Rawls's framework for global justice

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was immediately received as a major and progressive contribution to the theory of justice within existing societies. His Law of Peoples (1999) was intended to carry his basic ideas about justice to the international realm.  (Here is a PDF of a preliminary version of the title essay of the book as published in Critical Inquiry in 1993.) Here is how he defined the goal of a law of peoples in 1993:

The law of peoples ... is a family of political concepts along with principles of right justice, and the common good that specify the content of a liberal conception of justice worked up to extend to and apply to international law. It provides the concepts and principles by reference to which that law is to be judged. (43)

In contrast to the reception A Theory of Justice received, his work on the international part of the theory has not had much influence, and was roundly criticized for being too accepting of international inequalities.   Philip Pettit put the point this way in his contribution to Rex Martin and David Reidy's Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia:

John Rawls's work on the law of peoples is notorious for its anti-cosmopolitan stance: roughly, its insistence that those of us in well-ordered societies do not owe to the members of other societies the sort of justice we owe to one another. (38)

This is exactly the critique that Philippe van Parijs offered to Rawls prior to publication of the book (link).

Given that Rawls's intuitions seem to have been solidly progressive in other spheres, it is worth considering why he took this very limited view of the obligations of justice in the global context. Why did he begin with the perspective of peoples rather than persons?  (Here I'll make use of the 1993 statements of the view.)

A number of the critics put their cases in terms of Rawls's anti-cosmopolitanism.  "Cosmopolitanism" is the view that we are all citizens of the world, and we have positive moral relationships with each other no matter what nation issues our passports.  No one would deny that everyone has some kinds of moral relationships to everyone else -- for example, the obligation not to impose harm on innocent people.  But cosmopolitanism extends to the idea of positive obligations -- the obligation to render assistance as well as the obligation to refrain from gratuitous harm.  The contrary to cosmopolitanism might be called "nationalism", but this implies assumptions that Rawls would presumably not have accepted.  So let's call it "bounded people-ism": the claims of justice that a person has against other persons extend only to other members of his/her people and government.

One deep reason for the direction that Rawls took was the assumption he made about how to make use of the original position and the veil of ignorance in arriving at principles of international justice.  If this framework involved all human beings, then the results would have been very similar to the argument made in the case of a well-ordered society: inequalities need to be the least system possible consistent with maximizing the position of the least-well-off stratum of society.  However, Rawls chose instead to include "peoples" rather than "persons" in the argument from the original position in the case of international justice. What is a people?

By peoples I mean persons and their dependents seen as a corporate body and as organized by their political institutions, which establish the powers of government. In democratic societies persons will be citizens; in hierarchical and other societies they will be members. (41)

And he directly addresses the question of why it should be peoples rather than persons whose perspectives are represented in the original position for international justice:

Wouldn't it be better to start with the world as a whole, with a global original position, so to speak, and discuss the question whether, and in what form, there should be states, or peoples, at all? ... I think there is no clear initial answer to this question. We should try various alternatives and weigh their pluses and minuses. Since in working out justice as fairness I begin with domestic society, I shall continue from there as if what has been done so far is more or less sound. So I simply build on the steps taken until now, as this seems to provide a suitable starting point for the extension to the law of peoples. A further reason for proceeding thus is that peoples as corporate bodies organized by their governments now exist in some form all over the world. (42-43)

So his reasons for beginning with this premise are, first, we have to start somewhere and there isn't a philosophically compelling reason to favor persons over peoples in this setting; and second, peoples (and states) exist as actors in the world, so it is feasible to begin the analysis at this level. This way of formulating the original position is designed to establish fair terms of interaction between societies -- or in other words,

... fair conditions under which the parties, this time as representatives of societies well ordered by liberal conceptions of justice, are to specify the laws of peoples and the fair terms of their cooperation. (45)

This formulation, of course, immediately precludes certain questions, including all questions of difference in outcomes for the least-well-off in the various societies.  The fact that the LWO in country X are worse off than the LWO in country Y cannot be a factor in this deliberation, and therefore there cannot emerge a positive obligation to transfer resources from society Y to X to ameliorate this difference.

