Perverse Incentives in Justice Theory: Slack-taking as Chicken Game

Recent academic work on the division of labor between ideal and nonideal theory has sparked several debates about how our duties change once we move from ideal to nonideal circumstances, i.e. circumstances that include noncompliance with moral demands. One such debate concerns the justifiability of the so-called “duty to take up the slack”, that is, a duty for willing compliers to take over burdens left by noncompliers. This paper treats an objection to the duty to take up the slack. The objection from perverse outcomes states that affirming this duty would be counterproductive to the ends it seeks to promote. If assured that the final outcome will not be affected, otherwise willing compliers will be tempted to withhold their contributions. Yet, if too many defect, slack-takers will not be able to compensate for the failures of slackers, thus leading to more slack being left. I propose a new interpretation of this problem, arguing that the duty to take up the slack gives rise to a choice situation equivalent to a game of Chicken. This situation provides agents with perverse incentives to irrevocably pre-commit to defection. The problem of perverse incentives – incentives that seek to produce a certain outcome, but lead to its opposite – is well-known from the social sciences. Yet, while perverse incentives constitute an obvious flaw in institutional design, their normative implications are less clear. I argue that the perverse incentives following from the duty to take up the slack affects our assessment of this duty in two distinct ways. First, perverse incentives increase the risk for perverse outcomes, since they encourage hasty decisions and worsen the epistemic conditions in which such decisions are struck. As an effect, the duty to take up the slack is practicable in a narrower set of conditions than has previosuly been assumed. Second, perverse incentives challenge the status of the duty to take up the slack as a duty of justice, since they threaten to undermine conditions of reciprocity necessary for duties of justice to arise. By demonstrating that perverse incentives have not only practical, but also normative implications, my findings add to the worries concerning the effects of acknowledging the duty to take up the slack, and raises new doubts about its status as an enforceable duty of justice.