The moral sentiments

One of Adam Smith's contributions to the study of philosophical ethics is his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is an interesting work, one part descriptive moral psychology, one part theory of the emotions.  Here is the opening paragraph (link):

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

So Smith asserts as a matter of empirical fact that there are common moral emotions and feelings -- sympathy, pity, compassion -- that underlie human social and moral behavior.  And the most basic kinds of morally motivated behavior -- altruism in particular -- are explained by the workings of these natural emotions of empathy with other human beings.  So Smith posed a fundamental question: is there an innate human moral psychology, beyond the reach of training and teaching, that accounts for our willingness to give to others and sometimes sacrifice important interests for the good of others?  Why do firemen rush into the highly dangerous environment of a large fire in order to rescue the people inside?

Now fast-forward to the post-Darwinian world; look at the human organism from the point of view of the study of primate behavior; and ask this key question: Is there an evolutionary basis for social behaviors? Are there emotions supporting cooperation that were selected for through our evolutionary history? Is a moral capacity hardwired?

Philosophers have treated this question in the past.  Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment is a particularly good example. Here is how Gibbard describes the situation.

Consider now human beings evolving in hunting-gathering societies.  We could expect them to face an abundance of human bargaining situations, involving mutual aid, personal property, mates, territory, use of housing, and the like.  Human bargaining situations tend to be evolutionary bargaining situations.  Human goals tend toward biological fitness, toward reproduction.  The point is not, of course, that a person's sole goal is to maximize his reproduction; few if any people have that as a goal at all.  Rather, the point concerns propensities to develop goals.  Those propensities that conferred greatest fitness were selected; hence in a hunting-gathering society, people tended to want the various things it was fitness-enhancing for them to want.  Conditions of primitive human life must have required intricate coordination--both of the simple cooperative kinds involved, say, in meeting a person, and of the kind required for bargaining problems to yield mutually beneficial outcomes. Propensities well coordinated with the propensities of others would have been fitness-enhancing, and so we may view a vast array of human propensities as coordinating devices.  Our emotional propensities, I suggest, are largely the results of these selection pressures, and so are our normative capacities. (67)

One of Gibbard's key points is an analytical one. He argues against the idea of there being specific moral content, ethical principles, or moral emotions that are embodied in the central nervous system (CNS) as a result of variation and selection. Instead, he argues for there being a hardwired set of more abstract capacities that have CNS reality and selection advantage: the ability to learn a norm and to act in accordance with it.  (Richard Joyce makes a similar point: "Evolutionary psychology does not claim that observable human behavior is adaptive, but rather that it is produced by psychological mechanisms that are adaptations.  The output of an adaptation need not be adaptive" (5).)

This is the part that seems counter-intuitive from a simple Darwinian point of view. Wouldn't an organism possessing a genetically determined disposition to act contrary to its mortal interests almost necessarily have less reproductive success? So shouldn't such a gene quickly lose out to a more opportunistic alternative? Gibbard considers the evolutionary arguments surrounding the topic of altruism (including Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene), and concludes -- not necessarily.  It is possible to mount an evolutionary argument that establishes the fitness-enhancing characteristics of some specific kinds of altruistic behavior.

So what does the current research on this topic add to what we already knew?  And, can we draw any interesting connections back to the venerable Smith?

In fact, there seems to be a new surge of interest in the topic.  A number of philosophers and psychologists are now interested in treating moral psychology as an empirical question, and they are interested in working back to the evolutionary environment in which these human capacities emerged.   (For example, Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 1: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness.)  Particularly interesting is research by Michael Tomasello and his collaborators.  Tomasello is the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  He argues that human beings are hardwired for cooperation, empathy, and social intensionality in a very interesting recent book, Why We Cooperate.  A great deal of his research has to do with experiments and observations of human children (9-24 months) and of young non-human primates.  He finds, essentially, that infants and children display a range of behaviors that seem to reveal a natural readiness for altruism, sharing, coordination, and eventually following of norms.  "I only propose that the kinds of collaborative activities in which young children today engage are the natural cradle of social norms of the cooperative variety.  This is because they contain the seeds of the two key ingredients" (89-90).  He presents a range of experimental data supporting these ideas:

• Human infants have a pre-cultural disposition to be helpful and empathetic (12-14 months) 
• Human toddlers adjust their cooperative and normative behavior to be more attentive to the behavior of others: generous to the generous and not to the ungenerous. 
• Human infants and toddlers have a precultural disposition to absorb and enforce norms. 
• The emotions of guilt and shame to be hardwired to conformance to norms. 
• Infants appear to take a "we" intentional stance without learning.  They are able to quickly figure out what another agent is trying to do.
• Chimps differ from human infants in virtually each of these areas. 

Here is a particularly interesting piece of evidence that Tomasello offers in support of the idea that human evolution was shaped by selection pressures that favored social coordination: the whites of the eyes in the human being.  Almost all non-human species have eyes that are primarily dark; whereas human eyes feature a large and conspicuous circle of white (the sclera).  The whites of the eyes permit an observer to determine what another individual is looking at -- allowing human individuals to achieve a substantially greater degree of shared attention and coordination.  "My team has argued that advertising my eye direction for all to see could only have evolved in a cooperative social environment in which others were not likely to exploit it to my detriment" (76).

So does this recent work on the evolutionary basis of moral emotions have anything to do with Smith and the moral sentiments?  What the two bodies of thought have in common is the idea that there is a psychological foundation to moral behavior, cooperation, altruism, and helping.  Pure maximizing rationality doesn't get you to "helping"; rather, there needs to be some psychological impulse to improve things for the other person.  Where evolutionary psychology differs from Smith is precisely in the nature of the explanation that is offered for this moral psychology; we have the advantage of having a pretty good idea of how natural selection works on biological traits, and we are therefore in a better position than Smith was to explain why human beings possess moral sentiments.  What we cannot yet answer is the question of the nature of the mechanism at the level of the central nervous system or the cognitive system, of how these moral sentiments are embodied in the human organism.

(It is interesting to contrast this line of argument with that of Tom Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism.  Nagel argues against the moral psychology of Hume -- very similar to that of Smith -- and argues that altruism is actually a feature of rationality.  We behave altruistically, fundamentally, because we have a rational representation of the reality of the external world and of other persons; and to recognize the reality of another person is immediately to have a reason to help the other person.  So no "motor" of moral emotion is needed in order to explain altruistic behavior.  On this approach, we don't need to postulate moral sentiments to explain moral behavior; all we need is a rich conception of practical rationality.)

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Posted in: CAT_cognition,evolution,morality,motivation

Rawls on Marx; December 1973

John Rawls taught a course on the history of political philosophy throughout much of his career at Harvard University.  The course contained his description and analysis of the most important figures in modern political philosophy, including Mill, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx.  The course evolved over time; the final version from 1994 is edited in Samuel Freeman's Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.  I served as graduate assistant in Rawls's lectures on this subject in fall 1973, and recently reread my notes of the course.  Here are my notes of a particularly important lecture towards the end of the course: Rawls's treatment of Marx's ideas about economic justice.  This lecture demonstrates Rawls's understanding of the fundamentals of Marx's economic theories and the labor theory of value.  (I am inclined to think that Joseph Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis (1954) was an important source for Rawls on the history of economic thought, including Marx's economics, though I can't at this moment confirm this.)  This lecture is particularly significant in that it is roughly simultaneous with the emergence of "analytical Marxism" announced by the publication of an important article by Allen Wood, "The Marxian Critique of Justice" in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972 (link).

MARX'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE THEORY OF JUSTICE 

John Rawls, History of Political Philosophy, Phil 171, fall 1973
Notes from lecture, December 11, 1973
[notes taken by Daniel Little; intended to capture Rawls's formulations of the main points presented in the lecture]

[Quoting Rawls:]

Capital seems to be a description of an unjust society. The owners of the means of production live in relative abundance and idleness at the expense of the ever-growing class of wretched laborers. But Marx doesn't make any attempt to present an argument that capitalism is unjust, nor any concept of justice which would back up such an argument. Moreover, we have vitriolic criticisms of utopian socialists who did condemn capitalism on the grounds of justice. Marx asserts on the contrary, that capitalism is perfectly fair, perfectly just.  Why so?

(a) It is not enough to say Marx is averse to preaching or moralizing. He is so averse; but judgments of justice can be reasoned and hence not properly described as "preaching".

(b) It is not enough to say that he didn't want the critique of capitalism to rest on some social ideal. He does reject the utopian socialists' program; but that would not prevent him from stating his own opinion. And he doesn't do that either. He reproaches the utopians for not realizing that some major social change must precede an adjustment along moral lines.

Here is my conjecture as to why Marx didn't judge capitalism unjust. He thinks of justice as a political and juridical conception which is associated with a particular conception of the state and society; so it belongs to the prehistory of mankind. Given his picture of human society, these political and juridical institutions belong to the superstructure, and reflect the workings of the mode of production. For each mode of production there is a conception of justice appropriate to it, at least in prehistory. A further qualification: It is worthwhile to distinguish between the high time of a form and its low period -- where the form is a progressive force and where it stands in contradiction to the mode of production.

Here is a brief discussion of justice in Capital III:

To speak here of natural justice, as Gilbart does, is nonsense. The justice of the transactions between agents of production rests on the fact that these arise as natural consequences out of the production relationships. The juristic forms in which these economic transactions appear as wilful acts of the parties concerned, as expressions of their common will and as contracts that may be enforced by law against some individual party, cannot, being mere forms, determine this content. They merely express it. This content is just whenever it corresponds, is appropriate to the mode of production. It is unjust whenever it contradics that mode. Slavery on the basis of capitalist production is unjust; likewise fraud in the quality of commodities. (Capital III, 339-40) 

Here Marx conceives of justice in terms of adequacy to the mode of production.  (1) The justice of legal forms cannot be discovered on the basis of those forms alone. Rather it depends upon their adequacy to the mode of production. The juridical institution is formal; to give it content we must look to the way of life and its requirements. A consequence: There is no universal theory of justice which allows us to evaluate generally the social institutions of any society. There is no general principle like "slavery is always unjust." There are thus no general rules of natural rights, no universal justice. (2) This adjustment of justice to the mode of production doesn't mean there are no injustices. Slavery is unjust under capitalism; wage labor is just under capitalism, provided that the worker is paid the value of his labor power.

This view seems to suggest a sort of relativism; but this would be a faulty conclusion. We have a theory matching theories of justice with modes of production, and we might at some time find a function systematically linking them.

Let's now try out this suggestion on the conception of surplus value. The utopians argued that workers ought to be paid the value of their contribution to the firm. Since they are not, capitalism is unjust. Marx rejects this view. It makes the appropriation of surplus value appear accidental -- as if the capitalists could act differently. Marx required a theory of value which made the appropriation of surplus value a necessary part of the capitalist system. On the theory of value every commodity is exchanged for a strict equivalent.

Marx distinguishes between the product of labor and labor power. The worker is given the value of his labor power, not his product. It is on this ground that he is fairly treated. Thus he is undercutting the Ricardian socialist position by rejecting and replacing the principle of contribution. It is the system itself which brings about surplus value, not the behavior of individuals who violate moral principles. Surplus value is an intrinsic part of the working of the social institutions of capitalism.

Consider the description of the production of surplus value in Capital.

Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed their use-value. ... This metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, takes place both within the sphere of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation, because what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production of surplus value. (Capital I, p. 194)

The fact that surplus value arises is a piece of good fortune for the buyer, but no injustice to the seller.

Marx thus rejects the Ricardian principle of contribution. He finds it a bourgeois notion, basing property rights on one's labor.

Summing up. (1) Marx views the notion of justice as a virtue of legal forms and institutions, and thus perhaps it is a notion which belongs to prehistory. The state depends upon the mode of production. (2) Marx doesn't deny that the various conceptions of justice have formal features in common -- exchange of equivalents for equivalents -- but the notion of what is equivalent is determined in different ways. Marx would be prepared to admit that capitalism in its high period is just. One reason he rejects the utopian's argument is that it is misleading. It rests on a misapprehension of where the essential problem lies: not in the superstructure, but in the mode of production. He felt that the key enterprise is to give a scientific theory of the mode of production.

A second point: justice is a distributive notion. The appeal to justice suggests that we can separate the mode of distribution from the mode of production. This is for Marx incorrect. Appeals to justice are thus supposed to be superficial. Moreover, appeal to justice suggests that important social change can be achieved by legislation.

[Other relevant materials from the course:]

From the syllabus:

(a) Marx's criticism of the liberal state; (b) His attitude towards theories of justice; (c) The theory of alienation and exploitation; (d) The conception of rational human society

Final exam questions on Marx:

4. Present and discuss Marx's theory of alienation (as developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts)
5. Present and discuss Marx's theory of historical materialism (as developed in the German Ideology)
6. Present and discuss Marx's analysis of historical change in the Communist Manifesto.
7. Outline Marx's analysis of the basic characteristics of capitalism: the social relations which define it and the nature of the form of economic production.

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_moraltheory,justice,Marx,Rawls

Essentializing race?

PBS is running a program this month called "Faces of America" (link), hosted by distinguished African-American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  The program focuses on a handful of celebrity guests, a genetic profile for each, and then a variety of "surprising" discoveries about the genealogies of various of the guests.

What I found surprising and jarring in viewing Episode 3 is the degree of essentialism about race the script seems to presuppose.  Gates's script seems to suggest that one's racial or ethnic identity is a function of one's genotype and one's ancestral (though unknown) history.  At one point Professor Gates has a discussion with Kristi Yamaguchi, the Japanese figure skater.  Pointing out that her genetic profile indicates descent from a particular genetic group that originated in far northern Asia some hundred thousand years ago, he makes a joke to the effect that perhaps her skating talent is a reflection of her ancestry in an extremely cold climate.  It's a joke, of course; but it is a telling one.  It conveys the idea that genes make the person; that one's biological ancestry constitutes one's race or ancestry and one's current characteristics.

What is surprising about this biological essentialism is the fact that most scholars who think deeply about race have decisively concluded that race is not a biological category but a cultural one.  A person's race is socially constructed, deriving from the cultural communities in which he/she was formed and not primarily from his/her genotype or biological ancestry.  Population geneticists find that there is as much genetic variation within a "racial" group as across racial groups; which seems to imply directly that the race of each group is not determined by the genetic profile of the group.  Instead, racial or ethnic identity is created by the cultural environment in which one forms his/her most basic psychological dispositions.

The American Anthropological Association has had good reason to think deeply and critically about the concept of "race."  In 1998 the AAA released a careful statement on race.  Here are a few specific claims included in the statement:

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species. 

...

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world. 

So fundamentally, my reaction to the "Faces of America" script is that it seriously misrepresents the social reality of race and ethnicity, implying that identity follows from biology.  Now, of course Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is perfectly well aware of this view of the status of the category of race; he is in fact one of the country's leading thinkers on this subject.  So it is surprising that he would have permitted the simplistic version of the facts of race, ethnicity, and ancestry that the series conveys.

The most convincing voice I heard in the program was a statement by Ojibwe novelist Louise Erdrich who declined to undergo the genetic screening for the program.  Her explanation of her thinking, roughly, was that her Ojibwe identity was constituted by her experience of family and community, not by ancestry; and she preferred not to confuse that identity by conflating it with facts about her distant ancestors.

The point I am making here is not that the genetic techniques to which the program refers are scientifically invalid; I would be willing to assume that there is good science behind the inferences from one person's genotype to conclusions about distant ancestry (including the gimmick of discovering that several of the guests have an ancestor in common).  But my point is that this doesn't tell us anything at all of much interest about race or ethnicity; these are cultural constructs rather than biological facts.

Personally the conclusion I would rather come to goes along these lines: our genotypes matter very little to our current experience and social location.  The origins of our most distant ancestors is of some scientific interest but not much social significance.  If we take pride in being "Asian-American," "Irish," or "African-American," it is because we have had specific social, family, and community experiences that lead us to identify with those groups and to give special importance in their struggles and achievements through history.  The child who was a foundling in New York in 1900 and was raised in an Irish-Catholic family is no less Irish and no less Catholic if it turns out her father was an Italian anarchist and her mother was a Swedish Protestant.  It is the particular communities into which we have socialized that constitute our identities, and I think that extends to racial and ethnic identities.  Of course, some readers may think that this perspective also leads to somewhat paradoxical conclusions -- for example, the foundling who is "Irish" without a bit of Celtic ancestry, or that one could be Native American without any tribal ancestry.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,culture,identity,race

Appearance and reality in public life

So what kind of democracy do we have?  Do our institutions do a great job of establishing the public interest over the medium term, or have our institutions been captured by private interests, leaving essentially no real power in the hands of citizens?

The way it is supposed to work, according to Civics 101:

• Elected officials faithfully consider proposed legislation, based on their expressed political values, the interests of their constituents, and their perception of the best longterm interest of the polity.
• Decisions are made in public view.
• Legislative debates turn on the public presentation of reasons in favor of or against proposed legislation, invoking only rational assessment of likely consequences, fitness of proposed legislation to the longterm best interests of the polity, and consistency with existing law and constitution.
• Agencies use experts to faithfully create regulations that implement legislation in ways that are consistent with legislative intent, grounded in rational study of relevant scientific findings, and impartially applied without regard to persons or specific private interests.
• Lobbyists are able to influence legislation and regulation only through compelling rational arguments based on cost-benefit analysis, legitimate expression of a given set of affected interests, and public knowledge of their advocacy.

This sounds pretty much like the way that Rousseau would have expected the legislative process to have worked within the ideal polity; legislation enacts the "general will".

The not-so-ideal case:

• Elected officials give excessive importance to the impact their positions will have on the voters back home -- thereby paying less attention to the facts and consequences for the public good of various legislative initiatives.
• Elected officials sometimes permit themselves to be influenced by campaign contributions and other personal advantages from industries and other private interests, thereby supporting or opposing initiatives for reasons other than the overall goodness or badness of the legislation for the public good.
• Regulative agencies are influenced by industry "experts" in writing regulations, with the result that regulatory regimes are tilted towards the private interests of the regulated industries rather than neutrally establishing public health and safety.
• Lobbyists have substantial access to legislators and regulators, with the result that they are able to move the dial in their favored direction.

We might describe this scenario as the pluralism scenario, along the lines of Robert Dahl's theories of democracy.  Various interests contend through the use of various legal tools of influence, and the resulting set of laws, policies, and regulations represent a rough-and-ready balance of the many interested parties in a complex society.  Private interests have weight on this scenario, but they don't determine the outcomes.

