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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Hockey
Message-ID: <242@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Nov-85 12:34:05 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.242
Posted: Mon Nov 11 12:34:05 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Nov-85 21:01:24 EST
References: <237@gargoyle.UUCP> <252@l5.uucp>
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 61

Laura Creighton writes:

>The fact is that unhelmeted professional hockey players have chosen to live 
>this way.  They are not minors.  Why are you in such a hurry to take this
>choice away from them?

But what if both of the following statements are true:

1.  Each player prefers to play without a helmet, regardless of
whether anyone else is wearing a helmet or not; AND

2.  Given a choice between

    A.  everyone NOT wearing a helmet, including himself; and
    B.  everyone wearing a helmet, including himself;

everyone would prefer B to A.  

Then what do you do?  If these statements are true, there arises a
multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma, a.k.a. a free-rider problem.  If
somehow everyone was wearing a helmet at the beginning of the match,
players would simply remove them, and they would end up at A instead
of the preferred alternative B.  The same problem arises even when
everyone prefers C, "N players wearing a helmet, including
himself," to A, where N is some number > 1.

In real life, free-rider problems are sometimes overcome, in
different ways.  One way is through making the individually
unpreferred option mandatory, the dreaded coercive solution.  Another
is through "solidarity" or "class consciousness," which is just a
name for the empirically observed phenomenon that people sometimes
make the collectively rather than individually rational choice, as
often in strikes and revolutions.  Another way is through
irrationality:  the individual thinks "if I choose my unpreferred
option, everyone else will too" (magical thinking).  Another
explanation might be moral inculcation or indoctrination:  e.g.,
people could be strict Kantians and always act so that they could
will their maxim to be a universal law.

The point is that it is a problem, both normative and explanatory.
The normative (practical) problem is often a very serious one, e.g.,
how do we overthrow a dictatorship if each individual would risk his
neck by becoming a revolutionary?  How do we reduce the risk of
nuclear war, or reduce violent crime, or reduce death and injuries on
the streets owing to nonuse of seatbelts?  The explanatory problem is
how to explain why free-riding is sometimes overcome and sometimes is
not.  For example, no one really has a good explanation of how and
why revolutions occur.

The libertarian solution to everything seems to be "let the free
market solve the problem."  But the free market "works" only in cases
where the costs and benefits of actions are accepted *voluntarily* by
everyone, so libertarians advocate private ownership of everything to
internalize costs and benefits.  But this solution is utopian, i.e.,
totally unrealistic.  In the real world, a person's actions
unavoidably impose costs and benefits on other people, whether anyone
wants them to or not.  It is an inescapable fact of social life, and
cannot be eliminated by imposing a regime of private control of
objects, land, air, etc.
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes