What kind of girl do you think I am?

May 1, 2010
By Nikos Moraitakis

Don’t try this at home:

Guy: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
Girl: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
Guy: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
Girl: (outraged) “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
Guy: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”

(Edit: I first saw the story told by Richard Feynman, although readers point out that it is often attributed to several other sources, such as Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx or G. Bernard Shaw)

Without the million-dollar question, moral choice is easy for this girl. Yes, she won’t sleep with someone for $100 and that doesn’t take a lot of thinking. She’s just not that kind of girl. The million-dollar question is interesting because it forces her to really decide what kind of girl she is.

If a principle is subject to revision past a price point, then this is no longer a question of principle, but a question of finding the price point. Surely not $100, but possibly less that a million.

How many business decisions have you taken without the privilege of considering the million-dollar option, and its moral consequences? If you’re like most people, it’s happened to you several times and you weren’t even aware of it.

I think of this little anecdote every time a cost/benefit question comes up at work. It’s not uncommon in business to be faced with the opportunity to do something that is against your standards and professional practices, but would bring in some extra revenue. In such circumstances, it’s typical for the people involved to debate whether it’s “worth” doing X or not. And, inevitably, the “worthiness” of the action is measured in dollars. Sure, no big company will put its reputation or professional standards at stake for $10,000 (if they’re at all serious about their business) but for an amount that has an actual impact on its bottom line, morality get fuzzier.

So here’s a handy tool that may, in some cases, bring more clarity to your decision-making:

  1. Would it be easier/harder to decide if the amounts at stake were dramatically lower/higher?
  2. If so, then what kind of girl are you?

Legislators and moral philosophers have invented fancy terms for the two possible answers to the “what kind of girl are you” question.

Consequentialist reasoning suggests that morality is context-sensitive, in the sense that the results of an action have a real effect on our judgment of its morality. Torture is morally reprehensible, but what if torturing one man can give you information to save the lives of thousands? In other words, the potential outcomes of an action, i.e. what’s at stake, need to be considered in moral judgments.

The girl of our story is a consequentialist kind of girl. (if it bothers you that the difference between the options is just a bit more money, consider a case where instead of a million dollars she was offered the formula for a drug that will cure cancer for all humanity – and consider whether she should feel equally or less “dirty” for sleeping with the guy to get it as with the $100)

Categorical reasoning on the other hand suggests that the morality of action is independent of results. The morality of exchanging sex for money is the same regardless of the amount. We can debate if it’s good or bad, moral or immoral, but we would not be prepared to revise our moral judgment based on what’s at stake. In other words the girl should happily take the $100 assuming that this is a fair value for the time she will spend on the activity.

The philosophical debate is in no way decided (it wouldn’t be a philosophical debate otherwise) and that is really why making decisions generally sucks. In each case, we have to first decide whether we are a consequentialist or a categorical girl, whether we will always be that kind of girl, or whether we will take some decisions categorically (and set up “commandments”, “golden rules” and “honour codes” to defend from consequentialist creep) while allow for consequentialist thinking in others (and use methods such as “cost-benefit analysis” and “risk valuation” to determine our moral inflection point).

I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question. Imagining different stakes for the available options is perhaps one of the easiest ways to abstract any business decision to a level where the consequentialist/categorical dichotomy is obvious.


This entry was posted on May 1, 2010 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Featured, Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

  • mjc
    Another way to look at this is what does she lose vs. what does she gain? The amount lost seems to be a constant (depending on whom she does it with, of course) and is a combination of physical, moral, and other values. The amount gained is the variable and is money. It is hard to compare these (if it were easy, the problem would not be interesting).
  • bt
    I think if he actually had a million dollars, her answer would have been no.
  • Hey man, great post. I've done a few on behavioral decision making myself. Your title was the sex, the body was the relationship. Very well done!
  • JG
    This is precisely the fundamental issue of pricing that most people never seem to understand: absolutely everything is negotiable. Sadly this includes quite a few business and economics majors.

    This ranges from a woman's virtue to little things like the price tag on some item in a nominally "no haggle" US store. Pricing and the economic transaction itself is always a negotiation. Once you understand this, much becomes clear.
  • joshua
    @marcus

    Objectivity in ethics is a sort of axiom. If you can't accept some things as axiomatic, then you have no ground to believe that there are any other minds in the universe, or that physics or maths can tell us anything about the world, etc...

    What you are referring to as the standard of rationality is called evidentialism. Aka, a belief is not reasonable unless you can prove 'em with evidence.

    Unfortunately, evidentialism is self defeating, as the thesis cannot hold up to its own standard of rational belief. (You cannot prove that a belief is not reasonable unless you have evidence).

    Call it an intellectual farce if you like, but if you're going to make that claim, then you have to bite the bullet and admit that you can't really believe in anything—which is, of course, a conversation ender.
  • joshua
    Consequentialism postures the moral good making quality of an event in the results of the action—hence do the means justify the ends, and all that. Deontology, or 'categorical reasoning' if you like, submits that the moral good making quality falls squarely on the nature action itself and whether that action can be categorically applied universally to everyone else.

    But you've left out the best normative theory, virtue ethics!

    Virtue ethics goes back a step further than consequentialism or deontology and places the moral good making quality in the person himself. Making good choices, then, is a matter of developing a good character that goes 'all the way down.' When asked whether you'll do X for Y amount of money, instead of spending time counting utils, like a consequentialist would, or whether the action can be universally applied to everyone, like a deontologist would, the agent simply acts out of his own good character, doing as a good person would do.

    VE points to something like what we might commonly call a 'man of principles;' someone for whom price points don't matter, because they can't be bought. Someone who stands on their good character for making good ethical choices.
  • Marcus
    (P.S. Very interesting discussion to have, btw.)
  • Marcus
    This is the same old fraud of a dichotomy. We don't actually have proven objectivity, so both positions have to make assumptions, i.e. both are "wrong" since they can't be proven right. It's the same problem as when we let Right and Left set the framework for discussion. Until we as humans evolve a bit more reasoning skills we'll continue to support this intellectual farce.
  • To me it generally just sounds like she knows she's got value ;P

    We had the debate we amongst friends a while back, and we came to the conclusion that the amount would simply have to be enough to be worth it, and chances are that'd have to be quite a lot :P

  • Agreed. Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price.You say:


    In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.


    And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.


    I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.


    I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn’t believe that I have a million pounds to offer.


    When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey – but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).


    Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don’t know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.


    More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.


    For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.


    In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).


    This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn’t a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.


    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  • willz
    If you are sometimes a Consequentialist, and sometimes a Categoricalist, then you are a Consequentialist.
  • ih
    Mixed stuff, lots of confusion:

    "The million-dollar question is interesting because it forces her to really decide what kind of girl she is."

    now, for a moment, stop and think - put the problem this way:

    "Why is not the 100$ question, THE ONE that forces her to really decide what kind of a girl she is."


    This problem's answer cannot be given by common sense reasoning, an external factor might be introduced that will balance in either way, in both cases, having nothing to do with morality.
  • Alleagra
    I read this story many years ago as coming from G Bernard Shaw (GBS) the Irish playwright.
  • Jordi
    I think your first quote is from Groucho Marx.
  • This is often attributed to Winston Churchill.
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