The video below is a short but interesting talk by Robert Skidelsky, given on 15 October, 2014, on automation, economics and ethics, and invoking his book How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life (2012).
It also refers to Keynes’ somewhat utopian ideas in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (Keynes 1930a and 1930b; Keynes 1933), which I have written about here.
Skidelsky points to something very important indeed: that the Austrian and neoclassical disutility of labour axiom is not universally true. There really are certain jobs that people find rewarding and that bring satisfaction or utility (Lavoie 1992: 218).
Moreover, Skidelsky also highlights the negative distributional effects of the neoliberal era, and the effects of automation and IT as a driver of modern structural unemployment, though some of his suggested polices to retard the rise of automation seem misguided to me.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930a. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren II,” The Nation and Athenaeum 48.3 (October 18): 96–98.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930b. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren II,” The Nation and Athenaeum 48.2 (October 11, 1930): 36–37.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1933. Essays in Persuasion. Macmillan, London.
Lavoie, Marc. 1992. Foundations of Post-Keynesian Economic Analysis. Edward Elgar Publishing, Aldershot, UK.
Showing posts with label economics and ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics and ethics. Show all posts
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Hunter Gatherer Ethics?
Ethics is a complex subject, but the origin of some innate human moral intuitions is no doubt explained to some extent by evolution. Our species is about 200,000 years ago, and agriculture only emerged about 10 000 years ago. For most of our history (probably over 88% of it), we were nomadic hunter gatherers. Modern human psychology (which is partly and significantly caused by the evolved structure of the human brain) remains fundamentally the product of that evolution.
Therefore our evolutionary psychology has been shaped by hunter gatherer societies. Because of genetic differences owing to sexual reproduction and environmental influences, of course there is variation in us as well, but some core traits do seem to be very prevalent.
Many people have a visceral fear of spiders and snakes and this seems to come from our brain’s limbic system (see also Isbell 2006), itself created by the interactions of many genes by the process of evolution by natural selection.
There is strong evidence that some of our core moral intuitions are also the result of evolution. It is even likely that the sense of “fairness” or even “entitlement” leading to the existence of common property (the ancient equivalent of public goods) or sharing the wealth (e.g., egalitarian food sharing practices amongst hunter gatherers) appears to be evolved in us as an advantage for survival. Thus one could say that the desire to “spread the wealth” is not some alien, wicked propensity caused by “evil” governments: it is in our psychology, the psychology of egalitarian, food sharing hunter gatherers.
Public goods, modern welfare and social security paid for by progressive taxes are the effective modern equivalent of communal food sharing and cooperation; public property and public land the equivalent of the tribe’s common property; the widespread feelings of anger and injustice humans feel at gross inequality of wealth the equivalent of ancient egalitarianism.
The particular form that morality takes in any society is of course influenced by culture and history to a significant extent, and I do not wish to ignore the role of culture here, or suggest some vulgar genetic determinism (which I personally find distasteful). Human nature and our traits are a very complex interaction of environment, culture and genes (indeed some human traits are clearly explained more by environment and culture, than by genes). There can be many differences between what is regarded as moral in one society and another, and the innate moral faculty is probably like our innate language faculty (which also has a biological basis), and can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times, just as our core language faculty leads to different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax, even though underlying that surface diversity is Chomsky’s universal grammar, with a biological basis (attempts to deny that our language faculty is the product of evolution are disposed of by Dennett 1996: 370–400).
Of course, none of this constitutes an adequate moral defence of modern taxes or public goods, since the argument from nature is a logical fallacy. Our moral intuitions provide no objective basis for morality, any more than the mere intuition or conviction that god exists can provide any rational basis for believing in god. We do in fact have many wrong ideas or irrational emotions about the world and objects in it, from
A proper defence of what is right and wrong must come from an objective theory of ethics, not from our psychology.
