I’ve been dipping into the literature on the measurement of happiness, and the most stunning thing about happiness is that it is so incredibly robust. It seems that there is almost nothing one can do to significantly and permanently alter one’s natural temperamental disposition to happiness. Most people in most places are pretty happy. Income means very little. People who suffer horrifying disfigurements and disabilities usually bounce right back to their happiness “set-point.” The Minnesota twins studies show that hedonic tone is to a large degree genetic. It seems that even people in prison aren’t a whole lot less happy than people not in prison. Freedom and democracy mean something, but not that much. If you’re on good terms with your family, have close friends and meaningful work, you’re probably doing about as well as you’re going to do.

All this implies that any form of happiness-consequentialism is pretty much useless as anything more than a very brute standard of evaluation. I have yet to fully process what this really means. (It does mean that the Objectivist subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of objective-life-success view is plain false.) I do think this pushes me to a more Scanlonian view according to which our reasons for action are not even close to exhausted by considerations of “well-being.” If being more free, more healthy, and so forth do not cash out in terms of happiness, then so much the worse for cashing out value in terms of happiness.

Additionally, I think the methodological implications of the happiness research on measurement problems in economics have yet to be digested. Consider the concluding paragraph of Krugman’s excellent essay “Viagra and the Wealth of Nations“:

In other words, as soon as you try to think seriously about how to measure Viagra’s effect on the nation’s wealth, you realize what a dubious enterprise such comparisons are. I have nothing against calculating real G.D.P. as accurately as possible; we need that number for all kinds of purposes. But the rather vulgar case of Viagra reminds us that, in the end, economics is not about wealth — it’s about the pursuit of happiness.

Krugman seems to be saying that “problem of Viagra” is not simply a problem for calculating the effects new innovations have on material wealth, but a problem for determining the effects of innovation on happiness (which is what wealth really amounts to). But if we take the happiness research seriously, almost nothing has much effect on anyone’s long-term happiness. So if we are to say what makes it better to have Viagra than to not have Viagra (or whatever), then we’re going to have to say something about our reasons to value more possibilities, more choices, and enhanced abilities. But what we have to say is not going to be much about happiness. That is to say, “wealth” isn’t a measure of happiness, either. My intuition about what wealth is: a garden of forking paths leading to multitudes of possible lives.

Although we were not dominant in competition Team Jazz Hands was dominant in spirit (sprit fingers!) at the DC National Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. Jazz Hands member (and beloved housemate), Kelly, is featured prominently, if not exactly by name, in the Washington Post’s excellent coverage of the DC National RPS Championships (but why is this not in the Sports section?). Follow the link. Look at the picture. The boa! Jazz Hands represent! And check this:

Right now the men of DC Gambit are too busy for a formal interview because they are screaming insults at a possible opponent: a tiny woman in a black tank top and tight jeans, brandishing a cigarette and Yuengling beer, wearing a pink feather boa. She is yelling at them about what wimps they are, how they can’t possibly out-RPS her and her friends.

Sure, it’s cute, but you don’t have to live with the tiny, insult-screaming woman.

It must be mentioned that Jazz Hands member, Ryan “T2″ Nunn made the finals, and made us all damn proud.

And behold this awesomeness:

JAZZ HANDS! Next year, man. Next year.

From Slavoj Zizek’s review of Timothy Garton Ash’s Free World.

In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.

I have nothing to say.

Why is it that some conservatives get hung up on the idea that certain forms of behavior are “unnatural” and thus to be stamped out with extreme prejudice, but will, in the same breath, praise to the heavens our peculiar form of extended market-based social organization, which is as artificial and “unnatural” as one could like? If you want to put your anti-buggery together with cave-living, then, well, that’s OK by me. But if “unnatural” is an objection, then it applies to almost all the benefits of modern life.

Sorry for the slowdown in blogging. I’m working on a few non-blog pieces of writing, and today set up my spartan but functional office at the University of Maryland. I hereby express my thanks to the good taxpayers of the great state of Maryland for my accomodations.

Somehow I missed Sam Harris’s incredibly sensible LA Times op-ed (reg. req.), which simply articulates the plain fact that religious belief is a major source of our woes.

It’s a rhetorical question.

aren’t very smart.

Louis Menand has an enjoyable summary of some of the work on democratic choice in response to Phillip Converse’s classic “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Converse was the first systematically to point out that very few of us have any idea what we’re talking about when it comes to politics. Menand highlights three theories about democracy in light of Converse.

The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. . .

A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion. . .

The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences.

My own view is some combination of the first and second theories. However, I believe that the opinions of the elite are also “essentially arbitrary.”

Menand’s penultimate paragraph is excellent:

Man may not be a political animal, but he is certainly a social animal. Voters do respond to the cues of commentators and campaigners, but only when they can match those cues up with the buzz of their own social group. Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.

All this raises the question of the moral legitimacy of democracy. For here we are imposing coercive sanctions on people solely due to the fact that some critical mass of essentially ignorant people have happened to decide to choose one way rather than another. Although I am inclined to shit on democracy when given the chance, I acknowledge that it is superior to the alternatives. My main argument for a broad franchise is that it tends to create the illusion of legitimacy, and the illusion of legitimacy lends itself to a kind of political stability that each of us has reason to desire.

In other “the people are stupid” news, the AP runs a story by Jerry Schwartz about voter ignorance. Samuel Popkin, doyen of the “gut rationality” school of political choice is featured here as well as in the Menand piece. Popkin’s view about heuristics are not impressive. At best he establishes that our electoral preferences are not entirely arbitrary, but reflect some non-irrelevant information about candidates. This is not heartening.

After treating us to a fairly entertaining parade of voter incompetence Schwartz slinks back to civics class where Fishkin and Ackerman await to lecture us on the virtues of hanging out in elementary school gyms calmly “deliberating” about the commonweal as local chomskyites and christian evangelicals rip out each others’ throats. My comments on deliberative democracy are here.

Check out Friend of The Fly Bottle Robert Campbell’s review of Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul in the latest edition of Navigator. Compare and contrast with review of the same by Friend of the Fly Bottle Julian Sanchez in the January Reason.

Harry Brighouse keeps the debate on desert aflame.

It is as obvious to me that no-one deserves political power as that no-one deserves their talents, or deserves to live in an environment in which those talents attract the contingent rewards that they happen to attract. (Steffi Graff’s income more than doubled in the year after Monica Seles was stabbed. Did she deserve to be in that environment? No. So in what sense did she deserve her increased income? Not any foundational moral sense, surely?) Is Wilkinson denying this?

I find this to be a puzzling response. Yes. I’m denying a lot of this, because it’s pretty crazy.

Now, as a matter of fact, I think very few people deserve political power. But not because nobody deserves anything, but because the mechanisms of democratic choice generally fail to even loosely track desert. But sometimes people are elected because of their merit and, to the extent unequal political power is legitimate, they deserve their office and its powers. None of this is to say that there exist no non-desert grounds for legitimate political power.

People of course don’t deserve their talents, insofar as a talent is pure potential given at birth. People of course do deserve their talents if they have deliberately cultivated and brought them to fruition through effort and work. If I am a wonderful violinist, I no doubt got to be that way by some combination of native ability and years and years of hard practice and discipline. If Harry doesn’t believe that people deserve their cultivated talents, then I wonder why not. It’s obvious to me, and I think most people, that people do deserve their cultivated talents. I don’t deserve to be the sort of person who is ABLE to become good at the violin. But if I worked hard to realize my ability, then I deserve the ability that I’ve earned through my dedication and hard work. I take this judgment to be a deep and fundamental part of our moral self-conception. I think people who disagree have either broken or ideologically distorted intuition. Of course!

Surely Steffi Graff did not deserve to be in a Seles-free environment! But this has no bearing whatsoever on whether Graff deserved her winnings that year, since she had no responsibility for stabbing Seles. If she won a bunch of matches played according to the rules of tennis, then she deserved to win them, and deserved the prize money. Isn’t this obvious? Suppose that 30 years ago a fetus was aborted who, in the nearest possible world in which she was not aborted, became the best women’s’ tennis player in history and dominated all the major tournaments. By Harry’s logic, we then have to say that almost all of the major tournament winners neither deserved to win, nor deserved their prize money. I consider this a reduction to absurdity. (Michael Phelps is living a lie!)