Here are the principles that Rawls arrives at through this construction:

1. Peoples (as organized by their governments) are free and independent, and their freedom and independence is to be respected by other peoples.
2. Peoples are equal and parties to their own agreements.
3. Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to war.
4. Peoples are to observe a duty of nonintervention.
5. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
6. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions on the conduct of war (assumed to be in self-defense).
7. Peoples are to honor human rights. (46)

In the final version of the argument in 1997 he adds a final principle:

8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.

Later in 1993 he comments on the idea of a human right:

Human rights have, then, these three roles:
1. Their being fulfilled is a necessary condition of a regime's legitimacy and of the decency of its legal order.
2. Their fulfillment is also sufficient to exclude justified and forceful intervention by other peoples, say by economic sanctions or, in grave cases, by military force.
3. "They set a moral limit to pluralism" among peoples. (59)

Several things are evident from these lists.  First, the obligations represented here are indeed minimalist; basically, they are limitations on the use of coercive means by peoples (states) to achieve their ends.  Even the 8th principle added in the 1997 version creates an obligation only to assist other peoples in achieving a just political regime.  Second, there are no requirements of distributive justice in this list of principles.  Each society has internal requirements of distributive justice; but there is no inter-society requirement of distributive justice.  The fact that there are large inequalities of resources between countries is not a basis for a claim of injustice, according to these principles.

This framework has been strongly criticized by philosophers and others who found that it was far too accepting of global inequalities.  Alan Buchanan focuses on the global inequality part of the story in his 2000 contribution in Ethics. Buchanan holds that even representatives of peoples would not have overlooked the significant inequalities imposed on peoples by the global economic system.  He maintains that the original position concerned with international justice would have to take into account two important facts:

There is a global basic structure, which, like the domestic basic structure, is an important subject of justice because it has profound and enduring effects on the prospects of individuals and groups, including peoples in Rawls's sense.

The populations of states are not "peoples" in Rawls's sense and are not likely to become so without massive, unjustifiable coercion, but rather are often conflicting collections of "peoples" and other groups. (700-1) 

The first fact, if recognized, would ensure that the international original position would necessarily take into account the inequalities created by this system for different peoples.  He also believes that the second fact raises salient issues for the international original position.  Essentially the issue here is this: what happens when the multiple peoples of a single state come into conflict? By making the assumptions that "peoples within unified states" are the agents within the international original position, Rawls makes it impossible to arrive at principles of international justice that would specify just behavior in the face of civil war or secessionist movements. This approach makes it impossible to address intrastate conflict.

Tom Pogge extends his own critique of Rawls's position on international distributive justice in a Fordham Law Review article (link) (also included in Martin and Reidy's Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia).  Fundamentally, Pogge is highly critical of Rawls's failure to arrive at an international theory of justice that provides a basis for critique of global inequalities. In this piece he argues that Rawls's two theories are in fact inconsistent with each other.

As indicated above, much of this body of criticism has to do with the view that Rawls's Law of Peoples creates only the most limited obligations across peoples.  His view is not "cosmopolitan".  But a more fundamental criticism, which Buchanan hints at, is that there is a major strand of injustice embedded within the world system that is wholly invisible within Rawls's formulation of the law of peoples.  This is the fact that global institutions may create systematically imbalanced economic relations among states, with the result that some states are in a position to take unfair advantage of other states. This is a form of injustice that would not be accepted within the terms of a domestic society. But there is no basis within the framework of the law of peoples to identify and criticize these types of injustices.

These criticisms are surely correct.  As a theory of global justice, the Law of Peoples doesn't begin to provide enough of a normative basis to arrive at sound judgments about international arrangements.  I began by asking how it came to pass that Rawls presented such a limited theory of international justice. The best answer I can offer is that he was focusing on the wrong issues.  He focused on issues of war and interstate violence, and he did not sufficiently bring into his view the empirical realities associated with a highly unequal world economic structure.  And this is puzzling, since questions of global inequalities -- of resources, of power, and of self-determination -- were certainly widely debated at Harvard in the 1970s and 1980s while Rawls's thinking on this subject was developing.

(In addition to critics, Rawls has some defenders in this area.  Samuel Freeman provides an extensive and reasoned response to many of these criticisms of Rawls's theory of international justice here (link).)