Quite convincing moral justifications for government and government intervention (such as progressive taxes, basic welfare and universal health care) can easily be given through act or rule utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, the non-absolutist ethics of W. D. Ross, Rawl’s human rights objectivism, or other liberal contractarian moral theories. They could still be given even if we had no innate sense of altruism towards other people.
For free market libertarians, about the only moral theory that can be used to justify absolute property rights is natural rights/natural law ethics, which has severe flaws and is untenable (itself committing the fallacy of the argument from nature too).
Free market libertarians and Austrians face the double blow of advocating (1) things immoral by most objective ethical theories and (2) things that our innate sense of morality itself finds objectionable.
Any libertarian/Austrian faces a hard upward battle trying to convince people of ideas that (1) seem naturally repulsive and (2) can be rejected by many knowledgeable people with a background in philosophy of ethics by using rule utilitarianism, Rawls’ ethics or other theories.
The mass “conversion” of people to libertarian or Austrian philosophy (and the elimination of all taxes or public goods) is about as likely as the disappearance of the widespread human fear of snakes, which also seems to have a deeply ingrained, evolutionary and psychological basis. This of course is not a defence, or justification, of social democracy, but is a realistic statement of how things actually are with respect to human nature. By a similar process, religion, whether it is rational or not, will probably exist for a long time, for better or worse (and for the worse in my view), even though there are strong arguments against it.
So our innate psychological nature, which is a legacy of our evolutionary past, cuts both ways: it has left us with some beliefs and propensities that can be justified independently and some beliefs that cannot (sometimes in ways that are pernicious).
Moreover, in the case of inductive reasoning, we have a surprising mental process which appears to have been successful in general and allowed us to survive, but which might not be capable of rational justification, because of the notorious problem of induction (see “Risk and Uncertainty in Post Keynesian Economics,” Appendix 1: The Paradox of Induction?, December 8, 2010).
APPENDIX 1: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT?
Some people claim that the modern state has no parallel in the environment of our ancient ancestors. But the most obvious figure would be the dominant male/males of the tribe (just as in monkey and great ape groups) whose position was established by force and ability to protect other members of the group from wild animals and hostile humans from other tribes. That of course provides no serious justification for modern government or patriarchy, however.
Further Reading
Borders, M. “The Stone Age Trinity,” March 6, 2006
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/03/the-stone-age-trinity.html
Dennett, D. C. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, London.
Fehr, E. and U. Fischbacher, 2003, “The Nature of Human Altruism,” Nature 425 (23 October): 785–791.
Henrich, J. et al., 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91.2: 73–78.
Isbell, L. A. 2006. “Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains,” Journal of Human Evolution 51.1: 1–35.
Megarry, T. 1995. Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human Culture, New York University Press, New York.
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Ridley, M. 1996. The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.
“Spiders, Snakes, and Evolved Fears,” January 11, 2008,
http://neuroscientificallychallenged.blogspot.com/2008/01/spiders-snakes-and-evolved-fears.html
Therefore our evolutionary psychology has been shaped by hunter gatherer societies. Because of genetic differences owing to sexual reproduction and environmental influences, of course there is variation in us as well, but some core traits do seem to be very prevalent.
Many people have a visceral fear of spiders and snakes and this seems to come from our brain’s limbic system (see also Isbell 2006), itself created by the interactions of many genes by the process of evolution by natural selection.
There is strong evidence that some of our core moral intuitions are also the result of evolution. It is even likely that the sense of “fairness” or even “entitlement” leading to the existence of common property (the ancient equivalent of public goods) or sharing the wealth (e.g., egalitarian food sharing practices amongst hunter gatherers) appears to be evolved in us as an advantage for survival. Thus one could say that the desire to “spread the wealth” is not some alien, wicked propensity caused by “evil” governments: it is in our psychology, the psychology of egalitarian, food sharing hunter gatherers.
Public goods, modern welfare and social security paid for by progressive taxes are the effective modern equivalent of communal food sharing and cooperation; public property and public land the equivalent of the tribe’s common property; the widespread feelings of anger and injustice humans feel at gross inequality of wealth the equivalent of ancient egalitarianism.
