Economics and Ethics

Six fantastic ethics articles in December 2011 issue of Ratio

Mark D. White

The new issue of Ratio (24/4, December 2011) features six fantastic new articles for heavy hittrers in moral philosophy:

DEONTOLOGICAL MORAL OBLIGATIONS AND NON-WELFARIST AGENT-RELATIVE VALUES, Michael Smith Many claim that a plausible moral theory would have to include a principle of beneficence, a principle telling us to produce goods that are both welfarist and agent-neutral. But when we think carefully about the necessary connection between moral obligations and reasons for action, we see that agents have two reasons for action, and two moral obligations: they must not interfere with any agent's exercise of his rational capacities and they must do what they can to make sure that agents have rational capacities to exercise. According to this distinctively deontological view of morality, though we are obliged to produce goods, the goods in question are non-welfarist and agent-relative. The value of welfare thus turns out to be, at best, instrumental.

RECALCITRANT PLURALISM, Philip Stratton-Lake In this paper I argue that the best form of deontology is one understood in terms of prima facie duties. I outline how these duties are to be understood and show how they offer a plausible and elegant connection between the reason why we ought to do certain acts, the normative reasons we have to do these acts, the reason why moral agents will do them, and the reasons certain people have to resent someone who does not do them. I then argue that this form of deontology makes it harder to unify a pluralistic ethics under a single consequentialist principle in a plausible way, and illustrate this with reference to Rob Shaver's consequentialist arguments.

DEFENDING DOUBLE EFFECT, Ralph Wedgwood This essay defends a version of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) – the doctrine that there is normally a stronger reason against an act that has a bad state of affairs as one of its intended effects than against an otherwise similar act that has that bad state of affairs as an unintended effect. First, a precise account of this version of the DDE is given. Secondly, some suggestions are made about why we should believe the DDE, and about why it is true. Finally, a solution is developed to the so-called ‘closeness problem’ that any version of the DDE must face.

THE POSSIBILITY OF CONSENT, David Owens Worries about the possibility of consent recall a more familiar problem about promising raised by Hume. To see the parallel here we must distinguish the power of consent from the normative significance of choice. I'll argue that we have normative interests, interests in being able to control the rights and obligations of ourselves and those around us, interests distinct from our interest in controlling the non-normative situation. Choice gets its normative significance from our non-normative control interests. By contrast, the possibility of consent depends on a species of normative interest that I'll call a permissive interest, an interest in its being the case that certain acts wrong us unless we declare otherwise. In the final section, I'll show how our permissive interests underwrite the possibility of consent.

ENFORCEMENT RIGHTS AGAINST NON-CULPABLE NON-JUST INTRUSION, Peter Vallentyne I articulate and defend a principle governing enforcement rights in response to a non-culpable non-just rights-intrusion (e.g., wrongful bodily attack by someone who falsely, but with full epistemic justification, believes that he is acting permissibly). The account requires that the use of force reduce the harm from such intrusions and is sensitive to the extent to which the intruder is agent-responsible for imposing intrusion-harm.

DOES MORAL IGNORANCE EXCULPATE?, Elizabeth Harman Non-moral ignorance can exculpate: if Anne spoons cyanide into Bill's coffee, but thinks she is spooning sugar, then Anne may be blameless for poisoning Bill. Gideon Rosen argues that moral ignorance can also exculpate: if one does not believe that one's action is wrong, and one has not mismanaged one's beliefs, then one is blameless for acting wrongly. On his view, many apparently blameworthy actions are blameless. I discuss several objections to Rosen. I then propose an alternative view on which many agents who act wrongly are blameworthy despite believing they are acting morally permissibly, and despite not having mismanaged their moral beliefs.

Utilitarians aren't psychopaths--are they?

Mark D. White

The Economist published a short note recently summarizing the results of a forthcoming paper in Cognition that reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). The experimenters presented subjects with variants of trolley dilemmas--either watch five passengers in a runaway trolley car die, or push one bystander onto the tracks to his death to stop the car--and also asked questions to track their psychological dispositions, finding a strong link between the antisocial tendencies and willingness to kill the bystander to save the trolley passengers.