More of the same:

Politicians who win do not deserve to win at the very least because they do not deserve to live in systems which reward their particular talents (very few UK MPs would reach the top in the American political system, and very few American members of Congress would reach the top in the UK system; desert just doesn’t help out here). There are good, desert-free, reasons for designing a political system one way or another. I don’t see how desert could possibly come into it.

Again, I don’ think politicians tend to deserve their power, but I think they could in principle. Anyway, I guess I should just make explicit that I reject this form of argument:

(1) S doesn’t deserve to be in context C.
(2) S does A in context C, and thereby gets some reward R.
So, (3) S doesn’t deserve R.

I don’t deserve to be in a universe where our actual laws of physics obtain. But I eat, and thereby preserve my life in virtue of the laws of physics. So I don’t deserve to live? I know this is an utterly stupid argument, but I don’t really see how other arguments of this form really differ. Try a Michael Phelps example. Michael Phelps doesn’t deserve the existence of the 100m freestyle, which happens to be well-suited to his particular physical talents. Michael Phelps wins the Olympic gold in the 100m freestyle. So Michael Phelps doesn’t deserve the Olympic gold. But of course he does deserve the gold, simply in virtue of swimming faster than his competitors in accordance with the official rules.

I haven’t gotten to the core of Harry’s comments, but I need to run. So more later.

I just can’t get enough of Grant McCracken. Today he blogs his refrigerator. Awesome.

Check out the new group blog on technology policy by a bunch of geeky libertarians.

I liked this summary of the debate on desert from Lindsay Beyerstein.

Wilkinson claims to have found a conflict between common sense morality and Rawlsian theory. If so, this undercuts Rawls’ claim to have codified common sense justice. Wilkinson argues that instrumentalism doesn’t really explain our intuition that a hard worker deserves her reward, though it may explain our intuition that it would be expeditious to give it to her.

The instrumentalist position needs to be supplemented with a non-metaphysical theory of desert. It turns out that a contractual/procedural theory of desert explains our intuitions just as well. We don’t have to argue desert in terms of free will and moral responsibility. Sometimes promises beget desert. Our society wisely promises people that they will be rewarded if they work hard and contribute a lot. So, justice demands that we make good on that promise by rewarding the high achievers. Instrumentalism explains why it is a good idea to make that promise.

I think this is pretty good summary of my argument. And I’m glad to see DeLong copied it on his blog. (Thanks Lindsay!) However, I don’t think our intuitions about desert are necessarily rooted in the social practice of promising, although people obviously do deserve things in virtue of promises and contracts. I think that I can deserve thanks from my friend in virtue of having done him a favor, or deserve love in virtue of the love I have given. Anyway, I’ve claimed that anti-Rawlsian intuitions about desert run deep part in our moral psychology. (I see that Lindsay is involved in experimental moral psychology, so maybe she can test this!) The argument that it’s utility promoting, or instrumental to some other end, to treat people as if they actually deserve things raises the question of why this practice is utility promoting or instrumentally useful. My argument is that treating people as if they deserve things promotes utility because the practice aligns itself with their moral self-conception — their reflective judgment that they do deserve things. A practice or set of social principles that failed to respect this self-conception will be confronted with resistance and non-compliance, and will tend to be self-undermining. Now, the way I see it, if a practice based on people’s moral self-conception turns out actually to make people better off on the whole, then that just shows that our moral self-conception in this regard is justified, and establishes the moral facts of the matter. If we think we deserve things, and our acting on that conviction tends to make us all better off, then we really do deserve things. That is, then desert claims have real normative teeth. If vulgar consequentialists, like DeLong, buys the pragmatic argument for respecting desert claims, then he shouldn’t be skeptical about the existence or authority of desert.

Objectivism advertises itself as a “philosophy for living on earth.” Objectivism rejects the theory/practice dichotomy and holds that a true philosophy, that is, Objectivism, is a necessary instrument to a successful, happy life. The clear implication is that a consistent, integrated practitioner of Objectivism ought to be more successful and happy than people who do not espouse and practice Objectivism. However, one need only leave the house to see thousands of happy, well-adjusted people who know nothing of Objectivism, and one need only attend an Objectivist conference to observe a depressingly high ratio of the awkward, alienated and unhappy to the well-adjusted and happy. The fact that most successful, happy people are not Objectivists, and in fact espouse philosophical opinions opposed to Objectivism, ought to give Objectivists pause. But it doesn’t. Why not?

