By Mark D. White

There have been some new contributions posted to the symposium at the Yale Journal of Regulation I posted about last week on Livermore and  Revesz's book Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health (Oxford, 2021).

"OIRA the Angel; OIRA the Devil," by Bridget C.E. Dooling

"Reviving More Than Rationality," by Stuart Shapiro

"Cost-Benefit Analysis as Policy and as Dialectics," by Shi-Ling Hsu

While Dooling and Shapiro focus in on the nature and politics of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) itself, Hsu's contribution is more abstract, addressing the possibility of alternative values and principles to welfarism in public policy and acknowledging the difficulties with balancing these different conceptions of what is good or right:

Perhaps the most serious objection to a welfarist, cost-benefit state, is that welfarism is just another value. Welfarism should stand alongside, and not above, other values such as equality, nondiscrimination, liberty, or freedom. Welfarism might even be subservient to some of these other values. Even welfarists acknowledge the importance of distributional issues, while they work to incorporate them into welfarist frameworks. President Biden has called for changes to CBA to account for distributional issues. Liberty and freedom are obviously fundamental to Americans, as well as other Western societies, as the Brexit vote may well indicate. So perhaps government isn’t even supposed to maximize welfare. It is supposed to reflect the values of a moral individual.

But this line of thinking then leaves unanswered the difficult and obvious question of what government is supposed to do about conflicts in values. What, indeed, is government to do to balance say, public health and safety against liberty and freedom? Personal responsibility against equality? Fairness against prosperity?

They join the first three entries in the symposium:

"Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health," by Timothy Brennan

"Why this is still an important book after the 2020 elections," by E. Donald Elliott

"Cost as the Ultimate Regulatory Restraint," by Jonathan H. Adler

By Mark D. White

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project's "Cost-Benefit Analysis at the Crossroads" symposium, which I blogged about earlier, continues, adding two new contributions.

First, in "Equity in Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis," Zachary Liscow (Yale Law School) considers three ways to include distributional effects into CBA—incorporate mesaures of distributional impact in CBA estimates, "cleanse" cost and benefitm measures to account for distributional impacts, and use differential weights in CBA—and acknowledges that, at the end of the day, this is a political decision:

Which of these distributional strategies to adopt ultimately boils down to a political choice. Imposing distributional weights might be controversial politically, not to mention legally. It might be that the public finds explicit weighting quite problematic. We have no direct evidence on this, but the US tends to have strong legal and social norms of formal equality. And explicitly weighting the benefits conferred to some individuals more than others could violate those norms. On the other hand, it could be that the public would pay almost no attention to such procedures of government bureaucrats—or that they would like it if they did pay attention. Ultimately, this choice brings up deep questions of democratic theory: How, if at all, does it matter normatively what the public thinks? Or, alternatively, is this just a question of political feasibility, which depends on the difficult-to-predict reception of a new policy?

Continuing on this theme is "Let's Politicize Cost-Benefit Analysis" by Elizabeth Popp Berman (University of Michigan), author of the forthcoming book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (a book I'm certain will be a topic of discussion on this blog upon its release in March 2022). Berman reviews the different ways the two major American political parties have used (and abused) CBA for their own ends, but instead of arguing for CBA as an idealized and "objective" evaluative standard, she sees it for what it is,

a convenient fiction that exists to coordinate action and facilitate decision-making. Our methods for estimating, say, the Value of a Statistical Life are arbitrary. They put a patina of rationality on what is essentially a moral choice. We accept them because they give us a consistent way to produce a number that roughly accords with our sense of what is reasonable—but a dozen other numbers could be similarly justified. Our actual estimates of costs and benefits are often lucky to be correct within an order of magnitude. And minor changes in assumptions—for example, about the appropriate discount rate—can lead to dramatically different assessments of the benefits of a project or decision. [Emphasis added.]

She concludes that, in practice, CBA should (continue to) serve the goals of those using it, and technical improvements to it should be made for the same reasons:

The primary goal of CBA reform should not be to produce the best, most morally defensible analysis. It should be to introduce technical changes that tilt the playing field toward outcomes we think are good. And in areas where CBA seems likely to be irredeemably biased against action, our aim should be to push for alternative forms of evaluation.

Of course, this would negate any independent evidentiary value that CBA may have, but that is Berman's point—it shouldn't be regarded in that way at all. (Again, I eagerly await the publication of her book for more thinking along these lines.)

By Jonathan B. Wight

Conference Dates: October 21-22, 2021

Virtual Conference

LSBU Business School
&
London Centre for Business and Entrepreneurship Research

During the last 30 years, the conversation between economic theory and ethics has been restarted, after a period of interruption, generated by the positivist era in economics. We cannot ignore, in this revival, the role of the financial crisis, gender and racial inequality and now the divisions revealed by the unequal impacts of the pandemic. An important contribution has been the call for a professional economic ethics led by DeMartino (2011) and DeMartino and McCloskey (2016).

More recently, Dolfsma and Negru (2019) challenge the idea that ethics has no place in economics. Building on their ideas we ask: Is ethics important for the study of the economy and, if so, how should it be taught?