The particular form that morality takes in any society is of course influenced by culture and history to a significant extent, and I do not wish to ignore the role of culture here, or suggest some vulgar genetic determinism (which I personally find distasteful). Human nature and our traits are a very complex interaction of environment, culture and genes (indeed some human traits are clearly explained more by environment and culture, than by genes). There can be many differences between what is regarded as moral in one society and another, and the innate moral faculty is probably like our innate language faculty (which also has a biological basis), and can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times, just as our core language faculty leads to different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax, even though underlying that surface diversity is Chomsky’s universal grammar, with a biological basis (attempts to deny that our language faculty is the product of evolution are disposed of by Dennett 1996: 370–400).
Of course, none of this constitutes an adequate moral defence of modern taxes or public goods, since the argument from nature is a logical fallacy. Our moral intuitions provide no objective basis for morality, any more than the mere intuition or conviction that god exists can provide any rational basis for believing in god. We do in fact have many wrong ideas or irrational emotions about the world and objects in it, from
(1) sheer superstition (e.g., religion),For example, belief in supernatural beings or supernatural phenomena – which is (1) above – might possibly have some psychological basis explained by human evolution (although religion is also deeply ingrained in many people by culture as well), but such belief is most probably completely wrong. Atheists can face a difficult task trying to convince people of the falsity of religion, because of widespread cultural belief in religion and the possibility of a biological and psychological basis for it. But while modern philosophy and the natural sciences can provide atheists with strong arguments in support of their position, libertarians by contrast find little support from philosophy of ethics for their natural rights-based anarcho-capitalism and the view that all taxation is theft.
(2) faulty or poor inductive reasoning (e.g., pre-modern science or medicine), or
(3) innate human psychological traits that are the product of evolution (e.g., a widespread and visceral fear of, or repulsion towards, snakes, even though most of us in industrialised nations never encounter snakes, and tobacco, sugar, alcohol or cars kill more of us today than snakes ever do).
A proper defence of what is right and wrong must come from an objective theory of ethics, not from our psychology.
Quite convincing moral justifications for government and government intervention (such as progressive taxes, basic welfare and universal health care) can easily be given through act or rule utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, the non-absolutist ethics of W. D. Ross, Rawl’s human rights objectivism, or other liberal contractarian moral theories. They could still be given even if we had no innate sense of altruism towards other people.
For free market libertarians, about the only moral theory that can be used to justify absolute property rights is natural rights/natural law ethics, which has severe flaws and is untenable (itself committing the fallacy of the argument from nature too).
Free market libertarians and Austrians face the double blow of advocating (1) things immoral by most objective ethical theories and (2) things that our innate sense of morality itself finds objectionable.
Any libertarian/Austrian faces a hard upward battle trying to convince people of ideas that (1) seem naturally repulsive and (2) can be rejected by many knowledgeable people with a background in philosophy of ethics by using rule utilitarianism, Rawls’ ethics or other theories.
The mass “conversion” of people to libertarian or Austrian philosophy (and the elimination of all taxes or public goods) is about as likely as the disappearance of the widespread human fear of snakes, which also seems to have a deeply ingrained, evolutionary and psychological basis. This of course is not a defence, or justification, of social democracy, but is a realistic statement of how things actually are with respect to human nature. By a similar process, religion, whether it is rational or not, will probably exist for a long time, for better or worse (and for the worse in my view), even though there are strong arguments against it.
So our innate psychological nature, which is a legacy of our evolutionary past, cuts both ways: it has left us with some beliefs and propensities that can be justified independently and some beliefs that cannot (sometimes in ways that are pernicious).
Moreover, in the case of inductive reasoning, we have a surprising mental process which appears to have been successful in general and allowed us to survive, but which might not be capable of rational justification, because of the notorious problem of induction (see “Risk and Uncertainty in Post Keynesian Economics,” Appendix 1: The Paradox of Induction?, December 8, 2010).