Because Objectivism rejects the theory/practice dichotomy, it makes a falsifiable empirical prediction. Depending on the correct interpretation of the Objectivist standard of value, Objectivism predicts that Objectivists should either live longer or have happier (more successfully flourishing) lives than non-Objectivists. But there is no reason that I know of to believe that Objectivists live longer than average well-educated, middle class and wealthy white people (Objectivists are almost all middle class and wealthy whites). And, based on my own experience, Objectivists are not happier or in better psychological health than other people. Indeed, none of the happiest, most flourishing people in my experience are Objectivists, and I’ve met a lot of Objectivists.

The Objectivist can respond to this in number of ways. Here are two. First, she can say that few self-professed Objectivists (or “students of Objectivism”) have properly integrated the philosophy. But if this is the case, one wonders why a philosophy that is so hard for actual people to successfully implement is especially good for “living on earth.” Second, the Objectivist can say that insofar as non-Objectivists are doing well in life, they must be acting, perhaps unwittingly, on premises that are consistent with Objectivism. This is arbitrary and ad hoc. There is a great deal of evidence that many successful, happy, long-lived people in fact act according to premises Objectivism rules false and therefore impractical. If your mystical, other-focused, self-sacrificing grandmother dies happy at 95 years old, what are we to think of Objectivism’s empirical conjecture?

This brings me to my main thrust of today’s letter. Objectivism has risibly inadequate picture of human nature. It is therefore unable to provide truly useful practical guidance for non-fictional human beings. Objectivism’s most serious problem in this regard is in seriously addressing the essentially social nature of human beings and accounting for the values and virtues of human sociality. A good text in anthropology, social psychology, or evolutionary psychology can be read as an extended argument for the inadequacy of Objectivism as a practical philosophy for actual human beings.

This objection goes very deep. But some of the problems are right there on the surface. If Objectivism is a practical philosophy for real Earthlings, then what is the Objectivist theory of the family? What is the Objectivist theory of the value of childrearing? This is no small lack for a purportedly practical philosophy. Almost every human being for the entirety of history has lived and raised children in extended family groups. As a good first approximation, that just is human life. And Objectivism has nothing to say about it.

At a deeper level, Rand’s failure to understand and integrate the evidence of biology and anthropology into her picture of human nature leads to a distorted picture of our psychological constitution. Take family and children. Our very existence depends on built-in psychological dispositions to create and raise children. It’s a bizarre over-intellectualized distortion of our nature to understand the human desire for sex and physical intimacy as reflecting personal philosophical premises. Furthermore, the evidence is that human beings are naturally coalitional (tribal, if you will), obsessed (like all primates) with status and dominance, and that huge portions of the mind are devoted to the problem of navigating the social world. Furthermore, we have deep needs for casual physical and emotional intimacy. We need to feel welcome and included in groups. We need to feel liked. Social disapproval makes us very sad and often angry.

But Objectivism has very little to say about these facets of our social nature, other than to provide over-intellectualized rationalist just-so stories about the implicitly philosophical dimensions of phenomena that are in fact largely non-cognitively emotional and biochemical. (The relation of trust and cooperation to oxytocin levels, for example, does not appear to be an especially intellectual or philosophical matter.) There is useful insight in the Objectivist critique of “second handers” and “social metaphysics,” but this insight is mostly useless absent a better understanding and accommodation of the natural human tendencies that lead so many of us to fall into these traps.

If there is one thing that made it so that I could no longer take Objectivism very seriously, it is the failure of Objectivism to come even close to doing justice to the social nature of human beings. For a philosophy devoted to reason, there is a marked tendency to simply dismiss empirical evidence about human nature that is inconsistent with Ayn Rand’s idiosyncratic vision. Now, I think it’s perfectly natural and predictable that coalition human beings will be subject to confirmation bias and will tend to discount argument and evidence that threatens their intellectual and emotional commitments. It’s just what people do. But one can’t help but enjoy the irony in the Objectivist’s case.