I'm not going to address the secondhand claims by the authors regarding the "characterization of non-utilitarian moral decisions as errors of judgment," which are inevitably and necessarily made from a utilitarian point-of-view; it's the same problem as with Kaplow and Shavell's Fairness versus Welfare, which dismissed nonwelfarist policymaking as insufficiently welfarist. (I happily note that the paper's authors do criticize these statements in the discussion section of the paper.) But I do want to discuss briefly the results reported in the Cognition study, and explain why I have mixed feelings about it.

First, the trolley problem is too nuanced to make a quick-and-easy judgment regarding deontology and utilitarianism (as the authors acknowledge in the discussion section of the paper, albeit for different reasons). True, simple utilitarianism would demand that, all else aside, you kill the one person to save the five. But a deontological outlook--which is much less well-defined--would not necessarily forbid this, as deontology is not categorically opposed to consequentialist considerations. Rather than simply comparing one to five and making a decision based on the equally valid interests of all the person involved (as a utilitarian would), a deontologist would more likely think about the moral status of the individuals in the case, considering any factors related to responsibility or desert in that particular situation. After ruling out such concerns, a deontologist--even a Kantian--may very well kill the one to save the five (for instance, by judging the duty to save five people to have a "stronger ground of obligation" than the duty not to kill the one, according to Kant's only guidance in such cases of conflicting obligations). The brute utilitarian would regard the decision as the implication of a simple comparison (1<5), while the deontologist would more likely use judgment based on the rights of the persons involved--even if they both come to the same result.

Furthermore, the trolley dilemma also wraps up in it the relative moral status of acts and omissions (itself tied into the deontology vs. utilitarianism debate), as well as issues of identity and virtue (am I the kind of person who can take a life, even to save others?), which themselves have greater implications if taking the one life leads to a change of attitudes toward future moral dilemmas. In other words, the trolley problem should not be used as a moral barometer distinguishing between utilitarianism and deontology. This becomes particularly clear when one considers the different reactions people have to the surgeon problem, in which a surgeon considers harvesting organs from his healthy colleague to save five patients who will die without them--very few endorse this action, even those who would push the bystander in front of the trolley, but it can be difficult to parse out the salient differences in the two situations. (Several variants of these problems, including both the trolley and surgeon dilemmas, were used in the study, apparently with no distinctions made.)

As any regular readers of my work (either on this blog or in print) know, I'm no fan of utilitarianism. But I would never go as far as to say its adherents and practitioners are psychopaths. Utilitarians obviously do care about the well-being of people--my problem is that they are concerned with aggregate well-being that ignores the distinctions between persons (as Rawls said so well) and the inherent dignity and rights of each (as Kant wrote). And that is problematic: regarding persons as nothing but contributors to the collective good implies that each person has no independent, distinct value. And if so, why care about people's interests at all? To my mind, the utilitarian's disregard for the dignity of the individual is self-defeating, since it eliminates any imperative to consider persons' well-being at all (much less to consider it equally with all others').

Of course, the popular press coverage leaves out all of the nuance and qualification present in the academic article, but that is par for the course. The study's authors recognize, of course, that all the "psychopathic" respondents who chose the "utilitarian solution" are not necessarily well-read in Bentham or Mill, nor did they necessarily use utilitarian thinking at all. Nonetheless, the results are suggestive, and if it leads us to look at the differences between utilitarians and deontologists in a different way, it's all good--and right!

Liberalism and Capitalism (in Social Philosophy and Policy

Mark D. White

The theme of the latest issue of Social Philosophy and Policy (28/2, July 2011) is Liberalism and Capitalism, and the line-up of authors and topics is very impressive:

THE PARADOX OF JOHN STUART MILL (Alan Charles Kors)

CAPITALISM IN THE CLASSICAL AND HIGH LIBERAL TRADITIONS (Samuel Freeman)

FOUNDING LIBERALISM, PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM, AND THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY (Ronald J. Pestritto)

THE PROPERTY EQUILIBRIUM IN A LIBERAL SOCIAL ORDER (OR HOW TO CORRECT OUR MORAL VISION) (Gerald Gaus)

JUDICIAL LIBERALISM AND CAPITALISM: JUSTICE FIELD RECONSIDERED (Michael P. Zuckert)