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,globalization,justice,Rawls

The Racial Equity dividend

Racial justice organizations around the United States are struggling to find the resources from the corporate and foundation worlds needed to support their continuing work. One part of the problem seems to be that business leaders simply aren't convinced that racial inequalities are a fundamental and debilitating problem in the United States that presents a concrete threat to their own business activities. The issue has fallen off the first page of the priority list. This suggest that we need to revisit some of the costs that the structures of racial inequity are imposing on regions and cities.

The social costs of persistent racial inequity come in many dimensions. But particularly persuasive is the issue of the actual economic costs that these inequities impose on a region. We might put the point this way: racial inequities are an economic drag on a region, blocking the production of wealth and income and slowing down economic growth. Is it possible to estimate the magnitude of these hidden economic costs of continuing racial inequity?

Let's think about this problem in the context of southeast Michigan and its major city, Detroit. What would southeast Michigan look like if the racial gaps of the region were erased? The gaps that exist between white and black citizens in the region are well documented. Residential segregation is extreme. Unemployment levels are dramatically higher for African-American youth and adults. Health disparities are large and debilitating. Educational outcomes are significantly worse for African-American young people, including high school graduation rates and college attendance. And, of course, family and individual incomes and wealth levels are substantially different.

So imagine a different scenario: a region in which residential segregation has ended. Schooling outcomes are equal for white and black students. Health disparities have disappeared. Employment rates have equalized. And average incomes, wealth holdings, and employment rates have converged across races. Plainly this would be socially desirable outcome; it would be a great improvement in social justice. But what would the economic effects be? How much new income and wealth would this scenario represent over the present situation?

We might approach this question directly, by estimating the aggregate income created by bringing 40% of the population up to the per capita income of the majority population. Likewise we could estimate the aggregate wealth that would be needed in order to equalize the wealth gap. Nationally black households in 2010 earned only 58% of the income of white households (link). I don't have full data for Wayne County at hand, but if the ratio is roughly similar, this implies roughly a $20,000 gap in Wayne County household income between white and black households, which aggregates to almost $6 billion in lost income as a result of racial inequity. If the social factors leading to this inequity were eliminated, this would add $6 billion to the county's income, consumption, and savings. (These are back-of-the envelope estimates, of course, and should be taken only as illustrative of the magnitude of the problem. Here are some basic demographic and income data for Wayne County based on census results; link.)

This scenario presupposes economic growth and jobs growth, but this assumption is supported by the large increase in the talent and education level of the population. We would also need to estimate the economic benefits associated with improved health status for the African-American population -- likewise a large number that public health researchers have probably already estimated. It is well understood in the field of global public health that improving a population's health status also improves its productivity. (Here is a study sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation that tries to estimate these costs and benefits. Nationally the costs associated with racial disparities in health are estimated in the trillions.)

Another approach to this issue would be to follow the lead of CEOs for Cities in attempting to estimate the "talent dividend" (link): do an econometric study of cities measuring degree of racial difference and per capita income. This would be the "racial equity dividend." I don't know if there is a recognized metric that already exists for measuring racial gaps in metropolitan regions, but it shouldn't be hard to construct. It should include components reflecting segregation, income, schooling, and health -- kind of a Human Development Index for Regional Racial Equity. We could then plot racial inequity against per capita income to see whether there is a relationship between these variables. I don't know the answer, but I'd bet there is such a relationship. This would be a genuinely interesting piece of social research. And it might help communities realize the core importance of attacking their regional issues when it comes to racial equity. (I would love to know from Richard Florida whether there is any work available on this question in his research on cities.)

This whole line of thought depends on a hidden premise: that the racial gaps that exist in the metro regions of our country derive ultimately from racialized social and economic institutions that systematically produce and reproduce these racialized outcomes. This is what we once referred to as "institutionalized racism", though the term now sounds dated. It represents the systemic ways in which African-American people are tracked into lower social outcomes in health, education, employment, and income and wealth. Justice requires that we at long last dissolve those institutional tracks. But the economic health of the country demands no less as well. And it is in the best interest of corporations and foundations to support these efforts in their home cities and regions.

