Moral Preferences and the Marketplace of Ideas

Abstract

In the marketplace of ideas, advocates attempt to shift norms and behaviors through their rhetoric, sometimes precipitating tremendous change (e.g. abolitionism, women's suffrage). In the context of factory farming, we conduct a lab experiment to understand take-up of messages in the marketplace of ideas and those messages' induced moral costs. Subjects mostly avoid messages about the harms to animals in factory farms and there is some selective search for countervailing information. We find that the factory-farm message, when viewed, imposes fixed costs on eating meat, consistent with deontological morals, and quantity costs on eating meat, consistent with utilitarian morals, significantly reducing meat consumption. We then consider a policymaker with a limited budget who wishes to reduce harmful commodity consumption. We conduct structural counterfactual analysis to solve for the optimal policy. We find that a policymaker who neglects the marketplace of ideas mismanages policy, leaving feasible harm mitigation on the table. In contrast, the policymaker who mistakenly presumes all consumers have utilitarian-like quantity moral costs makes near-zero policy error, making this standard assumption in the discipline an appropriate approximation.

Keywords: marketplace of ideas, animal-welfare economics, information avoidance, meat tax, information tax/subsidy, moral preferences