APPENDIX 1: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT?
Some people claim that the modern state has no parallel in the environment of our ancient ancestors. But the most obvious figure would be the dominant male/males of the tribe (just as in monkey and great ape groups) whose position was established by force and ability to protect other members of the group from wild animals and hostile humans from other tribes. That of course provides no serious justification for modern government or patriarchy, however.
Further Reading
Borders, M. “The Stone Age Trinity,” March 6, 2006
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/03/the-stone-age-trinity.html
Dennett, D. C. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, London.
Fehr, E. and U. Fischbacher, 2003, “The Nature of Human Altruism,” Nature 425 (23 October): 785–791.
Henrich, J. et al., 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91.2: 73–78.
Isbell, L. A. 2006. “Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains,” Journal of Human Evolution 51.1: 1–35.
Megarry, T. 1995. Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human Culture, New York University Press, New York.
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Ridley, M. 1996. The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.
“Spiders, Snakes, and Evolved Fears,” January 11, 2008,
http://neuroscientificallychallenged.blogspot.com/2008/01/spiders-snakes-and-evolved-fears.html
Friday, October 8, 2010
Economics and Ethics: A Brief Survey
In the previous post (see “Rothbard on Mises’ Utilitarianism: Why the Systems of Mises and Rothbard both Collapse”), I pointed out that Rothbard’s natural law theory is untenable, and once that is recognised his whole case for anarcho-capitalism also collapses. While I will publish a longer post soon refuting natural law and natural rights theory, I present here a brief introduction to ethics. This post was also published as a guest post on the Cynicus Economicus blog ( “Guest Article: Economics and Ethics,” May 4, 2009).
For a number of economic systems (e.g., libertarianism, free market economics, neo-liberalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, communism etc), in intelligent debate many people justify their preferred system as public policy by appealing to some ethical theory, to convince other people of the morality or superiority of their system.
The Austrians who follow the praxeological system of von Mises claim that economic science is value-free, and that the inferences of praxeology are justifiable as economic laws independently of ethics, though that remains a questionable idea. But, as a public policy prescription, even Austrians will often require an ethical theory, and Rothbard explicitly used natural rights theory to justify his anarcho-capitalism.
In the end, when an economic system is urged as a policy it must often be justified or limited by an ethical/moral theory, and one needs an objective theory of right or wrong to do this. For the only effective theories available to justify a larger philosophical system in a consistent way are objectivist theories of ethics (that is to say, a subjectivist or relativist theory of ethics is self-defeating).
In essence, an objectivist theory of ethics holds that:
Ethics as Applied to Economics
Divine command theory is easily refuted: e.g., if god orders someone to commit genocide, then this suddenly becomes a “moral” action, because God has ordered it. Thus divine ethics turns out to be a subjective theory of ethics: what is moral and what is not actually depends, in the end, on the arbitrary whim of God, not the goodness of actions or their consequences. If God’s moral laws are not arbitrary, then there must be some independent, objective standard or method he uses to determine what is right and wrong. But, if there is an independent, objective standard, then it is this system that tells us what is right or wrong, not the commands of God. We could presumably use reason to apply the standard ourselves to discover what is right and wrong, without any need for instruction from God. (And Kantian ethics was in fact partly an attempt to create an objectivist ethics that could defend Christian morality, but remove this problem by basing morality on moral principles derived from human reason.)
Many libertarians rely on a natural law/natural rights theory of ethics.
Thus they often argue that state intervention is bad when it violates private property rights, and that this government action is always immoral, irrespective of the good or bad consequences that state intervention has or may have.
Natural law as a theory can be traced back to Plato, the ancient Stoics, and many Christian philosophers. (Contrary to popular belief, the most widely-held theory of ethics in the Middle Ages in Christian philosophy was the natural law theory, not the crude divine command theory.)
Natural law was famously attacked by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as “nonsense on stilts.”
