We like people from our own tribe. We like other people from our own family, neighborhood, school, ethnicity, city, or country. These preferences happen with intention, and they also happen even when we don’t deliberate about whom we like, hire, or hang out with. Many years ago, when the first of many studies came out showing that African Americans were discriminated against in the U.S. mortgage market, psychologist David Messick wrote a wise editorial arguing that the primary problem was not that white loan officers were overtly hostile to African Americans, but rather that white loan officers had a positive bias toward people who were a lot like themselves.1 Clearly, overt racism and sexism persist in our society. Hostility toward outgroups is real, and African Americans have faced far more of the harm of intentional discrimination than other groups. But Messick’s observation is consistent with a wealth of social psychological research showing that, today, in-group favoritism may be more pervasive than overt racism and just as harmful. Moreover, I believe readers of this book are much more likely to be biased by in-group favoritism than out-group hostility. And lack of hostility to out-groups doesn’t make us immune to tribal behaviors that indirectly harm out-groups.
One of the intriguing paradoxes of tribal behavior is that when powerful majority groups succumb to in-group favoritism (and, by definition, discriminate against out-group members), they often focus on the good they’re doing for in-group members. The harm they inflict on out-group members fades from attention. When those in the majority, or in power, give limited funds to people who are like themselves (based on religion, school, nation, etc.), there are less funds available for those who are different from them, including minority groups, women, and the powerless. When we choose recipients for our philanthropy based on their similarity to us, we constrain our ability to do the most good. And when we give limited and coveted spots in universities, corporations, and other exclusive groups to people who are like us, there is less room for diversity.
In his 2013 book, Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene describes how tribal behaviors can become a barrier to doing the most good possible.2 As Greene explains, there’s an evolutionary logic to why tribal behavior is so intuitive: in hunter/gatherer societies, relying on our local group, or tribe, may have been central to our survival. But an evolutionary logic does not justify tribal behavior in the current era, particularly when tribal behavior leads to sexism, racism, and hiring the wrong people to work for our organizations.
In the past four chapters, we explored four strategies we can use to be better—to reach more fulfilling, more ethical outcomes for ourselves and for the world. In this next section of the book, we will apply these four strategies to identify concrete actions we can take in four domains to create value. The first involves confronting our tribalism head-on and doing what we can to increase equality.
Counter to the media’s portrayals (and often our intuition) of societal woes, psychologist Steven Pinker convincingly argues in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, that the world is in a much better state today than it has been in the past.3 Pinker attributes this progress to dramatic improvements in our ability to reason, in science, and in the humanism that developed in the Enlightenment era. Pinker also gives considerable thought to the barriers that are preventing reason, science, and humanism from creating even greater improvements in societal well-being. Perhaps surprisingly to many, but consistent with substantial liberal thought on the topic, Pinker highlights one set of groups as creating barriers to enlightenment: extreme religious groups.
Pinker argues that religious groups that view members of their own group as superior to nonmembers, whether based on their religious beliefs, ethnicity, or nationality, move us away from equality and humanitarian behavior. While religiosity is positively correlated with giving to the poor, Pinker argues that encouragement to give more value to members than nonmembers is one of the greatest barriers to creating even more good. In the process of aiding their members, such religions sometimes end up punishing nonbelievers by not providing them with the help they need, allowing them to suffer, and spreading the view that disbelief in their specific faith will keep nonbelievers out of heaven.
In 2015 in the United States, 33 percent of all charitable dollars went to religious-based organizations. Some religious-based organizations offer donors, implicitly or explicitly, a perception that other philanthropies can’t match—a stairway to heaven. Many churches codify this stairway by offering members guidelines on what percentage of their salary they should give to the church. While some religions recommend a specified percentage of income be donated to their church, few religions recommend giving a specific percentage of their income to a charity other than itself.
