who work for them. Reading Hayek, however, I find it interesting that his defense of unequal outcomes explicitly denounces the idea of meritocracy. Value, not merit, is what should determine a person’s reward.

Some clarifications are in order. “Value” and “merit” are not well defined concepts. Let’s take an example to see the distinction between these two concepts. Imagine 2 students are studying for a math exam. One student studies 8 hours per day all week for the exam, but math has never been his strength and he ends up with a hard earned B+ on the exam. For the other student math has always come easy. He takes a quick look at his notes for a couple hours the night before and breezes through with an easy A. We might say that the first student deserves a higher grade than the second. If we graded based on merit we would want to give the higher grade to the student who worked the hardest. Of course, this grading system makes no sense when we consider that a grade is meant to represent a student’s knowledge of the material. Even though he didn’t work as hard, the second student knows math better and therefore deserves a higher grade.

The same arguments can be applied to an economic context. If two entrepreneurs each develop a product, a meritocratic society might suggest paying each based on how much work they each put into its creation. However, this criteria doesn’t consider the fact that consumers might place different values on the two products. If we want to maximize the benefits to society, we don’t actually care whether a product was created by a team of people and 2 years of strenuous research and development or by a guy coming up with ideas in the shower. All we care about is the value of the two products to the consumer. In Hayek’s words, “it is neither desirable nor practicable that material rewards should be made generally to correspond to what men recognize as merit…we do not wish people to earn a maximum of merit but to achieve a maximum of usefulness at a minimum of pain and sacrifice and therefore a minimum of merit” (The Constitution of Liberty, 157, 160).

It might seem unfair that talented people tend to earn more than the less talented. The handsome actor already gets good looks and fame. How is it fair that he also gets a big paycheck? And it’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean it’s not desirable. Because without that paycheck, without that incentive, maybe he wouldn’t have become an actor at all, and the opportunity to create a product that millions would have enjoyed is gone. It’s not fair that Tom Brady gets paid so much to play a game, but the only reason he does is because so many love watching him play. The alternative might not be that he gets paid less and still plays, but that he doesn’t play at all because his incentives to work hard and become a great player are diminished.

Another problem with a meritocratic society is that merit is hard to measure. Going back to the math example, I said that one student studied more than the other. But maybe his studying was not as efficient. Maybe he was actually on Facebook half the time, or didn’t focus on the right problems. And there are other factors. Maybe the second student paid better attention in class or had worked harder in previous classes and therefore didn’t need to work as hard now. Even if we wanted to reward the students’ merit, doing so would be a challenge. Similarly, looking at two products tells us little about how much work and how much effort went into the creation. What we can see is how much people like each product (by looking at how much they pay for it).

One of the greatest benefits of a market economy is that it pushes people towards the tasks that other people actually want them to do. In Hayek’s words, “If in their pursuit of uncertain goals people are to use their own knowledge and capacities, they must be guided, not by what other people think they ought to do, but by the value others attach to the result at which they aim” (The Constitution of Liberty, 159). By rewarding value over merit we ensure that people can only earn money by offering something that others desire. Everybody acts in their own self-interest, but the market usually ensures that that interest also aligns with the interests of others. Potential earnings act as a signal that shows what society values and attempts to regulate the market will almost certainly mess with these signals.

With this perspective, it is difficult to find a reason to care about others’ wealth. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg only got rich by offering a service that other people valued. Their contribution to society is likely far greater than any monetary compensation they received. Encouraging others to continue in their footsteps, to innovate and invent, is more important to the welfare of society as a whole than any attempts to redistribute their existing wealth. In fact, attempts to accomplish the latter discourage the former. I disagree with Ayn Rand on many points, but I think the overall theme in Atlas Shrugged is about right. When society feels like it can take anything it wants from the producers, they might decide that it’s simply not worth it any more, leaving no wealth left to redistribute at all.

 

Interesting Paper on Inequality and Fairness

As a followup to my recent post on inequality, I wanted to highlight some recent research by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom on fairness and inequality. Based on a survey of lab experiments and evidence from the real world, the paper argues that people don’t actually care about unequal outcomes as long as they are perceived as fair.

