Tiebreakers

You need to lay off Alice or Bob, or else the company goes broke. For private reasons, you dislike Bob and want to see him suffer. What should you do?

The obvious answer is: choose randomly.

But suppose that there is no way to choose randomly. For instance, perhaps an annoying oracle which has told you the outcome of any process that you could have made use of random decision. The oracle says “If you flip the penny in your pocket, it will come up heads”, and now deciding that Alice is laid off on heads is tantamount to deciding that Alice is laid off.

So what should you do?

There seems to be something rationally and maybe morally perverse in one’s treatment of Alice if one fires her to avoid firing the person that one wants to fire.

But it seems that if one fires Bob, one does so in order to see him suffer, and that’s wrong.

I have two solutions, not mutually exclusive.

The first is that various rules of morality and rationality only make sense in certain normal conditions. Typical rules of rationality simply break down if one is in the unhappy circumstance of knowing that one’s ability to reason rationally is so severely impaired that there is no correlation between what seems rational and what is rational. Similarly, if one is brainwashed into having to kill someone, but is left with the freedom to choose the means, then one may end up virtuously beheading an innocent person if beheading is less painful than any other method of murder available, because the moral rules against murder presuppose that one has freedom of will. It could be that some of our moral rules also presuppose an ability to engage in random processes, and when that ability is missing, then the rules are no longer applicable. And since circumstances where random choices are possible are so normal, our moral intuitions are closely tied to these circumstances, and hence no answer to the question of what is the right thing to do is counterintuitive.

The second is that there is a special kind of reason, a tie-breaker reason. When one fires Bob with the fact that one wants to see him suffering being a tie-breaker, one is not intending to see him suffer. Perhaps what one is intending, instead, is a conditional: if one of Alice and Bob suffers, it’s Bob.