This two day conference will be of interest to lecturers and students in economics and business - and anyone with an interest in the future of the economics curriculum.

Link for the event & registration: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/teaching-ethics-to-economists-challenges-benefits-tickets-170298187463 


Programme

Day One: Thursday 21 October

9.45am - Virtual housekeeping & Zoom functionality - Neil Hudson-Basing, Corporate Events Manager, LSBU

9.55am - Welcome - Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10am - Introduction to the day. Economics and Ethics - what is the agenda?

• Ioana Negru, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
• Imko Meyenberg, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
• Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10.30am - Revisiting the analytical relationship of Ethics and Economics - María Isabel Encinar & Félix-Fernando Muñoz, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

11.15am - Theoretical and ethical reductionism and the neglect of subjectivity in economics and economic education - Giancarlo Ianulardo, University of Exeter, UK

12pm - Lunch break

12.30pm - Keeping alive non-individualistic ethics in political economy: a review of concepts from Aquinas to Habermas - Stefano Solari, University of Padua, Italy

1.15pm - Racism, the economy and ethics: where does it all begin? - Paolo Ramazzotti, University of Macerata, Italy

2pm - Teaching economic harm to economists - George DeMartino, University of Denver, USA

2.45pm - Comfort break

3pm - The fate of moral philosophy in the age of economic scientism: ethics and welfare economics in mainline economics - Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA

3.45pm - Plenary: Reflections

4pm - End of Day One

______________________________________________________________________

Day Two: Friday 22 October

9.45am - Virtual housekeeping & Zoom functionality - Neil Hudson-Basing, Corporate Events Manager, LSBU

9.55am - Welcome and intro to Day Two - Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10am - Managerial decision making: consequences and Consequentialism - Malcolm Brady & Marta Rocchi, Dublin City University, Ireland

10.45am - Economic curricular, pluralism and the Global South - Michelle Groenewald, North- West University, South Africa

11.30am - Accounting as applied ethics: teaching a discipline - Wilfred Dolfsma, Wageningen University, Netherlands

12.15pm - Lunch break

12.45pm - Purusharthas: the human pursuit of wealth and welfare. The Indian approach to ethics and economics - V P Raghavan, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, India

1.30pm - Economics, ethics and deliberation

• Ioana Negru, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
• Imko Meyenberg, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
• Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

2.15pm - The kidney market debate: a retrospective on Becker and Elias - Jonathan Wight, University of Richmond, USA

3pm - Comfort break

3.15pm - Alfred North Whitehead on the education of the commercial class: its influence on Keynes - Dennis Badeen, University of Hertfordshire, UK

4pm - Plenary: Reflections

4.15pm - End of Conference

*Times according to GMT

________________________________________________________________________________________________

This conference will be delivered virtually via Zoom. You will receive the joining instructions on the Monday before the event takes place.

By Mark D. White

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project recently launched a symposium that promises to examine cost-benefit analysis (CBA) under the critical lens of political science, law, and philosophy. The introductory post by legal scholar Frank Pasquale can be found here, and after surveying a number of the issues with CBA, summarizes the symposium's intent and future participants in its final paragraph:

The challenge to CBA is now clear. If it is to be a tool of policy evaluation worth supporting, we must embed it in political frameworks that make CBA just as prone to catalyzing regulation, as to derailing it. Moreover, the limits of quantification must be squarely addressed. Posts in this symposium demonstrate a way forward on both fronts, enriching CBA with both immanent and transcendent critiques of past OIRA missteps. We will be thrilled to welcome the symposiasts over the coming weeks: Beth Popp Berman, James Goodwin, Lisa Heinzerling, Zachary Liscow, Melissa Luttrell, Jorge Romano-Romero, Mark Silverman, Amy Sinden, and Karen Tani. Each has done important work in the field, and LPE Blog is honored to host their contributions.

The first full post, by legal scholar Lisa Heinzerling, discusses CBA in the context of the dual concerns of racial justice and climate change. She asks whether CBA can adequately appreciate the true benefits of action on these fronts, given its reliance on discounting of future benefits (which is highly sensitive to the specific discount rate chosen) and monetary valuation of benefits (which does not apply well to issues involving dignity and rights). She concludes by suggesting an alternative evaluative approach to these policy issues:

Discounting and monetary valuation are so central to the cost-benefit method that it is hard to imagine cost-benefit analysis without them. Happily, though, it is easy to imagine White House regulatory review without cost-benefit analysis. The vast majority of federal regulatory statutes do not require cost-benefit analysis. Many do not even allow it. Instead of evaluating major rules by asking whether they satisfy the test of formal cost-benefit analysis, the White House could ask whether the rules faithfully follow the relevant statutory framework and whether the agencies have rigorously analyzed the evidence in front of them. This simple reform would not only avoid the conundrums posed by cost-benefit analysis. It would also close the gap that has opened between the regulatory standards set by Congress and the cost-benefit metric that recent presidents have preferred.

This symposium is shaping up to be a valuable and fascinating survey of the numerous moral, legal, and political issues with cost-benefit analysis, and we'll likely be highlighting more contributions here as it continues.

Mark D. White

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

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!

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 )

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.

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.

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).