(Here is a series in the Detroit News on the costs of segregation; link.)

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_policy,justice,race

Adapting to change

Organizations always have a set of fundamental needs. The organization does something -- it provides a commodity to consumers, it provides services that individuals pay for, it provides charitable services based on foundation funding, it employs specialists to steal credit card information on the Internet. All of these activities consume resources.

For the sake of clarity, let's have two organizations in mind: a mid-size company that produces cigarette lighters and a non-profit organization that provides adult literacy education in a high-poverty environment.

Key to an organization's "metabolism" is its regular access to resources, including especially revenue and people. Generally an organization has an existing model for satisfying these needs. It generates revenues through sale of goods and services or through gifts from foundations, corporations, and individuals who have a commitment to the organization's purposes. It acquires a talent base by hiring talented individuals and by attracting motivated volunteers. Call this a business plan--keeping in mind that profit-based and non-profit organizations alike need a business plan. If the business plan is a good one, the revenues match the expenditure needs of the organization, the talented members of the organization use their time and budgets to produce the organization's "deliverables", and the cycle begins again. The organization is sustainable.

A particularly bad scenario for a non-profit service provider is to begin its work on the basis of a large initial grant which is spent down until the organization expires. The profit-based equivalent is the new business that starts up with a large infusion of venture capital but never develops a revenue stream to support its activities.

What happens when the organization's business environment changes abruptly? Significant changes might include --

• Abrupt change in demand for the organization's product
• Abrupt change in the consumer's ability or willingness to pay for the product at the current price
• Change in the willingness of donors to provide support for this kind of activity
• Change in the costs of inputs necessary for producing the deliverables
• Appearance of a strong competitor who draws off demand and donors

We can easily think of examples of each of these changes. Gasoline prices spiked in summer 2010 and demand for large vehicles plummeted. Rapid increase in unemployment results in a massive decline to demand for mid-range restaurants. Foundations get frustrated about the slow rate of progress in education reform and cut back on funding for education reform NGOs. Digital photography rapidly undermines film companies. The iPod swamps the market for digital music players and other suppliers fail in the marketplace.

The question I'm raising here is a difficult one: what does an organization need to do in order to perceive and adapt to persistent changes like these? If we were asking this question in the field of ecology, the answer would be simple: many local species facing this kind of change simply will not be able to adapt in time and will go locally extinct. Natural selection is not a rapid-adaptation process, in general. Random variation and selection take time and large populations.

But this doesn't need to be the case for organizations. Organizations are led by intelligent and forward-looking people, after all, so in theory it should be possible for organizations to perceive impending change in their business environments and adjust accordingly. However, we also know that many organizations fail to do so. Think of the newspaper industry, the music publishing industry, the film-based photography industry, and some sectors of charitable providers.

So what are some positive heuristics that support effective adaptation? And what are some common sources of failure?

On the positive side:

• Be fact-driven and honest in assessing current conditions in the operating environment. Don't permit wishful thinking to cloud the assessment.
• Be rigorous in analyzing the consequences of these changes. If you are the leader of a non-profit with a great mission in an environment where funders have decisively turned away from this issue, consider the alternatives: downsize the delivery plan, reduce the cost of delivery, change the priorities of the organization, find new revenue partners, or find new sources of funding.
• Be innovative; search carefully for new ways of accomplishing the organization's goals at lower overall cost. A labor union might consider whether its army of organizers might be made more efficient (lower resource cost) by making use of social media.

On the negative side, we can think of a number of psychological and institutional factors that impede successful adaptation. Wishful thinking is at the top of the list. It is very easy for decision makers to persuade themselves that observed trends will quickly reverse -- "the foundations will soon return to a focus on poverty," "digital photography will never achieve the resolution and color fidelity of film," "the state's support for poverty programs will return after the next election."

Second, decision makers may reason that careful but painful adaptation in the near term may be more painful for them individually than the consequences of eventual failure of the organization in the long term. This may be worsened by CEO compensation packages that create perverse incentives for them. The CEO of our fictional cigarette lighter manufacturer may reason that another 10 years of gradually declining sales, leading to bankruptcy, may be preferable to the turbulence and conflict associated with downsizing, shifting to another product, or introducing a lot of new technology.

