Betsy used my recent post about schools as the spark for this post of hers. In it, she talks about her decision to send her daughter to a magnet school instead of to her neighborhood school: good (she says) for her daughter, but not so good for her neighborhood school. (I am unfairly shortening her thesis.) She ends by saying, " And I'll probably always wonder if I made the right decision [sending her daughter to the magnet school]...or if I only contributed to a larger problem. "
We can make decisions in our rational self-interest that would not be sensible if everyone made them. For example, measles is a dangerous disease. No rational person would want his or her child to catch measles. Yet in the United States, thanks to an effective public health program, immunized persons have a slightly higher chance of catching measles (from the vaccine) than do unimmunized persons (from infected people). So a rational individual would refuse to be immunized. But if everyone acted in rational self-interest and declined to be immunized, within a few years we would have a measles epidemic and a lot of children would die. So we (or most of us) accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for the larger social good: we act as we want others to act even though we increase our risk of catching measles. (If I were the only unimmunized person in the world, I would be safer than if I had the shot.) And by being immunized I have "some skin in the game" -- the moral right to insist that others be immunized also. If I refuse immunization, I'm making the "right" self-centered decision, but I'm becoming part of the larger problem.
Purely selfishly I should vote against school taxes. I have no children in the public schools. But what world would my children and grandchildren inhabit if their age group isn't educated? I think I've voted for every school tax measure on my ballot. By voting for school taxes I again have some skin in the game, and the right to insist that our schools do a good job. If I vote against school taxes then I'm again making the "right" self-centered decision, but I'm becoming part of the larger problem. Scientifically illiterate adults aren't going to cure cancer no matter how hard they try.
What about war? A government that starts a war can predict that a certain number of its soldiers will die, even though it can't predict which soldiers will die. That factor tempers the decision to go to war: is the possible result worth the loss of life? I don't want to stretch my theory too far, but it seems to me that a nation's leadership that has almost no record of service in the armed forces and no children in the armed forces doesn't have any skin in the game.