Well, they tend to assign themselves the positive task.
With this change, only 25% of participants offered to let the experimenter flip the coin, and another 25% flipped themselves, with 91% choosing the positive task.
Out of twenty participants, Batson found (Batson et al. 1997 13400): Furthermore, only 1 out of the 16 said that assigning oneself to the positive task was morally correct.
The remaining 50% of participants simply bypassed the pretense of the coin flip and gave themselves the positive task while readily admitting that this was not morally right (Batson and Thompson 2001: 56).
At least some of the participants in the second group must have flipped in a way that went in favor of the other person, but still assigned themselves the positive task.
For the positive task of avoiding the reversal of Enlightenment, reconstructing the rational content of modernity is not enough, since the issue is not to affirm its universalism, but its self-critical and emancipatory capacity.
But this motivation must have been so weak that, once the cost/benefit analysis was done on an alternative action of secretly ignoring the coin when it went against the person and instead assigning oneself to the positive task, it became fairly easy to outweigh or undercut the motivation to do the right thing.
It could be that the former group (rightly) rates the morality of their action highly, since they are following the fair procedure, whereas the second group rates it low, perhaps around 4.0 as do those who do not even bother flipping the coin and just assign themselves the positive task.
The positive task of increasing social and personal happiness, by contrast, can and should be should be left to individual citizens (who may, of course, act collectively to this end), who, unlike the state, have at least a chance of achieving this goal, but who in a free society are rarely in a position to systematically subvert the rights of others in the pursuit of idealised objectives.