Third, institutions have an enormous amount of inertia when it comes to change. Consolidating services within an organization, for example, is almost always met with a great deal of resistance from the various divisions that will need to "share" their IT person, their budget specialist, or their web designer.  And rethinking the "deliverable" of the organization, or the way that it is provided, is also often met with a lot of internal resistance.  A poverty-focused organization like the United Way may decide that its old model of distributing charitable funds needs to be more focused on a few central priorities; and this shift of delivery is likely to be met with resistance both internally (from existing staff) and externally (from powerful beneficiaries of the earlier system).

Fourth, there are very real limits on our ability to project current information onto future realities. What was called wishful thinking above might well be accurate in some situations: the current dire circumstances do sometimes get better and the existing business plan turns out to be sustainable after all. So there is always a degree of uncertainty associated with efforts to assess the current and future business environment.

No organization wants to be classified as a "dinosaur" -- the perfect embodiment of an "organization" (species) trapped in a period of change that moves more rapidly than its ability to adapt. But many do in fact find themselves in the contemporary equivalent of the tarpits when they run into unfamiliar and rapid periods of change. I have to hope that universities don't allow themselves to slip into that kind of endgame as they face the difficult and changing environment that currently confronts them.

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_institutions,organization

Re-mapping the philosophy of history

The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is it about history that supports philosophical inquiry? Why is the enterprise of investigating, documenting, and explaining facts about the past amenable to philosophical study? What makes the effort to arrive at knowledge of facts about the past an area of philosophical concern?

There are a couple of matters that are relatively clear. First, the domain of historical knowledge is a familiar subject for philosophical inquiry. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge generally. Philosophy of science is the careful analysis of the methods and justification of scientific knowledge. And philosophy of historical knowledge is likewise an epistemic and methodological domain: How do we know about the past? Are there limits to our possible knowledge about the past? What is involved in explaining a historical fact? Answers to these questions and others in the same vein may be difficult and controversial; but it is clear how they fit into existing conceptions of philosophical inquiry.

If the philosophy of history were limited to these sorts of questions, then it would be a variant of epistemology or the philosophy of science. However, some philosophers have felt that substantive history itself raises questions that do not reduce to questions about knowledge of this domain.

Here is one possibility: perhaps we need a metaphysics of history -- an account of the kinds of things, forces, and structures that exist in the realm of history. Perhaps the metaphysics of history can shed light on what kinds of structures and entities travel through history, and what kinds of causal processes and dynamical systems propel change in the structures and entities.

For example: Marx wrote that "history is the history of class conflict." This implies that classes are historical objects -- they exist in the flow of historical events. Other historians have said things like this: classical slavery gave way to feudalism, which was followed by capitalism. This formulation presupposes that large social-economic systems -- for example, social property systems -- exist in history and conform to some set of dynamics. And yet others have tried to analyze world history into a set of more or less distinct civilizations -- bodies of values, ideas, identities, and institutions that differ significantly one from the other.

We might say, however, that none of these questions pertains to a metaphysics of history, but rather a metaphysics of the social world. History is about change and transformation; but the subject of change is social structures, cultures, and agents that exist within the social world at a period of time. So classes, social-property systems, ideologies, and religions are all social arrangements that change over time. If there is such a thing as a "civilization", this is a fact about society at a certain time, not a fact about the structure of history. History has to do with events and dynamic properties; the social world encompasses everything that is happening at a moment in time. We might consider an analogy with fluids -- "history" is the waves, society is the water.

We might be more inclined to recognize a metaphysics of history if we thought there were temporal structures that could be discovered in substantive history -- perhaps the business cycle, the Kondratiev long-wave economic cycle, or the rise and fall of civilizations. In other words, if we thought that events and changes conformed to a higher-level pattern of temporal change, we might want to say that the meta-temporal pattern is a metaphysical characteristic of history. But it would also be tempting to say: these patterns of change too represent nothing more than empirical characteristics of social phenomena over time. They need to be explained using the tools of the social sciences and are not properly the subject of apriori investigation.
This suggests two important conclusions: There is no such thing as an historical ontology as such but only a social ontology; and there is no such thing as an historical theory of change as such but only social theories of change. The ontologies and theories that historians employ are strictly speaking features of social science knowledge rather than historical knowledge. So, properly understood, there is no legitimate place for an investigation of the "metaphysics" of history; that space is filled entirely by an understanding of the metaphysics of the social world. tIn this case, the philosophy of history is no more than a component of the philosophy of social science, with no distinctive questions or answers of its own other than the epistemological issues mentioned above.