Thankfully, there is in fact some slack between theory and practice. People can often get along fine with false beliefs (and can arguably get along better, depending on the belief.) And Objectivists, being humans, know more about living decent lives among other humans than Objectivism allows. So I don’t worry too much about my Objectivist friends. That said, a philosophy for living on Earth really ought to be able to do a better job of helping us think about what we ought to do given what we really are.

[I'll have more to say about the Objectivist view of human nature on my next letter on the Objectivist ethics.]

Chris Betram replied to my reply to his reply to my TCS piece (scroll down in comments). And I’d like to, well, reply. I’d also like to reply to Brad DeLong, who I don’t think understands what he’s talking about. Economists are usually like that — confused — when they dabble in moral philosophy, with the exception of Buchanan, Sen and a few others, like Tyler. For now, let me just quote from Chris:

One reason why I framed things in terms of the political turn was that Will has endorsed that part of Rawls’s work. So I think it worth repeating that to the extent to which conceptions of desert are the object of reasonable disagreement, they can’t be incorporated into public standards of justice. Will ought to agree with that.

I do endorse the idea of political liberalism. What I’m arguing is that the anti-desert party is violating the spirit of political liberalism. The content of our sense of justice, the content of the “reasonable moral psychology” of citizens of North Atlantic liberal democracies, is that people deserve rewards roughly proportional to their input to mutually advantageous cooperation. This is, of course an empirical claim. But my argument is that Rawls is simply wrong about the content of our considered moral judgments on this score, and Rawlsians about desert are employing a tendentious metaethical argument contrary to the content of a reflective sense of justice.

More from Chris:

There’s also the “tracking” point, which he doesn’t address in his response. I asserted, following Hayek and Rawls, that the free market doesn’t do anything like reward people according to desert. Does Will disagree? If he does, it would be nice to hear an argument. If he doesn’t then it would seem that he is hoist with his own petard, since libertarian principles will also fail to frame a stable social order, and for the same reasons.

I think this is a complicated question. Now, I think Chris is quite wrong that the market “doesn’t do anything to reward people according to desrt.” In fact, I think this is a rather absurd conclusion. The distributional changes that occur on the heels of voluntary market exchanges are more likely to track desert than any other mechanism I know of. The idea of desert based in mutually beneficial cooperation is, I think, the most neutral notion of desert available, and is reflected generally in our moral psychology.

The careful reader will have noticed that I didn’t actually defend meritocracy in the TCS piece. I simply defended the possibility of desert, and, implicitly, the idea that meritocracy is not appalling as an ideal. I think there is a totally intractable epistemic problem in discovering who merits what and to what extent. And this is in addition to the problem of settling on a public standard for merit.

Market exchanges, because they are voluntary and presumably mutually advantageous, generally split to gains of cooperation according to mutually agreeable terms. Whether people get what they deserve according to whatever the correct standard is . . . who knows? But if someone believes that the terms of cooperation and exchange are unfair in the sense that they will not be getting what they deserve, they can refuse to cooperate, and people often do. So it is reasonable to believe that market exchanges at least roughly track desert.

Now, I agree that the overall pattern of distribution in a market order will not tightly track desert. There is an assymetry in the nature of entrepreneurship, for example. People who make entrepreneurial bets that pay off seem to us to deserve what they get because they were willing to bear the risk of the bet, and ended up providing something that has enhanced others’ welfare on agreeable terms as evidenced by their revealed preferences in the market. People who make reasonable (not foolish or negligent) bets that don’t payoff don’t seem to deserve to be bankrupt. And the failure of their bet provides useful information to other entrerpeneurs, who in some sense don’t deserve to have this information. So here’s a case where the overall distribution of rewards tracks desert partially, but not very tightly.

Now, most people have some idea of the deserving and the underserving poor, of who does and doesn’t merit our charity and assistance. Because the standards of desert here are unlikely to be shared publicly, unlike our conception of desert in mutually advantageous exchanges, the political libertarian argues that the mechanisms of redistribution ought to be largely private. Some people deserve what they receive on the market. It’s not the job of the state to decide that they don’t. And some people deserve our aid, and it’s not the job of the state to decide that they do. So I think the tracking point is an argument in favor of political libertarianism, and an argument against infecting the general social principles of association with sketchy metaethical premises about determinism and desert.

