2014 paper
Code of Ethics: Cost-Benefit Analysis vs Ethics
Norwich University
SSD400M The Capstone Project
Week 8 Assignment- Final Paper
Abstract
Ethics as espoused by philosophers and employed as a control mechanism by the many instruments of power, seems to be more a construct of what ‘ought’ than what ‘is’ , detracting away from genetically coded Ethical Thinking within regions of the brain associated with the social and individual sense of self. This is perhaps why Ethical control mechanisms, derived from traditional Ethics instruction, often break down when clear thinking is required most. Even under periods of extreme stress however, when higher neuronal functions impacting thought and reasoning are impaired, precluding access to the self-restraint and control introduced through ethics training, those regions of the brain dealing with self-preservation are yet quite active. And central to self-perseveration is the brains native ability to conduct complex Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) with respect to individual survival. Ethical instruction molded to how the brain conducts individualized CBA, and introduced as an integral part of daily training and activity, might very well provide for a more effective means by which to ensure Ethical Thinking when it is absolutely essential.
I. INTRODUCTION
“Contemporary decision analysis [CBA] readily allows, incorporates, and encourages the consideration and valuation of fairness, the outcomes of others, symbolic acts, unintended consequences, precedent setting, and even moral rules (Hammond et al., 1999; Bazerman and Moore, 2008).” (Dreze & Stern, 1987)
The human brain is a highly complex information processing system, composed of a three-tiered model, whereby information is first processed according to the Four F’s[1] of the survival imperative, further reprocessed by the social imperative and finally processed by the rational mind. As survival is often dependent on near instantaneous decision-making and response times, the initial tier of information processing is heavily dependent on an emotion laden, composite view of the world composed of biases developed over the course of the individual’s life.[2] This initial assessment, now laden with emotion from the survival processing tier, is reprocessed with respect to how the initial assessment and preliminary course of action determined will be perceived and play out within the individual’s social network. And finally the initial input, now further refined, is reprocessed by the higher- rational mind to ensure consistency and to formalize course of action planning accordingly. This means that all input is filtered first through our biases, if bias is strong enough it prejudices all higher level thinking with justification for action, the secondary appraisal begins to look at CBA analysis with respect primarily to social cost and if the group hates or holds the same biases, then original justification is further strengthened such that by the third appraisal, related to checking the analytics of the first two appraisals and to the application of courses of action, the decision has already been made and the individual is prepared to act and bear the consequences of their actions.[3]
To be effective, ethical restraint must be a deeply rooted and seamlessly integrated portion of the survival and social selves, requiring time and careful and persistent delivery of contextually relevant to the individual instruction on the value of ethical thinking as relates to the survival of individual and then collective. The high-minded ethical ideals of philosophers break down under conditions of extreme reality, such as the insurgent battlefield, as they cannot overcome all the many other factors and inputs leading from the individual’s jealously guarded ‘bias’ maps of reality,[4] the individual self and the group. It is not that these ideals do not have merit or value to the individual and collective, or that there is not some aspect of them within the individual’s sense of self and map of reality, as derived from the evolutionary development of the human brain[5] and social conditioning experienced during one’s lifetime. The matter is that ethics, no matter how well argued using the tools of logic, are a philosophical construct of what ‘ought’ rather than what ‘is’ where the battlefield and its surround are overwhelmingly composed of what ‘is’, rarely making room or allowing for sustainment of what ‘ought’.