They highlight several studies that show that in laboratory settings people (even children) are likely to distribute resources equally. However, in many of these settings, equality and fairness are indistinguishable. Since none of the participants did anything to deserve a larger portion, participants could simply be attempting to create a fair distribution rather than an equal one. And experiments that explicitly distinguish between fairness and equality do find that people care more about the former. For example, people were not unhappy with allocations that were determined randomly even if the outcome ended up being unequal as long as everybody began with an equal opportunity. Children who were asked to allocate erasers as a reward for cleaning their rooms were more likely to give the erasers to those who did a good job.

In reality people also seem to prefer an unequal distribution of income as long as it is perceived to be fair. In surveys, while people’s perception of the true income distribution is often highly skewed, their ideal distribution is not one of perfect equality. Of course, looking at these surveys does not necessarily tell us much about what the “best” income distribution would be, but rather the one people (think they) prefer. As I argued in my last post, I think too much weight has been placed on income or wealth inequality when really all that matters are differences in people’s happiness or utility. The evidence presented here does not go that far, but it does suggest that people realize that different behavior should lead to different rewards in some cases.

One reason that I think the debate has focused mostly on income or wealth inequality rather than on fairness or another measure of inequity is due to issues with measurement. Everybody has different ideas about what is fair so it’s easier to frame the question in terms of something that can be easily reported numerically. We may want to reconsider our acceptance of those statistics as a meaningful representation of a social problem. The whole paper is well worth reading and it opens up some interesting questions about human behavior. I will have at least one more post related to inequality coming in the next week or so.

What Kind of Inequality Matters?

Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a thorough analysis of the causes and effects of inequality, recently became an international best-seller. It’s not often that thousand page economic treatises attract popular attention, so clearly there’s something important to discuss here. Looking at some of the data on inequality, it’s not hard to see why many people are concerned. Here’s a chart showing the share of income held by the top 10% in the United States since 1910:

Notice where the two peaks occur – 1929 and 2009. I seem to recall something important happening in each of those years. Whether inequality was a symptom or a cause of the broader problems that led to the Great Depression and the Great Recession is an interesting question and definitely deserves scrutiny. For the purposes of this post, however, I want to address a simpler topic. Should we care about inequality on its own? And, more specifically, what kind of inequality should we care about?

For the first question, let’s do a simple thought experiment. You can choose to live in one of two societies. In Society A, everybody makes $50,000 per year no matter what their profession is. LeBron James and a janitor get paid the same amount. In Society B, average income is the same $50,000 per year, but it is now dispersed, so that some people earn less than average and some earn far more. Now assume that you are guaranteed to begin at average income (to avoid questions of risk aversion). Which society would you rather live in?

The answer to the hypothetical depends in part on whether you care about absolute or relative income. Does it matter if you are rich, or does it only matter if you are richer than others? In Society A everybody is on the same level, which might seem to be an appealing feature.

Except as soon as we start to think a bit harder, we realize that people in Society A aren’t equal at all. At least to some extent, differences in income do come from differences in effort. Some people work harder than others. Should people get paid the same regardless of effort?

Of course, this reasoning attacks a bit of a straw man. Hardly anybody would argue for full equality of income. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some situations where reducing income inequality could be helpful. I don’t believe in free will, which means that I think that where you are today is determined by circumstances you had no control over. But even with free will, it’s impossible to deny that some people are luckier than others. Some people are born into families with higher incomes or better connections. Some people are just smarter, or more talented. Two people can put in the same amount of effort and come out with wildly different outcomes. Isn’t there some justification for correcting these kinds of inequalities?

Now we need to bring in the second question: what kind of inequality matters? To this point, I have focused entirely on income inequality, but money is only as good as what you can buy with it. Somebody who earns $1,000,000 per year but saves $950,000 is no better off than someone who earns $50,000 per year (until they start spending those savings of course). We also need to consider a dynamic component to inequality. The chart above shows only a snapshot of inequality at one point in time, but there is large variation in earnings over a person’s lifetime. So a better measure of the kind of inequality that actually matters would be total lifetime consumption inequality (due to measurement difficulties, the question of whether consumption and income inequality move together is still under debate – see a nice survey here).

But we’re still not quite there. Why do we consume anything? Presumably because it makes us happy, or, in the words of an economist, because it gives us utility. Simply giving people more stuff might not actually help them at all unless it’s stuff they actually want. So shouldn’t we actually care about total lifetime utility? And as soon as we jump into the world of utility, the problem gets much more difficult.

