[Note: I’m not sure I believe in the argument that follows. But this blog is made to test ideas!]
Free riding has bad press. The term itself (whose French equivalent is the even more negatively sounding “passager clandestin”) has a negative connotation as it connotes the idea that one is taking the opportunity of others’ effort to secure a gain for themselves at no cost. But why is our normative assessment of one’s act of free riding always negative?
The first and most obvious answer is that the choice to free-ride signals one’s egoism and that egoism is itself morally reprehensible. The problem, however, is that this last assumption is far from being obviously true. Henry Sidgwick for instance famously ended his Methods of Ethics conceding that in the context of the occasional conflict between the egoistic pursuit of self-interest and the impersonal aim of promoting social welfare, there is no obvious way to demonstrate that the latter must be preferred to the former:
"I do not mean that if we gave up the hope of attaining a practical solution of this fundamental contradiction, through any legitimately obtained conclusion or postulate as to the moral order of the world, it would become reasonable for us to abandon morality altogether: but it would seem necessary to abandon the idea of rationalizing it completely. We should doubtless still, not only from self-interest, but also through sympathy and sentiments protective of social wellbeing, imparted by education and sustained by communication with other men, feel a desire for the general observance of rules conducive of happiness; and practical reason would still impel us decisively to the performance of duty in the more ordinary cases in which chat is recognized as duty is in harmony with self-interest properly understood. But in the rarer cases of a recognized conflict between self-interest and duty, practical reason, being divided against itself, would cease to be a motive on either side; the conflict would have to be decided by the comparative preponderance of one or other two groups of non-rational impulses.”[1]
Sidgwick points out a “dualism of practical reason” indicating that there is no rational way to adjudicate between the impersonal aim of promoting social welfare and the egoistic goal of benefiting oneself. In this sense, even though free riding obviously goes against the former, it is not necessarily irrational – and, as long as we want to tie morality to rationality, not immoral.
However, a second objection is fast to come. Egoism seems to be self-defeating, as discussed at length by Derek Parfit.[2] Consider the standard situation where individuals pursuing their goals are rationally free riding on others, the prisoner’s dilemma:
Each individual’s dominant strategy is to defect. This leads to an outcome that is worse for both of them than if they had cooperated. In this kind of situation, egoism is self-defeating because it achieves a worse result on its own terms than if individuals had adopted another theory of practical reason.
In defense of egoism and free riding, it might be noted first that the fact that a theory of practical reason is occasionally self-defeating is not sufficient to reject that theory – a point Parfit concedes. Second, in many practical cases, the act of free riding takes place in situations that are not prisoner’s dilemmas but rather correspond to the following game (sometimes called the “Samaritan’s dilemma”):
The difference compared with the prisoner’s dilemma is that Ann prefers to unconditionally cooperate, say because she is motivated by a sense of duty. Bob egoistically prefers to free ride, even though I’ve assumed that in case Ann would defect, Bob would be willing to cooperate. The point here is that knowing Ann’s disposition to cooperate and to contribute to the common good, Bob’s pursuit of his self-interest is not self-defeating.
Our intuition continues nonetheless to tell us that even in this case we ought not to free ride. This may be due to the fact that our moral beliefs are largely tied to impersonal social rules that have evolved to promote cooperation. Most of our reactive attitudes (shame, anger, guilt, resentment) are activated when we are participating in social practices governed by those impersonal rules and some of the participants fail to properly follow the rules. These rules are constitutive of “moral games” where it is commonly assumed that participants have agency properties that make them accountable for their behavior. If we grant the assumption that social morality has functionally evolved to promote cooperative behavior, when someone breaks a rule, this triggers reactive attitudes from the rest of the population. We hold the rule breaker responsible because “they should have known better” and in many cases, we are ready to punish them, even at our own cost.
But then, consider the case of a person who willfully chooses to break the social rules constitutive of some of the moral games she is participating in to pursue a personal project that she takes to be of tremendous importance for her (and maybe for others), e.g., a university professor who decides to decline any collective responsibility and administrative duty for the sake of pursuing her research that, maybe, will earn her fame and great intellectual satisfaction. This university professor is free-riding on her colleagues. Most of the time, these colleagues will just take the extra work to compensate, so that the social harm is marginal. Is this university professor’s decision immoral? Well, it may be – as signaled by the fact that many colleagues will resent her. Is it non-justified? That depends. Bernard Williams has famously argued that in this kind of situation, the justification of one’s decision to pursue a personal project is a matter of luck.[3] If it happens that our university professor, thanks to her decision, writes a great book that revolutionizes her field and significantly advances human knowledge, that decision is rationally justified, though maybe not morally justified.
If we take value pluralism seriously, then we must accept that morality – moral values and rules – is not the sole source of justification and that free riding may conditionally have a different source of justification. That does not change the fact, however, that from the perspective of our social morality, we have good reasons to resent people who free-ride. It seems that it is nothing but an updated version of Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason.
[1] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Hackett Publishing, 1981), p. 508.
[2] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).
[3] Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
One good reason to cooperate and to act against free riding could be the prisoner's dilemna reiterated. It makes sense to pay a little to create an incitation for cooperation which is in the interest of both