Ends vs. Means: Why Does It Matter?

means to an end?

Source: pexels moritz feldmann

When trade-offs between ends and means come up in conversation, it’s usually in a context in which some clear-cut harm must be suffered by someone in order for a desired good to be achieved for others. To prevent a terrorist from attacking civilians, for example, one may have to weigh the collateral damage likely to be suffered by innocent bystanders. To reduce the commute times of large numbers of motorists, one may need to cut through what was once an undivided neighborhood and erect barriers that will sunder the fabric of an unluckily situated community.

A new study by economists Roland Bénabou, Armin Falk, and Luca Henkel considers a class of ends-means trade-offs in which—unlike those examples—the unappetizing aspect of the path to a desired end is not a harm done to anyone in particular. Rather, it’s having to violate a principle, moral norm, or ideal that the actor tries adhering to whenever possible.

As an archetypal example, the authors quote Emmanuel Kant’s claim that telling a lie can never be justified. Kant, the authors say, argued that saving a friend or family member from embarrassment, or even helping to alleviate another’s suffering, are never acceptable justifications for lying.

As another example, they consider expressing approval of a repugnant statement. What if you could achieve a highly commendable goal, like having your contribution to cancer research or refugee assistance tripled, provided that you express agreement with what you consider to be a reprehensible declaration, such as “I think that the environment should be destroyed,” or “I agree that the U.S. should stop accepting immigrants from ‘shithole countries’”? (Recall poor Galileo, who in 1633 was threatened by the Inquisition if he did not recant his support of the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun. Here, making an abhorrent statement permitted him to avoid torture or possible death.)

Suppose, now, that your abhorrent statement will be made in total secrecy, assuring that it can have no nefarious influence on your own reputation or on the opinions others will hold about the referenced issues. Doesn’t the good end easily justify the nauseating means? Wouldn’t it be the height of irrationality to hesitate to click your approval to the statement, if you had an iron-clad guarantee that nobody would find out?

The authors include one of the leading economic theorists concerned with the impact of self-image and moral value concerns and one of the top designers of studies on interpersonal cooperation and conflict using experimental lab and survey techniques. They elicited multiple decisions by study participants, decisions which were grouped into three clusters.

The first cluster studied willingness to violate norms (such as the norm against lying, and that against making disbelieved and reprehensible statements) if doing so was required to help others (such as having the experimenter release funding to a medical charity). The second cluster studied willingness to sacrifice some potential money earnings from the study in order to deliver more earnings or benefits to other individuals—for example, voluntarily contributing to a joint investment project, as discussed elsewhere in this blog. In other words, the second set of decisions were conventional tests of having other-regarding or altruistic concerns, tests that have typically concluded that such concerns are widely held.

The third cluster consisted of answering survey questions widely used to measure moral values, including modules known as the Oxford Utilitarian Scale (Kahane et al., 2018), the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011), the Moral Universalism module (Enke, Rodriguez-Padilla and Zimmermann, 2022), and a classical Trolley dilemma.

What the Researchers Found

The main findings of the study can be summarized by five statements.

First, a considerable number of study participants—specifically, between 20 and 44 percent, depending on the objectionable means in question—appeared to be unwilling to engage in the unsavory but inconsequential behavior as a means to achieve a benevolent goal.

Second, those who acted as if unwilling to accept some of the ends-means trade-offs were willing to accept several others, without any evident pattern as to which sets of means would tend to be unacceptable to given subsets of participants (say male vs. female, or religious vs. non-religious). There was not, for example, an identifiable subset of participants who tended to reject most of the objectionable means cases while most other participants acted as if concerned only about the ends, never rejecting any of the means studied.

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Third, in contrast to the previous point, individuals did tend to display considerable consistency with regard to how selfishly or unselfishly they behaved in the second cluster of decisions, the ones in which self-interest and altruism or cooperation were in conflict. That is, an individual who was relatively unselfish on some tasks (for instance, contributing to the group investment) also tended to be relatively unselfish on other tasks (for instance, dividing an endowment between themselves and an anonymous other individual).

Fourth, there was almost no correlation between the degree of hesitation to engage in unsavory but inconsequential actions, on the one hand, and the degree of willingness to engage in unselfish actions, on the other. Thus, having strong abstract values, such as a strong desire to avoid lying, to identify as non-racist or non-sexist, or to refuse to pay or accept bribes, was—perhaps surprisingly—not correlated with being strongly “pro-social” or unselfish in consequential choices. This means that whereas decisions in the first block seemed unrelated to one another and those in the second block seemed strongly related to each other, first- and second-block decisions were uncorrelated.

Finally, there were correlations among responses to the survey style moral values questions of the third block, indicating that elements of the different surveys tend to similarly distinguish between individuals claiming to hold more demanding moral values and those not doing so. However, responses to questions in the third block had little predictive power with respect to decisions in the other two blocks, with a few notable exceptions.

The strongest of those exceptions was that a “trolley-dilemma”-like means-ends conflict constructed by the authors for the first block of the experiment was a good predictor of responses to the classically phrased trolley dilemma of the third block, confirming that subjects understood the first block’s trolley-like problem similarly to the classically phrased hypothetical one in the third block. (In a trolley dilemma, an individual tells the interviewer or answers a questionnaire about whether they would be willing to push a large stranger off of a bridge and onto a trolley track, where the individual would die with certainty, if they knew for sure that this would prevent a run-away trolley car from killing five individuals standing further down the track.)

Why This Matters for Behavioral Economics

The most important takeaway from this research might not lie in the specific results just reviewed so much as in the way in which it begins to open up a "next frontier" in the field of behavioral economics.

The initial decades of economists’ research into the social and normative side of human behavior and its impact on aspects of economic life (like willingness to pay taxes, voluntary compliance in matters like recycling, or adherence to norms constraining corruption in the public sector) focused mainly on willingness to forego private rewards for the sake of fairness, loyalty, or group advancement. It also studied altruism, philanthropy, and willingness to incur costs in order to punish unfairness and norm violation.

These bodies of research helped economists to admit that the caricature of perfectly selfish decision-making had been an impediment to a better understanding of the complexity of human interaction. But most of this work remained focused on material payoffs, as if the actors in question considered only such consequences, and were fully indifferent to the means by which consequences were brought about.