LIBERTY AFTER LEHMAN BROTHERS (Loren E. Lomasky)

A LOCKEAN ARGUMENT FOR UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE (Daniel M. Hausman)

EUVOLUNTARY OR NOT, EXCHANGE IS JUST (Michael C. Munger)

RULE CONSEQUENTIALISM MAKES SENSE AFTER ALL (Tyler Cowen)

LIBERALISM, CAPITALISM, AND “SOCIALIST” PRINCIPLES (Richard J. Arneson)

ARE MODERN AMERICAN LIBERALS SOCIALISTS OR SOCIAL DEMOCRATS? (N. Scott Arnold )

The End of Cost-Benefit Analysis?

Mark D. White

Today, the editors of The Wall Street Journal commented on the fine print of President Obama's recent executive order requiring all regulatory agencies to submit their rules to cost-benefit analysis in an effort to streamline government and reduce regulatory burden on business. They note that the order requires that agencies include in their cost-benfit calculations "values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts," which robs cost-benefit analysis of any epistemic value it might have had. They conclude by saying, "this sounds more like the end of cost-benefit analysis than the beginning."

We can only hope. As heterodox economists of every stripe, from social economists to public choice/political economists, have long noted, cost-benefit analysis is fraught with vagueness and ripe for political manipulation. More specifically, by its nature it cannot incorporate values and principles that cannot be quantified, as the language in the executive order states. The administration is to be lauded to some extent for realizing that policy and regulation design must take into account their ethical impacts, but proposing to do this within the context of cost-benefit analysis is self-defeating at best, and a cynical facade at worst.

I do not deny that cost-benefit analysis has its place, even within a system of allocation which is based primarily on principles like dignity and justice. (See my chapter from my fothcoming edited volume, Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy, for an example in the context of criminal justice.) But it should never be presumed to work with any precision nor provide any conclusive results, and rather should provide merely one piece of information--the rough balance of quantifiable benefits and costs--which should always be included alongside other factors, such as impact on dignity, equality, and so forth.

Should Science Determine Our Values?

Jonathan B. Wight

David Hume be damned, the answer is "yes" according to Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010). Harris argues that all values reduce to "facts" that science can provide.

Harris is a utilitarian, seeking to reduce "needless human suffering." In his view, science allows "us"—that is, well-educated liberal Westerners--to decide on the meaning of "moral progress." It should be clear, he argues, what human flourishing means and that we can adopt a definition and measurement using scientific methods. In short, there is an absolute moral standard of right and wrong, as illuminated by the "science" of human well-being.

Aside from Harris' arrogance, there is a huge dose of condescension. There is no fair conception here of what the human experience means in non-Western cultures. To Harris, the measure of human progress appears to be externally-driven by caloric intake and clothes (he rails against the "sacks" that Islamic women wear). I haven't read the book, but I am curious if Harris is aware of Nozick's Experience Machine that could make and keep us perfectly pleasured. Is that an ideal life? It would seem so to Harris.

If you don't want to buy the book, you can get the essence of his message in this TED talk.

Does health (or health care) have special moral status?

Mark D. White

I just came across a fascinating paper titled "Is Health (Really) Special? Health Policy Between Rawlsian and Luck Egalitarian Justice" by Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. From the abstract:

In recent work, Norman Daniels extends the application of Rawls's principle of "fair equality of opportunity" from health care to health proper. Crucial to that account is the view that health care, and now also health, is special. Daniels also claims that a rival theory of distributive justice, namely luck egalitarianism (or "equal opportunity for welfare"), cannot provide an adequate account of justice in health and health care. He argues that the application of that theory to health policy would result in an account that is, in a sense, too narrow, for it denies treatment to imprudent patients (e.g. lung cancer patients who smoked). In a different sense, Daniels argues, luck egalitarian health policy would be too wide: it arguably tells us to treat individuals for such brute-luck conditions as shyness, stupidity, ugliness, and having the ‘wrong’ skin colour.

Segall takes issue with Daniels' analysis, but (with apologies to Segall) it is Daniels' basic thesis that interests me more. As regular readers of this blog may guess, even on utilitarian terms I would regard health (and by extension heath care) to be undeserving of any special moral status and, rather, just one component of a person's well-being which she can choose to pursue to whatever extent she wishes in conjunction with the other components (such as wealth, love, pleasure, etc.).

