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While I was at the IHS sem­i­nar last week, some­one men­tioned in pass­ing the issue of whether or not it is morally per­mis­si­ble to allow peo­ple to go ahead of you in a line. What pre­cip­i­tated this ques­tion was the fact that we were using the same din­ing hall as a num­ber of groups of young campers. They would descend like a swarm upon the facil­ity, dash­ing about, grab­bing things, and basi­cally dis­re­gard­ing the fact that there were other peo­ple there. This is not too sur­pris­ing since they were mostly lit­tle kids, and it wasn’t par­tic­u­larly unfor­giv­able. But it did man­age to raise the ques­tion of whether one ought to let them into the line. I also got on and off four planes over the course of the week, mak­ing the line issue even more salient to me.

So, I’ve been think­ing about it on and off since then. As it turns out, it’s actu­ally a great exam­ple of a prob­lem case for the lead­ing three types of nor­ma­tive moral the­o­ries. Today, I’ll show why. Next time, I’ll dis­cuss how I think we can pro­duc­tively think about the mat­ter “on the ground,” so to speak, and apart from any par­tic­u­lar moral theory.

The three basic types of nor­ma­tive moral the­o­ries are: con­se­quen­tial­ism, deon­to­log­i­cal (duty– or obligation-based) the­o­ries, and virtue ethics. The most often dis­cussed exam­ples of these the­o­ries are, respec­tively, Ben­tham & Mill’s act util­i­tar­i­an­ism, Kan­tian­ism, and Aris­totelian virtue ethics. I have nei­ther the time nor the incli­na­tion to repro­duce for you the argu­ments in favor of these the­o­ries, so just assume for the time being that they exist and are decent. I’m more inter­ested in see­ing how they fail to account for the line prob­lem adequately.

The ques­tion of the day is: what is the moral sta­tus of allow­ing a per­son to “cut” in front of you in a line? Is such an act morally imper­mis­si­ble, per­mis­si­ble, oblig­a­tory or even supereroga­tory? (see def­i­n­i­tions here).

Act Util­i­tar­i­an­ism

Accord­ing to tra­di­tional AU, an act is both morally per­mis­si­ble and oblig­a­tory if and only if it pro­duces more total util­ity (plea­sure minus pain, impar­tially con­sid­ered, in the long run) than all other acts avail­able to the agent. All other actions are morally imper­mis­si­ble because they pro­duce less than max­i­mal util­ity. No action is supereroga­tory, in the sense of going morally above and beyond what is required, because if any act would pro­duce more util­ity, even at a cost to the agent her­self, then the agent is already morally oblig­ated to do it. And every per­mis­si­ble act is also oblig­a­tory; AU is com­monly under­stood not to offer any moral options, except in case that two or more acts tie for best in their abil­ity to pro­duce utility.

How can we use AU to think about the moral sta­tus of let­ting some­one cut in front of you in line? It would seem to be pretty straight­for­ward: just fig­ure out if the per­son cut­ting in the line has some impor­tant and press­ing need to go first that out­weighs the minor incon­ve­nience to every­one else in the line. But actu­ally, the line case makes obvi­ous some knowl­edge & time prob­lems with AU. You really need to know quite alot about not only the per­son cut­ting, but also about every­one else behind you in the line, and whether or not a slight delay will affect them greatly. You also need to know about their per­sonal psy­cholo­gies: maybe some­one back there has an acute sense of line jus­tice and will get super stabby if they see some­one else cut. The time it would take to fig­ure these things out would end up cost­ing every­one a bunch of utiles. To this sort of objec­tion, John Stu­art Mill says we can use time-tested moral rules of thumb to avoid wast­ing time doing util­ity cal­cu­la­tions. For instance, we might adopt the rule that allow­ing one per­son to cut is gen­er­ally con­ducive to the over­all good. But JSM is still com­mit­ted to the posi­tion that, should the rule fail in a par­tic­u­lar case, that you have acted wrongly even with­out know­ing so. And that is weird. So AU is not par­tic­u­larly help­ful in our line case.

Kant­ian Deontology

To make a long story obscenely short, Kant thinks that moral per­mis­sions and oblig­a­tions can be derived from either of two cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tives. The first cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive gets trans­lated as some­thing like this: “Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a uni­ver­sal law.” It means that you ought not act on prin­ci­ples that either are log­i­cally impos­si­ble for every­one to fol­low (such as mak­ing promises that one knows one can­not keep — com­ment if you would like an expla­na­tion) or that would be really ter­ri­ble if every­one fol­lowed (a prin­ci­ple never to give aid to oth­ers). The sec­ond cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive says to “act in such a way that you treat human­ity, whether in your own per­son or in the per­son of any other, always at the same time as an end and never as a mere means.” This basi­cally says not to use peo­ple in ways to which they could not or would not con­sent as ratio­nal agents.

