The over-delegation problem
as soon as you start thinking about this, you’ll see it everywhere
I’ve come to believe that over-delegation is one of the most under-discussed moral phenomena of our times.
My favourite example of over-delegation is the case of the British person who, on overhearing a sexist joke in the pub, pops outside to phone the police. You think I’m making this up! I’ll write more on the UK’s disastrous free-speech culture some other time. But the point I want to make today is a simple one, about the risks of shirking responsibility. About why it’s bad to delegate the moral obligations that you’re supposed to meet.
The pub example is useful here because it forces us to recognise the importance of moral authority. It reminds us that you can believe that someone should indeed intervene in the sexist joke-maker’s behaviour — by telling them they’re being a bit of a dick, for instance — without believing it’s the police that should do this.1 Of course, the ‘someone’ who should intervene here may well not be the person who just happened to overhear the joke. More likely, it’s the person who the joke was directed at. Or perhaps, in this particular instance, there’s no third party whose business it is to intervene, and it’s all on the joke-teller to reflect on whether they should behave differently next time.
But the point I’m making is that there’s a question of authority to be addressed. Even when intervention is morally permissible — even when intervention is morally required — this doesn’t mean that any old person can, or should, intervene! The same applies to the kind of intervention that’s warranted. I mean, just because you’re sure that your friend is about to run a stop light doesn’t justify you chopping off their hands to prevent this happening, does it?
The sexist joke example is also useful, however, because it points to the particular problem of the state getting involved when it isn’t its business. One serious cost of such a thing is that the law is blunt. The law is famously bad at parsing and evaluating complex moral matters. Often, this is sufficient reason to counsel against the involvement of the law. But another, underrated, reason for concern about over-delegation to the law relates to its cost to the individual — and to society, over time.
This cost arises because failing to meet your moral obligations doesn’t simply put you at risk of serious wrongdoing — although clearly it does.2 It’s also bad for you, in itself. We are reasoning creatures, with the capacity to evaluate and determine how we should behave. But we have to keep practising doing so! And I mean ‘practising’ here both in the sense of actually doing the thing, and in the sense of doing the thing with a view to getting better at it.
This is quite an Aristotelian way of talking. And the Aristotelians might well associate my concerns about moral over-delegation with their concerns about ‘crowding out virtue’. Think here about when you’re at the train station and you see a sign telling you to be kind to your fellow passengers. Such signs are usually well-intentioned, I’m sure. But the Aristotelians would remind us how important it is that we do the hard work, ourselves, of working out how to behave well towards other people. It’s important that we attend to such things! We shouldn’t need the state to remind us to be good, and when it takes on this role for us, our moral reasoning can become lazy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ever help each other in these matters. Help is different from delegation, and delegation isn’t always wrong, anyway. It’s over-delegation I have a problem with, remember!
A great example of an appropriate kind of moral delegation relates to the obligation that all adults have to help children to learn how to use their reasoning skills. It’s good and right for adults to shoulder the burden of decision-making — including moral decision-making — when children aren’t capable of doing so. That said, we probably shouldn’t call this particular example ‘delegation’, because delegation implies intention, and it’s not really as if children are asking adults to shoulder the burden here! Indeed, part of what’s going on is that children don’t know when or how to ask for help with this kind of thing.
The children example does show us, however, that even when a lot of people share some specific kind of moral obligation, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those obligations are identical. Parents, for instance, have a very particular set of obligations to help children to develop their reasoning powers. And particular parents have particular obligations to their particular children!
The children example also helps to show us that it’s not always the person who can do the job the most efficiently — or even the most effectively — who’s the best person to do it. Again, this comes back to the idea of holding the right kind of authority. I mean, sure, the state actor has the power of guns and laws, but the use of such things is clearly not the right way to get little Jimmy to stop teasing his sister!
Acting morally is hard. It’s hard at the level of doing the right thing: when you’re the person in the pub who’s supposed to be telling your friend that they’re being a bit of a dick, then of course you want to look for a way out. Of course you want to just be able to laugh at the joke.3 So, you tell yourself that you’ll say something next time. Or you ask someone else to have a word. Or yes, you pop outside and take out your phone!
Then again, sometimes it won’t be right for you to intervene. And sometimes it won’t be clear whether you should or not. Because acting morally is hard even at the level of working out who’s supposed to be doing what. Nonetheless, there are some really easy cases of over-delegation to spot. Examples like dialling the police outside of the pub. Like bringing in the army to trample the campus protesters. Like getting your friend to break up with your boyfriend for you. Like threatening little Jimmy with a bazooka.
As soon as you start thinking about the over-delegation problem, you’ll see it everywhere.
None of this entails that the joke isn’t funny! As I argued in a recent podcast discussion with Henry Oliver, humour and subversiveness are often intertwined, and finding something funny is like being made happy, in that, if you find something funny, then you find it funny, even if you think you shouldn’t.
I’ve written here previously about the important distinction between the kinds of moral obligations that correlate with rights (often referred to as ‘perfect obligations’), and those that don’t (often referred to as ‘imperfect obligations’). When you fail to meet a perfect obligation, you are definitely at risk of serious wrong-doing!
As per footnote 1, none of this entails that the joke isn’t funny.
You might be interested in Stephen Crane's excellent story "When a man falls, a crowd gathers" (1894) about the responsibility of citizens when emergency response has been professionalized (all that was a mid-19th c phenomenon in NYC). Crane, like you, sees how easily the presence of many people becomes an excuse for each person to do very little. I think about this story all the time.
Link: https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Crane_When_Man_Falls.pdf
I think the concept is a useful one and describes a real area of concern but, in practice, I think it's not at all easy to draw the lines for what counts as over-delegation.
Yes, someone calling the police in response to a sexist joke is pretty clearly a bad idea.
But is it wrong to make a report to HR if a supervisor tells a sexist joke? If they repeatedly tell sexist jokes?
Is it wrong to call the police if someone in a pub looks like they are repeatedly trying to provoke a fight?
Part of the issue is that, I believe, given a case in which there is socially widespread behavior that has negative impacts but is such that any individual case is fairly minor changing that is likely to require both changing norms and some element of punishment (which is disproportionate in the individual case).
I say that thinking of the example of littering. If we didn't have a law against littering it would seem absurd to call the police just because someone threw trash on the side of the road but changing behaviors around littering involved both social persuasion and establishing fines for littering.