With respect to health care, Segall explains that

To say that health care is special was to say that it is morally significant in ways that justify distributing medical resources in isolation from the way in which other social goods, and wealth in particular, are distributed. The most obvious implication of the specialness account, understood this way, is that health care resources should not be treated as mere commodities... [they] should be distributed more equally than most other goods, and, in any case, independently of ability to pay. (p. 346)

He claims that this follows from commonly held beliefs regarding health care:

Such thinking about health care seems to correspond to a widely shared intuition: while many of us would not object to some people being wealthier than others, far fewer would condone a situation whereby greater wealth buys superior medical care. This intuition about health care as constituting a special and separate sphere is thus a well entrenched one. (Ibid.)

He then goes on to discuss (critically) Daniels' extension of this same status to health in general. I plan on reading the article carefully, and also Daniels' books in the area, Just Health Care and Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly, both of which I ordered today.

I'm fascinated by this line of thinking, as well as the claim that this is a common intuition--and I agree that it very well may be--because I find it so profoundly wrong. Simply put, I fail to see why health or health care should be morally privileged when it is a matter of individual choice to what extent a person takes care of her own health, or seeks out health care in pursuit of it. (For more on this, see my earlier posts on health care here, here, and here.) Accordingly, I think there is more of a case (though not a good enough case to support it overall) for resource egaliarianism which provides more equal resources for individuals to use as they choose, whether on health (or health care) or not, without granting either one any special status. But I don't see why health or health care should be given more status than other goals individuals may pursue with their resources (however those resources may be earned or allocated).

New book: Economics as Applied Ethics (Value Judgments in Welfare Economics)

Mark D. White

New from Palgrave is Wilfred Beckermam's Economics as Applied Ethics: Value Judgements in Welfare Economics, a detailed account of the intrinsically ethical nature of welfare economics, discussing the nature of preferences, utilitarianism, equality, happiness, and other important topics in the philosophy of normative economic analysis. Furthermore, it is written in a style appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as professional economists; in this way, it may have wider appeal and impact than even Hausman and McPherson's essential survey Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy and Little's classic A Critique of Welfare Economics.

And the endorsements are superlative (with one glaring exception, of course):

"This book is witty and wise, and a delight to read. It will enlighten economists – both students and teachers – and will encourage non-economists skeptical of the subject's ability to contribute to human welfare to think again." Wendy Carlin, Professor of Economics, University College London

"As more people are starting to realize, economics without ethics is dangerous, and ethics without economics is foolish. This very timely book explains why these two perspectives can and must be combined." Mark D. White, Professor in Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy, College of Staten Island/CUNY & author of Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character
   
"Wifred Beckerman's Economics as Applied Ethics: Value Judgements in Welfare Economics elucidates many of the important ethical questions that are almost always suppressed in both mainstream economics teaching texts and advanced scholarship. The book provides a productive blending of abstract theoretical discussion with applications that focus on contemporary policy debates. It should therefore appeal both to students who are excited by and seek deeper understanding of abstract ideas, and those who are impatient with abstract debate and want to see just how these ideas matter concretely in policy making." George DeMartino, Professor and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade and Economic Integration, University of Denver 

On What Matters

Jonathan B. Wight

Brad Hooker has an interesting post in The Philosopher’s Magazine on “Ideas of the Century,” focusing on Derek Parfit’s forthcoming book, On What Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011).  Hooker claims that:

The most widely discussed idea in moral philosophy to emerge in the last ten years is Derek Parfit’s conclusion that the best versions of three of the leading moral theories completely coincide in their implications.

 If so, this is partial justification for the view that moral theories are not conflicting, but rather complementary ways of understanding and guiding behavior.  In short, Parfit’s conclusion is that:

Rule-consequentialism is thus argued to be the upshot of the best forms of Kantian and contractualist ethics.

 Is rule consequentialism the version of consequentialism that Adam Smith would endorse?  Where would virtue ethics fit into this mix?  My own view is that in real life rule consequentialism evolves from society’s broad experimentation, not from a philosopher’s pen.  It takes social experiments to winnow out good from bad behaviors and to determine which rules are best.  In short, rule consequentialism is derived inductively rather than deductively. 