One of the main weaknesses of natural law theory is that its main historical justification was the belief in a “divine order” and a divinely-created human nature that makes us conform to “natural law.”
For Plato, the divine soul made human beings conform to the natural law of the universe. In ancient Stoicism, all humans had a divine reason given by the gods to make them adhere to divine “natural law.”
When natural law theory was taken up by Christian theologians, they simply substituted the Christian god for the gods of the Greek and Romans.
In the early modern period, rationalist European philosophers like Grotius tried to defend natural law theory by removing God and the previous supernatural justification for it.
However, in doing so, they destroyed the only convincing explanation for belief in natural law (Tawney 1998: xxv-xxvi).
Thus anyone who accepts an atheistic and naturalistic scientific view of the universe, and who rejects all religion, has no reason to believe in natural law or natural rights.
I would note here that just because we appear to have an innate sense of right and wrong, this does not provide us with an objective system of ethics. That some scientists believe they can identify an innate sense of right and wrong, which humans have evolved through social life in communities during our evolutionary history, does not mean that they have found an objectivist theory of morality that can function as a consistent, logical and universal system for justifying our moral choices, both now and in the past. The well-known fact that there is a vast chasm between what can be regarded as moral in one society and immoral in another demonstrates that, like our language faculty (which also has a biological basis), our innate moral intuition can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times (just as our core language faculty leads to vastly different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax). For instance, in ancient Greece and Rome, the killing of unwanted children by exposing them (i.e., leaving them at crossroads or abandoning them at birth) was widely accepted. Human sacrifice and slavery were also widely practised in many ancient societies, and this was apparently perfectly compatible with the “innate moral sense of right and wrong” that ancient people had, although it is no longer accepted today.
Only an objectivist theory of morality can demonstrate that these things are immoral now and also immoral in the past. So it turns out the innate sense of right and wrong is not the same thing as an objectivist theory of morality.
Nor does appealing to “nature” give us any objective standard of right and wrong. For example, cannibalism is observed in many species: does this make cannibalism moral for humans? It certainly does not, and anyone who thinks so has committed the fallacy of appeal to nature, a fallacy of relevance.
I will note here too that a very good starting point for why natural law and natural rights are untenable is Kai Nielsen, “The Myth of Natural Law,” in S. Hook (ed.), Law and Philosophy: A Symposium, University Press, New York. 1963.
Also relevant is L. A. Rollins, The Myth of Natural Rights (Loompanics Unlimited, 1983), which is an attack on the natural rights theories of Rothbard and Ayn Rand.
It follows that all modern types of libertarianism or free market economics based simply on a “natural law” or “natural rights” foundation are severely flawed systems (e.g., the systems of Adam Smith or Murray Rothbard). There is no reason to believe that the “natural law” that justifies placing inviolable property rights at the centre of our modern political or economic systems has any validity whatsoever.
In my opinion, Kantian ethics has no real consequences for economics: it can be used to justify numerous economic systems and is fully compatible with social democracy. However, Kantian deontological ethics has severe problems.
A better ethical theory, in my view, is a modern form of utilitarianism called rule utilitarianism (which is quite different from its crude early form as advocated by Jeremy Bentham). Some libertarians or advocates of free market economics actually do use utilitarian arguments to justify their positions and economic systems, e.g., Ludwig von Mises (although Mises’ praxeology was an a priori system of deductive reasoning, independent of his utilitarianism), the earlier Friedrich von Hayek (Gregg 2003: 21–22), and Milton Friedman (Frederick 2002: 23). Thus anyone who uses a utilitarian argument to support ideas about economics will ultimately have to examine the good and bad effects of the policies they advocate.
In these theories, there is no reason in principle why state intervention could not be moral and successful. Any economic argument, then, essentially becomes an argument about empirical reality: the consequences of economic policy today and in the past. The good consequences of state intervention and social democracy fully justify these policies. Of course, philosophical objections have been raised to utilitarianism as well.
