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Morality Games
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likely detected them and will likely levy sanctions. So the United States’s best response is to levy sanctions. Similarly, if the United States does not detect chemical weapons, it expects France did not and will not levy sanctions, so the United States is better off not levying them.
This result is useful for evaluating whether it is worthwhile to uphold a norm. The Obama administration was harshly criticized for threatening to go to war after the Assad regime used chemical weapons but not earlier, although the regime had already killed tens of thousands of civilians. The model clarifies that Obama’s position was not as inconsistent as his critics had charged: The norm against chemical weapons may be worth enforcing since it is sustainable, whereas norms against civilian casualties are harder to sustain and hence might not be worthwhile to enforce.
Let’s return to some more of our motivating examples. Our model can explain why we define murder categorically: It is not possible to punish differently for different amount of quality life years taken, but it is possible to punish differentially for a life taken. As with omission–commission, however, we do expect sadness or grief to depend greatly on life years lost, even if the punishment or moralistic outrage will be less sensitive. This is a prediction of the model that, as far as we know, has yet to be tested.
Similarly, the “one-drop” rule is a categorical norm, so it can be socially enforced in an apartheid society. In contrast, consider a rule that advocates giving up one’s seat for someone with lighter skin. Since this is based on a threshold in a continuous variable, while it might be enforceable by a unilateral authority, it cannot be enforced by “mob rule.” Other forms of discrimination, such as discriminating against the less attractive, or the less tall, or the elderly, all being continuous variables, cannot be socially enforced via coordinated punishment, and hence, we expect such discrimination to be of a different form. In particular, it will not be based not on punishing violators. For example, male CEOs might still prefer young attractive female secretaries, and taller men are more likely to be hired as CEOs, not because of coordinated rewards or punishment but because those who hire the CEOs or secretaries are likely to be satisfying their own preferences or doing what they expect will lead to higher profits.
Likewise, the number of victims tortured by a regime or the number of lives saved by torturing is continuous. Thus, a regime cannot be punished by a coordinated attack by other countries or by a coordinated rebellion by its citizens based on the number of people tortured or the paucity of reasons for such torture. But, a regime can be attacked or overthrown depending on whether a physical harm was inflicted on a citizen by the state. Hence, human rights are treated as inalienable, even in the absence of an a priori justification for this nonutilitarian norm. And why are human rights ascribed to all living Homo sapiens? Perhaps not because of a good logical a priori argument, but simply because violations of human rights are enforceable by coordinated punishment, but no regime can be punished for harming any “person” of less than a certain degree of consciousness.
Finally, here is one last application. The model might also explain why revolutions are often caused by categorical events, such as a new tea tax or a single, widely

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