This discussion suggests a few rather deflationary conclusions about the possible scope of research in the philosophy of history:

• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the epistemology and methodology of historical knowledge is straightforward but limited.
• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the metaphysical underpinnings of "history" will be disappointing; those foundations exist within the domain of the philosophy of the social sciences rather than the philosophy of history.
• The dynamics of historical change are properly the subject matter of the social sciences rather than the philosopher of history.
• It is true that some historical investigation requires "hermeneutic" interpretation of meanings; but these efforts always fall at the level of interpreting the meaning of historical actions and cultural settings.

This analysis suggests there isn't a lot of scope for the philosophy of history beyond the function of serving as a counterpart to the philosophy of science. We might say that there are basically three relevant activities in the realm of historical thinking. There is first-order research into facts about the past based on currently available evidence. There is analysis and explanation of those facts, including methods ranging from ethnography to process-tracing to application of findings from the social sciences. These two parts of historical research are guided by ensembles of historical methods and practices (historiography). And there is philosophical reflection on the logic and limitations of these processes of inquiry and inference, the narrowly epistemic version of the philosophy of history. This aspect of the discussion includes as well the conceptual work that philosophers are well qualified for -- posing and answering questions like "What is history?", "What is a cause?", or "What is involved in expressing a meaningful action?". On this scenario there is no room at all for substantive or metaphysical philosophy of history.

The title of Ian Hacking's book, Historical Ontology, suggests that he thinks otherwise, and that there is such a thing as an ontology of history. However, the sense of the title is different: he is interested in the history of ontologies -- the ways that our conceptual systems have changed over time -- rather than the ontology of history.

(I should say that this is a pretty limited view of the scope of the philosophy of history, so it should be taken as provisional.)

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_history

What is "history"?

What is "history"? And what is involved in historical research and knowledge creation?

We might begin by attempting to specify the meaning of the word. Consider this: History is the sum total of human actions, thoughts, and institutions, arranged in temporal order. Call this "substantive history." History is social action in time, performed by a specific population at a time. Individuals act, contribute to social institutions, and contribute to change.  People had beliefs and modes of behavior in the past. They did various things. Their activities were embedded within, and in turn constituted, social institutions at a variety of levels.  Social institutions, structures, and ideologies supervene upon the historical individuals of a time. Institutions may have great depth, breadth, and complexity. Institutions, structures, and ideologies display dynamics of change that derive ultimately from the mentalities and actions of the individuals who inhabit them during a period of time.  And both behavior and institutions change over time.  "History" is the temporally ordered sum of all these facts.

We are interested in understanding history for a couple of reasons.

We are interested in knowing how people lived and thought in times and settings very distant from our own. What was it like to be a medieval baker or beadle or wife?

We are interested in the concrete social arrangements and institutions that existed at various points in time. We would like to know how marriage or tax collecting worked in rural Ming China.

We are interested in the dynamics of change -- the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the reasons for a rash of peasant rebellions in 18th-century China, the reasons for the occurrence and characteristics of the Industrial Revolution.

We are interested in quantitative assembly of historical data -- population, economic activity, other kinds of social data.

Understanding the first kind of thing has a lot in common with ethnography or interpretive research; we uncover what we can of the circumstances, actions, and symbols of a group of people, and we try to reconstruct their mentality and their reasons for acting as they did.

Understanding the second kind of thing requires careful study of existing records that permit inferences about how basic institutions worked. Examples include bodies of law, charters, manorial records, and the like.