The nightmare scenario for democracy:

• Elected officials have no sincere adherence to the public good; they pursue their own private and political interests through all the powers available to them. (Senator Jim Bunning's unembarrassed willingness to block extension of unemployment legislation for narrow personal and political reasons falls in this category.)
• Elected officials are sometimes overtly corruptible, accepting significant gifts in exchange for official performance. 
• Elected officials are intimidated by the power of private interests (corporations) to fund electoral opposition to their re-election.  (The Supreme Court decision on corporate free speech makes this much more likely.)
• Regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries they regulate; independent commissioners are forced out of office; and regulations are toothless when it comes to environmental protection, wilderness protection, health and safety in the workplace, and food safety.
• Lobbyists for special interests and corporations have almost unrestricted access to legislators and regulators, and are generally able to achieve their goals.

This is the nightmare scenario if one cares about democracy, because it implies that the apparatus of government is essentially controlled by private interests rather than the common good and the broad interests of society as a whole.  It isn't "pluralism", because there are many important social interests not represented in this system in any meaningful way: poor people, non-unionized workers, people without health insurance, inner-city youth, the environment, people exposed to toxic waste, ...

The fact that healthcare reform, regulation of CO2 emissions, and significant reform of the financial system have all been essentially blocked in the current legislative process seems to point to one of these scenarios; and it isn't the first or the second.

I'll quote an idea used in the previous posting to suggest one possible way forward for our democracy: a movement towards substantially greater participatory democracy in this country.  Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright address the future of our democracy in Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance.  Here is how they set the stage for their analysis:

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century -- representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration -- seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century.  "Democracy" as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices.  Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions fo the democratic idea, assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation's wealth. (3)

It is an interesting question to consider whether a participatory process surrounding the issue of healthcare reform would have led to a more satisfactory outcome.  Given the results of the raucous, aggressive, and incivil disruption of town-hall meetings that occurred last summer around this issue, it is hard to be too optimistic about this approach either.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,corruption,democracy

Democracy and agency in development ethics

Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to explore the moral issues involved in global social and economic transformation.  Key to the urgency of the field is the fact of massive global poverty, hunger, and inequality.  The current situation of the world's poor -- in Egypt, India, Mexico, Sudan, or Brazil, for example -- is entirely unacceptable from a human point of view.  And governments, organizations, and individuals have positive moral obligations to work towards reducing these forms of massive suffering, and helping construct social and economic institutions that systematically reduce poverty.  So much is clear from the 60,000 foot level.  But how much more specificity can we provide about the bad of poverty, the principles of global justice, or the goals of development, so that moral theory can provide something of a guide to policy and action?  To what extent can we usefully connect moral theory to the practical challenges of designing workable development strategies?

Philosophers and social scientists have made a series of efforts at formulating a foundation for development ethics since the end of World War II.  Early contributors were Denis Goulet (Development Ethics: A Guide to Theory and Practice) and Robert Chambers (Rural Development: Putting the last first).  But the major progress in the field occurred through the writings of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, in the formulation of the "capabilities approach" to development.  Sen argued that the fundamental goal of development should be to create social and economic institutions within which every individual is enabled to fulfill his/her capabilities and to realize the functionings of a full human life (Development as Freedom).  And Nussbaum extended this idea with particular emphasis on the ways in which gender inequalities in development have deeply harmed women in the developing world (Women and Human Development).

There is now a third generation of thinking in the field of development ethics, well represented by David Crocker's excellent recent book, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy.  (Other important examples include Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction and Bina Agarwal, A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia.)  Crocker has been actively involved in the formulation of theories of development ethics for decades, and is the founder of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA).  This is an important forum for philosophers and practitioners to come together to discuss the ethical issues of development.  Crocker has been an exponent of the capabilities approach throughout his career, and has succeeded in deepening the debate by insisting on the importance of bringing the moral theories into direct engagement with the realities and practices of development.

The current book takes an important step forward.  It is framed around the foundation of the capabilities approach; but it goes beyond existing capabilities theory by emphasizing the crucial role of agency and democracy within development.  The capabilities approach focuses on achieving a form of society in which individuals can realize their capabilities and enjoy high quality of life.  This is a focus on the outcome of development.  Crocker refocuses this picture to emphasize the intrinsic and instrumental importance of the agency of the people involved in development -- the process of development.  And people best exercise their agency through a deliberative, participative process -- through a democratic process.  So Crocker's ethics of development might be described as a joining of the capabilities approach with current theorizing about deliberative democracy.  (Here is an earlier post on deliberative democracy.)

So what does this emphasis on agency and democracy involve?  Here is a concrete example: Indian economist V. K. Ramachandran's description of how the development process works in West Bengal and Kerala.



