In this blog post, we’ll start with the problem of free-riding and examine, from an ethical perspective, why we should live righteously even in the absence of external oversight or punishment.
The Temptation of Free-Riding and the Problem of Cooperation
This happened when I was in the military. In the early dawn of April 2012, under the guise of “a battle against myself,” I was gritting my teeth and holding on to a 200-kg wooden pole held above my head. Since I had already run and was exhausted from the drills, my fellow recruits holding the pole with me were also at the point where they could barely put any strength into their arms, just like me. At that moment, a thought crossed my mind: there were as many as ten fellow recruits holding the pole with me—wouldn’t it be okay if just one of us, like me, exerted a little less effort? However, even setting aside the issue that if I eased up, the others would have to work harder, I couldn’t bring myself to let up easily because I worried that if a few more classmates had the same idea, one side of the pole would definitely tilt—and then we might end up enduring even longer punishment from the teaching assistant. In any case, since I was struggling so much at the time, it would have been better for me to keep putting in the effort—even if it meant enduring a bit more punishment. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That’s because even if my body felt a little better by easing up just a bit, my conscience wouldn’t let me rest easy.
We often find ourselves agonizing over situations similar to this one in life. When it’s always in our best interest to be a free rider—regardless of how others behave—we’re tempted to take that path. For example, when working on a group project, this happens when, rather than working just as hard as the other group members, we delegate most of the work to those who are putting in the effort, even if it means getting a slightly lower grade ourselves. This is because it’s always to my advantage to do a little less work, regardless of whether the other members are working hard or not. The major problem with this situation is that free-riding becomes the best strategy for others as well. It also becomes problematic because when others free-ride, it results in significant disadvantages for those who are more cooperative. Therefore, we might ask ourselves: What is the best way to prevent free-riding? Narrowing the discussion to the problem of free-riding that occurs in school classes, what is the best way to ensure effective group work while preventing free-riding?
Institutional Methods to Prevent Free-Riding
One approach is to make cooperation—not just the final product of group assignments—a key criterion for evaluation. To achieve this, contributions to group activities can be assessed not just once, but through multiple rounds of confidential evaluations. Since this method is not a one-time event, it can filter out antisocial behavior to some extent. For example, suppose there are five group members and a member named A is a free-rider. If A gives a poor evaluation to B—who made a significant contribution to the group project—without any valid reason, B will inevitably suffer a major setback based on that single evaluation, even if B received positive evaluations from the other group members. However, since the number of people who give such unreasonable evaluations is generally small, conducting peer evaluations multiple times can filter out this type of antisocial punishment.
Furthermore, if students are allowed to select their own group members, it would minimize the harm that hardworking students suffer at the hands of free-riders. In other words, if hardworking students can form groups among themselves, they can reduce the harm caused by free-riders and, at the same time, potentially reduce the number of free-riders. In the anecdote from my military service mentioned earlier, the reason I hesitated to free-ride was that if others also free-rode, I would have to endure physical punishment for a longer period. For the same reason, if there were a mechanism to filter out free-riders, groups with many free-riders would find it difficult to choose to free-ride. So, how can we enable people with similar characteristics to group together? This can be solved using a method called “sending costly signals.” Before forming groups, we assign one or two individual assignments so that everyone can see the work done by others. Consequently, everyone will be able to evaluate others in terms of their task-performance ability and diligence. In terms of diligence, there will likely be a strong correlation between the effort put into individual assignments and that put into group assignments. In this context, individual assignments function as “costly signals,” allowing participants to predict a person’s level of contribution to group assignments. If participants are then allowed to form their own groups based on this information, the likelihood of people with similar tendencies grouping together increases.
The two methods presented above make free-riding difficult by overcoming the weaknesses of group projects—namely, their one-time nature and randomness. Therefore, these methods continuously deter free-riding throughout the group project and minimize the scope for free-riding more effectively than any other approach. Nevertheless, if anyone does attempt to free-ride, the severe penalties imposed will encourage mandatory participation in group projects. These methods for preventing free-riding are applied in similar ways not only in the classroom but also in society. Socially, while free-riding may yield significant personal benefits, if everyone engages in it, the result is ultimately a worst-case scenario. To prevent this, various measures are employed to deter free-riding in society; for example, imposing higher fines when free-riding is detected. Throughout their long history of living in societies, humans have faced various problems caused by free-riding and have likely employed these methods to prevent it. But is the reason we don’t free-ride simply to avoid punishment under the rules created to prevent free-riding in society?
Why We Must Live Righteously Even Without External Surveillance
If that were the case, the methods used to prevent free-riding would be completely ineffective in extreme situations. For example, imagine a group of people stranded on a deserted island. They have almost no food left. Every day during the daytime, they agree to scatter across the island to gather food and share it with the group, but there are many days when they find almost nothing and go hungry. Of course, there may be those who share the food they have gathered. However, in such cases, it is generally difficult to expect that someone who has managed to gather a small amount of food will share it with others. In other words, if there are no sanctions against free-riding, or if people find themselves in an extreme situation, it seems there would be no reason not to free-ride. Nevertheless, can we not find within ourselves a reason why we should not free-ride—and, furthermore, why we should live righteously?
First, we need to define what it means to live rightly. I will define living rightly as the pursuit of “goodness”—the ethical aspect of the three things humanity should pursue: truth, goodness, and beauty. So, what is “goodness”? I believe that, just as Kant defined the criterion of “disinterestedness” for judgments of “beauty” in ‘Critique of Judgment’, we can also apply this criterion to judgments of goodness. When we judge an action to be “good,” this judgment is disinterested because it is not bound by the benefits or self-interest derived from the action’s consequences. In other words, it can be considered disinterested because the pleasure that serves as the basis for the judgment of goodness is not motivated by self-interest. We can make a judgment about goodness based on this disinterested assessment of an action, and I will define such an action as a good action.
But how can this disinterestedness compel us to pursue the good? The reason lies in the fact that our judgments about the good are universal and necessary. If we make a judgment about an action based on self-interest, it cannot be considered a universal judgment. For example, if we act with a specific purpose in mind, that action is motivated by self-interest, so it is difficult to expect others to regard it as a good action. However, if we adopt a disinterested attitude toward an action—freeing ourselves from all private interests—we can rightfully demand that others judge it in the same way. Furthermore, by invoking Kant’s a priori ideal of “common sense,” we can establish the foundation for judgments about the good to be universal and necessary. Based on the premise that all human beings possess a sense of common decency, we can expect and demand that others agree with our judgment that a certain action is right. This universality and necessity are not merely mechanical; they are moral imperatives in the sense that we demand others act accordingly.
From this concept of the good, we can find the reason why we must act rightly even in extreme situations, such as the shipwreck dilemma. We can assume that, as human beings, we inherently possess the a priori ideal of a shared sense of morality, and in this sense, we have a basis for universal and necessary judgment—one that allows us to demand the same judgment from others. People who, even when the streets are overflowing with trash and no one is watching, refrain from littering and instead go out of their way to find a distant trash can; people who obey traffic signals on empty roads late at night—all of these are people who practice the morality that we, as human beings, ought to uphold. We have a reason to live righteously because such actions can be expected of us, and because the many moral acts we perform can also be expected of others.
