Moral Mathematics and the (Consequentialist) Ethics of Watching the World Cup of Football
Yesterday, despite an informal and mostly private[1] commitment to not watch the World Cup of Football (WCF) at all, I watched France winning its round of 16 match against Poland. As we know – though only the rich Westerners seem to care – there are good reasons to not watch the WCF as it indirectly supports an event whose organization is the result of practices of corruption and that has caused thousands of deaths and a lot of suffering, without mentioning the ecological nonsense it represents.
Reflecting on my choice, as probably many persons, I’m prone to a form of motivated reasoning. The most likely self-justification that one can make up is that watching or not will not change anything. The event is already organized anyway and therefore my current choice will do nothing to prevent the deaths, suffering, and ecological destruction that have been already produced. It could be counterargued that not watching is part of a retaliation strategy that should contribute to making sure that in the future never again a WCF or another worldwide event of the same sort will be organized at these costs. But then, it is obvious that my choice will have the same effect as a drop of water in the ocean. The marginal effect of my decision is basically close to zero and so, if I minimally enjoy watching my national football team, I should do it – or at least I’m morally permitted to do it.
Here comes however moral mathematics, i.e., “the application of mathematical methods, such as formal logic and probability, to moral theorems”. Derek Parfit famously identified five (really, four) “mistakes” in moral mathematics and at least one of them seems to be committed by those who reason along the lines described in the preceding paragraph.[2] One of the mistakes Parfit identifies is ignoring the effects of sets of acts:
(M1) If some act is right or wrong because of its effects, the only relevant effects are the effects of this particular act.
A second mistake is to ignore small or imperceptible effects:
(M2) If some act has effects on other people that are imperceptible, this act cannot be morally wrong because it has these effects. An act cannot be morally wrong because it has these effects. An act cannot be wrong because of its effect on other people, if none of these people could ever notice any difference.
A third mistake is to ignore small chances:
(M3) If some act is highly unlikely to have any positive effect on other people, it cannot be wrong to act otherwise, even if this act could bring a lot of benefits to others or small benefits to a very large number of persons.[3]
It seems that those who succumb to the kind of motivated reasoning I describe above are making mistake M1. Watching the WCF may have an effect, but as far as I’m only considering the effect of my act of watching the WCF, it is inexistent or tiny. This mistake is possibly compounded by mistake M2. This is not my choice to watch the WCF that is potentially harmful, but rather the fact that millions of people are making this choice. Each individual choice has an imperceptible effect. And then comes M3 for those who are the most sophisticated: even if I don’t watch, what is the likelihood that it will have any effect in the future on the decision-making process determining where the WCF will be organized?
Regarding M1, Parfit tells us that it entails that in cases of overdetermination where an outcome is caused simultaneously by multiple acts, no one acts wrongly. This is absurd. More generally, the wrongness of an act resides in the fact that it is part of a set of acts that together harm other people. Mistake M2 leads to similar conclusions. Here, it is wrong to act in some way if each knows that if a sufficient number of persons act otherwise, you will produce a better outcome. Mistake M3 follows from an improper understanding of expected benefits and harms. Even if an act has a small chance to bring a lot of benefits, you cannot claim that a small chance is not a chance. If the benefits are very large, this more than compensates for the fact that the chance is small.
But are the people watching the WCF really making these mistakes? Not necessarily, because many of them just don’t care about the morality of their act in this specific context. They are not mistaken about morality; they have just chosen not to be moral. For the rest of us, I think we are prone to commit M1. We are tempted to assume that our responsibility is literally diluted by the fact that millions of people are acting in the same way. It is easy to find other instances where this mistake is committed. I don’t think that M2 and M3 really apply in the case at stakes, however. You commit M2 only if you act in some way while you have strong reason to believe that your and others’ choices are somehow correlated. In practice, avoiding M2 may entail that people are “team reasoners”: they act based on a common objective to make the outcome as best as possible, and this is mutual or even common knowledge. The problem is that this last clause is of course not satisfied, and more generally few people are team reasoners, especially in this kind of circumstances. Regarding M3, even accounting for the possibly very high benefits that an individual choice of not watching the WCF can bring, the chance the one’s choice has this effect is so small that the expected benefits are infinitesimal.
Now, it is not even clear that anyone is committing M1 in a relevant way. After all, the retaliation strategy of boycotting the WCF is not subgame perfect in terms of individual rationality. If, whatever happens, you don’t expect that the FIFA expects that the next WCF will be significantly boycotted if its organization does not satisfy ethical standards, then not watching today will not have any positive effect in the future. For the FIFA to have the needed expectation, we would need far more people to behave according to a moral disposition and to avoid committing the above mistakes. But we commonly know that this is not the case. This is sad but true. The bottom line is, for football lovers, if they want to be at peace with their morality, they better be consequentialists!
[1] As a committed (privately?) late-Wittgensteinian, I should acknowledge that this was not a fully private commitment, as being committed to something is basically to follow a rule. And, as we know, private rule-following is impossible.
[2] See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press), Chapter 3.
[3] This is my formulation, as Parfit does not provide a formal one for this mistake. The other two are Parfit’s.