Here and elsewhere in the interview Ramachandran describes a process through which the West Bengal development agencies conduct their work.  They consult broadly with social groups, labor organizations, feminist organizations, and local communities and villages.  Proposals, goals, and strategies are developed through these consultations and deliberations; and the ultimate policy package is intended to represent a synthesis of the insights and claims of the various groups involved in the process.  So the process represents a practical illustration of the approach advocated by Crocker.

Why is a deliberative process along these lines appealing? First, it captures a set of social ideals associated with Rousseau and Marx about the value of individuals and groups self-constituting their goals and values through reflection and deliberation. Rather than the World Bank or the OECD Development Assistance Committee imposing a set of goals on a country or region (liberalization, more rapid urbanization, improvement of markets), the people of the region should have the opportunity and responsibility of setting their course and choosing the strategies they will pursue. Development should proceed through a process of local self-determination, and such a process is itself an intrinsic good.

Second, there is the idea is that the goals chosen through such a process will be in better alignment with the needs of the region, and will be better embraced by the people affected, because they have been refined and chosen through a deliberative, democratic process.  Policies developed through a democratic process have a greater level of legitimacy with those affected by the policies.

Third, there is the expectation that the people of the community will have a better factual understanding of their natural and social circumstances, and will therefore be better able to formulate strategies that will work in the given environment.  So Crocker and others expect that a process of deliberative democracy through which development goals and strategies are selected by a given community will have a higher probability of succeeding.   (Notice the convergence between this set of ideas and Scott's critique of "high modernism"; link.)

This set of values suggests several institutional features: decentralization of decision-making, massive consultation, and a requirement of equality among citizens.  Can we be confident that such a process will work well to reform society and reduce poverty and inequality?  Ramachandran highlights one obstacle to this process in the interview posted above: the fact of extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty in rural India.  But if the social setting is one of great inequalities between landlords, tenants, and landless workers, then to what extent can the requirements of democratic deliberation take place?  Ramachandran argues for the necessity of agrarian reform (land reform and caste reform) as a necessary precondition for just economic development in India.

Decentralization of decision-making raises another potential problem -- the myopia of the local.  A development plan that may be best for West Bengal as a whole may be undesirable to many communities; so how can we expect the process of deliberative democracy to arrive at a good outcome for the state as a whole? (The collapse of the Tata Motor Nano project in West Bengal perhaps illustrates this possibility.)  And the massive consultation involved in this ideal poses its own problems of practicality.  Can we be confident that such a process will come to a resolution, or will debate continue indefinitely?

Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright address practical responses to some of these issues in Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance.  Here is how they set the stage for their analysis:

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century -- representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration -- seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century.  "Democracy" as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices.  Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and implementing public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions fo the democratic idea, assuring that all citizens benefit from the nation's wealth. (3)

David Crocker's focus on the importance of the values and practices of deliberative democracy within the development process is an important step forward.  It helps to make more tangible the implications of the capabilities approach for specific development challenges; and it gives substance to the priority that Sen and Nussbaum accord to "freedom" as a central development value.

(Some readers may also be interested in my 2003 book, The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development. This book likewise places the capabilities approach at the center of the analysis.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,economic development,morality

Rawls and decision theory

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice was a strikingly original contribution to political philosophy upon its appearance in 1971.  Against the prevailing preference for "meta-ethics" in the field of philosophical ethics, Rawls made an effort to arrive at substantive, non-tautological principles that could be justified as a sort of "moral constitution" for a just society.  The theory involves two fundamental principles of justice: the liberty principle, guaranteeing maximal equal liberties for all citizens, and the difference principle, requiring that social and economic inequalities should be the least possible, subject to the constraint of maximizing the position of the least-well-off.  (The principle also requires equality of opportunity for all positions.)

Two elements of Rawls's philosophical argument were particularly striking.  The first was his adoption of the anti-foundationalist coherence epistemology associated with Quine and Goodman (SEP article by Jonathan Kvanvig); so Rawls conceded that it is not possible to provide logically decisive arguments for moral positions.  Though his theory of justice has much in common with the ideas of Kant and Rousseau, Rawls rejected the Kantian idea that moral theories could be given secure philosophical foundation.  It is rather a question of the overall fit between a set of principles and our "considered judgments" about cases and mid-level moral judgments.  He refers to the situation of "reflective equilibrium" as the state of affairs that results when a moral reasoner has fully deliberated about his/her considered moral judgments and tentative moral principles, adjusting both until no further changes are required by the requirement of consistency.

