Surface syllogisms and the sin-based model of causation

This is an interesting theory, but you may be overthinking the causal chain in order to get your sin-based theory.

I imagine it looks more like this: Advisor 1: "Something must be done about this BP fiasco! Let's put a moratorium on offshore drilling."

Advisor 2: "Good idea, but that would put people out of work, which would be bad press, especially in this economy. We'd need to find a way to pay them off."

Advisor 1: "Everyone thinks BP is doing a terrible job and won't have to pay enough for this disaster. Let's make them foot the bill."

"Sin" may be part of it, but if BP had much better PR (which would probably entail, in part, being more effective), I expect people wouldn't be all about punishing them, even if they were at fault for the oil spill.

Have you explored alternate theories, such as "people seek to define in- and out-groups, and their punishment intuitions follow this model rather than any causal moral reasoning"?

BP is being punished because they are the current reminder that the world is riskier than most of us like, and this makes them an easy target to rally against. "they're bad people, take their stuff and give it to the good people (us)" is about the level of reasoning I hear from people who actually support such actions. It's very hard to give any credence to the more complicated rationalizations you give,

I think the difference here is negligence - BP was (allegedly - p>0.7) negligent in its maintenance, which caused this oil spill. Anybody suffering because of this negligence - such as the fishers you mention - are entitled to compensation if the negligence can be proved.

Other oil workers are a different boat however, and I think the breakdown in logic is this:

"The oil spill caused a ban on drilling."

No - the government caused a ban on drilling. Maybe the disaster served as a wake-up call that the old regulatory regime was inadequate, though it's more likely that the government is simply knee-jerking to look useful. But whichever is true, this doesn't fall back on BP.

For example: if a highway gets shut down after a bad accident, it doesn't matter if A)the road was unsafe and needs a redesign anyway, or B)the driver who caused the accident was unsafe and the government is overreacting - either way nobody in the trucking industry gets compensation. And nobody would expect them to.

The difference here is that "The oil spill caused a ban on drilling" is a seductive concept for three main reasons: most people trust government (they don't view it as the mindless amoral bureaucracy it actually is), most people are feeling financially desperate right now (doesn't matter whether they get the payola or not, as long as somebody does it's comforting), and thirdly there's the whole 'oil companies are evil, ummmkay?' bias colouring their perceptions.

Basically it boils down to plain old tribalism - the oil drillers are good ole' working boys, while the oil company is a bunch of evil outsider despots.

~sigh~ How's that fertility-eugenics tech coming along?

There's some fairly direct experimental evidence supporting your hypothesis that people's causal judgments are influenced by judgments of wrong-doing. Joshua Knobe (dscussed here) concluded from his research in the area that

causal attributions are not purely descriptive judgments. Rather, people's willingness to say that a given behavior caused a given outcome depends in part on whether they regard the behavior as morally wrong.

But, it's not clear that the broader pattern (never mind BP for a moment) represents a mistake. In Cause and Norm , Knobe and Christopher Hitchcock argue that the point of the concept of one particular event causing another is to pick out appropriate targets for intervention.

Since we’re on the subject already, there’s something else that bothers me about the reactions to the spill. I’ve seen quite a bit of angry reactions to the fact that BP’s plans for a possible spill were “obviously inadequate”. (Which they were; see the article for details.)

However, I haven’t seen anyone point out that those plans were approved by the federal government. As I see it, it was explicitly the government’s responsibility (via the relevant regulatory agency) to determine that the company’s policies were appropriate before allowing it to drill.

Putting all the moral blame on BP sounds to me a bit like putting all the blame on a company for killing its customers after the government’s drug-safety agency approved its plans to sell human medicine based on clinical tests on insects. (Except in the case of oil drilling there are actually much fewer companies, AFAIK, that do that, so there’s no excuse for being “swamped with applications” or anything similar.)

I'm not from the US and have little knowledge of US politics in this case. But from what I've heard, there is a lot of anger being directed at BP. I therefore suggest this simpler explanation:

1. Many people want BP to be punished for the spill, regardless of the drilling ban. Congress and the governemnt are under public pressure to do so, and some politicians want it themselves.
2. Many people expect BP to be punished much less than they want them to be punished, whether due to law or BP's political power.
3. For reasons of safety, the government decides to ban new drilling.
4. This is a convenient opportunity to make BP foot the bill, making them pay for their real crime.

