- Joined
- Sep 30, 2011
- Messages
- 4,207
- Reaction score
- 2,615
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
Right now, $100,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people in this country.
The most ethically 'optimal' decision (removing other complications) under most mainstream ethical systems (i.e. Virtue Ethics, Deontological Ethics, Consequentalist Ethics) would be to give the other man everything. On the other hand, 50% isn't unethical under most considerations.
That's an extra complication which definitely could chance the ethical circumstances.How so? I've got ethical obligations to people and that money would go a long way toward me upholding them.
You are given a large sum of money (more than a million dollars)
True....A million dollars is still a lot of money to a lot of people in this country.
The most ethically 'optimal' decision (removing other complications) under most mainstream ethical systems (i.e. Virtue Ethics, Deontological Ethics, Consequentalist Ethics) would be to give the other man everything. On the other hand, 50% isn't unethical under most considerations.
Even if I intended to give all of it to charity, why would I give anything to that guy?
I've reread the OP a few times, and that doesn't seem to be the question.Because it isn't your money to decide what to do with. You're only responsible for it.
I don't think the poll question is legitimate in that it has no relationship to actual reality or the real political or ethical principle.
Wikipedia: The Dictator Game said:This game has been used to test the homo economicus model of individual behavior: if individuals were only concerned with their own economic well being, proposers (acting as dictators) would allocate the entire good to themselves and give nothing to the responder. Experimental results have indicated that individuals often allocate money to the responders, reducing the amount of money they receive.[3] These results appear robust: for example, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross cultural study that proposers do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the responder.[4]
If these experiments appropriately reflect individuals' preferences outside of the laboratory, these results appear to demonstrate that either:
1) Proposers fail to maximize their own expected utility,
2) Proposers' utility functions may include non-tangible harms they incur (for example self-image or anticipated negative views of others in society), or
3) Proposers' utility functions may include benefits received by others.
Additional experiments have shown that subjects maintain a high degree of consistency across multiple versions of the dictator game in which the cost of giving varies.[5] This suggests that dictator game behavior is, in fact, altruism instead of the failure of optimizing behavior. Other experiments have shown a relationship between political participation and dictator game giving, suggesting that it may be an externally valid indicator of concern for the well-being of others