“Thank you, Harold, for that provocative talk. I think I speak for everyone here in saying how much we admire both your erudition and your ability to speak so quickly.”
The laughter was good-natured. Lipkin’s smile was grim.
“You’ve packed so much in that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m going to restrict myself to the last point you made. I want to challenge your claim that the Milgram experiment shows that there’s no moral reasoning going on. And my objection to your interpretation of the Mil-gram experiment is an objection to your entire thesis that reasoning isn’t functioning in our moral calculations, that it’s all just gut reactions.
“Milgram’s results are astonishing, but no more astonishing than the result we get in game theory in what we call escalation games. What I’d like to suggest is that Milgram’s experiment is an escalation game, and the playing of an escalation game certainly involves reasoning.
“Take the simplest escalation game, the dollar auction. Two or more people can bid on a dollar. Each bid has to be higher than the last, and the highest bid gets the dollar-just like in a regular auction-but, crucially, the lower bidders have to pay whatever their last bid was, even though they get nothing. Given these rules, the bidding will quickly go up to a dollar, with the last bidder having bid ninety-nine cents. Will it stop there? No, because then the ninety-nine-cent bidder will have to pay ninety-nine cents and get nothing for it. So he rationally bids a dollar and a cent, so he’ll lose only a cent rather than a dollar, which is outbid by a dollar and two cents, and so on. What happens in the dollar auction is that people will bid five dollars, ten, fifteen dollars, just to get a dollar in return. In fact, once you get a dollar auction started, there’s no rational way for it to end, since the cost to either player of bowing out will be high, and the marginal cost of raising his bid is just a penny. So it’s rational to keep bidding, a penny at a time, even though this leads to an irrational result.
“Anyway, the Milgram experiment is an escalation game. Once a participant takes the first step, he’s already paid a certain price-he’s inflicted discomfort, and he’s feeling bad about it-but if he stops he’ll get nothing for his pain. He won’t have successfully completed a psychological experiment and contributed something to science, and that authority figure running the experiment is going to be displeased with him. So, once he’s made his first bid, and the experimenter escalates by telling him he has to give an even stronger shock at the next mistake or he will not have completed the experiment like a good subject, he’s more than likely to escalate by complying. Just like the dollar auction, once you start there’s no natural place to end until the experimenter calls a halt to it. It’s all perfectly rational, step by step, even if it leads to a bizarre result. In fact, given that the experiment is, in fact, an escalation game, the outcome is completely predictable.