Some religious groups explicitly encourage their members to favor their own group and its members rather than people who are in most need of help. In the 2018 Netflix biopic Come Sunday, Carlton Pearson, the first African American Pentecostal bishop of a megachurch in Tulsa, lost his church when he changed his beliefs. Pearson was horrified by the 1990 Rwandan civil war, in which 800,000 mostly innocent people were murdered. According to Pearson’s religion, since few of these people had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, most were going to hell. Unable to accept this idea, Pearson rejected the Pentecostal doctrine. He remained a person of faith but started to preach a modernized message of acceptance and inclusion. Pearson’s unwillingness to preach Pentecostal principles that defined the criteria for admission to heaven, rather than hell, led to his excommunication from a religion in which he had been a star.
Many people are attracted to religion because they hope to create value in the world. Yet many religions require followers to believe in ideas that may well detract from doing the most good that they can do. Organizations that endorse in-group favoritism, use scare tactics to keep members from using reason, create highly authoritarian structures, and question core findings well accepted by science may not be the strong positive social force that they claim to aspire to be.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR THE RICH
I belong to an organization that likes and shows a clear bias toward its members. That organization is Harvard University. Harvard’s preference for those connected to Harvard emerged in glaring detail in a recent lawsuit. In 2018, Harvard found itself defending its admissions policies in a federal district court in Boston against plaintiffs who accused the university of discriminating against Asian Americans, specifically by holding Asian Americans to higher admissions standards and using quotas to limit their numbers. Filed in 2014, the lawsuit is a recent chapter in a decades-long argument about whether Harvard imposes quotas limiting the percentage or number of Asian American students. (I do not believe that Harvard imposes formal quotas, but that belief is not core to the story I’m telling here.) The case was fairly unique in that the plaintiffs argued that one minority group was discriminated against in favor of whites and other minority groups.4
One strategy Harvard uses to discriminate against Asian Americans, the plaintiffs claimed, is to include a subjective personal rating as part of its applicant review process. The lawyers for the Asian American plaintiffs argued that the university uses the personal rating to assess “fit,” which refers to the degree to which applicants are similar to the existing tribe—rich white people from families that have been attending Harvard for generations. The plaintiffs connected the use of personal ratings to Harvard’s well-documented history of using some notion of “character and fitness” to keep Jews out of Harvard in the 1920s. In 1922, Harvard’s Committee on Admissions rejected Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell’s proposed 15 percent upper limit on Jews. There is evidence that Lowell disliked Jews, and he expressed concern that Protestant alumni wouldn’t want their children to be around too many Jews. Four years later, when Lowell was still president, the “character and fitness” admissions criterion was adopted. These days, Lowell’s anti-Semitism and broader racism have triggered debates about whether his name and image should remain ubiquitous across campus.
The plaintiffs’ expert witness in the Harvard case, Dr. Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University, argued that the “personal ratings” given to Asian American applicants lowered their chances of admission to Harvard. Harvard’s expert witness, University of California, Berkeley professor David Card, argued that when those personal ratings and other criteria regarding special status (legacy, donor admits) are accounted for, a statistical analysis shows no support for the plaintiffs’ claim of discrimination against Asians.
The case was complicated by the fact that the plaintiffs were led by Edward Blum, a white anti–affirmative action activist who broadly opposes special treatment for minority groups. Many of Blum’s critics have claimed he used the rejected Asian American plaintiffs as pawns in his war against affirmative action for other minorities, such as African Americans and Latinos. All of the other Ivy League colleges supported Harvard’s argument that a loss for Harvard would be a blow to diversity and inclusion efforts throughout higher education and beyond. On October 1, 2019, Blum and the other plaintiffs lost their battle: a federal judge rejected their claim that Harvard had intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans. The judge, Allison D. Burroughs, defended Harvard’s use of affirmative action and said the school had met constitutional standards for factoring race into its admissions decisions.5
While affirmative action is strongly rooted in arguments around justice, utilitarians have used their own logic to strongly support affirmative action.6 Utilitarians argue that discrimination harms those being discriminated against far more than it benefits the recipients of favorable treatment. In addition, they argue, discrimination based on inherited attributes is an inefficient means of doling out resources, as they are unlikely to go to those who would benefit most from them. As Mahzarin Banaji, whom you met in Chapter 2, has noted, if you know your steering wheel is biased toward a particular direction, the best way to offset the bias is to pull the steering wheel in the opposite direction.