Another and perhaps even more distinctive part of Rawls's approach is his use of the apparatus of decision theory to support his arguments in favor of the two principles of justice against plausible alternatives (including especially utilitarianism).  Essentially the argument goes along these lines.  Suppose that representative individuals are brought together in a situation in which they are expected to make a unanimous and irreversible decision about the fundamental principles of justice that will regulate their society; and suppose they are profoundly ignorant about their own particular characteristics.  Participants do not know whether they are talented, strong, intelligent, or eloquent; and they do not know what their fundamental goals are (their theories of the good).  Rawls refers to this situation of choice as the original position; and he refers to the participants as deliberating behind the veil of ignorance.  Rawls argues that rational individuals in these circumstances would unanimously choose the two principles of justice over utilitarianism.  And this conclusion is taken to be a strong basis of support for the two principles as correct.  This is what qualifies Rawls's theory as falling within the social contract tradition; the foundation of justice is the fact of unanimous rational consent (albeit hypothetical).

Once we connect the question, "what is the best theory of justice?", with the question, "what principles of justice would rationally self-interested persons choose?", there are various ways we might proceed.  Rawls's description of the original position is just one possible starting point out of several.  But if we begin with Rawls's assumptions, then it is natural to turn to formal decision theory as a basis for answering the question.  How should rational agents reason in these circumstances?  How should they decide which of several options will best serve their future interests?  And one point becomes clear immediately: the choice of a decision rule makes a critical difference for the ultimate choice.  If we were to imagine that decision-making under conditions of uncertainty mandates the "maximize expected utility" rule, then one choice follows (utilitarianism).  But Rawls argues that the expected utility rule is not rational in the circumstances of the original position.  The stakes are too high for each participant.  And therefore he argues that the "maximin" rule would be chosen by rational participants in the circumstances of the original position.  The maximin rule requires that we rank options by their worst possible outcome; and we choose that option that comes with the least bad outcome.  In other words, we "maximize the minimum." (The maximin rule was described by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944 in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.)

Notice that this analysis involves a question of second-order rationality: not "what outcome would the rational agent choose?", but rather "what decision rule would the rational agent follow?".  So it is the rationality of the decision rule rather than the rationality of the choice that is at issue.

Another important qualification has to do with defining more carefully what part of the theory of rationality Rawls is using in this argument.  It is sometimes said that Rawls applies game theory to the situation of the original position; and there is a certain logic to this interpretation.  Game theory is the theory of strategic rationality; it pertains to that set of situations in which the payoff for one participant depends on the rational choices of other participants. And the original position seems to embody this condition.  However, the requirement of unanimity and the complete absence of a context of bargaining makes the situation non-strategic.  So Rawls's use of rational choice theory does not involve game theory per se, and he is not interested in demonstrating a Nash equilibrium in the OP.  Instead, he believes that there is a single best strategy that will be chosen by each individual--the two principles of justice.  (Here is a good brief description of the main assumptions of game theory.)

One might ask whether the two features singled out here -- anti-foundationalism and decision theory -- are consistent.  If Rawls's theory of justice depends on an argument within formal decision theory, then why is it not a foundationalist argument?  (And in fact, Rawls on occasion refers to his argument as reflecting a "kind of moral geometry".)  What makes Rawls's use of decision theory "anti-foundationalist" is the fact that this argument itself is philosophically contestable.  Reasonable decision theorists may differ about the rationality of the maximin rule (as John Harsanyi argued against Rawls).  So the appeal to decision theory does not obviate the need for a balance of reasons in favor of the approach and the particular way in which it is specified in this situation; and this in turn sounds a lot like the role of physical theory and methodology within Quine's notion of "The Web of Belief."

(A mountain of words have been written about Rawls's moral epistemology.  Here is Samuel Freeman's excellent article on the original position in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; here is a useful compendium of the history of rational choice theory; and here is an old article of mine on the epistemology of reflective equilibrium.)

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,morality,rational choice theory,rationality,Rawls

Business interests and democracy

The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust.

The anti-democratic possibility is that popular debates and expressions of preference are only a sham, and that secretive, powerful actors are able to secure their will in most circumstances. And in contemporary circumstances, that sounds a lot like corporations and business lobbying organizations. (Here is an earlier post on a report about corrupt behavior at the Department of the Interior.)

The January Supreme Court decision affirming the status of corporations as persons, and therefore entitled to unfettered rights of free speech, is the most extreme expression of the power of business, corporations, and money. As distinguished law professor Ronald Dworkin argues in the New York Review of Books (link), this decision dramatically increases the ability of corporations to influence elections and decisions in their favor -- vastly disproportionately to citizens' organizations. And, as Dworkin points out, corporations don't need to exercise this right frequently in order to have enormous impact on candidates and issues. The mere threat of a well-financed media campaign against key representatives will suffice to sway their behavior.