Of course we might ask which of two social orders, a Rawlsian one or a free-market one, would diverge most flagrantly from the desert criterion that Will endorses. Note that under both systems the hard-working talented will, as a matter of fact, often earn more than those of an average talent and an average disposition to work, just so long as their talents are actually valued by others at or around the time they’re deploying them. This despite the fact that neither system contains an intention to reward such deployment for desert-based reasons and that the “fit” will be extraordinarily loose. But which of the two “maps” better? My money would be on a Rawlsian “well-ordered society”.

My argument is precisely that a Rawlsian well-ordered society just is a political libertarian order, once one eliminates the elements of Rawls’s theory, such as his metaphysical musings about desert, that are flatly inconsistent with his own methodology. I want to see the argument that Rawls is entitled to use his thoughts about desert in devising a distinctively political set of principles based in a reflective sense of justice.

Now, I’ve noticed that no one has disputed my argument that if the luck argument negates the moral right to unequal material holdings, then it also negates the moral right to unequal political power. That was my main argument, and I guess it stands. So even if Rawls is right about desert, which he is not, then we get a kind of political nihilism in which nothing much — the right to rule, the obligation to obey, etc. — is justifiable. Should I take it that this much is simply granted by the critics of my piece? If so, I’m pretty happy.

About DeLong, well, I need to go just now. Let me just say that I think I know exactly what Yglesias thinks about this issue. Matt’s a friend, a neighbor, and we’ve argued about it face to face.

[Note: Removed the little story about MY, which took place under conditions not particularly conducive to philosophical rigor, and should be off the record. Anyway, I thought it was funny.]

I’m proud to report that rent-seeking entrepreneur Matthew Lesko is sitting on a couch about seven feet behind me. Wearing the question mark suit, as seen on TV!

I see that I’m the Adam Smith Institute blog of the week. Cool. Thanks Alex!

Consider giving to this worthwhile cause. Tim Sandefur has information, and a stirring quote from Allan Kor’s great essay “Can There be an ‘After Socialism’.”

Wednesday’s TCS piece on the desert seems to be getting around and eliciting some useful discussion. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Betram takes me to task for (1) writing for TCS and (2) misrepresenting Rawls. There’s good debate in the comments.

Let me say that I’m very flattered that Chris thinks I am a mind of sufficient quality to lend what he takes to be undeserved intellectual legitimacy to TCS’s enterprise.

This very fact [that WW has a column up at TCS] is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this astroturf operation.

And then again:

One of the functions of columns at TechCentralStation is to pander to the psychological needs of a certain stratum of society — gas-guzzling SUV? No need to feel guilty, global warming is a myth ! — but such pandering would be rather unseemly coming from a political philosopher of Wilkinson’s ability, and I’m sure it wasn’t what he intended.

I’m touched (not joking) by Chris’s charitable estimation of my abilities, but, of course, I’m not thrilled to be pegged as a dupe and a shill. And, as they say, “some of my best friends” write for TCS. Anyway, I’ll leave aside the charge that I’m playing a (unwitting?!) part in reinforcing the false ideological consciousness of the ruling class, and just thank Chris for making me feel as though my productions matter more than I could realistically hope.

As to the substantive objection to my piece, Chris writes:

There are no doubt one or two sentences in A Theory of Justice that encourage such an interpretation. But, as Wilkinson surely knows, the argument in which Rawls asserts that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society” (which Wilkinson cites, selectively, from the first edition of ToJ) concerns the choice of a co-operative scheme for a whole society. In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme, he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others. And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others.