My hope that Harvard could maintain its ability to create a diverse and inclusive community led me to be on Harvard’s side in this lawsuit. Affirmative action allows Harvard to reward applicants who have excelled under difficult circumstances, and I found Blum’s exploitive use of Asian Americans insincere, given his broader objectives. My concern about fostering a diverse and inclusive student body is quite consistent with the goal of creating better overall outcomes for society, I believe. However, I’m not happy about all we learned about Harvard throughout the litigation process.
The lawsuit forced Harvard to reveal many details of its admissions policies, many of which are discriminatory, elitist, and far from optimal or ethical. The plaintiffs’ discovery unmasked the enormous favoritism Harvard provides to children of Harvard alumni, as well as to people who are willing to make large donations.7 And, for historic reasons, the majority of Harvard alumni and donors are Caucasian. The magnitude of the benefit accrued from being affiliated with the Harvard tribe is huge: Arcidiacono’s expert report claims that Harvard applicants with at least one parent who graduated from Harvard or Radcliffe (Harvard’s sister school for women through the twentieth century) were accepted 34 percent of the time, in comparison to just 5.9 percent of non-“legacies.”8 A Harvard analysis found that legacy status conferred a much larger advantage to the most desirable 20 or 30 percent of the applicant pool. Thus, legacy status is unlikely to make up for being in the lower half of the applicant pool, but it helps applicants tremendously at the margin.
Harvard and other elite American schools that admit to favoring legacy applicants claim that they use legacy status as they use race or other student characteristics, to foster a diverse campus—where “diversity” is defined as including people with and without a deep connection to Harvard.9 Harvard has also argued that legacy consideration “helps to cement strong bonds between the university and its alumni.”10 In addition, Harvard and other schools often claim that alumni donations allow them to financially support the neediest Harvard students. Legacy “applications tend to be well put-together,” Harvard’s president, Lawrence Bacow, says. “They have deep knowledge of the institution. So, it’s a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool.”11 While I believe Bacow, I see little reason to give the already-privileged children of wealthy alumni another bonus on top of what their family has already provided them.
Making this case more strongly, Harvard class of 1989 graduate Evan Mandery, who teaches at John Jay College in New York, argues, “There’s no plausible moral claim that accidents of birth that advantage you—like being a man, or being a white man, or being a rich, white man—should give you a further advantage.” Other critics of legacy admissions practices argue that it is unethical for an organization with such a public purpose as Harvard’s to discriminate against people who aren’t part of the tribe in order to keep the tribe happy.12 A secondary effect of legacy preferences is to favor the demographic category that is best represented among the alumni population—whites.
It is possible to run a fine university based on merit. Five of the world’s arguably top ten universities explicitly reject the idea of legacy preferences in admissions decisions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of California, Berkeley.13 But legacy preferences remain strong at many universities, including the publicly supported University of Virginia.14
Harvard administrators who want to help people affiliated with Harvard are thinking about the value they can bring, in terms of building a loyal community and fundraising. They’re probably not thinking much about the value they are destroying when rejecting the better-qualified applicants who would have taken these legacies’ places. As we’ve discussed, when people discriminate, it is often because they’re focused on helping their tribe rather than on harming outsiders. But when resources are limited, and those who are demographically similar to powerful decision makers get the resource, tribalism, bias, and discrimination are the end result. In college admissions, tribalism creates injustice, destroys the rights of other applicants to be evaluated fairly, and creates a homogeneous culture that misses opportunities to help craft a better society. Helping other people is generally a virtue, but when that help comes cloaked in tribalism, it becomes a vice that needs to be corrected.
