Yesterday, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s review (see here) of Kurt Gray’s new book Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground on pp. 63-65 of the January 20th issue of The New Yorker. Among other things, Professor Gray claims that our ethical and political judgments boil down to one overriding emotion–the perception of harm–and that most moral and political disagreements are due to our different perceptions of who is harmed in any given scenario. According to Gray, “If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful.” Gray further claims that these moral and political divides can be overcome through narratives and “harm-based storytelling.”

Although Gray’s thesis is an intriguing one, it is radically incomplete in one important respect, for he fails to consider the possibility that harms are a reciprocal problem, i.e. that victims are oftentimes just as responsible as wrongdoers for their plight, a counter-intuitive proposition that can be traced back to Ronald Coase’s classic paper “The Problem of Social Cost.” Researching and writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coase was an obscure middle-aged English economist at the time. Many years later, however, he would be awarded a Nobel for his contributions to the field of “law and economics,” and one of the most intriguing intellectual contributions Coase made is to challenge the standard victim-wrongdoer story in most law books.

Specifically, Coase conceptualizes harm as a “reciprocal” problem: whenever one party accuses another party of harming them, it is almost always the case that both parties are jointly responsible for the harm. And the most famous example Coase gives to illustrate the reciprocal nature of harm is his cattle trespass parable. In brief, the protagonists in Coase’s parable are next-door neighbors–one is a cattle rancher; the other, a crop farmer–and the conflict between them is a bucolic one: straying cattle who wander off the rancher’s land, invade the farmer’s neighboring land, and trample his crops.

But what makes Coase’s pastoral parable so original from a moral and legal perspective is that the victim and the wrongdoer are the same person! Both the rancher and the farmer are jointly responsible for the trampled crops because, as Coase correctly notes, either of them could have taken preventative measures ahead of time to avoid the harm. To the point, the rancher could have “fenced in” his cattle, while the farmer could have fenced the cattle out or planted cattle-resistant crops. For Coase, instead of asking which party is the wrongdoer here, we should ask, Who should pay for the fence … (To be continued)