Consider an extremely wealthy person. Incredibly talented and smart, he excelled in school, founded a business, and became one of the most successful CEOs in the world. He has a beautiful house, ten expensive cars, flat screen TVs, season tickets to the Patriots. He can buy anything you could ever want. Except he works all the time, hates his job, and has no time for his family or friends. Despite his money, despite his consumption, he is miserable.

Another individual earns far less. She isn’t poor, but she earns right around median income. She doesn’t have a luxurious life, but she can afford the basics. More importantly, she’s happy. She has a loving family, great friends, a job she likes. Would she be happier with more income? Probably. But she doesn’t need luxuries to live a good life.

How do we make this society more equal? Simply looking at income would suggest a transfer from the wealthy man to the average income woman. This transfer would of course reduce income inequality, but it would increase utility inequality. The woman is already pretty happy and the man is not. Taking money from him and giving it to her would only increase the happiness gap. Is this outcome desirable? I don’t think so.

Then maybe we should try to minimize utility inequality. But how? Taking money from the woman would probably reduce the woman’s utility and eventually it would be as low as the man’s, but giving it to the man would probably do little to increase the man’s utility unless he takes comfort in the fact that others are as miserable as he is. The woman’s happiness comes from pieces of her life that can’t be transferred to others. Despite being born with all the skills necessary to succeed, the man would likely view the woman as the more fortunate one.

In general, trying to equalize utility gives some strange implications. Let give a few more examples.

Two people work in the exact same job and get paid the same wage. Seems perfectly fair. But what if one of them enjoys working and the other hates it? In dollars per hour, they are equal. In utility per hour, one receives more than the other. Reducing utility inequality would require that people who enjoy their jobs be paid less for the same work.

Some people prefer living in cities while others would prefer to live in smaller towns. Houses in cities are usually much more expensive, which means to achieve the same utility, a city lover will have to pay far more. In this case, income equality greatly benefits people who hate cities. Utility equality would suggest transfers from people who love rural areas to those who love cities.

Consumption equality could also generate large utility inequality. If one person places a lot of meaning on material goods while another values other aspects of their life, they would need different levels of consumption in order to achieve the same utility. Should we give more to the materialist than the ascetic simply because giving to the latter wouldn’t help them anyway?

And even these examples ignore the largest problem with trying to achieve equality in utility – it’s difficult to measure and impossible to compare across individuals. I have trouble defining my own preferences and determining what makes me the happiest, I certainly don’t trust others to do that for me.

So utility equality is probably not an option even if it were desirable. But income equality almost certainly worsens the problem of utility inequality. The people who make a lot of money are much more likely to also be people who place a high value on money. Those who earn less are more likely to enjoy a simpler life. In fact, there is little evidence that the rich are any happier than the rest of us. Taking their money makes them even worse off while helping those who are already pretty happy despite their relatively low income. The happy get happier while the miserable get more miserable.

Notice that I have deliberately avoided using examples with truly poor people. I can certainly see an argument for redistributing income to the poorest. Nobody should have to live at subsistence levels if they are willing to work. But being concerned about poverty and being concerned about inequality are not the same. It is possible for a society to have zero poor people and still be incredibly unequal and also possible to be almost perfectly equal with everybody poor (as it was for most of the history of human existence).

Have we gotten any closer to answering the original question? What kind of inequality should we care about? If you’ve made it this far, it should be clear that there isn’t an easy answer. We often use the term “less fortunate” as a euphemism for poor people and that almost exclusively refers to poverty in a monetary context. We view income as if it came from a lottery and then aim to use redistribution to correct for discrepancies. Why is that? Aren’t people that can be happy despite low income really the most fortunate? Isn’t money just one of many factors that matter for a person’s happiness? And aren’t many of these other factors difficult to measure and even more difficult to redistribute?

If we answer yes to the above questions, reducing the kind of inequality we care about becomes a much harder task. Can we really correct the deeper inequalities that arise due to people’s preferences and talents – some of which will lead to higher incomes and some not? Or should we accept that inequality is an essential part of society, accept that treating everyone equally necessarily produces inequality in outcomes, that differences in wealth don’t necessarily lead to differences in happiness, and that correcting differences in happiness is almost impossible?

What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? A discussion of altruism, selfishness, and morality

I think most people believe that the world would be a better place if more people acted altruistically. Rather than focusing on trying to improve their own life, people should think about what they can do to help others. But the more I think about it, the less confident I am that an altruistic society is really something we should strive for.