The wealthy benefit not just from institutionalized tribalism, but from their ability to further use their in-group status and connections to bias the admissions process. In 2019, federal officials charged more than thirty wealthy parents, including famous actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, with being part of a multimillion-dollar scheme to buy their children into college. These parents allegedly paid a consultant to fabricate academic and athletic credentials and bribe their way into the college of their choice. The consultant, William Rick Singer, engaged in illegal acts to get the children of these alleged criminals into Yale, Stanford, and the University of Southern California. Meanwhile, in 2019, Harvard’s longtime fencing coach, Peter Brand, was alleged to have sold a house with an assessed value of $549,300 for $989,500 to a wealthy businessman, Jie “Jack” Zhao. Without living in the house, Zhao then resold the house for $665,000 as the market was appreciating. After the purchase, Zhao’s son gained admission to Harvard and joined the fencing team. Now, just to be clear, such actions, if they occurred, differ from Harvard’s legacy admission process in that they are illegal. But the broader issue of the inequality created by these various activities, and the past willingness of universities to allow such practices, damages any university’s aspirations of being a meritocracy.
I believe that most university officials have good intentions. Yet it is very disturbing to me that these racist, elitist policies remain so widespread. Which begs the obvious question: Why did it take so long for an uproar to emerge regarding unethical admissions policies at our leading universities? Part of the answer is that the harms these policies cause are ambiguous and hard to notice. Erosion of meritocracy occurs incrementally as universities make room for legacy admits. In addition, the qualified applicants who are disadvantaged by these policies rarely complain. While they may be upset about being rejected by a particular school, they don’t know that they were rejected in favor of marginally qualified or unqualified legacy admits, nor do we. Imagine if universities had to make public the names of students who would have been accepted if less-qualified legacy admits, or applicants favored by the fencing coach, hadn’t taken their spots. Transparency would make the disgrace of legacy admission policies clear and salient to all. The rejected students and the media would complain, the public would be indignant, and the system would have to change.
When the elite are highly overrepresented by one ethnic group, elitism turns into indirect racism as well. A decade or two from now, we will look back and be stunned that the leading U.S. universities would continue elitist and racist policies into the twenty-first century. These policies were developed when society accepted that the privileged were more entitled than others to attend schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Such policies implicitly existed from the formation of these elite universities, and more formal legacy admissions policies were created in the early 1900s to keep the most prominent minorities of the time, Jews and Catholics, off campus.
WHERE DOES OUR TRIBALISM COME FROM?
I opened this book by asking you to buy into what may have seemed to be some pretty innocuous ideas, including the notion of equality for all. But, quite honestly, that was a trap—very, very few of us are capable of selecting friends, hiring people, promoting people, and interacting with strangers without being affected by their demographics. And once we’re affected by their demographics, equality is no longer possible. This phenomenon is well understood in social psychology, but also in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
Sociobiology, a field of study originating in E. O. Wilson’s 1975 landmark book on the topic, attempts to explain and examine social behavior within evolutionary principles. More specifically, the field argues that social behavior has resulted from evolution.15 A closely related field, evolutionary psychology, seeks to identify which aspects of psychological behavior were optimally evolved adaptations—that is, functional for natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists define “optimally” very differently than economists and behavioral decision researchers like Daniel Kahneman do. Critical of the work described in Chapter 2 on decision biases, evolutionary scholars argue that while these patterns of cognition and behavior may not be rational economically, they may be “biologically rational”—that is, suited for the perpetuation of the species. The goal that many evolutionary researchers set for human behavior is not rationality, but rather reproductive fitness. That is, our evolutionarily created responses may have helped steer us away from behaviors encouraged by economic rationality in favor of responses that were biologically rational.16
