Strings Attached

Untangling the Ethics of Incentives

Ruth W. Grant

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691161020, 9780691151601
• eBook ISBN: 9781400839742
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

The legitimate and illegitimate use of incentives in society today

Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.

Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas—plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered.

Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

Index

accountability: avoidance of, 134

and coercion, 68

and IMF loans, 102, 107–8

incentives as masking, 9, 74

accusers, right to confront, 85

adaptation, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 42

African Americans, 98

agenda setting, 42–43

AIDS activists, 90

altruism, 4, 61, 69, 97, 115, 151n20, 161n61

American Federation of Labor, 20

Aristotle, 46

autonomy, 53, 57, 121, 135

and choice, 12, 127–32, 136

and democracy, 131, 136

desire for, 139

incentives as crowding out, 129, 169n6

and intrinsic motivation, 129, 131

and manipulation, 58

and medical research, 89, 91–92, 101

and national sovereignty, 103

and physicians and drug companies, 130–31

and plea bargaining, 77, 80

threat to, 128–29

and voluntariness, 12, 127, 128–31, 132

aversion, 94, 96, 99, 101

bargaining, ix–x, 42, 135

and character, 51, 52–53

with children, 126–27

and degrees of power, 49–50

and exercise of power, 32

as form of persuasion, 48

as form of power, 5, 6, 45

and government, 7–8

as human capacity, 48

ideal form of, 53

and incentives, 50

legislative, 125–26

legitimate vs. illegitimate uses of, 45

and medical research subjects, 88

and motivation, 53

and plea bargaining, 76, 80, 82

and Sophocles, 40

standards of legitimacy for, 50–51

as use or promise of exchange of gains or losses, 49

varieties of, 50. See also exchanges...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One Why Worry about Incentives?
• Two Incentives Then and Now The Clock and the Engineer
• Three “Incentives Talk” What Are Incentives Anyway?
• Four Ethical and Not So Ethical Incentives
• Five Applying Standards, Making Judgments
• Six Getting Down to Cases
• Seven Beyond Voluntariness
• Eight A Different Kind of Conversation
• Notes
• References
• Index