In his book A Tactical Ethic: Moral Conduct in the Insurgent Battlespace, retired Naval Captain, SEAL and ethics instructor and champion Dick Couch provides a discussion related to why and how ethical instruction should be added into daily life and training, interwoven with all training and activity. As example Couch uses the United States Marine Corps and the company providing advanced weapons and tactics training to Navy Special Warfare, Close Quarters Defense, both of which integrate ethical thinking instruction into daily training and regular activity. Couch provides an excellent means by which to reach the core and social self of the individual through prolonged exposure to the message of ethical thinking both on an individual and a social basis, however the artificiality of the philosopher’s ethics, the cognitive dissonance generated by such, and how to overcome such artificiality in the survival and social selves were not addressed by Couch or those he references. Even if the message is delivered in such a fashion as to have the capacity to influence the slow development of ‘bias’ maps the individual maintains and operates from, if the message does not ring as true when held up to the stark truth of reality, then the message will fail to attain more status than just that of an ideal ‘ought’. Modifying the presentation of ethical thinking from the traditional form of high-minded ideals presented most often in the language of religion, codes of conduct, moral superiority and other control mechanisms, to one of individual and collective costs and benefits provides for a means by which to become a natural part of the biases with which the individual processes and reprocesses external and internal inputs under situations of prolonged stress, when confronted with degraded cognition, and in those immediate Four F moments.[6]
II. COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS
“At the broadest and vaguest level, cost-benefit analysis may be regarded simply as systematic thinking about decision-making.” (Kelman, 1981)
In the decision making of CBA, the considerable differences with which the brain processes normative models and descriptive models must be understood, with the first arising externally as what ‘ought’ and the second arising from within as a reflection of what ‘is’.[7] Particularly, when discussing ethics, ethics instruction and the application of CBA to ethics training in the military, those aspects of the decision process which are unique to the mind of military personal confronted with ethical decisions must also be identified.
“When a person is confronted with a set of possible actions each of which can lead to some set of outcomes, the person should convert the benefits and costs of all possible outcomes to a single scale and adjust them for the probabilities that the outcomes will occur. In this calculation, the following three rules apply:
(1) The net benefit rule. The action that has the greatest expected net-benefit should be chosen from a set of possible actions.
(2) The sunk cost rule. Only future benefits and costs should be considered in current decisions. Past costs and benefits are not relevant, unless they predict future benefits and costs.
(3) The opportunity cost rule. The cost of engaging in a given course of action is the loss of the benefits and costs.” (Larrick et al., 1993)
The net benefit rule, sunk cost rule and the opportunity cost rule as each relates to ethical thinking are processes the human mind carries out intuitively as the individual moves throughout their everyday activities, however in periods or situations of extreme stress, intuitive background informational processing is greatly degraded, if not almost removed. In this state, where the immensely powerful intuitive ability has been limited or temporarily removed, intentioned reason must kick in, providing for at minimum, individual immediate and intermediate[8] survival neural processing. This place provides virtually zero room for the artificial or the ‘ought’, but does still rely on the millions of years of evolutionary developed of those regions of the brain which deal with organic CBA and the three rules of CBA as impacts individual and then collective survival. This is not to state traditional ethical training, interwoven with military training and provided over the entirety of service, do not provide a ready useable framework by which to embed higher-level ideals in the rational mind. However, at some point, in the most extreme conditions, even this intentioned reason breaks down, leaving the individual to fall back on almost instinctual analysis. If the three rules identified are to become a part of instinctual analysis, the three rules must be mapped to instinctual survival needs and a training program developed such that this mapped language and corresponding models are far more deeply embedded than traditional or evolved ethics instruction can provide for.
In their paper, The Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis. The Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis, Dreze and Stern state, “The purpose of cost-benefit analysis is to provide a consistent procedure for evaluating decisions in terms of their consequences.” This is exactly the sum of what instinctual analysis does. The difficulty becomes one of, when in instinctual mode where rational and ethical thought break down, the only rule which the mind still processes intuitively or rationally is the sunk cost rule as the individual has no thought to what has already been spent and is only thinking about future costs, and generally not that far out. This does not mean the other rules are not also in play, however, when in this condition, the net benefit rule most often relates to the greatest choice out of a panoply of bad choices while the opportunity cost rule only extends out to the very near future and is most often warped such that the mind begins the process of justifying and covering for the bad choice made and the bad thing done. Many would argue that this alone justifies a denial of CBA based thinking to the individual on the battlefield, particularly with respect to matters of ethical thinking and decision making, that the mind in the heat of battle or under prolonged stress is simply something too complex to model.