Consistent with Herbert Simon’s view that rationality is bounded in part by our cognitive limitations and time constraints, the biological view considers some of our cognitive biases to be the best possible solution to a problem, given the computational and time limitations that people faced many generations earlier.17 For example, decision-making research on self-control argues that while people should maximize their utility, aggregated over time, they tend to err by giving too much weight to present desires and concerns relative to future needs. This lack of self-control can lead to all kinds of shortsighted decisions, from overeating to failing to save adequately for retirement. Evolutionary psychologists argue that such behaviors made sense for our ancestors, who risked dying of starvation if they passed on the short-term rewards of food consumption in anticipation of a larger bounty.18
Economists would argue that they do value survival of the species and reproduction, but that these are two of a larger number of goals associated with maximizing utility, including current enjoyment, accomplishing career goals, and making the world a better place. More broadly, just because a behavior was biologically fit many generations ago in a hunter-gatherer society is no reason to accept these suboptimal tilts in our current-day behavior, when we have the option to engage our System 2 processes to maximize our value creation for ourselves and others. In fact, many biologically based behaviors that assured human survival now threaten to sabotage us, as in the case of the energy extraction that exacerbates climate change or overfishing that triggers international conflicts and the depletion of our oceans.
I’ve covered three perspectives on optimal human decision making in this book: economic rationality, utilitarianism, and reproductive fitness. Evolution may have fostered System 1 decision making that doesn’t steer us toward economically rational outcomes in the modern world. As we move the goal from maximizing individual utility (economic rationality) to the ethical goal of utilitarianism (maximizing value impartially—that is, across all sentient beings), we again encounter a conflict between what evolution led us to do and what would create the most aggregate benefit.19
Wilson’s Sociobiology and Singer’s The Expanding Circle highlight the biological fitness of cooperating with your tribe, even if that means working against your more myopically defined self-interest.20 That is, those who cooperate with their tribe, such as their family or employer, sometimes make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group, and as a whole, all members of the tribe are better off as a result of these actions. Moreover, people who belong to cooperative tribes are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cooperative tribes. Thus, cooperating within your tribe is biologically fit behavior and may well explain why today we generally care more about ourselves, our family, and other members of a relatively well-defined group that is smaller than the human species. Returning to our discussion in Chapter 3, we can broadly think of this as cooperating in a multi-round prisoner’s dilemma problem. The same principles of evolution can explain why we don’t make similar sacrifices for out-group members: because there is no biological advantage to doing so. I agree with sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who believe this may partially account for why we value and reward our tribe more than those who are far more distant.
But we aren’t limited to the intuitive rules of thumb that we have developed over generations: we have the power to engage in System 2 thinking. For many of us, our System 2 thought processes steer us toward equality for all, toward valuing the pain of all people equally, toward impartiality, and toward justice. Consistent with utilitarianism, this means that if we can do great good for those far removed from our group, that is a more ethical action than doing a lesser amount of good for our tribe. This utilitarian North Star often runs up against our evolutionary impulses and System 1 thinking.
IMPLICIT TRIBALISM
The most important discovery about tribalism may be that it often occurs without any intent to preference one group over another. The contemporary literature on ordinary prejudice, led by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, argues that those who have the power to distribute resources often implicitly favor their group over others without being aware of their favoritism or preferences.21 Implicit psychology shows that we have attitudes about men versus women, whites versus blacks, and, often, “our group” versus “their group.” Banaji and Greenwald use the word “ordinary” to clarify that the regular thought processes that we use to categorize, perceive, and judge information can lead to systematic preferences for groups to which we belong. Banaji and Greenwald, along with Brian Nosek, have developed a series of tests that confront people with their tribalism, tests that people have now taken tens of millions of times (to take one yourself, visit www.implicit.harvard.edu).