One solution may be that we should adopt James Cornman’s Utilitarian Kantian Principle of ethics: this (as I understand it) has caused a great deal of excitement amongst modern philosophers, because it combines the best elements of Kant’s deontological ethics with utilitarianism. It is perfectly compatible with state intervention in economics.
APPENDIX 1: WHAT WAS MARX’S ETHICS?
Marx himself, as I understand it, rejected the utilitarianism of his day for some very confused ideas on ethics (Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 240). And, at the very least, the question of what ethical theory he believed in is debatable (N. Churchich, Marxism and Morality: A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics, James Clarke & Co., 1994, p. 139).
Since I don’t advocate communism as preached in the Communist Manifesto, it has nothing to do with my moral argument for certain types of state intervention.
Furthermore, the means Marx advocated to achieve communism (i.e., dictatorship, destruction of freedom of speech and civil liberties) can be rejected on utilitarian grounds anyway, since the abolition of freedom of speech and dictatorship have harmful effects on everyone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cornman, J. W., Lehrer, K. and G. S. Pappas. 1992. Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction, Hackett, Indianapolis.
Frederick, R. 2002. A Companion to Business Ethics,, Blackwell, Malden, Mass.
Gregg, S. 2003. On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society, Lexington, Oxford and Lanham, Md.
Nielsen, K. 1963, “The Myth of Natural Law,” in S. Hook (ed.), Law and philosophy: A Symposium, University Press, New York.
Rollins, L. A. 1983. The Myth of Natural Rights, Loompanics Unlimited.
Scruton, R. 1994. Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, Penguin Books, London.
Tawney, R. H. 1998. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Transaction, New Brunswick, N.J. and London.
For a number of economic systems (e.g., libertarianism, free market economics, neo-liberalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, communism etc), in intelligent debate many people justify their preferred system as public policy by appealing to some ethical theory, to convince other people of the morality or superiority of their system.
The Austrians who follow the praxeological system of von Mises claim that economic science is value-free, and that the inferences of praxeology are justifiable as economic laws independently of ethics, though that remains a questionable idea. But, as a public policy prescription, even Austrians will often require an ethical theory, and Rothbard explicitly used natural rights theory to justify his anarcho-capitalism.
In the end, when an economic system is urged as a policy it must often be justified or limited by an ethical/moral theory, and one needs an objective theory of right or wrong to do this. For the only effective theories available to justify a larger philosophical system in a consistent way are objectivist theories of ethics (that is to say, a subjectivist or relativist theory of ethics is self-defeating).
In essence, an objectivist theory of ethics holds that:
– moral judgements are propositions that have an objective value, either true or false (e.g, “The unjustified killing of another human being is wrong”);If we want an objectivist theory of our morality, we essentially have these options:
– the truth of a moral proposition remains true regardless of the subjective opinions of a person or the values of a different culture (e.g., “Slavery is wrong”);
– morality is not subjective or relative.
All of these objectivist theories of morality/ethics can be divided into two basic groups as follows:
- (1) Moral absolutism
- (a) Divine Command Theory
- (b) Categorical Imperative ethics (Kantian ethics)
- (2) Moral Universalism (minimal/moderate moral realism)
- (i) Deontological theories:
- (a) Natural law theories (Plato and many Christian philosophers)
- (b) Thomist ethics
- (c) Pluralistic deontology, the non-absolutist ethics of W.D. Ross
- (d) Human rights objectivism (Rawls)
- (ii) Consequentialist theories:
- (e) Utilitarianism (act utilitarianism; rule utilitarianism)
- (f) Ayn Rand’s objectivism?
- (3) Ayn Rand’s objectivism?
- (4) Utilitarian Kantian Principle of James Cornman (this combines deontology and utilitarianism).
