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[Jan. 17th, 2009|04:02 am]
Scott
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I was not able to get my point about boycotts across very well, and I worry I was perceived as suggesting majority rule, or a slippery slope argument or somesuch. Let me try it once more, more formally.
Many commenters pointed out that boycotts can do a lot of good. For example,  pentacruz pointed out that it would have been great if people had boycotted the Nazi Germans.
There were a few efforts in that direction, but they were ineffective. In fact, the most influential boycott of the period was when the Nazi Germans boycotted the German Jews.
Boycotts by good people supporting good ideals can do great good, but boycotts by evil people supporting evil ideals can do great evil. Most of the commenters on my last post assumed that a boycott will always be of good people against evil people. What happens when we ditch that assumption?
If there are equal numbers of "good" and "evil" people, than there should be about an equal number of boycotts on each side. The overall contribution to the general balance of "good" and "evil" in the world should be zero.
Except it won't be, because no matter what the intent of a boycott, it will cause harm. Boycotts are fundamentally an attempt to inflict suffering on a certain group to convince them to stop doing something. Whether they stop or not, the suffering certainly is inflicted. People will lose their jobs, be harassed, feel intimidated. I mentioned one example the other day.
So the total amount of good or evil created by a boycott is (I + U) where I is the intended effect of the boycott, like getting Mormons to stop supporting Prop 8 or getting Jews to stop doing whatever evils they were accused of, and U is the unintended effect of the boycott, the general misery created by harassment and intimidation and loss of jobs.
Taking the positive direction to mean a good effect, "I" can be either positive or negative, depending on whether the people conducting the boycott are good or evil. U is always negative. If we assume the positive effect of a good boycott is about the same as the negative effect of a bad boycott, then in a system where there are an equal number (K) of boycotts by good and evil groups, the total moral effect of the boycotts is:
K(I + U) + K(-I + U)
= 2KU
The positive and negative values of I cancel each other out, so the total effect of all of these boycotts is 2KU. We already agreed U is always negative, so the total effect of boycotts in this system must be harmful.
So, when you're in a system where there are an equal number of "good" and "evil" people, and they're equally likely to boycott, having a general rule of holding boycotts will always cause more harm than good.
I think that culture war politics is such a system. There are about equal numbers of liberals and conservatives, and they both like to boycott based on their own personal beliefs. I know of both conservative boycotts of businesses they perceive as soft on gays, and liberal boycotts of businesses they perceive as being anti-gay. It's exactly the situation we just proved works out to 2KU total effect.
In contrast, consider Coca-Cola and their activist-killing hitmen. There are not equal numbers in the "good" and "evil" group - almost everyone opposes what Coke is doing. And the two groups are not equally likely to boycott one another - it's easy for me to boycott Coke for killing union activists, but it's hard to even imagine what it would mean for Coke to boycott me for not killing union activists. Let's do our calculation again, using a few more coefficients. This time, K1 will be the likelihood of the "good" group holding a boycott, and K2 the likelihood of the "evil" group holding a boycott, and a coefficient N in front of the impact will represent the larger number of people participating in the "good" group:
(K1)(N)(I + U) + K2(-I + U)
= K1NI + K1NU + -K2I + K2U
= (K1N-K2)(I) + (K1N+K2)(U)
N is greater than 1 (we said there were more "good" than "evil" people), K1 is greater than K2 (we said the "good" people were more likely to hold a boycott), and therefore (K1N-K2) is positive and I is positive. Since U is always negative and N is a positive number, (K1N+K2)(U) is negative. As long as K1 is significantly greater than K2, N is significantly greater than 1, and I is significantly greater than U, the net effect of the boycott will be positive. This is part of the ethical calculus behind my statement that a boycott of Prop 8 supporters would be a bad idea and one of the Coca-Cola corporation a good idea.
There is, however, one number I haven't mentioned until now because it would make the calculations much more complicated. This would be G, the certainty with which you can state that you're actually identifying the two sides correctly. A Nazi who believes the Nazi side is "good" and the Jewish side is "evil" will end up in a situation exactly equal to the Coca-Cola calculation below: a large number of "good" people with a high ability to boycott, and a low number of "evil" people with a low ability to boycott (ie Nazis outnumber Jews and have greater economic clout).
G = 1 should be equivalent to total moral certainty. G = 0 should be equivalent to having no idea who's in the right or if there even is a right. I have very little confidence in people's ability to estimate correct values of G for themselves: for example, I suspect that if we asked the majority of Prop 8 supporters and Prop 8 opponents, they'd both say they had 100% moral certainty that their side was correct, whereas really the two numbers ought to add up to 100%. The Nazis would also probably give a number close to 100% for their certainty that the Jews were in the "evil" category.
High values of G make the intended effects stronger than the unintended effects and make boycotts more beneficial. Low values make the unintended effects stronger than the intended effects, and make boycotts more harmful. Low values of G also destroy the advantage of having the "good" side larger than the "evil" side. On an issue where there are an equal number of equally intelligent people on both sides (like Prop 8) G should probably be set near zero, because a higher value means you trust that the brains of people on your side are better at working out logical arguments than the brains of the people on the other side, for which you have minimal evidence (the fact that your position seems more logical to you isn't evidence, because the other side would say the same). This is yet another reason to suspect that the unintended harmful consequences of a boycott on Prop 8 would be much greater than the intended beneficial consequences.
The cynic in me would say G should always be low, but looking over Wikipedia's list of boycotts, I find that if you discount the various anti-Semitic ones the rest are significantly more "good" than "evil" (to the degree that I, with the benefit of hindsight and moral progress, can identify them). That suggests to me that G is usually relatively high, another reason I'd be pretty confident boycotting Coca-Cola. |
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I would point out that people can also refrain from giving money to specific corporations not because they wish to do any harm, but simply because they don't feel *comfortable* funding said corporation. I don't refrain from shopping at WalMart because I think that the lack of my meager expendable income will *hurt* them in any way. I do it because I'm not at all comfortable with giving them my money. Arguably, I'm not comfortable with with giving them my money *because* they do things I think are ethically remiss, but trying to correct that isn't my intent in my consuming decisions. | |
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