Let’s take an example. Two people are contemplating volunteering at a center for homeless children. Person A absolutely hates their time there, but they know that the kids benefit, so they reduce their own well being out of a sense of moral duty and do it anyway. For person B, spending time with the kids is the highlight of their week. They know that they are helping the kids, but their primary motivation comes from having fun themselves.

Two questions come out of this example. First, can we really say that either person is acting selflessly? Although initially it would appear that at least person A is selfless, are they really acting against their own interest? Sure they don’t enjoy the time they spend volunteering, but if it makes them feel better about themselves, isn’t that as selfish a motivation as any other? As I discussed in my post on rationality, to an economist selfishness means nothing more than choosing the path that maximizes total (expected) happiness for a person. Person A values being a moral person and even if it comes with a short-term cost, they are willing to bear that cost because the benefit (being free of guilt, reputation, getting into heaven, the knowledge that they did something good, etc.) is even higher.

An even more interesting question comes when we try to evaluate which of the two people is more altruistic. I think it is natural to assume that altruism requires some amount of sacrifice. Even though the end result in the above example is the same – the kids are happy in either case – person B is just satisfying their own desires. How can they be altruistic? And I think that intuition is correct. If we want to make a meaningful distinction between altruism and selfishness, altruism needs to include some kind of sacrifice. If I act without thinking of others, my actions cannot be altruistic even if they coincidentally end up helping others. An entrepreneur that invents a cure for cancer in order to sell it isn’t altruistic even though they save the lives of millions of people. On the other hand, if I actively try to improve the lives of others even when I know it will hurt my happiness in the short run, we can call those truly altruistic actions.

But this definition of altruism makes it difficult to see the appeal of an altruistic society. Is a society where people help others only out of some sense of obligation, where I give only to satisfy some moral code, truly better than one where people love to give away? Would you want to live in a world full of people who act altruistically, constantly sacrificing their own well-being in order to improve the well-being of others? Or would you rather live somewhere where people act to make themselves happy, but their happiness comes directly from helping others?

Of course, the above dichotomy excludes a third outcome, one where everybody acts for themselves at the expense of others. Most would agree that this is by far the worst of the three societies. I definitely agree that our goal should be to avoid this result. The way to do that, however, doesn’t have to come from laws. It doesn’t have to come from religion. It doesn’t have to come from duty or obligation. Forcing people to do good might be effective, but wouldn’t it be a better society when people want to do good?

Fortunately, I think humans have evolved in such a way where we do feel good when we help others. Most of life’s best experiences come from our relationships with others. Love. Friendship. Family. Trust. Gratitude. Respect. Those feelings are some of the most valuable pieces of a happy life. They are impossible to achieve without other people. Someone might be able to get ahead in a purely materialistic sense by seeing their own well-being as their only concern. They’ll get more wealth. More fame. But not more happiness. The best way to get people to act selflessly is to make them aware of the fact that helping others is the best way to help themselves.

An altruistic society consists of a bunch of unhappy people doing their best to make other people feel happy. They help others despite the fact that it makes them feel bad. An ideal society, in my opinion, is one where people help others because it makes them feel good.

Free Will, Morality, and Libertarianism How can you be held responsible for something that wasn't your fault?

An astute reader sees an apparent contradiction between my last post and my post on free will, asking “how can a libertarian reconcile no real choice with the importance of being free to choose?”

It’s a great question. If free will doesn’t exist, if every single action is pre-determined, can we even have a consistent concept of morality? I made a distinction between actions made freely and those forced by the state, but isn’t that distinction meaningless in a deterministic world? When all actions are at some level outside an individual’s control, is there any difference between the direct coercion of government and more indirect factors influencing the decision (like genetics, education, religion, etc.) that are also completely removed from the realm of free choice? The answers to these questions are far from obvious and I certainly don’t pretend to have a perfect response, but I hope this post will clarify the way I think about the issue. My ideas here are heavily influenced by (who else) Hayek’s discussion of similar topics in chapter 5 of The Constitution of Liberty.

First, it is important to understand my earlier defense of determinism. The key point is that every action can be traced to a chain of previous events. Going back far enough in each person’s chain, some link will be the result of an event that is outside of their direct control. And if I know all of the links in this causal chain, if I know everything that has ever influenced an individual, I can predict with absolute certainty their next move. Their “choice” was determined long before they are required to make it.