(1) Deontological theories (= duty or obligation based morality): the basis of morality is duty and some acts are always right no matter what consequences they can cause (the best example of which is Kantian ethics or some forms of divine command theory; Kant famously said that it is always wrong to lie, no matter what the circumstances).Use your intuition and find out whether you subscribe to (1) a duty-based ethical theory or (2) a utilitarian or consequentialist ethical theory by thinking about this moral problem:
(2) Consequentialist theories: the basis of morality is the evaluation of the consequences of acts on people (the most famous such theory is Utilitarianism). The greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is one way of describing it.
(I will not address the question whether Ayn Rand’s objectivism is consequentialist or in a category by itself, since this is disputed.)
A known murderer comes to you and asks to know where a person he wants to kill is, and you are aware of his desire to commit murder. Do you:Decision (1) makes you a utilitarian, and (2) a believer of duty-based ethics. Immanuel Kant held that (2) is the moral course of action, since lying is always immoral, under all circumstances.
(1) Lie to protect the innocent person and say you do not know, or
(2) Tell the murderer where that person is in the knowledge that a murder may occur?
Ethics as Applied to Economics
Divine command theory is easily refuted: e.g., if god orders someone to commit genocide, then this suddenly becomes a “moral” action, because God has ordered it. Thus divine ethics turns out to be a subjective theory of ethics: what is moral and what is not actually depends, in the end, on the arbitrary whim of God, not the goodness of actions or their consequences. If God’s moral laws are not arbitrary, then there must be some independent, objective standard or method he uses to determine what is right and wrong. But, if there is an independent, objective standard, then it is this system that tells us what is right or wrong, not the commands of God. We could presumably use reason to apply the standard ourselves to discover what is right and wrong, without any need for instruction from God. (And Kantian ethics was in fact partly an attempt to create an objectivist ethics that could defend Christian morality, but remove this problem by basing morality on moral principles derived from human reason.)
Many libertarians rely on a natural law/natural rights theory of ethics.
Thus they often argue that state intervention is bad when it violates private property rights, and that this government action is always immoral, irrespective of the good or bad consequences that state intervention has or may have.
Natural law as a theory can be traced back to Plato, the ancient Stoics, and many Christian philosophers. (Contrary to popular belief, the most widely-held theory of ethics in the Middle Ages in Christian philosophy was the natural law theory, not the crude divine command theory.)
Natural law was famously attacked by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as “nonsense on stilts.”
One of the main weaknesses of natural law theory is that its main historical justification was the belief in a “divine order” and a divinely-created human nature that makes us conform to “natural law.”
For Plato, the divine soul made human beings conform to the natural law of the universe. In ancient Stoicism, all humans had a divine reason given by the gods to make them adhere to divine “natural law.”
When natural law theory was taken up by Christian theologians, they simply substituted the Christian god for the gods of the Greek and Romans.
In the early modern period, rationalist European philosophers like Grotius tried to defend natural law theory by removing God and the previous supernatural justification for it.
However, in doing so, they destroyed the only convincing explanation for belief in natural law (Tawney 1998: xxv-xxvi).
Thus anyone who accepts an atheistic and naturalistic scientific view of the universe, and who rejects all religion, has no reason to believe in natural law or natural rights.
I would note here that just because we appear to have an innate sense of right and wrong, this does not provide us with an objective system of ethics. That some scientists believe they can identify an innate sense of right and wrong, which humans have evolved through social life in communities during our evolutionary history, does not mean that they have found an objectivist theory of morality that can function as a consistent, logical and universal system for justifying our moral choices, both now and in the past. The well-known fact that there is a vast chasm between what can be regarded as moral in one society and immoral in another demonstrates that, like our language faculty (which also has a biological basis), our innate moral intuition can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times (just as our core language faculty leads to vastly different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax). For instance, in ancient Greece and Rome, the killing of unwanted children by exposing them (i.e., leaving them at crossroads or abandoning them at birth) was widely accepted. Human sacrifice and slavery were also widely practised in many ancient societies, and this was apparently perfectly compatible with the “innate moral sense of right and wrong” that ancient people had, although it is no longer accepted today.