First, I want to make clear that I did not intend to write a piece of Rawls exegesis. Whether or not Chris is right in his interpretation of the import of Rawls’s argument about desert in ToJ, it cannot be denied that many people have read Rawls as making a philosophical argument intented to undermine claims of desert generally, have been influenced by this argument, and have made it part of their dialectical arsenal. I was specifically addressing Yglesias’s thoughts on the matter, which I took to be representative of a certain class of philosophically sophisticated welfare liberals. Matt indicates in the comments of Chris’s post that he takes my reading of Rawls to be the “natural” one. So at this level Chris’s claim that I’ve misinterpreted Rawls is irrelevant. If he’s right, then I’m not attacking Rawls, per se, but rather attacking an argument that many people who have misinterpreted Rawls have deployed to undermine claims of desert and to justify redistribution. I do admit, however, that I should have been clearer that my way of reading Rawls in the column is disputed.

I understand and agree with Chris’s claim that Rawls’s argument comes in the context of the choice of the overall principles of association. But I don’t understand Chris’s appeal to Rawls’s “political” turn. First, Rawl’s understands his own argument in ToJ to be rooted on a partially comprehensive theory, which is why he later rejected the argument. It is not unreasonable as a matter to interpret Rawls’s argument about desert as a piece of comprehensive philosophizing on par with his comprehesive-ish claims later in ToJ about the nature of autonomy and personhood. And as Jacob Levy points out in the comments, ToJ is an extremely influential book, which has been far more widely read than the rest of Rawls’s works. It’s not unreasonable to criticize it in isolation from Rawls’s mature view, given that so many people have been influenced by it in isolation from Rawls’s mature view.

OK, I want to draw attention to the fact that Rawls is making a claim about our considered judgments. Now, it’s hard to keep the cast of characters in Rawls straight: the theorist and the rest of us real people, the model conception of the person (the citizen of the well-ordered society), the parties to the original position. The claim about our considered judgments is an emprical claim about us. (Tryst doesn’t have a copy of ToJ, so I have to wing some of this. I’m sitting next to the bookshelf, and do see a copy of the New Testament, but I doubt it’s going to help my case.) The character of the model conceptions, such as the original position, must justified by the method of reflective equilibrium (RE). Once we’ve our CMJs (considered moral judgments) more or less into RE with our model conceptions, we run the thought experiment of choice in the original position (OP). If it turns out the OP delivers principles out of RE with our CMJs, then we just go back and amend some aspect of the model conceptions until we get prinicples out of the OP that is in RE with our CMJs. My point is that given this procedure, it seems to me that Rawls’s argument has a great deal to do with how things work out within the basic structure. It says that principles for distributing cooperative surpluses need not take into account our sense that some people deserve more of the surplus in virtue of contributing more to the creation of the surplus.

I don’t dispute that we don’t deserve our natural endowments or the social position we find ourselves in. Who would, indeed. I dispute what seems to be Rawls’s next step: that we thus don’t deserve our character (some of us do, we worked at it, and some of us don’t). And I vigorously dispute the next step, whether or not Rawls takes it, that we thus aren’t responsible for and don’t deserve what we have worked to achieve. If he does take it, and it seems to me, and many others that he does, then he’s just wrong. If he’s not just wrong, then he has at least (in the argument on desert) abandoned his usual method of working from within our moral conceptions rather than dabbling in metaphysics-tinged metaethics.

My claim in the TCS column is that our CMJ that people ought to be rewarded roughly in proportion to the value of their contribution to cooperative endeavors, and have moral title to such rewards, runs extremely deep. The implication is that principles of justice that fail to respect title to these deserved rewards — that expropriates and redistributes goods acquired according to this kind of principle of desert — will fail to be in RE with our CMJ, and thus are fail as acceptable principles of justice.

Exactly why principles that fail the test of RE fail is another question. I don’t think the method of RE offers a theory of the epistemic justification of moral beliefs. RE has to do with human sense of justice in a way that is more practical than epistemic. The sense of justice is both the source our considered moral judgments and the source of our motivation to act according to fair terms of social cooperation. I think the function of RE is to tie together the cognitive and motivational dimensions of the human sense of justice to create a social structure that we both recognize and affirm as moral, and which we are disposed to sustain through our willing compliance to the principles of justice. The point of RE is to deliver principles of justice that are sufficiently aligned with the sense of justice to produce motivationally effective individual reasons for action that will tend to scale up to macro-level stability.