Advances in CBA, such as the “Bergstrom-Samuelson Social Welfare Function (SWF) of the form
“ or the, “…additive form:
” (Boadway, 2006) challenge assumptions related to human behavior being too complex to be understood much less computationally modelled. If models can be derived related to human behavior and evolutionarily embedded and augmented CBA in matters of individual and social welfare under normal circumstances, as the increasing volume of research and sophisticated algorithms attests to, then it should be possible to computationally model CBA even under conditions of severe or prolonged stress. [9] Further, relying on advances in the neurosciences, it should be possible to demonstrate organic CBA at the physical level in the human brain both under normal conditions and within the brains of those having or experiencing severe or prolonged stress.[10] What is required then is a means by which to take this new awareness of how the brain conducts CBA organically, how such is enhanced neurologically through augmentation arising from decision making training, and how both are impacted by severe or prolonged stress, and to apply sophisticated neurological training, interwoven with everyday combat and operational training, which impacts those regions of the brain directly involved in such thinking processes and decision making.
III. TRAINING THE FIGHTER
Dick Couch CPT USN(Ret) talks to an aspect of this type of training in his discussion of Close Quarters Defense and their integrated ethics and shoot house mode of instruction, training which stimulates multiple pathways in the brain through a combination of the physical, emotional and the mental. While an excellent means by which to instruct and directly affect the circuits of the brain, the difficulty, in those extremes, is the artificiality of the ethical teaching, consisting of ideals often having little or no place in the real world the warfighter lives within. Understanding the real nature of the conflict within the individual when faced with an extreme choice, that it is not related to rewards realized from adhering to artificial ethics but to what reward the individual will take from the action and how one will be perceived amongst one’s immediate peer group and community according to the inherent ‘bias’ map which construct the individual’s reality. It is this careful attention to the individual’s ‘bias’ map of reality and a highly targeted CBA – Ethical Thinking molded to the individual’s ‘bias’ map which must be woven into any self-constraint training conducted.[11] This requires a far greater degree of sophistication in our faculty-cadre and our classroom, scenario and live action training, providing for scenario’s and models which feed directly out of the individual’s choices, as they move through their own perception of reality as played out in a given discussion or scenario. In particular our models, training materials and scenarios must demonstrate how things really play out, the ‘is’, and not the idealized vision of how things ‘ought’ which so often is the sum of our warfighter instruction.
Warfighters are, for the most part, a combination of tactile and instinctive learners, so any CBA – Ethical training must be incorporated into everyday warfighter training with more of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)[12] methodology than today’s limited environment, limited scenario training allows for. This means more open scenarios where each choice, good or bad, leads to different pathways in the training leading to greater bonding or isolation of the individual from peers and the greater community, as would occur in life, as well as to mission success or failure. And when poor choices are made leading to unsuccessful or disastrous outcomes the instruction which follows must be presented not in higher ideals but cold rational detail directly related to where those poor decisions came from and how the individuals manner of thinking impacted and led to those decisions, with precise recommendations based on neuroscience as to how to improve the individual’s baseline thinking. Specifically, CBA methodology must be applied which imparts on the individual the ability to better rationally and instinctively analyze the cost of decisions, not in monetary values, but in mental health and social group and belonging values, such as how specific poor decisions lead to isolation from peers, society, greater bonding with same and particularly to the death of peers and societal members, in direct and indirect fashions.
IV. EDUCATING THE FIGHTER
This type of bare-bones, genuine warfighter environment, CBA – Ethical training when extended to the classroom in the military or purely academic venue must be designed to provide historic and current references for how just such decisions led to success or failure, in terms of the individual rather than the nation, society or the collective beyond the small peer group of the warfighter. This means, woven through our higher-ideal courses on philosophy, military ethics, honor, duty, and discipline and the many other framework lessons provided relating primarily to society as a whole, must be an emphasis on how these sophisticated ideals and methods of thinking are reduced to almost nothing in those extreme conditions. An appreciation of the physical brain and how the brain changes in different situations needs be introduced with particular emphasis on how severe or prolonged stress inhibits rational thought and results in the warfighter possessing little more than instinctive CBA based thinking, thinking arising from ‘bias’ maps of reality generated and modified by the individual over prolonged periods of time.