Only an objectivist theory of morality can demonstrate that these things are immoral now and also immoral in the past. So it turns out the innate sense of right and wrong is not the same thing as an objectivist theory of morality.
Nor does appealing to “nature” give us any objective standard of right and wrong. For example, cannibalism is observed in many species: does this make cannibalism moral for humans? It certainly does not, and anyone who thinks so has committed the fallacy of appeal to nature, a fallacy of relevance.
I will note here too that a very good starting point for why natural law and natural rights are untenable is Kai Nielsen, “The Myth of Natural Law,” in S. Hook (ed.), Law and Philosophy: A Symposium, University Press, New York. 1963.
Also relevant is L. A. Rollins, The Myth of Natural Rights (Loompanics Unlimited, 1983), which is an attack on the natural rights theories of Rothbard and Ayn Rand.
It follows that all modern types of libertarianism or free market economics based simply on a “natural law” or “natural rights” foundation are severely flawed systems (e.g., the systems of Adam Smith or Murray Rothbard). There is no reason to believe that the “natural law” that justifies placing inviolable property rights at the centre of our modern political or economic systems has any validity whatsoever.
In my opinion, Kantian ethics has no real consequences for economics: it can be used to justify numerous economic systems and is fully compatible with social democracy. However, Kantian deontological ethics has severe problems.
A better ethical theory, in my view, is a modern form of utilitarianism called rule utilitarianism (which is quite different from its crude early form as advocated by Jeremy Bentham). Some libertarians or advocates of free market economics actually do use utilitarian arguments to justify their positions and economic systems, e.g., Ludwig von Mises (although Mises’ praxeology was an a priori system of deductive reasoning, independent of his utilitarianism), the earlier Friedrich von Hayek (Gregg 2003: 21–22), and Milton Friedman (Frederick 2002: 23). Thus anyone who uses a utilitarian argument to support ideas about economics will ultimately have to examine the good and bad effects of the policies they advocate.
In these theories, there is no reason in principle why state intervention could not be moral and successful. Any economic argument, then, essentially becomes an argument about empirical reality: the consequences of economic policy today and in the past. The good consequences of state intervention and social democracy fully justify these policies. Of course, philosophical objections have been raised to utilitarianism as well.
One solution may be that we should adopt James Cornman’s Utilitarian Kantian Principle of ethics: this (as I understand it) has caused a great deal of excitement amongst modern philosophers, because it combines the best elements of Kant’s deontological ethics with utilitarianism. It is perfectly compatible with state intervention in economics.
APPENDIX 1: WHAT WAS MARX’S ETHICS?
Marx himself, as I understand it, rejected the utilitarianism of his day for some very confused ideas on ethics (Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 240). And, at the very least, the question of what ethical theory he believed in is debatable (N. Churchich, Marxism and Morality: A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics, James Clarke & Co., 1994, p. 139).
Since I don’t advocate communism as preached in the Communist Manifesto, it has nothing to do with my moral argument for certain types of state intervention.
Furthermore, the means Marx advocated to achieve communism (i.e., dictatorship, destruction of freedom of speech and civil liberties) can be rejected on utilitarian grounds anyway, since the abolition of freedom of speech and dictatorship have harmful effects on everyone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cornman, J. W., Lehrer, K. and G. S. Pappas. 1992. Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction, Hackett, Indianapolis.
Frederick, R. 2002. A Companion to Business Ethics,, Blackwell, Malden, Mass.
Gregg, S. 2003. On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society, Lexington, Oxford and Lanham, Md.
Nielsen, K. 1963, “The Myth of Natural Law,” in S. Hook (ed.), Law and philosophy: A Symposium, University Press, New York.
Rollins, L. A. 1983. The Myth of Natural Rights, Loompanics Unlimited.
Scruton, R. 1994. Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, Penguin Books, London.
Tawney, R. H. 1998. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Transaction, New Brunswick, N.J. and London.
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