Response from Alexander George on October 3, 2005

I'm not sure that ethics has much to do with it: whether to take the shortcut doesn't seem like a moral question. But your situation does have a paradoxical flavor: the very fact that you and others take the shortcut to avoid the slowdown at the bridge is what causes the slowdown at the bridge. If everyone could just agree not to take the shortcut, then there'd be no slowdown, and no need to take the shortcut. Of course, it's difficult to get everyone to cooperate. And if somehow you could, it wouldn't last long: someone would realize that s/he could take advantage of that cooperation by taking the shortcut and not encountering any traffic at the bridge. And then another person would realize that; and then another. Until enough people began taking the shortcut to cause a significant slowdown at the bridge. Philosophers have been very interested in such unstable attempts at cooperation which eventually break down and leave all participants worse off than they might otherwise be. (They've been baptized Prisoner's Dilemma situations.) What's of perennial fascination is that the breakdown is caused not by participants' failing to reason correctly about what would be in their self-interest, but rather precisely by their correct reasoning about the situation. Reasoning well can leave one less well off than one might otherwise have been. And such a situation attracts philosophers like moths to a flame.

Response from Alan Soble on October 4, 2005

The expressions "Free Rider" and "Easy Rider" both fit nicely with this cute example. I'm not convinced (yet) that it is not a moral question. When I refrain from making that automotive move--or when I give in to temptation, and do it--I feel my moral sense at work. I'm a cheater, or I rose above the base human urge to cheat. I suspect that utilitarians, deontologists of various stripes, and virtue-ethicists all would have something to say, or pontificate, about it. Jan Narveson, by the way, would say (has said) that the fact that we have such crowded highways is a sign that our lives are getting better (and not, say, environmentally worse).

Update February 14, 2006: I took a passenger van from O'Hare airport in Chicago to a hotel in the Loop last Thursday. The cars on I-90 were crawling up each other's tailpipes. My driver scooted off the interstate at an obscure exit, zipped through the intersection (the light was green), and dove right back in on the other side. When I got out of the van at Club Quarters on W. Adams, I mentioned to him that I thought he didn't save any time by that maneuver. His reply: "Oh? I skipped past 100 cars." Not quite. There were 3 lanes of traffic. On my calculation, he skipped by 33.3333 cars. (Another update, 04/03/06: maybe he skipped by 300 cars!)