That said, a principles of justice that run roughshod over our deep-seated intuitions of desert will therefore fail to gain our affirmation and compliance, and will thus fail to frame a stable social order. That’s why a principle of justice out of RE with our CMJs fails.

This looks like an interesting book. It’s hard to get the right balance between maximization and reciprocity to enable broad, complex social cooperation. I think that if more people had a better grasp of the huge benefits of effective social coordination, together with the delicate balance of cognitive and emotive capacities needed to sustain it, then there would be much much less mystification about morality.

I believe this is what happened to 17th St.

Tuesday night I observed a debate on subjectivism and Objectivism (as in Randianism) in ethics. Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center defended the party line. Max Borders of the Institute for Humane Studies argued for a sort of anti-realist subjectivist contractarianism. I found a great deal to disagree with in both arguments. But I think I was a little surprised to find myself almost completely exasperated by Hudgins’s fairly orthodox summation of Objectivist ethics. It’s been years now that I’ve felt little affinity to Objectivism. However, that’s where I started out in philosophy, that’s how I was inducted into the tradition of classical liberal thought, and Objectivism provided my first sense of serious intellectual community. I feel an intellectual debt to people like David Kelley, my friends and teachers from TOC seminars, and folks on the Objectivist mailing lists (the ones that didn’t try to kick me off, that is). And I feel a bond with a good number of self-described Objectivists, and I have no desire to have them think of me as, you know, “the other.”

I remember when in the middle nineties how Mike Huemer’s set of essays on “Why I am not an Objectivist” had me up in arms. I don’t intend to write my own version of Huemer’s explanation (which, for what its worth, I still think differs with Objectivism for mostly the wrong reasons.) That said, I do want to set down some of my differences with Objectivism in the hope that it might prove helpful to someone much like me about a decade ago. In fact, I’ll address my arguments to Will Wilkinson circa 1996, taking for granted what I know he knew, and aiming for what I know to be his soft intellectual underbelly. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then it’s probably because I’m not talking to you. I’ll do one of these every few weeks or so, as the spirit moves me.

So, let’s start with free-will.
(more…)

Irfan Khawaja calmly points out the dumbfounding contradictions in the reviews of Michael Moore’s latest tour de sophisme. For example:

Todd Gitlin’s review in Open Democracy calls Fahrenheit 9/11 a “shoddy work”: the film’s “sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery,” he argues, are an affront to one’s “conscience,” and make it the moral equivalent of a beer commercial. The same conscientious concern induces Gitlin to describe Fahrenheit 9/11 somewhat paradoxically as a moral necessity. Meanwhile, he lionizes Moore himself as a “master demagogue.”

Check out the rest for more smart meta-reviewing.

Thanks to those few who replied to my request for stuff on calculating real wages. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Paul Krugman, “Viagra and the Wealth of Nations,”

Arnold Kling, “How Much Worse Off Are We?,” TCS, July 2004

Amartya Sen, “The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons”, Journal of Economic Literature,1979 (available through JSTOR)

Jack Triplett, “Hedonic Indexes and Statistical Agencies, Revisted,” paper presented to the BLS, June 2000. [PDF]

And a bunch of other possibly relevant stuff from Triplett here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics FAQ about the Consumer Price Index.

Krugman gets very close to what I’m thinking about, but the end of his piece skirts the real issue about the extent to which economics relies on implicit psychological and moral theories. I’m still looking for something that’s more deeply reflective about the philosophical dimensions of this issue. I’ll let you know if I find anything, and please let me know if you know of anything.

[Update: More Citations]

William D. Nordhous, “Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not”

The Boskin Commission Report, “Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living,” Report to the Senate Finance Committee, 1996.

Robert Gordon, “The Boskin Commission Report and Its Aftermath,” NBER Working Paper 7759

Thanks so far to Tyler Cowen, Ryan Seals, Erin Shellman and Alex Taborrok.

Over at TCS I try to parry the thrust of this Matt Yglesias blog post. I argue that it is in fact possible to deserve what once has worked for, and that there are in fact self-made men who deserve credit for their achievements. I don’t believe these are controversial propositions, aside from a few sholastic dissenters. But I think this is a case where it’s worthwhile bolstering common sense.

[NB: I have nothing to do whatsoever with the red donkey illustration.]