Friar Laurence, Ethics and Finance

Here is a small reflection about an extract of Romeo and Juliet that raises the question of ethics. When Friar Laurence decided to secretly marry Romeo and Juliet, he expected this action to put an end to the poisonous rivalry between the Montagues and the Capulets. However, even if this goal was eventually reached, given that it led to the death of the two lovers, the question is: was Friar Laurence action right or wrong?

The problem is: how can we stipulate that a given action is inherently right or wrong? This ethics issue is all the more so complex as there is no longer absolute moral rules in our modern society. For lack of anything better, we can try to use the ethics rules proposed by Margaret Sommerville, namely the respect of all life, especially human life, and the protection of the human spirit.

Given the eventual deaths of Romeo and Juliet, we could hastily claim that Friar Laurence’s decision did not respect human life and conclude that his action was wrong. However this conclusion do not take into account that the other possible decision – not marrying Romeo and Juliet – could have led to a greater human toll because of the ongoing war between the two families. In order to take this fact into account, we could simply decide to measure the death toll resulting from the other decision and claim that the right decision is the one which minimize this toll. The problem is that once the decision is made, the resulting toll will be known but we will never know the toll resulting from the opposite decision. To solve our problem, we have thus no other choice than adopting a kind of ex ante actuarial approach, which means estimating the expected outcomes of the different possible decisions just before the decision is made. The decision minimizing the expected toll will then be defined as the right one.

This rule is however not that satisfactory. Imagine a fictitious decision resulting, if taken, in 2 deaths with 100% chance, but, if not taken, in no deaths with 98% but 100 deaths with 2% chance. The expected toll is in either case equal to 2. The previous rule claims that the two possibilities are equivalent. But is that realistic? Will you risk the lives of 100 people with the hope to save 2 of them? The answer is not obvious and depends on your own risk aversion, a concept well known to financial practitioners. If you are risk averse (meaning you do not like risk), you will secure the outcome by taking the decision. On the contrary, if you are seeking risk, you will take the risk not to take the decision. This behaviour toward risk can be properly represented through the concept of utility (which is basically a function measuring satisfaction from our objective variables), and our rule can be updated from the minimization of the expected toll to the minimization of the expected utility of the toll. This is a concept hugely used in portfolio theory for instance.

Of course, the drawbacks are numerous: how can we estimate the outcomes and their probabilities? How to measure risk aversion? What is the shape of a typical utility function?

There exists tools to provide solutions to these questions, but it would go far too far. This post will remain a simplified introduction to the improbable ideas resulting from the still more improbable combination of Romeo and Juliet, ethics and financial tools. I however do think it provides a sound framework to fairly assess Friar Laurence’s action.

Memes are anywhere !

One of my Christmas gift this year is a role-play game master book. It describes a post-apocalyptic world and is entitled Cyberpunk. I read the beginning and I was very surprised to discover an entire chapter about memes !

The definition given was quite the same our professor gave us last year. So, if I remember well, the meme of meme live in me...and you now !
Remember that memes are a kind of ideas, living in our brain and they are transmitted by our expression. A good example is a song whistled by someone. It enters your head and you can't stop thinking of it. This song is a meme you have.

You want to know more about ? go to our professor's blog !


Ok, now you know as good as us what memes are. What do you think about them ?