As a result of our implicit tribalism, many of us frequently fail to treat people outside our tribe with the respect and dignity we show members of our own tribe, or with the dignity and respect needed to create as much good as we can. In her book The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, my colleague and friend Dolly Chugh builds on the implicit psychology literature to describe how and why well-intentioned people who believe in diversity and inclusion (whom Dolly calls “believers”) still miss many opportunities to treat people with the level of equality to which we aspire. As a result, good people fail to create as much value as they could. Chugh encourages all of us to go beyond believing that equality is appropriate to being “builders” who proactively undertake actions aimed at treating all people with dignity and respect. She pushes us to take responsibility for our mistakes and oversights so that we can overcome our limitations and move toward equality.22
For me, perhaps the most compelling story Chugh tells in her inspiring work concerns the very simple act of learning someone’s name. When meeting new people, most of us are pretty good at recognizing and absorbing the names of members of our own tribe. Yet, in our more diverse world, we often regularly engage with people from other tribes. As a teacher, I have the wonderful opportunity to engage with students from around the globe on a regular basis. I most typically teach groups of MBA or executive students in classes ranging from sixty to ninety-five students. The good news is that Harvard Business School arranges for all students to have a nameplate in front of them during class, which reduces the burden on me and other teachers to remember student names. However, it doesn’t solve the challenge of pronouncing those names correctly. Because I don’t like the feeling of mispronouncing someone’s name, I have tended to skirt this challenge (as, Dolly notes, many of us do) by using the Americanized nickname provided on the student’s name card or pointing at people with challenging (to me) names rather than attempting to say their names correctly. A year ago, if you asked me why I didn’t at least try to pronounce a student’s name, I would have said that I didn’t want to offend the student with a mispronunciation. But, to be honest, I was avoiding the work that would be required to learn to pronounce students’ names before the course started.
Thus, it was a bit startling for me to read some pretty obvious facts that Dolly highlights in her book. First, people care about their identity, and their names are part of that identity. Second, most names are actually not that hard to pronounce if you take an extra thirty to forty seconds to focus on them; many “difficult” names are simply the aggregation of many easy-to-pronounce syllables. Third, most students would prefer a teacher’s sincere attempt to pronounce their name, even with an American accent, as compared to the teacher’s obvious attempt to avoid saying their name. Many of us repeatedly fail to step up to this simple pronunciation challenge, instead imposing what feels like a minor cost by pointing. Yet once we take the perspective of the student with the five-syllable “difficult” name, we would easily recognize the wiser strategies of asking them to help us pronounce their name or giving it a sincere try on our own.
I am trying to handle the name challenge more effectively, and the cost is small. For me, Dolly’s focus on the use of someone’s name highlights one of the many potentially hurtful micro-behaviors we engage in when a bit more reflection would guide us toward behaviors that would create more value in the world. I believe that if I keep Dolly’s advice in mind, it becomes easier to act with less tribalism and greater equality.
TOWARD EQUALITY—THE OPPOSITE OF TRIBALISM
It is pretty easy to get liberals and progressive politicians to be in favor of equality, even equality for all. Yet, with the exception of overt nationalists, it is rare for politicians to vocally criticize people for supporting their in-group, even when such action creates inequality. Treating our commitments to our churches, communities, and families as a moral virtue, we rarely stop to consider whether the actions we undertake as a result of these commitments are also creating inequality. Harvard and other elite universities favor not only the children of alumni and donors in their admissions policies, but also the children of faculty. I have lots of liberal professor friends at Harvard (which is located in what is often described as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge”) who strongly believe in equality for all, yet would never question Harvard’s decision to give the children of faculty an admissions advantage.
While most of us readily agree that equality is good, it is far different to act on equality or even to be clear about what it means to be equal. When we say that we believe everyone is equal, what do we mean? Clearly, people have different levels of intelligence; some people are better musicians, accountants, or athletes than others; men are taller than women, on average; and so on. Sexists, racists, and opponents of equality use such facts to argue against the notion of equality as a goal, saying that equality is not an accurate description of the world as it is.23 Moreover, affirmative-action activists certainly have no interest in ensuring that all job applicants are treated equally; rather, they want those who have been discriminated against in the past to receive affirmative remedies. Yet, as we’ve seen, equality has long been a part of discussions of ethics and is core to utilitarianism. So, what do we mean when we say that we want equality?