At the individual level people follow some rules but emotions give rise to impulses and individual deviations based on moral sentiments that produce new experiments.  Hence, the moral sentiments are essential for the evolution of rule consequentialism. Virtue is needed also to help people develop self control so as to follow the rules. 

Can Consequentialists Honour the Special Moral Status of Persons?

Mark D. White

That's the question posed and answered in the affirmative by Martin Peterson in an article of that title in the new issue of Utilitas (22/4):

It is widely believed that consequentialists are committed to the claim that persons are mere containers for well-being. In this article I challenge this view by proposing a new version of consequentialism, according to which the identities of persons matter. The new theory, two-dimensional prioritarianism, is a natural extension of traditional prioritarianism. Two-dimensional prioritarianism holds that well-being matters more for persons who are at a low absolute level than for persons who are at a higher level and that it is worse to be deprived of a given number of units than it is good to gain the same number of units, even if the new distribution is a permutation of the original one. If a fixed amount of well-being is transferred from one person to another and then transferred back again, two-dimensional prioritarianism implies that it would have been better to preserve the status quo.

I very much look forward to reading this one.

Baker, "A Stoic Defense of the Market" (from Accepting the Invisible Hand)

Mark D. White

Today we continue our preview of Accepting the Invisible Hand: Market-Based Approaches to Social-Economic Problems with Chapter 4, "Don't Let the Best Be the Enemy of the Good: A Stoic Defense of the Market," by Jennifer A. Baker. (Chapter 3 by James D. Gwartney and Joseph Connors was discussed here, Chapter 2 by John Meadowcroft was discussed here, Chapter 1 by me was discussed here, and the preface was posted here.)

From the introduction to the chapter:

The moral relevance of general affluence is often overlooked. We might wish for humane conditions, we might talk of human value, but short of some minimal level of general affluence, life is too grim to entertain ethical notions beyond it. It seems we can hardly count the very poor of the world into our moral considerations. If everyone has to be considered, “well,” the ethicists seem to harrumph, “then we are dealing with too much need and everything thought conventionally moral is off the table!”

In this chapter I would like to offer a corrective, a way to acknowledge the moral significance of general affluence without disassembling conventional morality. To do this we have to recognize that markets are our only means of bringing about general affluence. We have, literally, nothing else capable of doing the job. Yet markets are, for reasons we will go into, left out of our moral calculations. We either suggest “it isn’t personal, it’s just business” in the hopes that all moral bets are off when we are engaging in trade, or simply live with the cognitive dissonance of refusing to integrate our support for markets with the rest of our beliefs about what is good. (p. 69)

...

For many reasons, it will be helpful to point out a way in which we can situate support for general affluence within conventional morality. Clearing up the deep confusion we so often display about the role of ethics in the market is one, clarity about our own behavior is another, and what we owe other humans worldwide is a third. After reviewing approaches that will not work, I will offer a means for this. I argue that the solution is to organize our thoughts about morality using an ethical theory—Stoicism—that has a two-level structure. One of these must acknowledge the value of material inputs to human life, and the other must function to maintain a standard for personal choices. How these levels serve as a framework for making choices we already admire is what I aim to demonstrate. (p. 70)

Baker surveys the difficulties with justifying the market using standard theories of moral and political philosophy, as well as attempts by economist-philosopher to do so, before laying out her Stoic alternative, based on essential concepts thereof such as indifferents, neutrality, and the bi-level theory of value.

She phrases her conclusion exceptionally well (emphasis added):

Is the market just? Not in the sense that it meets some discrete ideal of political good. The market, not being an ideal, simply cannot measure up to such standards. If we are to dismiss it as amoral, we are left without guidance when it comes to how we should act in the market. Far better is to determine that the market has a peculiar status of “just enough.” It is not glorious. It is never how we would prefer it to be and never as good as it could be. But humans thrive in market-based systems and can do so without the cost of horrific violations of human dignity. Higher standards cannot be imposed on a social system until the possibility of meeting these higher standards exist. We are not to expect too much, or to confuse political ideals for actual social good. (p. 83)