imagine that one day you are running late leaving the home you live in with a roommate and, just before you slip on your shoes, you spot a problem. let’s say you see a mug had been knocked over on the linoleum kitchen floor by a cat during the night, shattering and spilling a puddle of water. the core idea of the copenhagen interpretation of ethics is that if you are perceived to have become aware of this problem, you become ethically culpable if you do not then successfully fully solve the problem. this extends to noting that one of the most common ways that people become perceived as being aware of a problem is by interacting with that problem. your roommate surely won’t blame you if you pretend you didn’t see the shattered remains or the spill on the floor, finish putting on your shoes, and make your escape - so long as they don’t have reason to think you saw the mess.
certainly you aren’t such a bad roommate - you wouldn’t notice sharp ceramic on the floor and leave either your roommate or the maleficent feline to discover it with abruptly bleeding feet. you really /must/ be out the door though, so you quickly scoop up the shards of dishware and throw them in the trash. i would, of course, agree that you have acted more morally than the miscreant version of you who simply looked away and left. however, imagine your roommate wakes up, stumbles sleepily into the kitchen and is forthwith graced with the most sopping of socks. should they spot the broken mug resting atop the contents of the trashcan, they are not likely to hold you blameless for their sodden predicament. by interacting with the problem - despite improving the situation - what remains of the problem is now, at least in part, your fault.
stated directly, the risk of only partially solving a problem is that society may view you as more responsible for what remains of that problem after your contribution than if you did not help in the first place. in our society, if you remain a plausibly unaware bystander you are unlikely to be held responsible. for serious problems, breaking this plausible deniability risks real social cost. the copenhagen interpretation of ethics is not a statement of what should be and is instead an observation of an unhelpful way we often assign blame in our society. i would argue that many of us, at least subconsciously, factor this concept into our choice to help in at least some situations. if you have a job you hate and identify a messy problem that you /could/ just ignore and let be someone else’s problem, i imagine that at least most people would not risk tying the problem to themselves. conversely, my perception is that it is far less common for people to be aware of how often it appears to affect how they assign blame to others.
i feel that being aware of this tendency towards misattribution is positive and i also think that the name chosen for it by the person who coined ’the copenhagen interpretation of ethics’ (after the quantum mechanics perspective) is cute. unfortunately, in the same post where the phrase was coined, the author seems most interested in using it to excuse ethically questionable behaviors by organizations, including starkly predatory ones. perhaps this perspective shouldn’t be a surprise coming from someone who argued here that if only capitalists would just arbitrage harder then wage discrimination would be solved. still, i have found value in having a label for this specific type of misattribution and so would like to delineate between an interpretation of the phrase which i find valuable, and the original author’s expression of the concept.
the crux of the issue, i feel, is that a positive/useful interpretation of the concept is rooted in an assumption that the person or organization interacting with a problem is, in fact, actively seeking to make progress towards solving the problem. as someone who believes that intent /does/ matter when assessing the morality of actions, i would go further and say that helping make progress on solving the problem needs to be the primary motivation for the agent taking the action in order to be a candidate for absolution. this is in clear contrast to the original author who appears to believe that, even if your intent is primarily predatory, so long as you improve a situation in any measurable way, you are a benevolent actor.
the post which i believe first used the phrase points to several examples, but one stands out. in 2012, at south by southwest (sxsw - a yearly springtime conglomeration of festivals and conferences which takes place in austin), bbh labs (a british marketing firm) conducted what it called a ‘charitable experiment’ where it paid unhoused people $20 a day (plus tips) to be walking billboards with wifi hot-spots attached. the author points out that the people bbh employed received, at minimum, $20 they would not have had otherwise and that they volunteered. the thing is, i do not believe that there is any doubt that bbh labs intended to profit from this arrangement, an arrangement where they engaged the services of people for less than the standard federal minimum wage. perhaps the author believes that if only capitalists would just exploit harder then the housing problem would be solved.
i believe that ’the copenhagen interpretation of ethics’ is a useful concept which should only be applied to people and organizations who are primarily and earnestly making an attempt to solve (or improve) a problem, like you, cleaning up mug shards to save your roommate’s feet. the original author’s framework would serve to say that aristocrats of a previous age throwing coins into a crowd of starving peasants just to enjoy the pandemonium should not be maligned. they are, after all, technically leaving some people in that crowd v slightly better off than they were before. to use the concept in this way ignores that our society is built in a way that necessitates and perpetuates an underclass. exploiting people for profit or amusement, even if it marginally improves a small number of people in the underclass’ situation, is not in fact solving any problems; it is merely participating in the same system of exploitation which places people in a position to be exploited in the first place.