Utilitarians view everyone’s interests as equal, with interests being defined as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (“Equality of interests” is similar to the use of the term “equity” in many contemporary diversity training programs.) This means that no group’s interests should be valued more than those of other groups; the pain and pleasure of all humans should be weighed equally. This doesn’t mean treating everyone the same, argues Singer.24 He gives the example of the aftermath of an earthquake where limited morphine is available to alleviate the pain of the survivors. Should the morphine be divided equally across all those who are suffering or distributed based on patients’ level of need? Singer (and I) argue for allocating the morphine based on how it can do the most good. The interests of all are weighed equally, but this doesn’t translate into equal treatment or equal division of the morphine. And, while it may seem obvious, it’s important to note that the concept of equality of interests is a prescription, not a description of the world as it currently exists.
Even if we accept the idea that the interests of all people should be treated equally, tribalism can threaten our willingness to follow through. Biological and social factors pressure us to do more to try to alleviate the pain experienced by our family members, and perhaps those in our community, city, or country, than the pain of outsiders. While many can agree that the pain of Americans of African ancestry should be as important to address as that of Americans of European ancestry, few of us do as much to address the pain of people in distant lands as we do to help family members who are suffering. Equality of interests is an abstract idea, and it is certainly hard to assess the interests of all. It is also easy to imagine (but not condone) well-intentioned people overweighting the interests of people similar to them because they understand their interests better than the interests of out-group members. By examining how we diverge from the standard of equality of interests, we can become better and move in the direction of creating more aggregate value.
PUSHING THE LIMITS OF EQUALITY OF INTERESTS TO INCLUDE ANIMALS
As I argued for focusing on equality of interests, rather than equality of treatment, I violated the very concept of equality of interests by focusing only on humans. What about other animals?
In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote:
The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin . . . are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? . . . the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?25
Racists create less good in the world by giving greater weight to the interests of some races over the interests of other races. Speciesists create less good than they have the potential to create by ignoring the interests of nonhuman sentient beings. Of course, we are all speciesists, since even the most committed utilitarian favors sentient animals over nonsentient plants. There’s a valid basis for this favoritism; nonsentient plants are not capable of suffering or experiencing joy, so they have no interests that need to be considered. Similarly, I have a preference for people and other mammals over insects, which generally have shorter lives and experience less physical and mental pain and pleasure than people and other mammals do.
Arguably, there are a number of good reasons to value humans over nonhuman animals. Due to our longevity and cognition, humans are likely to have more opportunities to experience pleasure than nonhuman animals. We also likely have greater capacity to suffer mental anguish than most nonhuman animals; for example, most nonhuman animals with cancer will suffer the physical downsides but not the mental anguish of fearing or knowing they will die. Yet the argument that most people have more capacity for pleasure and pain should not reduce our concern for the interests of nonhuman animals. Most of us can do more good by placing a greater value on nonhuman animal interests than we currently do, whether by consuming less meat, advocating against the abuse of animals on factory farms, or protecting wildlife habitats.
THE LIMITS TO ACHIEVING EQUALITY
The burden of living up to the standard of looking beyond our tribes to treat the interests of all equally is enormous. We often fail to notice our cognitive limitations, the wise trades where we can reduce our tribalism and get better results, and the corruption that encourages tribalism. But, like you, I know that I can be better and move in the direction of greater equality. I can identify where I fall short and consider adjusting my behavior. I can also think about ways that I can continue to move toward greater equality over time, even as I recognize my current limitations. To use Dolly Chugh’s language, I can move from believing in equality to being a builder of greater equality. I hope that you see similar opportunities for yourself.