Is allow­ing peo­ple to cut in line required, per­mit­ted or for­bid­den by either cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive? When we test it with CI #1, it seems that mak­ing into uni­ver­sal law a rule allow­ing peo­ple to cut in line is not log­i­cally impos­si­ble nor cat­a­strophic in prac­tice. This sug­gests that it has the same sta­tus under Kan­tian­ism as imper­fect duties of benef­i­cence to oth­ers: one ought to give to char­ity some of the time, and to give oth­ers a place in the line some of the time. Trou­ble is, Kan­tian­ism doesn’t really have any­thing more to say as to when and where imper­fect duties ought to be dis­charged. So it isn’t really help­ful in the line cut­ting case. It only ver­i­fies the com­mon­sense intu­ition that some­times line cut­ting should be per­mit­ted and some­times it shouldn’t.

It isn’t par­tic­u­larly help­ful to resort to the sec­ond cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive, either. I agree with Fred Feld­man that, while the moral intu­ition that using peo­ple is morally bad is surely cor­rect, it is not a par­tic­u­larly infor­ma­tive guide to action (“On Treat­ing Peo­ple as Ends in Them­selves: A Cri­tique of Kant”). The most plau­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tions of CI #2 read it as requir­ing that either one help oth­ers achieve their goals, or specif­i­cally their ratio­nal goals. But, pre­sum­ably, both a per­son who wants a place in line and the peo­ple behind you in line have goals, even ratio­nal ones, which con­flict. You can’t help both. So Kan­tian­ism doesn’t seem to gen­er­ate any kind of spe­cific answer to our question.

Aris­totelian Virtue Ethics

Aris­totelian virtue ethics exam­ines what kind of life is good for a human and how one comes to lead that kind of life, rather than assess­ing par­tic­u­lar acts for right­ness or wrong­ness in iso­la­tion. In short, a flour­ish­ing human life con­sists in devel­op­ing and exer­cis­ing both moral and intel­lec­tual virtues. The moral virtues in par­tic­u­lar are prob­a­bly famil­iar to you: hon­esty, kind­ness, gen­eros­ity, etc etc. Aris­to­tle pro­poses the Doc­trine of the Mean as a way of think­ing about virtues: find a pair of oppos­ing virtues, and aim at the mid­dle in thought, feel­ing, and action. For instance, true courage lies at the mean between rash­ness and cow­ardice. But the mean is rel­a­tive to us and our sit­u­a­tions; what would be rash for me might be coura­geous for some­one larger and stronger than me. Young peo­ple can be habit­u­ated to act­ing well (e.g., not lying, not hit­ting) by the rewards and pun­ish­ments of author­ity fig­ures.  Then, with time and matu­rity, their proto-virtues can be per­fected by their com­ing to under­stand the rea­sons why those are good actions & com­ing to take plea­sure in act­ing well. Even so, per­fect virtue is an ideal that no one or almost no one will reach.

Try as though I might, and much to my cha­grin, I am thor­oughly unable to come up with any virtues that are clearly related to the line cut­ting issue. Gen­eros­ity is not quite right, because a place in line which, say, costs 10 peo­ple 2 min­utes is not entirely or even mostly yours to give. Allow­ing the per­son to cut costs you 2 min­utes and 9 other peo­ple a total of 18 min­utes. Surely true gen­eros­ity does not con­sist in giv­ing away oth­ers’ time to which you have no right. And, if the line were such that the amount of time you’d lose were equal to the time one other per­son behind you would lose, then there would be no com­pelling rea­son for another per­son to ask to go ahead of you, or for you to let them. Patience isn’t really right, either, because gen­er­ally allow­ing peo­ple to cut in front of you prob­a­bly rep­re­sents an excess of patience, and not the mean. So, at this point, I have no idea how to make the line cut­ting issue fit the virtue ethics mold at all.

So, at this point, you should know a thing or two about the three main kinds of moral the­o­ries, and why the line cut­ting issue is at least prima facie not ade­quately addressed by any of them. I don’t mean to say that no form of con­se­quen­tial­ism, deon­tol­ogy or virtue ethics is prop­erly equipped to deal with the line issue. It’s just inter­est­ing that, for all I know about ethics (which I like to think is kind-of-quite-a-bit), I have not been able to use these the­o­ries to fruit­fully think about what seems like a rather triv­ial mat­ter. But actu­ally, stand­ing in line is some­thing we do alot more often than we find our­selves in a trol­ley car case, for instance. So I think we need to dig a lit­tle deeper into the ethics tool­box to get at the heart of the mat­ter. And that’s what I intend to do, when I fol­low up on this post later this week.

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