The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really
decide* what kind of girl she is.
Going into a business negotiation thinking either you or them are deontologists is selfdeception that will hinder you in your negotiations.
Maybe. But in practice, it might be a simplifying assumption that either you or them are "deontologists" in the context of the negotiations because there is nothing you have to offer that has any chance of budging their position.
In other words, she may be that kind of girl for a million dollars, but you don't have a million dollars.
You say:
In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.
And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.
I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.
I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn't believe that I have a million pounds to offer.
When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey - but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).
Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don't know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.
More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.
For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.
In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).
This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn't a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.
This is ridiculous. The question does make her uncomfortable, but not because of the question itself. She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it. She may have even thought about her "price" for letting a man fuck her. The problem is she knows the limits on what she's supposed to say and how she's supposed to present herself, and here's this clueless jerk trying to force her beyond them. She's playing the game, navigating social rules, and he isn't even acknowledging the tight spot he's put her in. In fact, he's simultaneously relishing her discomfort and resenting her for feeling that way. What does she do? To get through the situation as easily and harmlessly as possible, she either denies the legitimacy of the argument or names absurdly large amounts of money.
To really get a woman's price, she'd have to be assured of discretion. And her price would, ultimately, be affected by her confidence in the assurances of discretion offered. Her price for prostituting herself openly would be much higher, though not as high as the price she's willing to admit to in the original joke or the experiment you describe. After all, in the experiment, she pays the price of advertising her willingness to have sex for money without actually getting the money. A million pounds buys a lot of honesty -- what were you offering? Even with the check, you haven't established a credible offer. The woman would have a lot of doubts that would be difficult to overcome. Is it a scam? Why me? Does this guy want to hurt me or humiliate me? Is this a mean-spirited prank organized by one of my exes? From her point of view, it's vanishingly unlikely to be a genuine offer. She's thinking, "If I even give this guy a chance to prove his bona fides, I'll probably be putting myself at risk." After all, even if he actually has a million pounds in his checking account, he's still more likely to be a killer than a guy who pays a million pounds for sex. Just sayin'. She's not stupid. And if the guy is serious, the onus is on him to prove that he understands her reservations and to think of some way to reassure her. Her initial response shouldn't deter him.
Anyway, to depart from your experiment and get back to the conversation in the joke as it's usually told -- no longer talking about your experiment -- it's a typical conversation for socially incompetent young geeks who are frustrated by all the social taboos, who suspect (partly correctly) that everyone around them is screwing like rabbits, and who are so painfully frustrated about not being able to talk about it that they make fools of themselves beating their heads against the wall of taboo with rational arguments instead doing something that might actually clear the way to frank conversation, such as cultivating trust and intimacy. (Gosh, I just might be speaking from experience here.)
So the whole thing resolves to a guy making a girl uncomfortable and taking her refusal to be outré for stupidity. That's pretty dickish. Especially when the point is to make yourself look smart in comparison. I have NO idea why Feynman liked this joke, except that maybe he used it as a racy line-crossing move when chatting up women, in which case the logic itself is kind of beside the point. I supposed he knew the right moment to push it. Or maybe he just knew his audience. But that would make him a bit of a misogynist, since he would know -- admit it -- that the chief delight of this story for most people is not whipping it out Feynman-style at just the right moment when a woman is ready to let down her barriers. The chief appeal for most is getting the last laugh on a woman who wouldn't let you past her facade of propriety. Why would he stoop to that kind of pandering?
Anyway, the original word game breaks down if you examine it just a little. If I'd bake a loaf of bread for a million dollars, am I a baker?
If I'd do your taxes for a million dollars, am I a tax accountant?
If I'd write a book for a million dollars, am I a writer?
If I'd change your oil for a million dollars, am I an auto mechanic?
If I'd teach a yoga class for a million dollars, am I a yoga instructor?
So is she a prostitute? Clearly not. Is she a whore? Well, yeah, quite often she is, in the sense that the word "whore" in any language usually means a woman whose sexual activity makes the speaker feel bad in some way.
But don't worry about this line of reasoning, or any other, being used against you when you whip this gem out at a party, because the response will divide between a couple of straight-up misogynists enthusiastically backing you up and a majority who just distance themselves from you, possibly by scoring points off you in some irrational way that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the point you're trying to make, because people are STUPID and more interested in playing STUPID SOCIAL GAMES than actually THINKING. So your point is unchallenged! Unrefuted! Whoohoo! (Sarcasm aimed at the original joke and at my teenage self, not personally at you.)
I'm 5 years out of college and I think my position has changed significantly since then. Until probably a year out of college I only thought very abstractly about questions like this and believed there was a large class of problems for which there is no price.
Until a year or so after I graduated, I think I believed that most people (hookers excluded) wouldn't offer sex at any cash price. I always thought those transactions generally HAD to occur masked as "I'll buy you some beers/some dinners/we'll date/any time or cash value exchange in return for sex"
My more recent experience with regards to your experiment is almost the exact opposite of your findings. I'm consistently shocked by how LOW a price people are willing accept for all manner of tasks, including sex.
Not to sound way too shady, but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined. Or maybe I've just met way sluttier girls since graduating. The price for most men is basically zero.
I'll also say there's likely some sort of phase transition here where the answer to "what kind of girl she is" is dependent on some socioeconomic indicator. Hypothesis: Money and status buy people a LOT of self importance and stricter adherence to a moral code. People don't have to bend their espoused morals unless faced with tough questions.