An example of how this might look could be derived from a slight modification to Norwich’s Strategies Studies and Defense Analysis (SSDA) Bachelor of Science degree completion program, where members of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) community are provided with world-class education designed to make them better strategic, operational and tactical specialists and thinkers. In its current incarnation students are provided with a sequence of courses designed to make them think of the battlefield in a far broader spectrum than is provided for in traditional military training, education and thinking alone. However, these courses are provided as individual units unrelated to the specific work in the SOF community the student may be involved in and disconnected from the current real-world environment in which the student must daily operate, disconnected from the individual students ‘bias’ map, [13] with a course on ethics as the final course required for completion of the degree. If instead the entire course was conducted as a single whole, with modification and customization directly related to the aspect of the greater SOF mission in which the particular student works and operates and the student themselves, with CBA – Ethical thinking woven throughout, the impact would be far greater as over the course of the program the student redefines their particular ‘bias’ map of reality.
More refined this might look like this. The first course in the SSDA program is a course on ethical thinking, such as this course, which discussed not only traditional ethical thinking and instruction but concepts emerging from the worlds of neuroscience and CBA. Completion of the course would depend on delivery of a paper, such as this, detailing the reality of ethics and ethical thinking and instruction in their everyday activities, training and work and the providing of recommendations as to how to improve such in the student’s environment and community, with particular emphasis on a specific country or ethnic community within the area of responsibility and the impacts of ethical or unethical activities conducted by US forces within this same country or upon the ethnic group. The concepts put forward by the student in this first course, in the form of discussion groups and final paper would then be revisited throughout the remainder of the student’s SSDA studies with emphasis on how the students CBA – Ethical thinking concepts apply or were applied within the subject of each subsequent course, or how the student’s original CBA – Ethical concepts have changed due to their studies and further thoughts on the matter as realized in each subsequent course. The summation of the entire SSDA course would then be a revisiting of the student’s original CBA – Ethical thinking paper requiring the student sum their learning in the program with specific recommendations as to how the specific aspect of the SOF mission and corresponding community of the student might better conduct or direct its operations within the country or with the ethnic group first identified by the student in the very first course.
V. SUMMARY
“That ethical propositions can be evaluated with respect to a metalogical truth or correctness predicate does, of course, not imply that they can be true in a realistic sense of truth…For logic is not about the nature of truth; logics is about the nature of truth-preservation − whatever truth substantially means: be it correspondence with the real world, or as correspondence with conceptual and ideal worlds, or whatever.” (Schurz, 2004)
Ethics and Ethical Thinking are constructs of the idealized view of the world philosophers and religious leaders hope can be brought about, ideals to be put forward and worked towards, but which rarely are met, and which break down almost completely under the reality of severe or prolonged stress on the battlefield. Embedding the ideals of ethical thinking in the warfighter, such that better decisions are made when the fighter is reduced to instinctive thinking, removed from the rational mind where such high ideals as ethics reside, will require reaching into the physical structure of the human brain to regions and neural structures evolutionarily developed for CBA. The physical structure of the brain and its function is as an organic Cost-Benefit Analysis machine, with the functions reduced but still active even when under severe or prolonged stress. Structurally rewiring these portions of the brain to conduct more effective, broad-spectrum CBA – Ethical programming will require entirely new ways of training and teaching, requiring substantial improvements in psychological testing, scenario development, training materials, outcome based instruction and the full-spectrum of warfighter awareness development. Many of the tools are available currently, but either operate in isolation from one another or are simply not sophisticated enough to accomplish rewiring of the physical brain with improved analytical capabilities, particularly those related to making a good decision in an impossible situation, such as on the insurgent battlefield. Integrating Ethical Thinking with advances in CBA while integrating and employing breakthroughs in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience with military education and training materials, methodologies and training venues, perhaps through MMORPG or other such high complexity scenario engines, would provide for a more complete and thorough method of instruction, one which over time would accomplish the physical rewiring of the brain critical to improved decision making.
VI. REFERENCES
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Bazerman, M. H., & Greene, J. D. (2009). In Favor of Clear Thinking: Incorporating Moral Rules into a Wise Cost-benefit Analysis (No. 10-001) (pp. 1–11). Cambridge. Retrieved from http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication Files/10-001.pdf
Boadway, R. (2006). Principles of Cost-Benefit Anaylsis. Public Policy Review, 2(1), 1–44. Retrieved from https://www.mof.go.jp/english/pri/publication/pp_review/ppr002/ppr002a.pdf
Chediak, K. (2006). The problem of the naturalist fallacy for evolutionary ethics. Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 2. Retrieved from http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?pid=S0100-512X2006000200002&script=sci_arttext&tlng=pt
Concept, T., The, C., & Notions, P. M. (2014). Philosopher ’ s Deduction Fallacy.