I predict that if BP had somehow caused a ban on drilling without causing such an oil spill, they would not have been punished by having to pay the oilmen.

The White House says there will be a temporary ban on new deep-water drilling, and BP will have to pay the salaries of oilmen who have no work during that ban. I scratched my head trying to figure out the logic behind this.

This isn't to agree or disagree, but to say that if you think something is being argued that is stupid, it would make sense to link to the text wherein that argument is to be found. Otherwise you're setting up a straw man. What was the US' executive's actual argument for calling on BP to pay those salaries?

One possible justification for the punishment of BP is that while BP may not be causally responsible for the unsafeness of other companies' oil rigs, BP is the only oil-drilling company whose procedures were provably unsafe.

In other words, if the government decided to ban drilling because it suddenly realized, with p ~ 0.9, that drilling, on average, caused more harm than good, then of course the payments for displaced workers should come from the general public treasury, or, at worst, from the drilling industry as a whole.

What actually happened seems to be that the government continues to have no idea whether drilling, in the abstract and done cautiously, causes more harm than good, but that the government has suddenly updated its estimate that an arbitrary currently existing dirller is negligent from ~ 0.01 to ~ 0.3, and has suddenly updated its estimate that BP is negligent from ~ 0.01 to ~ 0.95. Given that "data," and without making any attempt to vouch for the accuracy or precision of the government's conclusions, it does make sense to punish BP, not punish other drillers, and shut down drilling.

It makes sense to punish BP because BP was almost certainly negligent, whereas Rachel Carson was not negligent; she warned of the dangers of DDT in good faith and with ample consideration of the risks of causing economic inefficiencies.

It makes sense not to punish other drillers because there is no way for the government to cheaply prove their negligence; a massive investigation of the entire industry would consume too much political capital. Although the government suspects that many, if not most drillers were negligent, no one driller (besides BP) is so clearly negligent as to deserve the punishment of being held responsible for displaced workers.

Finally, it makes sense to ban drilling, because, even if individual negligent drillers (besides BP) cannot be reliably and cheaply identified, it seems clear that there are at least a few other negligent drillers in the marketplace right now, and that allowing drilling while knowing that there are probably some negligent drillers out there is expected to do more harm than good.

Thanks a lot for the post. Your analysis looks correct to me. It's fascinating how consequentialism mixes with deontologism in our minds: we seem to search the causal chain from any bad consequence backwards until we find some deontologically bad action and attach the blame to that. Without deontological morals we'd have no mechanism to decide who is "responsible" or determine which step in the causal chain should be modified in response to the bad consequences.

(This is a tricky point and I'm not sure this comment is correct. Hopefully someone will set me right.)

There is a significant difference between BP and Carson that has nothing to do with sin or morality:

Many more human decisions lie between Carson writing her book and factory workers losing their jobs. Carson just made a persuasive case. Other people decided to accept the case and to implement bans, which in turn led to people losing jobs. In contrast, the only human decisions in the causal node just prior to the spill were BP's, and no human decisions stand between the oil spill and the fishers being unable to fish. That, at least, is the common conception of the chain of events.

Burn the witch!!... is what I was tempted to write, with no followup ;-)

On the other hand, I could see how it might be useful for social beings to coordinate their behavior with relatively little cognitive effort by collectively implementing relatively simple "witch finding and punishing heuristics" (perhaps with punishment of non-punishers mixed in?) while at the same making sure they never do anything that calls attention to themselves as a possible witch.

Personally, I would think that the deep problem with such a scenario is not that some people might be unjustifiably burned, but that particularly clever people might game the system, extracting value from other people in a way that doesn't trigger a witch hunt, because the witch detecting heuristics probably have gaps. It would not surprise me if the practical upshot, absent a perfect "accounting" system for causal utility, was some amount of "cycling through moral fashions" due to iterated application of Goodhart's Law.

Downvoted for main (and avoidable) focus on politics to make a very narrow point.

Agreed that social treatment of workers who suffer from major outside economic factors is pretty capricious, though.