Understanding the third kind of thing has to do with identifying dynamic causal processes of the sort that the social sciences study -- why legislatures tend towards certain kinds of institutions and behaviors, why bureaucracies tend towards rigidity, why people are susceptible to extremism. This second kind of question pays attention to both internal reasons for change and external reasons -- an internal dynamic towards dynastic instability and an external shock imposed by sudden climate change, for example.

Understanding the fourth kind of thing requires discovering data sources in the historical records and archives that permit estimation of things like marriage rates, grain prices, or church membership totals, and then analyzing and presenting these data in convincing ways using established methods in social science quantitative methodologies.

So historians can ask a relatively limited series of questions about time and change:

• Why did actors choose to act as they did during period P?
• How were actors shaped in agency and identity during period P?
• What institutions, structures, and mentalities existed during period P?
• What dynamics of change were inherent in institutions, structures, and mentalities of these sorts during period P?
• What contingent events and actions took place in period P that influenced the mentality, actions, and structures of the successor period P'?

This suggests a fairly simple logic of historical representation:

• Historians discover factual circumstances about conditions of life, action, and thought (mentality) during specific periods.
• Historians identify changes in these conditions from one period to another.
• Historians identify the features of social relationships, institutions, structures, and ideologies during specific periods.
• Historians use a "path-tracing" methodology to discern how circumstances and actions in one period led to specific outcomes in a later period.
• Historians make use of the findings of the social sciences to identify social dynamics associated with specific kinds of social institutions, structures, and ways of thinking.

The historian who is primarily interested in the specifics of a particular time and place is more distant from the social sciences. This work is more particularistic and "idiographic". The historian who is primarily interested in the dynamics of transition and transformation is more closely related to the social sciences, since he/she needs to borrow good theories about how institutions work. This work is more interested in causes and generalizations (usually at a meso level).

This description leaves out a great deal of what historians spend a lot of time on: formulating narratives that make sense, discovering unexpected causes or outcomes of historical circumstances, finding new perspectives on old historical questions, or just figuring out what is going on in an archival source (like the photo above), for example.  I've tried to strip away those elements of the historian's work, in order to highlight the logic of the varieties of factual and explanatory claims that historians make.  What I've described is abstract, of course, but it seems to capture the main elements of historical cognition.  In an upcoming post I will ask how philosophy is relevant to this body of intellectual activity -- why, that is, we might want to have a philosophy of history.

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_history

thescribblerspen

thescribblerspen

Read more »

Sen on well-being

In 1985 Amartya Sen published a very short book entitled Commodities and Capabilities. The book was reissued by Oxford after Sen received his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

The topic is at the core of Sen's economic and philosophical work. Most basically, he is asking Aristotle's question -- what is happiness? -- and is putting forward an answer that combines analysis of economic behavior with philosophical analysis of action and purpose in human life. Economists from Mill to Samuelson sought to understand economic choices in terms of subjective utilities and unanalyzed sets of preferences. A consistent theme was that economics can't be concerned with the content or validity of the individual's utility function or preference ordering. Rather, economics is about the rules by which rational agents design their actions to maximize utility or preference satisfaction. Economic rationality has to do with the choice of means, not ends.

This approach to action also unfolded into the formal theory of social choice. Given that citizens have a set of preferences about social outcomes, what rational procedures can be designed to aggregate these preferences into a single coherent social choice preference ordering.  Essentially the underlying idea is that the social good is secured when we succeed in aggregating citizens' preferences onto a single social preference ranking.  And this is where Kenneth Arrow's famous impossibility theorem comes in: given a small set of reasonable constraints on social choice, there is no social choice procedure that is both complete and transitive (Social Choice and Individual Values, Second edition). Sen's first major book (1970) gave a different formal exposition to this set of arguments (Collective choice and social welfare).