There are too many examples of pernicious influence of business interests on public policy. Take a useful policy that many states and cities have tested, pretrial release programs. It appears that the public interest has been defeated by ... the bail bondsmen. NPR ran a story on the pretrial release program in Broward, Florida (link). The program was successful, with a high appearance rate for court appearances and annual savings of $20 million for the county. But this program cost the bail bondsmen business. They hired a lobbyist, and in the dead of night the county commission scaled back the program. Here is how the "industry" describes the issue (link).  It is a pretty shocking story:

According to campaign records, Book [the lobbyist] ... and the rest of Broward's bondsmen spread almost $23,000 across the council in the year before the bill was passed. Fifteen bondsmen cut checks worth more than $5,000 to commissioner and now-county Mayor Ken Keechl just five days before the vote.

Keechl and several other commissioners declined NPR's repeated requests for an interview. At the meeting last January, they said they were concerned that Broward's pretrial program cost more than other counties' programs, and they vigorously denied that campaign contributions played any role.

Book had his work cut out for him. Broward's own county attorney wrote a memo warning commissioners that cutting back pretrial could be unconstitutional. But Book worked behind the scenes.

He met with commissioners, and according to county records, he had unusual access. That's because at the same time he was hired by the bondsmen to lobby commissioners, he was also hired by the commissioners to be their lobbyist. (transcript from NPR report)

The story makes the sequence pretty clear: Through the use of campaign contributions and influence of votes by commissioners, the bondsmen groups have prevailed to abandon the policy which was unmistakably in the public interest.  The commission acted in deference to the narrow financial interests of a business group; campaign contributions by that group played a decisive role; and an overburdened county government was denied a tool that was good public policy from every point of view.  And similar efforts are taking place in many cities.  So where is the public's interest? 

Or take the largest issues we face today in national politics -- cap-and-trade policy, healthcare reform, and the nation's food system. The influence of large financial interests in each of these areas is perfectly visible. Energy companies, coal companies, insurance companies and trade associations, and large food companies and restaurant chains pretty much run the show. Regulations are written in deference to their interests, legislation conforms to their needs and demands, and elected officials calculate their actions to the winds of campaign contributions. And the Supreme Court reverses a century of precedent and accords the rights of freedom of expression to corporations and unions that are enjoyed by individual citizens. So the influence of financially powerful corporations and industry groups will become even greater.

It would be deeply interesting if we had a sort "influence compass" that would allow us to measure the net deviation created by the private interests of companies and industries for a number of policy areas. How far from the due north of the public's interest are we when it comes to --

• Environmental protection
• Banking regulation
• Insurance regulation
• Energy policy
• Cost-effective military procurement
• Urban land use policy 
• Airline safety
• Licensing of public resources such as gas and coal leases

Of course the metaphor of "north" doesn't really work here, since there is no purely objective definition of the public good in any of these areas. That is the purpose of open democratic debate about policy issues -- what are the facts, what do we want to achieve, and what are the most effective ways of achieving our ends? But when private interests can influence decision makers to adopt X because it is good for the profits of industry Y -- in spite of the clear public interest in doing Z -- then we have anti-democratic distortion of the process.

Where are the democratic checks on this exercise of power? A first line of defense is the set of regulations most governments and agencies have concerning conflict of interest and lobbying. These institutions obviously don't work; no one who pays attention would seriously think that agencies and governments are uninfluenced by gifts, contributions, promises of future benefits, and the blandishments of lobbyists. And these influences range from slight deviations to gross corruption.  Moreover, influence doesn't need to be corrupt in order to be anti-democratic.  If an energy company gets a privileged opportunity to make the case for "clean coal" behind closed doors, this may represent a legitimate set of partial arguments.  The problem is that experts representing the public are not given the same opportunity.

A related strategy is publicity: requiring that decision-making agencies make their deliberations and decision-making processes transparent and visible to the public. Let the public know who is influencing the debate, and perhaps this will deter decision-makers from favoring an important set of private interests. Then-Vice-President Cheney's refusal to make public the list of companies involved in consultations to the National Energy Policy Development Group (link) is an instructive example; it is very natural to suspect that the recommendations put forward by the NEPDG reflected the specific business concerns of an unknown set of energy companies and lobbyists (link). So greater publicity of process can be a tool in enhancing the fit between policy and the public's interests. (Here are earlier posts on the capacity of publicity to serve as a check on bad organizational behavior (post, post).)

Another line of defense is the independent press and media. Our newspapers and magazines have historically had the resources and mission to track down the influence of private interests on the formulation of legislation, regulation, and policy. Bill Moyers is a great example (link); for example, his recent story on the role of campaign contributions in the election of judges (link). But the resources are disappearing and the cheerleaders at Fox News are gaining influence by the month. So relying on the investigative powers of an independent media looks like an increasingly long-odds bet.

So we have our work cut out for us to validate the main premise of democracy: that the interests of the public will be served faithfully by government without significant distortion by private business interests.

(Here is a recent post on C. Wright Mills' analysis of power elites and the influence accorded to corporations in the United States.)

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Posted in: CAT_power,corruption,democracy,power