Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives
Ruth W. Grant - Princeton University Press, 2012 Anteprima del libro
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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.
