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Morals on the scales
Does our morality have roots in an economic phenomenon?
Imagine you’re back in elementary school. It’s the birthday of one of the kids in your class — the kid who has been pestering your little brother for weeks. The bully in question approaches your desk with a bag of candy from which everyone can grab a couple of sweets in celebration of the happy event. They are your favourite kind, but you, you look the other way — you will not have any confectionery from your little brother’s tormentor.
Even if this particular situation has not actually happened to you, I expect that you can vividly imagine the emotions involved, and how you too might have chosen to forego the chance of a favourite sweet in the circumstances. It is an illustrative, and far from rare, instance of what looks, at first sight, as a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
A sacrifice… for what?
From an economic perspective, you would not have made a sacrifice — no candy! — without getting anything obvious in return. Sometimes, people engage in what is known as ‘costly punishment’: they incur a cost themselves in order to harm another person as punishment for some transgression. The idea is formalized in the ultimatum game: one player (the proposer) is given a sum of money, which they can split with the…