If we accept this argument, then at the moment of a decision nothing can be done. There is no way that a given individual would have made any decision different than the one they made. We could replay the same history a million times and get the same result in every single trial.

But here’s the problem. Go back to the example I gave in the last post. A person is trying to decide whether to give money to the poor (let’s call him Bob). Note that I will consider giving to the poor to be a good thing. If for some reason you disagree with that assessment, replace “giving to the poor” with any action you consider moral and the argument should still go through.

Now assume Bob exists in two universes (A and B). In each universe, Bob has had almost the exact same experience. He has the same parents, the same teachers, read all the same books. As a result, in each universe he has developed a system of values which teaches him to care for his fellow human beings. Now introduce one difference between the two universes. Universe A has a government which forces Bob to give to the poor through taxation. In Universe B, Bob is free to do as he pleases. Of course, we know  that Bob is not really free to choose. If he chooses to give to the poor, it is only because he grew up in a society that taught him that that was the right thing to do, and only because of his upbringing that he has any desire to do the right thing at all. Universe B Bob doesn’t choose to give to the poor any more than Universe A Bob does. Both only give due to the influence of others. How can we say one is more moral?

Consider George. George also exists in both universes, but he has had a different experience than Bob. Where Bob was taught to live a life of compassion, George only cares about his own material well being. Help the poor? How does that help George? In Universe A, George still has to give to the poor. The government forces him to give against his wishes. And it makes him angry. He works hard to earn his money, why should he give to those who don’t? He sees Bob gives to the poor as well, but he believes it is only because the government forces him to do so.

In Universe B, George doesn’t give to the poor. His values tell him that you get exactly what you deserve in life and he acts on those values. There is no government to force him to do otherwise. And yet he sees Bob give to the poor anyway. Maybe he just dismisses Bob as too stupid to realize that his money won’t help them, that the poor need to help themselves. But maybe Bob’s actions give him pause. Maybe they form a new link in George’s causal chain. Maybe he questions his decision, and even though he could never have changed his choice at that moment, he might think about the situation differently next time. Maybe his system of values begins to change.

Phrased in this way, we begin to see a real distinction between the decision to give in each universe. It is true that in both universes Bob would have given to the poor. Our reason for calling Bob’s actions moral cannot be that he himself could have made another choice at the moment of his decision – without free will, he really couldn’t have. But we can compare Bob’s choices to those of another individual. If we replace Bob with George in Universe A, the result is the same – both give to the poor, and we can’t judge morality because nobody could have acted differently. In Universe B, however, Bob and George are allowed to act differently in the same situation. Their decision tree has two branches. Neither will choose any branch other than the one already pre-determined by their life experiences, but the existence of the branches matters because somebody else could have.

So now we can give an answer to the original question. If nobody can truly make choices of their own volition, why does choice matter for morality?

Because if a choice is available, even if each individual will always make the same choice, another might have acted differently.

But even if you buy the argument above, a question still remains. We might agree that Bob made a moral decision in the example above even though it wasn’t truly his choice, but does that mean that George is responsible for his actions? Can we blame George for not giving to the poor? After all, it’s not his fault that he didn’t have Bob’s life. Here I defer to Hayek:

Strictly speaking, it is nonsense to say, as is so often said, that “it is not a man’s fault that he is as he is,” for the aim of assigning responsibility is to make him different from what he is or might be. If we say that a person is responsible for the consequences of an action, this is not a statement of fact or an assertion about causation. The statement would, of course, not be justifiable if nothing he “might” have done or omitted could have altered the result. But when we use words like “might” or “could” in this connection, we do not mean that at the moment of his decision something in him acted otherwise than was the necessary effect of causal laws in the given circumstances. Rather, the statement that a person is responsible for what he does aims at making his actions different from what they would be if he did not believe it to be true.

We assign responsibility to a man, not in order to say that as he was he might have acted differently, but in order to make him different.The Constitution of Liberty, p. 137-138

What do we want from our society? Do we want to move from Universe B to Universe A, from a world where people are free to make their own value judgements to one where they are not given any choice, where we claim to know what is best for them? Or do we want to convert people from Georges to Bobs, to convince them to buy into the system, convince them that the ideals we aim for are ones worth striving to achieve? In my view, a free society gives us the best chance of achieving the latter goal. Only a free society allows us a choice, and even if our choice is set long before we make it, knowing that other individuals could have made another choice remains important.