Early draft.
Consider rules like the following:
These are rules about when a decision can be declared legitimate[3], a project beneficial, or a policy ethical.
We don't often use rules like this when we make decisions ourselves. Instead we go with our gut, we do what feels necessary, or we do what a person like us would do.[1] This seems true even with heroic acts. Velleman writes about the lack of "moral language" when rescuers of Jews, during the holocaust, were asked about their choice-making:
These moral heroes would say things like “They appeared at my door, and I didn’t have it in me to turn them away,” “They needed help, and I couldn’t refuse,” “It was the obvious thing to do,” often failing to invoke any moral concepts such as obligation or virtue.[2]
So, if we don't use ethical rules for our own decisions, of what use are they?
Perhaps these rules are for evaluating the decisions that others have made. When someone else makes a decision that impacts me, I have to decide whether to go along or to contest it. Their decision might be bad for me, personally. Should I rise up? Should I work to remove the decision-maker from power, and reverse the decision? Or should I instead declare that the decision, while it might be bad for me, was overall the right decision to make? Whichever I choose—whether I go along with the decision, or fight it—I'll need to explain what I think of the decision, and I might use an ethical rule to do so.
Which rule I choose will depend on the scale of the decision. In the list above, different rules apply at larger scales. Consider the rules towards the bottom. These apply to decisions made far from us—decisions by political leaders, corporate executives, and others with sway over our lives. The decision making processes in these domains are complex: there might be complex bureaucracies, assessments, and so on.
Rules like "the customer is always right" or "the people have spoken" don't specify exactly how each business decision or each law must get made. Rather, for "the people have spoken" to apply and legitimize decisions, certain things must hold true: (1) the people must be polled, and (2) they mustn't be manipulated, paid off, or forced to vote a certain way. It's similarly with "the customer is always right"—for this rule to apply, there must be choice in the market, and customers must be making one choice over another.
So, we can think of each rule as subjecting a complex decision-making process to a simpler verification process. A small number of people work on the inside, doing the complex thing: proposing laws or business ideas, debating about them, refining them, and so on. A larger group of outsiders acts as verifiers, working only to verify that the rule has been followed correctly, so they can assent to the decisions made.
In this essay, the focus is on which rules work out well for the verifiers.
One requirement here, is that verifiers need access to data in order to verify that a legitimization rule applies. For instance, the rule "the people have spoken" only works when paired with voting methods and voting data. Similarly, the rule "the customer is always right" goes along with information about differential choices in a fair market. Large-scale legitimation rules require large-scale data collection.