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Dreze, J., & Stern, N. (1987). The Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis. The Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis, 2(4), 909–989. Retrieved from http://personal.lse.ac.uk/sternn/040NHS.pdf
Gamba, J. O. (n.d.). Two Ways of Deriving Ought from Is without Committing the Naturalistic Fallacy.
Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (1992). Troubles for New Wave Model Semantics: The “Open Question Argument” Revived. Philosophical Papers, XXI(3), 153–175. Retrieved from http://thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/thorgan.faculty.arizona.edu/files/Troubles for New Wave Moral Semantics.pdf
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[1] Fight, Flight, Feed or F*&^ ( the last more commonly known as ‘Mate’)
[2] “In other words, perceived threat tends to skew the appraisal towards more core self input, leading to less nuanced, more categorical results, and to more emotional, less rational and less moral responses.” (Dan, 2014)
[3] “A person confronted with a new situation will appraise it, interpret its meaning and try to integrate it in social context. Discussing the more general case of an organism confronted with a change in its environment, Lazarus (1990, 1991) has identified three distinct stages of appraisal:
- primary appraisal, concerned with the integrity of the organism, which is fast and approximate and answers basic questions such as: Do I fight? Do I run? Can I eat it? Can I mate with it?
- secondary appraisal which is slower and answers more complex questions for example ones including meaning and social context
- re-appraisal, essentially a feedback check on whether the results of the primary and secondary appraisals are appropriate
In fact the process starts with an initial appraisal and the creation of a model of the environment.” (Dan, 2014)
[4] See Cognitive Dissonance – How the mind deals with competing or conflictatory beliefs
[5] “Herbert Spencer (1898) penned the first systematic theory of evolutionary ethics, which was promptly attacked by T.H. Huxley (Huxley 1894). Second, at about the turn of the century, moral philosophers entered the fray and attempted to demonstrate logical errors in Spencer’s work; such errors were alluded to but never fully brought to the fore by Huxley. These philosophers were the well known moralists from Cambridge: Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick 1902, 1907) and G.E. Moore (Moore 1903), though their ideas hearkened back to David Hume (Hume 1960).” (Allhoff, 2003)
[6] “We also disagree…that moral rules achieve better outcomes than deliberation in multi-party settings. It is inappropriate to judge the quality of an individual’s decision based on a collective outcome lacking evidence that the individual attempted to maximize collective outcomes… what is needed is a prescriptive model that incorporates a realistic set of expectations of others and concern for other parties—which decision analysts have been writing about for over a quarter century” (Dreze & Stern, 1987)
[7] Even though this ‘ought’ and ‘is’ are themselves a construct of individual biases and are constrained by the individual’s ability to process and understand informational input flows.
[8] In this extreme or prolonged stress condition the individual is almost incapable of thinking of anything beyond immediate and medium term survival.
[9] “…multiple studies have shown that patients with emotion-related neurological damage are dramatically more likely to make utilitarian judgments (Ciaramelli, Muccioli, Ladavas, and di Pellegrino, 2007; Koenigs, Young, Adolphs, Tranel, Cushman, Hauser, and Damasio, 2007; Mendez, Anderson, and Shapira, 2005).” (Dreze & Stern, 1987)
[10] “Berns et al. (2012) have shown that decisions considered as having been made based on principle are processed – and interpreted – differently from decisions made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, meaning that if one can deceive him or herself that their action is principled, it is easier to see it as justified.” (Dan, 2014)
[11] “The origin of human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction – the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own social group. Social intelligence enhanced by group selection made Homo Sapiens the first fully dominant species in Earth’ history.” (Wilson, 2014, pp.45-46).
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game
[13] “Sidgwick thus thought that there was a ‘gap in ethical construction’ between physical law and moral law; as Richards remarks, Sidgwick thought that ‘the ‘oughtness’ of moral principles depended upon no empirical conditions for its force’ (Richards 1987, 322) (such as natural law).” (Allhoff, 2003)