One of Sen's most fundamental contributions in economics is to question the theory of subjective utility and revealed preference. He thinks that we can give a substantive, not formal, account of wellbeing that permits us to analyze the individual's behavior and choices in a more meaningful way.  He writes here:

It is fair to say that formal economics has not been very interested in the plurality of focus in judging a person's states and interests. In fact, often enough the very richness of the subject matter has been seen as an embarrassment. There is a powerful tradition in economic analysis that tries to eschew the distinctions and make do with one simple measure of a person's interest and its fulfilment.  That measure is often called 'utility'. (1)

He wants to complicate the issue by drawing distinctions -- that is, by breaking down the austere abstractions about choice that are most comfortable to the economists:

I would distinguish broadly between two ways of seeing a person's interests and their fulfilment, and I shall call them respectively 'well-being' and 'advantage'. 'Well-being' is concerned with a person's achievement: how 'well' is his or her 'being'? 'Advantage' refers to the real opportunities that the person has, especially compared with others. The opportunities are not judged only by the results achieved, and therefore not just by the level of well-being achieved. It is possible for a person to have genuine advantage and still to 'muff' them.  Or to sacrifice one's own well-being for other goals, and not to make full use of one's freedom to achieve a high level of well-being.  The notion of advantage deals with a person's real opportunities compared with others. The freedom to achieve well-being is closer to the notion of advantage than well-being itself. (3)

This discussion announces his important distinction between capabilities and functionings; functionings are the realized form that capabilities take when they are fully cultivated.  "A functioning is an achievement of a person: what he or she manages to do or to be" (7).  It is worth noticing that the idea of freedom comes into this formulation in a fundamental way -- fifteen years before freedom becomes central to his thinking about the good of economic development in Development as Freedom.

Sen's argument next moves into another topic that has been characteristic of his thinking throughout his career, the relationship between two or three central components of "satisfaction" or "well-being".  There is subjective satisfaction -- the degree to which the individual has accomplished a large portion of his/her preferences.  There is the role of commodities and material things in the composition of individual satisfaction -- the bundle of stuff that the individual can call upon in attempting to satisfy basic needs and desires, from grain and clean water to iPads and access to the Internet.  And there is the "fit" between the individual's material circumstances and his/her ability to fulfill capabilities and complete an autonomous plan of life.

The key idea expressed in this monograph and subsequently in Sen's work is that well-being is the aggregation of the individual's collection of functionings.  "It is possible to argue that the well-being of a person is best seen as an index of the person's functionings" (17).

On what does the claim of functionings to reflect well-being rest? Basically, the claim builds on the straightforward fact that how well a person is must be a matter of what kind of life he or she is living, and what the person is succeeding in 'doing' or 'being'. (19)

And Sen thinks about this formulation in formal terms: the person's functionings are represented as a vector of qualitatively distinct characteristics, and one of the central problems is to assign relative values to the components of the package.

The primary specification of a person's well-being is in terms of a functioning vector bi. It can be converted into a scalar measure of well-being only through a real-valued 'valuation function' vi(.), mapping functioning vectors into numerical representations of well-being. (33)

Sen's approach is appealing largely because it replaces "utility" with a more granular conception of "functionings".  This permits more concrete discussion of the individual's life activities and, as Sen argues here, a better way of assessing his/her overall well-being.

What has turned out to be enormously important in Sen's framework of capabilities and functionings is its relevance to the topic of economic development.  We want economic development to lead to an overall improvement in human happiness.  But how should such a goal be assessed and measured?  By offering a concrete theory of functionings, Sen lays a basis for attempting to empirically measure changes in functionings over time.  Literacy, for example, is an important functioning for the human being.  Extremely poor societies invest very little in formal education, and literacy in the population is low.  We can make a very concrete argument that a given strategy of development is improving human well-being if we can demonstrate that it is leading to a higher level of attainment of literacy.  Health itself is a complex functioning for the human being; here too, it is possible to measure progress in health achievements in different societies.  So the functionings approach provides a concrete way of trying to assess progress in economic development processes.  The approach is a great improvement over the "average GDP" approach, since Sen demonstrates in numerous places that average income implies something about access to commodities, but it has only a weak connection to the functionings that the population is able to realize.

The Human Development Index championed by the United Nations Development Programme takes advantage of this insight.  HDI includes three measures: life expectancy, literacy, and per capita GDP (link).  And a very powerful argument can be made that societies that make the most progress in improving their HDI levels have made more progress in improving human well-being than those that increase GDP but fail to improve factors like literacy and health.  It will not surprise the reader to learn that Sen's writings and advocacy played a crucial role in the design of the HDI.

Read more »

Posted in: CAT_agency,economic development,globalization