Re your experiment: - saying and doing are different, especially since the question seems to have been explicitly phrased as an exchange of sex for money. there are all sorts of ways to phrase the question where sex is understood but without actually saying it. - £1MM is doesn't even feel like a real number to most students. hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
Like @Confusion, I now generally believe there's a price for everything. If it can be measured in dollars, thats an easy question to answer. The hard questions are those that are measured in things money can't buy.
We think about getting paid with money differently than we think about getting paid with gifts, for some reason.
Of course you should be moral, but most business questions aren't a question of morality, but of direction and the most appropriate path to achieve your objectives.
Companies are amoral (not to be confused with immoral) entities that will not necessarily act in the people's best behavior. If companies act in a morally acceptable way, it is because of the individual employees that together make morally acceptable choices. Every business question is a question of morality, because you can always choose to commit fraud, cheat someone or act in an otherwise immoral fashion. Sometimes you won't do that for fear of customer or supplier retribution. Often you won't do that for fear of the law. But sometimes, you just shouldn't do it, because it has possible consequences you should never risk.
No one at BP is individually responsible for the current calamity. The more responsibility is spread over multiple layers of decision making, the less responsible individuals feel and the less moral their behavior will be. Not because they are immoral, but because the pressure to act as is best for the company is strong enough to suppress moral qualms. No 'evil' individual made the immoral decision that lead to the accident. It was a large number of people that each made slightly immoral decisions, the cumulative result of which is now the largest ecological disaster in US history.
This is the essence of the problem of libertarianism and complete free market capitalism. This is why we need a government to regulate capitalism.
Accidents happen, maybe because we veered too far towards profit, maybe because we encountered a black swan, but we learn from them and do our best to mitigate them, then we go back to treading the fine line of cost and safety.
That being said, the US Gov should have learned from disasters like Piper Alpha and separated it's own safety and cost structures in respect of the oil industry long ago. Not having done so before now is, to me, inexcusable.
Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle, EU commission-funded technical research projects need to follow strict ethical and social governance programs, and the commission is directly funding more research into how to more effectively govern these sorts of endeavours (rather than simply relying on "ethical codes" or "ethics checklists"). It's only a few steps up from that to regulating more widely across Europe (but obviously they need a playground to test in first! and the billion+ euro research Framework Programmes are a pretty good one for that).
I can't really see the US going for this sort of thing though, to be honest, even though it'd most likely prevent things like the BP catastrophe :(
But that was an emotional decision, and he made the wrong one.
Still not a moral question, imho.
Consulting is especially like this, if you want to build the best damn thing you can, consulting is usually at odds with that core value. Consulting is as much about placating the client's ego as anything else.
Violating your core values for money will lead to a death-spin of post hoc justification and misery, so it's rarely worth it.
That said, I don't think sleeping with someone for money is a moral question, and the example is indeed misogynistic.
In the articles terms, you could be moral according to the category of your actions, or according to the consequences of your actions. The first one ignores reality ('whatever happens, don't lie'), and the second one negates judgement ('the right action depends on the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences, and the consequences of... ad infinitum' an endless, useless subjectivism). They can be sidestepped by applying judgement according to reality and a measurable standard of value, eg. self-interest. You could call this contextual or objective morality.
To put that more simply: past a certain point, the idea of marginal value in a cost/benefit analysis breaks down, because the benefit "changes the game." (That is, creates a discontinuity in the valuation curve.) A million dollars "changes the game" of your life. $100 doesn't.
Yes, there are always creative ways to avoid really answering the question (such as doing a brain upload, as suggested), but these answers do nothing to answer the underlying question, which is what the thought experiment is really trying to get at.
The problem with that, of course, is that even within our species, we have many different (and mutually-exclusive!) utility functions; sociopaths, for example, calculate theirs noticeably differently. So, it still ends up turned into a problem of cultural meta-ethics. That is, it's no longer a matter of "who do we shun and revile?" but "how do we get along?" or perhaps "do we want to get along?" (Which brings me to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/)
If this is your understanding of philosophy, I'd say you're misusing philosophy for dealing with personal problems.
On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your proposed actions. For me, personally, I wouldn't want to "influence" (vaguely kill, but also any of these "duplication" scenarios) someone else's mortality for any amount of money.
That's what I mean by "discontinuity": you can't give a cost-benefit analysis to something like a trillion dollars, because one trillion-dollar investment can completely alter the course of civilization with its knock-on effects.
If your morals are based on principle, then no matter who the person was, your decision would remain the same.
I believe/hope that I am the type of person who would not take anothers' life no matter what the circumstances because I want to be a person of principle. If there were some situation where I did take a life, then I am not the principled person I think I am.
Take the example of Google and their motto,'Don't be Evil'. It was a nice bit of marketing, but when the value of doing business with a repressive government was high enough, they and other company's apparently had no problems working with said governments to continue the repression of it's citizens.
Now, you may say, Google has left that country. But, it was not due to the moral repugnance they felt about repressing the citizens, but the fact they were under attack by agents/citizens of said government and felt it was no longer in their interest 'financially' to stay.
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/what...
It seems rather hard to pin down the original source!
The example may be misogynistic, but the idea that the example is an example of is not.
Also, suppose that the genders were removed:
X: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
Y: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
X: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
Y: (outraged) “What kind of person do you think I am?”
X: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”
It just kind of pissed me off to see the vandalism of presumably one person downvoting everything on the page, because only people with quite a lot of karma can downvote.
I suspect that's also why I got voted up to 7 and then back down to 1 - because people are looking at the votes now see no issue.
Not saying thats the right thing to do, but thats my guess.
He said: "... I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question..."
This shows that he is the "Consequentialist" girl.